Variations on the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” are common on both the right and the left (a Google search for “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” yielded roughly 180,000 results). Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to see Indiana University law professor Steve Sanders modify Charles Krauthammer’s famous coinage in order to trash religious conservatives.
“The Christian right is deep in the grip of gay marriage derangement syndrome,” wrote Sanders in a Thursday article for The Washington Monthly. “Conservative Christians grew accustomed to hegemony in a world where judges and lawmakers frequently deferred to their preferences…But as Americans become markedly less religious, things are changing, and the law’s treatment of homosexuality is a cutting edge of that change. So far the Christian right is reacting exactly like an indulged child throwing a particularly stormy tantrum.”
Sanders argued that for most social conservatives, religious liberty is less a matter of principle than a straight-up carve-out: “The Christian right has stopped even pretending that its understanding of religious liberty involves anyone other than certain Christians.”
From Sanders’s piece (bolding added):
The Christian right is deep in the grip of gay marriage derangement syndrome. As demonstrated by the vulgar spectacle instigated by Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis and her enablers, its activists refuse to adapt to the new world in which they live, and they find it impossible to exercise discipline over their demands, rhetoric, or legal arguments. And so, having lost the culture war they started decades ago over homosexuality, the Christian right is now on its way to losing the war it provoked over “religious liberty.”
…[T]he term “religious liberty,” which once signified a noble American value on which both the right and left could find common ground, appears to be headed toward the same fate as that old chestnut “family values”: a once-potent rallying cry that was so misused and abused that it became just another synonym for bigotry…
…[A]ccommodations made on behalf of a believer must be objectively reasonable. Beliefs may be grandiose, but accommodations may not unduly burden other people…
…[L]egal balancing tests don’t work when one side believes it is the center of the universe and everyone else’s rights must give way…
Properly understood, religious liberty refers to limitations on the government’s power to interfere with a believer’s conscience and how she chooses to live her own life. But as used by the Christian right, it is a demand that government laws or policies conform to evangelical doctrine…
The Christian right has stopped even pretending that its understanding of religious liberty involves anyone other than certain Christians...
…Conservative Christians grew accustomed to hegemony in a world where judges and lawmakers frequently deferred to their preferences…But as Americans become markedly less religious, things are changing, and the law’s treatment of homosexuality is a cutting edge of that change. So far the Christian right is reacting exactly like an indulged child throwing a particularly stormy tantrum.
