{"id":81318,"date":"2019-05-09T14:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-05-09T18:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81318"},"modified":"2019-05-09T18:26:56","modified_gmt":"2019-05-09T22:26:56","slug":"nr-david-french-a-new-york-times-op-ed-is-very-wrong-about-religious-liberty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81318","title":{"rendered":"(NR) David French&#8211;A New York Times Op-Ed Is Very Wrong About Religious Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[I need to respond to]&#8230;Margaret Renkl\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/05\/06\/opinion\/vaccines-religious-freedom.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">fundamentally misguided op-ed<\/a> about religious liberty in&#8230;[a recent] <em>New York Times<\/em>. Like me, Renkl writes from Tennessee (she\u2019s in Nashville; I\u2019m in Franklin), and she uses a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newschannel5.com\/news\/tennessee-wedding-cake-shop-refuses-to-serve-gay-couple-citing-spiritual-conviction\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Tennessee incident<\/a> where a Dickson County baker refused to design and bake a cake for a gay wedding as a launching pad for an attack on America\u2019s most fundamental First Amendment freedoms. Unfortunately, she makes two important legal errors.<\/p>\n<p>First, she gets the primacy of American law exactly backwards. She formulates religious liberty like this: \u201cIn this country, citing religious or spiritual convictions is often a surefire way to get out of doing something you\u2019re required by law to do.\u201d This is a common framing on the left. Essentially, it\u2019s an argument that religious freedom is an intrusion into the law and that religious people are engaged in a form of special pleading \u2014 seeking rights and exemptions unavailable to other Americans.<\/p>\n<p>In reality, the First Amendment is supreme, and when states seek to intrude on religious liberty, <em>they\u2019re<\/em> trying to get out of something they\u2019re required by law to do. Respecting the First Amendment is the default obligation of the federal government and every state and local government in the United States. When people of faith appeal to the First Amendment, they\u2019re appealing to America\u2019s highest law, and while <em>Employment Division v. Smith<\/em> weakened the Free Exercise Clause, multiple subsequent cases have restored at least some of its vitality, and most religious freedom claims are also grounded in the very robust free speech clause of the First Amendment.<\/p>\n<p>And this brings us to Renkl\u2019s second error \u2014 false equivalence.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/corner\/new-york-times-wrong-religious-liberty\/\">Read it all<\/a> and makes sure to read the origirnal article to which he is responding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[I need to respond to]&#8230;Margaret Renkl\u2019s fundamentally misguided op-ed about religious liberty in&#8230;[a recent] New York Times. Like me, Renkl writes from Tennessee (she\u2019s in Nashville; I\u2019m in Franklin), and she uses a recent Tennessee incident where a Dickson County<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=81318\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,168,133,114,108,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-history","category-law-legal-issues","category-religion-culture","category-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81318"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81321,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81318\/revisions\/81321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}