Losing Ground

Only Certain Kinds of Religion Tolerable

The Washington Post recently carried a piece on how Christian groups and institutions are losing legal battles in the States.

Faith organizations and individuals who view homosexuality as sinful and refuse to provide services to gay people are losing a growing number of legal battles that they say are costing them their religious freedom.

The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing. They point to what they say are ominous recent examples:

-- A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney's costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple's commitment ceremony.

-- A psychologist in Georgia was fired after she declined for religious reasons to counsel a lesbian about her relationship.

-- Christian fertility doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient were barred by the state Supreme Court from invoking their religious beliefs in refusing treatment.

-- A Christian student group was not recognized at a University of California law school because it denies membership to anyone practicing sex outside of traditional marriage.

"It really is all about religious liberty for us," said Scott Hoffman, chief administrative officer of a New Jersey Methodist group, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which lost a property tax exemption after it declined to allow its beachside pavilion to be used for a same-sex union ceremony. "The protection to not be forced to do something that is against deeply held religious principles."

These developments are perfectly consistent with the humanist idolatry of demand rights. Civil liberty is re-defined from its original construction in the founding documents into a demand-rights construct, where everyone is required to tolerate, approbate, serve, and support the particular beliefs and practices of everyone.

Now, of course, this is contradictory and nonsensical. To approbate everything and deny nothing means that one must be forced to adopt a radically agnostic and amoral approach to all of life. The only way in which such a community can be maintained is by force. Since it is clear that not everyone is radically agnostic and amoral (faith groups do exist, after all), they at least must be forced to conform--along with anyone else who has reservations about a particular moral or ethical practice.

The homosexual and other demand-rights activists seek to blur this tyrannical reality by acknowledging that people still have a right to believe what they want in their consciences. It is just that they cannot act according to their beliefs in public--by which they mean, in any interaction with any other person.

"People seem to say that if you enter the world of commerce, you lose all your First Amendment rights" to free exercise of religion, said Jordan Lorence, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal organization that has represented several businesses. "They . . . have become nothing more than vending machines, and the government can dictate the conditions under which they dispense their goods and services."

Even when groups opposing homosexuality have prevailed in court, they have gone on to face other setbacks. The Boy Scouts of America won a lawsuit in 2000 because it did not allow openly gay Scouts or Scout leaders. Since then, some private charities have refused to support the Scouts, and some local governments have yanked free use of facilities and other benefits. In Philadelphia, the city is demanding that the Scouts pay $200,000 in annual rent for a building that they had been using rent-free. The dispute is in court.

Banning religion from the public square has long been a tactic of the anti-Christian brigades. As the foment has continued, increasingly the only tolerable religion is one which is entirely private. Religion cannot be allowed to affect how one raises one's family, educates one's children, runs one's business, or any other public activity. This is exactly the same kind of tolerance accorded the Christian faith by the Soviet Union under Stalin. The Constitution of the USSR prescribed religious liberty, but the observance and practice of one's religion was entirely at the behest and prerogative of the government--and the government insisted that it be an entirely private matter.

Demand rights theories cannot sustain civil liberty. They are a fundamentally inimical to human liberty. Over time the sheep's clothing is removed to reveal the wolf underneath. You cannot demand and enforce approbation, on the one hand, and defend religious liberty of thought, conscience, and practice, on the other, unless you are prepared to do what the Communists did--which was to tolerate only a certain kind of religion--one which was prescribed and proscribed to remain within non-public, private, mental, inner, realms.

It seems as if the Communist approach to religion is finding favour. If so, the United States is about to see the establishment of religion in that country--albeit, an official pagan idolatry which adores the State. New Zealand will likely follow suit, as we always tend to do, in these matters.