For years, Christian conservatives have insisted their religious liberties are under attack. The proof, to hear them tell it, can be found everywhere.
So, for instance, if you require Bible-believing county clerks to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, you are trampling on their sincerely held religious beliefs.
Never mind that these officials are government employees whose salaries are paid by the taxpayers, including gay taxpayers. Apparently, they should be exempt from doing their jobs in an equitable manner because their freedom of conscience outweighs the rights of gay or lesbian couples seeking to wed.
Likewise, if the state requires Christian cake-makers, website designers, photographers, or other service providers to offer those services to all, regardless of sexual orientation, they are violating the religious liberty of Christian businesspersons.
So too, is religious freedom squashed by expecting Christian pharmacists to fill prescriptions for birth control they believe to be abortifacient and, thus, responsible for taking human life.
Or requiring health insurance plans to cover IUDs, HPV vaccines for youth, or HIV-suppressing medications, all of which, in the estimation of these “sincere” Christians, encourage immoral sexual activity.
Or requiring Christian doctors to provide care to patients whose gender identity or sexual orientation they object to for reasons of faith.
Or, most recently, requiring Christian teachers to refer to students by the names and pronouns preferred by those students if those conflict with their biologically-presumed gender at birth. As Christians, these teachers reject the idea of trans identity or gender fluidity, so expecting them to refer to kids as those kids prefer is to ask them to violate their conscience or some such thing.
Basically, to require Christians to live by the same anti-discrimination laws as everyone else, to do their secular jobs in a way that treats all with equal dignity, or to subsidize anything, even indirectly, to which they object on spiritual grounds is seen as a violation of their liberty.
Needless to say, if a liberal Christian said the same about paying taxes for weapons of war or the militarization of police or for prisons that warehouse people with little expectation of rehabilitation, those who scream about religious liberty being violated would hardly be persuaded.
Nor are they moved when Jews remind them that under Jewish law, abortion is allowed, and the view of when life begins is different than for fundamentalist Christians. By the logic of the religious liberty police, banning abortion would violate religious liberty.
But since those whose liberty would be violated aren’t Christians, it doesn’t matter.
Just as it hardly seems to bother them that if religious carve-outs are allowed over matters of sexuality, then so too would they have to be allowed for those who object on religious grounds to interracial marriages, women working outside the home, or who insist upon the Biblical authority to beat their wives or children.
Once a Pandora’s Box of religious exceptions is opened, there is virtually no way to limit what emerges. Consequences be damned.
But none of that bothers them.
Because all the blather about religious liberty was nonsense from the beginning.
When these folks insist they only wish to be free to practice their faiths while allowing LGBTQ folks to obtain the services they seek from others who don’t share those faiths — a kind of live-and-let-live stance — they are lying.
Since religiously conservative Christians ultimately seek to convert the masses, their endgame is not limited to simple carve-outs for themselves amid a sea of unbelievers who can continue to marry the gays, make their cakes, fill PrEP prescriptions, and give contraceptives to women who think, scandalously, that sex might be for more than procreation.
No, their goal, however unattainable in practice, is to make all the doctors, pharmacists, cake-makers, and county clerks who issue marriage licenses evangelical Christians.
In their ideal world, which they very much seek to bring about, LGBTQ folks would not be able to access services for their weddings because there would be no such weddings.
In their ideal world, there would be no unbeliever to whom they could turn to serve their needs while still respecting the rights of the faithful.
Because there would be no unbelievers left.
If the goal of the religious liberty crowd is, essentially, to end religious pluralism, the idea that religious liberty means anything to them beyond their own right to make the rules is absurd.
. . .
And now and then, they say the quiet part out loud, letting us know that it isn’t freedom from oppression they seek but the freedom to impose their beliefs on the rest of us.
To wit, the recent testimony of a Texas parent in favor of a bill to require the posting of the Ten Commandments — specifically, the text from the King James Version of the Bible — in every public school classroom in the state.
With font big enough to be seen from any part of the room, even by people with poor eyesight.
I repeat: In every public school classroom.
Meaning in classrooms where children of many different faiths and no faith at all sit, and in which religious proselytizing has been deemed unconstitutional multiple times by the courts of this nation.
But they don’t care about the Constitution. They reject secular law. They believe, as this particular parent openly admitted, that America “must restore a Biblical standard” to our schools.
In short, public institutions must be governed by adherence to religious beliefs, specifically those of the dominant religious majority.
Interestingly, the parent who offered this paean to theocracy doesn’t even have kids in the public schools. As she noted, she homeschools her children and presumably would continue to do so, even were the Ten Commandments bill to become law.
In other words, she is already exercising her religious liberty regarding her children’s education. It isn’t being restricted.
No one is banning her ability to homeschool her kids, even if it means teaching them a steady diet of codswallop about how dinosaurs and humans lived together, how the Earth is only 10,000 years old, or that Noah really did live to be over 900.
She can teach her kids that ignorant horseshit all day, every day, and no one is stopping her.
Mocking her? Yes, let’s hope so, mercilessly. But not stopping her.
What she wants is not the liberty to teach her kids what she believes but to force other people’s children to be subjected to what she believes. She wants — as all conservative evangelicals do — to impose her religion on those who do not share it. Because to her and them, the liberties of unbelievers (or merely different types of believers) don’t matter.
They must be forced to bend to the one true God.
You know, the God who said to remember the Sabbath and keep it holy but forgot to explain how to deal with people whose Sabbath is a day earlier than most Christians — and who also failed to account for football.
The God who said not to steal or kill but whose sincere believers saw nothing wrong with stealing the land of Indigenous peoples and the bodies of Africans and killing those who stood in the way of their “Manifest Destiny.”
The God who said to honor thy father and mother unless, of course, those fathers and mothers are something other than Christians, in which case you should dishonor them by rejecting the faith they taught you, embrace Jesus, and insist that your folks are going to hell.
In other words, these are people who want others to follow rules they don’t even believe in, or which, if they were genuinely followed — like the one about honoring parents — would require the rejection of Christianity by anyone raised as anything else.
But evangelicals never think about any of that.
They ignore the contradictions that riddle their Bible and the hypocrisy that marks their daily lives. Or they write it all up to man’s sinfulness and use it as more proof of our fallenness and need to be saved by the Grace of God. Because hypocrisy is evidence of our inadequacy, see? The circular logic never stops.
But we must stop them.
Stop them from using the red herring of their religious liberty as a weapon to restrict the liberty and opportunities of others.
They can believe whatever they wish.
They can teach their children to believe those things too.
But the rest of us also have that right.
Allowing discrimination against some is never okay, even when — and perhaps especially when — you justify it in the name of a supposedly loving God.
Those who insist otherwise are bad people and shitty Christians.
And we should say so loudly and often, starting today, on Easter.
After all, surely, on a day like today, when so many are focused on what they believe happened to Jesus’s body, they could find at least a little time to reflect on what happened to his message.
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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.
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I wrote out a lengthy response concerning this screed but alas, your website refreshes itself randomly, so here is the re-write. Nevertheless, as always, your piece is written with the assumption that Christians never question their faith, never consider the things they constantly wrest with and are never exposed to a culture which surrounds them at all times. “But evangelicals never think about any of that.” That somehow we have never considered how that we still have to honor our mother & father despite that we recognize they may be headed for destruction. I guess we never read where Jesus… Read more »