Roman Catholic scholar George Weigel explains the the totalitarian impulse of those who would impose the acceptance of gay marriage on others, including civil society and religious institutions.

If, as its proponents claim, resistance to gay marriage is nothing more than hateful bigotry, why should Americans tolerate institutions like the Catholic church? Such immoral institutions should be marginalized, if not stamped out completely.

Already the churches and people who hold such traditional views of marriage are being vilified by gay activists and their straight liberal allies. The pressure to accept the new government-approved definition of marriage is growing more and more intense.

Writes Weigel:

As analysts running the gamut from Hannah Arendt to Leszek Kolakowski understood, modern totalitarian systems were, at bottom, attempts to remake reality by redefining reality and remaking human beings in the process. Coercive state power was essential to this process, because reality doesn’t yield easily to remaking, and neither do people. In the lands Communism tried to remake, the human instinct for justice — justice that is rooted in reality rather than ephemeral opinion — was too strong to change the way tastemakers change fashions in the arts. Men and women had to be coerced into accepting, however sullenly, the Communist New Order, which was a new metaphysical, epistemological, and moral order — a New Order of reality, a new set of “truths,” and a new way of living “in harmony with society,” as late-bureaucratic Communist claptrap had it.

When the gay lobby went after the Boy Scouts of America to pressure that organization to accept openly gay scouts and scout leaders it prevailed upon politicians and local governments not to do business with the BSA. Point out the thuggish tactics used by gay activists and you get called a homophobe and a bigot yourself.

As Weigel points out:

... (this) line of attack nicely demonstrates the truth of Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that the only way to rid oneself of temptation is to yield to it. For crying “homophobia” is a cheap calumny, a crypto-totalitarian bully’s smear that impresses no serious person.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of unserious people who take themselves quite seriously when they play this ugly game.