Forcing their religious opinions on us:

I must have blogged about this a while ago, but this trope keeps bugging me. “Those fundamentalist Christians are trying to force their religious opinions on us,” the argument goes. But that’s what most lawmaking is — trying to turn one’s opinions on moral or pragmatic subjects into law.

     Gay rights activists are trying to force their opinions on us by making employers not discriminate based on sexual orientation, or by making taxpayers pay for various marriage-related benefits for same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples. Civil rights activists forced their opinions about race and sex discrimination on private employers, landlords, and business owners.

     Nor are libertarians immune, unless they’re anarchists (though even the anarchists are willing to force their opinions through the use of deadly force, even if not through legislation). After all, laws against breach of contract, theft, rape, murder, and the like also involve the defenders of those laws forcing their opinions on the rest of us.

     Ah, the argument goes, but those laws are backed by secular arguments, not religious ones. Well, as it happens, many laws — civil rights laws, for instance — were motivated by religious opinions (it’s the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., you might recall). But more importantly, all of our opinions are ultimately based on unproven and unprovable moral premises. For some of us, the moral premises are secular; for others, they’re religious; I don’t see why the former are somehow more acceptable than the latter. And the slogan “separation of church and state” hardly resolves anything here: Churches may have no legal role in our government, but religious believers are just as entitled to vote their views into law as are atheists or agnostics.

     Of course, it’s perfectly sound to disagree with people’s views on the merits: If I don’t agree with the substance of someone’s proposal, whether it’s religious or secular, I’ll certainly criticize the substance. And naturally people will often find others’ religious arguments unpersuasive — “ban this because God said so” isn’t going to persuade someone who doesn’t believe in God, or who has a different view of God’s will. (Likewise, many devout Christians may find unpersuasive arguments that completely fail to engage devout Christians’ religious beliefs.) But there’s nothing at all illegitimate about people making up their own minds about which laws to enact based on their own unprovable religious moral beliefs, or on their own unprovable secular moral beliefs.