Category Archives: Religious Liberty

Not Your (Founding) Fathers’ Definition of “Religious Liberty”

Sunday Sermon time….

It’s not just the fight over RFRA.

Increasingly, defenders of “religious liberty” are insisting that what their liberty requires is the right to dictate the behaviors and prescribe the rights of others. Any effort to remind these theocrats that non-Christians and nonbelievers are entitled to equal treatment by government is met with outrage and accusations of “political correctness” and “waging war on faith.”

Think I’m exaggerating? These three examples all crossed my desk on a single day:

In Michigan, a Catholic hospital repeatedly refused to perform a medically-necessary tubal ligation, despite the doctor’s strong recommendation.

Weeks after learning she would give birth to her third child, Jessica Mann was faced with a difficult decision: because she was stricken by a life-threatening brain tumor, her doctor recommended she have her fallopian tubes tied at the time of her scheduled cesarean section delivery, later this month….

Mann’s doctor advised her that tubal ligation during the C-section it would be the safest route, consistent with long-established standard of care, and prevent the need for another surgery.

The hospital cited its Catholic affiliation–and its liberty to follow the teachings of  the Church, even if that meant it was sufficiently in conflict with the medical “standard of care” as to be considered malpractice– as justification for the denial.

In Tennessee, self-identified “Sovereign Citizens” are refusing to buy license plates or to register their automobiles. From the Marty Center at the University of Chicago, we learn that

While the sovereign citizen movement is often represented as a collection of scofflaws creating elaborate interpretations of the American legal system in order to scam it, the reality is more complex…

The majority of sovereign citizens conceive of and engage in their claims and practices as religious.

These sovereign citizens claim–and fervently believe–that the law as they espouse it always supersedes other interpretations of the law. Their “liberty” to follow the “real” law is thus more important than the government’s interpretation of the law.

But this is my favorite: In Washington, D.C., a church is actually claiming that the location of a proposed bike lane adjacent to its property would “infringe on its constitutional right to religious freedom.” (You really can’t make this shit up.) As a post at Think Progress pointed out:

Currently, D.C. provides the church with a benefit that is paid for by taxpayers: a road near the church which does not include a bike lane. D.C. proposed offering the church a different benefit which would also be paid for by the city’s taxpayers: a road near the church which does include a bike lane. The church, in effect, is claiming that it has the right to dictate which taxpayer-funded benefits the District of Columbia shall provide, solely because it happens to be a religious organization.

These assertions of “religious liberty” would have baffled the men who drafted America’s Constitution. They are certainly inconsistent with the libertarian construct that emerged from the Enlightenment and influenced America’s founders: the notion that each individual has a right to make his or her own moral choices–follow his own telos–so long as he does not thereby harm the person or property of a non-consenting other and so long as he is willing to accord an equal right to others.

To put the philosophy of the Bill of Rights into modern terminology, it’s pretty much “live and let live.” (Again, so long as you aren’t harming anyone else–and “harming” is admittedly a contestable definition.)

That philosophy definitely isn’t “I get to do what I want, and since I have a direct line to God and Truth, I also get to make you behave the way my religion thinks you should.”

We are each entitled to liberty, not privilege.

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Whose “Religious Liberty” Do We Protect?

A couple of years ago, the website Raw Story had a troubling report about a conflict between religion and individual rights that is both accelerating and less visible than the high-profile conflicts (think Kentucky clerk) that make the news.

Healthcare providers and institutions are increasingly consolidating. In Washington State, for example, if all of the mergers planned when the Raw Story article was written were consummated, all hospital beds in nine counties are tied to religious institutions. That includes the University of Washington system.

Why should we care? Why is this is medically problematic?

Recently a woman was traveling across the Midwest when she developed abdominal pain. She and her husband went to the nearest hospital, where she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal ectopic pregnancy. The doctors recommended immediate surgery to remove the fallopian tube containing the misplaced embryo, a procedure that would reduce by half her future chances of conceiving a child. They failed to mention that a simple injection of Methotrexate could solve the problem, leaving her fertility intact. (In fact, at a secular hospital she found on her smart phone, it subsequently did.) Why the omission?

According to Catholic teaching, an injection that destroys an ectopic embryo counts as an  abortion; removing the part of a woman’s reproductive system containing the embryo is not.

The article has several other examples of situations, both in the U.S. and abroad, where theological commitments have trumped sound medical practice. In 2012, for example, a 16-year-old Dominican girl was denied cancer treatment for weeks while doctors debated whether chemotherapy would constitute an abortion. She eventually miscarried and later died.

An angry father shared his daughter’s experience:

A Catholic doctor at a Catholic hospital went against my daughter’s wishes and signed consent to have a hysterectomy because of severe endometriosis. One ovary had already exploded. My daughter had never intended or desired children nor was she in a suitable situation to have a child. She was single, in her late 20s. When she awoke from surgery she learned that the doctor had over-ridden her wishes and consent in an attempt to save her fertility. The operation was botched, leaving my daughter on permanent disability, in pain, with even more health problems than she’d had before.

When we go into a hospital, most of us expect our doctors and other healthcare providers to honor our expressed treatment directives. Many of us have Living Wills or other healthcare documents that reflect our own considered, deeply-held beliefs.

When a patient’s wishes are disregarded because they are inconsistent with someone else’s religion, that’s an unjustified denial of religious liberty–a denial that is particularly egregious because the  “bargaining power” of the parties is so unequal.

In a diverse society committed to civic equality, hospitals dependent upon government funds (Medicare, Medicaid, etc.) should be required to respect the decisions of adult, competent patients.

And medical practices consistent with accepted standards of care should never take a back seat to doctrine.

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Privilege and Persecution

Can you stand one more rumination triggered by the marriage license controversy in Kentucky?

Usually, when Americans talk about inequality, we’re talking about economic disparities; over the past several years, such conversations have tended to focus on the troubling and growing gap between the “one-percenters” and everyone else. But every once in a while, we need to remind ourselves and our fellow Americans that there are other kinds of inequality—sometimes affecting economic opportunity, sometimes not—that can also be deeply corrosive of public life and civility.

The obvious example, of course, is racism, which has become more visible due to some white folk’s seething resentment over Obama’s election. But racism isn’t the only manifestation of tribalism and legal disadvantage that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to address.

The past few weeks, we’ve seen a flare-up of America’s long-simmering “culture war,” thanks to Kim Davis, the Kentucky County Clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples and defied several court orders demanding that she follow the law.

Her legal position is untenable, even ludicrous. (She has a constitutional right to religious liberty but no right to hold a government position and no right to use that position to deny equal rights to others.) But her defiance has once again exposed a persistent belief on the part of many Americans that this is a “Christian Nation,” and that any denial of Christian privilege is tantamount to persecution.

Indeed, in a particularly offensive assertion of that perspective, Davis’ lawyer characterized her five days in jail for contempt of court as “just like what happened” to Jews in Nazi Germany.

Several Republican candidates for President have rushed to defend Davis and “religious liberty.” An increasingly unhinged Mike Huckabee has warned of the imminent “criminalization” of Christianity; rhetoric from Cruz, Trump, Jindal and others has been equally intemperate. Anyone listening to them would conclude that secularists control America and are oppressing the few remaining Christians.

Sane people, on the other hand, observe that over seventy percent of Americans identify as Christian, that every President the country has ever elected has been Christian, and that Christians—at least white ones—are privileged by the culture to an extent that few of them recognize or admit. Christians routinely get time off work to celebrate religious holidays, Christian music and television programs with Christian themes fill the airways, and multiple stores carry items Christians need in order to celebrate religious holidays. Unlike Muslims, Jews and others, Christians aren’t pressured to celebrate holidays that conflict with their religious values. The (extensive) list goes on.

The erosion of privilege can trigger unpleasant responses from those who feel entitled to deference. Some men react badly as women make inroads into what was once a “man’s world.” Efforts to ameliorate structural racism engender hostility and resentment. We probably shouldn’t be surprised to see the same reaction from those who have uncritically accepted Christian privilege as their due, and who consider any diminution of their exalted social status an unwarranted affront.

How did Orwell put it in Animal Farm? Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others.

And some want to keep it that way.

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Faux History For God

I’ve often repeated Pat Moynahan’s famous adage: we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts.

I stand corrected.

In Texas (where else?), “educators” unsatisfied with actual American history have responded by creating their own. Because God.

Did you have any idea that our first President believed that government required God and the Bible in order to function? And are you familiar with the following quote from President Ronald Reagan? “Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.”  Chances are you haven’t heard of either of these – because they’re both fiction. George Washington is better categorized as a Deist (rather than a traditional Christian), and Reagan never made such a statement about the Bible.

It’s part of a strange indoctrination strategy at a small school district in eastern Texas. On the walls of the school hallways and classrooms are many such alleged “passages” from the Bible and “statements” attributed to prominent figures in American history that all are inaccurate, misquoted, taken out of context, and even made up out of whole cloth.

The school’s practice of inventing “suitably” pious quotations with which to indoctrinate children came to light after a letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation challenged the quotations.  According to the organization’s attorney Samuel Grover:

“The district cannot even fall back on the argument that these quotes have educational merit, given the many examples of misquotes, misattributions, and entirely fraudulent quotes displayed on its walls…The district sets a poor example for its students if it cannot be bothered to fact check the messages it chooses to endorse.”

With all due respect, I don’t think the problem was “failure to fact check.” I think the problem was the readiness of dishonest people to invent a history that would be more consistent with their religious preferences than that pesky thing called reality….

I guess they missed that place in the Ten Commandments about “bearing false witness.”

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Suffer the Little Children

File under: unbelievable and despicable.

As numerous news sources have reported, a second grade student at Forest Park Elementary School in Fort Wayne was asked by a classmate where he went to church. The seven-year-old said he didn’t go to church, and didn’t believe in God–but it was fine with him if the girl posing the question believed in God.

This evidently upset the girl, who began to cry. At that point, the teacher stepped in. And punished the second-grader. She told him she was “very concerned” about what he had done. Then she required him to sit by himself at lunch and forbid him to talk to the other children. For three days.

According to the lawsuit that has been filed on the second-grader’s behalf:

A.B. had been publicly separated from his classmates and informed that he could not speak to them. All the students in his class heard and were aware of this. He was publicly shamed and made to feel that his personal beliefs were terribly wrong.

No efforts were made to correct the damages that had been done.

A.B. came home from school on multiple occasions crying saying that he knows that everyone at school — teachers and students — hate him.

Even now there are some classmates who will not talk to A.B.

Even now A.B. remains anxious and fearful about school, which is completely contrary to how he felt before this incident.

What kind of teacher humiliates a second-grader for sharing beliefs of which she doesn’t approve? Would she treat a Jewish or Muslim or Sikh child this way? Or is her lack of compassion and humanity reserved for children from non-religious families?

And why is she in a classroom?

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