Prof. Hadley Arkes, writing in the Federalist, explains why, in the wake of the Indiana State Legislature's recent passage of its own iteration of RFRA, "Republicans Need To Argue About Sex Like Gay Activists." Some excerpts: "So, what do the Republicans of Indiana do in the face of a whipped-up fury that cannot give an accurate account of what it assails? Do they defend their act and make the case anew for religious freedom? Or do they seek to “solve” their problem by vowing now to “fix” a bill so carefully done that it needs no fixing?...Hence this signal addition to the Adventures of the Stupid Party: To placate its enemies, Republicans contemplate adopting a law that would decisively undermine the moral ground of their position, expose the logical flaws in RFRA that are best left unnoticed, and make their own version of RFRA far less defensible." "If there is a remedy for the conservatives and religious here, it comes in countering the proposals on 'sexual orientation' as we would counter any other laws that would restrict personal freedom: by testing in a demanding way the meaning and justification of that proposal that people would impose as law. The most sensible path, that is, still involves the challenge to the substance of the law itself." "At the ground of it all is finally the question of just why it is wrong for people to cast an adverse judgment on the homosexual life. At first we were told that these were simply matters of personal taste, that we should no more judge the character of a person by his style of sexuality than by his preference for peanut butter over coq au vin. But if it is simply a matter of taste, the demand for acceptance is amply met by the report that 'that is a taste we don’t happen to share.' Yet, as we’ve seen, the argument that began with the wrongness of casting judgments on matters of taste moved on, in its momentum, to casting the most severe judgments on those who would cast judgments!" "And we can probably predict that if there is no attempt to offer a moral defense of the law in Indiana, the consultant class will draw this inference as its ongoing wisdom: that it is far better for the Republicans to steer away entirely from these vexing moral questions, and concentrate on taxes and regulation. Those vexing questions just happen to go to the very core of what constitutes this regime or our way of life; but for Republican consultants those issues are distant from the business that counts as their political life." Read the whole piece here.