As both Justice Scalia and Chief Justice Roberts in his separate dissent clearly pointed out, the majority characterized those who supported DOMA -- which included President Bill Clinton, majorities of both houses of Congress and millions of Americans -- as acting out of malice. It's one thing to judge someone's actions. To judge someone's motives, however, is to assume that you have a window into that person's heart, mind and soul, a supposed view that is almost always clouded by one's own prejudices and judgments. Let me propose a story that might help clarify this point.
Suppose you were walking in the forest with a friend when you come upon a large patch of wild mushrooms. Your friend, who loves mushrooms, pounces upon them with glee and starts happily munching them and picking them to take home.
You, however, happen to know for certain that these are poisonous mushrooms. They're not poisonous in the same way that Snow White's apple was: one bite and you keel over dead. Rather their poison accumulates in the system over time, eventually leading to sickness and death.
So what would be the loving thing to do in this situation? Would you say, "Well, he doesn't know that they're poisonous, and he likes mushrooms so much, he might be really upset if I tell him, so I'll just let him be"? Of course not! The loving thing to do would be to plead with him to stop eating the mushrooms.
Hopefully your friend would trust you enough to at least pause and ask why you think they're poisonous. But what if he rejected your pleas, told you that you were crazy, or even mean-spirited, because you were trying to deny him the pleasure of eating those wild mushrooms? His negative assessment of your motives would not change the fact that you were actually motivated by a desire for his greater good, that is, by love.
Now let's take the story a little further. Let's say that your friend decides that these mushrooms are so delicious that he's going to spread the word about these great mushrooms to others. In fact, he's going to gather the spores and start raising these mushrooms so as to make them available to others. Soon he's formed an association of wild mushroom lovers who are promoting eating the mushrooms.
Now you're faced with a real dilemma. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent people could start eating those mushrooms, not knowing that they're eating something that will eventually kill them. So would you just throw up your hands, saying, "I tried! It's their problem!" Or would the loving thing to do be to try to protect people from the dangers of eating those mushrooms? I think the answer is clear.
So you form an association to help educate people about the dangers of eating those mushrooms. You even try to get laws passed, making the eating of those mushrooms illegal. All this angers your former friend and his associates who accuse you of acting with malice to restrict their freedom to eat wild mushrooms. "If you don't want to eat them," they say, "then, fine! But leave us alone!"
Meanwhile, some of the wild mushroom eaters are starting to get sick and even die. But rather than consider that maybe there really is a problem with eating the mushrooms, they point to other causes. They even blame the "stress" caused by your "hate speech" toward wild mushroom eaters. They slap you with a lawsuit to get you to stop telling people that the mushrooms are poisonous and shouldn't be eaten, claiming that your hateful speech is causing them great physical and emotional suffering. You're forced to defend yourself not only in the court of law, but also in the court of public opinion, as the public sees you as a bigot acting with malice toward wild mushroom eaters, while all along, your motive was to actually save their lives, even at the cost of great suffering to yourself.
Does my story, especially the last scene, strike you as "over the top"? Then perhaps you haven't heard about the Canadian bishop who was accused of "hate speech" for a 2005 pastoral letter to his diocese on marriage. Or the youth pastor in Canada who was in legal battles for years over an op-ed piece that was published in a local paper. Or the decision by the Canadian Supreme Court last February that a man who distributed flyers regarding the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexuality was guilty of a hate crime.
I suspect that in the months and years ahead, Christians are going to have more opportunities than ever before to say with Jesus on the cross, "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they are doing."
