October 2015
THE LINE BETWEEN CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS RIGHTS
Jim Denison- Denisonforum.org Kim Davis’s story has elicited strong opinions from people on both sides of the political spectrum. She was a talking point in the latest Republican debate, and her story continues to polarize as people are seemingly forced to choose whether or not her religious rights are more important than her duties as a government employee. Linda Greenhouse reflects on that choice in her latest opinion piece for the New York Times. In “Drawing the Line Between Civil and Religious Rights,” Greenhouse asks “For all the reasons to object to a public policy…should claims
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based on religion receive more respect than the others? If the answer is yes, is it yes without limits?” Religious liberty is one of the foundational tenets of the United States. The first colonists left England in the hopes of finding a place where they could practice their beliefs without government interference. And while those early settlers were more concerned with their religious freedom than that of others who believed differently, it was still a principle that eventually developed into our First Amendment right to live free from Congress passing any “law respecting an
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establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That all sounds great in theory, but what happens when protecting the religious rights of some means denying the civil rights of others? Should one take precedence over the other? Davis’s case isn’t the first to raise this question. Greenhouse points out that, in 1998, a federal appeals court in Chicago denied a police officer’s request to be exempt from standing guard at an abortion clinic on his beat even though he claimed a religious objection to doing so. Judge Richard A. Posner wrote of the decision that while the officer was “entitled to his view,”
he was “not entitled to demand that his police duties be altered to conform to his view.” Posner went on to reference how a firefighter could not refuse to put out the flames if a competing religious sect’s house of worship was on fire simply because he opposed their views. Essentially, it would seem that the court’s opinion was that an individual has religious rights until exercising those rights causes him or her to violate the rights of others. Perhaps it is at this point that the principle of accommodation
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The Ambassador
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