Great essay on the HHS mandate at Crisis Magainze that argues that liberal arguments from the right are undermining the principles that should govern our perception of the debate.
Famously in his “Letter Concerning Toleration,” John Locke refused to extend toleration practically to only one faith – Catholicism. His claim was that toleration could not be extended to any faith that acknowledged a “foreign potentate,” which, for all practical purposes, meant the Pope. But, it requires a peculiar set of assumptions to conclude that the Pope is a “foreign potentate” – while the Pope does not claim political rule over Catholics, the Pope is the final arbiter of doctrine that is to govern not only the private behavior of Catholics, but their role and witness in the world. It is no coincidence that many of the cases involving “religious liberty” now involve Catholics, inasmuch as Catholics have erected worldly institutions in the effort to live out the witness of their faith – schools, universities, hospitals, charities, and the like. The Catholic faith is, by definition, not “private”; it involves a conception of the human Good that in turn requires efforts to instantiate that understanding in the world. As such, Catholics represent a threat to the liberal order, which demands that people check their faith at the door and acknowledge only one sovereign in the realm of proscribing public behavior – the State.
Catholics begin with a fundamentally different understanding of the human person than liberalism. We are not by nature “free and independent”; we are, rather, members of the Body of Christ. In the natural law understanding, we are by nature “political and social animals” (so states Aquinas, following and amending Aristotle), requiring law, culture and religion for our flourishing and right ordering. The law does not simply seek to regulate and prevent bodies from committing harm; rather, the law necessarily derives from, and seeks to advance, a positive vision of human good and human flourishing. The law reinforces the Divine law, seeking the restraint not only of practices that will harm others, but which will tend toward a condition of sin and self-destruction. Even where the law is “silent,” we are not at leave simply to act as we wish; rather, we are admonished to live in accordance with and by the practice of virtue necessary to human flourishing. A polity based upon securing “the Right” is radically insufficient; rather, the polity is understood to be a reinforcement of efforts to orient people toward “the Good.” While the Church and State necessarily operate in different spheres, the State’s activities are oriented by the vision “the Good” articulated by Church and God’s word.
Critics of the HHS mandate have framed their responses to the mandate within liberal terms. This is doubtless a requirement and necessity in contemporary liberal society – to gain a hearing at the table of public opinion, and especially the Courts, arguments must be framed in dominantly liberal terms. Thus, critics of the Mandate have sought to craft their response by claiming that the Church’s internal beliefs will be violated by the Mandate, that the Mandate represents an encroachment upon “conscience.” Critics of the Mandate thus downplay and even ignore the content of the belief in question; they rally around the protections of conscience, claiming a sphere toward which the State should manifest indifference, in which they should not meddle. The nature of the belief is largely irrelevant for the sake of the claim. Many of the Mandate’s critics (especially non-Catholics) claim that they regard the Church’s view on birth-control to be somewhat batty, but that fact is irrelevant to the Constitutional issue protecting private institutional conscience and free-exercise. Catholic critics don’t depart much, at all, from this same argument.*
Catholic as well as non-Catholic defenders have largely sought to hold at arms length any claims about the rightness or truth of the Church’s teachings on birth control: these are to be treated as belief within a “black box” that should be ignored by liberal society. As long as those crazy beliefs don’t harm individuals within or beyond the faith tradition, then they should be accorded respect and indifference by the State. The Church seeks the leave of the State on the only terms recognizable by the liberal state: we have a certain set of private beliefs that aren’t harming anyone. Leave us alone, and we’ll be quiet.
However, everyone is aware, even if dimly, of the real issue, though few explicitly raise the matter. The Church does not seek to propound its teachings as a matter of internal belief solely for its faith adherents: it claims that its teachings are true as a matter of human good. The teachings regarding birth control are not simply a peculiar faith tradition that is thought to apply to adherents of Catholicism; it is a teaching that Catholicism hopes and intends to be adopted by all people, regardless of their faith tradition. The strictures concerning birth control are not propounded as a “faith-based” peculiarity applicable only to Catholics, like Jewish dietary laws, but as a considered position concerning the Church’s deepest understanding of the human good – one that can be, and has been, framed in terms that are intended to be accessible and persuasive to non-Catholics. Among other reasons offered, the adoption of a birth control concerns a practice that Catholicism has understood to entail profound social consequences that, when widely practiced, leads to profoundly damaging social practices.
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