Religious Freedom is Anything But Free
by Grace Norton
Legislative Chair
The spate of so-called “religious
freedom” and “religious freedom restoration” laws being passed by a number of
state legislatures are, in fact, nothing more than discrimination-promotion
legislation. The language of the bills
purports either to prohit government
from interfering with individuals’ religious freedom or else to “restore”
religious freedoms allegedly being interfered with by government actions. The first purpose is unnecessary because the
First Amendment of the Constitution already prohibits government interference
with freedom of religion throughout the United States and its territories. The second purpose presumes that substantial
interference with religion actually exists.
Some factual basis is supposed to
be established credibly by that section of legisltion known as
“legislative purpose.” These laws fail
the credible basis test.
What the Constitution protects in
the First Amndment is, first,
unrestricted freedom to believe something (e.g., that there is a God,
that the earth was created in seven days, etc.)
There is no constitutional requirement that the belief be rational, that
it conform to fact established by legitimate evidence, or that it conform to
social norms. The First Amendment also
protects the “free exercise” of religion, but it does that on a somewhat
restricted basis. For example, a parent
may not require his child to handle poisonous snakes to prove the child’s faith. Nor must government permit someone to blow up
an abortion clinic no matter how strongly his religion opposes abortion, or gun
down a group of people no matter how strongly he believes in Islamic jihad. The free exercise of religion, particularly
outside the context of an actual religious ritual occurring in a place of
worship, ends at the point where it interferes with the fundamental rights of
others.
The bills that legislatures have
produced so far are, for the most part, vague and otherwise badly written. All of them appear to empower the employees
of governments and/or businesses to pick and choose what items on
their job descriptions they would perform and for what customers they would
perform them. All that appears to be
necessary to exempt an employee from doing part of his or her job is for the
employee to claim that he/she has a “sincerely held religious belief” that
doing some part of the job is immoral.
That is little short of utter insanity guaranted to subvert the purposes
for which any workplace exists.
Government agencies exist to serve
members of the public by providing some good or service. Governments license businesses to transfer goods and services it is lawful
to transfer from the company to customers legally entitled to purchase them and
able to pay for them. Governments and
businesses pay employees to facilitate the transfer of goods and servicess from
the agency or business to the customer.
When a government agency or a business hires someone to do a job, that
person is informed about what the job duties are; and, by accepting the job
(and the compensation), the person assumes an obligation to do what is on the
job description.
People who either create a business
or take a job knowing that they may not be able to perform its functions for each and every customer are behaving
unethically and/or immorally unless they informed the licensing body or the
employer up front about any and all impediments to performing as expected. An employer has a right not to hire someone
unwilling or unable to perform what the job requires. Historically, if some condition arises in which an employee feels he or she cannot,
in good conscience, do some aspect of the job or follow an order, the
expectation has been that the employee resign–not that the employer and
custormer have to put up with self-righteous non-performance. The burden should be–and historically has
been–on the employee to either do their job or resign from it.
Does anyone really
“sincerely believe” any of the following?
1. If your church disapproves of gay marriage, it
is immoral for you to serve pancakes to a same-sex couple.
2. It is an immoral act for you to
set a plate of pancakes on the table of a gay patron.
3. It is an immoral act for you to
talk to a gay patron to take his order for pancakes or process his payment for
his bill.
Since when are activities such as serving food in a
restaurant, selling wedding rings in a jewelry store, or recordng a certificate
of marriage in as clerk’s office either
a “religious belief” or an “exercise of religion? “Religious freedom” legislation tacitly
acepts the false premise that these ordinary job activities are one or the
other.
The truth is that these laws are
being passed to facilitate discrimination.
They have nothing to do with “freedom of religion” or its “free
exercise.”
