So, can we all just agree that we’re done with the protests? They’re either violent, loud, inorganic, one-sided, hateful, or any combination of those, and the people involved think they have political clout because they exist and they’re angry. If nothing else you know they’re happening, and either you support them (which says a lot about you, frankly) or you don’t. But what I’ve seen lately has confirmed a long-held belief: That every movement is its own worst enemy, and it’s either because the lunatics and virtue signalers dominate the narrative, or because the rationalists don’t have a clue how to play a decent PR game.

Christian perception is dominated by, from my narrow, news-based perspective, the likes of Joel Osteen and either a failure to defend people like the Oregon, Colorado bakers and the Indiana pizzeria or being drowned out in the outrage the media not only eats up, but is more favorable to. This isn’t a case of “Christian victimhood”, it is simply hard to make a case that the media is in any way “friendly” to Christian beliefs. We seem to let Pat Robertson speak for us on one end of the crazy, and let Joel Osteen speak on the other.

On the Religious Freedom idea now circulating because President Trump (two words I will never get used to using in that order), it must be said that Muslims are not to favorable towards homosexuality either. The Religious Freedom bill Trump floated does not focus specifically on Christians. It is however, a reaction to the various cases of Christians choosing not cater to, or serve gay weddings.

As Andrew Wilkow notes, one of the key aspects of a free society is that your freedom to be you includes my freedom to be free from you. In other words, the store owners freedom is not beholden to his customers. There is no way the couples in Oregon or Colorado, or the family in Indiana were the only people in that line of work in the city, let alone the state.

The perception of BLM is dominated by the loud, obnoxious, seemingly astroturfed protests, the lack of a visible leader, and a platform that seems to say “we will achieve all of this by walking a lot”. More to the point, they are lumped in with the riots of pretty much every stripe, with the possible exception of the one at the Milo event at UC Berkley. Activist agitators like Shaun King see the world strictly in black and white, and seem to support these riots because the ends (whatever they are at this point) justify the means.