Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id588719001
religious people say that this is not an unfair double standard, but merely the enforcement of the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of “free exercise” of religion. But the First Amendment isn’t the only law, and it often conflicts with other laws.
id588719007
The right to “free exercise” cannot be an unlimited pass to exempt yourself from laws, otherwise a Church of Child Sacrifice could freely commit ritual infanticide.
id588719022
How much to bend the rules to accommodate “free exercise” requires value judgments about the relative importance of religious freedom versus other goods. You cannot resolve these disputes by simply pointing to the text of the First Amendment; they depend on how subjectively important you think certain legal protections are versus others.
✏️ Here’s where things get ugly. Taken at face value, free exercise of religion says I can get away with anything if my religion says it. If my religion says to kill someone, prejudice against someone, etc., the thought process is that this trumps all else. The value judgements that come into play about the importance of following this right vs others, is where people get stuck. How do you decide where the line is? Is violence the line? Are we talking physical violence only; what about emotional violence? 🔗 View Highlight
id588719237
The Church itself would “weigh the competing values” differently. New Jersey has decided that a woman’s right not to be discriminated against is simply not as important as the Catholic Church’s right to enforce its bizarre, misogynistic, archaic code of “ethics.”
id588719462
Taken to an extreme, as the Supreme Court wrote in 1878, the acceptance of religious exemptions for lawbreaking “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and, in effect, to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.” There’s no law anymore if anyone can just say “My faith says no” and do whatever they like.
id588720663
Throwing away religious liberty exceptions does not mean empowering a totalitarian and intrusive state. In many domains, it means expanding liberty, by guaranteeing freedoms to all rather than reserving them for people who subscribe to certain belief systems. Everyone should be permitted to use peyote, not just those who have a religious reason to use it.
id588720672
it does mean there will be some restrictions on “free exercise” that people won’t like: Yes, anti-discrimination laws will apply to all, and if you become a wedding cake baker, you have to bake cakes for everyone, not just the particular people God tells you that you should bake cakes for. The law will indeed compel some restrictions on the right to mistreat other people over their race, gender, marital status, pregnancy status, etc.,
id588720682
restrictions on harmful religious practices that hurt other people (such as, for instance, making unmarried pregnant women struggle to find jobs or depriving people of contraception) are justified.
id588720721
I still believe in robust rights of public speech and private activity, with strict limits on state power.
✏️ All these highlights are me trying to parse out.. where are the lines drawn? How do you dictate which liberties must be protected and where restrictions on “free exercise” are placed? What rights get robust and all-encompassing allowance, and what state powers get strict limits? #followup 🔗 View Highlight