It concerns Obama's repeal of the Provider Refusal Rule, which had allowed doctors and others from performing certain functions (like filing out a birth control prescriptions if you are a pharmacist) if they had moral opposition to doing so.
Why shouldn't you be free from doing certain things if you were morally opposed, as an individual, to those things? What rights does society, acting through its government, have in limiting this individual freedom?
Fish reaches back to Thomas Hobbes, who Fish claims held:
that if one gets to prefer one’s own internal judgments to the judgments of authorized external bodies (legislatures, courts, professional associations), the result will be the undermining of public order and the substitution of personal whim for general decorums: “. . . because the Law is the public Conscience . . . in such diversity as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Sovereign Power farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes.”
As I take it, the shared conscience, as enshrined in various public and private entities, must take precedence over individual consciences because it provides for the steadiness necessary to civil society. Individual will is arbitrary and capricious.
This even applies to religious objections:
“As citizens, we should all be concerned when freedoms that are enshrined in the constitution (e.g. freedom of conscience and religion) are blithely swept away” (Susan Martinuk, Calgary Herald).
But while these freedoms may be enshrined in the constitution, they have not fared so well when they have come in conflict with laws passed with an eye toward maintaining order and predictability. In a series of cases stretching from Reynolds v. United States (1878) to Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court has ruled that when the personal imperatives of one’s religion or morality lead to actions in violation of generally applicable laws — laws not promulgated with the intention of affronting anyone’s conscience — the violations will not be allowed and will certainly not be celebrated; for, says the court in Reynolds, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
But while these freedoms may be enshrined in the constitution, they have not fared so well when they have come in conflict with laws passed with an eye toward maintaining order and predictability. In a series of cases stretching from Reynolds v. United States (1878) to Employment Division v. Smith (1990), the Supreme Court has ruled that when the personal imperatives of one’s religion or morality lead to actions in violation of generally applicable laws — laws not promulgated with the intention of affronting anyone’s conscience — the violations will not be allowed and will certainly not be celebrated; for, says the court in Reynolds, “To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
The last part especially is pretty radical. In case you didn't get it, the Supreme Court in 1870 basically stated that the rules of civil society are superior to religious doctrine. If a law is neutral to religion--does not single one for punishment or special status--it takes priority.
Agree? Disagree?
