Freedom of Conscience

Two recent court cases illustrate the incoherence and remarkable intolerance of “liberal” views regarding conscience.

One involves the bottomless pockets of the atheist Michael Newdow, who most recently joined several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department demanding the words “In God We Trust” be scrubbed from U.S. currency. Newdow advocates what Richard John Neuhaus called the “naked public square,” a public life stripped of all references to God or to the duties we owe to Him. The “Constitution” is invoked, that document granting jurists ultimate authority over the local customs of citizens a thousand miles away. The courts have been as wary of religion approaching the minds of impressionable children as an epidemiologist is wary of meningitis. A child in a public school must never have to endure even the vicinity of any common, publicly acknowledged prayer, lest it wound him in his feelings, and lest it undermine a parent’s conscientious objection to giving homage to the Guarantor of conscience.

That supersensitive concern must puzzle a young Christian couple in New Mexico, the Hugenins. They run a small photography business, and they were sued, not for doing anything, but for begging to decline from doing something. They cannot in good conscience take pictures for a celebration of sodomitical relations. They are not saying, like Melville’s Bartleby, that they should prefer not to. They are saying that they must not. They have no choice in the matter—unless they wish to betray all that they hold most dearly. And, with stunning insouciance and callousness, the New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled that such betrayal is the price you must pay to live in a civil society.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s like saying that one must cease to be fully human in order to attain to the human flourishing which civil society is for. That is a contradiction in terms. That the court does not see it as such suggests that it has not considered the nature of religious faith, the claims that the worship of God makes, and the centrality of conscience to the human person.

Think of the violence the state wishes to wreak upon that young couple. Their involvement in the celebration would not be incidental. Unlike people attending a graduation ceremony, they would not be merely present while others did something ordinary, something that even the atheist would not call indecent. If you’re going to take successful photos of the groom and groom, you have to enter into the spirit of the occasion. You have to ask them to kiss one another. You have to photograph their embraces. You have to be a participant.

Alter the terms of the situation. Suppose the Hugenins were asked to shoot photographs at a party thrown to celebrate a friend’s divorce. Would they be required by law to participate in that? Suppose it was a celebration of a porn magazine’s jubilee. Must they assist in that, if the editor comes a-calling? Why should they be compelled to stifle their consciences and be less than human, just to run a business? Aren’t business and politics meant to serve the flourishing of human persons, and not the other way around? Why should running a business expose you to what Jefferson called tyranny upon the mind of man?

Conscience-forcers will argue that the Hugenins are like a racist restaurateur who turns away a black customer. I wonder whether Americans have lost the capacity for rational thought, so feeble are their powers of analogy. First, the restaurateur is in the position of Bartleby, not in the position of Daniel, who refused to do homage to the statue of the emperor. He would prefer not to serve the black customer; but his objections are not moral. It is not his conscience speaking, but his self-will. He does not say that it is wrong for a person to eat. If he believed that, he’d not have gone into the business in the first place. He’d be six feet underground. He simply does not want to serve the man his dinner. But that won’t do, not for someone whose business is to serve the bodily needs we all share in common. It is wrong not to feed the hungry, and people do not digest food through the skin! But the Hugenins most certainly believe that two men or two women celebrating a mimic-marriage are engaging in behavior that is gravely wrong. It’s the behavior and not the persons that they cannot in conscience serve. If one of them were to ask them to photograph her brother’s graduation, there would be no problem.

Second, the restaurateur is not being asked to cooperate in a deed. What the man at the lunch counter does when he leaves the diner is not his business. A bad man may show up at your stationery shop to buy paper. What he does with that paper is not your business. But it’s another matter entirely if the chef or the stationer is asked to take action to support something he believes to be evil. Suppose a Kleagle from the Ku Klux Klan shows up at your bakery and wishes to order a cake with a flagrantly racist decoration—are you required to make that cake? Why? Keep the law out of it for the moment. Consider only the demands of conscience. What would we call the chef who gives in, who knows that what the Kleagle is ordering is wrong, and whose conscience tells him that to comply is evil? We call him a coward, that’s what.

The real question is not whether the Hugenins have a duty to obey their consciences, but why any lover not merely of freedom but of humanity would want to compel them to disobey. Here it’s not just that a Hugh Hefner claims a supposed right to produce pornography. He is claiming the right to make you look at it, to be a part of it, knowing full well that you believe it is evil. He wants you to be either a coward or a hypocrite. What is going on? What kinds of people want to leave the souls of their fellow human beings a twisted mess, by forcing them to violate their consciences? Who would want to make Quakers shoot to kill, not because they need the Quakers to do that, but just because they revile their pacifism and want to rub it out?

One way to blunt your own consciousness of wrongdoing is to bully as many people as possible into it, to compromise them, to wear down their defenses, to entice them if possible, to badger or threaten them if necessary. The homosexuals in question cannot tolerate dissent. If even one person is allowed to decline to manifest a tacit approval of sodomy, that is a punishable offense. You must be suborned or silenced. A child may not be made to endure the proximity of prayer, but he may be required, in some of our schools, to say “I am gay,” or to imagine it, regardless of his conscience or his parents’ moral directives; and if he doesn’t, he will be castigated for his intolerance.

What we see here is the imposition of a religion—the religion of the sexual revolution, as bizarre and incoherent and dehumanizing as it proves to be. The state has become the church, and hearkens to no commandments but those of its own devising.

Article from Crisis Magazine located at:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/2013/conscience-freedoms-denied-by-liberal-courts

God Bless
Nathan

White Martyrdom

You are now living in a country which is rapidly becoming secularized. Now we have a White House that begins to make distinctions between freedom of religion and freedom of worship. Freedom of religion is a right. It’s guaranteed in the First Amendment. And yet, by euphemism and turn-of-phrase, the present administration talks about freedom of worship. The Red Chinese speak about freedom of worship; the old communists and the Soviet Union spoke about freedom of worship. There is a big difference between freedom of religion and freedom of worship.

Freedom of religion, guaranteed to us by the Constitution, tells us that we have a place in the public square, that we have a right and an obligation in conscience, not given to us by a state, but given to us by Almighty God. That is our fundamental right, a right to go out and to speak the truth to power.

But instead, we hear now about a freedom of religion now called freedom of worship. What does that mean? It means you go to your little church, or synagogue, or mosque on Sunday, or Saturday, or Friday night, and you make your prayers over there quietly and don’t bother anybody. And we’ll all get along just fine in this godless, secular world that we are creating; a world in which there is no truth except the truth that man manufactures. And without a truth that comes from Almighty God, all of our rights are in jeopardy.

Will you have the courage to exercise your First Amendment right, freedom of religion? Or are you going to be satisfied with freedom of worship?—I’ll say my prayers quietly; I won’t bother anybody; I won’t disturb the society in which I live.

Right now our Church is being threatened. You don’t often think of it that way; this couldn’t happen in America. And so you hear about an administration that is forcing an HHS Mandate on us, telling us that we must provide in our Catholic institutions abortifacients, sterilizations. For us, that is a moral aberration. It is something that we cannot do. And why is it being pushed on us? Because if we do not obey, then our Catholic colleges, and our hospitals, and our Catholic outreach institutions will be fined and eventually closed down. That will remove the presence of the truth of the Church, remove the mission that Christ gave us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to give drink to the thirsty, to heal the sick. That will remove us from the public square.

This is no accident, my sons and daughters in Christ. This is well-planned. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be fooled.

You’ve heard, the Catholic Church has had one of the most successful adoption services in the country for years. And all of a sudden, in some states, and now in the District of Columbia, there’s a new human invention called same-sex “marriage.” And we are told that our adoption agencies have to supply babies for same-sex couples. This is abhorrent to Almighty God. And we cannot put children in jeopardy of losing their souls and their identity in homes that are now led by same-sex couples. And so our adoption agencies have had to close in those states because the states say that we are not practicing “equality.”

We have had one of the most successful operations to save women who are involved in sex trafficking, sex slavery. The federal government then tells us, “If you want to receive funding for your programs, you’re going to have to supply them [the women] with information for abortion, for birth control pills.” And when we refuse, they tell us, “We can’t help you anymore.” And once again, they try to remove us from the public square.

That’s the secularism that is now engulfing our country. That’s the secularism that you are going to be called to fight. Do you have the courage? Do you have the courage?

Let me tell you what will happen to you. As soon as you take a stand—if you take a stand, because some of you will not, some of you will—if you take a stand, you may not be hired by a firm; they find out that you’re pro-life. We’ve had someone in our class that has had that experience already. If you do become a part of a firm, if you are hired, you may never get promoted, you may never become a partner because you stood up for life or you spoke out against same-sex “marriage.” You may be fired from a position with a corporation because you’re telling them things that they don’t want to hear. You’re speaking about justice. And you’re speaking about the dignity of the human person before profit. And you just might not fit their profile. You may not get a raise. You may not have friends in the office. And some of you might decide you want to run for political office. Will you have the courage to say, “I’m pro-life.”? We have a congressman here now who’s had that courage and he’s been re-elected year after year. Do what’s right. Do what’s right.

But you will be tempted. You’ll be tempted to remain silent. You will be tempted to skirt around the issues. You will be tempted by fame. I want to be a famous lawyer. I want to be a judge. Power! I want to be a powerful person! I want money. But didn’t the devil tempt Jesus in exactly the same way? He’ll tempt you: “Change these stones into bread. Jump off the parapet! Kneel down and worship me!” You’ll be tempted. Like Jesus, though, you must have the courage to say, “Be gone, Satan! I will worship the Lord, my God, and Him alone!” That’s what we call “white martyrdom.”

But then there is “red martyrdom.” Red martyrdom means that you might be called to shed your blood for your faith. You say, “Oh Father, that couldn’t happen in America, could it? Now Oh Father Oh, is really going too far.” Let me tell you something:

Not even a hundred years ago, our closest neighbor to the south, Mexico, had a revolution. And godless secularists took over Mexico, a Catholic country. Churches were closed. Schools were closed. Priests, nuns couldn’t wear their habits in the street. Religion couldn’t be taught. But a movement began, the Cristeros movement, because you cannot suppress the truth; you cannot suppress the Word of God. One of the members of this movement was Father, now Blessed, Miguel Pro. (I gave you small cards with Blessed Miguel’s picture on those cards.) People were being rounded up because they didn’t obey the government. They taught religion. They worshiped. They prayed. And many of them were put before kangaroo courts —This is in Mexico, 1927! — and they were executed. Father Pro — he’s been one of my heroes for years — Father Pro knew that these people needed the ministrations of a priest before they died. And he came up with an ingenious plan. He got dressed up like a prison guard and snuck into prison numerous times. And he heard confessions and he gave the Eucharist before people met their fate at the firing squad. Eventually, Father Pro himself was captured, brought to prison, another kangaroo trial, and the next day, he was brought before a firing squad. Father Pro asked the guards a favor: could he pray before he died? Father Pro knelt down and prayed. Then he stretched out his arms, and he shouted the motto of the Cristeros movement, “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Cristo Rey!” “Long live Christ the King!”

I gave you, attached to that card of Miguel Pro, a small crucifix. Put it in your pocket. And when the world challenges you, when the devil comes after you with all of his enticements, reach into your pocket, take out that crucifix, hold it in your hand, and recite those words, “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Cristo Rey.” And remember what Jesus said your reward would be: The world will hate you; the world will persecute you; the world will speak every calumny against you; rejoice and be glad, for yours is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Good bye. Good luck. God love you all.

Rev. Michael Orsi is a chaplain and research fellow in law and religion at the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida.

Watch the video of his homily at
http://www.catholicwitnesses.org/2013-baccalaureate-mass-homily/

God Bless
Nathan