Are Religious Rights and Freedoms Being Trampled? | Center for Inquiry

Some religious people complain that we are now witnessing a ‘clash of rights’. They suppose that in the hotelier and photography examples, we are, in effect, allowing gay rights to ‘trump’ religious rights. What of the right of religious people not to be forced to act against their own religious consciences?

I have allowed that exemptions to rules and laws should sometimes be made on the grounds of conscience. However, clearly not every conscientious objection can or should be accommodated. Consider: ‘I believe it is fundamentally wrong that I not be allowed to steal from supermarkets – in fact my new religion demands it of me!’ Precisely when exemptions on grounds of conscience should be made is a tricky matter. Various factors need to be taken into consideration, including how strongly the objection is felt, and also the effects on others of exempting or not exempting. If one doctor refuses to perform abortions, but other doctors are available, then the service need not suffer as a result of the exemption. On the other hand, while it is true that if one hotelier is allowed to turn away gay couples, others will probably continue to provide that service, such public displays of discrimination against gay people are clearly going to have a bad effect on their well-being.

In fact, if hoteliers can appeal to conscience to justify saying ‘No gays’, then why can’t they similarly justify saying ‘No blacks’? If you think such objections should be accommodated if and only if they are religiously motivated and that ‘No blacks’ wouldn’t be, think again. US racial discrimination and segregation has often been Biblically justified. Racist signs would certainly have to be permitted if the hoteliers belonged to, say, the racist Dutch Reformed Church of South Africa. So too would religiously motivated signs saying ‘No Jews’ and ‘No Catholics’. Accommodating the consciences of the religious in this way would quickly undermine the effectiveness of equal rights legislation and usher back the bad old days when a stroll down a street of hotels would reveal sign after sign displaying poisonous bigotry.

Still, shouldn’t religious conscientious objections sometimes be accommodated? Our answer to this question needs to be carefully qualified. Yes, a religious conscientious objection should sometimes be accommodated. But not because it is religious.

Are Religious Rights and Freedoms Being Trampled? | Center for Inquiry