Conscience Protection Protects Everyone

Rebecca Hamilton reports on the AZ bill allowing businesses to refuse customers based on religious grounds.  I haven’t seen the bill either, so I don’t have an opinion on whether it is a good one. But the idea — that a person should not be required to do something they think is wrong — I like that idea.

Some people would go so far as to say it’s such a good idea it ought to be in our Constitution.

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The trouble we’re having with these laws is that no one is testing the courts in all the possible directions.  What we need to do is start an onslaught on the printing companies.

  • Find a printing press owned by an ardently pro-choice feminist.  Place an order for bunches of anti-abortion propaganda.
  • Find a printing press owned by an openly gay couple.  Place an order for bunches of pro-traditional-marriage tracts.

When the tables are turned: Shouldn’t the business owner have the right to decline?  I think so.  I think it so profoundly that I’m not sure I could bring myself to place the test-order.  Who would do that?  If you care about someone, would you really put them in that position?

If I did it accidentally, I’d apologize and quietly take my business elsewhere.  What kind of person *wants* to make another person miserable?  Not me.

This decency is killing us. We’re too nice for own good, and we have an empty slate of court cases to prove it. Because the “anti-discrimination” cases are all running in a single direction, today, everyone thinks that “conscience protection” is all about right wing religious extremists wanting to discriminate against innocents.

No.  Just no.  Conscience protection is about everyone being free to refrain from actions that violate their conscience.

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The one trouble with conscience protection is that it eventually reaches a wall.  As a society we have a fundamental morality, a firm set of non-negotiable beliefs.  Americans believe (rightly) that discrimination based on race is wrong. It’s a non-negotiable.  If you want to have a business that serves the general public, you can’t pick your clients based on race.  That is a fundamental moral law that Americans have (rightly) adopted.

The battle in our courts and in our legistures right now is not, therefore, fundamentally about “freedom of belief”.  If we truly thought that people were free to have any number of opinions about abortion, or contraception, or the nature of marriage, we would not have these cases. The Bill of Rights would suffice, end of story.

What is being fought, now, is a battle over what our national morality will be.  “You must believe that contraception is morally acceptable.”  That’s what’s at stake. “You must believe that marriage is not the sole province of one man and one woman.”  That’s what’s being fought.

This is evil.

 

2 thoughts on “Conscience Protection Protects Everyone

  1. I got a little ranty a while ago about corporate morals. We expect corporate morality when it comes to fair wages, safe working conditions. We also like our florists to have fresh flowers, our bakers to use non-rancid grains and fats.
    Those require ethics, at least. Morals, at some point. And then someone gets upset that a company wants to make their own determination about health care, and people start clamoring about corporations being totally un-thinking entities without ethics, morals and opinions. It’s not going to work!

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