In the overall scheme of things, it matters very little that radio host Rush Limbaugh won’t become a minority owner of a National Football League franchise anytime soon. What disturbs us is that he was shoved aside over the content of racist statements that he apparently never made and almost certainly doesn’t believe.

The implications for Christians who support biblical values such as the sanctity of life and the definition of marriage are frightening, and are already being played out in the public square.

Limbaugh said on his radio show that he was approached in late May to become part of a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams (he’s from Missouri), and ultimately agreed to join the bidding group. His participation arguably should never have become more than a footnote to the story; do we care how other millionaires invest their money? But activists and journalists quickly seized upon that nugget of information and created a firestorm. Most egregiously, the journalists’ “research” seems to have been limited to Limbaugh’s entry on Wikipedia, the online-dictionary site that is notoriously unreliable because anybody can publish anything he or she wants about anything there. A fabricated quote suggesting he supported slavery made it into numerous stories, even though there was not legitimate evidence that the quote was authentic.

Ultimately, Rush became tarred as a racist, and some players went on record saying they’d never play for a team he owned. The commissioner of the NFL and its players union made a point of denouncing Limbaugh’s views. The head of the investor group publicly dropped him, and the architects of the smear campaign won – but not without setting a dangerous precedent that should concern anyone holding “controversial” views. Like values voters.

Can you imagine a climate in which an outspoken belief in the biblical principle that marriage is solely the union of one man and one woman becomes “unacceptable” in polite company? Advocates of same-sex marriage are clearly trying to make that fanciful view a reality. Susan Schulman, a professor of English at New York’s City University, proposed in a recent book that “homophobia should be treated as a sickness, with families court-ordered into treatment programs.” Business people who have supported ballot issues defining marriage God’s way have faced economic boycotts. Even within the Church, the biblical view of life and family is coming under attack in some quarters.

Rush Limbaugh’s experience differs from these attacks only because he has a microphone and 20 million listeners a week (and jealously on the part of the media that Rush could conceivably own a pro football team is likely at least part of the reason he was attacked).

We are proud supporters of the First Amendment not because of episodes like this, but in spite of them.