Religious belief versus Human rights
I have said elsewhere and repeat here:
"No one has a right to burden others with their religious tenets, especially when those burdens can or do threaten the very lives, liberties, and happiness of others.
"The entire religious argument of the religious right is: "If we want the world to be as narrow-minded as we are, we can make it so." If they can't get everyone to agree, then they need the 'rule' that those who follow their rules should be exempt from the rule of law, annihilating the notion of the equality of everyone before and under civil law, which is, by the way, the very foundation upon which civil law is based and the very foundation of civil society.
"Put differently, rights of conscience are not 'own' rights. Rather they are human rights held mutually in common. The fact that these are rights held mutually in common is what restrains how they may be used justly : : with fairness towards everyone :: either by persons acting alone or together or with others. This is (ideally) the political order of republican democracy based upon mutually shared human rights.
"This political order says that we politically/together have the 'authority' to make civil laws :: i.e., the rules we live by ::that may conflict with Divine laws as the religious right divines them. That this is anathema to them is self-evident, for they believe that civil law exists only to properly enforce 'Divine' law as they see it.
"The religious 'right' has insisted on this point ever since the first whispers of representative government surfaced and developed in the West. And, the early migrations to America were made by those who opposed the burdens that state-religions imposed upon them.
"So, what they are seeking by 'conscience' exemptions is, in effect, the
overthrow of the very rule of law upon which the authority of civil government is based in the West. They seek to establish an inequality between us that, if allowed, dooms political democracy itself.
"What they ultimately reject is neither more nor less than our view that it
is civil society altogether that frames human rights and sets the the
limits of personal and social liberty as mutual rights held in common.
They are NOT properties one can do with as one wants, nor unbridled by
responsibilities to preserve and protect those human rights.
"This is hardly the only area wherein they refuse to consider that operating
with a public license requires actually serving the public at large
unless there is very good common interest cause not to. Or, that keeping
that license is a privilege that can be revoked. The USCCB's persistent
theme, for instance :: one imposing dogma over medical practice :: is
subversive to civil government, its authority, and the liberty of all
within the framework of mutually shared rights and responsibilities.
"The Religious Right rather firmly believes that they are being persecuted
if they are not permitted to burden anyone they want to.
"They deserve rebuke and ridicule. And they warrant losing their voice in
politics on that position alone, for that voice threatens to destroy
liberty of the people, for the people, BY the people, a dream we have
together as a political ideal (one never quite likely to be realized).
"For them, there is no commons of mutual human rights that is shared between
us. They prefer to act as if their human rights are their property to do with as they please, rather than ours held together in common. As a property of theirs, a point I can never concede, they feel they can act on their rights, unbridled by the restraint of having to recognize and adjust to the reality that others share the same human rights they have, neither more and nor less than they.
Human rights are our mutual possessions. They come with inherent responsibilities to protect them. Or, as Thomas Paine once put this, 'Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.'
"When anyone loses 'rights' we hold in common, then everyone has. This should need no explanation."
Please pass this forward.
