Friedersdorf on Trump Appointments and Religious Liberty

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf argues that one can't trust Trump-appointed judges even on religious-liberty questions. Responding to Rod Dreher's argument that Trump would be only indifferent to religious liberty while Clinton would be actively hostile, Friedersdorf writes:

     The glaring flaw in this logic is that Trump is not, in fact, ambivalent about protecting the liberty of religious Americans, he is openly antagonistic to it––it’s just that he has singled out Muslim Americans rather than Catholics or Jews or Mormons.

     Dreher is blind to the degree to which their respective fates are tied.

     If Trump and the judges he appoints help local communities to prevent the construction of mosques, other zoning bodies will use the same precedents to rein in churches; an effort to ban headscarves could have implications for Sikhs and Jews; whether a Muslim cab driver is able to refuse passage to someone ferrying alcohol will bear on whether a Christian can decline to bake a cake for a gay marriage. It’s hard to anticipate exactly what controversies will arise in future years, or how the precedents set will be applied still farther in the future, but suffice it to say that any legal attack on one faith’s religious liberties threatens every faith.

 

I'm very sympathetic to the argument that religious-liberty claims stand and fall together. That's partly for the precedent-based reasons Friederdorf cites. And it's partly because I think judges and the public--at least those in the reachable middle, who in my view are always the key audience--will tend to be more sympathetic to any given religious-liberty claim in an atmosphere where all such claims are treated with respect, and conversely less sympathetic when religious-liberty claims are seen as special pleading for one's underlying views. I just gave a talk at BYU on why our current atmosphere of reaching for labels of "Muslims terrorists" and "Christian bigots" is unhealthy for religious liberty. In my view, Trump's inclinations are a part of that miasma.

 

At the same time, I have to be honest and say I don't think I'm persuaded by Friedersdorf if he is arguing that as a matter of pragmatic self-interest, conservative Christians should fear Trump just as much as Clinton. I don't want this to be a "Clinton vs. Trump" post (although I suppose it unavoidably has that element); I'm more interested in considerations about the dynamics of judicial protection of religious freedom. So here's why I think Friedersdorf's argument, while good in principle and in the long term, is not likely to convince religious conservatives in real-world terms now [ADDED FROM HERE]--if you start from the premise that Clinton judges will be unsympathetic to conservative Christian religious-liberty claims involving gay rights, abortion, etc.

First, Friedersdorf seems to assume that Trump-appointed judges will share Trump's personal authoritarian and anti-Muslim positions, [ADDED] which will then lead them to devalue religious liberty. But if his appointees are principled conservative judges, as are many on the recently released "short list," then they seem more likely to give consistent weight to religious-liberty claims, including those of Muslims. The stronger warning against Trump's likely pattern of appointments, it seems to me, is that there's no strong reason to assume he will be constrained by the short list, because he's shown so little inclination to be constrained by anything.

Second, the sequence Friedersdorf describes--"Trump judges first rule against Muslim claims, and then those rulings affect a case that comes along about about traditionalist sexual morality"--seems relatively unlikely. The likely order seems the opposite. For example, among the cases about objections to facilitation of allegedly-sinful behavior, there are many more disputes about wedding vendors and Catholic or evangelical colleges or social services than there are about Muslim cab drivers objecting to passengers with alcohol or checkout clerks objecting to ringing up pork. That's unsurprising given the relative number of Christian traditionalists and Muslims. The Christian-traditionalist cases seem more likely to come first. 

Finally, although I definitely think that religious liberty is strengthened for each claim by treating it as a powerful right for everyone, this effect is not conclusive: it's also true that there are factual differences in cases that allow judges to distinguish claims if they're strongly inclined to do so. If we assume that Trump appointees will want to target Muslims (which is questionable, see point #1 above, but let's assume it), they can likely find ways to distinguish the primary cases affecting traditionalist Christians. For example, more Muslim cases may involve government claims of national-security needs, as opposed to claims in the Christian-traditionalist cases about the need to combat discrimination.

In sum, while I think Friedersdorf's argument against Trump on religious liberty is right in principle, I'm unconvinced that he can make the case to religious traditionalists purely in terms of their own self-interest.