The right abandoned civility long ago. So why is it the left that’s being told to pipe down?

Stephanie Wilkinson, owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, made a fatal mistake when she politely ushered White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders off the premises. Instead of basing her objection on the discomfort of her LGBT staffers, she should simply have said serving Sanders was against her religion. She could have quoted Psalm 101:7: “No one who practices deceit will dwell in my house; no one who speaks falsely will stand in my presence.” If there’s one thing the Bible has plenty of, it’s fulminations against putting up with bad people who are doing bad things. Like lying to the American people about why children were being ripped from their parents with no plan to reunite them.

Freedom of religion is the right’s legal superpower. Right now, if your religion, as interpreted by you, says it’s a sin to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding, or your religion says your employees shouldn’t be able to get birth control through their health insurance, the Supreme Court says, go right ahead.

Religion gives you freedom of speech denied to your opponents. The Supreme Court just struck down a California law requiring Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” to inform women of their right to an abortion, a legal procedure, even as states force doctors to read their patients scripts falsely claiming that abortion causes breast cancer and depression. Claiming that religion gives you the right to harm your fellow Americans probably works best if you are Christian. A Hindu wouldn’t get very far with a lawsuit to shut down the beef industry.

The resignation of Justice Anthony Kennedy ties together the firestorm over “incivility.” We would not be where we are today had not Mitch McConnell violated every civil norm, to say nothing of hundreds of years of historical precedent, and refused to allow President Barack Obama a vote – or even a hearing – on his choice for the Court vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia. The pretext for this outrageous power grab was sheer effrontery: Since when does a sitting president not get to nominate a justice?

But it worked. Democrats fumed, but assumed Hillary Clinton would win the election, and it would all come right in the end. Republicans stole the seat and put Neil Gorsuch in it.

Trump supporters, egged on by the president, have already breached every social norm in the book. Right-wing troll Milo Yiannopoulos texted reporters, “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” Two days after his provocation went public, someone did just that at Maryland’s Capital Gazette, killing five. Now Milo says he was just kidding. For years, anti-abortion zealots have done their best to make normal life hell for red-state abortion providers and their patients: picketing their homes, sending – and sometimes fulfilling – death threats, socially ostracizing them, leafleting their neighbors.

For the right, civility left the building a long time ago.

KATHA POLLITT is a columnist for The Nation.