Monday, March 12, 2012
Misunderstanding (or misrepresenting) the concern for religious freedom
My resolve, in the wake of its recent decision to run an ignorant, nasty, and bigoted advertisement, not to engage New York Times pieces on this blog was, it appears, pretty weak. (That said, I hope all of you are cancelling your subscriptions, and urging any Catholic institutions with which you are affiliated to do the same.)
In this piece ("Leaps of Faith"), Molly Worthen charges that the recent expressions of concern about the Obama Administration's insensitivity to, and undervaluing of, religious freedom are really part of a strategy to deny or question the President's own faith, to paint him as a "faker on religious freedom," as part of the "ongoing attack on his legitimacy."
Groan. This is nonsense. This Administration has said and done a number of things that, taken together, more than justify the concern that it does not value religious freedom -- and does not appreciate the constraints that a meaningful commitment to religious freedom puts on governments -- to the extent it should. It is entirely reasonable to worry, given what the Administration has done, that it does not value, to the extent it should, a rich and pluralistic civil society when it comes to religious social-welfare institutions and their distinctive character. Ah, but -- like a clever detective in a Dan Brown or Umberto Eco novel -- Molly Worthen sees what is really going on:
[Religious liberty] is a code phrase alternately benign and sinister, much like that other clever cloak for bigotry, “states’ rights.” In the context of the 2012 race, the charge that Obama subverts religious freedom is a code meant to label the president as an impostor, a blasphemer of the American gospel who adheres to another religion entirely.
No, Ms. Worthen, it isn't. And, just a note: Charging that concern for religious freedom is really sinister (racist?) code-talk is hardly the kind of "civil discourse" that our President -- whose "legitimacy" I do not question, even if I regret his election -- says (even if not consistently) our politics is lacking.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/03/misunderstanding-or-misrepresenting-the-concern-for-religious-freedom.html
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It is truly astonishing that the guardians of reason continually resort to what are nothing more than ad hominem attacks. Even if those who criticize the administration have impure motives (and I don't believe they do), it would not follow that their arguments are bad. Suppose, for example, it turned out that Sandra Fluke harbored deep anti-Catholic bigotries. That would have no wit of relevance to whether her case for government coercion is justified or unjustified.
What Worthen is doing in this piece is both anti-intellectual and anti-democratic. To nurture bad habits of reasoning--as she is most certainly doing--is an injustice against the intellectual powers of her readers. And it is indeed a strange litmus test of democratic participation that entire swaths of citizens ought to be excluded from the public conversation because of speculations of their inner lives based on absolutely no empirical evidence whatsoever.
A while back I was bowled over by an equally offensive piece Worthen published in Christianity Today. I found myself defending southern Baptists with whom I would ordinarily disagree. Click my name to read my blog post.