BALTIMORE — The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops opened a new front in their fight against abortion and same-sex marriage on Monday, recasting their opposition as a struggle for “religious liberty” against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church’s rights.
The bishops have expressed increasing exasperation as more states have legalized same-sex marriage, and the Justice Department has refused to go to bat for the Defense of Marriage Act, legislation that established the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman.
“We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion,” Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, president of the bishops conference, said in a news conference Monday at the bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore.
— New York Times, Nov. 15th
There is apparently a new drive underway. By "new" I mostly mean "old", because it is the same campaign as always, it has only shifted fronts. The premise is and always has been that if government does not act to enshrine one particular religious viewpoint into law, it is oppression against that religious group. It is the worst, dullest, and most hollow notion of "religious freedom" possible, because it of course demands that the government reject all possible religious groups and interpretations except for your own. It demonstrates an inherent bigotry on the part of the asserting party, yes, but it also demonstrates a particular philosophical stupidity, one so egregious that it naturally makes the listener suspect all of the rest of the claimant's philosophical underpinnings. If you devote your life's work to the supposed study and expression of ethics and morality, but obtusely misunderstand the meaning of the word liberty, then your life's work seems to have been considerably less productive than you imagine it to be.
Whenever I write about the Catholic Church, I feel I am supposed to add a disclaimer: "as a lapsed Catholic," it is supposed to start out. It also seems inevitable that, as in the New York Times story itself, the recent and still viciously raw stories of pedophilia come up in some context. The church's behavior in the scandal was abominable—there is no nicer word for it—and carved a deep canyon through the implied moral superiority of the institution. When the Archbishop tells Penn State that "we know what you are going through, and you can count on our prayers," there is always the nagging suspicion that the prayers, like all the other acts, are dedicated more earnestly towards the perpetrators than the victims. Or that perpetrators and victims are synonymous terms.
So right off the bat, there are those elements of instinctive hostility to contend with. My own lapsed status, caused because of no particular outrage but a gradually growing feeling of moral stagnation coming from those old buildings, of places where the same words are repeated week after week and that is supposed to suffice, and the more recent actions of an institution that I thought of, during my childhood, as a realm if not of assured purity then at least of reasonable safety. I could and perhaps should write reams about those older days, when the neighborhood church seemed so much bigger, and the stained-glass windows seemed to filter the very sunlight into supernatural forms, but it never quite seems the right time. Instead, there is just the slow, acidic drip of more current news.
It is galling, then, when the high figures of that church parrot the talking points of all the others. They are, after all, the moral superiors to all those other petty denominations (growing up Catholic, you are made very clear on this point), but nonetheless they come to the same dismal conclusions. Even decades ago it was clear that peering up the church's hierarchy was like a journey back in time: in the Church, authority goes hand in hand with stuffiness, and intractability, and archaisms. Bishops talk about cafeteria Catholics, but most parish priests are themselves distinctly of the cafeteria variety, and it always made for an awkward Sunday when one of the higher-ups would grace our community with his presence, stoic and firm, and it seemed like just saying the words in English instead of Latin was a burden that burned the tongues of some of them, so grating was any concession to the modern age.
There is no doubt that some religious individuals in America consider homosexuality to be sinful. There is also no doubt, however, that other religious people do not. Once you acknowledge this one small point, that is all that is needed: the proportions of how many people feel each way is irrelevant. By codifying one position into law, you are codifying religious discrimination against all others that feel differently. Forget even the uncomfortable, ever-galling existence of atheists; just chalk them up as a religion based on anti-religion and be done with it, if you like. The point remains.
It takes a special kind of presumptuousness, then (one even greater than the normal presumptuousness of many religious folks, in identifying their own sub-sub-denomination as the One True Faith, and that is saying something) to declare that the unwillingness of government to codify your religious views as the only legally acceptable ones somehow counts as discrimination against you, or an attack on your liberties. To respond to it more tersely, get bent. The notion that all other citizens should be bound to your convictions, not their own, or the notion that you have the obvious moral superiority in spite of all evidence that suggests that you, too, might have serious flaws of your own to be considered—no, that is outright infuriating. It is not even possible to take it seriously, it so brands you as a pompous, arrogant moral charlatan.
To say that government not discriminating against individuals based on your own religious viewpoints counts as "neutering" your religion is so lazy, dull, and pompous a thought that it nearly requires you to be slapped. (My religion, should I ever found one from scratch as I have often contemplated doing, would include this as a central tenet.)
Religious liberty allows you to believe homosexuality is a sin. Religious liberty does not allow you to impose that belief on others by force of law. Religious liberty suggests that you should not be required to personally gay-marry people, in your own church; it does not suggest that you are allowed to declare a blanket ban on the practice among every religion and every church, nor as official government practice. If you believe birth control is a sin, fine; I believe murdering fellow human beings on a foreign battlefield is a sin as well, but nobody in Congress has yet demanded all American tax money be withheld from the practice.
If we are to pass laws based on the opinions of individual religious groups, then which groups should we base them on? Many individuals believe that eating animals is a sin, but banning hamburgers would result in a riot on the streets before the first afternoon was out. The Amish have grand ideas on both buttons and gas-powered engines: if theirs is deemed the One True Religion, it would nearly be worth it just for the comedy of seeing the rest of America adjust. We tried banning alcohol; it didn't work out. Proper women's clothing is always a contentious issue; should the One American Faith require full burkas, or would mandatory wool sweaters suffice?
It should go without saying that I do not want to "neuter" Catholicism, as much as we might all agree that a judicious use of castration might have saved a great many recent problems. Even if I did want to, however, it is thankfully not up to me to decide, and by the same token I would rather such decisions not be up to anyone else either. We have quite enough bigotry and prejudice without further enshrining any more of it into law.
So where to draw the distinctions? After all, thou shalt not kill is both a religious law and a civil one, and is usually (but not entirely) uncontroversial in either sphere. The motivations behind that one are perfectly clear: one person's freedom does not outweigh another's, and killing a person is as complete a removal of freedom as you can possibly get. As the aphorism goes, the right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins; see John Stuart Mill for a less nose-oriented explication:
[T]he only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.
The definition of harm is the only sticky part of it. I think most would agree, however, that citing government demands that you not cause harm to others as inflicting "harm" upon yourself is too clever by half. (Too clever by half is an old saying that boils down to only half of clever, which is a polite way of calling a pompous person a dullard without ever quite saying it outright.) Yes, we all recognize that the power to discriminate is fundamental to religion, and that enforcing strict bigotries about what is declared moral and what is not is nearly all the institution even exists for, but still: the slaveholder was not more harmed by the freeing of his slaves than the slaves were in being enslaved, and the outrage felt by a man over not being allowed to string a homosexual up by his neck is not the equal to the harm caused to the person being strung up.
We define religious liberty to be the ability of any group to practice their own religious beliefs, so long as those beliefs do not cause harm to others. We do not define religious liberty to be the codification of your beliefs into law, to the exclusion of others. That would be the opposite.
Nobody is threatening to force the Catholic Church to marry homosexual couples, at least not as far as I have been able to discern. There is, more audaciously, support for government paying for birth control in certain circumstances, and it has been exclusively predicated on the health advantages of such, not on concerns of morality or immorality. Abortion remains a nearly all-encompassing concern among some religious communities, but whether or not you believe it to universally run afoul of the harm principle depends on whether you can credibly claim sentience of a zygote. Any such claim would be rooted in religious faith, because the hard science of it conclusively suggests the opposite.
In each of these cases, the proper government course would seem to be the path of greater individual freedom. Those persons whose religion ascribes immorality to the acts can simply avoid them, and the only concrete harm to them comes from the reminder that other people think differently. The opposite situation—lesser individual freedoms, in deference to a specific religious viewpoint—would demand constraining individual behavior based exclusively upon the demands of that religion, regardless of the individual's own religious views. That seems by far the more troubling case to make.
The church in this instance is citing a more galling supposed injury to liberty than any of these, however. It is considerably more spurious and considerably less ambiguous or philosophical:
[I]n an impassioned address to the prelates, Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., the chairman of the bishops’ newly established committee on religious liberty, said the church would urge priests and laypeople to take up the religious liberty cause. Bishop Lori said that in states like Illinois and Massachusetts, and in the District of Columbia, Catholic agencies that received state financing had been forced to stop offering adoption and foster care services because those states required them to help same-sex couples to adopt, just as they helped heterosexual couples.
Bishop Lori said in his speech, “The services which the Catholic Church and other denominations provide are more crucial than ever, but it is becoming more and more difficult for us to deliver these services in a manner that respects the very faith that impels us to provide them.”
In this case, the government is barring a specific form of prejudice, but the church argues that prejudice is central to the "very faith that impels" them. Outrageous! Shocking! Such tyranny!
Except that the claim is based on a rather peculiar assertion: that those prejudices would be disallowed in order to receive financing from the state. Well now, that seems a considerably less distressing state of affairs. Government allows you to condemn the filthy homosexuals wanting to adopt and care for children who would otherwise likely be in a considerably worse situation; you just have to forgo government stipends in order to do it. Again, that would seem to allow considerable religious liberty to be what other people might call a bigot; government will not, however, finance it.
The church response? That if they cannot discriminate when on the government dime, they will not assist any of those children at all. That does not come off as terribly committed to the noble cause towards which they initially dedicated themselves, but fine; refuse the government funds, and the problem is solved. It is even solved in the most correct possible way: through voluntary separation. If your religion demands you leave a child homeless than put them under the care of a family consisting of two men or two women, so be it. It is in demanding government bend to, and fund, your point of view is where the line is crossed.
This is the bothersome thing: yes, religious freedom must be protected. But when a religious institution operates as another entity, as an official avenue of adoption for children in state care, or as a hospital, or as a university, then their activity ceases to be purely religious and becomes civil, or medical, or educational. When conducting those activities, it is reasonable to ask that they comply with the laws of the state. (Is there a religious exception for building codes? If a doctor cuts off your leg in a religious hospital when you came in for surgery on your arm, can the fellow claim religious exemption from malpractice, because his errant hand and incompetent mind were God-inspired? I wonder.)
This is the difference: as religion, believe whatever you want. Preach whatever you want, hold whatever bigotries you want, consider bacon or buttons or buggery a sin, if you want. As adoption agency, or as hospital, or as university, you may face more specific civil constraints. This is the balance we strike, and it seems the only plausible one.
None of this is to say that notions of morality should be discarded, or should be construed as an attack on faith itself. The notion of religious liberty, however, is an essential premise within our nation. To turn it on its head and declare that your "liberty" requires the rest of society to bend to your own moral beliefs is both irritatingly commonplace and utterly flawed. It takes only the most cursory of thought experiments to imagine what a society would look like if one religious view was legislated to the exclusion of others. Yes, you may consider your moral instincts to be the correct ones, to be universal absolutes, in fact—but history is filled with movements similarly confident in their morality, and similarly intent on imposing them upon all they meet. We can read the textbooks to see what happened next; not a one of them turned out as pure and flawless as they believed themselves to be.
Religious freedom is not simply a vehicle for protecting individuals, or even for safeguarding individual religious sects. It safeguards notions of justice and morality themselves. The law of the land is determined by moral consensus, not religious consensus. If we restrict the rights of the individual, it should be only to safeguard greater rights on the part of the whole. Notions of justice have bent greatly since the founding of the nation, but they have turned inexorably towards diminished prejudices and greater inclusion. We are a better people than we once were. We are no means perfect, and I hope our own great-grandchildren look back on our own times and shudder in embarrassment at our own ever-too-apparent prejudices and false moralism, but we are better, and it is because we have somehow managed to shun religious or moral stagnation in favor of a melting pot of notions, all in enforced contention.
The conflicts that are created may be vicious ones, but the resulting debates, often conducted over the span of decades, have at least the benefit of allowing the better ideas to rise to the top, and consensus, eventually, emerges. It is the rare fool that would still argue for slavery, or against the voting rights of women—the conversation has passed them by long ago. We let them speak, as we let all fools and geniuses speak, but we do not let them act. It is by moral consensus. We recognize that allowing them license to harm others in deference to their own "moral convictions" is a greater injury than is imposed by demanding that they refrain from such actions.
Who knows: perhaps we will go backwards. The thrill of fundamentalism is strong for a great many people, and if entire religions are more devoted to obsessions over sex than they are over feeding the poor, or healing the sick, then heaven knows what would bend them in the other direction.
That remains to me the most grievous part. As a child the lessons were drilled into me, every Sunday, and so I know what Jesus said about the poor, and the sick. If he preached about the improperness of particular sexual partnerships, however, it seemed he was considerably less insistent about them. I know the lessons of forgiveness, and I know how Jesus advocated we treat sinners, and even criminals. Sermons on birth control were less prominent.
For all the talk of the sanctity of life, I have never heard of a politician being refused Communion after overseeing the execution of a prisoner. I have seldom if ever heard on the television religious injunctions against war or torture that were half as urgent or commonplace as the various injunctions against sex. Making sure the poor get fed or the sick get treated seem to revolve mostly around shelters for the former, and bake sales for the latter: there is no fervent cry for further government intervention on moral grounds, there is no pronounced outrage when we cut the budget for such things further, or propose that more of the hungry or the sick or the young or the elderly go without care. I wish there was: if we are going to have knock-down, drag-out fights over the moral fiber of our nation, I can think of a great many punches worth throwing. None of them are predicated on the punishment of sinners, or on which sexual positions are abominable unto the Lord.
Someday I expect I will write about leaving the church. The short version is, I suppose, obvious; it became less and less credible, even as a young child, to accept that religion was an expression of true faith and not just a carefully circumscribed prison for it. It became even clearer that concepts like morality, ethics and justice had very little to do with reading old words on Sunday, and forgetting them by Monday, and I certainly never saw a difference in the day-to-day morality of any person based on how many crucifixes or pictures of the Blessed Mother they displayed in their house. I would rather not trust another person's definition of either justice or morality, and will especially not trust it if they confidently insist that I will burn in the fires of hell if I disagree.
Liberty, though: that word I know. I am confident I know what it means. Preach whatever you want in your churches, or on the televisions, or on the sidewalks for all I care, but that word belongs to all of us.