While I have been busy with my newborn daughter there has been a lot of brouhaha over the Obama administration and their infringement of religious liberty due to their position on contraception and health care. I don’t have a strong opinion on that issue, rather, I want anyone who entertains qualms about religious liberty to read Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. In it the author argues that religious liberty for religious systems with an orthopraxic dimension, basically every major religious tradition except a few radical Protestant sects, is always problematic because allowances for those liberties and accommodations are always premised on the authority’s adjudication of what is, and isn’t, within bounds of a given tradition. In other words judges are put in a position of determining whether a given practice is authentically an expression of the religious practices of a given group.
The practical ramification of this, manifest over American history, is that religious liberty is granted as a function of two variables. First, adherence (or acculturation to) of a given religious tradition to American norms. There is a rather good line of argument that both Judaism and Roman Catholicism have refashioned themselves into Protestant denominations, more or less, in the USA. Second, numbers are critical. 20-25 percent of Americans are Roman Catholic today. Something like the Ursuline Convent Riots could only have occurred in an America where Roman Catholics were a marginalized and exotic minority. Catholic opinions on contraception matter not because they are the sincere opinions of many Catholics, but because there are many Catholics!
Well said. This is what a real protest for religious liberty would look like:
John Boehner Lights a Spliff for Religious Freedom, http://blog.chron.com/goplifer/2012/02/john-boehner-lights-a-spliff-for-religious-freedom/
Sorry, can’ resist.
And there aren’t many peyote smoking Indians, right?
I’ve seen numbers indicating that among American Catholics, 95-98% have practiced birth control at some time. So if give or take three million Catholics practice birth control, isn’t that a critical mass? I mean for the constitutional principal contra tyranny of the majority.
With a different slant, there is no reason to preserve liberties based on sincere and shared religious conviction than any individual preference. the definition of religion and granting privileges thereto is a logical definition of establishmentarianism, however catholic in these days.
Yeah, I haven’t heard any great public outcry over requiring employers who are Jehovah’s Witnesses to cover surgery involving blood transfusion.