On the other hand, Rod Dreher is decidedly more pessimistic about the ability of the Church to resist in any meaningful way when Christians will take their cues from the predominant culture against the clear teaching of Scripture and the Church. He uses the fact that Southern Christians saw no contradiction between slavery or segregation and the Bible as an example of culture triumphing over clear Christian teaching.
I don't know if the analogy completely holds. The Bible can obviously be invoked against the way blacks were frequently treated in the South, but the case against slavery or segregation per se (as opposed to what a Christian defender of them might term abuses) aren't quite so clear. The Bible is pretty clear about the ultimate unity of the human family and that unity in Christ trumps the division between slave and free, and from these you can make a strong case against the compatibility of slavery (especially race-based chattel slavery) and racial segregation with Christianity, but it's not really that straightforward. Brotherhood in Christ clearly relativizes distinctions of class and race, but the idea that it requires the abolition of their social manifestation is actually a recent idea that would probably seem revolutionary to most Christians of the past.
In contrast, it's pretty hard to get around the Bible's condemnation of gay sex. (In fact, even if we're right about the incompatibility of slavery and racial segregation with Christianity, the fact that we think that it's completely obvious, when clearly many Christians have not found it so, is a good demonstration of the dominance of the surrounding culture over us that Dreher is talking about. For our culture, racism is the worst thing, so obviously Christianity clearly condemns it.)
That doesn't mean he's not right about culture trumping Christian teaching anyway, but a closer analogy would probably be the compatibility of feminism with New Testament teaching on the submission of women. In practice, most people wiggle their way around that by contextualizing it. Not that most people actively accept such arguments to dismiss the Biblical teaching on male and female roles--but they mostly just ignore them in practice and if they run into something dismissing it, they accept it as fitting how they already live and think. It's not too hard to imagine the similar pro-gay-sex arguments gaining traction in the same way--though, even here, the Biblical teachings on male-female relations seem to either be so specific (cover your hair) that they seem obviously culture-specific, or broad enough (submission of woman-as-Church, self-giving love of man-as-Christ) to allow a fair amount of cultural specification.
Also, I think about the persistence of creationism. It's hard to think of something more uncool in our culture, but lots and lots of people still believe in a six-day creation--even though it means derision from opinion makers and even though (I think) not that many churches actually teach it or push it that hard. (Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I would bet that there are a lot of creationists in churches that don't actually teach it. For some reason, it's always news when the Catholic position on evolution gets restated.) Of course, creationism vs. evolutionism doesn't have the same day-to-day implications as marriage, and while creationists are dismissed as rubes, they aren't condemned as bigots.
I don't know. I basically agree that things don't look good for hard, popular resistance to gay rights, and this probably even holds for resistance to its enforcement against the Church. But maybe I have more hopes for at least the persistence of the kind of quiet obstinance we see with creationism--even if it's mostly ineffective politically.
