This is my rant. After Susan G. Komen Foundation, myriad attacks on Planned Parenthood, the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Catholic Bishops and legions of health care and social work professionals seeking conscientious objector status from the 21st Century, while religious based employers seek the right to act as moral police rather than employers over their employees and the never-ending bait and switch of invoking Freedom of Religion as a shield to protect belief-based bigotry, this is my rant.
The anti-progressive forces are at it again, plying their discursive sleight-of-hand trade to every media and political denizen ready to accept the distraction and run with it. After reading and ranting and listening and eventually simply muting the television whenever the "religious freedom" stories appear, it has finally occurred to me that what we are currently undergoing is not so much a crisis about religion, but rather a challenge to democracy.
The real question underlying all of the religiously tinged social issues that the Catholic Church and its right wing political front men and women keep pushing to the forefront is not "how do we minimize the threats to religious freedom?". The question is rather: "how does a democracy handle anti-democratic religious beliefs?"
The answer to that question is not to be found in religion, in identifying the place of religion in US society, in the US polity or even in the US democracy. For clearly there is a place for religions in all three, rocky and tumultuous though it may be. Religions and democracy can co-exist, but when they come in conflict, the principles of democracy must take precedence.
To fall into the trap of defining this in religious terms or even AS a religious issue is to refuse to meet the challenge. This is the distraction the right wing propagandists and pundits are working to create. This debate we now find ourselves in, which we are fighting on several fronts at once: to protect women's rights and health, to insure marriage and family equality, to have employers, whether religious or not, act as employers when they employ and not as arbiters of the individual behavior of their employees, this debate is not about religion, my friends, this debate is about democracy.
As frustrated and angry that the current discussions make this agnostic, feminist advocate for human and civil and economic and healthcare rights for all, I can't help but also see the potential in them to reinvigorate our lagging democratic proclivities, provided we couch them as such. As a feminist, the tendency to make the argument in women-centered, feminist terms is powerful. For LGBT folk, I imagine that same tendency must also hold for human and civil rights centered, anti-discriminatory framing.
Each of those kinds of arguments are compelling, and have strong merits. And each offer the opportunity to express their validity in human terms. I'd not advocate abandoning them, only opening them up to their relationship to the real issue: what's the democratic answer for a pluralistic, multi-faith, non-theocratic society?
Democracies, perhaps more than any other form of government, carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Look to the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky in 1918 Russia. Freedom of religion is one of the central tenets of our democracy. But it is not a weapon to be wielded to dismantle democratic principles (or policies).
Even with this ability to destroy themselves because of the breadth of civil and human rights that they embrace, democracies can use this contradiction to reaffirm and validate those very values. The current miasma of religious scare-mongering, I've come to see, is just such an opportunity.
A strong and healthy democracy can withstand it. A declining one that has perhaps lost its way could use such a challenge to fortify that which it had forgotten. I keep hoping that's the path our public conversation on this issues will take. But it can only happen, if we fail to fall into and accept the right wing framing of these issues as ones of religious freedom. It is vital, I think, to remember the democracy.
It took the Occupy movement to change the economic narrative, mainstream political and media folk seem incapable of doing so without an outside force pushing at them. Perhaps what is needed is a similar movement, calling itself the Challenge, or something, to highlight the democratic frame and change the narrative on all these so-called "social issues" that are really issues about how a democratic society faces the challenges that pluralism in the 21st Century offer.
The question remains: what does a democracy do when religious beliefs are in conflict with democratic values? The answer, I hope, is that it turns full-forward and faces the challenge in democratic terms. And if it does that, difficult and painful though it may prove to be, it renders itself all the more democratic for having faced the challenge and weathered it.