Conscience Freedoms Denied by Liberal Courts

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.  (more...)

Conscience Freedoms Denied by Liberal Courts