{"id":6908,"date":"2012-02-12T04:45:54","date_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=6908"},"modified":"2012-02-12T04:51:35","modified_gmt":"2012-02-12T04:51:35","slug":"there-is-no-religious-liberty-only-religious-vips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/there-is-no-religious-liberty-only-religious-vips\/","title":{"rendered":"There is no religious liberty, only religious VIPs"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a>. 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.<\/b> 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.<\/p>\n


\nThe 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<\/a> 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[746],"tags":[892,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6908"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6911,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6908\/revisions\/6911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}