Ideological Fault Lines in (Post-)Mormonism

[Analytics]

That's exactly why the underlying principle should be questioned. The ACA was a compromise that took a single payer system off the table. But while it relies heavily on employer-provided health insurance programs, it's disingenuous to argue the government is forcing a group to violate their beliefs by requiring a standard that includes reproductive rights as if it would then be different if the government was instead collecting taxes to accomplish the same end.

So it is reasonable to ask where one should draw the line on being able to opt out of paying into programs the government claims are for the common good but where a person may object on moral grounds.

I don't think the discussion is benefited by the details of religious vs secular beliefs. I agree the issue should be one of law. The argument in either direction should stand without appealing to atheists or religionists asserting they are being discriminated against one way or the other. That's part of the problem.

I think the following quote is illustrative of several things we're talking about: inconsistency in views, the shifting political landscape, and making opinions based on what side of the cultural divide you are on rather than true underlying principles.

Not too long ago, a supreme court justice argued for exactly what I've been arguing for in this thread. He said:

"The free exercise of religion means, first and foremost, the right to believe and profess whatever religious doctrine one desires....

"Respondents in the present case, however, seek to carry the meaning of "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" one large step further....They assert, in other words, that "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" includes requiring any individual to observe a generally applicable law that requires (or forbids) the performance of an act that his religious belief forbids (or requires)....

"We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition....

"...[freedom of religion does not create] a private right to ignore generally applicable laws."

Those words were penned by non other than conservative hero Antonin Scalia in 1990.

It needs to be understood that the orientation of that case was reversed--the religious practices in question weren't anti-abortion nuns (i.e. aligned with the religious right), but rather were native Americans who smoked peyote during their religious services (i.e. aligned with liberals).

So what's happened? Has the political spectrum shifted to the right, so that if Scalia were to say now what he said then he'd be considered just as liberal as me? Or are they simply selective about which side of the culture war gets strong freedom of religion vs. weak freedom of religion?

My position is to liberalize all the laws. Let everybody practice polygamy. Let everybody smoke peyote. Let bakers everywhere discriminate against gays. Let all employers decline to offer contraception coverage in their health plans. If a law is really necessary, make everybody obey it. Don't carve out exceptions for people who meet the government's definition of being sincerely religious.

I may be wrong about that, but I hope I'm at least being internally consistent.

[Symmachus]

Are you projecting? I suspect my lack of emoticons (e.g. ) caused you to misinterpret my amusement ( ) for for touchiness ( ).

Maybe I really am a Nazi!

Not touchy at all.

Desirability and logical consistency are two different things. I'm certainly not saying that logical consistency is a sufficient condition for a desirable world view, and I'm not necessarily even saying internal consistency is a necessary condition for a desirable world view. I am suggesting that it if hills somebody chooses to die on are not consistent with each other (e.g. sometimes they shrug their shoulders about their own people choosing to use birth control and other times they take the issue to the Supreme Court), something else is going on besides a rational expression and defense of their own values.

Yes, of course they are different things, but my point is that there much more to consider than apparent in/consistency.

I don't disagree with this. I'm just pointing out that things have gotten more acrimonious, the willingness to compromise is diminishing, the division is getting more pronounced, and where the lines are drawn are shifting. There are reasons for those things.

Yes, and I'm saying a number of widening ideological rifts are the reason. I think structural arguments put the cart way before the horse. You can have the most finely honed political structure imaginable designed by the brightest political scientists ever to have drawn a paycheck from a think tank, but it won't matter if the constituents parts of the society hate each other's guts.

No, I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that if somebody is being inconsistent about what wars they fight in defense of their own values, it is an indication that something else is going on. For example, the Little Sisters' legal bills must be in the millions. Did they come up with that money themselves? I would guess not. Then who is footing the bill? Why? Do they have purposes other than a mere passion that religious organizations should not being forced to fill out a simple one-page form that declares their religious objection to providing birth control coverage?

I'm sure it's a papist cabal of some kind behind it all. Or maybe some unreformed Jacobites.

Inconsistency is a sign something else is going on other than a rational expression of your values, whatever they may be.

Absurdly simplistic. It could be a sign of all kind of things that are independent of the rational expression of values. People face constraints, which creates priorities, etc. That doesn't diminish the underlying rationality of a position or the advocacy of that position in a given context. Indeed, tighter constraints in one area will lead to emphasis in another area where constraints are looser. I'm sure you can think of some examples from Mormonism. In any case, I still see nothing inconsistent in the nun's position beyond mirage of alternatives you conjure up as an arbitrary benchmark.

Imagine a vegetarian organization that got a tax-subsidy on offering food to their employees in their cafeteria. A stipulation of the tax-subsidy said they had to either serve meat or file a one-page document that declared their religious objection to meat. Filing that objection would allow employees to get a free meal with meat down the street, if they wanted to eat there rather than the vegetarian cafeteria.

Say the organization decided to sue, saying they were so opposed to meat that it would be unconscionable to declare their opposition to meat; doing so would allow their employees to get free meat elsewhere if they wanted to. If they were that opposed to meat, I'd expect them to say that being a vegetarian was a condition of employment. After all, non-vegetarians could use their paychecks to purchase [gasp] meat!

Your tweaking of the analogy misses the core issue of the case, but as I said, I'm not interested in trying to defend the case on its own grounds but rather to show that it reflects a genuine ideological rift. So I'll run with your analogy. Why did the government decide to introduce this new stipulation about meat? Of course, there is a rational articulation for that basis—helps feed people—but ultimately there is an ideological split between the state, which believes eating animals is moral or at least aligns with such a belief and the fanatical vegetarians, who believe it is not. There is moral question at the foundation of this. Now, previous to the enactment of this stipulation, the state took no position on the eating of meat one way or the other. Now they are mandating that meat be offered. That is to say, the state has used its power to advance a moral position on the question of eating meat, whatever the reason they give for doing so. The vegetarians, by filling out this document, will activate a series of procedures that will make meat available. Whether this meat becomes available hinges on their participation, because without their participation, that meat won't be made available. Personally, it won't affect them perhaps, but by participating in this process, they are helping the state to advance the moral position to which they are opposed. Added to that, there is no guarantee that the state will approve the accommodation: the state has the final say on whether or not the objections merit a waiver anyway. In other words, the practice of fanatical vegetarianism is conditional on the state's acquiescence.

My point is that, whatever you think should happen, it is undeniable that the state has taken an ideological position on this issue and arrogated to itself powers to enforce that position that it previously did not have.

If they were selective in their fanaticism and didn't require their employees to be vegetarians, I'd accuse them of being inconsistent in their moral outrage.

I don't think this is necessarily inconsistent. It's a question of priorities. For all I know, the nuns require all employees to be celibate, but they have no mechanism by which to impose that (there is no meaningful action they can take) whereas it is/was within their power to sue on an issue in which their organization was mandated to perform an action.

So what's happened? Has the political spectrum shifted to the right, so that if Scalia were to say now what he said then he'd be considered just as liberal as me? Or are they simply selective about which side of the culture war gets strong freedom of religion vs. weak freedom of religion?

Once again, I think there is a far more fundamental misunderstanding, and viewing this through the lens of "conservative vs. liberal" or "right vs. left" distorts the issue. Scalia is not a stand-in for every conservative, and in fact a lot of conservatives have been opposed to his jurisprudence precisely because it was positivist in the strictest sense (as have many liberals): that's what originalism is. As I'm sure you know, the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act—spearheaded by Chuck Schumer and Ted Kennedy!—was passed not long after this by a Democratic congress and administration in 1993 because of the absurdity that Scalia's positivism created in Smith. Before that case, the state had to prove it had a compelling interest in curtailing religious practice, and American citizens had a very, very wide berth because of the 1st amendment. Scalia curtailed that right in the peyote case. Before Smith, the state could not ban peyote use in a religious ceremony unless it could show there was a compelling reason for it. However, under Scalia's view, as long as a state applied the law to everyone without singling out a religion in the text of the law, then it no longer had to show that it had such interest. That meant that Oregon could just ban all peyote but just not its use by Native Americans in particular—effectively denying the plaintiffs in that case the ability to practice their religion. By the same token, the state couldn't ban hijab but just all head-covering. It couldn't ban bris but could ban circumcision in total. It couldn't ban baptism but it could ban public water sprinkling of babies, etc. etc. It effectively nullified the free exercise clause because Scalia's ideological positivism.

If one believes the law is the law without considerations of justice or right, and that the scribbled letters are the final arbiter, that judges are cogs who only need to look words up in dictionaries, and that their task is a simplistic internal consistency that is divorced from the needs of the human society that the law is meant to serve—well, then perhaps one can find something to admire in Scalia's jurisprudence. The fact that he was personally conservative is irrelevant; as a judge, he was as positivist as they come.

I may be wrong about that, but I hope I'm at least being internally consistent.

Well, at least we agree that being consistent is different from being correct.

See my upcoming book, "I May Be Wrong About That, But I Hope I'm At Least Being Internally Consistent: The Jurisprudence of Antonin Scalia."

[Analytics]

Desirability and logical consistency are two different things. I'm certainly not saying that logical consistency is a sufficient condition for a desirable world view, and I'm not necessarily even saying internal consistency is a necessary condition for a desirable world view. I am suggesting that it if hills somebody chooses to die on are not consistent with each other (e.g. sometimes they shrug their shoulders about their own people choosing to use birth control and other times they take the issue to the Supreme Court), something else is going on besides a rational expression and defense of their own values.

Yes, of course they are different things, but my point is that there much more to consider than apparent in/consistency.

If I ever implied that the only thing to consider is somebody's consistency, I apologize. That was not my intention.

Yes, and I'm saying a number of widening ideological rifts are the reason. I think structural arguments put the cart way before the horse. You can have the most finely honed political structure imaginable designed by the brightest political scientists ever to have drawn a paycheck from a think tank, but it won't matter if the constituents parts of the society hate each other's guts.

That sounds an awful lot like that quote from Obama I cited that you really hate.

Imagine a vegetarian organization that got a tax-subsidy on offering food to their employees in their cafeteria. A stipulation of the tax-subsidy said they had to either serve meat or file a one-page document that declared their religious objection to meat. Filing that objection would allow employees to get a free meal with meat down the street, if they wanted to eat there rather than the vegetarian cafeteria.

Say the organization decided to sue, saying they were so opposed to meat that it would be unconscionable to declare their opposition to meat; doing so would allow their employees to get free meat elsewhere if they wanted to. If they were that opposed to meat, I'd expect them to say that being a vegetarian was a condition of employment. After all, non-vegetarians could use their paychecks to purchase [gasp] meat!

Your tweaking of the analogy misses the core issue of the case....

I get the impression that we disagree about what the case was actually about. To get on the same page, can we agree on an outline of what happened?

Here is my understanding:

1- The ACA was passed in 2010. Regarding contraceptives it gave broad discretion to the department of HHS to define what was required. They determined that churches and religious organizations would be exempt from the contraception mandate, and that other non-profits could file for exemption by filing "EBSA Form 700" with their insurance carrier.

2- EBSA Form 700 was a simple, one-page form they had to sign that declared, "I certify that, on account of religious objections, the organization opposes providing coverage for some or all of any contraceptive services that would otherwise be required to be covered; the organization is organized and operates as a nonprofit entity; and the organization holds itself out as a religious organization."

3- Since Little Sister's wasn't a church, in order to avoid the mandate they were required to sign that declaration and send it to their insurance company.

4- Hobby Lobby's pre-Obamacare health plan covered contraceptives, including Ella and Plan B.

5- In 2012, Hobby Lobby dropped contraception from its health plan.

6- In 2012, Hobby Lobby sued the government, claiming that they couldn't force it to offer a benefit that went against its sincere and deeply held religious beliefs.

7- Little Sisters of the Poor objected to having to file EBSA 700 with their insurance carrier, and was granted an injunction on December 31, 2013 pending the resolution of their case.

8- In June 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Hobby Lobby's favor, saying that if it didn't want to offer the coverage on religious grounds, it didn't have to. They said if a privately held corporation had religious objections to offering contraceptives, they could file an EBSA 700, just like a non-profit could.

9- A few weeks later, the Supreme Court said that a non-profit or privately held corporation could file EBSA 700 directly with the federal government if filing it with its insurance company violated its religious principles.

10- At that point, there was one hoop any non-profit or privately-held corporation needed to jump through to get out of the contraception mandate. All they had to do was sign EBSA 700 and "certify that, on account of religious objections, the organization opposes providing coverage for some or all of any contraceptive services that would otherwise be required to be covered."

11- The Little Sisters and several organizations continued their lawsuits, claiming that even declaring their beliefs on the matter was too big of a religious hurdle.

12- Eight appeals courts ruled that filling out EBSA 700 was not too big of a burden in order to get out of the mandate. One said yes, it was unconstitutional to ask a non-profit or a corporation to declare its religious beliefs in order to be granted an exemption.

13- The various cases were combined, and in March 2016 in Zubik v. Burwell, the Supreme Court made an order that echoed the sentiments of Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" The basic gist of it was that since insurance companies were happy to provide the required coverage for free because the cost was immaterial, there must be a way to trigger that happening without making the non-profits fill out a form they didn't want to fill out. It was sent back to the lower courts to figure out how to make that happen.

That is my understanding of the facts of the matter. Do you agree, or did I misrepresent or omit any important points?

If one believes the law is the law without considerations of justice or right, and that the scribbled letters are the final arbiter, that judges are cogs who only need to look words up in dictionaries, and that their task is a simplistic internal consistency that is divorced from the needs of the human society that the law is meant to serve...

First of all, that is simply not true. Even if one doesn't care about what's fundamentally fair or right and only cares about the letter of the law, the law is still a messy thing where even laws written with the best of intentions find themselves in conflict with one another in the face of competing priorities that need to be balanced. Being a judge will always be hard because reality is a messy, complicated thing.

But more to your point, I think you misrepresent Scalia's position and what Employment Division v. Smith actually said. Regarding my position, I care deeply about human conscience and about what is right and wrong, and I definitely think such things should be considered. I'm simply suggesting that if we really must have a law, why not apply it uniformly and fairly?

[Analytics]

At risk of killing this content-rich thread by Godwin’s law, I’d like to tell a personal story.

My personal ancestry is basically one-quarter Mormon pioneer, one-quarter Ellis-Island immigrant, one-quarter pilgrim, and one-quarter 20th century German immigrant.

My German grandmother was a wonderful person. From her conversion in her early 30’s to her death in her late 90’s, she was a dedicated Quaker. She lived a life of conscientiousness and service.

Although she was born in the USA, she lived in Germany for a few years while she was growing up in the 1920’s and 1930’s. About 15 or 20 years ago when she was in her early 90’s, somebody made a passing reference to Hitler. When you get that old you tend to spend a lot of time thinking about your youth, and how you thought and felt when you were really young tends to be more real and present than most of the decades since then. In any case, my grandmother responded, “You know, when I was a teenager I went to a Hitler rally in Germany, and he made a lot of really good points. I really liked Adolf Hitler.”

I’ll repeat that for emphasis. In the 21st century, my very own grandmother personally told me, “You know, when I was a teenager I went to a Hitler rally in Germany, and he made a lot of really good points. I really liked Adolf Hitler.”

Aghast, one of my siblings quickly changed the subject. But it struck me that if my grandmother would have been given the opportunity to expound her point, she would have painted an empathetic picture of what the Nazis, including her own cousins, really believed and why.

My point is this. Everybody has their own experiences, their own biases, their own thoughts, and their own opinions. It is proper to try to understand where others are coming from. And it is important to critically examine your own thoughts and biases as well. In all likelihood, others are more right and you are less right than you think.

But that doesn’t mean that all thoughts, values, and positions are equal. Some really are more accurate than others. Some really are more moral than others. Some really are better than others.