A stunningly unfair attack on religious exemptions . . . and the creeping danger of "scare quotes"

In today's New York Times, there's this from Katherine Stewart (author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children."  Nice.)  According to Ms. Stewart, the longstanding practice in the United States of accommodating religion through exemptions turns out, actually, to be part of a plan to create a theocracy and, maybe, commit genocide.  Here's one of the more measured passages in the piece:

 When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.

I suppose that the re-branding of religious freedom as "religious refusal" will be useful to the efforts and goals of some.  Of course, to claim exemption is not to "take the law into one's own hands" but is instead to invoke the law's protections; it is "the law" itself which has provided for the (legal) right to claim the exemption.  (To say this is not to say that religious freedom is a gift or concession or is not a human right; it's simply to point out that, again, in this country, our positive law itself provides a mechanism for claiming religion-based exemptions from the positive law.  As it should.)

I'm reminded of this quote, which a friend shared with me a few days ago:

"There are many ways of bracketing the normativity of normative concepts: . . or by ironically desiccating even the values of one's own culture, putting 'scare quotes' around value terms and sucking out their normative juices so that there can be no claim on one's life."

 

William Lad Sessions, Honor for Us: A Philosophical Analysis, Interpretation and Defense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010)