Public Displays of Religion

For a while I thought I was mistaken in my criticism of the historian Brent Sirota's claim that religious freedom litigation will "eventually ... make the state the arbiter of orthodoxy."  After giving it more thought, though, I'm not so sure.

What gave me pause in the first place was Winnifred Fallers Sullivan's book The Impossibility of Religious Freedom (Princeton, 2005).  Sullivan bases her argument on a single 1998 case, Warner v. Boca Raton, in which

a group of Florida residents ... sought to prevent the forced removal of the numerous statues, plantings, crosses, Stars of David, and other individually crafted installations that, with the tacit permission of city officials, they had placed on the individual graves of their deceased relatives over the course of ten to fifteen years ... The principal issue at trial was whether the non-conforming memorial arrangements assembled by plaintiffs were an "exercise of religion," and therefore protected by the relevant statues and constitutional provisions [2].

The issues were complicated.  Although the plaintiffs had been erecting these installations for a considerable time, they were in violation of "local cemetery regulations that limit the size and placement of memorials to small flat metal plaques, flush with the ground, giving only names and dates, and that can easily be mowed over" (ibid.).  In purchasing their cemetery plots, the plaintiffs agreed to abide by those regulations; but they saw that the cemetery contained many such decorations already, and assumed that their additions would also be permitted.  In many cases, cemetery staff not only knew that the decorations were being installed, they helped with the work.  It was unsurprising, then, that the plaintiffs believed that their installations were compliant with the regulations.

Strictly speaking, then, the problem was not one of religious freedom but of compliance with a secular contract.  It may have been a mistake for the plaintiffs to pursue a religious-freedom exemption, since they lost the case; but then, except for the cemetery's tacit toleration of the decorations over a period of years, they probably didn't have a leg to stand on otherwise.  Sullivan draws on the testimony of the plaintiffs and the contributions of several academic experts in religion, including herself.

The question Sullivan poses with respect to Warner v. Boca Raton is what constitutes religion, and it was this that led me to agree at first that the case put the state in the position of determining orthodoxy.  Were the statues, plantings, crosses, etc. exercises of "orthodox" religion, or were they "folk" observations, even "individual" practices that the First Amendment was not intended to protect?  In the end the court ruled that they were not religion, because they were not mandated by religious authorities.  Florida already had a Religious Freedom protection law at this time, and the judge's decision tended to ignore its provisions, yet as far as I can tell his ruling was upheld on appeal.

So, is religion for legal purposes a set of doctrines and practices neatly defined by elite leaders, or do lay believers and practitioners have a say?  If the courts must decide this, then yes, they are deciding what is orthodoxy and what is not.  But if laypeople are allowed to determine what they consider religion, wouldn't almost anything be defensible as religion under the First Amendment?  The answer is probably Yes, but I suspect that's the consequence of a policy of religious freedom, because there is no reliable way for an outsider to distinguish between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy.  That may not be a bad thing, and under our present regime of religious freedom the legislatures and the courts should not, as I argued before, try to settle, let alone enforce the distinction.

Nor need they do so: after all, such invented religions as Scientology, the Pastafarians, and the Church of Satan have been able to use the doctrine of religious freedom to their own advantage or, in the case of the Satanists, educationally.  It's evidently not necessary, in the view of the US courts, for a religion to have existed from time immemorial or to have the prestige and dignity associated with ancient cults in order to be recognized as religions.

While I agree with Sullivan's main point, then, I disagree with a lot of her analysis.  She tries to tie the plaintiffs' position to "individualism," fostered by Protestantism and secularism.  She's aware that most of the plaintiffs were not Protestants but Catholic and Jewish, but she explains that away by pointing to the influence of American Protestant individualism on other traditions.  I'm not persuaded, because all the plaintiffs claimed that their installations conformed to what they'd been taught by their training in their own religions.  For example:

But I know that Jesus' grave was protected, was guarded, and it was not allowed to be walked on.  And we were created in his image [39].

Sullivan points out that "Nowhere in the New Testament accounts of Jesus' death does it say that Jesus' grave was protected so that it would not be walked on. The plaintiffs often elaborated on biblical accounts, making such untutored and naive, sometimes plainly heterodox, efforts to articulate positions of biblical interpretation and theology, searching their personal repertoire of stories and teachings to explain what they had done and why" [39].  But "orthodox," officially authorized beliefs and practices also play fast and loose with biblical material, a practice that in Christianity goes back to the New Testament itself.  Christianity originated in rebellion against orthodox religious authority, appealing sometimes to "untutored and naive" elaborations of the Hebrew Bible, at other times directly to higher authority, God or the Holy Spirit.  Jesus himself sometimes set his own personal authority against tradition: "You have heard that it was said to those of old ... but I say to you ..." (Matthew 5:21, ESV).  That fits better with Sullivan's characterization of American religion, but I didn't notice any of the plaintiffs going so far in their testimony.

This is what I've been taught always, that it is a desecration to walk on a grave [43].

Polish people love the Blessed Virgin.  If you know anything about Polish people, that's one thing they do [52].

It's a tradition, as I say, it's a tradition, it's how it is done in the Jewish religion in England ... It's not necessarily a religious belief.  It's a tradition which in turn is my belief [127].

This doesn't sound to me like "locat[ing] religious authority in their own religious experience and judgment" (139), very much the opposite: one's religious judgment is authorized by the tradition, which one accepts, "which in turn is my belief."  I don't see how anyone could look at American evangelicalism and claim that it locates religious authority in one's own religious experience and judgment.  Appeals to the Bible as authority are universal; if the appeals are often naive and untutored, they are not any more fanciful than the interpretations of duly authorized scholars and clergy.  There's always a circularity in such use of authority, of course.  How do I know? The Bible says so.  Why does the Bible settle it?  Because I believe the Bible.  Why do you believe the Bible?  Because the Bible says so.

Sullivan refers to the "Church's efforts to control popular piety, efforts interestingly parallel in some ways to those of the City" (38).  Indeed they are, but those efforts are as old as the Church, as is the popular piety they attempt to control.  Neither is limited to the United States, or to Protestantism -- for that matter, not even to Christianity.  As one of the contributors to Stereotyping Religion, quoted here, pointed out, popular piety and smorgasbord religion are virtually universal around the world.  It's the "high," authoritative religion that isn't representative, except as it represents a minority of believers who are interested in constructing intellectually interesting systems of dogma and practice -- and in controlling the beliefs and practices of others.  What Sullivan describes as the Protestant assertion of individual religious autonomy is in fact the worldwide and historical norm, characteristic of cultures that I don't think anyone would call individualist.

Sullivan often refers to "secular courts" deciding these questions.  Would "sacred courts" do any better?  Of course not; that's why the ideal of religious freedom was advanced in the first place.  Religious courts may at most decide what is orthodox for the orthodox, and even then they aren't to be trusted, nor should their power to discipline believers be unregulated. Orthodoxy is a construct meaningful only within a given community, like grammatical correctness, and like grammatical correctness it's subject to disagreement and change.  It's often been said that a language is a dialect with an army; analogously, a religion is a heresy with an Inquisition.  At the same time, though, the Warner plaintiffs' attempts to support their (yes) religious observances with regard to the dead have no authority either.  They don't need to.

Sullivan's attempts to sort out the "lived religion" of the Warner plaintiffs vs. orthodoxy seem to be based in an assumption that the difference is real in some sense of the word.  What really seems to have been at stake in the case were issues around property (who owned and could regulate the use of the burial plots) and class (there were some complaints that the contested decorations were "garish," for which probably read "tacky").  Only the first set of issues were really the domain of the court, I should think, and the real problem was the confusion and inconsistency of the cemetery management's enforcement of the contractual standards.  Orthodoxy really wasn't the issue, which I think confirms my previous sense that religious freedom doesn't necessarily involve "secular courts" deciding what is orthodox and what isn't.  A major difficulty would be getting judges to recognize this, and if experts like Sullivan and her colleagues struggled vainly with the problem, nonspecialist judges are not likely to do much better.

It also seems to me, as I've suggested, that the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts are bound to backfire, much like the Reagan-era Equal Access Act of 1984.  This bill was meant to guarantee access to public school facilities for religious groups, but it ended up being the backbone of defense of Gay-Straight Alliances. Warner v. Boca Raton might be an example of such unintended consequences, and could constitute more reason why RFRAs are not a good idea: believers are giving the courts authority to decide matters they should not be deciding.  As with liberals who want the State to decide what is true news and what is fake, the faithful will quickly discover that they, and not those they hate, are suffering disadvantage or even being penalized.

The Mote and the Beam

There's a post (via) at the "progressive Christian" blog slactivist which deals with an interesting religious-freedom case that came before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.  The plaintiff was an evangelical Christian who refused to submit to "biometric hand scanning for time and attendance taking" at his job with a coal and energy company, because he saw the scan as a fulfillment of Revelation 13:16-17:

¹⁶ And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
¹⁷ And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

The complainant's employer refused to make a reasonable accommodation with his religious belief, and the EEOC ruled in his favor.  As the blogger points out, this resolution has the effect of disproving, to some extent, the complainant's belief that those who refuse to wear the mark of the Beast will be persecuted.

Fine with me.  What I want to address, however, are the following remarks by the blogger.

Religious liberty, if it is ever to mean anything at all, must include the freedom to be wrong. It cannot matter, legally, whether or not a religious belief is orthodox, or coherent, or part of a longstanding established tradition. Protecting religious liberty means protecting the right to believe in the implausible, the idiosyncratic, the offensive, the stupid, the factually insupportable, the demonstrably false. Otherwise we’d wind up putting the state in the position of adjudicating between legitimate and illegitimate religious beliefs.

And that, we should have learned by now, never ends well. That’s a recipe for inquisitions and for sectarian violence. That reduces religious liberty from an inviolable human right to a privilege contingent on the religious perspective of the current regime.

Again, fine with me.  This is the basic rationale for freedom of religion as it's conceived in the US.  But I was struck by the irony of a Christian writer mocking another Christian's beliefs as implausible, idiosyncratic, offensive, stupid, factually insupportable, and so on.  It's possible that that string of adjectives is merely rhetorical, and that the writer doesn't necessarily mean them to refer to the EEOC plaintiff's beliefs.  However, elsewhere in the piece Clark calls the man's beliefs "ludicrous," "absurd," "weird, Barnum-esque folklore," and refers to him as "a devotee of the pseudo-Christian folklore promoted by the likes of Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and Jack Impe."  

Leave aside the fact that most New Testament scholars today would agree that Jesus himself taught precisely such weird, Barnum-esque folklore, and that it permeates most of the New Testament.  (Ironically, it is fundamentalist scholars who try the hardest to argue that Jesus didn't mean that the End was near, or that he would return on clouds of glory before the generation of his first followers passed away.)  There's a great deal of resistance to admitting this, and has been ever since Albert Schweitzer made the classic case for Jesus as an end-times preacher more than a century ago.  Laymen of all stripes try to evade it, first through ignorance of the scholarship, and second by displacing the embarrassing doctrine onto the book of Revelation alone.  They also try to forget that Jesus, far from being a cool, hip Enlightenment philosopher, is depicted in the gospels as a wandering faith healer, exorcist, and hellfire preacher, quite apart from his end-times teaching.

But as I say, leave that aside.  I don't know the details of this blogger's Christian beliefs, but since he is a Christian it is reasonably certain that he holds some absurd, factually insupportable, idiosyncratic, etc. beliefs himself, either in terms of what he believes about Jesus or how he evades the problematic parts of Jesus' teachings.  But he feels free to jeer at the beliefs of other Christians with different absurd beliefs.  Whatever else can be said about this, it flouts one of the few teachings of Jesus that I respect -- the one about attending to the log in your own eye before you complain about the speck in your brother's.

A few years ago a Christian minister named Barbara R. Rossing published a book called The Rapture Exposed: The Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation (Westview Press, 2004).  With considerable Christian love she attacked evangelicals who believed in the Rapture.  It got a fair amount of attention and praise from people, Christian and otherwise, who didn't know much about the New Testament or Christian history, but knew what they liked.  I read it a decade ago and found Rossing's scholarship wanting, to put it politely.  That matters because Rossing is not merely a minister but professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.  Ever since then I've been meaning to reread her book and take more notes than I did the first time; maybe I'll finally get around to that this year.  But two things still stand out in memory for me.  One is Rossing's mean-spiritedness as she pointed out the speck in her brothers' and sisters' eyes.  Soon after reading The Rapture Exposed, I read a couple of other books that Rossing had cited, though she was unenthusiastic about them because their authors, though critical of their subjects, were less sure than she that Rapture-believing Christians were not really Christians: Heather Hendershot's Shaking the World for Jesus: Media and Conservative Evangelical Culture (Chicago, 2004) and Amy Johnson Frykholm's Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical America (Oxford, 2004).  The other thing I remember is that Rossing herself declared explicitly that she believes that Christ will return, just as he promised to do in the gospels and in the book of Revelation.  Since Jesus promised to return within a generation, that belief falls under the absurd, factually insupportable, stupid, and demonstrably false headings -- but it didn't seem to bother the people who trumpeted Rossing's book, like this writer whose post appeared at the same site, Patheos, as slacktivist.  And why should it?  Many of them probably had not actually read the book, just heard that Rossing put the bad fundamentalists in their place.

Do I include myself in these strictures?  Of course I do.  As an atheist and a homosexual of my generation, I know how important the principle of freedom of belief and expression is.  The gay movement relied on it for a long time.  There was a time, not really so long ago, when the idea that homosexuality was not a criminal aberration but a valid variation of human sexual expression, was counted absurd, factually insupportable, offensive, demonstrably false.  In this sense I'm a liberal, as Paul Feyerabend described the type:

A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

I'm also used to being dismissed in slactivist's terms by liberals and conservatives alike, who don't know what's wrong with my statements but are sure they're crazy.  As long as I can rebut them, without having to worry about being penalized by the state for doing so, I'm fine.  I don't need for everyone to agree with me.  So when one Christian attacks another Christian for holding absurd beliefs, what can I do but giggle and point and make rude noises?

Jesus himself didn't claim to be reasonable; he recognized that he wasn't, and blessed those who were not scandalized by him.  Paul exulted in the offensiveness of a crucified Messiah, a scandal to the Jews and folly to the Greeks.  Whatever the slactivist blogger's personal, idiosyncratic version of Christian belief, I doubt he regards Jesus or Paul as marginal figures.  Nor do I, but luckily I'm not a Christian, so I can freely regard their teachings as absurd, factually insupportable, and so on.

Freedom for Me, Burning Effigies for Thee

My reading continues to educate me historically.  Recently I learned about the American Revolution's use of young boys as shock troops against Loyalists, which led to the martyrdom of at least one ten-year-old  Now I'm reading John Fea's Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? (Westminster John Knox, 2011).   Fea's an Associate Professor of American History at Messiah College, a Christian college in Pennsylvania.  Judging from his remarks in the book, I gather that Fea is an evangelical Christian, probably fairly conservative, but he is a good historian, and Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? is an accessible discussion of that question for non-historians.

My attention was snagged by part of Fea's discussion of George Washington's personal religion.  Washington was surely a Christian, but he was an intensely private man and didn't wave his faith around in public.  In one step "designed to end religious persecution and enhance religious freedom":

While the Continental Army was engaged in Boston in 1775 Washington banned his soldiers from participating in Pope’s Day, a popular anti-Catholic holiday in New England that featured, among other things, burning effigies of the Pope [189].

Why had I never heard of this grand old American Protestant tradition before?  The things that get left out of the history books!  It turns out that Pope's Day, or Pope Day, was what Guy Fawkes Night became in the American colonies, and it died out after the Revolution.  Washington's prohibition of his soldiers' participation in the festivities speaks well for his commitment to religious tolerance Or should I call it "Political Correctness"? the PC problem is obviously much older than I'd realized).  The existence of this holiday is also a reminder that "papists" were widely considered beyond the pale where religious toleration was concerned in the colonies and early America.

We Will All Be Gay-Married

Rod Dreher has also been working the religious-freedom aspects of the question of same-sex marriage.  Mostly it's the same old stuff, with new examples culled from the Gay-Marriage Panic Department of the Right's propaganda mills.  On Friday he linked to an article by one Jim Antle at The National Interest, who wailed:

A viewpoint that was once acceptably held by the President of the United States—indeed, a viewpoint one had to hold to be elected president in the first place—is now considered rude to express in public. The Mary Cheneys who once allowed people to simultaneously support traditional marriage and avoid charges of bigotry against gays and lesbians have revoked that protection.

So many openings here.  For one thing, when the President of the United States declared his personal belief that marriage should be limited to one man and one woman -- as he and his main competitor had also declared during the 2008 campaign -- many people did object, but most of them were just homosexuals and didn't count.  Most Obama supporters didn't even notice it, and excused his statement as a political necessity if he was to be elected.  When he changed his mind a few years later, any suggestion that he did so as a political necessity to be re-elected was dismissed as callous cynicism.   But I don't recall anyone objecting because he was "rude" (though I don't doubt that some fools did).  I objected because he was trying to impose his personal religious beliefs on the secular institution of civil marriage, flouting the First Amendment.  He was and is entitled to his personal religious beliefs (just as I'm entitled to criticize and mock them), but they aren't and shouldn't be law.

For another thing, what does it mean to "support traditional marriage"?  Antle seems to believe that it means denying civil marriage to anyone who isn't "traditional."  And that's not rude either; other words apply.  Consider the ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Israel who, when they get into trouble for harassing and spitting on young girls they consider immodestly dressed, complain that "we feel we are being prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which we wish" and compare their Jewish critics to Nazis and themselves to victims of the Holocaust. "They hate us because we’re going the Jewish way.  And there’s only one Jewish way."  Just as there's only one form of "traditional marriage," if we can just figure out which one it is.

The haredi also protest that "We do not hate the secular people, but rather love them, we bring them closer."   Sound familiar?  But 1) the little girls assaulted by haredi men on their way to school weren't "secular," they were Orthodox; and 2) the secular people might well suspect that "we bring them closer" only so that "we" can more easily spit on them.

On the other hand, no one seems to be trying to prevent the ultra-orthodox from observing Torah as they wish, in Israel or in the US; they are only prevented from attacking other Jews who observe it differently.  Likewise, no advocate of same-sex marriage is saying that men and women should not marry legally -- at least, Dreher and his allies haven't quoted anyone who is.  "Traditional marriage" (which the conservatives interpret very elastically when it suits them, including even heterosexual marriage by atheists with no religious dimension) is not under attack, only the attempt to forbid marriage to "non-traditional," same-sex couples.

So it seems that by "traditional marriage" Dreher means not the marriage of one man to one woman, non-traditional though that is, but the heterosexual monopoly on marriage, civil as well as religious.  Being prevented from imposing their particular sectarian doctrines and practices on everyone -- religious and secular alike -- is exactly what religious reactionaries everywhere decry as a violation of their religious freedom, "the dictatorship of relativism" as Pope Rat called it.  They must even be exempt from any criticism or disagreement whatsoever, or they'll cry intolerance.  Let them cry.

But I want to pursue the word "rude."  We've been through that one too, and I've often attacked liberals for their refusal to debate ideas, their taking refuge behind emotive wails of Oh, how could you say such an awful thing?  It's likely that opponents of same-sex marriage will be called rude for expressing their views, but so far they've shown a resilient ability to steal their opponents' tactics and return accusations of rudeness for accusations of rudeness.  It's entertaining to imagine a traditionalist Christian like Dreher facing a Roman governor's order to burn incense before an image of the Emperor.  If he can't even stand up to being called rude for "defending traditional marriage," it's a safe bet he'd have apostatized under real persecution in a New York minute.)  It's so much easier than discussing the issues.  A rational person -- at least the kind of rational person I respect -- will respond to accusations of rudeness by taking the high road and defending his or her views with evidence and good reasons, challenging his or her opponents to refute them.  Our corporate media aren't interested in evidence or reason: they prefer the diversionary tactics of name-calling followed by insincere apologies.  But those people who care about the issues shouldn't let themselves be deterred, and will try to focus on the issues.  Digging through the muck and obfuscation to try to get at what is important in a disagreement.  But as Dreher's citation of Antle shows, the conservatives are just as invested in muddying the issues as liberals are.  Sometimes indeed, liberals and conservatives join hands in the struggle against rational thought.

Dreher also linked recently to an old post on same-sex marriage by (be still my heart!) the Randite blogger Megan McArdle, in which she made this challenge to proponents of same-sex marraige:

My only request is that people try to be a leeetle more humble about their ability to imagine the subtle results of big policy changes. The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can’t imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that’s either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I’m a little leery of letting you muck around with it.

The reference to "rare ritual behaviors" shows that McArdle doesn't know what she's talking about, as usual, but I think she does have a point.  The trouble (or the good news, if you prefer) is that it cuts both ways: opponents of same-sex marriage can't say what the longterm effects of same-sex marriage on society will be either, though they are quite sure they'll be cataclysmic.

And the question is more complicated than either McArdle or Dreher cares to think about.  For one thing, heterosexual marriage in the West has become increasingly degendered over the past half-century or so, with the partners formally more and more equal.  So far that is in many ways a good thing, since married women with more autonomy consistently appear to be happier than their counterparts with less autonomy; on the other hand, reactionaries are claiming that women's increased autonomy in marriage has made men unhappier, making them impotent and unwilling to work for a living, etc.  It's not easy to say what to do about that; I don't believe that all men need a woman as a footstool, and those who do might as well adjust or do without.  Anyone who wants to turn the clock back must justify why women -- half the species, after all -- should have to be miserable to boost men's egos.  Defenders of tradition have been perfectly happy to let women suffer.  If it's a zero-sum game where both can't be happy, there's no solution.

Which brings me to my next point: Whether or not same-sex marriage is legalized in the US, heterosexual marriage will continue to change, from pressures within heterosexuality.  And that's not news; heterosexual marriage has never existed in just one form.  Marriage hasn't even been the cultural ideal in Christian cultures, as an Orthodox Christian like Dreher ought to know.  There have been waves of rejection of marriage, by women and men alike, throughout Western history, and in Christian tradition that rebellion has the sanction of Scripture and practical precedent.  We're living in such a time now, in the US and elsewhere in the world, when many heterosexuals are voting against marriage with their feet.  Since gay people are a small minority, and those who will marry are a minority within a minority, those who want to play Chicken Little over marriage should worry more about the social changes being wrought by the heterosexual majority.  It's possible of course that same-sex marriage will have effects greater than the numbers suggest.  But it will be hard to distinguish those effects from those of heterosexuals choosing other options for their own reasons; it might even be that the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage is an effect of changes in heterosexual marriage and coupling.  As I've indicated, there are reasons to think so.

People like Dreher and McArdle cultivate a blissful ignorance of larger social forces and trends, except when they endorse destructive ones.  The weakening of heterosexual marriage is arguably connected to political and economic changes whose effects have already been noticed by people who care: the destruction of America's industrial base, for example, followed by the attack on jobs with benefits and security, has devastated the nuclear family (which isn't really "traditional" anyhow) and made it impossible for most men to support a family on one paycheck.  When higher-wage jobs with benefits are eliminated, they are usually replaced with low-wage, no-benefit jobs, forcing many married couples to become two-paycheck families, or even three-paycheck since it is often necessary for at least one partner to work two jobs.  (The wife will usually work two jobs anyway, the Second Shift of housework in addition to wage work.)  If the Right wanted to worry about "traditional" marriage and families, it could focus on this trend, but if anything the Right endorses it.  The longterm effects of these and other economic changes are likely to outweigh any caused by the legalization of same-sex marriage, but the Right finds it convenient to have Teh Gay as a scapegoat while ignoring other, arguably more significant factors.

Notice that McArdle is playing the same dishonest game as many other traditionalists: "If you think you know why marriage is male/female, and is either outdated" etc.  Advocates of same-sex marriage don't think heterosexual marriage is "outdated" -- very much the opposite.  They approve of it, and they want same-sex couples to get its privileges and benefits.  (If they consider anything outdated, it's limiting marriage to mixed-sex couples.  It's a bad argument, but a popular one for many issues.  But Loving v. Virginia didn't mean that white people marrying white people was "outdated" either.)  Legalizing same-sex marriage won't stop marriage from being overwhelmingly, even primarily, male/female.  Letting a few same-sex couples marry legally won't change what marriage predominantly is.  Heterosexuals never had any difficulty in using "marriage" as a metaphor for same-sex relationships in the past, and since marriage is a metaphor, not a natural phenomenon, civil same-sex marriage isn't going to change anything that wasn't already changing.

We Are All Gay-Married Now

It looks like the same-sex marriage debate is moving into a new phase of misinformation, ignorance of history and other relevant matters, and irrelevance.  Business as usual, in other words, only with different hot buttons and dog whistles plugged into the arguments.  Right now, as many opponents concede that they've lost and it's only a matter of time until we're all gay-married, the question is how much of a threat same-sex marriage poses to religious freedom.

Last week the blogger and Greek Orthodox convert Rod Dreher wrote a post for The American Conservative on just that subject.  The title under which it appeared, "Does Faith = Hate?", was an exercise in bad faith all by itself; probably he's not responsible for the title, but the following content is not better.  It's a somewhat milder, more reflective, less panicky version of what he wrote immediately after the Supreme Court's DOMA decision last June.

Just for fun, though, let me begin by dissecting the rhetorical question in that title.  Does "faith" equal "hate"?  Those are both some rather fraught words.  If "hate" is supposed to mean "opposed to same-sex marriage," then the answer is obviously No, since many religious believers aren't opposed to same-sex marriage.  Some of them are gay.  It would be interesting and possibly fruitful to probe Dreher on this.  Does he deny that pro-gay and gay Christians, say, are Christians?  (If so, he has some common ground with President Obama, who has said [via] that "people of faith", Democrats, and gay people are separate mutually-exclusive groups.)  Any religious conservative who doesn't address that point has some explaining to do, don't you think?

As for "hate," the misuse of that word by liberals is a problem.  You can, of course, simply postulate that any position you disagree with is "hate," but as Bertrand Russell said, postulating has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.  Liberals are also prone to deny that people are entitled to hate in a free society, or that "hate speech" (which they figure they'll define) is protected by the First Amendment; I disagree, but if they were right they'd be in trouble themselves.  But I'll return to this, because antigay religious believers are prone to wail that they're hated, or "demonized," as though they or anyone has a right not to be hated.

So, Dreher begins by quoting the ultra-Catholic opponent of same-sex marriage Maggie Gallagher to the effect that "there is an accelerating awareness that the consequence of marriage equality is going to be extremely negative for traditionalist Christians."  Dreher agrees: "the most important goal at this stage is not to stop gay marriage entirely but to secure as much liberty as possible for dissenting religious and social conservatives while there is still time. To do so requires waking conservatives up to what may happen to them and their religious institutions if current trends continue—and Catholic bishops, say, come to be regarded as latter-day Bull Connors ... The threat," he intones, "is real."

Religious schools and charities could suffer penalties such as the loss of government funding or state credentials necessary to operate. They could also have their tax-exempt status taken from them.

In support of this claim Dreher cites a 2007 case from New Jersey, in which a Methodist Church lost its tax exemption for a pavilion it owned, when a lesbian couple were denied permission to use it for their civil union ceremony.

The judge determined that the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association breached its agreement to make the pavilion available to the public on an equal basis. The association was also required to make the pavilion public in exchange for a state tax exemption it received that requires equal access on a non-discriminatory basis. Metzger also noted that while the association is free to practice its mission without government oversight, it had never attached any religious ministry to the wedding venue until it received Paster and Bernstein’s application.

“(The association) was not, however, free to promise equal access to rent wedding space to heterosexual couples irrespective of their tradition and then except (Bernstein and Paster),” Judge Metzger stated.

So, the church-affiliated association violated the agreement into which it had entered to get a tax exemption, and lost the exemption as a consequence.  The group had apparently so far abandoned its faith commitment that it was willing to let Papists, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindoos, even Presbyterians use the pavilion, but it suddenly got religion and drew the line at queers. 

Dreher quotes law professor and "religious liberty expert" Susan Fretwell Wilson on the Ocean Grove case: "That tax benefit is one of the most substantial benefits religious groups receive from the government. Although the group had elected a local tax status tied to public access, if state and local governments use this as a guide for how to deal with religious organizations that don’t accept same-sex marriage, that could be a big deal."

Dreher ought to pick his authorities more carefully.  (For one thing, Wilson breezily assures us that "Everybody knows that [church] sanctuaries are going to be out of the reach of same-sex marriage laws."  If only! The idea that little churches in the glen will have gay weddings rammed down their throats still inspires panic in "traditionalist" circles.) There's no reason to suppose that Ocean Grove will be used "as a guide for how to deal with religious organizations that don't accept same-sex marriage", because the principle involved is well-established in other domains of "religious freedom."  Affiliated religious organizations previously faced the same choice between tax exemption and the freedom to discriminate on the basis of race.  The most famous example is probably Bob Jones University, a private Christian college which admitted no black students for many years, and when that policy was changed refused to admit "interracial" (but heterosexual!) couples and banned mixed-race dating among its already-enrolled students, based on the Joneses' religious beliefs.  As Wikipedia tells it:

Under pre-1970 IRS regulations, tax exemptions were awarded to private schools regardless of their racial admissions policies, and Bob Jones University was approved for a tax exemption under that policy. Pursuant to a 1970 revision to IRS regulations that limited tax-exempt status to private schools without racially discriminatory admissions policies, the IRS informed the University on November 30, 1970 that the IRS was planning on revoking its tax exempt status as a "religious, charitable . . . or educational" institution. In response, the University filed suit in 1971 in Bob Jones University v. Schultz.

Which they lost, and with it their tax exemption.  The noted Constitutional scholar Ronald Reagan intervened on BJU's behalf, then flipflopped, but in 1983 the US Supreme Court upheld the denial of the exemption in an 8-1 decision.  (Reagan was a true Christian, it must be noted, turning the other cheek after Bob Jones III denounced him "as 'a traitor to God's people' for the sin of choosing as his vice president George H.W. Bush, whom Jones called 'a devil.'")  In 2000, BJU abandoned its prohibition of interracial dating and marriage, admitting that they couldn't remember what the biblical evidence against it was.

While Bob Jones University is a marginal institution, opposition to racial desegregation was widespread in American Protestant Christianity, notably in (but not limited to) the Southern Baptist Convention.  The SBC is the largest Protestant denomination in the US, and the second largest Christian denomination after the Roman Catholic Church.  It has come a long way since it emerged in 1845 to defend slavery and white supremacy, having apologized for its racist past and elected its first black President just last year, but it still denounces same-sex marriage with as much conviction as it ever denounced Abolition and Race-Mixing.

Then there are the segregation academies, private schools founded around the United States after the Supreme Court ruled public-school segregation unconstitutional in 1954. Many were explicitly Christian.  Some are still around.  Some manage to get federal funds.  Some get tax-exempt status by admitting one or two token black students.  The point is that the concerns Dreher and Wilson express are nothing new in American life.  Religious doctrine and civil rights have often clashed, and there's no simple way to resolve the conflict.

The rest of Dreher's piece is predictable: Christian bakers who get into trouble because they refused to bake a cake for a homosexual wedding, and of course, "religious conservatives are increasingly demonized for their beliefs about homosexuality."

And not just religious conservatives. In August, Dartmouth withdrew its job offer to a African Anglican bishop hired to run a campus spirituality and ethics center because of his past opposition to gay rights. Though Bishop James Tengatenga, a widely respected and effective advocate for peace and reconciliation in his native Malawi, had since evolved into a gay-supporting liberal Anglican, the fact that he hadn’t always been one cost him his job.

There are a lot of schools in this country that would withdraw job offers to bishops who'd "evolved into a gay-supporting liberal".  (For that matter, a pro-gay Catholic priest in Australia was recently excommunicated by Pope Francis.  I wonder what Dreher would say about that.)  I suspect that Dreher is shading the story a bit to make it fit his narrative, but even accepting his version it's hard to see how he can object to a private school making hiring decisions based on the candidates' values.  Maybe he's ignorant of the heresy trials that have riven hardline Christian schools in recent years.  I recall, but I'm not going to bother tracking it down today, the case of a professor at a Baptist (I think) college in the 1980s or 90s, who was accused of having denied the "once saved, always saved" doctrine of his denomination.  They couldn't hang him or burn him at the stake, but they could fire him, and as I recall, they did.  Plenty of faculty have been fired from conservative schools for being too liberal on gay or other issues.  Surely Dreher recognizes that the autonomy of denominations and their institutions is a pillar of religious freedom.  If he believes that conservative or "traditionalist" religious institutions have the right to be bigoted, he must extend the same right to liberal ones.  I believe in intellectual freedom and have often criticized decisions to fire staff based on their expressed opinions (even when I disagree with those opinions), but I'm not a conservative.

I certainly expect that the spreading recognition of same-sex marriage will produce conflicts with entrenched religious beliefs.  So did the success of the Civil Rights movement; so did the anti-slavery movement; so did the emancipation of Jews in Europe; so did the struggle for religious freedom, a struggle that is far from over yet.  Specific cases are going to be decided wrongly (in my opinion, no less than in Dreher's), but it can hardly be news that freedom -- including religious freedom -- isn't absolute.  Religious freedom doesn't grant conservative Christians the freedom to interfere with the lives of gay people -- or African-Americans, or Jews, or other conservative Christians.  Remember that lovely passage by a Pilgrim Father who wrote that "All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keepe away from us"? And the other who wrote that "Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration. ..."?  Our founding fathers had to give up the pleasure of torturing and killing each other for the sake of the Gospel in order to build a free nation; indeed, they gave it up voluntarily, to save themselves from being killed and otherwise oppressed.  Some, though, have never quite gotten over the loss of that pristine original liberty.

To be continued...