The Insanity of Religious Exemptions

With the recent decision from the Supreme Court that the right to marriage is fundamental and cannot be denied to same-sex couple, the fight has moved on to one of ‘religious liberty’ and the right people think they have to act as their faith dictates. Except here’s the thing: you don’t have that right. You have the right to believe whatever you wish. The government cannot force you to act against your beliefs (to a reasonable extent). But your actions are governed by the rules of society and you cannot pick and choose which ones you will follow. Such a path leads to chaos and is antithetical to civilized behavior.

The way to see this is to understand the principles being argued and look at what they actually mean and where they would lead. What many are now saying (perhaps even a majority, for what that’s worth) is that people shouldn’t have to provide services to others if doing so violates their deeply held religious beliefs. It comes in two main forms for this particular case: government officials shouldn’t have to issue same-sex marriage licenses if they don’t want to and private companies should be able to refuse service to people who are having gay weddings. But what does it mean in general?

First, why does it have to a religious belief? What if someone just has a very strong moral feeling not based upon faith but something else? What if, on a scientific basis, someone believes people shouldn’t be driving cars that release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which is altering the world’s climate? Do they have a right to turn away those who drive big trucks from their gas station? And does anyone determine if these ‘beliefs’ are real? If I don’t like a regular customer because he seems smug and condescending, can I claim a firm belief that khakis are evil and deny him service? Who gets to test these beliefs for validity and decide which ones rise to the level protected by law? Because if you have to defend religious beliefs as rational you’re going to have a very hard time doing it.

And who gets to decide what is a deeply held religious belief? Does the church? Does each individual? Most Christian religions list gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins. Does that mean a county clerk can deny a business license to McDonalds? Can the 7-Eleven worker turn overweight people away from the Slurpee machine? Do hotels have the right to turn away unmarried couples? And how about all those divorced people looking to get married? The bible clearly says that divorce is not allowed, the Catholic Church still doesn’t recognize it – shouldn’t any decent Catholic practitioner have a moral obligation to refuse to participate in any way in a second (or third or fourth) marriage? Where does it end?

Apparently people are allowed to pick and choose what actually offends them and what they claim religious liberty on. But without any official guidelines, that means people can simply choose whether or not they have to serve others in society. Does anyone really want to live in a world where any person, any government official, can turn away anyone they want for completely arbitrary reasons?

The answer is no. For a society to function we all have to abide by certain rules. One of those is that if you choose to work for the government you agree to follow the laws that our government has enacted. The government isn’t forcing you to do anything. If you do not desire to serve people who your religion considers sinners (which equates to 100% of the population), then you can simply find a job where you don’t have to serve anyone else.

The same goes for commerce. Many of the people arguing for their religious liberty are also big proponents of the free market. If you know anything about the market, you should realize that if some groups of people can exclude others from the marketplace then it isn’t free. We’ve gone through this in the past and I thought by now people realized that you can’t be allowed to treat people differently regardless of the excuse. Religion was used to justify slavery and then discrimination against blacks; it was used to argue against equality for women. We have a long history of people coming up with convenient reasons why they shouldn’t have to treat everyone the same. Thankfully we’ve overcome such self-serving myopia and time has shown the benefit of such advances. It’s very hard to look at the situation now, forecast the future, and not come to the conclusion that those arguing for the right to treat others unequally will once again be shown wrong by the passage of time.

Religious liberty is actually already well protected by our government. You can indeed believe whatever you want. Yet actions based upon those beliefs must always be governed by the rules of society that demand fair and equal treatment for all of its members. If you can discriminate against homosexuals – and make no mistake, if you want the right to not serve gay people, that, by definition, is asking for the right to discriminate – you can discriminate against anything. It’s very easy to find justification in the Bible, Torah, Koran, (or any other old book you find laying around). But diverse societies don’t function by the laws of religion. That’s what a caliphate does.

In spite of many protests to the contrary from the religious right, the U.S. Constitution clearly separates the laws of our government from any religious doctrine. They set up fundamental rights that didn’t depend upon the particulars of your faith and worked hard to establish the principle that everyone must be treated equally. Now that our government has recognized that fact, it’s sad to see people are so determined to limit what others are allowed to do. They want to take back that equality by moving the discrimination from the body of the beast to the prerogative of the individual. Either way it’s wrong.

I’m not entirely sure what it is about the sin of homosexuality that makes it so much worse than all the others. People haven’t been clamoring for religious exemptions on the many other sinful behaviors that we all participate in on a daily basis. These very same Christians who want the laws of their faith brought into the realm of commerce speak out loudly against other groups trying to do the same (Sharia-law phobia, anyone?). It seems people do recognize that other groups should not have the right to ignore society’s laws, but somehow they still want that right for themselves. Our society needs to be bigger and better than that.

Majority ≠ Right

One of the founding principle of our country, and a defining characteristic of any just society, is that the minority must be protected from the tyranny of the majority. I would go further to say that we should be judged not in how we treat most people, not in how well we provide for those who already have the advantage of numbers on their side, but in how we treat the few, the disadvantaged. We don’t decide right and wrong by popular vote. Those of us in the majority should not seek out that which pleases us at any cost to others. We have a deeper responsibility to use our power to care for those who lack power of their own.

Which brings us to the Confederate Flag. A recent poll states that the majority of Americans view the flag as a symbol of southern pride and heritage. It doesn’t matter. At all. The simple truth is that the descendants of slave owners have no right to decide the moral correctness of a symbol which sprung, clearly and unequivocally, from the fight to keep a group of people enslaved, judging them to be lesser beings simply because of the color of their skin. It’s those who face the symbol as a reminder of their past, the fact they were brought to this country in chains, traded like livestock with no rights as human beings – they are the ones who get to decide what that flag means and whether it should be flown freely as a symbol of our current government. By a decided majority they find the symbol to be one of hatred and bigotry.

Our debate should not be about what the flag represents. We should be asking how we wish to treat each other. Is it important for us to hold onto something which so obviously is rooted in a time when we were deeply divided? We don’t need to erase the symbol or its history from all accounts. We don’t need to ban private expressions or dictate what any people should think or feel. But as a just and free society we need to separate our official institutions from a symbol that holds nothing but past horrors and continued hurt for a large group of our people. These are our brothers and sisters who are hurting. These are our children who must be raised under the flag’s shadow. How can we justify the pain it causes? How can we expect them to have any faith in or devotion to a government that claims pride in a past that was built on a practice we all agree was an abomination? Let us take down the flag. It’s the least we can do.