The "Religious Liberty" Crowd Echos the Effort to Maintain Segregation

Just last night at a St. Patrick's Day dinner I mentioned how it drove me t o distraction that many local black pastors were routinely duped into acting as water carriers for The Family Foundation, a Christofascist organization with antecedents in the same demographic that vigorously fought to block desegregation.  While the modern day Pharisees at The Family Foundation continue to fight a rear guard action against blacks by supporting voter ID laws, gerrymandered GOP districts that dilute black voting strength, etc., another raison d'être of the organization is to keep LGBT Virginia stigmatized and subject to a form of second class citizen much like that of blacks under segregation.   And how does the Family Foundation support this agenda?  By claiming that it is "protecting religious liberty" even though this in fact translates to forcing Christofascists beliefs on the entire population.  The phenomenon is not, however, unique to Virginia.  It has become a nationwide rallying cry for those who would take the nation backward in time.  Even the bitter old men in the Catholic Church hierarchy have joined in this reactionary endeavor.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at how the phenomenon hearkens back to the effort to keep segregation alive and well.  Here are excerpts:

Thirty-five years ago, having lost the moral battle for segregation, a small group of evangelicals met to rethink their attitude toward politics. Unlike Catholics and mainline Protestants, evangelicals had tended to stay out of secular politics, believing it to be irredeemable. But with the IRS’s decision to withdraw tax-exempt status from the evangelical Bob Jones University, which discriminated against African-Americans, the Christian right was born. Their mission, they said, was to defend “religious liberty.”

Today is a different age—but the players, and the rhetoric, are the same. Today a far-right coalition of conservative Catholics and evangelicals perceive that they have lost the moral battle against LGBT equality, particularly same-sex marriage. And so, as described in a lengthy report released Monday by the think tank Political Research Associates and chiefly authored by this writer, they are waging a multi-pronged battle against LGBT rights, not on substantive moral grounds but on the premise that equality for gays restricts the religious liberty of Christians to discriminate against them.

Of course, this is rhetoric, not reality. Forty years ago, the newly minted Christian right “played the victim” by claiming that a racist school, rather than the students being discriminated against, was the true victim. And today religious-liberty activists claim that bullies are the real victims because they cannot “express their views about homosexuality.” They claim that businesses who say “No Gays Allowed” are being oppressed because they are forced to “facilitate” gay marriages. And they claim that the real targets of discrimination are not gay people, who in 24 states can be fired from their jobs simply for being gay, but employers who can’t fire them.

Yet unlike recent anti-gay sloganeering, the religious-liberty campaign makes use not of theological arguments but of civil libertarian ones, and as such is much harder to recognize than the usual Bible-quoting bigotry.

Religious liberty is a code word, like family values. Though Laycock and other academics may be sincere, the Family Research Council, Christian Legal Society, Ethics and Public Policy Institute, and the legion of other Christian right organizations are chasing the same bugaboos as ever—gay rights, abortion, prayer-free schools—and simply repurposing an old, racist rhetoric to fight the same social battles as always.

This strategy has worked. Several states include religious exemptions to nondiscrimination law and same-sex marriage laws. “Conscience clauses” have limited women’s access to reproductive health for decades. 

Religious-liberty rhetoric notwithstanding, civil rights is always about balancing competing interests. If the wedding photographer refuses to take a picture of a gay couple, the gay couple suffers injustice. If the wedding photographer must obey the same anti-discrimination laws as everyone else, then he or she has to put up with it, because this is America, and America doesn’t believe in discrimination.

Unfortunately, such points are lost in the din of right-wing talk radio. Just last fall in Minnesota, for example, the religious-liberty crowd was warning that if same-sex marriage passed, ministers would be compelled to perform gay weddings. This was an out-and-out lie, and they knew it. No rabbi can be forced to perform an intermarriage. No Catholic priest can be forced to marry two divorcees. And no, Virginia, no minister could ever be forced to solemnize a gay wedding, a straight wedding, or any other kind of wedding she or he found objectionable. But try telling that to honest Christians who are being robocalled on the eve of an election.

Religious liberty is being used to mask a conservative Christian agenda—the same agenda that’s been pushed for half a century now. Some on the far right may sincerely believe their liberties are being threatened, but they believed that about desegregation too. A belief does not make something so. The question is how many new believers they’ll recruit before this crusade is defeated.