That's what a number of a conservative Christians argue. And as exhibit A they cite the new HHS regulation requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptives, which some religious groups (including the Catholic Church) complain violates God's creative design for sexuality and, hence, their religious liberty.
I sympathize with their complaint. Because I read the First Amendment guarantee of the free exercise of religion broadly, I would have exempted not just churches themselves from the contraceptive mandate, as the Obama administration did, but all religious organizations, including religiously-controlled hospitals and universities.
But the fact remains that the government already requires religious organizations and religious people to provide material support for all sorts of causes and actions that they deem to be inconsistent with their faith.
To take an easy example, consider the Amish. As pacifists, they do not support the state's power to kill under any circumstance and therefore reject the legitimacy of both the police and the military. And yet all sorts of laws require the Amish to do everything from report certain crimes to the police (e.g., sexual crimes against children) to pay taxes in support of the police and military.
It's hard to argue those kinds of "Anti-Amish" laws are illegitimate. Analytically, however, there is no difference at all between them and the new Obamacare contraceptive mandate. The only thing that makes them different is that many more people object to the morality of birth control pills than they do state-controlled violence.
But our view of the First Amendment and its scope cannot be based on the popularity of the religious belief at issue. Either it protects all religious groups from all state interference, or it does not. And if not - as almost everyone agrees - then the only question is where the line should be drawn.
I agree that Obama drew the line a little too far to the left in this case. But that hardly makes him at "war" with Catholicism anymore than the vast majority of us who support both the police and state - and who recognize that such support must to some extent be compulsory - are at war with the Amish.
(Image via Gila Brand)
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