If you have doubts about the importance of religious freedom, ask yourself: Where do the "inalienable" rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, as enumerated in our Declaration of Independence, come from? Not from positive law, which can repeal what it enacts when political interests change. The Declaration states the source: They are "endowed by our Creator." The original draft of the Declaration declared that "we hold these truths to be sacred" rather than "self-evident," which underscores the rights' divine origin. (The word was changed at the behest of Benjamin Franklin. Philip Rieff, The Crisis of the Officer Class, 140.) Inalienable rights are sacred, i.e., absolute, partaking of a transcendent, eternal, unchangeable, inalienable order. How else could they be inalienable?
How does one speak to a power that would alienate inalienable rights? Only by the voice of conscience, which listens to the unchanging sacred order, and prophetically calls power back to obedience to it. Conscience must speak if liberty would be preserved; else tyranny triumphs, pushing freedom to its knees.
To require religious institutions materially to support morally abhorrent practices -- practices which directly contradict the sacred, inalienable right to life guaranteed in the founding documents of our country -- amounts to a silencing of the voice of conscience, and a prohibition on the free exercise of religion. Power's message to religion then is: Say what you will, but do what I say. A civic community desiring to preserve its freedom will not hear those grating words without protest.
No comments:
Post a Comment