Beliefs are Protected, Actions Less So

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Wednesday September 30, 2015 · 9:27 PM PDT

2015/09/30 · 21:27

On the first day of 1802, President Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to a “committee of the Danbury Baptist association in the state of Connecticut.” The Baptists had a problem. They were experiencing tolerance to be the despotism that Thomas Paine had recognized it to be. They had told the new president that “what religious privileges we enjoy (as a minor part of the State) we enjoy as favors granted, and not as inalienable rights. And those favors we receive at the expense of such degrading acknowledgements, as are inconsistent with the rights of freemen.”

Jefferson’s response gave us one of the most vivid images in American government. He wrote back that the “whole American people” had declared “a wall of separation between Church & State.” At least as important, though, is an earlier part of the same sentence, which says, “… the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions….”

Jefferson, not a bad source on the thinking of the founders, says that the first amendment protects belief absolutely but actions less so. If your particular mythology says that you should not eat ham, you are free to believe that you should not eat ham, to say that people should not eat ham, and to not eat ham. You are not free to prevent others from eating ham. If the canon that defines your mythology says that human beings should be stoned to death for any of a number of non-violent, social behaviors, you are perfectly free to believe that canon, but you are not free actually to stone anyone.

Kim Davis, a pious fundamentalist of no other note, got elected to a government position and then used that government position to impose her personal extremism upon others. Inexcusable. Next came the obligatory claim from the Right that her having been dealt with appropriately had magically transformed her from a perpetrator into a victim. Farcical. Yet, the Pope met with her. Inexplicable.

Jefferson was clear. The Constitution protects your right to irrational, credulous, and just silly beliefs. It does not confer an imaginary right to infringe upon or to limit the rights of others because of your personal silliness. Government has a duty to regulate actions that harm others, and such regulation does not constitute an infringement on “religious liberty.” It constitutes common sense.

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