Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway refused to defend the Commonwealth’s marriage law which put him in good company with fellow Louisvillian and former GOP Chairman Brad Cummings, who waved the white flag of surrender and called on the Kentucky GOP to abandon its defense of man/woman marriage.

A teary-eyed Conway said if he appealed the ruling that he “would be defending discrimination.”

Discriminating minds might wonder how Mr. Conway defines discrimination. Literalists may equally ponder why he defended the law for five months in federal court if he really felt this way. But what politician-aspiring-to-be-governor ever let consistency get in the way when he can default to decrying the woes of discrimination? The term has been retooled today and attached to anyone who makes a moral judgment, especially regarding judgments of human sexual behavior.

The GOP should be inclusive and tolerant (how one defines those terms is another story.) But Cummings is dead wrong to say that redefining marriage doesn’t affect anyone else’s marriage. How human beings order themselves in the most intimate of ways has everything to do with the success or demise of their civilization.

Marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher put it bluntly: “sex makes babies, society needs babies, and babies need mothers and fathers.” Sometimes the obvious must be restated. Thank you, Gallagher. Revisionist marriage, while at odds with nature, is also at odds with society as it is incapable of producing the public good produced by heterosexual marriage.

Gallagher said the task of marriage is “to regulate the sexual relationships between men and women in order to reduce the likelihood that children (and their mothers and society) will face fatherlessness, and increase the likelihood that there will be a next generation that will be raised by their mothers and fathers in one family where both parents are committed to each other and to their children.” What? Is this woman from Mayberry? Before you can say “awe shucks Aunt Bea it’s the 21st century, get over it,” marriage revisionists will pull the race and bigotry cards from their stacked deck of moral relativism and say that denying “marriage equality” is akin to refusing service to blacks at a lunch counter. Problem is that we are not talking about race, nor are we talking about restaurant service. We are actually talking about a covenant that Christians, Jews and Muslims believe is a sacrament that God ordained.

Redefining marriage is incompatible with religious freedom – the ability to live in society according to one’s moral convictions.

We all want tolerance, but when tolerance means that a baker will face jail time, as did Jack Phillips who owns Masterpiece Cake shop in Colorado, for failing to lend his talent and trade to an activity he believes is sinful, then modern notions of tolerance need to be redefined.

The Republican Party should be inclusive. In fact, Americans have an inherent inclination toward inclusivity. We’re a melting pot after all. But when inclusiveness defines an irreplaceable human relationship to the realm of “whatever” then it’s time for inclusiveness to be redefined.

Christians like the Rev. Louie Giglio and gospel singer Donnie McClurkin experienced how a morally bereft, hyper-sensitive culture defines inclusiveness when they were both disinvited from participating in major political events last year (Obama’s inauguration and MLK commemoration). Their transgression? Each simply said that homosexuality is a sin – years ago. The Unforgivable Sin.

Interestingly, protecting marriage was a plank in the GOP’s original 1856 platform; “It is the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism – polygamy and slavery.”

They should equally reject marital norms outside one man and one woman just as they did in the beginning. Should Cummings successfully lead Republicans astray from their founding principles, the party is destined to join the Whigs which ended up a sorry footnote in history.

Letter from Richard Nelson, Director of the Commonwealth Policy Center