Other Opinion: Government involvement diminishes faith, freedom

Posted: Friday, July 09, 2004


Perhaps to a casual observer, the American Civil Liberties Union and those of us who are unapologetic defenders of minority rights take positions that seem inconsistent. We certainly don't agree on every issue. The Second Amendment is a good example; the ACLU basically punts.

But we're guided by an almost absolutist belief that the overwhelming power of government - certainly including majoritarian ones - is lead-footed and easily bent toward the worst impulses of whatever faction is in control. That recognition led to passage of the Bill of Rights, landmark principles bounding the majority's will.

A vibrant, functional democracy must be as solicitous of consensus as it is of a majority. After all, that majority can be little more than half plus one on any given issue. But no government truly upholds democracy if it fails to afford equality before the law even for the most despised among us. That failure endangers everyone's liberty since it makes civil liberty severable and subject to the prejudices or preferences of the majority.

The ACLU has defended the right of Nazis to parade in the streets of Skokie, Ill., and has defended the Klu Klux Klan against government demands that it hand over its membership lists. These organizations aren't exactly bastions of the American liberal traditions often associated with the ACLU, and a fair number of ACLU members bolted in protest.

The genius of our founders charged an independent judiciary with responsibility for the subtlety of thought and nuance of judgment necessary to distinguish disgusting attitudes from actual lawlessness - the difference between belief and action. We're all free to believe exactly what we choose or hold dear, but our action upon those beliefs must be lawful.

That distinction is precisely why many civil libertarians oppose hate-crime laws. Not because civil libertarians think the wrongs these laws are designed to redress don't exist - far from it. We just believe it's a dangerous and slippery slope to put the government in the business of deciding which beliefs are acceptable and setting punishments accordingly. In the end, that's what hate-crime legislation does.The objective may be laudable, but the precedent threatens liberty.

During World War II, patriotic war fervor led to persecution and imprisonment of Jehovah's Witnesses because their religious views precluded saluting the flag or serving in the military. The ACLU defended their religious beliefs.

No sanction of the Bill of Rights remains under more assault or subject to more confusion than the principle of separation of church and state.

Last month the ACLU came to the defense of a Virginia church denied the use of a public park for baptisms in the Rappahannock River. If you or I can swim in the river, then the Cornerstone Baptist Church certainly can baptize in it.

Recently the ACLU's Southern California chapter filed suit on behalf of a Native American inmate who was denied most prison privileges and held beyond his scheduled release because he refused on religious grounds to cut his hair to the prescribed prison length. And in Omaha, Neb., suit was filed on behalf of a Muslim woman who was refused access to the public swimming pool to supervise her children because she was wearing the head scarf prescribed by her religious beliefs.

On what some would see as the other side of that divide, last month the ACLU intervened to force a suburban Kansas City school district to quit Bible distributions in the public schools. In April the Supreme Court let stand a litigated ban on coerced mealtime prayers at the Virginia Military Institute, a public college.

Inconsistent? Not really. The struggle over religion in the public sphere has been with us since the beginning of the republic. There was a minority at the founding, including the Virginian Patrick Henry, who thought we should officially be a Christian nation and that it was appropriate for the government to endorse one religion - even to tax for its benefit.

Fortunately, the view prevailed that religious freedom was a cornerstone of the republic. Its protection, enshrined in the very first amendment, recognizes that government involvement by its very nature poses a threat. So we're a secular nation with an entirely secular constitution.

That means the government can't coerce or punish us on account of any of our beliefs - religious or otherwise. But when the agencies of government endorse religious ideas and observance, however benignly, there's an agenda.

That's politics, not religion.



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