Both Canada and the U.S. were formed with the concept that people ought to be free to live according to the religious beliefs of their choosing. Our rights to free speech and to elect our own government, which is bound by a national constitution and set of laws, form the balance between our religious freedoms and our secular freedoms. They are the bedrock of our two nations.
It’s when people confuse their religious freedoms with their secular duties that the balance breaks down.
Two examples, taken from recent news headlines.
In Rowan County, Kentucky, the people believe in participatory democracy. Even the county clerk’s office is an elected position. In their case, they elected a county clerk who follows a strain of evangelical Christianity that holds that she has God’s authority to decide who can or cannot get married. In her mind, the laws that uphold the freedom of everyone lay beneath that authority, at least as far as marriage is concerned.
So, rather than obey a court order requiring her to issue marriage licences to gay couples, Kimberly Davis decided last June to not issue marriage licences at all. Her chosen faith tells her that same-sex marriage is part of the broad path that leads to damnation, and she will have no part of it.
So, of course, to preserve the basic freedoms of Kimberly Davis and everyone else, Kimberly Davis was put in jail. She emerged a few days later to a hero’s welcome, flanked by a gravely misinformed presidential candidate, still defiant of the law any president would need to use the entire power of the state to uphold.
Marriage licences for Rowan County were issued by her assistant while she was in jail (we can assume there was a rush of applications while she was gone). But it has been reported that Davis later confiscated and altered those licences, making their subsequent marriages legally suspect.
This is obviously not what Davis was elected to do. But people continue to confuse the rights of religious practice with the ability to impose individual beliefs over and above the law of the land. So, encouraged by an eager media, Davis is enjoying a brief spell of fame as a living martyr of sorts.
She is nothing of the kind. She is free to believe as she wishes, and free to speak of the values that bolster her beliefs; the nation’s constitution and laws have carved that in stone.
But she is no more free to defy the laws that govern her public duties, than a person whose beliefs forbid contact with pork can refuse to licence a hog processing plant, if that happens to be their job.
Here’s another example. Ranee Panjabi practices a unique form of Hinduism that is strongly concerned that “nothing must mar the soul’s identification with the person.”
What might mar that mystical unity? Wearing a microphone, so that a hearing-impaired student in her class at Memorial University in St. John’s can follow her course on the history of espionage.
She has complaints dating back 20 years on her refusal to do so, and has been officially reprimanded in the past for refusing to wear a microphone during class, when asked to do so by a student who needs some assistance to hear the lectures. How’s that for the power of academic tenure?
She told a TV interviewer “the microphone would interfere with the harmony I must always feel between my inner self and my outer person.” More than one expert in Hinduism have called that baloney.
One wonders how Panjabi feels about her soul while she’s talking on a cell phone. Merely temporal disunity?
Amazingly, her employers at Memorial are both flummoxed and hamstrung by this. Deciding this is not rocket surgery. If your religious beliefs forbid you from fully completing your secular duties, you get another job.
No religion “owns” marriage. No soul can decide that another soul should not be taught (especially if that soul has paid tuition).
Our freedom to practice does not include the freedom to deny one’s own legal obligations in public service.
If we cannot get our heads around that, we need only look at our own Western history of religious wars and persecution, and the current history of religious state-ism in the Middle East.
A secular democracy, bound by laws and a constitution works far better than a society where clerics can decide your rights, or where individuals can decide their souls might be more important than yours.
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