The 'Religious Liberty' Campaign May Be Backfiring For Conservatives
ED KILGORE – FEBRUARY 25, 2014, 6:00 AM EST
In 2012, the conservative “campaign for religious liberty” looked like a smart and possibly winning strategic gambit. Aimed specifically at the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate, nestled in a broader claim of institutional and individual exemptions from complex and sometimes unpopular laws and regulations, the campaign linked the Conference of U.S. Catholic Bishops with conservative evangelicals and both to the Republican politicians (including presidential candidate Mitt Romney) who made it a new front in both their anti-Obamacare and “family values” messaging.
Some leading Catholic Democrats (e.g., E.J. Dionne) feared it would become a crucial wedge issue. And it gave a nice First Amendment gloss to unseemly culturally reactionary impulses, while providing mainstream respectability to the “constitutional conservative” claim that church-state separation was a threat to faith itself.
Two years later, the “religious liberty” crusade shows signs of backfiring. This very day, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer may veto a bill just passed by a legislature controlled by her own party that provides a broad exemption from discrimination laws to businesses and individuals claiming compliance violates their beliefs. And more generally, an argument that once distracted from the extremist nature of conservative Christian objections to gay rights and reproductive rights is drawing attention to them in a dangerous way.
This began happening first on the contraception coverage front, where the religious objection to the Obamacare mandate had to be justified (in the Hobby Lobby litigation most notably) by the claim that highly effective contraceptive devices (the IUD) and treatments (Plan B and hormonal “patches”) used by millions of women were in fact “abortifacients.”
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How on earth could a gay couple coming into your bakery to buy bread or your restaurant to buy a meal do anything to your faith or practice of your religion? This is in fact saying that discrimination can be based on treating people as non-humans. Just by the fact that they are gay or seem gay, you can shun them and throw them out of your business????? Their very person is an offense to you? It's making my brain destruct!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know I'm not saying anything anyone here doesn't already know. I think the backlash against these kinds of things is going to put the fundies back under their rock where they belong. When I was growing up, fundies were shunned for being insane freaks. Reagan gave them their fifteen minutes and they used their allotted time to screech and howl their incoherent ramblings. Now it's time to yank them off the stage. And it won't be soon enough!!!!!
