This column is a response to the column "Freedom of religion under attack" that ran Wednesday.
Mr. Wilson:
I ordinarily don’t respond to columns. But I believe you might be in need of a quick lesson in case law, a clarification of my original point and some perspective on what real oppression might look like.
To start with, you claim that Christianity in America is under attack. You give several examples of people attacking it, President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Hollywood, corporations and sports leagues among them. Forgive me if I have a hard time believing those people are aiming to stamp out your freedom to live a Christian life.
President Obama has spoken about being born again. Hillary Clinton is a Methodist. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and many people in Hollywood are married to Christians. So the people you claim are out to get you either share your faith or are married to people who would be caught up in the persecution.
Now let’s look at the more nebulous collective of “liberals” you cite as trying to curtail your freedom. While congressional Democrats aren’t unanimously Christian, as the Republican delegation is, over 80 percent of their members profess to hold the same faith as you. In 2012, every state but Oregon, Delaware and Vermont had a Christian governor. That includes most blue states. In effect, you’re claiming the Democrats are moving in lockstep against 80 percent of their representatives.
But the real problem is that an activist Supreme Court has been trampling believers and kowtowing to the homosexual agenda, right? Well, a majority of the justices are Catholic.
If you're mad about the business community persecuting believers, your argument is both wrong and contradictory. In essence, you're arguing that businesses owned by Christians can deny service to whomever they want, but businesses with different values can't make political statements. The comparison also doesn't work on a practical level. Christian business owners want to deny service to groups of people they don't like; larger corporations are just threatening to move to states with a better business climate.
As far as I can tell, if Christians are oppressed in America, it means that many believers have either been duped or manipulated into voting against their own rights or, at least, not stopping the discrimination against their own churches.
In a different vein, you also got your case law a little bit muddled. Yes, the Supreme Court has acknowledged limits on the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment. Yes, courts have ruled that freedom of religion can’t be used to imperil the life of another. But they went a bit further. Until the 1980s, case law held that religious freedom wasn’t protected under the Constitution if it burdened anyone else; even refusing to work on the Sabbath wasn’t protected because other workers had to pick up the slack. Then Justice Scalia drastically curtailed religious liberty in his majority opinion, prompting Congress and many states to pass laws bringing back the old, narrow protections. That was the law Bill Clinton signed and Hillary Clinton approved of.
It wasn’t meant to cover the “rights” that Christians are demanding today in state legislatures and the judicial system. You mention a group of nuns who are suing the administration because they don’t want to provide birth control to employees. That’s actually a mischaracterization. They already don’t have to provide birth control under the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby ruling. Instead, they simply have to file a form with the government that says they won’t provide it, and another insurance company will pick up the tab and provide it. Church money doesn’t pay for birth control, and no woman has their right to health care restricted. Contrary to what you suggested, there isn’t a conflict between those rights at all.
However, the nuns believe that filing the form means they become complicit with their employees getting access to birth control. What the good Christians want is the right to keep their employees from gaining access to a medical treatment they object to even if it's provided by a third party with no money or involvement from a religious organization.
But what we’re really talking about was the slew of laws legalizing discrimination against LGBT people or legislating away trans people’s bathroom rights. According to your argument, those are meant to protect the rights of Christians to live their lives.
How does it really hurt your life to be forced to sell products to people who pay for them? And if your morals are more important than money, why are you working in a for-profit business to begin with? You could always just work for a church that’s already broadly protected by the First Amendment. Instead, the laws you are defending are meant to ensure that Christians can enjoy the many protections the government gives to them in the free market while ignoring the protections of others.
And make no mistake: People are getting hurt. Let’s look at the trans community. A staggering percentage of trans people simply can’t find work or housing, in part due to the laws you are defending. When trans women go to prison, they usually end up in a men’s facility where most are raped, held in solitary confinement or both. Oh, and since many trans people end up with no other option than (illegal) survival sex work and many trans people have been arrested for no reason at all, the prison situation is somehow even more horrifying.
I could go on. I could tell you about a trans man who died a preventable death from ovarian cancer after several doctors refused to see him. Or how bathroom laws like the one proposed in South Carolina facilitate bullying of trans youth. Or how the laws block trans women, who face high rates of domestic violence, from women’s shelters. Or how you can forcibly strip a trans woman, beat her to death because of who she is and plead innocent because you were so upset by her gender.
That is real oppression. That is the denial of a right to live your life. And it happens in your country while you look the other way. Mr. Wilson, I urge you to stop playing the victim. I urge you to take a moment this Sunday and look up at the likeness of a man who was arrested and beaten and killed by religious authorities. Then you can go back to defending the legislators enabling arrests and beatings and killings in the name of that very same man.