Sunday, April 15, 2012

Why Religious Freedom And States' Rights Create A Strong Federal Government

The irony of the fight over the provision of birth control by religious organizations and state control over such things as immigration is that the proponents of the primacy of religious freedom and states' rights provide the most convincing case for why we have federal laws and programs. It is the failure of private organizations and states to protect and guarantee the exercise of civil rights for everyone that leads to the passage of laws and creation of programs to rectify this failure. The Federal response has been as a countervailing force to ensure that civil liberties are not dependent on who you are or where you live.
Our constitution does not allow for a differentiation in the protection, exercise, or enumeration of rights dependent on whether you are male or female, black or white, Alabaman or Iowan, gay or straight, Jewish or Atheist. A Catholic Latina woman in LA should have the same rights and free expression thereof as a male WASP in NY. Americans have the same basic rights regardless and any denial, restriction, or differentiation is unconstitutional. It is precisely this failure to adhere to this constitutional principle by private and religious organizations, businesses, and states that prompted the intrusion of the Federal government to enforce the protection of the rights of everyone in all circumstances.
You do not have to go far back into history to find Jim Crow laws, restrictive real estate covenants, denial of admission into colleges, job discrimination, and many other instances of violations of the rights of some class of people to realize that the exercise of religious freedom and states’ rights has been used in large part to suppress a political, social, ethnic, or gender group that is deemed less worthy. There are echoes of this in the current controversies with states trying to suppress voting by voter ID laws and loss of rights by felons, depictions of Obama as a monkey, or churches denying coverage for things they object to on religious grounds. Bob Jones University objected to interracial dating on religious grounds – is that so different?
It is fashionable now to argue that The Civil War (or The War of Northern Aggression as it is known in the South) was fought not about slavery, but about states’ rights. Perhaps, but the state right they fought for was the right to own Black people and treat them as they saw fit.
The Catholic Church wants to protect the unborn, yet failed to protect the rights of the already born from predatory pedophile priests.
There is nothing inherent in these two, just how they are practiced.
One of the problems, particularly for religious institutions, is that they venture into the public realm when they move beyond merely running a religious house to operate schools, hospitals, and charities. As befits most religions, these institutions are open to all, or at least most, and serve as an extension of their religious service. It is precisely this openness, though, that creates the problem of constitutional equality. These institutions, in some broad sense, no longer serve merely as extensions of the religious institution, but as providers of a public good that requires them to provide constitutional equality to all their employees and clients. It is particularly incumbent on those who provide services in areas and ways that are otherwise not well served.
It is not incumbent solely on government to ensure our civil liberties are respected and their exercise freely available. It is also the responsibility of the private and non-profit sectors to be guardians of our rights. We do not give up our rights when we walk through a door to work or move to another state. We have the same rights and the same freedoms to exercise those rights no matter who we are or where we live. There are some allowances made for practical restrictions, such as political speech in a workplace, but these apply to everyone, not just a subset of the workforce.
It is unclear just what has pushed these two issues to the forefront. Proponents state it is because of the overbearing intrusion of the Federal government. Cynics might say it is a political foil to defeat Democrats. Conspiricists might say it is to once again allow for discriminatory behavior as in the old days.
In a conversation a few years ago, I expressed my dismay at why there was such a push on for returning so many powers to the states. “Don’t they remember what it was like back when states ran things?” I asked. To which my good, Republican mother answered, “Perhaps they do.”

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