Don's Tuesday column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   12/31/2013

           Who triumphs in courts, culture, graveyards?

The address on “Religion and Public Life in America” by R. R. Reno, editor, First Things, delivered at Hillsdale College last February, deserved more attention than I could devote last week. Overall, his observations and arguments paint a troubling scenario for the defense of religious liberty, when juxtaposed with the determination and sweep of anti-Christian agendas and attacks. When religious liberties vanish, no one has liberty or rights.

“Recent court cases and controversies suggest trends unfriendly to religion in public life.” Few will likely recall the 2012 Supreme Court case involving Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Redford, Michigan. The case title included “v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” because the EEOC took the side of a wrongful termination lawsuit filed by a dismissed teacher for supposed disability discrimination. The school said it could fire an employee under a legal doctrine, “the ministerial exception,” which allows a church wide latitude to choose its religious leaders.

“[While legal arguments are complex and multi-layered], in this case the Obama administration’s lawyers made a shockingly blunt argument: Their brief claimed that there should be no ministerial exception. The Supreme Court rejected this argument in a unanimous 9-0 vote.” In the minds of the hard left Obama lawyers, the unique prerogatives associated with religious groups to choose their own leaders are of little merit when the state’s agencies see any form of (in their view) discrimination. While church employment, leadership and staffing decisions might not conform to every conceivable application of fairness, the state must keep its hands off the religious according to first amendment protections: “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise (of religion).” This is especially concerning “when we remember that the Left is currently pushing to add gay marriage to the list of civil rights.”

“Concerns about the autonomy of religious institutions are also at work in the Obama administration’s tussle with the Catholic Church and her religious allies over the mandate to provide free contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.” I’ve mentioned this previously but what’s crucial to understand is that the Obamacare law, as written, allowed for no religious exceptions. This prompted widespread public outcry, to which Obama’s people then allowed that only churches have that right to “opt out of the morally controversial coverage.” To religious colleges and charities, an “accommodation” was offered.

To churches and their allies, the act of the all-powerful state pronouncing or granting a narrow accommodation, is an act of “accommodating” the supreme authority of the state. “When various states such as Illinois passed laws allowing gay adoptions, they did not ‘accommodate’ Catholic charities, but instead demanded compliance …” and the Church simply shut down adoption agencies. I imagine atheists, cheering on the state’s authority in this issue, will eventually find that same state authority to be despotic when it forces conscience-violating compliance from them in other ways (Mandatory gun ownership? Mandatory military service?).

Cardinal Dolan of New York explained that (in Mr. Reno’s words) “for-profit companies are not religious in the way that Notre Dame University is religious. Nonetheless, the religious beliefs of those who own and run businesses in America should be accorded some protection. This idea the Obama administration flatly rejects. By their progressive way of thinking, economic life should be under the full and unlimited control of the federal government.” Read that again … and be very afraid.

Another way that religious liberty is undermined is in the legal doctrine that “political theorists like John Rawls have argued that our laws must be based on so-called public reason, which is in fact an ambiguous, ill-defined concept that gives privileged status to liberalism.” This hyper-rationalism has reared its head, perhaps most prominently, in the judicial activism of liberal judges from California to New Mexico to Utah, who simply reject any arguments on their face, that contend traditional, opposite-sex marriages are harmed by legal acceptance and approval of same-sex marriages. Hence, they reject the voters’ choices because they impute inherently religious convictions as motivations for voting against gay marriage—convictions simply dismissed by secular and atheist fanatics.

Reno states the following far better than I could paraphrase: “In the world envisioned by Obama administration lawyers, churches will have freedom as ‘houses of worship,’ but unless they accept the secular consensus, they can’t inspire their adherents to form institutions to educate and serve society in accordance with the principles of their faith. [‘Public reason’ allows religious freedom of speech] but when their voices contradict the secular consensus, they’re not allowed into our legislative chambers or courtrooms … What we’re seeing today is a secular liberalism that wants to expand the prohibition of establishment to silence articulate religious voices and disenfranchise religiously motivated voters, and at the same time to narrow the scope of free exercise so that the new secular morality can reign over American society unimpeded.”

Two final quick points: Courts do not exist in a cultural/political vacuum; Reno notes “the rise of the Nones (who check ‘None’ for religious affiliation)” from 3 percent to over 20 percent. They dominate elite academic culture, media, and politics; friction with religion ensues.

The long-term prospects for the ideological attackers of Christianity are not hopeful. Graveyards and cemeteries are full of people, their antagonisms and efforts to crush religion, which has somehow survived, even thrived, over millennia.