Denying Accommodation for Religious Conscience

Nearly 225 years after the ratification of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the cause of conscience protected by the principles of “no establishment” and “free exercise” may be losing support in the minds and hearts of the American people. Appeals by religious individuals and groups for exemption from government laws and regulations that substantially burden religious practice are increasingly unpopular and controversial. So much so that many in the media have taken to using shock citations excerpts, transforming religious freedom into “religious freedom.”

Earlier this month, the Obama administration released a report with recommendations clearly and unequivocally bidding to deny Americans’ cherished religious liberty. The lengthy new report, titled “Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Nondiscrimination Principles with Civil Liberties,” came from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (whose membership the President appoints). The report represents the most blatant and open attempt by federal officials to subjugate religious liberty to the current phase of sexual social revolution. The commission chairman wrote what I contend are antagonistically, aggressive and argumentative language in his personal statement in the report: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance. … today, as in past, religion is being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality. In our nation’s past religion has been used to justify slavery and later, Jim Crow laws.”

Ironically, slavery and Jim Crow laws were wholly Democratic Party institutions. Democrats created them, perpetuated them and enforced them with the aid of their own military wing. The military wing which, in addition to lynching blacks, systematically murdered those opposing their ideology. Here is a fact that most of the left fail to mention. It was Christians and Jews for the most part that led the fight against slavery – on biblical grounds – as well as the civil rights movement of the 1960s? Makes one wonder if the left, to include Obama and Hillary have actually read any speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.?

Now the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights appears to be recommending that we make it official: Our first freedom is first no more. According to a commission report, “civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination, as embodied in the Constitution, laws, and policies, are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence.” If we accept this assertion, it means that conflicts between religious freedom and nondiscrimination principles are resolved by denying accommodation for religious conscience — except perhaps in very rare and narrow circumstances.

Vigorous protection for civil rights is, of course, essential in a democratic society. But so is protection for liberty of conscience. Despite dark chapters of religious discrimination, the United States has a long and honorable history of taking claims of conscience seriously. From conscientious objection to war to religious accommodations in the workplace, the American experiment in religious freedom seeks (on our best days) to ensure that people are free to follow the dictates of conscience in matters of faith.