In the August 4th edition of this newspaper Julianna Young wrote an opinion piece entitled “Prop 1 could threaten religious freedom.” She describes the presence of Prop 1 on the ballot as the result of people’s tendency to conform to the latest wave of popular opinion. Public pressure can, as she puts it, “find its way into the law — sidelining disagreement based on sincere religious conviction”. That’s what she says Prop 1 seeks to do. In other words, Prop 1 is on the ballot because people have thoughtlessly yielded to the latest opinion fad, forgetting their long-standing commitment to traditional Christian values.
Prop 1 would establish women’s right to have abortions and receive other forms of pregnancy-related medical care. Young is incredulous that it “proclaims a right to receive something that must be provided by another,” She’s apparently unaware that a great many existing rights do just that.
Prop 1 also acknowledges the right of the state to regulate abortion according to the age and viability of the fetus, and the right of any physician to refuse to perform those medical procedures due to personal moral convictions. Young insists, however, that the rights of religious organizations and institutions must also be protected. She’s referring not just to institutions like religious hospitals, but to businesses like Hobby Lobby, who, as you may remember, refused to accept medical insurance for their employees that made contraceptives available. She fails to note, I must mention, that if a Christian hospital hired only doctors who will not perform abortions, it would seem to be immune to violation of its religious convictions.
But we need to ask ourselves: exactly what is this “religious freedom” we Idahoans have that Prop 1 will impair. Young isn’t claiming that it’s our freedom to hold an opinion about morality and believe that killing a fetus at any stage of its life is — or isn’t — morally wrong; we can still refuse to have abortions ourselves, advocate for our beliefs, and be listened to. So what freedom is it? I’d say that it’s the freedom of Christians who share Young’s religious convictions to compel the enactment of state laws that criminalize any behavior not in agreement with those convictions. In other words, the
freedom threatened is actually Idahoans’ freedom to act in accordance with whatever they believe to be morally permissible.
That kind of religious “freedom”, we should note, is exactly what the First Amendment forbids. Several colonies, you’ll remember, enacted laws that created state religions, forcing every citizen to pay for, and participate in, particular forms of Christian worship, no matter what his or her actual religious beliefs were. That, the amendment tells us, violates a human right.
The First Amendment implies that there are realms of individual freedom that must not be constrained by government legislation, no matter what the majority of voters may wish. A citizen must have the right to hold different religious opinions and engage in public worship as he or she sees fit. That’s what the separation of church and state is all about. Any government coercion affecting these realms is impermissible.
I don’t deny that there are limits to someone’s freedom to act out his or her religious beliefs. The public interest must be protected. All religions agree that murder, theft, etc., are wrong, and law must reflect that. Christians who believe in witches, therefore, must be punished for killing someone they think is a witch. But It’s not always clear what sort of behavior calls for government prohibition. Those who, for religious reasons, refuse to be drafted, are granted exemption from military service, though required to perform other duties. In any case, it’s surely evident, when what’s morally-correct is a matter of widespread public disagreement, even among Christians, that an individual’s right to act in accordance with his or her own moral principles must not be preempted by law.
If we review Idaho’s legislative record, we find that it closely resembles that of those colonies whose state-religion legislation led to the First Amendment. Idaho has, to all intents and purposes, created a state religion. It has made abortion a crime, it uses public money to fund Christian schools; it will not require a Christian sect called the Followers of Christ, whose members refuse to take their sick children to doctors, to stop that practice, though the public interest clearly could be invoked to do so; it denies the rights of gay and trans-gender humans for conservative-Christian reasons by banning gender-transforming medical services; it
criminalizes anyone who helps someone else leave the state to have non-Christian-approved medical care; it forbids suicide, on the grounds that the Christian God so requires; it encourages conservative-Christian parents to prevent their children from being exposed to church-disapproved viewpoints in public schools.
It’s relevant to point out, as well, that Idaho’s religious bias isn’t actually “Christian”; it’s a right-wing variant of Christianity. Not all Christians support the prohibition of abortion that this state has made into law. The state has simply assumed that its version of Christian doctrine is the one that must be observed.
In the case of that law prohibiting abortion, Christians have differing “sincere religious convictions”. When is it that a fetus becomes a person? That’s a question that really has no “right” answer, and it’s not up to the government to decide the matter; it’s up to individual citizens, who should have the religious freedom to decide, and act, as their own moral principles dictate.
I don’t deny that a majority of Idahoans may belong to similarly-conservative denominations. What I deny is that those Idahoans have the constitutional right to force the rest of us to live in a state whose laws reflect only their own conception of what’s right and wrong.
You’ve no doubt heard of the movement called “Christian nationalism”. Idaho isn’t merely an example of what that movement calls for; it probably has installed just the reactionary version of Christianity that the movement favors.
I quoted Ms. Young’s observation that public pressure can “find its way into the law — sidelining disagreement”. She was quite right about that. In this state, public pressure has sidelined religious disagreement to such an extent that Idahoans now find themselves in a religious tyranny. The passage of Prop 1 wouldn’t lessen religious freedom; it would help to restore it.
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