"Proxy Wars Over Religious Liberty"

In the latest/current issue of National Affairs (an excellent publication, IMHO), there's a good essay by Ryan Anderson called Proxy Wars Over Religion.  A bit:

The past decade has witnessed some intense battles over religious liberty. But when you consider the character of those battles, it's often hard to avoid the conclusion that both sides have treated religious liberty as the subject under debate in order to avoid the real points of dispute between them. The resulting political arguments have given us all the impression that religious liberty is more controversial with the American public than it really is, and therefore that the progressive enemies of religious liberty have the political winds at their back. To recover a clearer sense of the matter, we need to be more careful in what we expect of religious liberty and how we understand it. . . . 

This unwillingness to engage the substantive moral debates that actually divide us in the culture war leaves us fighting proxy wars over religious liberty. These wars confuse the issue, and put at risk our capacity to defend the rightful place and purpose of religious liberty. . . .