Students, faculty and staff listened in concentration in the Carl Grant Events Center on Tuesday night as Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, spoke about religious liberty and discrimination, focusing on the cases occurring after of the redefinition of marriage.
Anderson, founder and editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey, and author of Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, began the lecture by saying that the same sex marriage debate is one of the important intersections of religious liberty and discrimination that has launched the discussion into public.
“To a certain extent, the redefinition of marriage isn’t the cause of the breakdown of marriage in the United States, it’s the consequence,” Anderson said. “But it’s a consequence that could now be a catalyst.”
Anderson said that the Supreme Court’s ruling could catalyze penalties for people who are trying to live out their beliefs that marriage unites a man and a woman. He outlined several areas of concern dealing with religious liberty that arose after the redefinition of marriage. The first one was the forced shut-down of faith based charities, such as Catholic charities in Boston that were denied an adoption license for refusing to send orphans to families without both a father and a mother because they believe that men and women bring different gifts to the family.
Anderson also said that there is a possibility that faith based schools that teach views about the human body at odds with the government could face penalty in the future, such as the loss of non-profit tax status, accreditation or government loans.
“One of the hallmarks of American education, especially higher education, is that we don’t force every institution to be the same,” Anderson said.
He said that allowing a variety of beliefs in institutions and having students and parents choose the education and community they want to be a part of would encourage diversity instead of imposing uniformity.
Anderson also addressed cases of professionals and civil servants that were not allowed to integrate their beliefs in their work. Barronelle Stutzman, a florist, and Jack Phillips, a baker, were sued for declining to create products that would be used at a same sex marriage. Kim Davis, a Kentucky clerk, was put in jail for proposing a way for same sex couples to receive licenses without clerks having to violate their beliefs about marriage.
Anderson said that even if individuals disagree with beliefs of these people or institutions, they should care about protecting religious liberty.
“We should care about religious liberty because it is a fundamental human right,” Anderson said. “It’s not just the right to be right, but it’s even the right to be wrong.”
He said that everyone should be allowed to seek truth independently and live according to the truth they found. Anderson explained that this fosters common good, but that a limit to the protection of religious liberty is necessary when harm such as murder or theft is done in the name of religion. In the same way, discrimination is prohibited because it harms the common good when one group is treated as less than the other, undermining justice and equality. Anderson also added that not every disagreement or separation is equal to discrimination.
“What we have to do as a community is call out acts of real bigotry and injustice and discrimination where they exist,” Anderson said. “But believing that we’re created male and female and that male and female are created for each other isn’t bigotry.”
Ben Leach, a junior political science major, said that this is a good reminder for both conservatives and liberals in establishing that disagreements in issues such as same sex marriage are not always equal to bigotry or the treatment of certain people as less than others.
“It exemplifies what this country is about, coming together with different ideals and finding this common truth that can be found no matter what side,” Leach said.
Ryan Anderson is the co-author of What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, as well as the co-author of Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. Anderson is currently working on a book titled When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.
Photo courtesy of Janelle Vest
