Does it sound like I’m kidding? I’m not. “The effort to ban Drag Queen Story Hour starts when we have the courage to clarify the moral stakes,” Ramona V. Tausz wrote in a follow-up First Things piece. “This requires casting off the civility creeds of the woke liberal left.”

This is clarifying. There are times where the rights of religious believers and those of a pluralistic society conflict: when, for example, conservative Christian bakers are asked to make wedding cakes for gay couples, or some ultra-Orthodox Jewish parents are ordered, against their own convictions, to vaccinate their kids. The existence of Drag Queen Story Hour is not one of those times. Conservatives are not being subjugated because they can’t stop other people from holding a public event that offends them. It’s telling that some of them think they are.

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A progressive truism holds that when one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Ahmari and his allies seem intent on proving the point. A RedState article siding with Ahmari described two recent incidents in which Christian clergymen got involved in political controversies and faced harsh criticism on Twitter and from within their churches. Such pushback seemed, to the RedState writer, totalitarian. “If we don’t increase the level of pain we are able to inflict upon them to the point where they back off , we might as well climb in the boxcar that is heading for the camps because that is our destination,” said the article, referring to secular leftists.

This sense of persecution seems odd at a time when the far right controls the presidency, the Senate and the Supreme Court. States are passing the strictest anti-abortion laws since Roe v. Wade. The Trump administration is allowing federally funded foster care agencies to refuse to place children with couples who are gay or non-Christian.