Chick-fil-A and the Attack of the Tyrannatots

Douglas Wilson: Chick-fil-A and the Attack of the Tyrannatots

...
Criminalizing sin and folly is always a dangerous thing to do. Where do you stop? And once you have realized you can't stop, you will wind up -- as we manifestly have done -- criminalizing the refusal to go along with sin and folly.
...
Now anybody who cannot see how the legal solutions to the first problem created this second problem is simply not paying attention. Because of how we solved the first problem (not because we solved it), we are smack in middle of the second problem. The two issues are plainly connected, and if we want to solve them biblically, we have to think in terms of principle. And you can't think in terms of principle when you don't have any.

Exactly

Not all sinful acts should be criminalized, for government is a very dangerous thing, and the cure may be worse than the disease. And, as is the mode du jour, when you are criminalizing not acts, but attitudes, the *only* possible result is to increase tyranny.

See also, Alan Roebuck: A Nation That Honors Sin

See also, Ed Driscoll: Five Angry Pieces, Revisited

...
This scene is generally remembered more than the rest of the movie. In context, however, it is even more telling. Dupea isn’t really a working-class guy. He was born to wealth and was successful as a concert pianist, and his work as an oil rigger is just his personal quest for authenticity. The waitress, however, is the real thing: a woman with few other options trying to make a living at a tough job. So the restaurant scene really offers a privileged elitist who has the freedom to float among whatever social roles he pleases, raging against someone he regards as beneath him because she is so bound to the conventions of her job. She is a resident of the working class; he is merely a truculent visitor. But the movie essentially invites us to see things his way. We, the sophisticated audience, are asked to share in Dupea’s contempt for meaningless conventions, even if we squirm a little at his cruelty to the waitress. ...

Even as a youngster, I understood this about the well-off "liberals" (and especially the hard-code leftists) who like to make a pose of "siding with the little man" ... to them, we are just props in their little solipsistic psychodramas, and they actively despise us.