Fur is flying, as usual, as politicians and pundits of all
stripes, from skunk to tiger, chase each other round and round about religious
liberty. It’s an old fight, which began long before the country, when Pilgrims
banned Christmas as too frivolous, and Roger Williams and the Massachusetts Bay
Colony feuded over the relation of religion to government. Perhaps that’s why a Constitutional
Convention the majority of whose delegates were clergy tabled Ben Franklin’s
motion to begin proceedings with a prayer and refused to vote on it. They then proceeded resolutely to avoid
mentioning religion in the Constitution itself except for the stricture against
any religious test for public office (a rule resolutely ignored by social conservatives
at every election cycle since then.)
In a way, it’s just shorthand for asking, “Could I take you
home to grandpa without getting run out of the house?” That, actually is a serious question; I’m a
grandpa myself, and know we deserve at least a modicum of respect. It’s part of
the braking system in our vehicle of social change and requires periodic
testing. Sometimes it’s just a way of
diverting attention away from policy issues that conservatives know they hold a
losing position on. Occasionally, the perennial
debate is just silly; James Madison, when asked about the constitutionality of
a prayer in the Senate, replied that he personally was against it, but that “the
law should not concern itself with little things.”
Sometimes though, the debaters tackle a really serious
issue, and that’s the case now. On the
one hand, social activists rightly believe non-Catholic women should not be deprived
of insurance coverage for contraception; to them, Catholic institutions’
refusal to fund abortion coverage is a violation of rights. Meanwhile, Catholic
bishops argue that “no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion” means
just that – the state can not prohibit
the church from discriminating if it is genuinely a part of their doctrine. It would be a much less thorny problem if
only Catholic women worked for the church, but the church’s good work to
alleviate poverty, run hospitals, etc., is so extensive, and integral to its
doctrine, that it could not possibly be done without employing
non-Catholics. And both sides are
equally sincere and fervent in their views.
Both sides forget of course that most Constitutional rights are
relative, not absolute, and end “at the tip of the other person’s nose.” That the church “holds itself out to the
public” to provide goods and services means that the state can, through
exercise of the interstate commerce provision determine where each nose must
end for the good of the country. The
long, torturous history of this debate began with the intellectual grandfather
of the Constitution, the Englishman John Locke, who in his Essay on Tolerance argued that no one should be required to adhere
to any religious dogma except through persuasion; I personally believe that the
founding fathers had that in mind and would have sided with the activists over
the church. Others, including the
Supreme Court, may well disagree.
However it decides, through regulation or a Supreme Court
ruling, the state will be perceived as villain by one side or the other. The real culprit here though is employment
based health insurance. The controversy
would not occur, except perhaps in a vastly different form, in places like Canada,
Scandinavia or the United Kingdom, where a truly national health program does
not rely on the scruples, or lack thereof, of individual employers. The social conservatives are, interestingly,
thus raising the case for the thing they hate most, a national health insurance
program. The plot grows very thick indeed.
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