Religious Liberty – Page 30

Mike Delph and “Religious Freedom”

It’s deja vu all over again.

Mike Delph–whose hysterical (in both senses of the word) tweets in the wake of the failure of HR3 left no room for doubt about his feverish homophobia–has introduced a bill to protect “religious” folks from having to recognize the civil rights of LGBT citizens. [Update: Evidently that other “religious warrior,” Scott Schneider, authored this particular bill. Given Delph’s legislative history, you can understand how I made the mistake…]

(I’m sure Schneider is equally anxious to protect good Christians from being forced to do business with unwed fornicators, bearers of false witness, adulterers and other sinful folks. That bill will undoubtedly be introduced any day now. Not.)

My friend Bill Groth, a highly respected lawyer who frequently litigates constitutional issues, reminded me via a Facebook post that we’ve seen this movie before. In Newman v. Piggie Park Enterprises, Inc. the Court wrote:

” The free exercise of one’s beliefs…is subject to regulation when religious acts require accommodation to society. Undoubtedly Bessinger has a constitutional right to espouse the religious beliefs of his own choosing, however, he does not have the absolute right to exercise and practice such beliefs in utter disregard of the clear constitutional rights of other citizens. This court refuses to lend credence or support to his position that he has a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of the Negro race in his business establishments upon the ground that to do so would violate his sacred religious beliefs.”

Newman was decided in 1968.

The identity of the people who we are being asked to classify as second-class citizens may have changed, but the desire to justify bigotry in the name of religion sure hasn’t.

Fortunately, on this issue, that pesky Constitution this proposal ignores hasn’t changed either.

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Speaking of Religion…

We’re seeing multiple tantrums from self-styled religious folks these days, and it isn’t likely to abate in the coming new year.

Huffington Post recently reported on a lawsuit brought against the Kansas State Board of Education.

An anti-evolution group is suing the Kansas State Board of Education for instituting a science curriculum that teaches evolution.

The nonprofit Citizens for Objective Public Education filed a lawsuit Thursday to block the board, education commissioner and Department of Education from teaching science classes consistent with new educational benchmarks developed by 26 states to align school systems across the U.S. These Next Generation Science Standards, which Kansas adopted in June, have seen fierce opposition from critics opposed to the teaching of climate change and evolution.

Citizens for Objective Public Education argues in its lawsuit that the standards promote atheism and therefore violate the separation of church and state.

I wish the theocrats would make up their minds! Texas textbook reviewers insist that there isn’t any separation of church and state. Marco Rubio agrees with them (which tells you that denying separation is a litmus test for the GOP base). Something called the Jeremiah Project says the theory of Church-State separation is a nefarious plot by those who deny that America is a “Christian Nation.”

Apparently, interpretation of the First Amendment is a matter of convenience, to be changed when a different understanding is required in order to reach one’s desired outcome.

I must have missed that part of scripture where it teaches us that “the ends justify the means.”

Welcome to 2015.

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About Those Religious “Victims”

Speaking of religion and government–as I have been for the past couple of days–it might be well to consider just how much the pious victims of religious persecution are suffering financially in our (ostensibly) secular culture. An article in the Washington Post recently considered the fiscal relationship of church to state.

Well, sort of. The article actually reported on a study detailing the various tax benefits our religiously “neutral,” government extends to religious organizations, the vast majority of which are Christian.

When people donate to religious groups, it’s tax-deductible. Churches don’t pay property taxes on their land or buildings. When they buy stuff, they don’t pay sales taxes. When they sell stuff at a profit, they don’t pay capital gains tax. If they spend less than they take in, they don’t pay corporate income taxes. Priests, ministers, rabbis and the like get “parsonage exemptions” that let them deduct mortgage payments, rent and other living expenses when they’re doing their income taxes. They also are the only group allowed to opt out of Social Security taxes (and benefits).

What is the value of all this preferential treatment?

The article quotes the authors of the original study, who calculated the total subsidy at $71 billion. But the original study didn’t include the cost of a number of subsidies, like local income and property tax exemptions, the sales tax exemption, and — most importantly — the charitable deduction for religious donations.

The charitable deduction for all groups cost the government approximately $39 billion dollars in 2014, according to the CBO. Since some 32 percent of all charitable donations are made to religious groups, the value of just those exemptions is around $12.5 billion.If you add that to the amounts reported in the original study, you get a religious subsidy of about $83.5 billion.

Next time someone whines about the war on religion or Christmas, or complains that government is insufficiently protective of “people of faith,” think about that.

I’d love to be “victimized” to the tune of 80+ billion dollars…

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Religious Liberty Redux

Americans haven’t talked this much about religious liberty since the Puritans defined it as worshiping the right God (and making sure their neighbors did too). A few examples:

Creationists are building Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. Per Juanita Jean:

“They feel that it will be a great tourist attraction. Who knows? People go to Dollyworld. Need I say more?

So, they set themselves up as a non-profit and applied for $18 million in tax incentives from the good people of Kentucky.

One problem. They will only hire you to work there if you are a fundamentalist Christian.

It turns out that the state will not grant incentives to companies that discriminate in hiring. Ken Hamm, the creationist applying for Kentucky tax dollars, says the state’s refusal to fund him is persecution–that the governor is attacking his religious freedom and persecuting his organization “because of our Christian message.”

Meanwhile, in Ohio, there’s a guy facing legal action if he doesn’t take down the Nativity scene he erected at his own expense on his own property, because it features zombies instead of traditional biblical characters.

Jasen Dixon told WXIX that he manages 13 Rooms of Doom haunted house, so he already had the zombies, including one resembling the baby Jesus.

“I wanted a Nativity scene and I worked with what I had,” he explained.

Town officials claimed that Dixon was breaking rules that limited displays to no more than 35 percent of the yard. Needless to say, more traditional displays with equal proportions have not been cited, and Dixon had displayed the same size installation at Halloween on the same property with no problems.

And back home again in Indiana, State Senator Scott Schneider intends to “shore up gaps in Indiana’s religious liberty framework.”

“The focus has been on same-sex marriage because that’s the hot topic right now, but it goes far beyond that,” he said. “It’s important to have some religious freedom and protection.”

The “freedom” Schneider wants to protect is the freedom to discriminate against gay customers and citizens on the basis of (his preferred) religious doctrine.

Let’s cut the pretense. What people like Schneider and Hamm want is preferential treatment by government for their particular beliefs.

Hamm wants to use public money to promote his religious literalism; Schneider wants to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT patrons. At the same time, they and other “religious freedom” theocrats want to use the authority of the state to shut down private religious displays or observances of which they disapprove.

Here’s the deal: thanks to separation of church and state (and yes, Virginia, the First Amendment may not use those words, but separation is what the religion clauses do) you have a right to believe anything you want. You also have a right to practice much–but not all–of what you believe. (You can’t sacrifice your firstborn, or beat your children senseless, or use illegal drugs in the name of your particular God).

Religious liberty does not mean you have the right to use other citizens’ tax dollars to promote your religious beliefs.

And Scott Schneider’s definition of “religious liberty” to the contrary, the First Amendment does not give businesses that rely on publicly-supported roads, sidewalks, transport, snow removal, garbage collection and the like the right to pick and choose which members of that public it will serve.

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Arrogant Virtue

Andrew Sullivan recently shared the following quote from Reinhold Niebuhr’s postwar book, The Irony of History.

“We … as all ‘God-fearing’ men of all ages, are never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. …There is…the necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities…

.. if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.”

Among other things, the excerpt reminded me of Learned Hand’s famous observation that “the spirit of liberty is the spirit that’s not too certain it’s right.”

In God and Country, I noted that America remains deeply divided between contemporary descendants of the early Puritans, on the one hand, and those I call Modernists, whose worldviews are rooted in the Enlightenment, on the other. Puritans define liberty as freedom to do the “right” thing, the thing that God wants. And what God wants (as Niebuhr noted) is–coincidentally–exactly what those self-same “God-fearing men” want.

Puritans believe that government has an obligation to enforce “God’s commands,” which they alone understand.

The American legal structure, however, is not a product of the Puritans who came to these shores for the “liberty” to worship the “right” God and the “liberty” to punish or expel those who differed. Established some 150 years after the Puritans first landed, our government began with a very different definition of liberty: freedom to live your own life as you see fit, free of government interference, so long as you don’t thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as you are willing to grant an equal liberty to others. Consistent with these caveats, the Bill of Rights ultimately boils down to “live and let live.”

These very different worldviews divide us still.

In the kneejerk reactions to LGBT progress—especially the rush to legislate “religious liberty” exemptions from civil rights laws—we see the Puritans, furiously fighting back against modern life.

In Michigan, a bill recently passed by their House of Representatives would “limit governmental action that substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion,” by allowing or disallowing “an act or refusal to act, that is substantially motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not compelled by or central to a system of religious belief.”

In other words, if you are a pharmacist who doesn’t want to fill prescriptions for birth control or antiretrovirals, if you own a bakery and don’t want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, or if you are an EMT reluctant to treat gay patients, you can cite your “sincerely held religious belief” (no matter how idiosyncratic) to justify noncompliance with legal and/or professional obligations.

I think these laws are what Nieburh meant by “blindness induced by hatred and vainglory.”

The zealots who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center were undoubtedly motivated by “sincere” religious beliefs. The homegrown terrorists who gun down abortion doctors are motivated by “sincere” religious beliefs.

In a society where my (arrogantly held) sincere belief is different from your (equally arrogant) equally “sincere” belief, government cannot and should not privilege either of us.

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