Rod Dreher on Kim Davis, religious-freedom challenges, and picking battles

Rod Dreher's piece at The American Conservative ("What Hill Do We Die On, Then?") is worth reading and taking seriously, I think.  I do not for a moment agree with those who seem to think that Kim Davis should lose (a) because she's been divorced or (b) automatically because she's a public official, and I believe that, even in cases like hers, it should be possible to craft exemptions and extend accommodations.  That said, Dreher seems on the right track when he says:  

So, if Kim Davis isn’t a hill to die on, what is? It’s a fair question. Broadly speaking, my answer is this: when they start trying to tell us how to run our own religious institutions — churches, schools, hospitals, and the like — and trying to close them or otherwise destroy them for refusing to accept LGBT ideology. This is a bright red line — and it’s a fight in which we might yet win  meaningful victories, given the strong precedents in constitutional jurisprudence.

But court decisions do not come from some Platonic realm; judges are shaped by the same cultural forces that shape all of us. Many, many Americans — certainly those in the media, and other opinion-shaping institutions — see our stance as motivated solely by bigotry, and therefore morally illegitimate. These judges, and the elected representatives who appoint them, will lose the ability to understand why “bigotry” should be tolerated. . . .

There's more.