Catholic Bishops Put Religious Privilege Above the Rights of Others

I often maintain that while they claim that gays are the ones who want "special rights," it's actually the Christianists and the Roman Catholic bishops who want their rights and special privileges to trump the civil rights of others.  They want to make their religious beliefs the de facto established religion in America - never mind that the U. S. Constitution forbids this very thing.  Sadly, the same mindset exists in other countries as well be it in the form of the Taliban or ultra-conservative Hindus or orthodox Jews in Israel.  It's all about inflicting their beliefs on the larger secular society.  And unfortunately, for too long the Catholic bishops and others have been allowed to receive special rights at the expense of others.  The fact that these unwarranted privileges and improper special rights are now being challenged is what is really behind the disingenuous lawsuits filed by Catholic institutions.  An article in the National Post looks at the selfish demands of the Catholic Church hierarchy and the disdain they bishops hold for the rights of others.  While the article looks at the Church's ridiculous claims of persecution in Canada, the pattern of Church dis-ingenuousness applies in the USA as well.  Here are highlights:

As screams of victimhood grow ever louder and calls for new rights continue to expand, a much needed debate on the difference between rights and privileges may have been generated by the newest – and most unlikely – claimant for persecuted group status: the Catholic Church.

That’s right. The same Roman Catholic Church that controls a city state valued at $15-billion and a diplomatic arm granted special Permanent Observer status at the United Nations, believes it is the special target of persecution both internationally and here in Canada. The recent 12-page “Pastoral Letter on Freedom of Conscience and Religion” [download PDF] released by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops is another example of a continuing exercise among religious believers to convince themselves and others that they are a persecuted minority.

To set the stage, the document references Pope Benedict’s Message for the 2011 World Day of Peace: “It is painful to think that in some areas of the world it is impossible to profess one’s religion freely except at the risk of life and personal liberty. In other areas we see more subtle and sophisticated forms of prejudice and hostility towards believers and religious symbols.”

While the opportunity existed to bring attention to serious forms of religious persecution around the world, the quote instead is used to quickly pivot towards the Pastoral Letter’s real thrust, which is to reinforce the preeminence of religious rights over all other freedoms, while bemoaning the loss of privilege and dominance of the Christian religion.

The conflation of rights and privileges can lead to some bizarre results. The same Bishops demand that in Ontario via their privileged publicly funded Roman Catholic School System they should be able to deny a Charter right – freedom of association – to gay students.

The public seems to get the difference. This week a Forum Research survey found that a majority of Ontarians support the Charter right for students to form gay-straight alliances in public schools while opposing the special privilege of publicly funding a single religious school system.

The document’s arrogant tone comes out clearly through its recommendation of civil disobedience if Christians fail to get their way and its almost exclusive focus not on genuine rights under threat but on those “subtle” attacks on their religion which turn out to be any removal of Christian symbols or ritual from its position of privilege in civic society.

The intention here is not to compete for scarce victim points but to point out the hypocrisy of a Church that denies others fundamental rights while claiming for itself special privilege.

The real problem with the pastoral letter is its casual inclusion of the secularization of society within a list of the most pernicious forms of religious persecution. By listing the dangers of “radical secularism” alongside the murder of Coptic Christians in Egypt and the battering of missionaries in Hindu sectors of India, the result is to trivialize genuine persecution.

The secularization of the public sphere is a necessary reaction to the reality of a pluralistic democratic society. The removal of public spectacles of Christianity from government institutions does not, as these Bishops claim, erode the “rightful role of religion in the public square” unless its rightful role is the permanent enshrinement of Christianity as the dominant symbol in civic society.

Religious freedom is a fundamental right. Elevating it above all others, and using slippery language to claim special privilege under the same banner, is to make a mockery of real affronts to human rights and serious religious persecution. If these Bishops don’t know better, it’s our right to tell them.