Je suis Charlie, Je suis Abdul Muhammad, Je suis Hobby Lobby

by Libby Sternberg

The US Supreme Court ruled yesterday, in Holt v Hobbs, that Abdul Muhammad, a prisoner in Arkansas, can grow a beard according to his Muslim religion's dictates. Does that decision make you uncomfortable, given that men and women who adhere to Mr. Muhammad's faith have been involved in massacring others who don't share their beliefs?

If so, welcome to the uncomfortable world of religious freedom and freedom of expression.

This is what religious freedom and freedom of expression really mean: letting people act on their beliefs when their actions don't trigger a compelling state interest to intercede. Religious freedom, in particular, can be summed up in this phrase: the right to be wrong (the apt title of a book on First Amendment rights by Kevin Seamus Hasson, founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty). 

Freedom of expression means the cartoonists at the satiric publication Charlie Hebdo should have the right to mock Muslims, Jews, Christians and all peoples of faith, no matter how wrongly offensive their drawings are. 

Free exercise of religion means that Arkansas prisoner Abdul Muhammad has the right to grow a beard in accordance with his faith, no matter how wrong the authorities think he is, nor how angry we are at those who share his faith and use it to slaughter innocents.

And, yes, it also means that the Greens, the devout owners of the Hobby Lobby craft stores, have the right to exclude what they believe to be abortifacients from the health care they offer employees, even if many liberals, including Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, think they are egregiously wrong-minded.

Let me repeat: We all have the right…to be wrong. And the only time the state, in the form of any government, should infringe upon that right is when it has a compelling interest to do so. A compelling interest.

Why bring this up now? First, because some who celebrate and agree with the Abdul Muhammad decision wailed over the Hobby Lobby one. And some who are eager to utter Je suis Charlie to stand with free artistic expression against Islamic extremism balk at agreeing with the Holt v Hobbs ruling or the Burwell v Hobby Lobby one. 

Such was the case, in fact, with Justice Ginsburg. She voted with the unanimous court in the Abdul Muhammad opinion that said Muhammad, an Arkansas prisoner, had a right to grow a beard in accordance with his Muslim faith, despite the prison's rule against beards more than 1/4 inch in length. The state had no compelling interest in enforcing that rule. 

Ginsburg, perhaps realizing the potentially contradictory ground she was headed into, penned a one-paragraph concurrence that said, in essence, that Holt v Hobbs was different from Burwell v Hobby Lobby because Muhammad's actions "would not detrimentally affect others" who don't share his beliefs. (It's on p. 20 of the opinion.)

But in the Hobby Lobby case, the owners' actions didn't "detrimentally" affect others, either. The Green family, as has been pointed out numerous times, wasn't forbidding employees from using abortifacients. The family simply wasn't going to pay for them. The state had no compelling interest in forcing the Greens to go against their faith -- not when employees still had other contraceptives covered and could easily access the uncovered ones elsewhere (or the government, if it felt the need for these items so compelling, could have provided them, rather than forcing the Greens to do so).

Justice Ginsburg, though, faced the problem that many people face when thinking of protections of religion and free expression rights. She had to confront her own biases, her own dislikes and discomforts.

I'll be honest about mine, at least. I probably would have looked for ways to justify the beard ban in the Holt v Hobbs case because I would have wondered if Mr Muhammad was truly a devout practitioner of faith or merely a cynical prisoner trying to stick his finger in the eye of the system. I would have been troubled by the idea of giving aid and comfort to a man espousing a religion which has been used to justify massacres and terror. 

But that speculation and discomfort doesn't trump religious freedom. He has the right to be cynical or devout, the right to embrace a religion I find troubling because of how it's been used. The right to be wrong.

You can't pick and choose favorites when ensuring that right is protected. You can't embrace freedom for folks whose ideas you embrace, yet want to take it away from others when you disagree with the faith in question.

Je suis Charlie. 

Je suis Abdul Muhammad.

Je suis Hobby Lobby.

Cringe, if you must, when saying any one of those. But they all embrace something we should recognize as a fundamental right, to be proclaimed proudly, vigorously and often: the right to religious freedom, the right, sometimes, to be wrong.

Is the First Amendment Outdated?

by Libby Sternberg

It’s easy to forget, in this freewheeling, anything-goes, tolerance-minded society of ours, that it wasn’t so long ago that Catholics were derided, their beliefs publicly ridiculed, and their leaders mocked.

Oh, wait, that was just yesterday.

Or so it seemed when the contraception debate began. That is, when advocates for the HHS mandate (saying all employers must include free contraception coverage in their insurance plans regardless of their church teachings on the matter) turned the tables on free-conscience supporters by making the debate about bishops and their fellow-traveling Republican men who want to control women’s health. You remember the infamous photo, correct? Yes, this one:

Sorry, wrong picture. That’s a Thomas Nast cartoon from the 1800s suggesting bishops wanted to control American public schools (look closely—the alligators coming to attack the poor schoolchildren are wearing bishops’ miters). Those bishops. Always trying to control something or other.

The photo to which I’m referring, though, went so viral that a short description will probably suffice: about a half dozen men, most in clerical garb, seated glumly at a congressional hearing table, microphones and notes at the ready.

They were there to testify about religious rights, not contraception, but that didn’t matter to the folks who passed the photo around as one more example of the miter-wearing Y chromosome crowd trying to crush women under their heels.

In the interest of full disclosure, I do not agree with the Catholic Church’s position on many things, including contraception. But, like Kevin Seamus Hasson, the head of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, I believe the Church has the “right to be wrong.”

Hasson has penned a book with that title on first amendment issues. For Christmas one year, I gave each of my children a copy. It’s a fast read, chock full of valuable history and information.

Hasson’s book title is apt. It’s what the first amendment, with its protections of religious liberty, is really about: the right to a free conscience that makes moral judgments, even if sometimes those judgments are wrong and unpopular. That’s at the nub of the First Amendment, making it a relevant principle to atheists and believers alike—it protects individuals’ right to say, essentially, this is morally repugnant and I will not just “follow orders” and do it.

As I witnessed the contraception argument debated on Facebook and elsewhere, I’ve been amazed at the number of people, however, who seem to think free conscience decisions should be popular in order to be truly valid. Many people seemed to think that the unpopularity of the Church’s contraception stance (as evidenced by the lack of large Catholic families) demonstrates that the Church is wrong on the issue, and because they are wrong, the Church must obey the more popular “right” stance on birth control coverage.

Arguing against this view usually elicited a litany of other Church wrongs, most notably the sex abuse scandals, Church views on sexuality in general, the celibate priesthood, and… Rick Santorum…as if these things confirmed the Church was wrong, too, on contraception.

The Church, of course, is not a democracy, and those who’d like to make it so should focus their efforts on trying to change it in the private sphere. (I suggest a nail, hammer, and some theses—perhaps 95.) Using the government to coerce the Church to change might get you what you want in the short-term but will likely lead to things you don’t want in the long-term, the dilution of free conscience rights overall.

The debate over the Church’s “wrongness,” however, reminded me that everything old is new again. It’s not really a joke that I included the Thomas Nast cartoon above. It represented a commonplace view during its time, that Catholics were so wrong in their views that they needed to be legislated virtually out of existence. They had a different approach to worship (a Mass in Latin—quelle horreur!), celibate leadership (for a peek at views on this, take a look at Rev. Justin D. Fulton’s 1880s masterpiece Why Priests Should Wed, a treasure trove of anti-Catholic propaganda in the guise of “advice” on Catholic principles), a different Bible (the Douay and not the King James) and a foreign Pope, among other things. Anti-Catholic views were as acceptable back then as, say, bashing Mormons is today.

As a long-time school choice and voucher advocate, I’m aware of this history and how it played a distasteful part in a significant public institution in America—the creation of public schools, which were originally designed to blanche threatening “papist” views from new immigrant children’s minds. (That history still touches the voucher debate in the courts, by the way, in a tangential way. A regular legal opponent of school vouchers is the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. At their formation in the 1940s in the wake of court rulings that benefited Catholic institutions, they were known as Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State, only shortening their name in 1971.)

Here we are, more than a century after the anti-Catholic campaigns of yesteryear, though, and we’re still seeing the same old misunderstandings, and, in a way, the same old arguments. The Church is wrong, the Church is different, and—instead of “the Church is the enemy of America”—the Church is the enemy of women; therefore the State must make the Church into something else by legislating a violation of its principles.

In an increasingly secular society, people forget why it’s important to let the Church be wrong. Freedom of conscience is such a powerful human drive that it leads men to choose death over recanting their beliefs. Early Christians, after all, went to the arena rather than burn incense to pagan gods because they believed they had found a higher truth. Even atheists believe in seeking truth, which is at the foundation of a free conscience.

Hasson writes in his book, “A government that seeks to minimize the consciences of its citizens may well find itself, in a generation or two, in a predicament far worse than having too many principled people claiming too many points of conscience. It may find itself with too few principled people to sustain a society.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is fighting the HHS contraception mandate in court, is promoting rallies on Friday, March 23 for those interested in supporting rights of conscience. Information is here.

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Libby Sternberg is a novelist. Her book website is here. She also occasionally blogs at Hot Air.