Nathaniel Frank on Contraceptive Coverage Discussion: Belief Alone Is Not Enough

And here's a companion piece to what I've just written about Kirk Cameron and his assertion that if he and other right-wing Christians believe it, so it should be: if I'm a Christian and I believe, then it's right.  And how dare you contest my claims and then pretend to stand for morality or Christianity?  When I'm the definition of morality and Christianity.

Nathaniel Frank expertly dissects these claims and their consequences in the public square as he examines the ongoing attempt of the religious and political right to block access to contraception in health care plans.  As he maintains, the mere assertion of a religious belief is not a sufficient warrant for denying rights to others in a pluralistic secular democracy, nor is it a basis for claiming "conscience exemptions" that permit you to flout laws binding on others, which are designed to serve the common good:

From that central revelation [i.e., that law cannot compel particular beliefs] flowed a body of law that attempted to protect religious practices that did not conflict with other people's autonomy. The first amendment protects religious liberty, but it's not absolute, any more than any other constitutional protection. The Supreme Court has now said repeatedly that moral disapproval of homosexuality -- absent any compelling governmental interest such as protecting people from harm -- cannot be used to deprive people of liberty, including the freedom of consensual sex. Its decisions were not a matter of controlling belief, but of protecting universal freedoms against government incursions that were being justified solely by a belief in the immorality of homosexuality. 

Indeed, what you believe is not the same as how you behave, particularly outside of a church or other religious institution (the Obama health care policy already exempts churches from full participation). If you choose to run a business, organization or state (or country), you are signing up to play by a common set of rules. These rules should not be set by the mere profession of some people's beliefs, particularly when those beliefs are not subject to standards of empirical evidence about the costs and benefits of the policies they're cited to justify.

The American system of governance, from its foundational documents forward, respects the right of religious freedom as a basic human right.  These foundational documents do not, however, regard religious freedom as an absolute right.  

When any religious group seeks to press claims about its "right" to disobey laws crafted to serve the common good, those claims must be weighed against the common good itself in a democratic society.  And simply asserting that one believes, and what one believes must be right because one believes it, is not enough, in a democratic society that expects to function well.

Not if we care about the common good, that is.  Because creating and sustaining a fragile common good requires us to weigh conflicting claims of various faith communities, as well as of citizens who do not adhere to any faith tradition at all--to weigh these claims against the needs of the body politic as a whole.

If, that is, our goal is really to build and maintain the common good . . . .