gracchusdixit

The recent brouhaha over the ruling of the Obama administration that religiously affiliated institutions provide to all their employees the health insurance benefits required by law—including birth control—has been labeled by Republicans as an “unprecedented” violation of the religious freedom guaranteed by our Constitution.  This charge might well be troubling—if it were true.  But it isn’t true.  It is a blatant and deliberate distortion of the facts.

There is, to begin with, nothing “unprecedented” in the original requirement or in the “compromise” that followed it   This stipulation merely reflects laws that are already on the books in more than twenty states—laws which are altogether reasonable and have been accepted as such for years.  These laws do not require priests or pastors, churches or synagogues, to condone contraception or any other form of birth control they may object to.  If Catholics or evangelical Protestants or anyone else choose not to use this kind of coverage, that is, and always has been, up to them.  Neither existing laws nor the new ruling affect the freedom of religious practice in the least.

The more serious distortion, however, lies in the way Republicans twist the meaning of the phrase, “religious freedom”.  The Constitution mentions religion exactly twice, and it is unmistakably clear from these references that our Founding Fathers had two sorts of religious freedom in mind:—freedom “of” religion and freedom “from” religion.

The Sixth Article of the Constitution states that “no religious test” shall ever be imposed as a qualification for holding office or a public trust.  Religion, in short, is to have no place in deciding who governs our country or how it is governed.

The First Amendment guarantees a number of fundamental rights, one of which is the right of all Americans to practice religion as they wish.  Another is the right to be free from any “established” religion.  Individuals, in short, are free to believe whatever they choose, but government has no right to enshrine a particular set of religious beliefs as the law of the land.

People like Rick Santorum want to change that.  They are less concerned to preserve their own freedom “of” religion than to abolish the freedom “from” religion guaranteed to everyone else.  They assert that we are, or should be, a “Christian nation,” and that’s what the Founders really intended us to be.  If that were the case, the Founders had plenty of opportunity to say so.  But they chose otherwise.  In none of our founding documents do the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” or “Christianity”—or even the word “God”—appear.

The Founding Fathers were men of the Enlightenment.  They read the Bible, to be sure.  But they also studied Voltaire and Diderot, Gibbon and Spinoza.  Whether men like Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington actually believed in the Christian God is an open question.  What isn’t in question is their firm conviction that every American should be free from the tyranny of someone else’s religious beliefs.

That is what this argument is really about.  Those who oppose the administration’s ruling can invoke the freedom “of” religion all they want.  Yet in seeking to deny full health care coverage to those who don’t share their beliefs, they have no right to violate the freedom “from” religion which the Constitution guarantees to us all.