What is the Space for Personal Belief?
Within what space can I freely exercise my personal beliefs? What if my personal beliefs impact on others? Community is possible or impossible depending on where boundaries are drawn.
Recent events tell us we are not a place where community thrives.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in a case from Colorado in which the plaintiff wants to refuse her normal business services of creating websites to same sex couples. Her Christian faith, she says, does not allow her to create messages celebrating the marriage of a same sex couple.
In Virginia a restaurant cancelled a reservation when the owners realized the group actively opposed LGBTQ and abortion rights. Our staff, many of whom are women and/or LGBTQ, would feel “uncomfortable or unsafe”, the owners said.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, who has historically opposed LGBTQ rights, explained her vote for the Respect for Marriage Act. “For the sake of our nation today and its survival, we do well by taking this step, not embracing or validating each other’s devoutly held views, but by the simple act of tolerating them.”
The days leading up to the vote were “a painful exercise in accepting admonishment” from opponents. After her call for simple toleration, the response from supporters was the equivalent of gee thanks! Rather than wrapping arms around gay neighbors her decision was “not to throw a brick through their window.”
The Tampa Bay Rays this spring staged a Pride Night in which the logo on the players uniforms was rendered in rainbow colors. Five players opted out feeling that wearing the logo would indicate their personal support of a lifestyle counter to their Christian faith.
The sportswriter for the New York Times wanted an enforced unanimity. “By allowing the players to opt out of the promotion — and to use the platform to endorse an opposite viewpoint — the Rays undercut the message of inclusion they were trying to send.”
In November, five people were killed at a LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs. In December, a transgender activist committed suicide. He was 24. His mother, a Kentucky state senator, said, “This hate building across the country weighed on him.”
The human reality is we are individuals. We are diverse. We come from different places. We grow up in different cultures. The beliefs we learn as children from our parents remain with us. If we want to enjoy the good that comes from living in harmony, we have to do what it takes to live peacefully with our diversities. Uniformity is not an option. Squelching diversity requires force, makes community impossible and usually ends, history tells us, in conflict, bloodshed, repression, and eventually rebellion. People do want to be free.
How then to enjoy our individual freedoms in a way that maximizes the possibility of maintaining community? How to both give you the most freedom to be you and me the most freedom to be me? To that end, are there reasonable constraints we both should live with?
In his essay, “On Liberty”, John Stuart Mill described the line between my freedom and yours in two different ways. The only justification for interfering with your “liberty of action” is “self-protection.” My liberty is limited in that I “must not make myself a nuisance to other people.”
In Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ more vivid imagery, my freedom ends where your nose begins.
There is, however, an almost universal desire to impose one’s values on the community. As Mill points out, we are intolerant in things “we really care about”. An intolerance that gets embedded in law, but also imposed by a “social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression … (leaving) fewer means of escape.”
We see that intolerance in the stories told above. Much of the tension comes from the divide between increasingly secular social mores and a growing militant form of Christianity that seeks to make America a Christian nation.
Even though, the art of politics is finding a way to accommodate conflicting values, we haven’t figured out how to do that in the current divide between secular and religious. Part of the reason is that the two political parties have joined the conflict. The Democratic Party is becoming increasingly secular, while Republicans, dependent on the support of religious voters, move toward aligning law with Christian belief.
Former Attorney General William Barr, in a speech at Notre Dame University said, “Judeo-Christian moral standards … are like God’s instruction manual for the best running of man and human society.”
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, said Jesus should be recognized as “lord over every sphere, especially the public sphere.”
Donald Trump was clear. “God is on our side.”
Ralph Reed, head of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and influential within the Republican Party, called Democrats “vicious and unhinged … anti-Christian, anti-freedom, anti-America … anti-God.”
Rather than a search for accommodation, politics becomes a war between good and evil. No compromise is acceptable. There is no limit to my freedom to impose my values on you.
The French writer, Albert Camus, writing at the end of World War II, recognized the contradiction inherent in claiming freedom only for oneself. “Those who applaud freedom only when it justifies their privileges and shout nothing but censorship when it threatens them … say they are defending freedom, but they are first of all defending the privileges freedom gives to them and them alone … they (use) an ideal liberty to justify a real oppression.”
There are three guidelines in our laws and constitution that set boundaries.
First, organized religious entities are free to exercise their beliefs within their organizational structure and are generally exempt from requirements that run counter to those beliefs. The recently passed Respect for Marriage Act which gave federal protection to same sex marriages is an example. It exempts “not for profit religious organizations whose principal purpose is the study, practice or advancement of religion.”
Second, individuals who act in a public setting, or provide a service to the public, cannot treat people differently because of their sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin: characteristics we have from birth. Every individual has the legal right to be treated equally with everyone else.
Third, there are “conscience clauses” at the state and federal levels that protect individuals from being compelled to perform acts contrary to their conscience. The Wisconsin constitution reads, “… nor shall any control of, or interference with, the rights of conscience be permitted…”
Thus, in general, religious organizations in carrying out their religious activities are free to follow their beliefs. When acting in the public sphere, organizations and individuals are not free to discriminate. Individuals cannot be compelled to act against their conscience. Where then to draw the lines when these principles compete?
In considering that question, it is helpful to be specific about what is being claimed. Does the activity itself offend the conscience? Or is it the person for whom the activity is undertaken?
In the case of the website designer, the owner is not objecting to the activity of designing a website. That is her business. She does it every day. Even websites for weddings. The customers, because they are the same sex, are the primary problem.
The customers were also the problem for the restaurant that cancelled a reservation by anti-LGBTQ activists who wanted to gather for a dinner.
The issues are similar to those raised by the pharmacist in Wisconsin who refused to sell contraceptives to customers, and by the owner of Hobby Lobby who refused to include contraceptive coverage in employee health insurance plans. Both claimed that facilitating the use of contraceptives by others violated their religious belief that using contraceptives is contrary to God’s law.
In each of these cases, the costs of the freedom claimed by one fall mostly on others.
The relationship between provider and customer or employee can change depending on the service requested and the extent of personal involvement by the provider. There are gradations. What if the website designer was asked to do a website actively promoting LGBTQ issues? What if the anti-LGBTQ activists wanted to do a rally at the restaurant, rather than just eat a meal? Should a political consultant with progressive ideals be expected to use that experience to work for a conservative client with conservative goals? The objections in these cases would relate more directly to the services performed than to the customer.
Actions I take myself may offend my conscience. But what does it mean to claim the actions of someone else offends my conscience? That comes close to refusing to serve them because of who they are.
The refusal of the Tampa Bay players to wear rainbow colors is a simpler case. Like Colin Kaepernick who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial inequality, it was an action they took upon themselves. It may have offended, it may have made some uncomfortable, but diminished nobody else’s freedom.
Some of the controversies are manufactured to stir up supporters and make them feel threatened.
With the website designer there is no same-sex couple wanting a website design. The owner filed suit “just in case”. When legislation was introduced in Wisconsin to prohibit pharmacists from refusing to sell contraceptives, there had been one such incident in the previous ten years and that had been resolved under existing regulations.
Even though the controversy is contrived and hypothetical, our differences are exacerbated. We are all drawn into a fight over words and principles that by their nature are more difficult to resolve than the reality on the ground.
In Wisconsin, the legislation was amended to place the requirement to sell contraceptives on the business rather than the owner or an employee, thus bypassing the contrived controversy over conscience. In the Hobby Lobby case, the Supreme Court ruled that privately held for-profit corporations may be exempt from a regulation its owners religiously object to, if there is a less restrictive means of furthering the law's interest,
But there are those who don’t want accommodation. For them, the debate over the appropriate space in the public square for personal belief has been decided. Motivated by ideology, religious belief, or the pursuit of power, they insist on uniformity and their Truth alone.
Living by one’s own Truth but also accepting diversity and the possibility of multiple Truths is the alternative. An alternative that requires intellectual humility and a recognition that our own understanding might be incomplete or flawed. The only alternative, history tells us, that fosters conversation and plants the seeds of community.
Sen. Lummis’ recounting of her own internal tension is telling. “I’ve tried to distinguish the fact that I support God’s definition of marriage but now there’s a second definition of marriage ― it is secular … and it deserves respect, too … I hope that message will resonate. So far, it’s been a tough sell.”
Douglas Kane is the author of "Our Politics: Reflections on Political Life" published in 2019 by Southern Illinois University Press
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