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.

TX town forcing Muslims to serve pork?

By Libby Sternberg

(Note: You must read to the end of this story for an important update.)

In what civil rights activists are calling a “stunning slap in the face” to local devout Muslims, the town of Gallate, TX (pop: 13,000) has passed an ordinance that forces local food vendors that provide catering services to any public event to include “among the proteins offered, at least one pork item.”  

Gallate is a major pork-producing town and holds an annual pork barbeque cook-off that attracts aficionados from across the country and beyond. But the town’s pride is sacrilege to a group of devout Muslims, several of whom operate food businesses in the area and, until this ordinance was passed, participated in public food contracts and events.

Mohammed al Ibrahim, the owner of Specialty Foods in Gallate, operates a food catering business that, until the ordinance, regularly landed local town food contracts and took part in public events. Now, Al Ibrahim will have to consider going against his faith and handling pork products or pulling out of the events and contracts altogether.

“A good portion of my business is taken away with this,” he said, standing outside his facility, which also includes a popular local restaurant offering Middle Eastern and Mediterranean fare. “I cannot continue to operate successfully in Gallate with this law.”

A town council member, speaking anonymously, said she understood Al Ibrahim’s point of view, but believes the town’s common good comes first. 

“The pork business is our heart and soul. It puts us on the map. We can’t be offering contracts and opportunities to a group that deliberately excludes our economic interest from its offerings.”

One council member, Jean Sherwood, suggested that the new ordinance was about promoting Gallate and its main business, not in restricting anyone. “If Specialty Foods wants to operate without including pork products in their menus, we don’t have a problem with that.”

Several civil liberty groups have offered to challenge the Gallate ordinance in court, but the Al Ibrahims have not decided whether they’ll sue.  A local lawyer suggested the Al Ibrahim family has a good case. 

“On the merits, this is one of the most straightforward violations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act a court is likely to see,” Wayne Martin said. “The family’s religious beliefs prohibit them from providing food services in Gallate under these circumstances. The council mandate at issue here cripples them.”

***

April Fool’s. This story is NOT TRUE. So don’t start sending it around the interwebz as an example of hick Southwesterners going after Muslims. In fact, the “lawyer” quote at the end of the story is actually a paraphrasing of the opening paragraph of Hobby Lobby’s petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.

That was the reason I wrote this tale: to illustrate, for many of my liberal friends, some principles at play in the Hobby Lobby case. If you found yourself sympathizing with the Al Ibrahim family in this story, then just substitute the Green name (owners of Hobby Lobby) in the tale. Instead of being forced to offer pork products, slip in the words “abortifacient contraceptives.” And instead of the fictional town of Gallate, use “the Affordable Care Act” or “Health and Human Services” or even, “the United States of America.”

I know this story isn’t an exact parallel to what has been happening to Hobby Lobby (one could argue that the ACA contraceptive mandate is far more restrictive of religious rights than this fictional town ordinance), but the large points are applicable. The government of the United States is compelling a devout family to offer something that goes against their religious tenets. 

I know my friends mean well when they offer passionate arguments about the value of contraceptives and why women should have easy access to them. But, like the Muslim family in this story, the Greens shouldn’t be compelled to offer products that go against their religious views to achieve the government’s goal. 

I know my friends mean well when they use glib slogans such as “Keep Bosses Out of My Bedroom,” but that glibness demonstrates a lack of understanding of the facts of this case, the principles involved, and any smidgeon of sympathy for the Greens’ predicament. 

We don’t know how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in the Hobby Lobby case, but I at least hope my liberal friends can now see that the Greens have a right to their views, and that the government can achieve its goals—whether those objectives are town promotion or contraceptive access—without impinging on the religious views of individual citizens.

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Libby Sternberg is a novelist.

This post also appears at Liberty Unyielding.