OPINION:
The great religious liberty debate has been put to bed if not to sleep, if only for now. We can be sure the devout and aggressive secularists of the left are picking through the debris of controversy to find something more to quarrel with. Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana marched up the hill to defend his state’s law and then wobbled down again as if to surrender. Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, on the other hand, saw a prospective problem of perception with similar legislation in his state, asked the legislature to fix it, and be quick about it, and within 24 hours had a slightly revised bill on his desk, and he signed it.
Mr. Pence, when first confronted with gay fury, dithered and imagined that good will and talk of his willingness to compromise would resolve the problem. The gay lobby is not interested in compromise because wedding photographs and wedding cakes are not the goal. They want straight, heterosexual society — the 97 percent, by the reckoning of the government — to “cry uncle” and applaud their sexual proclivities and practices as the respectable equal of their own, to renounce cherished religious teachings and cultural traditions honored over thousands of years.
The left, which ordinarily has little truck with the captains of industry and the chiefs of corporate America, embraced their support. Eli Lilly, one of the giants of Big Pharma and a major employer in Indiana, aimed a wilting frown at Gov. Pence. Apple, the electronics giant, warned other states that it does not approve of religious liberty legislation (though it did not say it would not sell its gadgets in those states). The National Football League, grateful for something to distract attention from scandal in its ranks, including medical abuse and abuse of women, nevertheless threatened to withhold Super Bowls from “guilty” states. Business interests applied similar pressure in Arkansas.
There’s no scarcity of guilty states, 21 with Arkansas and Indiana. The federal law on which the states’ religious liberty legislation is based was the work of Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, who expects to be the leader of the Democrats in the Senate when Harry Reid retires in 2017. Barack Obama, as a state senator, voted for similar legislation in Illinois. When Mr. Schumer’s federal legislation reached President Clinton’s desk, he eagerly signed it.
Those worthies saw nothing wrong with such legislation, and neither did anyone else until gay rights activists, looking for an issue to fire up their troops, manufactured this one. Rarely has a controversy been so transparently false. Republicans invariably enjoy the bravado in big campaign talk; it’s the follow-through that’s inconvenient. Republican politicians never learn that big talk with no follow-through inevitably leaves them humiliated and exposed as boasters and braggarts.
“We have watched a sad spectacle this week as one Republican elected leader after another retreated on the rights of people of faith to have space to express their religious beliefs and defend their conscience,” says Tim Head, executive director of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. “When criticized on the simple issue of the First Amendment right to exercise one’s religion, they folded like a cheap suit. It’s time Republicans grow a backbone and stand tall for religious expression, one of the most cherished rights under our Constitution.”
The Obama administration has imposed mandates on both individuals and businesses that run counter not to fringe beliefs but to personal, long-held, generally accepted and defensible religious beliefs. Roman Catholic nuns have been required to pay for abortion-inducing contraceptives, evangelicals to pay for medical services that violate their collective conscience. The defenders of the faith must not go wobbly in the face of challenge from wealthy campaign donors and powerful special interests. Retreat and surrender are strategies only for congenital losers.
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