This post is the sort of thing I was thinking about when I launched this blog. thoughts and wonderings from outside my professional sphere, but things I still engage intellectually. This post makes me feel very exposed, however. Please be gentle!
There was an interesting story this morning on Morning Edition, about the conflicts between churches and legally recognized same sex unions, and it has my brain whirring around.
A note before we start: I fully support same sex civil unions. I also support heterosexual civil unions. I believe that a civil union is all the government has the power to convey. Marriage is the eternal mating of souls, a magical and spiritual act, and outside the realm of government. What government can do is provide legal incentives, tax changes, ease name changing, “legitimate” offspring (which has to do with ancient inheritance laws) and make de facto certain other inheritance rights under a legal status it conveys. Legal stuff. All that is civil union. And I think everyone who is so lucky as to find the person they love, and who loves them back, the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, their partner, everyone who is just that lucky and brave should be allowed the right for legal protections of the unit they form.
I also believe that religions should be free from legal interference into their practices and actions. They’ll change or die on their own abilities and perceptions, and social forces will play a role. But I support a thick tall wall (with a moat even!) between Church and State.
And I also support a legal system that makes sense, because if it isn’t built on sense and precedent, it can’t stand up over time. Legal decision based on anything else will crumble! If the legal bricks aren’t in place, point out where they are missing and build a stronger foundation! Anything else is just rigid quicksand! So please take the following with that in mind: this is not a critique of same sex marriage, or the rights of gay and lesbian folks. It is a critique of our legal system, and how religion is enacted in America.
Well, that was a bot of a long digression… this morning’ story included a piece about a lesbian couple who wanted to hold their NJ civil union ceremony in a Methodist owned pavilion on a bordwalk, a place where marriages are often held. They were denied, and sued. Not only did they win the suit, the church lost their tax exempt status for the pavilion and the surrounding area. Another couple sued the photographers who told them they didn’t shoot gay marriage ceremonies (because of their religious beliefs).
I don’t see these two as comparable at all! The photographers were more clearly discriminatory, although the story was cast in the light of the photographers as employers, and the discrimination flowed from there. I saw it as the couple was the employer and the photographers refused to work for them. Phrased that way, is it still discrimination? It’s unpleasant, and doesn’t make me happy, but don’t folks hold the power in deciding who they wish to work for? And the reason this story was included in the news piece was because of the religious motivation of the photographers: they wanted to act in accordance with their religious beliefs. NPR didn’t really take that up in the telling, but it’s an interesting wrinkle. If the photographers are the employees, they are free to act on their religious beliefs in terms of who they work for, right? Aren’t we all? If the photographers are the employers, different laws hold precedence and if they refuse to take on a client due to their religious belefs, that’s another box of monkeys. NPR dropped the ball on spinning out those ramifications!
The first story, the main stoiry, engaged me for all the reasons that I pursued a PhD in religion and politics, religion in America. I think that Freedom of Religon in America has never been really enacted, and instead we have a freedom to beleive whatever we want, but we must act in ways that resemble Christianity.
For example, Islam will always be a hard sell for American businesses to work with, because of the floating calendar. Feast and fast days and other major holidays happen on fixed days in the Islamic calendar, but float on the Gregorian calendar. Businesses can’t deal with that sort of scheduling; Native Americans face similar lack of acceptance (and significant employment discrimination) because their holidays (especially the western peoples) are often called at the moment and not scheduled on any sort of calendar. We could talk about the lack of acceptance of peyote as a sacrament for the Native American Church, denials of candles and incense and access to the open air under the full or new moon for Wiccans in prison, even the difficulties faced by observant Jews who won’t work on Saturdays. Dare I bring up polygamous marriages based on scriptural precedence (I will say that government has an obligation to protect the underage, and and am not equating acceptance of religiously based polyamory with abuse of young children and forced marriage of minors). I studied New Religious Movements (aka cults) so I have lots of examples of the ways that people who practice religions that don’t behave like Christianity are discriminated against and denied rights. And I would love to see true freedom of religious behavior in this country, accepted by all.
But that also means I have to accept the same rights of practice for Christian groups. And I am frankly baffled at how a Methodist-owned chapel can lose it’s status for following the beliefs of it’s church. And it makes me very uncomfortable; it is a huge crack in the Church/State wall, a weak and tenuous wall to begin with.
This got to be very long, and I feel like I haven;t spun it all the way I want to, so I’ll sum up the high points:
- religious freedom is legally assured in America
- religious freedom is less frequently enacted in America
- I support the rights of all to civil union
- I am deeply worried about legal decisions based on what the law ought to say but perhaps doesn’t
- I worry that the wall between church and state is crumbling
