I actually don’t find the case below discussed by David Bernstein all that ridiculous. Well, it may be completely wrong as a matter of First Amendment compelled speech doctrine. But as a matter of general free-speech and role-of-government principles, I do find this sort of behavior somewhat problematic.
A useful role these sorts of “ridiculous” accommodation claims serve is to remind us how ideological even innocent-looking activities can be. Putting on Gone with the Wind means that someone has to say “Damn,” even if it’s against their religion (or other deeply held belief), and what if this is required to get a drama degree from a public university? So in addition to the primary moral issue with public universities — that is, they take our hard-earned money to provide privileges to other people — they also, by their very nature, have to impose conditions (in this case, speech-based) on people’s behavior to distribute benefits.
But, you say, this is inevitable in any sort of government program — why, you can’t be in the Army unless you agree to do certain things that you wouldn’t otherwise choose to do, and which you have the right not to do! Exactly. The Army and other similar institutions, which are on balance morally justified (they protect more rights than the rights they violate by taxing people, restricting employees’ speech, and killing innocents in war), still survive under this analysis. But institutions that don’t protect anyone’s rights, but only exist as a way of distributing benefits — like universities, arts funding boards, and the like — have this additional conditional compelled speech or compelled action problem going against them.
Perhaps, for various reasons, it’s not feasible to write such a doctrine into the First Amendment. But it does provide an additional moral reason for disliking government institutions that don’t protect people’s rights.
UPDATE: Sean O’Hara at Gibberish in Neutral says that this is like “someone going for a biology degree but refusing to study evolution, or an English major specializing in 20th Century British literature objecting to an assignment on D.H. Lawrence — some fields of study just aren’t always compatible with every belief system.” I agree — but does this mean that (1) the government should offer these fields of study anyway, or (2) that the government just shouldn’t offer those fields of study? Another way of phrasing (2) would be: (a) The government shouldn’t set up a system that rewards people for subscribing to one ideology over another, violating their religious or other deeply held beliefs, etc. (b) Unfortunately, any drama/literature/etc. program worth its salt will violate someone’s deeply held beliefs. (c) Therefore, because the government would only be permitted to offer an awful, useless, watered-down program, it should leave it to the private sector.
So David and I agree that the ideal would be for the government not to offer the program at all, which is all I’m really getting at. Another interesting question is what’s the second best. David suggests that if the government offers the program, it should “pursue reasonable educational goals”; and this is attractive, but it kind of assumes that the “pro-science” perspective (in the biology/evolution context) or “pro-non-ideological-acting” perspective (in the acting/saying-the-F-word context) is a “reasonable educational goal,” which is precisely what these religious objectors are disputing. I don’t agree with the religious perspective, but I appreciate that they’re forcing us (or at least trying to force us) to recognize that even innocuous-looking programs are in reality highly ideologically charged — a view that the radical left has also been (rightly) pushing for ages. Most of us agree that religious education (even if we can agree that it’s desirable in principle) can’t be done both effectively and unbiasedly, so the government shouldn’t do it at all; maybe we should extend that thinking much more broadly.
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