Conservative talk show host Steve Deace writes in the Washington Times today that gay rights advocates are trying to instill a 1984-style “fascism,” and blames this development on the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas.

“Every fascist movement in human history would be proud” of the gay rights movement, he writes, warning that the movement poses a greater threat to America than “jihadists” and is forcing Christians “debate our very existence” in the US.

After being desensitized to homosexuality by popular culture for the past two decades, the American people were promised by the Left that allowing the sexual revolution to reach its climax wouldn’t change anything. Now that our brave, new world of anything goes has arrived, the American people are beginning to realize this actually threatens to change everything.

Free speech, your own conscience, and religious freedom — rights as old as our republic itself — are now threatened more than ever before. Those God-given rights aren’t being threatened by jihadists or the Redcoats. They’re being threatened by a new fascism that calls itself “tolerance.”

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Those who pleaded for “tolerance” and demanded “equality” only intended to do so until they acquired supremacy. Then, when they had the advantage, they would make sure their opponents understood that it’s not any fun once the rabbit has the gun. This reconstruction of previously agreed upon terminology and values is always the first step towards totalitarianism, as George Orwell pointed out in “Animal Farm” and “1984.”

A brief history lesson for those wondering how “tolerance” turned into fascism.

When sodomy laws were nullified by controversial Supreme Court precedents like 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, the Left and the Republican Party’s surrender caucus promised us this was only about consenting adults’ private behavior, and this wouldn’t lead to a fight over marriage. But that’s exactly what it did.

While we were winning the fight to preserve marriage in 31 of the 35 states it was contested, the Left and the Republican Party’s surrender caucus promised us that redefining marriage and granting new rights based on behavior wouldn’t cost anybody their previously acknowledged God-given rights.

But that’s exactly what it’s doing, as it was intended to do. Statists are cheering on the fascism because their ultimate goal has always been to silence the church in America, for it’s the church that preaches the sovereignty of God and not government.

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Christians now find ourselves in the position of having to debate our very existence in a country that wouldn’t have existed without our Christian forefathers, who came here for religious freedom in the first place. Can we hold jobs and still believe the Bible and church teachings? Can we own businesses? Will we be blacklisted from certain industries? Will they try to stop us from passing these teachings down to our children at home, since they’re already indoctrinating our kids against us in the schools as it is? And so on, and so forth.

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The new tolerance has become the new fascism. How fabulous.