Religious Liberty and the Left’s End Game

By Andrew Walker

Thursday, April 2, 2015

When Ed Schultz orders the microphone to be turned off because he’s getting schooled about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), we know not to expect the Left to answer for its many sins when talking about religious liberty.

And given the liberal misinformation regime, don’t assume the Left to be held accountable for the principles that that lead to its protest against religious liberty. But the moment we’re in requires us to think critically about the perilous state of our constitutional rights and the Left’s hostility toward them.

Policies come to us with principles attached to them, and when debating public policy we should consider the principles not only of legislation that has passed but also of legislation that has been rejected. No one to my knowledge is discussing where the principles implied in the Left’s rejection of the RFRA lead. Responsible statecraft entails an examination of a principle’s logical conclusion. In the case of liberalism, the conclusions to which its principles lead help us see just how deeply opposed those principles are to the constitutional order we’ve inherited.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites compelled speech. When photographers are forced under threat of fines to shoot weddings or religious services that they believe are immoral, the assumption is that we are sometimes legally bound to participate in certain kinds of speech, and the state becomes the arbiter of what that speech is in specific instances.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it welcomes the erosion of free association. When the state can deem codes of conduct or membership statements to be irrational prejudice, it diminishes the ability of citizens to associate or to organize for a cause.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites the derogation of religious motives underpinning free expression. It allows the state to determine what beliefs are properly or improperly grounds for taking legal action.

Which leads to my final point. When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites the imposition of state-enforced morality. The Left requires obedience and punishes dissent. It insists that all citizens must, against their will, act only in a manner that liberalism judges to be accommodating and politic.

Anyone acquainted with progressive thought knows that it is founded on unexamined assumptions, but seldom until now have we seen its unhinged hostility unmasked, as the Left reacts to our defense of a cherished freedom written into our Constitution.

Conservatives need to begin going on offense when talking about the RFRA. We need to clearly state that opposition to it is support of state-sanctioned coercion in all its many forms.