Religious Liberty

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Please put aside your biases against the Trump administration and Jeff Sessions before entering into this discussion . . .

Sessions and Pence are launching an initiative to expand religious freedom so people can have more choice about how to participate in public life according to their beliefs and consciences.

Imo, this is a great thing but I understand why people who want birth control, for example, think it's unfair if everyone pays insurance/taxes to fund other medications but not the one they use.

Consider this, though: there is nothing stopping pharaceutical companies from simply lowering the price of birth control so people who want to fund it can afford to without taking money from all the religious people who don't support it, so why don't they do that?

answer: because they want money and if they can withhold their product from people who want it in order to stimulate them to put political pressure on religious people to pay into the company's profits, they will do so. Why don't those who want affordable birth control petition and protest the companies directly instead of petitioning and protesting those of us who don't want to fund it?

In short, why not respect liberty and direct your energy toward those who are impinging on yours, i.e. businesses that withhold products not because they have religious sensitivities but because they want to get more money by making everyone pay instead of just those people who are actually using their product.

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@livinglava,

Hip hip hooray for the New American Taliban!

1 Reply

A couple of thoughts:
- Religious freedom has never been an excuse to break the law. If you believe in faith healing and let your child die instead of seeking medical attention, you will be convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
- The tenets of any religion are for its adherents to say and not the government. You can say your religion supports human sacrifice or animal torture or doesn't respect property rights, etc. You can excuse any crime just by claiming your religion allows it. (Prior to the civil war, southern pastors used the Bible to support slavery.) Saying religion trumps civil law is a formula for disaster.
- The idea of this administration touting its respect for religious freedom when it is denying academic and medical visas based on religious affiliation is ridiculous.

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@tsarstepan,

Well, that's a strawman and nothing more.

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@engineer,

This is an important part of the discussion: i.e. when is someone's religious freedom too much of an infringement on the rights and safety of others to be allowed. E.g. if your religion says that a fetus is not a person with the right to life, can that be limited by government?

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@engineer,

Quote:

Religious freedom has never been an excuse to break the law.

This is factually untrue. There are many examples where people were given exemptions to "break" the law (i.e. act against the mandates of a law because of a religious exemption).

Let's see, there is

- The Sanctuary movement to skirt immigration law, the police abstain from raiding churches.
- Legal protection for conscientious objectors to avoid the military draft
- Exemptions to vaccination programs based on religious beliefs.
- Religious justification for civil disobedience on civil rights issues.

This is another case of ideological bias; the left condemns the right for breaking the law, and then ignores the cases where they themselves break the law for a matter of conscience.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

- The Sanctuary movement to skirt immigration law, the police abstain from raiding churches.

This is a myth. Churches in the US do not have the ability to offer wanted criminals sanctuary.

maxdancona wrote:

- Legal protection for conscientious objectors to avoid the military draft

While conscientious objectors can be religiously based, they don't have to be. That protection is available to everyone.

maxdancona wrote:

- Exemptions to vaccination programs based on religious beliefs.

These exemptions are not breaking the law, the exemptions are written into the law and not all states have them. Mississippi for example does not allow religious exemptions for school immunizations.

maxdancona wrote:

- Religious justification for civil disobedience on civil rights issues.

You can offer those justifications but you will still be arrested. There is no civil disobedience get out of jail card for religion.

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@engineer,

... And yet, the Sanctuary movement was successful in the 1980s, and there are still undocumented immigrants living in churches.

But the point I am making is about ideological bias. Consider the two cases...

- A baker who doesn't want to fulfill his legal obligation to make a wedding cake because it violates his conscience.

- A draftee who doesn't want to fulfill his legal obligation to serve in the military because it violates his conscience.

You are pretending that there is a moral difference between these two (other than your own biases). I don't suspect you have any objection to carving out legal protection for the conscientious objector... I suspect you do have an objection to carving out the same protection for a pharmacist whose conscience won't let her fill a prescription.

This isn't about principle. It is about political partisanship.

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@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

if your religion says that a fetus is not a person with the right to life, can that be limited by government?

What you wrote is the opposite of what you started the thread with. The government is not going to force you to get an abortion if you don't believe in it. I don't think that is in question. What I thought you asked is can someone claim they don't have to follow a law due to their religion. I'd say that answer is no. Either everyone has to follow the law or no one does. If you believe that all creation is to be shared by everyone and you and your fellow believers break into your neighbor's yard and start having a picnic, the police will haul you off and the judge is not going to be sympathetic to your religious beliefs.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

- A baker who doesn't want to fulfill his legal obligation to make a wedding cake because it violates his conscience.

How is the baker legally obligated unless he/she accepts the job and takes payment?

The real issue with this case is whether people have the right to refuse service as an act of conscience when the refusal also constitutes discrimination against someone for their sexuality, gender, race/ethnicity, etc.

To me it would be discrimination if a gay person comes in to buy a wedding cake that the baker designs as conscienable, and the baker refuses to serve him because he's gay. I.e. if a straight person comes in a orders a gay-themed wedding cake that the baker doesn't feel comfortable designing/making, it is not discrimination to refuse to make that cake and it would be as bad as a straight person asking a T-shirt printer to print a hateful or vulgar message and the printer refusing to do it. If someone doesn't share you cultural views, they don't have to help you with them.

That said, I believe Trump is currently accusing the media of being biased against conservatives, so the question will be whether they have the right to refuse to represent certain views in their product the way a baker can refuse to represent gay love in their cake designs.

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

... And yet, the Sanctuary movement was successful in the 1980s, and there are still undocumented immigrants living in churches.

That officials choose to let it lie to avoid the publicity doesn't mean there is a legal right to it. There is no religious right to break the law based on your beliefs.

maxdancona wrote:

You are pretending that there is a moral difference between these two (other than your own biases)....
This isn't about principle. It is about political partisanship.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that I am not making a principled argument here, that I'm just a partisan hack. Could you show me where in this thread I am pretending anything?

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You come up with the goofiest ideas. This seems to be the crux of your argument; at any event, you give it pride of place:

Quote:

In short, why not respect liberty and direct your energy toward those who are impinging on yours, i.e. businesses that withhold products not because they have religious sensitivities but because they want to get more money by making everyone pay instead of just those people who are actually using their product.

What is the basis for this claim? Do you have any evidence to support such a claim? Is this not, in fact, something you just dreamed up and are now arguing because it seems plausible to you?

It seems to me that you have just dreamed this up and now, having erected your elaborate and crippled straw man, you want people to argue against it. Show some evidence that your claim is true; otherwise it's just a silly pipe dream of yours.

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@Setanta,

I'm not sure how you think, but try to think of what I'm saying in terms of a simpler example:

Let's say you have a lemonade stand and you want free lemonade, or at least affordable lemonade. The lemonade company sells lemonade to insurance companies for $100 a cup, and so you assume that's the price and you want insurance to pay for you to drink the lemonade too. Now some people say they don't want to buy lemonade for other people, so you get angry at them and say that everyone should have the right to drink lemonade.

Now what I am saying is that instead of getting mad at the people who don't want to buy you lemonade, why not get mad at the lemonade company for charging $100 a cup because they know they can get insurance companies to pay such an exorbitant price?

Do you really think that if suddenly no insurance companies were buying birth-control that they wouldn't lower the price and go on selling it? They are just keeping the price high because they want people to petition the government to pay their high prices out of the general tax fund.

If these companies are setting their prices too high for you to afford, it's their fault, not the fault of people who don't want to buy their birth-control for other people. Can't you see that it's ridiculous to play into the hands of big pharmaceutical companies by lobbying government to tax everyone to pay their ridiculous prices?

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@livinglava,

Your post is really off topic and you started the topic, but I think you have a fundamental misconception about insurance. Insurance companies have a lot of purchasing power and a strong incentive to drive prices down. Insurance companies routinely pay less (often much less) than individual consumers, not dramatically more.

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@engineer,

I apologize Engineer... I re-read that, and that was more personal than I intended. I am frustrated with the left, not with you personally.

The political left is being hypocritical in this case. In cases like sanctuary churches they want law enforcement to let it lie (there would be a big uproar if law enforcement entered a church to make an arrest). In cases like conscientious objection they want legally protected exceptions in the law, and they want the law interpreted in the most lax way.

However the left wants no legal exceptions in cases like the baker who doesn't want to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, or the pharmacists whose conscience prevents her from filling a prescription.

The hypocrisy is the point.

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@engineer,

How is it off-topic? People want religious liberty to not be required to fund birth-control and other things that don't agree with their conscience. All I was doing was trying to show that I have some understanding for people who feel discriminated against if all their health care is free but suddenly they have to pay ridiculous prices for birth-control.

My point is that the companies that make and sell birth control don't have to charge you that much for it. They set their prices to maximize revenues based on what they can sell their product for. If insurance companies will pay $100 a dose for something, they'll charge that. If insurance companies refuse to pay that price, they'll lower the price and try to get more sales that way.

Anyway, the point is that if you want to fund the birth-control industry, no one is stopping you - but you don't have the right to force people to contribute to that industry against their conscience. If you can't afford birth-control then, blame the companies that sell it. You might also consider that not everyone gets to buy every product and birth control isn't a basic need. It's a lot like driving; most people do it and can't imagine life without it, yet life is possible without driving and ultimately it's a privilege and not a right; a luxury not a need.

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@livinglava,

This has to be the most witless and lame attempt at an analogy that I've ever seen, anywhere.

Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies have different incentives. Pharmaceutical companies rarely have any competition (in the United States) thanks to their buddies in Congress. They don't give a rat's ass about what insurance companies are willing to pay because, until a drug can legally be offered in its generic form, they've got the only game in town. When that happens, they just tweek the molecular structure of their drug, and then offer that with the same exclusivity they enjoyed before. Where they spend money to promote their drugs is with doctors and their support staff. They take the receptionist, secretary and nurses out to lunch, they rent a closet in the doctor's office at the same rates they'd pay for an actual office--all of that to convince the doctor to prescribe their exclusive new drug.

Engineer has already explained how insurance companies operate and what their corporate motives are. Just about every thread you start here is warped by your silly religious beliefs and by your nearly total ignorance of how contemporary society and business operate.

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@Setanta,

That may be true, but then why would you think it would be a good idea to pool everyone's money by government mandate to give it to them?

Anyway, the point is that people want the religious liberty not to contribute money toward funding things that disagree with their consciences, like birth control.

So if those people pull their money, and the pharmaceutical company withholds the drug from people who can't afford it, why is it the people's fault who don't pay instead of the company's fault who won't sell it to you at a price you can afford?

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@livinglava,

The government pools money and does all sorts of things that are against the conscience of individual taxpayers. There are people who are opposed to war or drone strikes or foreign aid or separating families at the border, etc. There are people who believe in faith healing and do not support going to doctors at all. Should the government cancel all health insurance to support their beliefs?

The challenge here is that if you say that religious belief allows you to break the law and religious beliefs are whatever you say they are, then you can claim a religious right to do just about anything.

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@livinglava,

livinglava wrote:

. . . why would you think it would be a good idea to pool everyone's money by government mandate to give it to them?

I have said nothing remotely like that. You are always whining about straw man fallacies (to the point that I don't believe you actually know what that means), and yet you deal out the straw man fallacies right and left.

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