Hatch Speaks on Contemporary Threats to Religious Liberty
WASHINGTON—Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, took to the Senate floor to deliver the fifth in a series of speeches on religious liberty this afternoon.
Senator Hatch has previously delivered speeches on the basic principles, the history, and the status and substance of religious liberty. Last week, he addressed the critical balance between faith and public life. Today’s speech focused on the contemporary threats religious liberty faces at home.
In ways that are both surprising and unprecedented, religious liberty is under attack here in the United States. I speak not merely of attacks on particular practices, but also of attacks on the very idea of religious liberty itself—on the idea that there should be room in society for believers to live and to worship in ways that differ from prevailing orthodoxy.
The campaign against religious liberty has three prongs: the courts, the Obama administration, and state legislatures. My goal today is to explain how each of these institutions is undermining the vitality of religious life in our country and why what they are doing is wrong.
The full speech, as prepared for delivery, is below.
Mr. President, I rise today to speak once again on the topic of religious liberty. This is the fifth in a series of addresses I have given on this vitally important subject. In my previous remarks, I have discussed why religious liberty matters, why it’s important, and why it deserves special protection from government interference. I have also detailed the history of religious liberty in the United States in order to show that the desire for religious freedom was central to our nation’s founding and to the very idea of America. From the beginning, religious liberty has been a preeminent value in American life: government accommodates religion, not the other way around. Lastly, in my previous remarks I have sought to explain how religion has always had a robust public role in our society and to rebut the wrongheaded, ahistorical view that religion is a purely private matter that should be kept out of the public domain.
Today I turn to the status of religious liberty in contemporary American life. My argument is straightforward. In ways that are both surprising and unprecedented, religious liberty is under attack here in the United States. I speak not merely of attacks on particular practices, but also of attacks on the very idea of religious liberty itself—on the idea that there should be room in society for believers to live and to worship in ways that differ from prevailing orthodoxy.
The campaign against religious liberty has three prongs: the courts, the Obama administration, and state legislatures. My goal today is to explain how each of these institutions is undermining the vitality of religious life in our country and why what they are doing is wrong.
Many Americans are unaware of the substantial threats religious liberty faces here in the United States. They look abroad to the Middle East or to Africa, where Islamist regimes are killing Christians and other dissenters from religious orthodoxy, and suppose that by comparison, things are not so bad here in the United States. While it is true that religious minorities in America do not face death or serious physical harm for choosing to live their faith, we must not blind ourselves to the ways in which our government institutions are undermining religious liberty. We must instead come to recognize that powerful forces in our society are working actively to restrict the ability of religious believers to live out their faith and to foist upon them government mandates that are flatly inconsistent with their most deeply held beliefs.
I begin with the courts, which I identified as the first front in the fight against religious liberty.
For a number of years now, there has been a steady stream of cases in which everyday Americans have been sanctioned—sometimes severely—for adhering to religious tenets that conflict with current political orthodoxy. The examples are myriad. A photographer in New Mexico was fined $7,000 dollars for declining to photograph a same-sex commitment ceremony on the grounds that her religious beliefs teach that marriage is a union between one man and one woman and that she could not in good conscience lend her services to the event. A florist in Washington state was fined $1,000 dollars for declining to provide flower arrangements for a same-sex wedding. And a couple in Oregon who owned a cake shop were ordered to pay $135,000 dollars for telling a same-sex couple that they could not provide a cake for their wedding ceremony because the shop owners adhere to a traditional, biblically based view of marriage.
The message that these court cases send is clear: if you are a religious individual with religiously rooted views that differ from the current policies of the state, you follow your beliefs at your own peril. Even those who don’t endorse the view that it’s appropriate for businesses to deny service to customers on the basis of deeply held beliefs must concede that the fines and other sanctions in these cases present a direct threat to religious liberty.
Note that there was no suggestion in any of these cases that the defendant’s refusal to provide service actually prevented the same-sex couple from obtaining the desired items. In each case, other photographers, florists, and bakers without religious or moral objections stood ready to assist. The state was not stepping in to ensure that the couples had access to needed goods and services. Rather, the injury to the couple in each case was that the defendant would not sanction their ceremony. The state did not like the message the defendant’s religious beliefs conveyed and so ordered the defendant to pay a potentially ruinous fine.
The notion that government can override—or punish individuals for—deeply held religious beliefs merely because those beliefs deviate from prevailing views strikes at the very heart of religious liberty. Religious liberty is the right of an individual to practice his or her beliefs even in the face of government, social, or community opposition. If all that is needed for government to override a person’s deeply held beliefs is a disagreement over whether the person’s beliefs send the right message, then religious liberty is weak indeed. It is no longer a preferred value that government must make room for, but rather a common, run-of-the-mill interest that government can override essentially at will.
Recent court cases have undermined religious liberty and threatened the integrity of our religious institutions in other ways as well. One case, decided by the Supreme Court about five years ago, held that schools can require student religious groups to accept nonbelievers as leaders, even though doing so could undermine the group’s mission and install as leaders individuals who do not share the group’s core beliefs. Other cases have sown confusion about students’ ability to express religious conviction in school settings. Teachers and school administrators have barred students from wearing religious imagery, from affirming their faith in essays and speeches, and from performing religious music because they fear running afoul of judicial prohibitions on state establishment of religion. Other officials have denied religious groups access to state facilities to worship or to hold meetings, again fearing potential lawsuits.
But courts are not the only place where religious liberty is under attack. I am sorry to say, Mr. President, that the current administration has done much to weaken religious freedom and to undermine rights of conscience.
Certainly the most notorious instance of the administration’s efforts to undermine religious liberty is the Obamacare contraception mandate. This provision requires employers to provide their employees access to contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs even when the employer has profound moral objections to such drugs. There is a narrow exemption for houses of worship, but countless other religious employers—including religious schools, hospitals, and charities—must either comply with the mandate in violation of their religious beliefs or pay substantial financial penalties.
The administration has also stripped funding from religious groups that refuse, as a matter of conscience, to toe the administration’s line on abortion and contraception. In a remarkable and short-sighted move, the administration revoked funding for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’s relief program for victims of human trafficking because the Conference declined, on religious grounds, to refer victims for abortion or contraceptives. So not only is the administration using the threat of financial loss to pressure religious groups to violate their beliefs, but it is also harming trafficking victims by hindering the ability of religious groups who differ from the administration on matters of conscience to aid victims.
The administration, too, has put federal contractors that subscribe to traditional views on marriage and sexuality on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Last year the President issued an executive order prohibiting contractors from taking into account sexual orientation or gender identity when hiring employees. The order contains no exemptions for contractors with religious affiliations. Under the President’s order, a contractor with a religious mission may be forced to hire an individual who holds views that run counter to that mission in order to remain eligible for federal contracts. The President’s order thus creates the very real possibility that religiously affiliated contractors will have to choose between impairing the integrity of their organization and competing for federal funds.
In addition to pursuing these troubling policies, the administration has also taken extreme and unsupportable positions in court filings that, if adopted, would undermine religious freedom. Before the Supreme Court, the administration made the remarkable claim that federal law authorizes the federal government to involve itself in the hiring and firing of church ministers. Specifically, the administration said that federal antidiscrimination laws override the First Amendment right of churches to select whomever they wish as ministers and instead allow the administration to actually sue a church if it believes a particular hiring or firing was improper. This radical position would allow the federal government to insert itself into some of the most important decisions churches make regarding religious doctrine and governance.
Thankfully, the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s position unanimously. Indeed, in a striking rebuke, the Court called the administration’s claim that the First Amendment provides no more protection to a church in selecting its leaders than it does to a “labor union[] or a social club . . . remarkable.” But the fact that the administration felt comfortable making this argument, and apparently thought that it was a correct argument, speaks volumes regarding the administration’s dim view of religious liberty.
More recently, the administration has signaled tha
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