Conscience and Religious Liberty
by
Christopher Dodson
Executive Director
North Dakota Catholic Conference
June 2008
The need to protect religious liberty and
rights of conscience from government intrusion has become a
pressing issue for state Catholic conferences. For years,
abortion proponents have called for mandating Catholic
hospitals to perform abortions, provide contraceptives on
demand, perform sterilization, and dispense the
“morning after pill.” Adoption agencies have
faced pressure to provide services to same-sex couples.
Some states require Catholic employers to include
contraceptives in employee health plans.
These attempts to erode religious liberties involve
government action through laws or regulations. To some
extent, therefore, the Constitution provides some
protection.
The Constitution, however, only protects a person from
improper government action. It does not protect someone
from private action, such as when private groups use public
pressure to get a person or entity to change its policies.
That there seems to exist more public acceptance of
demanding a religious person or institution to change its
policies in contradiction to their religious beliefs should
give us reason to worry.
Take, for example, a recent case involving the University
of St. Thomas in St. Paul. The university’s law
school, as part of its effort to instill a Catholic sense
of community and solidarity in its students, requires every
student to complete a public service project. A student
tried to fulfill that requirement by volunteering at a
Planned Parenthood site. The dean decided that such service
could not count as the student’s public service since
Planned Parenthood’s work is “fundamentally at
odds with a core value of the Catholic Church.” The
story, as is often the case today, circulated on numerous
web and blog sites, in addition to the traditional local
newspapers.
Some of the negative reactions to the school’s
position revealed confusion about Planned Parenthood and
what it does. Simply put, these writers were ignorant of
how Planned Parenthood’s work is in direct
contradiction to Catholic teaching. More disconcerting,
however, were those who thought that the school had no
right to restrict where the student conducted her public
service. To many, the university’s Catholicity should
not extend beyond some curriculum and upper faculty
choices. A commonly expressed argument was that since
school accepted the student’s tuition and accepted
non-Catholic students, the university had no business
dictating what was a proper form of public service.
Glaringly absent from these comments was any appreciation
of the fact that University of St. Thomas is a private,
religious institution and as such has every right to decide
what is or what is not consistent with it’s religious
beliefs.
Another example: A private nursing home has a privately
funded chapel dedicated for Christian services. When a
resident who adhered to a non-Christian faith died, the
facility decided it could not allow a service for the
resident in the chapel, since having a non-Christian
service would have been contrary to the facility’s
mission and the purpose of the chapel.
The story became public when upset friends of the deceased
person wrote letters to the local newspaper. The writers
accused the nursing home of practicing discrimination and
of forfeiting its religious rights when it accepted the
resident’s money. It did not matter to these critics
of the nursing home that payment wasfor the purpose of
providing health and residential care, not post-death
religious services.
The charge of discrimination is frequently made in these
cases. “Discrimination,” with its connection to
animosity-driven injustices, particularly those based on
race and gender, immediately evokes negative feelings. We
have, however, gone too far in that regard. There exists
wrongful discrimination and acceptable discrimination.
Practically every law discriminates, in that it
distinguishes or differentiates between actions and classes
of persons.
The right to discriminate - that is, to differentiate, is
at the heart of religious liberty. Every religion, by its
nature, differentiates between what is right and what is
wrong, what is proper and what is improper, what is
desirable and what is undesirable. Every religion also, in
various degrees and actions, distinguishes between who is
“in” and who is “out.”
Claiming that no church should discriminate may sound
appealing at first. Taken to its logical conclusion,
however, such an attitude means the elimination of
religious liberty and ultimately religion itself.
