BANNING FREEDOM OF RELIGION

Having declared by a 4-3 vote that “husband and wife” are purely accidental terms when it comes to the definition of marriage, the California Supremes are now mulling over a case that promises to stigmatize moral conviction as unlawful bigotry.

The question at issue involves an Oceanside woman whose desire to be impregnated at the medical center of her choice conflicted with the consciences of doctors at the North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group. The matter of conscience involved the fact that the mother-to-be was a lesbian.

The patient in her mid-thirties was already a mother but apparently wanted to increase the number of little ones that she and her same-sex partner were caring for. The doctors at the medical center, however, weren’t willing to be directly involved in promoting a state of affairs they deemed immoral.

In taking this stand the doctors’ consciences were in harmony with the scriptures of every major religious tradition in history—none of which recognize same-sex unions. The doctors’ convictions might also have been shaped by the quaint notion that children deserve to have both a father and a mother and that individuals who intentionally deprive their offspring of one or the other are engaging in an act of stunning self-centeredness.

The plaintiff, however, insists that doctors don’t have a right to make judgments that she and her attorney equate with racism. Echoing a similar sentiment, one of the court justices asked how the doctors’ position differed from that of a pharmacist who refused to sell medicine to “people like you.”

Absent from this analogy was any reflection on the doctors’ obligation to consider the welfare of the fatherless children they would be helping to bring into the world. More egregiously, the plaintiff’s race-based argument ignores the fact that men and women are biologically and genetically different in profound ways—despite the academic idiocy of the 1970s that continues to be selectively invoked in elite circles.

More to the point is this complaint by the plaintiff: “It does do a great deal of damage to a person when you tell them they aren’t worthy of having a child or having a family.”
The politically correct grammar of that statement coincides perfectly with the idea that moral judgments (at least those of the traditional variety) make people feel bad and thus must be expunged.

Public opposition to homosexual activity has already been criminalized in a Canadian jurisdiction where a pastor was ordered to apologize and pay $5,000 for the “pain and suffering” his words inflicted on an aggrieved activist. Canada, of course, doesn’t have a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech and religion. But the Constitution doesn’t seem to be an obstacle for activist judges when it comes to doing the politically correct thing.

Whatever the court decides in this particular case, I am confident our judicial masters will eventually rule that traditional religious and moral convictions about homosexuality constitute “hate-speech” and must be consigned to the privacy of one’s closet.

So much for freedom of religion.