This Needs Fixin'

I said yesterday that Jonathan Larsen, of “The Fucking News”, is a better writer than I am.

And this is true.

He can usually get at the core of an issue more elegantly than I ever could, and structure his discussion to highlight the particular rhetorical tricks being played in the discourse. He’s really quite good at it.

Turns out he’s also better at it than some folks at “Mother Jones“.

Which brings me to religion, and how U.S. law is being warped to support it.

I’ve discussed this once: That’s Me In The Corner: Privileging My Religion; it’s a short piece, focused on a single example and gets in a few zingers. Not bad, certainly for me. It gets my point down into a single sentence:

The State should not be accepting get-out-of-law-free cards from anyone’s imaginary friend.

“Mother Jones” talks about law and religion quite a bit, naturally, but I want to just look at an example from today: The Parental Rights Movement Has a Big Day at the Supreme Court; it’s long, and very detailed. No zingers, sadly, but that’s not really their style anyway. It fully accepts the framing that the issue is about the 1st Amendment right to practice religion:

Lastly, “The Fucking News” also addressed this hearing yesterday in a Media Watch section of its news roundup. He cuts right through the framing and defines the issue precisely:

This is not about religious freedom. Religious freedom is the freedom from persecution that is not meted out to others.

What anti-LGBTQ+ parents are seeking here is a religious exemption. Religious freedom is the right to equality before the law. The parents are seeking to be above the law.

Now that is some clean writing.

That is exactly what’s going on in this case, and in the religious law movement generally:

The parents are seeking to be above the law.

That’s a good way to think about the issue: the religious law movement is trying to turn a freedom from State intervention into an exemption from the law.

They are, in essence, trying to create a get-out-of-law-free card.

But only for themselves, and only for their religions.

Which is frankly impossible to do in a fair way; there are just too many people and too many religions here.

The only fair solution is for the State to treat each individual equally, privileging none and disadvantaging none, and just ignoring their religious beliefs entirely.

To make that work, the State would also need to stop interfering with freedom of association and to stop using the education system to propagandize to children as well; to stop requiring businesses to service events their owners disagree with, and to stop telling children that one side of a cultural controversy is correct.

It’s simple, but not easy.

I, personally, think that bakers should be happy to bake cakes for gay weddings and that there’s nothing wrong with people choosing whatever “gender expression” makes them happy.

But what I think shouldn’t matter here, nor should what any person thinks; we’re talking about what the State should do about it.

And what the State should do about cultural controversies is nothing.

The only way to preserve freedom is for the State to not be taking sides on cultural issues at all.

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