I remember when it was normal to drive when you had had a few (or more); you may not have been falling down, but you were impaired. Due to a successful public awareness campaign, our culture around driving while impaired has changed. Yes, there are still a few die-hards (some of them friends of mine) who still indulge in this dangerous habit, but for the most part, we, as a society, view it as a bad idea, and don't do it.
In the same way, there is an acceptance of same-sex relationships and fluid sexuality, which is something unimaginable to my teenage self. In the sheltered world I grew up in, it wasn't even talked about. Now, it is 20 years past the date of the first same-sex marriage, in the modern era, at least. (It was, naturally, practised in the ancient world long before Judeo-Christian dogma completely infested Western culture.) This cultural shift of happened so quickly as to infuriate a segment of North American society: the God-fearing "traditional" religious person.
We are still in a period when change is inevitable, and those among us who have learned to be flexible (or at least polite) in the face of radical social change have done relatively well. It's easy to criticize those who have not, from the lofty perch of our well-intentioned and well-fed liberalism, but it has been hard on the religious person. At the same time, though, I wonder if it's wise to cater to those whose ideas and traditions (mostly the latter, for if religious people were serious thinkers, they would have questioned their beliefs and dumped them long ago) prevent them from appreciating, understanding and accepting the many fundamental changes Western society is undergoing. The train has left the station; you are no longer in Witchita, and no-one really knows where the train is heading.
The religious person, if he is polite, seeks to persuade, cajole, influence, either through his words or his example, those who have left the path. Other religious persons seek to clamp down on, suppress and even destroy the person who is embracing a new culture. They are two sides of a strange coin, for whose business is it to change someone's mind, or to try to make them stop doing what you disapprove of?
Just as God is changeable: from the aggressive, capricious murderous one of the Old testament to the loving, but still pretty inflexible, God of the New, so is human society. There is no constant but change (so far).
