Wednesday, May 18, 2016
"The Future of Accommodation"
Here's my contribution to the symposium on the Court's recent (and somewhat cryptic) per curiam opinion in the Little Sisters of the Poor case. A bit:
. . . Regardless of what happens in the ongoing contraception-coverage saga, though, there are more than a few troubling signs that this policy of accommodation and the commitments it reflects are falling out of favor and even being squarely rejected. More and more, the enterprise of accommodation of religion, which is so crucial to the creation and maintenance of civic friendship in a diverse political community, is linked in the public mind and in political arguments with reactionary and even “bigoted” resistance to or reservations about the ongoing and dramatic shifts in attitudes and laws regarding sexuality, family, marriage, and identity. Increasingly, commentators’ emphasis seems to be shifting from the invaluable work that religious civil-society institutions do to the ways in which their norms and practices differ from those of the liberal state. There is decreasing appreciation among scholars and officials for religious organizations’ freedom-enhancing role and the good of pluralism and increasing worry that these organizations’ distinctiveness might, in some cases, complicate the state’s ambitions or undermine its goals. In some quarters, there is more fear that the accommodation of religion will somehow endorse or involve an insult to a third party’s sense of dignity than there is that state action will violate the right to religious freedom that human dignity demands.
To quote the symposium contribution of my friends and colleagues Nelson Tebbe, Micah Schwartzman, and Richard Schragger, it is a “demand of justice” that political authorities in diverse and sometimes disagreeing communities avoid, to the extent their obligations to promote and protect the common good allow it, burdening religious exercise or violating religious conscience. We should hope that, going forward, this demand will be heard and heeded. There is no denying, though, that to the extent the right to religious freedom is regarded as a luxury good, a license to do wrong, or as special pleading by the culture war’s losers, it is increasingly vulnerable. This should concern us all, because believers and nonbelievers alike benefit from a legal and cultural commitment to religious freedom and have a stake in the legal regime that respects and protects it.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2016/05/the-future-of-accommodation.html