October 11, 2015 8:37 AM

When "religious freedom" doesn't mean what you think it means

[O]ur very favorite First Amendment activist-trolls, the Satanic Temple, sued back in May for an exemption to Missouri’s 72-hour waiting period for an abortion, putting the “logic” of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision to pro-choice use. Well! There have been developments! Back in June, Missouri filed a motion to dismiss the suit, and last week, the Satanic Temple filed its answer, arguing that as a Satanist, their client, “Mary Doe,” believes her body is inviolable, and only she can make medical decisions about her medical care. Thus, the waiting period and mandatory anti-abortion reading material infringed her ability to exercise her faith. (Also, at this point, while the suit is going forward, the practical outcome is no longer a question, since “Mary Doe” went ahead and had the abortion, accepting the waiting period under protest.)

This story comes to us straight from the “Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it” file. Intent on fighting the culture wars until their dying breath, Missouri Republicans, in their never-ending battle to render abortion legal but unobtainable, have passed laws intended to erect significant hurdles before allowing an abortion to take place. The intent, of course, is to make the process difficult and onerous enough that it would dissuade women from climbing the mountain.

Thanks to their restrictive TRAP laws, Missouri has only one abortion clinic to serve the entire state…and no, it isn’t in the business of selling fetal tissue for profit.

The problem, as the state of Missouri is discovering, is that when you pass laws based on what you believe to be Christian doctrine, that argument could be turned on its head and used for purposes you never wanted or intended. This is where the Satanic Temple comes into play. They’re suing the state of Missouri on behalf of “Mary Doe,” who claims that Missouri’s restrictive abortion laws constitute an unreasonable imposition on her religious beliefs.

Doe’s attorney, W. James McNaughton, argued that Doe was entitled to an exemption from the waiting period and reading material under, Missouri’s Restoring Freedom of Religion Act:

Doe “is asking for an abortion on demand,” MacNaughton said. In Missouri “the Legislature has deemed that human life begins at conception. They’ve deemed that an abortion is a termination of human life separate and independent from the mother. These are religious beliefs and she says, ‘No, thank you, I don’t believe in that stuff.’”

The state claims that neither the reading material nor the 72-hour waiting period should be a problem. Their argument contends that Ms. Doe was given reading material as required by state law, but there’s no corresponding requirement that she actually READ it. To call “bullshit” on this argument wouldn’t begin to do justice to it. As Satanic Temple leader Lucien Graves said,

The idea that the materials are of little consequence because you don’t have to read them certainly wouldn’t fly in schools if they started passing out Dianetics, by L. Ron Hubbard to the children[.]

Or tracts from the Satanic Temple, I suspect.

Doe’s attorney argues that forcing her to endure the 72-hour waiting period is a violation of her sincerely held religious beliefs, which include the belief in her bodily integrity and the conviction that she and only she has the right to make medical decisions regarding her body.

It would seem that this boils down to a case of dueling religions. If the state of Missouri is going to make law based on what they define as sincerely held (Christian) religious beliefs, they can’t very well claim to be surprised when someone steps up and says, “Hey, my (non-Christian) religious beliefs are every bit as important and valid as yours.” To argue what at its most basic comes down to “My religion is better than yours” is as intellectually and morally deficient as it is unconstitutional.

It will be very interesting to see how the court rules on the state’s request to dismiss. In the meantime, if you want to support the effort to actually protect religious (not just Christian) freedom, you can drop a few bucks in the Temple’s virtual offering plate at their crowdfunding site.

This might be a good time to remind those wishing to fight the culture wars from a Conservative Christian perspective that America isn’t a Christian nation; it’s a secular nation with a Christian majority. Not exactly a subtle difference, eh?

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on October 11, 2015 8:37 AM.

Conservative, religious...and completely devoid of anything resembling a sense of humor was the previous entry in this blog.

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