A shabby pretext
Inayat Bunglawala is pondering (in a rather inconclusive and unproductive way, which I suppose in his case is probably just as well) the tensions between religious freedom and other kinds of freedom, religious rights and other kinds of rights. One thing he mentions needs more second-guessing than it usually gets.
Professor Roger Trigg kicked off last night’s discussion by pointing out that Article 9 of the European convention on human rights guarantees that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to … manifest his religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.” However, Professor Trigg argued that, in reality, a number of recent cases showed that this religious freedom was being trumped by other human rights.
He cited the case of a registrar in the London borough of Islington who had objections to conducting civil partnership ceremonies. The registrar happened to be a Christian and “could not reconcile her faith with taking an active part in enabling same sex unions to be formed”. This was a case where the freedom to manifest one’s religious beliefs in practice appeared to come into direct conflict with the right not to be discriminated against due to one’s sexual orientation.
Here’s what I think needs closer examination: in what sense is it really part of the registrar’s religious beliefs that gay people shouldn’t get married?
Is that something Jesus is quoted as saying? Is it a central Christian belief? Is it a religious belief at all?
Not that I know of. As far as I know, it’s just a traditional entrenched customary belief – a “Yuk” belief, to borrow from Leon Kass and Jonathan Haidt. It doesn’t really have any strictly religious content. Yet it gets called a religious belief. Why? Partly to make it seem more respectable, and partly precisely to take advantage of the rights that Bunglawala mentions. A mere stupid bit of bigoted dislike doesn’t deserve or get the dignity of a right, but if you say it’s a religious belief – oh well that’s different. Only it isn’t. But a lot of people say it is. It’s mostly a con, and should be treated as such.
Even if it was. My professor for economics and ethics used to say you can only ever have one principle as that supercedes everything else. As such, you also must have a hierarchy of rights, and even if you hold many rights in high regard, one of them is bound to be more important than others. And religious freedom is simply *not* the most important one.
The registrar is marrying people according to the laws of the state. The fact that she believes their marriages are not true marriages because they were not and cannot be married according to religious rites gives her no more right to refuse to marry them according to the laws of the state than she would have to refuse to marry a man and a woman who had not had a religious rite.
Honestly, I don’t think it matters one bit how genuinely “religious” any particular religious belief is. The registrar’s right to religious freedom does not equate to or justify a presumed right to employment in her current position, nor does any person’s right to religious freedom guarantee their right to a particular job just because they happen to currently occupy the position. If one’s religious convictions prevent one from carrying out the duties of one’s employment – whatever that employment may be – then one is obligated either to give up/be flexible about those religious convictions or to give up the position whose duties contradict one’s religious convictions as one understands them.
The registrar’s claim of a right not to perform the assigned duties of her position is not even remotely analogous to requiring employers to make reasonable accommodations (flexibility about religious holidays, for example) so as not to discriminate against swathes of potential or actual employees on the basis of their religious beliefs/traditions. That “reasonable” part of reasonable accommodations doesn’t extend very far at all, nor should it: If a position absolutely requires night and weekend work (at a nightclub, let’s say) and there is no alternate way for the job duties to be performed, no employer is required to accommodate an orthodox Jew who refuses to work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Employment for the state offers even less flexibility with regard to religious accommodation in some respects, and for good reasons: If you work for a government that recognizes and protects citizens’ religious freedom, then you are obligated to perform your official duties for all eligible citizens in a neutral fashion that respects those citizens’ religious freedoms, and you are certainly not free to impose your own religious beliefs on citizens in any way, whether by refusing to serve them or by showing any religious preference whatsoever. (Public school teachers are obligated not to proselytize, to give an oft-violated example.) For similar reasons having to do with the obligations one takes on with state licensure to practice a vital profession, pharmacists with religious objections to filling prescriptions for birth control or abortificants are obligated to either get over their religious objections or pursue another career.
Or, shorter version: If you’ve got a religious problem with fulfilling the duties of your job, don’t let the door hit your ass on your way to the unemployment office, you self-righteous git.
But legally it does matter, George. Everything you said is right, but this woman’s argument fails even before you get to the question of where religious rights end, because they’re not even religious rights.
Everything you’ve said is an argument that ought to be made–but we should also point out how a lot of what gets called “religion” isn’t even that. That helps stem the tide of dressing up bigotry as some super-special, super-personal element of one’s life.
I think there may be a bit of a problem in determining whether or not the woman’s objections to marrying gays are part of her “religious beliefs.” Who’s going to go and decide what are and are not “central Christian beliefs”? This is where the “excessive entanglement of government with religion” comes in, at least in US jurisprudence, so that, among other things, the state isn’t supposed to decide between divergent religious claims. (In practice things might be a bit different.) Better to avoid the whole issue of whether Belief X is or is not a “central” belief at all and attack on some other grounds (e.g., discrimination trumps religion).
Well I’m not the state, and I think if the registrar gets to say her objections to marrying gays are religious, observers get to dispute her claim. Of course I don’t get to determine what Christian beliefs are central, but I certainly think I get to offer an opinion on the matter. This is a public issue that has been much discussed, and I think the question of what sense her putative beliefs are religious at all is relevant and wide open to criticism.
My response to whether her objections to gay marrage are religious or not is ‘don’t care’ – they’re still bigotted and she is unsuitable for the job.
Likewise if someone is motivated to kind acts towards me because of their faith, I don’t care that their motivation is religious: it’s still kindness.
I think it’s fair to say religions per se have a detrimental effect and we can say Religion X promotes homophobia but when it gets down to individual cases that person has to take responsibility for her prejudices.
If I were a registrar in the Borough of Islington and refused to conduct ceremonies for black people because they were ‘tainted by the curse of Ham’ how would that go down? There’s no real difference between that position and refusing to conduct marriages for gay couples. Both can be ‘justified’ through reference to scripture and both are powerful arguments for the separation of church and state and the rule of secular law.
Jenavir gets my point, but no one else does.
No, the ‘religious beliefs’ claim doesn’t make her refusal to do her job any better, but to a lot of people it makes it somewhat more respectable, so it really is worth pointing out how bogus the claim actually is. Jesus is supposed to be central to Christianity, but it’s not as if Jesus is portrayed as obsessed with the eeevil of homosexuality. Right-wing Christians get away with calling vast swathes of bigoted ignorance and plain ‘the way I’ve always done things is the right way’ism by pasting the ‘Christian’ label on them when they’re not inherently Christian at all. It’s worth pointing this out.
I suppose you’re right — it’s part of that “undeserved respect for religion” the so-called “new atheists” spend a lot of time talking about, and here we see a perfect example of what that can lead too. (I saw a book the other day on just this subject, but didn’t get a chance to really look at it — Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty: Emerging Conflicts by Douglas Laycock.)
Still, I’m concerned that telling such people that “homophobia isn’t really part of your religion” will degenerate into a scripture-citing fight — “Yes it is, look at this!” “No it isn’t, you’re just quoting verses to justify your own bigotry!” “But it’s God’s word!” and on and on. You can’t really win a fight like that against hardcore believers.
True – but then I’m not likely to convince a hardcore believer of anything at all! I’m not addressing believers, particularly, I’m just attempting to say what’s going on. The newspapers don’t do it – they just report the claims that X Y or Z is a “violation of her religious beliefs” or the like. Somebody should be challenging such claims.
In the US at least this stuff is a deliberate, organized campaign: to treat all sorts of things as some kind of violation of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The courts find themselves having to attempt to figure out what is central to a given religion and what isn’t. Reactionary believers of all religions are energetically working on expanding and entrenching that, declaring all sorts of things central that have never been central before. I’m quite familiar with the four ‘gospels’ and they really don’t put homosexuality front and center.
Reactionary believers of all religions are energetically working on expanding and entrenching that, declaring all sorts of things central that have never been central before. I’m quite familiar with the four ‘gospels’ and they really don’t put homosexuality front and center.
Ah, see…for the Catholic Church, the four gospels and indeed the whole Bible are of only secondary or even tertiary importance compared to “Tradition”! Similarly, although many aspects of Judaism and Islam are not found in the Bible or Qur’an, they are present in that amorphous, nebulous blob of “Tradition,” whether in the Talmud, Hadith, or just unwritten “Tradition,” that is given just as much weight as Holy Writ. This is where it gets really complicated — “But the texts are only one part of my religion! My religion is what I and my clerics say it is! How dare you question ANY of it and challenge my religious authenticity!”
Of course, if you then say that the FSM says that you must get drunk every morning before going to work because it’s the “Tradition,” they’ll just say, “Well, the Church of the FSM isn’t a ‘real’, ‘respectable’ religion.” Mmm-hmm…
I might add that I think that the reason that the reactionary believers are working on expanding and entrenching their practices and beliefs is that they’re trying to sustain the status quo before their authority was challenged and the things they’re pushing for weren’t enshrined into law precisely because they were so accepted by society that it was a shock when it became clear that this wasn’t the way things had to be. Doubtless one reason why the clerics didn’t go off on homosexuality previously was because society at large saw it as disgusting and reprehensible, and that was the way the clerics liked it. Or, rather, they didn’t realize just how much they preferred it until the gays started “pushing their perversion in everybody’s face.” Now it was a threat! The same could be said of women’s rights — certainly, in the days before feminism, it wasn’t necessary for clerics to preach against it because women’s subjection was merely part of the accepted way of the world, and any uppity women who got ideas above their domestic station could be dealt with individually as heretics or bad women or witches or whatever.
Lisa points to exactly the reason I think it just doesn’t matter how “genuinely religious” any given belief is. I do get what you’re saying, OB, and you sort of have a point – but ultimately I think you’re simply wrong. Take, for example, our small-minded, petty, self-righteous twit of a registrar’s conviction that the gays are just awful, and certainly shouldn’t be allowed to marry! Her belief IS in fact thoroughly Christian, simply and entirely because that belief is endorsed and reinforced in her by her preachers and fellow believers at her Christian church. You have no legitimate basis for dismissing the belief as somehow separate from her Christianity, because it isn’t. Yes, at some level this religious belief is just her own (or some current or former religious opinion-shaper’s) political opinion or personal opinion or emotional “Eeuww!” reaction given a religious gloss, but that’s because ALL religious moral beliefs are ALWAYS just political opinions or personal moral convictions or emotional reactions given a religious gloss: There is no God to be an actual moral authority, so moral claims attributed by people to their religion CANNOT conceivably be anything other than their own opinions which are socially endorsed and spread by religious traditions and communities, and personally justified in the minds of individual believers by the usual process of projecting their own opinions onto God.
Yes, it’s true that Jesus is quoted as saying exactly bupkiss in the New Testament about homosexuality, and that (male only) homosexuality is condemned as an “abomination” in the Old Testament only in the context of long lists of rules that also condemn eating shellfish and wearing silk and wool together as abominations. So what? Picking and choosing which parts of a holy book a given believer or church takes seriously and which it ignores is always shaped by whatever idiosyncratic personal beliefs the picker-choosers bring to the task. It’s not as if there could possibly be an objective, rational basis for accepting a book of self-serving myths written by long-dead goatherds as authoritative in the first place, so no amount of subsequent picking and choosing from it could be rational or objective, either. Insofar as people do bring their religion-independent, possibly even rational and considered moral convictions to the task of deciding which church to join and which bits of holy text or preaching to embrace and which to ignore, once they retroactively designate any given moral belief to be one that God always-already said they should have, and once that moral belief becomes part of a given church’s doctrine or preached from its pulpits or simply embraced and reinforce by fellow believers as a religious matter, it’s no longer an independent moral conviction, but also a religious belief.
To worry at all about the origin of any given religious belief and how “genuinely religious” it is, as if there were any lesser or greater legitimacy to any religious belief, is always a non-starter. From a secular perspective, the state doesn’t protect the freedom of religion because anything about any religion is legitimate or true or even rational in the slightest way, but because people ought to be free in general – even free to be blinkered, pig-ignorant, self-righteous buffoons, as long as they can exercise that freedom without encroaching on others’ rights. Religious freedom is only singled out for special consideration because religion has historically been a particular sticking point on the freedom front (to say the very least).
Hmmm. Yes, I see your points, both of yiz.
True. Can I distinguish between de facto Christianity and –
Oh well I suppose all I’m doing is being a Protestant atheist, god damn it. I’m doing a Luther: go back to the text, go back to core Christianity, ignore that anti-Christ in the corner.
And yet the pedant in me wants to say “in what sense is this bullshit specifically Christian?” I’m a Protestant atheist pedant.
Alllllll right, you win. Thanks Lisa, thanks G.
(I’ll probably make the same mistake at some point in the future. Memory fail or irresistable temptation or both.)
Don’t ignore your corrective urge entirely, OB. It may be impossible to use arguments alone to dissuade people from beliefs they embrace that never had aught to do with reason in the first place. However, it’s persuasively useful to appeal to “evidence” and “arguments” that people are already motivated to take seriously, such as digging into the book they think is sacred and inspired and all that jazz and pointing out how their position is wildly inconsistent and cherry-picking with respect to that text. Call it framing, if you will. ;-)
B&W readers just aren’t the right target audience.
Well G I have been thinking (I blush slightly to admit) that in a way Luther wasn’t wrong. I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for him, up to a point (well short of the anti-semitism, peasant-hatred, general 16th c brutalism). If you’re going to do the religion thing you might as well at least distinguish between doctrine and bizarro random accretions. Truth in advertising sort of thing.
Now looky here, B&W readers can just damn well put up with my less cogent ramblings now and then. What do they think this is, a restaurant?
hahahahahahahahaha
I don’t know, George–doesn’t your view mean that everything a person who calls themselves “Christian” says is “Christianity” must BE “Christianity”?
And doesn’t that totally invalidate the study of religious history as a factual discipline?
Can’t we say, as a matter of historical fact, that this belief here has been central to Christianity for centuries and this other one here hasn’t?
If she wants to call homophobia part of *her religion*, then fine. But calling it ‘Christianity’ would seem to be a stretch if we accept that words have meaning. Of course meanings are fluid and ever-changing, etc., but aren’t there some limits to that? And given that we have legal fixtures like the “free exercise of religion” clause in the US Constitution, I don’t see how it can hurt us to point out that “religion” can’t just mean anything that anyone wants to call religion. I understand Lisa’s point about not wanting the state to make such determinations, but if something called ‘religion’ has a protected legal status (and it does) then the state *has* to make such determinations.
Jenavir, I simply didn’t describe or imply that level of Humpty-Dumpty-ism, where anything any individual says is Christian simply is Christian. You don’t need to read my whole comment to see it, either: The little bit OB quoted refers to the registrar’s homophobic moral stance being endorsed and supported by her preachers and fellow believers and such. At the very least, that implies a religious community.
And given that fairly explicit homophobic doctrines have become a central moral tenet and motivation for political action for many Christian denominations – a majority of Christians by membership, I believe – I’d say that any attempt to argue that homophobia isn’t really a Christian value would itself smack of Humpty-Dumpty-ism, or hair-splitting at the very least. I suppose one could argue that homophobia isn’t Christian because “Teh gays are yucky” isn’t mentioned in the Nicene Creed, or something like that. But overly simplistic definitional boundaries, especially definitions which rely overmuch on internal doctrinal matters, would probably make as much of a hash of the historical/sociological/anthropological study of religion as any sort of “Christianity is what any given person says it is” lack of definitions would.
Hm. Jenavir is right though – this is exactly the kind of thing that courts do have to adjudicate, precisely because of the wretched Free Exercise clause. This kind of thing is one reason the wretched Free Exercise clause can potentially be so illiberal (and in practice sometimes is, as in Yoder v Wisconsin). If people get to have protected status for some noxious activity just because it’s what My Congregation thinks is Christian (or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu) – well you see how it could go.
The registrar is not under the jurisdiction of the Free Exercise clause, but UK law clearly pays attention to First Amendment jurisprudence – that fact was mentioned either in this article or some other recent one (surprising me a little). The basic idea is obviously influential – on the European human rights court for instance.
Fair enough, George–the “religious community” requirement does make things a little more stringent. But it’s still entirely possible for religious communities to have counter-factual ideas about their own religion, in my opinion. Thinking that something is in the Bible when it isn’t, for instance. Homosexuality is probably a gray area, as Christian history with regard to homosexuality is mixed. Abortion is a little bit more clear-cut–for Christians, particularly Protestants, the obsession with abortion is purely a reaction to a post-1970s politics and has nothing to do with “spirituality” or the more personal elements of religion that make people feel it should be protected.
In general I like the Free Exercise clause but it does cause problems–and state determinations of what is religion is one of them. I suppose it would have been better to make it a “Free Thought” clause or something. Free thought coupled with free association ought to protect the harmless types of religion quite well.
This all gets impossible when christians (my sister for instance) tell me they don’t believe the bible “in a literal way”, thus kicking away any underpinnings at all that their religion may have. Christianity then becomes whatever one thinks it is so any aspect of a person’s belief, whether scripturally founded or not, becomes “religious belief” and therefore protection is claimed for it in the face of nasty people like us who don’t accept it. It isn’t only christians – indeed they may not be the worst; where is the scriptural foundation in islam for FGM, burka, hajib, not drawing mohammed and so on and on and on? This is why we rationalists are so non-plussed by religiots – they aren’t rational about religion