As Michael Brown wrote here last week, Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and court costs that could wipe out not just her livelihood but her retirement fund and leave her homeless — all for the “crime” of not taking part in a same-sex wedding that violated her religious beliefs. And my reaction is: “Get on with it, already! Show the courage of your convictions and just ban Christianity outright.”

I’m getting really sick of this death by a thousand cuts. The elites who dominate our society and run the U.S. government via the courts clearly do not want to tolerate Christianity. Since they don’t have the votes to amend the Constitution and outlaw the practice of that faith entirely, instead they pack the bench with leftist sophists who twist our Constitution like saltwater taffy — amending it via judicial diktat dozens of times a year (if you count lower courts as well as SCOTUS), enshrining leftist secularism beyond the reach of shuffling, deplorable voters.

Oh, they’ll make room for progressive Christians that mutate the Faith, discard whatever secularists tell them is out of fashion, and “discover” that Jesus really meant to say precisely what the world wants to hear at this very moment. (Funny coincidence, that.)

Worship Caesar

What the Ivy League, the federal bureaucracy, the media, and the courts who do their bidding will not endure is genuine Christianity, the historic faith in any form that would have been recognizable, say, in 1963, on the day C.S. Lewis died. It’s precisely that “mere Christianity” Lewis explained which Baronelle Stutzman faces ruination for practicing. It’s the same creed which the Obama administration tried to snuff out among the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Here are two Christian principles that simply will not be tolerated:

• Marriage is between one man and one woman.
• Killing the innocent is wrong and must be punished.

I know, I know: What’s with all the esoteric theology, John? Do you really have to try to impose things that only Roman Catholics believe, because the Blessed Virgin Mary told them to peasant kids in some apparition? Can’t you stick to something … basic, which people could know is true just by thinking about it clearly? How about something that most people in most societies, even without the Gospel, knew was true?

Okay, kidding. These aren’t Catholic-specific. The two claims above are not exclusively Christian, or Jewish. You don’t even need to be a monotheist to see these things, since the Zeus-worshipping Greeks saw them too. But they are truths which the Christian faith accepted and built on, and which it can’t live without — any more than advanced physics could survive if you outlawed simple arithmetic.

If Baronelle Stutzmann or the Little Sisters of the Poor cannot assert these truths, and act on them — by refusing to take part in fake marriages or chemical abortions — then Christianity is in effect illegal. You know, the way it was in the Roman Empire, when Christians were ordered on pain of death to worship the emperor. The parallel is exact. No one claims that Ms. Stutzmann or the Little Sisters were running around disrupting same sex marriages, or stealing people’s abortion pills. No, they faced government persecution for not taking positive action to do what they know to be evil. They wouldn’t burn incense in front of Diocletian. They wouldn’t recite the Shehada when ISIS told them to.

Ruth Bader Ginbsurg and Anthony Kennedy could come up with some narrative that “proves” that the whole Bill of Rights is really a recipe for chicken mole.

Enough Half-Measures Already

So I wish that our masters would just admit what they’re really up to and try to enact a Christian ban. All they would need to do is create a case that makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which gives the judges the pretext to exempt Christianity from the First Amendment’s protections. I am sure that the legal brains at the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center could find the right test case, and aim it at the creative jurists of the Ninth Circuit Court — confident that the same five-vote majority that issued Obergefell v. Hodges would vote their way. In fact, they really ought to, if they want to honor that precedent, as well as that shining lodestar of American moral thinking, Casey v. Planned Parenthood.

Perhaps the case could center on Christian parents who wish to home-school a child, or a Christian college that doesn’t want to hire openly homosexual faculty, or a doctor who won’t perform abortions. I leave the specifics to our betters. I know that they’re up to the task.

I have faith that Ruth Bader Ginbsurg and Anthony Kennedy can come up with some narrative that proves that the Founding Fathers really meant to ban orthodox Christianity, while protecting other creeds. Those justices could “prove” to their own satisfaction that the whole Bill of Rights is really a recipe for chicken mole. And the rest of our elites (including too many Republicans) would back them up, and call that decision “settled law.”

Decades of training and practice of modern legal theory have trained these experts to see through the tangle of messy words with specific denotations and plausible connotations, and ignore the grubby historical context and plain intentions of the Founders — and hear the clear, pure voice of our “living Constitution.” That god, whom Caesar demands that we worship, will never fail. It can be trusted. It will always tell the world just what the flesh and the devil would like us to hear.