US: Religious Rights vs Secular Rights

the full options:

No person should be required to obey a law whose obedience causes conflict with their religious belief, under any circumstance
No person should be required to obey a law whose obedience causes conflict with their religious belief, except in an instance where an exemption would have influence on other individuals
No person shall receive an individual exemption from the law for religious reasons, but a private business can seek religious exemptions
A person should be allowed individual exemptions from the law for religious reasons, but businesses should not receive such consideration, private or public
Regardless of religious affiliation, citizens of a secular society should be subject to the same laws
Religious folk should be forced to relocate to a specific city in the United States, where they can do as they please and leave me the fuck alone
Secular folk should be forced to relocate to New York City and party it the fuck up until the Rapture
Stryper were never a 'true' Christian band as they were seduced by the evils of the secular world and hurt our Saviour deeply
Ave Sathanas
Other (explain)

secular obv

Why can't the secular folk be forced to relocate to the suburbs to party?

Regardless of religious affiliation, citizens of a secular society should be subject to the same laws

This one.

1. The clever blurring of "freedom of religious belief" and "freedom of religious practice" can get tae fuck, as they say.

2. Dear conservative xtian: there's not a person alive of any gender, orientation, color, place on the political spectrum, etc etc, who can keep you out of your heaven. Everything else is just "fuck you."

I was going to answer this poll seriously but, as always, I found Satan to be the more compelling option

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puwllq0fBLs

lol crut

Conscientious objectors are about the only category where I would give an exemption, and then only to military conscription. NB: in the USA COs are only allowed a choice between going to jail or performing some alternate service that amounts to enforced servitude, so it isn't as if they get some cushy ride.

I guess where I fall is...I don't feel that 'beliefs' should be a shield, for the most part. Just because this particular 'belief' (in your mind) affects your 'final destination' shouldn't make it more special than other kinds of beliefs.

That said, I am definitely not saying "trample on the rights of religious folk simply because I have a chip on my shoulder". But I think in attempting to walk the thin line in respecting religious belief while also not infringing on secular society, the balance is teetering dangerously closely to swinging back in the favor of those who do practice.

There was one politician (whose name I've forgotten) who recently went on record as stating that nobody should ever be compelled to violate their religious beliefs, ever, under any circumstances, which is utter nonsense. Where religion and law intersect, law should win. The concessions I'm willing to make are individualist concessions, like an employee asking an employer for Sundays off due to his religious beliefs. If it doesn't negatively impact his co-workers (ie, them constantly being short-staffed), then why not.

United States v. Lee was really the most practical and common-sense ruling in this case, but it sort of became negated due to a broad interpretation of the RFRA.

No person should be required to obey a law whose obedience causes conflict with their religious belief, except in an instance where an exemption would have influence on other individuals

Does "influence" mean, generally, a negative ramification? You can practice your religion as long as it doesn't hurt other people? Does this include your children, ie you can practice your religion as long as you don't indoctrinate your kids into it? Like to some extent I do believe that to truly protect freedom of religion, we need to not just allow pockets of exemption for individuals, but for families and communities too. And maybe even for tradition/ritual/faith that is possibly negative and even harmful.

But like I think we should still ban human sacrifice, even if it's really important to the religion. We don't have to completely abdicate all of our ethics, but maybe just loosen them considerably in favor of freedom of religion. i think we do something similar for freedom of speech where we allow very broad expression (tho not all speech is protected) even when it's hate speech (as long as no imminent danger).

good point re indoctrination: should obv be illegal imo

How would you go about enforcing that?

beatings

of the kids or the parents?

being able to distance yourself from your parents is an important freedom in 2014

As important as it is impossible to define.

It's more a q of parenting but I wld advocate more choice for kids rather than giving religious parents extra rights over them re: exemptions/blood transfusions &c.

How do you go about determining the age at which kids are best equipped to make these choices and how do you account for what can be drastic variations in maturation and circumstance?

Say some parents don't want their child to have a transfusion and the child exercises those given rights acquiescently in order to please their parents, whilst not fully comprehending the implications. What then?

i think if we don't give parents a certain amount of autonomy in raising their children according to their faith we can't really be said to have freedom of religion

so be it tbh

When I mentioned transfusions I was thinking of something parents shouldn't have rights over rather than something for kids to choose (unfeasible in lots of important cases anyway).

Does freedom of religion mean no freedom of religion for children?

When we've gone as far as state laws allowing parents to let their children die so long as they "sincerely" follow a program of "faith healing" in lieu of medical treatment we've gone way past "a certain degree of autonomy" tbrr

I don't think a parent choosing to raise their child in a certain religion should be regulated, as it's the reverse side of the coin - parents are going to do the same thing with many other non-religious beliefs, would we police those too? Ethically, of course, I always feel a parent should expose the child to the options that exist, including the belief they possess, and let them choose for themselves, but we know that doesn't always happen.

When it comes to the health and safety of a child, that's a different matter. I support the current laws in this manner, as many Christian Science practitioners have let their children die of diseases due to non-belief in medicine/treatment, and I support them being incarcerated for child neglect. As the child can't drive themselves to the hospital, or understand the breadth of their medical diagnosis, they are wholly dependent on their parental unit to provide them the best care. I don't care what god you believe in, if your child is dying of cancer, and needs treatment to survive, it is your duty to seek it for them.

"Freedom to practice religion" is too often conflated with "freedom to exempt oneself from the laws of society on account of religion". I don't feel that merely having a spiritual belief should compel the government to bend over backwards to accommodate you. There are thousands to millions of competing religions with conflicting beliefs - it is inevitable that the tenets of these beliefs might conflict with societal law.

Where it is feasible to accommodate an individual without directly impacting others who don't share the belief, then I say "fine, go ahead"! But the slippery slope we're headed now may lead to individuals who don't believe suffering repercussions on behalf of someone else's religious belief.

part of freedom of religion is the right to practice even when it conflicts w/ the majoritarian ethics + laws. i think something like blood transfusions or refusing medical care is maybe a location where we might want to limit this freedom, but in general it should be preserved. for example i don't think we should ban circumcision, even tho some ppl believe it is damaging/abuse.

but what about when someone's belief compels someone else to believe by proxy? ie in the Hobby Lobby ruling, the impact of acknowledging their religious exemption spread to their entire female employee base, who may or may not share those beliefs.

body modification is in a way the key case - ancient cultural traditions vs one of the most fundamental enlightenment rights: sovereignty over yr own body cf. fichte, locke &c.

US founded on principles much closer to the latter + so mb seems particularly incongruous.

how do you figure that the US was founded more on principles of body sovereignty than principles of freedom of religion?

I suppose ancient cultural traditions & religion are basically the same thing for that purpose, but I am curious if e.g. cranial deformity is legal in the US

I don't rly understand how this can be discussed without being able to define 'religious belief'. What makes a belief 'religious'? "I believe abortion is wrong" vs "I believe abortion is wrong... because God/the Bible/etc says so"?

i think we're talking about particular tenets of faith + practice. for one, bc afaik cult praxis isn't protected like established religion. so yes, the belief has to be located in a particular religious tradition/text.

I'm thinking maybe I'm wrong about drawing a distinction between cults + established religions... I feel like a lot of protected controversial religious practices though rely on the existence of a history justifying that practice. I'm not sure you could just start up a religion tomorrow with a precept about chopping the earlobes off newborns and get away with it...

why not

mormonism?

All of the top 5 sound like they would work just fine as long as the people involved had good intentions and didn't want to fuck over anyone else.

If I'm right in thinking that 18th century freedom of religion laws were a way of getting out from under the absolute misery brought about by the 15th-16th-17th century wars of religion between Catholicism and Protestantism (and their associated political powers - states, empires, princes, clergy etc) ... then what happens now, after the reformation/counter-reformation has been resolved?

Or has it. Dunno, not saying that all religious conflict has been solved by any means, but today's world is obvs very different from the world of the English Civil War, War of Spanish Succession, German 30 Years' War etc. The original backdrop to the American freedom of religion laws having receded, where does that leave us?

(Or is the government telling a chain of fast food restaurants that they can't refuse to employ gay people really no different from people being burned at the stake for reading the Bible in the wrong language? Does it feel like that to the believers in question?)

i don't hold this position myself but i can see how someone might feel like paying for birth control is a horrific breach of their conscience. only bc i'm familiar w/ the emphasis (wrongfully, imo) placed on these issues in christian life. imho in this case they should get over it - but someone might feel the same way about ritual islamic + jewish circumcision - "okay i understand it's important to you, but get over it," and i think that kind of thing should be strongly protected by the first amendment. so maybe we should always err on the side of religious freedom when it's not an egregious violation of public values. re hobby lobby i don't think businesses are ppl, even family owned businesses.

nb "Among all women who have had sex, 99 percent have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98 percent, among sexually experienced Catholic women." so hobby lobby's position is kinda infinitely more hypocritical than circumcision cases.

Reading about the case of businesses wanting the right not to employ gay staff, and similar, has made me think about what my principles actually are, and what I seem to think is, that there's a huge difference between:

The effect I have on the world around me using my own body

and

The effect I have on the world around me using my employees, owned property, and financial power

It seems like common sense to me that the state should allow you a lot of room for your conscience in the former case, but in the latter, the state should step in because now you have a lot of power over other people and that should be subject to rules above you.

lots of religious traditions conceive of identity in more collective & relational terms than rights, which are formulated at the level of the individual, purely on grounds of being human/a citizen. mordy is probably right that without some protection at the collective level you don't have particularly strong freedom of religion. dysmorphia is probably a way down the list of most serious symptoms of a religious upbringing though

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