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Federalism Can Still Save Religious Liberty

In an America divided over sex and marriage, devolution is once again the best solution.
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We live in a post-Christian America, broods the insightful “natural pessimist” on morality and religion, Rod Dreher, writing two long pieces on his The American Conservative blog that feature theologian Peter Leithart coming to this dramatic conclusion about government and Christianity in America today:

We’ve fooled ourselves for decades into believing that Christian America was derailed recently and by a small elite. It’s tough medicine to realize that principles inimical to traditional Christian morals are now deeply embedded in our laws, institutions and culture. The only America that actually exists is one in which “marriage” includes same-sex couples and women have a Constitutional right to kill their babies. To be faithful, Christian witness must be witness against America.

Specifically, Leithart had predicted beforehand that “Tax exemption will be challenged, and so will accreditation for Christian colleges and schools that hold to traditional views of marriage. Once opposition to same-sex marriage is judged discriminatory, no institution that opposes it will be unaffected.” He justified his pessimism by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in Windsor:

In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” ”injure,” “degrade,” ”demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

Dreher concluded with an even darker insight, from Catholic Cardinal Francis George:

I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”

Dreher bases his grim view from the passion on the matter exercised by the other side of the debate. He recalled that Maggie Gallagher had reported on a 2006 Becket Fund conference about the now EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum who, raised as an Orthodox Jew, was open enough to attend the symposium with the goal of showing gay respect for religion. Yet, it turned out to be a limited type of respect.

To Feldblum the emerging conflicts between free exercise of religion and sexual liberty are real: “When we pass a law that says you may not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, we are burdening those who have an alternative moral assessment of gay men and lesbians.” Most of the time, the need to protect the dignity of gay people will justify burdening religious belief, she argues. But that does not make it right to pretend these burdens do not exist in the first place, or that the religious people the law is burdening don’t matter.

Feldblum believes this sincerely and with passion, and clearly (as she reminds me) against the vast majority of opinion of her own community. And yet when push comes to shove, when religious liberty and sexual liberty conflict, she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

And it appears that public opinion is now on the side of the gay community. Case closed.

Is America really on the verge of a civil war in which Christians replay the early persecutions? Actually, the most recent Pew survey finds only a plurality of 49 percent in the U.S. support gay marriage but also that 51 percent still think such marriages are sinful. Gays may have won the marriage law but they still lack the legitimacy they demand. The public is split down the middle on whether caterers and florists who have religious objections should be able to refuse services to gays. As far as political elites, region and urbanization play big roles. California has required churches to purchase insurance that includes abortions. Oregon required bakers to supply gay marriage ceremonies. Washington state sued to require a florist to garnish for a gay marriage. Catholic dioceses in Washington D.C. and Boston have left adoption services because forced to refer children to gay couples against church policy. The city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho demanded married, ordained Christian ministers running a wedding chapel, marry gays. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges threatened to revoke their accreditation of Massachusetts’ evangelical Gordon College if it did not change its policy on homosexuals.

This division reflects that of U.S. politics and culture generally: left and right coasts verses middle America, blue verses red states, sophisticates verses rednecks, religious against secularists, conservatives against liberals. The difference is that power has shifted radically left through the Ivy League elite-dominated Supreme and lower federal courts. But does this mean civil strife? Leithart recommends that discriminated-against Christians witness peacefully even at the cost of reputation, economic opportunity and income or even more serious repression. James Davidson Hunter has long recommended shunning politics and especially national policy and going local to reconnect with Jesus and community. Are the catacombs, then, the only remedy for traditionalists determined to follow their faith as courts take decision-making from local control?

Fortunately, federalism is not that brittle. While granting national appeal courts a strong hand against the states on gay marriage, the most recent Supreme Court decision actually turned the matter back to the states for administrative disposition. National courts have limited ability to write their own marriage laws and even with their oversight there is much room for state action to limit the damage as traditionalists await future changes in the complexion of federal courts and law-making.

Before the Supreme Court ruled, 24 states more-or-less voluntarily adopted or accepted same sex marriage. That means remedies are potentially available in the other 26 states to consider legislative remedies to preserve, in some manner or another, marriage between one man and one woman as a unique relationship. The fact that Republicans now control two-thirds of state legislative bodies makes this possible. At least some gay marriage supporters—for example law professor James G. Dwyer–recognize there is a sufficient state interest to pass federal judicial rational-basis review in treating traditional marriage distinctively based upon the unique biological composition of such unions in producing children and perhaps even because children may benefit more under such relationships.

State regulation of marriage itself could remain minimal as at present, being basically a contract between the couple being married. Only with children and the possibility of their abuse, or in separation or divorce is state regulation of marriage per se common. Marriage could even be a purely private or religious contract without government controls other than offering an alternative state contract for those who might prefer one and for all of them being enforceable in state courts. Divorce and separation options could be specified in the original contract, perhaps with limited additional state oversight. When children are involved, the law could distinguish between different child situations: most sections of traditional state child protection law could be re-organized under the title of biological family law and new titles added for adoption and artificial insemination for other child custody originations, which clearly present different issues. Rational differences could be deduced and the state interest in each identified, including any empirical benefits to children under different relationships.

Significant privatization is essential for marriage and social policy generally if force and severe civil conflict are to be avoided. Justice Anthony Kennedy’s main concern was to provide equal material benefits to homosexuals as granted to heterosexual couples under Federal laws. That can easily be achieved by granting all welfare benefits to individuals, to children through whoever has legal custody. As far as anti-discrimination laws, these were adopted as an extreme means to combat the extreme evils of slavery and legal segregation. Over time, new aggrieved groups demanded equal remedy for less cause. Applying such laws to sexual preferences and religious disagreements on morality would be momentous. The European religious wars of the past are not appealing futures and make no mistake, a secular demand for moral equality is a religious claim under a different label. One need only look to the Middle East to see what we should want to avoid. Any real reform of marriage must take place freely in what future pope Joseph Ratzinger then called an attitude of “non-conformity” toward the dictates of current fashion.

Conditions change. Christian marriage did not even require clerical witnesses for its first millennium. The state did not control marriage in Britain until 1754 or in France until the Revolution, before America broke free of both.  Catholic marriages were not recognized in the United Kingdom until 1836. Meanwhile, American federalism provided the means for cooling things off. It managed tensions well enough to take extremely diverse colonies, from Puritan New England, to Anglican Virginia, to Quaker Pennsylvania, to Catholic Maryland, to mixes of these and others throughout the colonies and early states finally developing into a nation by allowing each to develop independently and freely. It failed in 1860 with a civil war but slowly a rose again to a reasonably peaceful, just and prosperous America in modern times.

The U.S. is divided once again by strong views on social policy and wisdom suggests the solution once again is regional diversity, federalism, and a live-and-let-live culture. Without them, Dreher, Leithart, and George might just be proven prophetic.

Donald Devine is senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies, the author of America’s Way Back: Reconciling Freedom, Tradition and Constitution, and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during his first term.

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