Pope Francis supports actual exercise of religious liberty

Pope Francis often has a roundabout, "chatty" way of expressing Universal Truth, but he was pretty direct about conscientious objectors like Kim Davis. Excerpt:

"I can't have in mind all cases that can exist about conscientious objection,” Pope Francis told journalists on his flight, “but, yes, I can say that conscientious objection is a right that is a part of every human right."

"And if someone does not allow others to be a conscientious objector,” the Holy Father said, “he denies a right."

The pope also said conscientious objection must be respected in legal structures.

"Otherwise we would end up in a situation where we select what is a right, saying: 'This right has merit, this one does not,'" he stated.

The unambiguous comments from Pope Francis in support of religious freedom come after other comparable statements he made, spoken and symbolic, throughout his historic visit to the United States, making religious liberty a recurring theme for the trip.

It would seem like the Pope believes, as do all of us in the whole 1st Amendment crowd, that you actually have to exercise your religious freedoms the way you exercise your muscles to keep them from atrophying. And it would seem that conscientious objections to bad laws would strengthen the case for religious liberty, not weaken it. It's in line with the whole St. James "screw faith without works" thing.

UPDATE: When I posted this yesterday I was thinking about Dreher's contempt for Kim Davis. But I wasn't thinking about the Benedict Option. Silly me; I forget about the principle of material equivalence. Rod Dreher is the Benedict Option, or BenOp, or Benny, or Strategic Withdrawal, or "Pull and Pray"... at this point in his life at least. I was also thinking about Michael Medved who said a lot of similar things about Davis on his radio show. Medved has a masterful mind and I usually agree with him, but I was not swayed on this point. Maybe Kim Davis isn't the best spokesperson for religious liberty, but this is a time in history to take a stand poorly rather than withdrawing or doing nothing.

Keith's posted comment showing Dreher's use of the photoshopped face of Pope Francis incenses me. And so that is why I feel compelled to make this update. I have lost friends over my refusal to attack the Pope over his deficiencies, real or perceived. Rod Dreher is NOT A CATHOLIC ANYMORE and therefore feels like he has the freedom to say whatever he wants about the leader of another religion. Oh, yeah—if it happens to be the Roman Catholic religion. But my guess is that he has borrowed this image from others with an opposite opinion from his, i.e., people who think it is great that Pope Francis is more lax, less rigid than his predecessors and aligned with mercy rather than justice. At the same time these people tip their hand on what they really think about the Office of the Papacy, the Vicar of Christ, by painting his face like a clown to get their message across, and that is what Rod Dreher and those on the opposite side have in common: contempt for the Catholic Church and her mission in and to the world.

A lot of people do not realize that a week before Rod Dreher penned his famous 2013 Time article "I'm Still Not Going Back to the Catholic Church" he wrote this article in the NY Times titled "The Pope Did More Damage Than He Realized". Taken together, these articles give the impression of a Goldilocks personality who doesn't even care for the baby bear's bed, chair or porridge. His position can be stated "I completely disagree with the Pope's position, he is damaging the church even worse than it was when I left it, he's proving my point about the general unseriousness of Catholics especially in America, he is empowering the dissidents, but I'm still not going back to the Catholic Church." Oh, well to be honest we sort of didn't think you would, Rod, after the article you wrote a week earlier.

So Rod Dreher is all for taking a stand... but not like Kim Davis, God forbid! He stands up and points a finger at her and cries "Who is she to judge!?" He is all for judging himself, and he damn sure wants a father figure who presages Almighty God at the final judgment. But everyone else can just shut the hell up.

If we are entirely confused at this point about how exactly Rod Dreher wants Christians to behave then it is Rod Dreher's fault. And this is nothing new. In his confusing world, we have seen over and over again conflicting images. We've seen a story where an Orthodox Priest reports jubilantly that Rod Dreher has left the Catholic Church and become Russian Orthodox, followed by an angry Rod Dreher lashing out at the messenger in the case, my friend J-Carp, a Citizen-Journalist, for revealing something he was supposedly proud of and yet hiding it under a bushel basket. We've seen him now constantly playing the part of a little, misunderstood Alfred Prufrock when people sensibly and persistently point out that the Benedict Option sounds an awful lot like the refusal to be "salt and light" in the world. And throughout all of this there runs a current of anti-Catholicism of Rod Dreher. The fact that his anti-Catholicism is more intellectual than that of Jack Chick makes it no less real. And no less disgusting.

And the fact that this update is long enough to be its own post... well, it probably means it will be its own post when I have a little more time.

A brief note on religious taxation

Unlike institutions kept by the State, churches and other religious institutions which spurn such ownership agreements as conditioned special tax treatments have no worries about losing what they do not possess when the time comes to speak out about individual politicians and their policies from the pulpit.

Having both individual and hegemonies of churches directly addressing the specific people and policies in their communities and nationally which affect them and their religious liberty is a pressure from which the political class has previously been free.

Why not give those who would remove special religious tax treatment exactly what they want, good and hard?

Did Obergefell just rewrite the First Amendment?

That is, with respect to the free exercise clause, has Kennedy and the majority just left us now with a Bill of Rights containing, in order, a 3/4th Amendment, a Second Amendment, a Third Amendment, etc? A lot of people fainting onto their blogging couches today seem to think so, finding evidence for it both in Kennedy's reference to religious liberty and even in the words of the four dissenting Justices.

But Obergefell simply wasn't about the First Amendment or religious liberty, it was about a federal right to gay marriage. Like many badly built thought structures - ::coughObamacarecough:: - Obergefell almost certainly contains deformative logic bombs which will continue to detonate at later times, more likely unpredictably than predictably, and, as I continue to argue, very, very likely with predictable consequence to Obergefell itself as a legal precedent.

But while, of course, Obergefell has immediately set up imminent clashes with religious liberty protections under the First Amendment - duh...that's what legal logic bombs do - that is patently not the same thing as a claim that the former has now effectively trumped and subordinated the latter (I had originally written "not the same thing as suggesting that", but that is patently what it is: mere suggestion, preying upon suggestibility).

Still, like my grocery list (ribeye steaks, Macallan 12,...), First Amendment constitutional protections of religious liberty remain just words on a piece of paper until someone acts on them one way or another. I usually find that, if I don't make it a point to buy my groceries myself, those words just continue to lie there and I don't get to enjoy their promise.

If you believe Obergefell has immediately and directly threatened or curtailed your separate First Amendment religious rights, let's hear about it.

And if you think, as I do, that religious liberty questions will always be their own, separate and distinct battles, let's hear your arguments as well.

UPDATE (as they say): Unifying marriage, or fun with logic bombs.

This is entirely tangential to the thrust of this post, but I'm sticking this addendum here anyway. The question is, if the courts can unify marriage federally with respect to gender, on what basis could any state still argue its primacy with respect to any other discriminating marital provision such as blood tests, waiting periods, expiration of marriage licences, etc?

UPDATE 2 (also a non-sequitur):

Q: Why are people terrified of doing to Scientologists what they'll cheerfully do to Christians?

A: Because they know that Scientologists will legally tear your legs off and beat you to death with them for trying while Christians will simply take it.

Answers for Kemetica

In a previous thread, our new commenter Kemetica posed a few questions:

My point was that those who oppose SSM must be very clear on what it is that they want:
Just to be allowed to dissent (e.g. a clerk doesn't have to file an SSM marriage license) because of conscience?
To be allowed to refuse gays service for arguably expressive activities (e.g. cakes and photos and flowers)?
To be allowed to reject any service to gays in any context (e.g. housing)? 
To eventually be able to ban SSM?
To eventually be able to ban domestic partnerships? 
To eventually be able to reinstitute the closet?

My answers are a bit too long to be conveyed in a comment in that thread, not to mention that the comments are taking off in a different direction from Keith's original post, so I'm answering them in this new post.

But to answer fairly, I'll need to reframe the questions differently. Actually, they fall into two separate questions.

1.  "To eventually be able to ban SSM?" 

The short answer is:  unquestionably yes.

As I discussed here, IMO and under current equal protection law, a State can have a perfectly rational basis for establishing a special status for one-woman-one-man committed relationships (i.e. marriages).  To rehash briefly, biology matters in that men and women are different in ways that complement each other -- and that complementarity not only results in procreation, but indeed has shown through history to be the basis of stable and prosperous societies.  A State can (and should) recognize the importance of these facts, as based in biology, by favoring such arrangements.

Secondly, under our constitutional system, a State may, through its duly elected legislature, choose to define marriage to extend to same sex arrangements.  I don't think they should, but under our system they can. But the electorate and their representatives ought to be permitted to work out this question one way or the other, so that those who are disappointed by the result can at least respect the process. But if the Supreme Court rules that a State cannot define marriage as one-woman-one-man, that process is taken away from the electorate -- rather than settling the question, preventing the question from being settled  See the political effects of Roe v. Wade if you don't believe me.

2.  Why should you not be compelled, under penalty of law, to offer services to those selected by the State?

On the questions about "rejecting service" and the like, your questions are framed incorrectly IMO.  What you are asking is why the State shouldn't compel any business to offer their services to those identified by the State.

Here's where I'll earn some libertarian points, maybe.  IMO, the starting point should be:  no person shall be compelled, under threat of law, to perform services to anyone who he or she do not want to, unless there is a damn good reason.

As I mentioned here, race is a damn good reason.  We fought a Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of our citizens lost their lives over this issue, and we have express constitutional amendments on this issue.  And MLK showed us why racial discrimination is contrary to reason and God's laws.

I would pose that there are few other "damn good reasons" to compel businesses, under penalty of law. Preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation falls short of a damn good reason, IMO.  And as Keith mentioned, the market and social stigma can provide excellent motivations in this regard.  Few businesses will turn away willing customers -- and if some do for illegitimate reasons as judged by the consuming public, competition will take care of the issue.

But in any case, the law should never require one to violate one's religious tenets (facilitating sin) in order to comply with the law.  We must not entertain a regime, as we have now with Obamacare and in the Indiana situation, in which the approach is to enact and enforce such a law, with the possibility that waivers or exemptions may be granted for religious reasons.  No -- a law requiring compliance by violation of religious tenets is an unjust law, and "an unjust law is no law at all" (St. Augustine).

Does this mean that a homeowner renting out a room or half of a duplex via AirBnB can choose not to rent to practicing homosexuals so as not to facilitate sin?  Of course.  Does this mean that a Muslim restaurant can require men and women to sit in separate rooms if required by their flavor of Islam?  Sorry, but it means that too.

There you go.  Have at it. Convince me of my error.

Apparently, now "we" will be fighting the gays for Rod Dreher's religious liberty

while he reclines in the Cozy Corner with a Calvados and coffee.

As they say, "let's you and him fight". Remember, this is the feckless boy-child still wailing into his 40's about teachers not doing his fighting for him in high school.

Just today, here, we had a discussion of why Dreher's provocative lunacies matter. Here is a prime example of classically provocative Dreher imbecility: there are no "gay rights" - only constitutional rights for all - and "religious liberty" is available to all who will assert it; but unfortunately unavailable to those like Rod Dreher who can't be bothered to assert it himself.

By Dreher's distorting and subsuming the pursuit of religious liberty by any who would have it within his own personal and cynical effort to drive hits to the blog he's paid to write, Dreher knowingly sells out the very social conservatives he so piously appoints himself spokesman for.

This, Kemetica, is why I continuously criticize him, because he persists as a septic boil on the body politic and particularly on the corpus of those social conservatives he attempts to traffic in.

A long rant by Ace you must read

Having chided him in private (not personally) for letting himself be gulled into promoting Rod Dreher's Benedict Option book campaign yesterday, let me turn about and post a long rant by Ace you really must read if you hope to prevail religiously in America. Whining and screaming and hoping Teacher stops them from pulling your pants down on that hotel room floor is probably not going to cut it anymore, no matter how productive that sort of marketing might be in flogging book sales for someone else. There are naughty words involved, for any who need such warning.

Dear Bill Quick...

Of course, if your life is only of the mind, you can just retreat there and hope others take care of things for you the way you instructed them to through your megaphone from deep inside there.

Rod of Arc

In his most recent post donkey punching the GOP, Rod Dreher draws his line in the sand, pokes his finger in the dike, and makes his stand in the pass at Thermopylae:

I am not a libertarian; if anything, I’m a Red Tory, or a Christian Democrat in the European sense. But ours is not a culture where Red Toryism or Christian Democracy makes much sense. It might have at one time, but not anymore. I have been thinking for a couple of years now that if I’m going to protect my religious liberty rights (the most important right, in my view), I’m going to have to figure out how to do so within a libertarian framework.

So here we have Dreher's latest branding: no longer the impossible to sell Crunchy Con, he has now burst forth transcendentally from that crunchy chrysalis to become the Jean D'Arc standing between you and the lime eaters ready to strip you of your religious liberty.

First question(s): How much relief and confidence does Rod's new stance instill in you? Enough to overlook his _______ (fill in the blank)?

Second question(s): Clearly in our current environment this is a gambit with potential. If you yourself wouldn't follow Rod to the barricades, who do you see as his most likely market and followers?

Final question(s): If your individual liberty ends up getting discounted and falling somewhere behind your religious liberty, are you still okay with having your religious options preserved for you by some non-individual-you religious group (the alternative to your own individual choice)? Might be the religious group you belong to now. Might not.

Oh...and where would you look to politics and in particular any of the political parties in all of this?

Toobin makes two large errors

“You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.” This quote is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and it's true no matter who said it first. With that in mind, we have to make some corrections to Jeffrey Toobin's article praising Ruth Ginsberg for being, oh, so smart and prescient in her Hobby Lobby dissent.

There was an exemption already for religious institutions. Hobby Lobby, a closely held corporation, is a secular, for-profit business, but the Court held that because the owners of Hobby Lobby held a sincere religious belief that certain forms of birth control caused abortions, they could deny employer-paid insurance coverage for them.

Is this just bad writing? Unclear. It's not a "religious belief" at all that "certain forms of birth control caused abortions" or, I think he means to write cause abortions. But syntax errors aside, there are certain forms of birth control which cause abortions. The links here would be useful to Mr. Toobin as sort of a science primer.

One of the problems with the whole debate and discussion is that "birth control" is somewhat of a misnomer. Birth prevention is really the goal of both contraception and abortion. The latter is more morally egregious than the former, but those who approve of contraception but are against abortion may want to consider the continued use of the softer phrase "birth control" as something which dilutes the strength of pro-life/pro-child argument against the anti-child mentality, or the contraceptive mentality as it is sometimes called.

Here's the next "mistake":

What about religious individuals who say that they have sincere objections to conducting business relationships with gay people or immigrants?

Oh stop it. You obviously mean, Mr. Toobin, to indicate illegal immigrants, so why not use the word? The use of the single, neutral word "immigrants" is meant to suppress or diminish the amount of eye-roll from the general public who are tired of the gay whining.

This line should offend legal immigrants tremendously because it implicitly lumps them together with illegals. Why? Because no mainstream religious denomination objects to legal immigration. This article is obviously written from a biased point-of-view, but these errors are either due to sloppiness and laziness or malevolence and they need to be pointed out whichever is the case.

For Me, Not For Thee

I am registered at The Daily Kos blog under the name of Gary. So I get all their blast emails about how we all need to support Obama, kiss Elizabeth Warren's butt, throw the Koch brothers in jail for something, etc. I do this because I think it's good to know what the enemy is yammering on about. Here's the latest one I got, with my emphasis in italics:

Gary, almost 90,000 people signed our pledge to boycott Hobby Lobby after an ultra-conservative Supreme Court ruled that for-profit corporations are not only people can have religion, but people who can impose that religion on their employees.

Your signature is missing. Please add your name: Boycott Hobby Lobby.

We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent.

Keep fighting,
Chris Bowers, Daily Kos

I would be the last person to disagree with the statement "We can vote with our dollars to register our dissent." But ironically that is what this entire case is about! The people who own Hobby Lobby are willing to pay for 16 different types of birth control but believe that 4 types are morally reprehensible and they don't want to be forced spend their dollars on those. They don't tell their employees not to go and pay for these themselves any more that they force them to attend mandatory Bible study meetings.

Minor point: the notion that the Supreme Court is ultra-conservative is almost as silly as Harry Reid's suggestion that Justice Clarence Thomas is white.

Went in dumb, come out dumb too

Rod Dreher charges gay marriage greases a slippery slope to greater religious freedom for traditional conservative Mormons in Utah.

Huh?

Surely this guy is a liberal fifth columnist masquerading as a conservative, deliberately sowing sabotage in an effort to make social conservatives look desperately ridiculous. Not even a monkey on acid could accidentally make an argument this stupidly contradictory and self-defeating.

Hmmm, but looks like the spell didn't take first go-round. Muons maybe. So he doubles down. The monkey averts its eyes out of compassion, and Alex Jones begins to look sharper by the minute.