Protection for the "well formed" conscience

I do think the point of disagreement between Fr. Araujo and me is coming into focus.  I do not think that our law's protection of conscience is based -- or should be based -- on whether the conscience in question is "well formed," particularly if that term is defined to mean conformity with Church teachings.  From the time of St. Paul, believers have been asked to defer to the consciences of others, well formed or not.  (That does not mean we should not aid in their proper formation.)  The reason we do not grant conscientious exemption to murder statutes is because there are certain non-negotiable rules required for any ordered society, not because the conscience of the person seeking such an exemption is poorly formed according to Church teaching.  The line of military draft cases cited by Fr. Araujo earlier does not show that courts engage in a normative evaluation of the particular conscience's dictates, nor that conscience-based claims that are consistent with a particular religious tradition are privileged over other claims.  In Seeger and its progeny, the courts are focused on the role those dictates play in the believer's life and worldview.  That's a very different sort of inquiry.  It is an explicitly subjective inquiry.

If we want to secure freedom for Catholic Charities to resist laws compelling the provision of contraceptives or the placement of children with same-sex couples (as I do), our argument cannot be, "these institutional claims are the products of well-formed consciences."  That argument prevails only as long as the claims themselves prevail politically (in which case there is no need for a conscience-based exemption).  The whole point is that, on an expanding variety of issues, the majority of citizens have decided that consciences reflecting Church teaching are not well-formed.  Yes, they may be "well formed" according to Church teaching, but the claim for an exemption does not aim at persuading the legislature to embrace the "well formed" judgment as a normative proposition, but to defer to the claimant's own understanding of "well formed."  And, unless we're ready to eviscerate the Establishment Clause, we cannot privilege conscience claims that are well formed according to Catholic teaching over claims that are well formed according to other religious (and, depending on our interpretation of the Clause, moral) traditions.  In many areas -- e.g., the use of contraceptives -- those criteria will be in considerable tension.