Religious Liberty and the LGBT Categorical Imperative By Andrew Harrod, Phd.
http://www.religiousfreedomcoalition.org/2015/06/26/religious-liberty-and-the-lgbt-categorical-imperative/
Senator Mike Lee’s June 11 religious liberty proposals at Hillsdale College’s Washington, DC, Kirby Center will have limited effect against increasingly aggressive LGBT agendas. Countering viciously self-righteous LGBT orthodoxy will demand exposure of this movement’s bankrupt, inverted sexual morality and a more critical tone than suggested by an overly generous Lee.
Lee noted America’s “monumental achievement” of religious freedom, a “radical departure” in human history. America’s founders had considered “religion…too important—too central to human happiness and social flourishing—to be managed by, and subject to, mere politicians.” Lee grounded religious freedom in natural law while citing James Madison’s classic 1785 formulation against Virginia’s established church.
Being religiously “free in America is to know you won’t be forced to compromise your conscience as a price of your citizenship,” Lee stated, as long as individuals “aren’t threatening the public order.” The First Amendment’s “exceptionally robust” religious provisions sought “not to scrub religion from the public square, but to ensure religion’s equal and enriching access” and made Americans “at once so religious and so religiously tolerant.” “[I]ndividual Americans’ religious convictions” in turn gave rise to “[e]very great social reform movement in American history.”
These “cherished American ideals are being questioned, and in some cases threatened, as never before,” Lee observed, principally due to the advance of same-sex “marriage” (SSM). From SSM in the media continually comes “another story more reminiscent of an Orwellian dystopia or theocratic inquisition than the tolerant society all of us know.” Lee notes that
it is becoming increasingly clear that the next controversies will not be over whether gay couples should receive marriage licenses, but: whether people who don’t think so may keep their business licenses…colleges…will be able to keep their accreditation…military chaplains…will be court-martialed…churches…will be targeted for reprisal by the state.
Yet SSM opponent Lee has a surprisingly benign view of a SSM movement that “appealed to the country with the principles of justice, tolerance, and equality.” “Sometimes in a democracy, the other side wins,” he stated as if judicial activism and societal intimidation had played no small part in SSM victories. Overlooking SSM’s sexually revolutionary implications, he casually stated that “it seems likely that America’s public square will fully welcome married, same-sex couples—not as victims or revolutionaries, but simply as equals.” “Most advocates of marriage equality,” he asserted with moral relativism and the propagandistic slogan for SSM, “are no more radical than most advocates of traditional marriage.” Similarly, his religious relativism that “most followers of Jesus are no more radical than most followers of Moses, Mohammed, and the Buddha” might surprise Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist victims worldwide of Muslim persecution.
“But just as radical fundamentalists exist in every religious sect,” Lee argued, “so too can they be found at the extremes of otherwise healthy political movements.” While the SSM movement has a “tolerant national majority” unbeknownst to many, for the SSM fundamentalist “error has no rights.” These zealots desire an “official orthodoxy” of SSM and in some cases see “not danger, but opportunity” in crushing America’s social conservatives.
“Americans’ commitment to tolerance, diversity, and dignity,” Lee responded, “is perfectly capable of making room for the rights and dignity of those who disagree about the meaning of marriage.” His proposed legislation would prevent the denial of federal benefits “to an individual or institution based on a belief that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.” SSM dissenters could then emulate his persecuted Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS) forebears who trekked America’s pioneer trails “as witnesses to the truth that everyone has an equal and fundamental right to a free conscience.” He quoted for many a rather unlikely truth teller, LDS founder and “prophet” Joseph Smith, who once sermonized that “truth will cut its own way” amidst contending ideas.
Lee’s “commitment to tolerance, diversity, and dignity” vision faces many dangers according to eminent natural law scholar Hadley Arkes. Sexual left political forces led by the Barack Obama Administration want “to establish the clear, commanding rightness of abortion and the liberation of things sexual from the confines of nature and moral restraint.” Any “who deny these things, in word and deed, are doing wrongful things” and “must not be allowed any sanctuary beyond public reproach” in a society where it is “shameful for respectable people to express such views.”
Leftists “who began by denying radically any grounds for casting moral judgments on others now turn about and thunder the unyielding logic of a Categorical Imperative” based on “indefensible moral predicates.” Examining Supreme Court precedent stripping Bob Jones University of tax exempt status for its segregationist dating policies, Arkes has outlined legal challenges that could defeat the kind of legislation offered by Lee. Arkes’ arguments stand in stark contrast to Lee’s naïve claim that the Obama Administration’s “forcing innocent people to violate their conscience” stems from a “partisan triviality.”
Conservative social critic Jennifer Roback Morse further analyzes that “religious liberty arguments are not compelling enough to induce our fellow citizens to sacrifice something they value, namely, sexual liberty.” In an increasingly secular society, religious liberty advocates like Lee are “putting the emphasis on ourselves” with their arguments and “sound like we are whining.” Her strategy is to “argue against the Sexual Revolution because it has hurt people” with Christianity’s “viable, humane, intellectually coherent alternative.” “Sex makes babies. Children need their own parents. Men and women are different. These are facts: trying to build an entire society around their opposites is inhuman and impossible.”
Lee’s own Mormon history would remind him that religious doctrines deemed esoteric will be unavailing against a society’s marital morality. American authorities in the late nineteenth century correctly and successfully suppressed Mormon polygamy. Yet today, natural law scholar Robert Reilly notes, “homosexual proponents have taken on themselves the mantle of civil rights” as heirs to the abolitionist Abraham Lincoln with stupefying illogic.
Only a return to first principles can defeat this sophistry, Reilly writes, such as in the “moral argument for natural marriage” expressed by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. His United States v. Windsor dissent rightly defined marriage as a “comprehensive, exclusive, permanent union that is intrinsically ordered to producing new life, even if it does not always do so.” “Natural marriage and unnatural ‘marriage’” for homosexuals “are not two kinds of marriage: one is marriage, and the other is not,” Reilly writes in unequivocal rejection of “marriage equality.”
“Retreating to a religious freedom defense” by Lee and others, Reilly adds, “means not only that the nature of marriage has been conceded, but that the issue of the immorality of sodomy and other homosexual acts has been abandoned.” “If sodomy is not wrong, then not allowing it to serve as the basis of marriage will inevitably be seen as bigotry.” He demands forthright demonstration that “sodomitical behavior is against the ‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God’” cited in the Declaration of Independence. “If sodomy is wrong, if it contradicts human flourishing, then it cannot be the basis of marriage.”
Lee’s emphasis on religious liberty in the SSM battle underestimates the fanaticism promoting an upside-down LGBT morality. While he is correct to call upon his political allies to “be gracious, and civil, and solicitous,” such “cheerfulness and charity” cannot obviate the proclamation of hard truths concerning LGBT agendas. Such truth is necessary not only for the ultimate defense of marriage, but also for any interim preservation of religious liberty in his desired marketplace of ideas.
Absent a linkage of the religious faiths of people like Lee to facts about marriage, such views will appear as an archaic, atavistic theology grievously wounding innocent individuals. Lee will seem the equivalent of uncritical supporters of the Confederate Battle Flag that outrages many with its various horrific racist associations. For SSM opponents to enjoy the respect American society has always conceded to the pro-life movement, they must similarly appeal to reason, not just religion, and proclaim that certain actions are wrongs, not rights. No one should bring a knife to a gunfight, and no one should enter a universal moral culture war merely with sectarian scriptures, Book of Mormon, Bible, or otherwise.
=
Comments are closed.
