ERICKSON: 'You will be made to care'

On Monday, my new book comes out. It is entitled "You Will Be Made to Care." The title comes from an exchange I had with a reader at RedState several years ago. The reader, a college student, said he did not care about gay marriage because it did not affect him.

I replied that he would be made to care. The secular left, with its secular religion of government worship, would give him no room to sit on the fence. He would not be allowed to live his life according to his faith if his faith conflicted with secular norms. He would be made to care.

Since that time, numerous examples have come up of the left in America ruining lives, closing businesses and censoring any who refuse to care as the left demands. My new book chronicles what is happening that few are reporting. Several of the cases are from Georgia, a state where people say this sort of thing could never happen. Here is an excerpt.

Back in 2006, two students at Georgia Tech filed a pivotal lawsuit against the school in a case that brought national attention to the administration's thuggish tactics. Ruth Malhotra, a conservative Christian and president of the College Republicans, and Orit Sklar, the president of the Jewish Student Union, had endured violation after violation of their First Amendment rights to their free speech and freedom of religion. They were being told not what they could and could not say but how they should think.

In Ruth's sophomore year, she was called into the office of the dean of the Liberal Arts College. According to Ruth, the Dean said, "Ruth, you're asking too many questions, and you're here to listen and learn." When Ruth said she felt that some of the professors were practicing indoctrination rather than education, the dean responded with a statement that shocked her: "Ruth, students have been indoctrinated for the first 18 years of their lives by their parents and by their churches, and we only have four years to undo the damage." Eventually, the president of the school called Ruth in and told her she had to change her views or she was no longer a good fit for the school.

Three years later, their case was resolved. Ruth and Orit won on each of the four separate policies they challenged. Among other changes, Georgia Tech's speech code was repealed and Tech was subject to judicial oversight to make sure it was left behind for good. A policy called SAFE Space was also challenged. This LGBT initiative had been run through the Dean of Students and the Dean of Diversity's offices. It employed a "scale of tolerance," which rated how tolerant different religions were, with Buddhists deemed most accepting and Southern Baptists the least.

"These are taxpayer-funded administrators. It's not their role to tell me that it's better to be Buddhist than to be Baptist," Ruth said. "They're the ones that cry about separation of church and state all the time, but here you had a state school telling you what church you should go to." The judge ripped the policy to shreds, saying the SAFE Space policy violated the Constitution's Establishment of Religion clause. He added that it was "very puzzling to the court that ... what they say is the promotion of tolerance actually amounts to intolerance on the part of the institute." Exactly what Ruth was saying all along.

That was in 2006. The situation in Georgia and the nation has only gotten worse for people of faith.

Erick Erickson is a Fox News contributor and radio talk show host in Atlanta.

This story was originally published February 18, 2016 at 9:44 PM with the headline "ERICKSON: 'You will be made to care' ."