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Showing posts with label religious freedom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religious freedom. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Chinese State Theology: Caesaropapism Lives - in China
Monday, July 28, 2014
An African woman’s “Thank-you” letter to Meriam Ibrahim
The images of this graceful and beautiful African woman, babe in hand, stepping out of the plane was a sight to behold especially after her unspeakable pain and suffering in the Sudanese prison.
So I thought I should, in a very simple letter, write down my reflections and thoughts of gratitude for this resilient daughter of Africa whose freedom is being celebrated by the entire world today.
On behalf of all African women, I thank you Meriam Ibrahim, for showing the world the indomitable courage that is at the core of authentic femininity. I say this because your pain and persecution were tied so firmly to your femininity. And so your triumph was a most powerful witness to life, to motherhood, to marriage, to love and to faith.
You are indeed a true picture of faith and virtue, a true symbol of strength and resilience. You are, in my humble opinion, a real woman of substance, an African woman of substance and your story fills my heart with courage and audacity in my own vocation to defend our African culture of life,marriage, motherhood, faith and family, no matter how difficult, no matter how shameful and no matter how painful for me.
For under intense persecution, you refused to deny your Christian faith. Under the threat of the extremists, you stood as a witness and a martyr. Under the pain of incarceration, you would not deny your husband or renounce your marriage. Under the heavy shackles of prison you still had the strength and defiance to give life , to give birth. Under the certainty of a death sentence you had the determination to nurse your precious little baby.
By your powerful example, the world has come to witness the resilience of a young African woman who in the worst conditions bore heroic witness to the virtues of faith, marriage, and motherhood. Your unspeakable struggles in the last few months have been a most radiant ray of light that has pierced through the darkest clouds to contradict a modern world that is telling us that faith means nothing, that religious freedom is not all that important, that marriage is whatever we want it to be, that motherhood should be a choice we make under the most conducive situations, that our babies should only be born at the most convenient of times.
You, my African sister, have become a lightening rod to the radical feminists of our times who repudiate and denigrate every virtue that you epitomize .
Within your body, you have borne the marks and scars of a true Christian, a wife, a mother and a martyr, and in this way you have shown us what it means to be an empowered and liberated woman, and I'm glad to say it is certainly not what the western radicals and ideologues are telling us. They try to tell us that for African women to be empowered, they need to be "sexually liberated", selfish, individualistic and fiercely autonomous, but you Meriam , by your own example , have taught us that the liberated African woman is the woman who is free to live and practice her faith, love her husband , and protect her children (born and unborn). A liberated woman is a woman of faith and family. This is the truth that must be spoken throughout Africa.
Today, the world watched you as you breathed the fresh air of freedom and as you made your first stop, not at the Whitehouse, but rather at the House of St Martha (Casa Santa Marta) which is also the house of the Holy Father Pope Francis. Instead of the presidential handshake that many others would have craved first, you chose the papal handshake. And instead of the political reception you chose the apostolic benediction for you and your family. You chose the Pope over the POTUS!
You are a woman of great wisdom and strength and indeed Africa raises, praises and celebrates you.
We rejoice with you and for you. We rejoice that you are free at last. And out of our rejoicing,
I pray that more women (from our Africa and from every corner of the world) will reflect deeply on your experience so as to emulate you.
I pray for women of faith to rise up and bear courageous witness even to the point of martyrdom.
I pray for women who are pregnant to choose life for their babies at all cost.
I pray for women who are wives and mothers to stay true to their vows and vocations.
I pray that beyond our global rejoicing, we would be adorned with even a portion of the heroic virtue of Meriam Ibrahim's authentic feminism purified and forged in the fiery crucible of religious persecution.
Reproduced with the kind permission of the author: Editor
This article is published by Obianuju Ekeocha and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.Sunday, June 22, 2014
Sunday, February 23, 2014
The silent war on religious liberty - Bobby Jindal
The Governor of Louisiana sails into American elites trying to circumscribe religious freedom
In a recent speech delivered at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library Louisiana, Governor Bobby Jindal made the case for defending religious liberty. He sailed into the “group of like-minded elites”, including the Obama administration, “determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed.”
The following excerpts re taken from his prepared notes.
* * * * * *
Tonight I want to give a speech I’ve never given before, about an issue lurking just beneath the surface – that issue is The Silent War on Religious Liberty. I can think of no better place to give this speech than the Ronald Reagan Foundation and Library. President Reagan himself said that, “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few, but the universal right of all God’s children.”When he said this, he was not expressing a strictly personal belief in the nature of man as a created being — as a child of God. He was reaffirming the most basic contention of the American Founding, set forth in the Declaration of Independence, that we are a nation constituted in accordance with the “Laws of Nature and of Nature's God,” and that we are a people “endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
The religious foundations of America
Let me make this explicit: the source and justification for the very existence of the United States of America is and always has been contingent upon the understanding of man as a created being, with a Creator conferring his intrinsic rights — “among [them] Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
How we understand and approach that Creator is properly left to the hearts and consciences of every citizen. I am a Catholic Christian. My parents are Hindus. I am blessed to know Baptists, Jews, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and so many more in the rich tapestry of American faiths. And I know men and women who acknowledge no denomination or creed, confess to uncertainty about the Divine, yet look to the richness of nature and the majesty of this world — and wonder, and inwardly seek, the Author of it all.
These days we think this diversity of belief is tolerated under our law and Constitution. But that’s wrong. This diversity of belief is the foundation of our law and Constitution. America does not sustain and create faith. Faith created and sustains America. President John Adams, in 1798, wrote to Massachusetts militiamen to remind them that “… Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
In 1798, this was simple common sense. In 2014, we are forced to confront a question that would have been unthinkable to President Adams…and President Washington, and President Reagan, and every other American throughout history who believed in America’s founding premise: What happens when our government decides it no longer needs a “moral and religious people?”
…..
Mired in a silent war
Today the American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war. It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square, and the endurance of our constitutional governance. It is a war against the propositions in the Declaration of Independence. It is a war against the spirit that motivated abolitionism. It is a war against the faith that motivated the Civil Rights struggle.
It is a war against the soul of countless acts of charity. It is a war against the conscience that drives social change. It is a war against the heart that binds our neighborhoods together. It is a war against America’s best self, at America’s best moments. It is a war — a silent war — against religious liberty.
This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power. It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith — into a land where faith is silenced, privatized, and circumscribed. Their vision of America is not the vision of the Founding. It’s not even the vision of ten years ago. It’s a vision in which an individual’s devotion to Almighty God is accorded as much respect as a casual hobby — and with about as many rights and protections.
These elites have to this point faced little opposition – a non-profit here, a dedicated attorney there, a small business over there. A handful of principled organizations with the courage to stand up to the crushing weight of a liberal consensus unalterably opposed to their participation in the public square. They are the remnant who have the temerity to believe in America and its promises — and to do something about it.
After all, every person wants to live out his or her values. America’s most fundamental promise is that we can. When we cannot — when we are told that our faiths and our consciences are inimical to good governance and the law — then we are not simply facing a threat to our faiths and consciences. We are facing a threat to the very idea of America.
…..
Consider three storylines playing out in the states and at the highest courts over the past several years in three different areas, yet all with overlapping effects.
First: the freedom to exercise your religion in the way you run your business, large or small, is under assault.
Hobby Lobby and the free exercise of religion
You have likely heard of the Obama administration’s case against Hobby Lobby, a mega craft store and a family business whose battle against President Obama’s contraception mandate will end up as a Supreme Court decision. The national chain filed suit after being told they would be fined $1.3 million per day if they didn’t pay for abortifacients through their insurance.
Hobby Lobby is nothing less than an all-American success story. The family owned company was launched in Oklahoma in 1970 with nothing more than a $600 loan and a workshop in a garage. Today they have 588 stores in 47 states. They have more than 13,000 full-time employees. They expanded, branching out to create a Christian supply shop to sell Bibles and craft supplies, opening another 35 stores in 7 states, with almost 400 more employees. This is entrepreneurship at its best…
Through it all, Hobby Lobby has retained the guiding principles of their devout founders. Their statement of purpose begins with a Bible verse, and they are closed every Sunday. They’ve committed to honor the Lord by being generous employers, paying well above minimum wage and increasing salaries four years in a row even in the midst of the enduring recession. The family also signed the “Giving Pledge,” committing to donate the majority of their wealth to philanthropy. This is the definition of what a faithful entrepreneur looks like.
None of this matters to the Obama administration. The argument they have advanced, successfully thus far, is that a faithful business owner cannot operate under the assumption that they can use their moral principles to guide the way their place of business spends money. According to the administration's legal arguments, the family that owns Hobby Lobby is not protected by the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion clause.
That’s the part of the First Amendment which states that "Congress shall make no law ... prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.
The Obama administration and Attorney General Eric Holder argue that because “Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular employer, and a secular entity by definition does not exercise religion.” A federal judge agreed: since Hobby Lobby is a “secular” corporation, they have no right to be guided by the religious beliefs of their ownership.
Keep in mind that the Greens weren’t arguing that so-called morning-after pills should be illegal, or banned, or doing anything to prevent their employees from paying the small cost of such pills. They just had a serious moral problem with paying for something they viewed as inherently against their deeply held beliefs.
The Obama administration’s argument ignores these beliefs and treats them as little more than an inconvenience to its ever-expanding regulatory state. The administration’s argument strikes at the core of our understanding of free exercise of religion. This case could have enormous ramifications for religious business owners across the country.
….
Hosanna Tabor and freedom of association
And that brings us to the second front in the silent war: the assault on our freedom of association as people of faith, to form organizations where we work alongside others who share our views.
This brings us to the Hosanna-Tabor case, which revolved around the ability of a Lutheran academy in Michigan to fire a teacher. Here, the Obama administration advanced another extreme argument, claiming that job regulations prevented the academy from being able to fire anyone over a difference in beliefs.
The lawyers for the Obama administration went far beyond the issues of the case to instead advance the legally absurd position that there is no general ministerial exception, arguing that religious groups don’t even have the Constitutionally protected right to select their own ministers or rabbis.
Thankfully, here, the administration’s extreme position was rebutted by the Supreme Court in decisive fashion, with a 9-0 decision opposing its perspective. You have to take a pretty extreme position for Elena Kagan to join with Samuel Alito on an opinion.
So for the time being at least, the government doesn’t get to decide who can preach the gospel. But the important thing to note is that the government wanted to make that decision. That is truly offensive and frightening.
The administration advanced that extreme argument because it is consistent with the view of many on the left, particularly elite liberal legal scholars, that the god we must worship first is government, and that our rights are doled out by Washington as they see fit.
This same argument is even now being advanced against Catholic hospitals and adoption service providers, and other organizations that have a deeply held worldview, and simply want all their members and employees to share that worldview. The onslaught of lawsuits based on anti-discrimination law will inevitably lead to conflicts, which damage our society.
Elane Photography and freedom of expression
But those cases are only the beginning – there is a bigger threat, one that brings us to the third front in the silent war: the assault on your freedom of expression in all areas of life.
Consider the many cases against bakers, photographers, caterers and other wedding consultants who have religious beliefs, which prevent them from taking part in a same-sex ceremony. The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that one small business, Elane Photography, had violated the state’s Human Rights Act by declining to photograph a same sex commitment ceremony. In his opinion, the judge informed the Christian photographers being fined that they were “compelled by law to compromise the very religious beliefs that inspire their lives,” because that was “the price of citizenship.”
This assault will only spread in the immediate future. We will see continued pressure brought on anyone who "refuses and refers" to be penalized for their views, denied membership in professional groups or even rejected from licenses.
The effect of redefining marriage
Many states have considered these issues in the light of the ongoing legal battle over marriage laws in the country. But that pressure is not going to stop with photographers and bakers – it’s going to be brought on churches, mosques, and synagogues, too.
Illinois shows us a preview of what this looks like. In legislation they proposed altering the definition of marriage, they would have required churches and other congregations to essentially close their doors to outsiders, stop providing services to the community, and close off their facilities to other non-profits or church groups in order to avoid being required to host same sex ceremonies.
The Illinois legislation would have required an unprecedented degree of government oversight, such as sending government representatives to survey students at Catholic schools to see how many were actually Catholic. They would not allow religious bodies to rent their facilities to non-members for use in weddings. They would drive churches to have to eliminate classes, day schools, counseling, fellowship hall meetings, soup kitchens and more.
In other words, this law and others like it would require believers to essentially choose to break with their deeply held theological beliefs, or give up their daily activity of evangelism, retreat from public life, and sacrifice their property rights. Churches that do not host same sex unions would essentially be barred from participating fully in civil society.
This is the next stage of the assault, and it is only beginning. Today, an overwhelming majority of those who belong to a religious denomination in America – that’s more than half the country – are members of organizations that affirm the traditional definition of marriage. All of those denominations will be targeted in large and small degrees in the coming years.
“Hate speech” and human rights
Will churches in America even be able to remain part of the public square in a time when their views on sin are in direct conflict with the culture, and when expressing those views will be seen as hiding hateful speech behind religious protections?
Just as in Canada, where hate speech laws force courts to discern whether quoting Bible verses amounts to violating “human rights rules,” giving up your rights of religious expression may, as the New Mexico judge put it, be just “the price of citizenship.”
This war on religious liberty – on your freedom to exercise your religion, on your freedom to associate, on your freedom of expression – is only going to continue. It is going to continue because of an idea, a wrongheaded concept, which President Obama apparently believes: that religious freedom means you have the freedom to worship, and that's all.
In this misbegotten and un-American conception of religious liberty, your rights begin and end in the pew.
…
[Governor Jindal next reviews protections for religious freedom being enacted by states, and calls for more of them. He also reminds his audience that Christians in some countries are actually paying with their lives for their faith.]
So here, in America, we should be grateful that the laws and principles put in place by the Founders, men like George Mason and James Madison and Patrick Henry who understood the importance of religious liberty, have endured for so long. They are the reason America has come so far, and it is those same principles that should guide us farther still – principles that understand that power is derived from the people, not the government.
Calvin Coolidge understood this, in his own time: “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp.”
The things of the spirit do come first. We must act, and act now, to protect them. The temptation in some corners is to ask for a truce in these fractious battles – but in practical terms, a truce would only amount to those who value religious liberty laying down their arms. Our religious freedom was won over the course of centuries of persecution and blood, and we should not surrender them without a fight.
…
A few final thoughts.
Public opinion
First, let me be clear on something. You may or may not agree with the Catholic Church on contraception, most Americans undoubtedly do not. You may consider yourself to be pro-life or pro-choice, Americans remain fairly divided on that issue. And you may favor protecting traditional marriage between one man and one woman or you may favor making gay marriage legal. If we did a poll on those issues in this room, we would certainly find a variety of views. None of that is relevant in the least to the points I have made in this speech.
Our religious liberty must in no way ever be linked to the ever-changing opinions of the public. To the contrary, we must understand that our freedom of conscience protects all Americans of every persuasion — however those persuasions may evolve.
Targeting Christians
Second, it is unmistakable that most of the Obama Administration’s attacks on religious liberty are aimed at conservative Christians. But the fact is that our religious liberties are designed to protect people of all faiths. And I will note, that while I am best described as an evangelical Catholic, my extended family is quite diverse when it comes to matters of faith. And our liberties in America demand equal protections for all.
Stifling public debate
Third, for those of you who follow pop culture, you may have taken note of the recent flap between The Robertson family of Duck Dynasty fame, and the A&E Network that produces and broadcasts the Duck Dynasty show. And you may have further observed that the one of the loudest and most aggressive defenders of the Robertson family was the Governor of Louisiana.
You may think that I was defending the Robertsons simply because I am the Governor of their home state, the great state of Louisiana. You would be wrong about that. I defended them because they have every right to speak their minds, however indelicately they may choose to do so. Of course, A&E is a for-profit business, and they can choose what they want to put on the air.
But there was something much larger at stake here. There was a time when liberals in this country believed in debate. But that is increasingly not the case for the modern left in America. No, the modern left in America has grown tired of debate. Their new strategy is to simply try to silence their critics. So these leftists immediately mobilized and did all they could not to debate the issues, but rather to attempt to silence the Robertsons.
There was a time when the left preached tolerance. And they are indeed tolerant, unless they disagree with you. To paraphrase William F. Buckley, a liberal is someone who welcomes dissent, and is astonished to find there is any. The modern left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.
A pressing matter
Fourth, though this silent war on religious liberty may not seem as urgent a matter as the fact that our national debt is over 17 trillion dollars, it is actually a very pressing matter. Remember this quote from President Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”
A truly bizarre speech
Finally, let me finish by mentioning an incredible irony. I’ve been working on this speech for a good while. And last Thursday, exactly one week ago, something truly bizarre occurred.
The person who is at the tip of the spear prosecuting this quiet war on religious liberty spoke at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The topic he chose to speak about was defending religious liberty.
I was stunned, and I bet the President of Hobby Lobby, who was in the audience, was stunned as well. Yes, President Obama did wax eloquent, as he always does, about the horrors of religious persecution that are occurring beyond our borders. And good for him.
To be clear, churches in America are not being burned to the ground, and Christians are not being slaughtered for their faith. There is really no comparison to the persecution of people of faith inside our borders and outside.
Yet, it is stunning to hear the President talk of protecting religious liberty outside the United States, while at the very same time his Administration challenges and chips away at our religious liberty right here at home. Once again, there is a Grand Canyon sized difference between what this President says and what he does.
Here is what the President said last week, no doubt playing to his audience -- “History shows that nations that uphold the rights of their people — including the freedom of religion — are ultimately more just and more peaceful and more successful.” Well said Mr. President, I couldn’t agree more.
So I leave you with this -- The President is very concerned about religious liberty…and also, if you like your religion you can keep your religion.
Thank you, and may God Bless these United States.
This article was published by Bobby Jindal and MercatorNet.com and is posted here under their Creative Commons licence. You may republish it or translate it free of charge with attribution for non-commercial purposes following these guidelines. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation to MercatorNet. Commercial media must contact us for permission and fees. Some articles on this site are published under different terms. - See more at: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_silent_war_on_religious_liberty#sthash.tB0XC3ec.dpufSunday, April 7, 2013
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Church, State, and Marriage in the UK
Paul Adams
The previous post by Michael Cook on an important legal opinion about the impact of the UK Government's planned redefinition of marriage raises some interesting questions.
The Church, like English and American common law as I understand it and the Natural Law, regards marriage as one of those God-given institutions that precedes the state and does not depend on the state for its definition or permission to exist. For the Catholic Church and the Orthodox, it is a sacrament like baptism and the Eucharist. The Church could not simply stop celebrating this sacrament any more than any other as a way of avoiding legal action or persecution. The state could, of course, refuse to recognize, for civil and legal purposes, marriages celebrated in church before a priest, though such a move (like SSM itself) would not be politically popular.
Such a cutting off of civil from religious marriage would be more complicated for the Church of England because the state controls the Church and imposes laws on it about such things as whom it must marry. It is not clear that the C of E would have a legal basis, though there is certainly a theological and ecclesial one, for refusing to marry two people of the same sex. The two would be physically incapable of consummating their "marriage," of course. There could be no one-flesh union in a conjugal act that was open to new life. Any children the pair acquired would not and could not be the result of such a union and necessarily would grow up without at least one of his or her natural parents. But if the state insists than such an intrinsically barren union must be celebrated as a marriage, how can the state's church refuse? Woolly and accommodationist to secularism and the sexual revolution as the C of E (and even more its American partners) may be, it seems there must be a point where the body must heed the anti-totalitarian principle enunciated by Christ himself, to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.
If the state imposes its own secularist and anti-Christian sexual morality on the Catholic Church, the Church must and will resist, no matter the cost in terms of persecution. Serious Christians as well as Orthodox Jews and Muslims doubtless will do likewise. The C of E is more problematic. A product of the state against the universal Church from the start, it seems to be approaching a point where it can no longer plausibly claim to be both Christian and the state church, with the monarch as its head on earth. Disestablishment may not save the C of E from the persecution that faces the rest of us but it might enable it to maintain some integrity in the process.
The previous post by Michael Cook on an important legal opinion about the impact of the UK Government's planned redefinition of marriage raises some interesting questions.
The Church, like English and American common law as I understand it and the Natural Law, regards marriage as one of those God-given institutions that precedes the state and does not depend on the state for its definition or permission to exist. For the Catholic Church and the Orthodox, it is a sacrament like baptism and the Eucharist. The Church could not simply stop celebrating this sacrament any more than any other as a way of avoiding legal action or persecution. The state could, of course, refuse to recognize, for civil and legal purposes, marriages celebrated in church before a priest, though such a move (like SSM itself) would not be politically popular.
Such a cutting off of civil from religious marriage would be more complicated for the Church of England because the state controls the Church and imposes laws on it about such things as whom it must marry. It is not clear that the C of E would have a legal basis, though there is certainly a theological and ecclesial one, for refusing to marry two people of the same sex. The two would be physically incapable of consummating their "marriage," of course. There could be no one-flesh union in a conjugal act that was open to new life. Any children the pair acquired would not and could not be the result of such a union and necessarily would grow up without at least one of his or her natural parents. But if the state insists than such an intrinsically barren union must be celebrated as a marriage, how can the state's church refuse? Woolly and accommodationist to secularism and the sexual revolution as the C of E (and even more its American partners) may be, it seems there must be a point where the body must heed the anti-totalitarian principle enunciated by Christ himself, to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's.
If the state imposes its own secularist and anti-Christian sexual morality on the Catholic Church, the Church must and will resist, no matter the cost in terms of persecution. Serious Christians as well as Orthodox Jews and Muslims doubtless will do likewise. The C of E is more problematic. A product of the state against the universal Church from the start, it seems to be approaching a point where it can no longer plausibly claim to be both Christian and the state church, with the monarch as its head on earth. Disestablishment may not save the C of E from the persecution that faces the rest of us but it might enable it to maintain some integrity in the process.
How Does It Harm You? Let Me Count the Ways
Could British teachers be sacked for opposing gay marriage? Probably, says QC
Michael Cook | 11 Sep 2012 |
Teachers and chaplains who openly oppose the UK Government's redefinition of marriage face being disciplined, or sacked for their views if the law is changed, warns a top legal expert. The detailed legal opinion from Aidan O'Neill, a senior QC and expert on civil liberties and human rights, commissioned by the Coalition for Marriage, concludes that legalising gay marriage will affect the lives of millions of ordinary people.
Mr O'Neill warns that the plans to tear up the centuries-old definition of marriage will have far-reaching consequences, affecting schools, foster caring, adoption, the use of public buildings and even the careers of individuals. In the most alarming section of his assessment, he warns that teachers and chaplains who work in hospitals, or even the armed forces, could face being sacked under equalities legislation.
Asked about the effect of redefining marriage on schools, Mr O'Neill writes that if gay marriage became law in England and Wales, a school would be within its legal rights to dismiss a teacher if he, or she, refused to use material in the classroom that endorses gay marriage. This would include a teacher refusing, on the grounds of religious or philosophical conscience, to use a storybook about gay marriage called "King and King".
He also warns that parents who object to gay marriage being taught to their children across the curriculum will have no right to withdraw their child from lessons they disapprove of, for reasons of conscience.
Mr O'Neill also warned that Government promises to protect marriage celebrants, who object to the current definition of marriage being rewritten, are meaningless.
Asked if those conducting religious marriage ceremonies could be taken to court for refusing to carry out a gay wedding, Mr O'Neill replies "Yes". The QC, based at Matrix Chambers, states:
"If marriage is opened to allow two individuals, regardless of their gender or sex, to marry one another, then Article 12 ECHR will apply both to same sex and opposite sex marriage. Any attempt in law, then, to differentiate between same sex and opposite sex marriage would in principle be covered by the non-discrimination provisions of Article 14 ECHR and any differentiation in treatment between opposite sex and same sex marriage would be subject to particularly strict scrutiny by the Strasbourg Court and the offending State would have to show particularly convincing and weighty reasons to justify any such a difference in treatment."
"Churches might indeed better protect themselves against the possibility of any such litigation by deciding not to provide marriage services at all, since there could be no complaint then of discrimination in their provision of services as between same sex and opposite sex couples."
"And, in principle, the Church of England might be better protected under any such claim if it were disestablished in the sense that its clergy were no longer placed under formal legal obligations by the general law to solemnise the marriages of all and any person otherwise eligible to marry under the general law, since then it would be more able to claim the protection of Article 9 ECHR and the principle of religious liberty as against the requirements of the State rather than as present where, at least in matters of the solemnisation of marriage, the position of the established church appears closer to being an arm or department of the State."
Leaked communications between the Scottish law officers and their English counterparts have already highlighted concerns that Alex Salmond's administration has about the inability of the Scottish courts to protect clergy from legal challenge. Dr Sharon James, an expert on family policy and a Coalition for Marriage (C4M) spokesperson, described the legal picture as "a disaster waiting to happen" and a "lawyers' charter".
"Looking at the effect this change will have on children and parents, taking absolute control of a child's education from a parent and handing it to a local authority is an unprecedented assault on the rights of parents. This is a dangerous path to go down and one that should be resisted. Redefining marriage would also demand that social workers ask prospective foster carer applicants if they support the new definition - and could halt their application if they do not. Supporting civil partnerships, but not gay marriage, would almost certainly fail the equality and discrimination policies, and could prevent an individual from becoming a foster parent."
"Mr O'Neill's expert summary is incontrovertible proof that legalising gay marriage is not only a legislative minefield but an unparalleled attack on the freedom of conscience Britons have under the law. The redefinition of marriage would ride roughshod over a person's right to support marriage as the exclusive union between one man and one woman, whether that person be a teacher, a parent, a foster carer or a marriage registrar.
"The only winners from a change in marriage law will be lawyers, who will make a fortune out of what would rapidly become a legal mess of untold proportions. I hope the irony is not lost on the Government that their misguided campaign to legalise gay marriage would create a society with fewer freedoms than before."
First published by Michael Cook and MercatorNet.com under a Creative Commons license on the Conjugality blog.
Monday, July 30, 2012
The Battle Over Marriage and Religious Liberty: Why No Compromise Is Possible
Remember all the assurances that same-sex marriage would have minimal effect on the rest of society and even on the institution of marriage? In this post from Public Discourse, Robert George explains why the notion that a grand bargain could be struck between supporters and opponents of SSM - such that SSM would be legally recognized but its proponents and the law would respect the right of supporters of marriage as traditionally defined to act on their consciences without penalty - was always an illusion.
There is, in George's opinion,
There is, in George's opinion,
no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree....
The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage.
Marriage, religious liberty, and the “grand bargain”
Robert P. George
July19, 2012
In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.
It was only yesterday, was it not, that we were being assured that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships would have no impact on persons and institutions that hold to the traditional view of marriage as a conjugal union? Such persons and institutions would simply be untouched by the change. It won’t affect your marriage or your life, we were told, if the law recognizes Henry and Herman or Sally and Sheila as “married.”
Those offering these assurances were also claiming that the redefinition of marriage would have no impact on the public understanding of marriage as a monogamous and sexually exclusive partnership. No one, they insisted, wanted to alter those traditional marital norms. On the contrary, the redefinition of marriage would promote and spread those norms more broadly....
Remember?
No one, they assured us, would require Catholic or other foster care and adoption services to place children in same-sex headed households. No one, they said, would require religiously affiliated schools and social-service agencies to treat same-sex partners as spouses, or impose penalties or disabilities on those that dissent. No one would be fired from his or her job (or suffer employment discrimination) for voicing support for conjugal marriage or criticizing same-sex sexual conduct and relationships. And no one was proposing to recognize polyamorous relationships or normalize “open marriages,” nor would redefinition undermine the norms of sexual exclusivity and monogamy in theory or practice.
That was then; this is now.
READ THE FULL POST HERE
Abp Chaput on Growing a Culture of Religious Freedom
Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia gave this thoughtful address at the Napa Institute. He argues that "America is now mission territory. Our own failures helped to make it that way. We need to admit that. Then we need to re-engage the work of discipleship to change it."
Building a Culture of Religious Freedom (6204)
Address Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia gave at the Napa Institute on July 26.
by ARCHBISHOP CHARLES CHAPUT 07/27/2012
Transcript of Archbishop Charles Chaput’s keynote address given at the Napa Institute on July 26.
A friend of mine, a political scientist, recently posed two very good questions. They go right to the heart of our discussion today. He wondered, first, if the religious freedom debate had “crossed a Rubicon” in our country’s political life. And, second, he asked if Catholic bishops now found themselves opposed — in a new and fundamental way — to the spirit of American society.
READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Conscience and the Catholic Social Worker
Paul Adams
Here is the paper I just presented in Indianapolis on the significance of conscience in social work and professional ethics in general. It asks whether the discounting and trivialization of conscience in social work - a result of conceptual confusion and partisan passions - is deprofessionalizing the field by turning social workers into the moral equivalent of robots or vending machines.
Here is the paper I just presented in Indianapolis on the significance of conscience in social work and professional ethics in general. It asks whether the discounting and trivialization of conscience in social work - a result of conceptual confusion and partisan passions - is deprofessionalizing the field by turning social workers into the moral equivalent of robots or vending machines.
Conscience and the Catholic Social Worker
Paper presented at the
Catholic Social Workers National Association 2012 National Conference
Indianapolis, July 20-22, 2012
Paul Adams
Here is a typical passage from the regular column of Director of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), Dr. Elizabeth Clark, in NASW News, for May 2012:
In the last few months, we have seen the worst attacks on women’s rights since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. These attacks have come in many guises and from oblique directions. They have been couched in outcries of religious freedom, conscience clauses, cost containment and paternalism. We have seen restrictions in Plan B, the emergency contraception pill,, for younger women, a challenge to insurance coverage for working women, and proposals for required ultrasound procedures....
American women and women’s groups have not been silent during this turbulent spring. We watched women challenge the decision of the Susan B. Komen Foundation to defund Planned Parenthood. We were appalled.... We were further outraged by....
On the other hand, we cheered with the defeat of the Blunt amendment to allow religious groups to decline insurance coverage they morally oppose.
And so on and on, with the full stock of Democratic Party/Planned Parenthood talking points supporting their “war on women” narrative. Such partisan, unnuanced rants in which our professional association’s executive director purports to speak, not only for all social workers but all women too, ought not, by now, to surprise us. For a response from women for whom Clark, the DNC and Planned Parenthood do not speak, see this letter. Nor by the unsupported and indeed counterfactual assumption that abortion and contraception are goods for women (see, for evidence to the contrary, Eberstadt’s (2012) Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution.
Set aside for the moment the particular issues that exercise Clark here and what still startles is the casual dismissal of all talk of religious freedom and conscience. Such blankness of incomprehension here and consistently through NASW’s statements is a debased understanding of the very concept of conscience. No other profession gives such short shrift to conscience or has so little regard for the conscience rights and protections of its own members.
The threats to conscience and religious freedom confronting Catholic social workers have become more evident and pressing since I submitted the proposal for this session. There has been a flood of writing about the subject covering everything from individual legal cases to the HHS mandate to the Fortnight for Freedom launched by the U.S. bishops.
Here I will limit myself to developments most directly related to social work practice and to the threat posed to conscience by the very way in which the social work literature frames the discussion of conscience exemptions and conscientious objection. As Catholic social workers, I want to suggest, we need to understand some important distinctions in the realm of conscience in order to argue our case with colleagues and legislators, as well as to consider our own options.
Threats
Catholics and others in social work and related fields who adhere to the religious orthodoxy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in matters of life, death, sex and marriage face threats to conscience at every level. The secular-liberal orthodoxy in these areas aims not at tolerance or pluralism, but seeks a monopoly in the public square (George, 2002)
In 2009 Julea Ward was dismissed from her counseling program at Eastern Michigan University after she sought to refer rather than treat a potential client who was seeking counseling about a homosexual relationship. The university’s insistence that Ward needed “remediation” to help her abandon her beliefs about homosexual behavior and act against her conscience led to her dismissal from the program and resulted in a series of university and judicial hearings and appeals. In June 2012, the Michigan House passed Bill 5040, known as the Julea Ward Freedom of Conscience Act, prohibiting religious discrimination against college students studying counseling, social work, or psychology.
In its review of ten social work education programs, the National Association of Scholars found many examples of the coercion of student consciences, legitimated by a narrow reading of the NASW Code of Ethics. The cases involved requiring students to advocate and lobby for positions to which they were opposed in principle and as a matter of conscience. Again and again, we find students coerced into a morally degrading performance that requires public avowal of belief contrary to their own belief, conscience, and faith.
The issue of coercing the conscience of professionals in the health and helping professions has come to the fore in recent years as a result of the discovery, invention, or promulgation of new rights in matters of life and death, sex, marriage, and family. Behaviors that were illegal or socially stigmatized for millennia have been declared legal and become rights. This is not simply a victory for tolerance against the views and values of the majority of the population. It is a claim, supported by the force of law, for equal recognition and respect, subject to anti-discrimination measures equivalent to those that apply in the case of sex and race.
For more than two millennia, physicians have sworn by the Hippocratic Oath not to engage or collude in practices like abortion, euthanasia, or assisted suicide. In the wake of the egregious violations of the Hippocratic ethic by Nazi physicians, the World Medical Association’s 1948 Physician’s Oath affirmed “I will maintain the utmost respect for human life from the time of conception, even under threat." The legally binding United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and the 1959 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child affirm the rights of the child before as well as after birth (Joseph, 2009).
With astonishing speed, all these and other legal protections have been swept away either in letter or spirit. UN officials have been criticized for attempting to pressure sovereign member states to establish abortion as a legal right (Tozzi, 2008).
Hippocratic and other oaths have been revised to eliminate the prohibitions on killing—whether through abortion, euthanasia, or assisted suicide. And, most disturbing of all, health care providers have transformed their own professional ethics from forbidding abortion and other life-terminating measures to all but making direct or indirect participation in them a requirement of professional practice.
In recent years, the threat to conscience rights has widened beyond abortion and the duties and conscience rights of physicians, nurses, and pharmacists to areas in which social workers are more directly and routinely involved. Among these are counseling or psychotherapy and foster care and adoption, where practitioners and agencies are expected to affirm same-sex sexual relations and, in a growing number of states, same-sex “marriage,” as equivalent in moral status, social honor, and appropriateness as family environments for children, to conjugal relations between husband and wife.
One driver of these developments, Alvaré (2012) argues, is the vigorous promotion by the Federal government of a new moral orthodoxy, an ideology she terms sexualityism or sexual expressionism. Against what social science tells us about human happiness, as well as against the defense of religious freedom, “the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex.”
The HHS mandate stands on this theory. In a world of easy availability of birth control and abortion, the only reason for a federal mandate for a “free” and universal supply is to try to send the sexualityism message. The White House has all but come out and said: “women of America, vote for the incumbent this presidential election year because he supports women’s equality and freedom, which he understands to include at the very least nonmarital and nonprocreative sexual expression.” Why else choose Sandra Fluke—an affluent, single, female law student, who demands a taxpayer-subsidized, 365-day supply of birth control as the price of female equality—as your spokeswoman?
The HHS mandate requiring all employers, with narrow exceptions, to provide “insurance” coverage of abortifacients, contraceptives, and sterilization, threatens the religious freedom of all Catholic employers and organizations. My own hometown is built around a university that has made it clear it will not comply with the mandate. Nor will the local Catholic school, the only school in town. The threat is to the existence of the whole town, which cannot survive as a Catholic community without these Catholic institutions at their heart.
In general, either Catholic organizations will violate the Church’s authoritative teaching and effectively cease to be Catholic, or they will be closed down, sold off, or fined (that is, “taxed”) out of existence . As Cardinal George of Chicago put it, “a governmental administrative decision now mean[s] the end of institutions that have been built up over several generations from small donations, often from immigrants, and through the services of religious women and men, and others who wanted to be part of the church’s mission in healing and education.”
One result of the stripping of these health and social service programs from the Church would be to deprive Catholic social workers of even the possibility of practicing their profession in a Catholic context, that is as part of the Church’s corporate response to the needs of the poor, sick, homeless, and oppressed - an organized activity and duty of the Church from the beginning.
Conscience
Among the health and helping professions, social work stands out for its opposition to conscience exemptions for its own members. More than two-thirds of respondents in Sweifach’s (2011) study believed that laws protecting some health care providers should not be extended to social workers. In contrast, and despite ongoing attacks on conscience exemptions within the professions, other fields give more weight to professional judgment and discretion in choosing whom to serve and how to serve them. The American Pharmacists Association (2008) recognizes an individual pharmacist’s right to conscientious refusal.The AMA’s (2006) Code of Medical Ethics states that “A physician shall, in the provision of appropriate patient care, except in emergencies, be free to choose whom to serve.” According to the American Nurses Association, nurses have a right to refuse to participate in a procedure, but the conscientious objection must apply to the procedure, not the patient. Lawyers also assert the right to refuse representation in cases they consider morally repugnant, though they seem not to have the right to exclude whole categories of clients, such as men in divorce cases (Harpaz, 1998).
In social work, in contrast, the tendency is to address the conflict in ways similar to that of the Eastern Michigan counseling program - treat or exclude the practitioner. Tellingly, Sweifach (2011) cites the NASW code of ethics insistence on the social worker’s primary responsibility to promote the well-being of clients, as though the practitioner’s judgment of that matter were necessarily subordinate to the client’s. “Commentators explain that when clients’ behaviors and practices conflict with a social worker’s personal morals or religious beliefs, the social worker may be in need of peer support, supervision, or values clarification training to responsibly serve clients.” Conscience is thus reduced to “personal values,” and the professional as moral agent to a cipher.
In part, the failure of professional organizations like NASW to protect the conscience rights of their members is justified by an implicit rejection or belittling of the very concept of conscience as traditionally understood. In its place we find a contrast of public (or professional) and personal “values.” Here values have no intrinsic authority or foundation beyond being the subjective opinions or beliefs of those who hold them. If this is so, then why should the personal opinions (values) of a practitioner not be subordinated to those of the state that licenses and funds the professional or institution?
Much social work literature on the subject frames issues of conscience as a conflict between personal and professional values. In a recent article, Sweifach (2011) gives several examples from the literature as well as himself framing the issue of conscience and conscientious objection in those terms. For example, Linzer (1998) suggests that “in conflicts between personal values and professional values, the professional is duty-bound to uphold professional values. Upholding professional values represents ethical action” (p.28). According to this view, it is ethical, in these circumstances, to act against your own conscience.
As Catholic social workers come under increasing pressure to cooperate with evil in the name of professional duty, the question of conscience becomes correspondingly urgent. Recent statements from NASW, its executive director and its Legal Defense Fund, make it clear that our professional organization will not defend the conscience rights of its own members when policies they support are involved.
Opponents of conscience exemptions give little or no weight to the gravity of requiring someone either a) to act against their conscience or b) to leave their profession or be denied admission to it and hence to its schools. But the choice to act against your conscience can never be right. It is to choose to do what you believe to be wrong, and in the case of abortion, gravely wrong. For a Christian, it means to put your immortal soul in jeopardy; for a Catholic Christian, it means to excommunicate yourself from your Church and its sacraments.
In its hotly disputed Opinion #385, entitled “The limits of conscientious refusal in reproductive medicine,” the Committee on Ethics of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (2007) takes the position that pro-life physicians must refer patients seeking an abortion to other providers, must tell patients in advance of their views though not explain or argue for them, and must in emergency cases involving the patent’s physical or mental health, actually perform abortions. It treats conscience as one value among others, which means it can and should be overridden in the interest of other obligations that outweigh it in a given circumstance. That is, not only the hospital or clinic, but also the individual physician, is called upon to override the physician’s conscience.
A prevalent idea of conscience, implied by this opinion and most of the social work literature, minimizes its claims by treating it as only one thing among others that the practitioner must take into account in deciding how to act. Conscience becomes a matter of personal values that must be left at the office door when duty calls. At least, as it is put in one formulation, professional duty trumps personal conscience.
But this account trivializes the very concept of conscience and renders it incoherent. It runs counter to the traditional understanding of the term, according to which conscience is the supreme and final arbiter for an individual’s actions precisely because it represents the agent’s best ethical judgment all things considered. All things here must include considerations of what the agency or the state or professional codes of ethics tell us our duty is. It could never be right to act against one’s own conscience. It is hard to see how a notion of conscience as one value among others from which a professional should choose could be other than incoherent. On what ethical basis could such a choice be made? What is to be counted after everything has been counted?
Not only has the Nietzschean term “values” become a rhetorical device for subjectivizing and relativizing moral discourse, but conscience itself has become “the ghostly inner voice telling an individual what he or she should or should not do” (Moreland, 2011, p.320). When conscience is conceptualized as a faculty of the individual, its claims too readily become detached from judgments of practical reason about the right thing to do. McCabe (1986, quoted by Moreland, 2011) draws the contrast with the older Catholic tradition: “Aquinas does use the word conscientia, but for him it is not a faculty or power which we exercise, nor a disposition of any power, nor an innate moral code, but simply the judgment that we may come to on a piece of our behavior in the light of various rational considerations” (p.322).
Conscience in this view is not subjective opinion, a matter of autobiography, but involves knowledge and judgment, and is thus open to rational inquiry. It is not a conversation stopper, like the subjective preference for vanilla over chocolate ice cream. As Moreland explains, “A person is said, then, to act in accord with a good conscience with truthful knowledge, which, in turn, habituates one into the cardinal virtues of justice, temperance, fortitude, and especially prudence” (p. 322). For Aquinas and the Christian tradition, conscience--applying the general principles of practical reasonableness to specific circumstances--is closely linked to the classical virtues (above all prudence) acquired by experience and habituation.
We thus ought to follow our conscience not because it is a uniquely authoritative autonomous inner voice but because it is our best practical judgment of right action all things considered. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition of acting well. As Anscombe ([1958] 2005) puts it in her justly renowned critique of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” “a man’s conscience may tell him to do the vilest things” (p.170).
Karl Jaspers gave the example of a young German concentration guard he met in hospital at the end of WWII - the man’s conscience tortured him still because he let a Jewish boy escape instead of doing his duty of rounding him up and sending him to the gas chamber. Our conscience is our last defense against cooperating with evil in the name of duty, but conscience can itself be wrong and direct us to do evil. We must both follow our conscience in all matters and also form our conscience well by following reliable authorities and the advice and models of prudent persons. As Anscombe ([nd] 2005) - in unpublished notes for a lecture - explains the dilemma,
If you act against your conscience you are doing wrong because you are doing what you think wrong, i.e., you are willing to do wrong. And if you act in accordance with your conscience you are doing whatever is the wrong thing that your conscience allows, or failing to carry out the obligation that your conscience says is none.
There is a way out, Anscombe concludes, but you have to know that you need one and it may take time. The way out is to find out that your conscience is a wrong one (p.241).
In social work we do wrong both when we act against our conscience and when we follow a badly formed conscience into evil actions thinking they are good or morally neutral. The wrong in the second case is not that we followed our conscience, but that we failed to form our conscience correctly. We are obliged, as John Paul II (1993) says in Veritatis Splendor, both to inform our conscience and to follow it. We can be at fault at either stage.
Preferences and Obligations
Whether conscience is treated as one factor among several to be taken into consideration or as a subjective, non-rational inner guide or faculty, it appears reasonable in either case to reject or minimize the claims of conscience in policy and law, even when a religious motivation is claimed. For the late political philosopher Brian Barry, conscientious objections based on religious belief are simply preferences. He asks why some, namely religious, preferences should be privileged in law or policy over others. Why should the state bend over backwards to accommodate the preferences of a minority? Why should laws be crafted so that individuals and their associations will never be unnecessarily coerced into violating their consciences?
As Moschella (2012) summarizes the argument (that she proceeds to rebut) advanced by the editors of the New York Times and many others, “opposition to the [HHS] mandate seems like an attempt to impose Catholic views about contraception on the rest of the society, or an unjustified request for special treatment. Why should a minority of Catholics ... determine public policy for the entire country? Yes, the government could provide free access to contraceptives without conscripting employers to do it for them through their health plans, but why should we bend over backwards to adapt our policies to the religious or moral sensibilities of a minority?”
No-one claims that the conscience of a given individual or group always trumps other considerations in policymaking. A conscience, even one that is shaped by binding religious obligation, may be badly formed and contrary to moral truth, as when a religion requires its members to offer human sacrifice or kill nonbelievers. In those cases, the common good requires that such believers be coerced into violating their consciences.
But the moral integrity of persons is itself constitutive of the common good. Absent an absolute necessity to coerce the consciences of some in order to protect public order and the rights of others, the common good also requires respecting the claims of conscience.
The blurring of the distinction between preferences and obligations is one aspect of the trivialization of conscience in much discussion on these issues. As Moschella (2012) argues,
[T]here is a world of difference between a law that makes me do something I don’t want to do, and a law that makes me do something I have an obligation not to do. The former is an annoyance, the latter an assault on my moral integrity. I may not want to follow the speed limit, but that doesn’t give me a claim to be exempted from the law. On the other hand, if I believe that killing animals is morally wrong, no law should force me to serve meat in my business’s cafeteria, or give my employees gift certificates to a steakhouse, even if encouraging people to eat more high-protein foods would promote public health.
Here we might add that there is also an important difference between my deciding whether or not to meet my religious obligation to attend Mass on Sundays or have my sons circumcised and the state’s compelling me to do or not to do so.
As Moschella (2012) argues, “laws that forbid individuals to act in accordance with the dictates of their consciences place a burden on those individuals that differs not only in degree, but in kind, from the sort of burden involved in forbidding someone to act in accordance with mere preferences, however strong.” Such laws distribute the burdens and social benefits of social cooperation unequally. It is a difference in kind of burden imposed, not merely of degree.
We may see this by looking at the notorious precedent created by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in the second century B.C. The tyrant required his Jewish subjects to eat pork and food sacrificed to idols and not to perform circumcisions. Those who refused to violate their consciences in this way “were to be broken on the wheel and killed” (4 Maccabees 5:3). The edict imposed a radically different burden on observant Jews than on others. It was a gratuitous act of forced submission, a brutal assertion of secular power against a people of faith. As Paulsen (2012) puts it, the story remains “a remarkable two-thousand-year-old parable about tyranny and conscience, about cram-downs, accommodations, deception, and adherence to principle.” Like the HHS mandate, it was an unnecessary cram-down, a case of a government insisting “on vindicating its authority and overriding religious conscience for its own sake—purely for the symbolism of power prevailing over conscience.”
Redefining Religion
An important element of the current assault on religious freedom is the administration’s effort to redefine the place of religion in public life by reducing religious freedom to freedom of worship. The HHS mandate promotes a false but prevalent idea of religion as a private and marginal activity, the practice of which involves only co-religionists. Thus the state takes it upon itself to redefine religion, and to do so in ways that exclude essential elements of Christianity and other universal religions from their beginnings. The mandate’s exemption covers only religious organizations that have religious function as defined by the state and that serve primarily co-religionists.
From this perspective, put bluntly by the British Equality and Human Rights Commission Chief, Trevor Phillips, religious beliefs end “at the door of the temple.” For Catholic Christianity, the duty to evangelize non-Christians and to serve the poor, sick, homeless, prisoners, widows and orphans - both Christians and non-Christians - is not an optional add-on to the free exercise of religious faith. It has been a corporate, not just individual responsibility of the Church from the very beginnings.
Conscience and Duty
The argument against conscience exemptions for health care and social service professionals (physicians, nurses, social workers) is typically framed as a conflict between an individual’s (or institution’s) right to decide what services or treatment it will provide and patients’ rights to treatment, which is said to imply a duty to treat.
The client’s right to treatment, to a full range of services, may be linked to professionals’ willingness to provide them, especially in rural areas. As the chair of the ethics committee of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology put it, the “reproductive health needs” of women should trump the moral qualms of doctors (see Bioedge, January 2, 2009). (Here I leave aside the tendentious way in which advocates of abortion, contraception, and sterilization--where these are not medically indicated--describe these interventions as part of “reproductive health care,” although they are anti-reproductive, seldom have anything to do with the health of either mother or child, and in the case of abortion involve by definition not care but killing one of these patients.
In this discourse, the personal is contrasted with the professional, the idea being that a professional has a duty to provide whatever services are legal and demanded by clients. The conscience of the professional is invariably given short shrift and subordinated to the supposed rights of the client to treatment. I say “supposed” because it is not clear how the legal right to have an abortion, for example, in itself gives anyone a legal right to demand its provision, let alone legally obliging anyone else to carry it out or pay for it. In a shift characteristic of contemporary rights discourse, a right to freedom from state interference (a “right to privacy”) is transformed into a claim on public provision (Arkes, 2002).
Some opponents of conscience exemptions respond by saying fine, if you cannot in conscience meet the expectations and duties of the profession, leave it or choose a different line of work. This may indeed be the only option facing conscientious individuals where no accommodation is made. Conscience also trumps career.
Exclusion of pro-life physicians, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists from their professions and the closing down of institutions that respect life and adhere to Hippocratic ethics has practical consequences. But my argument here against exclusion does not depend on the empirical reality that religious professionals and institutions—e.g., Catholic physicians, nurses, social workers, and pharmacists as well as hospitals and clinics—play an important role in the American health care system. Their exclusion would involve a tremendous loss of talent, knowledge, skill, aptitude, and dedication for the healing professions. It would also substantially reduce health care services of all kinds and therefore the access of patients to such services. The argument here, rather, is that the coercion of conscience of professional health care and social work providers is morally corrupting for the profession concerned and its practitioners.
Compared with simply allowing the professional participation of members in abortion, to take the clearest case, mandating such participation makes the profession even more complicit in a culture of death that betrays social work’s (as well as the medical and nursing professions’) core values. It is a culture in which the dignity of the human person is restricted in ways that exclude precisely the most vulnerable and dependent members of society—born and unborn babies, those with severe physical and intellectual disabilities, those whose quality of life others deem inadequate.
Justifying such an abdication of the defense of human dignity as a core social work value entails a kind of self-deception. The view that the child in the womb is not a person or a human being seems not more but less and less tenable in light of scientific advances since Roe v. Wade. These show ever more clearly that the unborn child is a separate being with his or her own DNA and own principle of existence (George & Lee, 2005; George & Tollefsen, 2008; Lee, 2010) . It seems a truth not easily evaded without a level of self-deception that is itself morally corrupt, that the fetus is the baby we all once were and we are alive now in part because our mothers did not have us killed at that stage of our lives (George & Tollefsen, 2008).
In any case, if the profession as a whole accepted the evidence and logic of the position that children in the womb were as fully human as those with severe disabilities or those just born or close to death or suffering advanced dementia, but abortion remained a legal right of pregnant mothers, would NASW require its members to refuse participation, direct or indirect, in the taking of human life in any or all of these conditions? Or, on the contrary, would it still fail to defend either the most vulnerable among us or the conscience rights of its members? Would the legal right to engage in a gravely evil act as the profession itself now saw it be sufficient to require practitioners’ participation in the evil, whether on the grounds that client self-determination should drive professional decisionmaking or that a state license makes a practitioner an agent of the state? This is not a far-fetched thought experiment, given the history of dehumanizing language that was and is being used to justify violent acts against vulnerable people, including not only fetal children but also African Americans, the elderly, women, and Jews (Brennan, 2000). In particular, American liberal progressives and not just Nazis, have a long and disreputable history of objectifying and dehumanizing vulnerable persons in the name of eugenics (Largent, 2011 ; Gallagher,1999; Sandel, 2009; Goldberg, 2008).
The Moral Agency of the Practitioner
The idea that if an action is legally permissible and demanded by a client, the social worker (or other health professional) has the duty to provide or participate in providing the requested service itself represents a fundamental shift in the balance of rights and powers between professional and client. It strips the professional of her full moral responsibility and reduces her to a kind of machine or robot that delivers what the customer demands. The professional’s right and duty to use her judgment about what is required or indicated or morally permissible in the situation is stripped away in favor of a kind of client “empowerment” that radically disempowers, even dehumanizes the social worker. As the former governor of Wisconsin Jim Doyle put it when vetoing a conscience bill for health care providers, “you’re moving into very dangerous precedent where doctors make moral decisions on what medical care they provide” (Vischer, 2011). The practitioner is reduced to a kind of vending machine, like those increasingly found in college dormitories with the function of dispensing contraceptives.
Opponents of conscience clauses and exemptions sometimes pose the matter in terms of the desire by professionals who are religious to impose their personal views or morality on clients or patients. This is a misunderstanding. None of the case for conscience exemptions has anything to do with imposing my will on the client. Patients and clients have an uncontested moral right to informed consent and informed refusal.
But this is not the issue. The client may find abortion morally permissible and it is certainly legally permissible at present in the United States. I respect the client’s right under law to decide to have an abortion and will not condemn, moralize, or argue with her. My right not to participate in what I believe is grave wrongdoing does not imply or depend on a right to impose my belief on the client. “Conscientious objection, “ as Pellegrino (2008) says, “implies the physician’s right not to participate in what she thinks morally wrong, even if the patient demands it. It does not presume the right to impose her will or conception of the good on the patient” (p.299).
The question whether someone’s right to engage in a behavior entails an obligation on anyone else’s part to assist her in the process has important implications for all professionals, but especially those supposed to be helping or healing their clients. For any professional social worker from any faith tradition or none, such a legally mandated obligation is a serious potential threat to their conscience and as such, to their humanity as moral agents. The issue, which applies to lawyers and physicians no less than social workers, is only in part whether a professional is obliged to treat or serve anyone who seeks her services. Harpaz (1998), discussing the 1997 ruling of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination ("MCAD") that a woman lawyer could not refuse to represent men in divorce actions under the state's public accommodation statute, shows that the issue of compelled service or representation is not simple or confined to the health and helping professions.
For social workers, as for priests, it is common to serve clients whose behavior the practitioner finds morally repugnant. The challenge to conscience arises not from the requirement to serve - or not to discriminate against - a particular kind of client, but from the expectation in certain cases that practitioners will act against their own judgment and collude or participate in what the practitioner determines is wrong or harmful, or simply because the client demands it.
The question is wrongly put in the form of whose conscience counts, the client’s or the professional’s. No-one can be bound by someone else’s conscience. The professional remains a moral agent, not a robot or vending machine, and so is responsible for following his or her own practical judgment about what is the right thing to do, all things (including the client’s wishes) considered.
Licensing and Professionalism
Another aspect of the opposition to conscience exemptions is a novel view of professional licensing. In this view licensing, traditionally justified in terms of protecting the public by ensuring the competence of practitioners, becomes a process whereby professionals are transformed into public officials. If the state decides to recognize same-sex marriage, then its public officials - e.g., those who issue marriage licenses - are bound to issue those licenses to whomever the state decides is now qualified under its rules. Licensing of professionals, insofar as it transforms the practitioner into a public official obliged to do the state’s bidding, in effect becomes a process, not of safeguarding professional discretion while protecting the public, but of deprofessionalization. Social workers, among the least secure in their professional status, are to that very extent less inclined to defend the scope and legitimacy of their own professional judgment and discretion against tendencies to subordinate them to bureaucratic-state or client demands.
There is an analogous process through which the state, by providing most of the funding of voluntary social service agencies like Catholic Charities, turns them into agents of the state. Far from being a strength of civil society, of an institutional pluralism that protects the structures that mediate between state and individual, they become vehicles for increasing the reach of the state. Rather than allowing for alternative visions of the common good in the associations that people with differing religious and moral commitments build over generations, the state squeezes out the social space of civil society and becomes absolute sovereign of all.
Conscience, Subsidiarity and the State
The coercion of Catholic consciences, then, is a threat not only to individual practitioners but also to the institutional pluralism that lies at the heart of subsidiarity and American society. From this perspective, it is wrong to reduce matters of conscience to the state’s protection of individual rights, whether of consumer against provider, or professional against employer. Conscience is not simply a matter of individual rights or individual autonomy vis a vis the state and civil society. It is inherently relational.
This case for the relational dimension of conscience, in contrast to an emphasis on individualist rights talk and the autonomous self, is persuasively made by Vischer (2010), who seeks to recapture the concept of conscience as shared knowledge. He argues,
There is a clear need to recapture the relational dimension of conscience - the notion that the dictates of conscience are defined, articulated, and lived out in relationship with others, Our consciences are shaped externally, our moral convictions have sources, and our sense of self comes into relief through interaction with others. By conveying my perception of reality’s normative implications, my conscience makes truth claims that possess authority over conduct - both my own and the conduct of those who share, or come to share, my perception (p.3).
This argument has at least two important implications. First conscience is not simply an internal oracle, with only biographical interest, like a preference in ice cream flavors. It implies shared knowledge and truth claims about right action. And it binds those who share that knowledge and accept those truth claims.
The shaping of our consciences is a matter neither of individual nor state, but of the subsidiary associational life that mediates between them, especially church and family. These are sources of conscience formation, communities of discernment, and venues for expression.
When the state closes down avenues by which persons live out their core beliefs - and admittedly, some avenues must be closed if peaceful coexistence is to be possible - there is a cost to the continued vitality of conscience (p.4).
In this respect, Catholic social teaching offers a sharp contrast to the Hobbesian picture, in which “the sovereignty of Leviathan is absolute, so subsidiary units of the social order--churches, groups, smaller units of government--exist merely at the sufferance of the sovereign” (Moreland, 2011, p.325).
In the current attack on religious freedom and conscience, we see the relentless imposition of a new state orthodoxy and a growing intolerance of dissent on the part of subsidiary associations - even, in Canada, imposing the new sexual morality on the curricula of private religious schools and homeschooling families.
The issue of conscience, then, needs to be understood not only in terms of the rights of individuals, who must look to the state for relief or protection, but also and especially in terms of the scope for a rich associational life that subsists in tension with both individual and state. A commitment to freedom of conscience, properly understood, “should underlie our legal system’s reluctance to restrict the independence of the myriad associations that make up the vast space between person and state” (Vischer, 2010, p.4).
From this perspective, driving Catholic organizations and professionals out of health care, education, and social services does great social harm on several levels. Most directly, it threatens a tremendous loss of talent, knowledge, skill, aptitude, and dedication for the healing professions. It would also substantially reduce health care services of all kinds and therefore the access of patients to such services. In addition, the coercion of conscience of professional health care providers is morally corrupting for the profession and its practitioners. Catholics are bound to follow their correctly formed conscience even if it means loss of job, career, profession. Some will fail the test and be corrupted members of a profession that is corrupted by demanding such corruption - now called leaving your personal values at the door. But a regime - like that of Antiochus IV Epiphanes - that requires such heroic sacrifice on the part of its members is also corrupt, falling as it must into what variously has been called a soft or liberal totalitarianism.
In this sense too, individual or group conscience is not at odds with the common good but constitutive of it. The common good is not solely expressed or subsumed in the state, but requires a healthy institutional pluralism.
The HHS mandate, as Lee (2012) argues, “not only attempts to coerce Catholics to violate their conscience, it also insinuates a false redefinition of religion for our whole culture. But religion is not a creature of the state: it antedates the political community and has its structure independently of political laws and mandates.”
The Obama Administration’s narrowing of freedom of religion to freedom of worship reflects a notion of the state in direct opposition to Catholic social teaching on subidiarity. It is a notion that, in the words of Scottish bishop Philip Tartaglia, “appears to have no respect for institutions, such as the family and the Church, which pre-exist the state, which straddle the private-public domain, and which have their own internal constitution. This is a state moving toward a kind of soft totalitarianism.”
Some Conclusions
So what is a Catholic social worker to do?
At an individual level and collectively, we have to recover the Catholic understanding of conscience as a matter of shared knowledge and truth claims, as developing moral reasoning and practical judgment in the application of general principles to particular cases. It is about discerning the right thing to do, all things considered. By definition, there cannot be other things to be considered in addition to conscience. Nor can conscience be reduced to a kind of non-rational internal oracle that tells us what to do, in the manner of the voices in the head of a schizophrenic.
In this sense, conscience cannot be separated from rational argument about the right thing to do, as if it trumped or silenced such deliberation. It is a matter of practical reasonableness.
Exemptions Not Enough
In terms of the issues at stake in current debates that divide society on matters of life, death, sex, and marriage, it may sometimes be necessary but is never sufficient to rely on conscience protections. These issues are not matters of freedom of worship in the sense that attending Mass on Sundays is a rule that applies only to adherents of the faith. Catholics with informed consciences object to demands that they pay for or collude in abortion, sterilization, abortifacient drugs, the normalizing of disordered sexual relations and the redefinition of marriage, assisted suicide, and so forth, not because these things are matters of right worship or religious belief that ends the temple door. They involve truth claims about the common good and integral human development that the Church proposes - and justifies on rational grounds - to the larger society.
Without these caveats, appeals to conscience become what Barry, the New York Times, and others see them as, a call to privileged treatment and accommodation for certain beliefs just because they are strongly held or called religious.
As social workers, we are well placed to make the argument from subsidiarity - that health of a democratic pluralist society depends on maintaining the space between individual and state, for the associations, mediating structures, and natural, prepolitical institutions like marriage, family, religion, and market. We have a tradition of empowerment that recognizes that problems are best resolved closest to the people involved and their culture and resources, that seeks to leave the caring capacity of families and communities stronger than we found it. That tradition comports well with the arguments for subsidiarity advanced by Popes Leo XII, Pius XI and John Paul II. In both cases there is a rejection of the Hobbesian Leviathan state that claims absolute power over the whole of society and its institutions and associations, disempowering individuals, families and communities even in the process of helping them. Both Catholic social teaching and social work empowerment tradition, at least implicitly, reject the individualist hypertrophy of the autonomous unencumbered self no less than the hypertrophy of the state. That space is the one in which conscience is shaped and the virtues on which it depends are developed through practice and habituation.
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