The New Anti-Catholic Bigotry

 From Crisis:

Thus Cohen’s “novel” solution: “If religious people can opt out of secular laws they find sinful, then maybe the rest of us should be able to opt out of religious laws we find immoral.” For example, she explains, anti-abortion laws are “religious laws,” and thus persons who are not religious should be able to exempt themselves from them. “Let’s call it a rational exemption,” she explains. “Rational exemptions could be used for religion-based laws with which people strongly, sincerely disagree. For example, a law that values the life of a quarter-inch embryo more than the life of a person carrying that embryo. That’s clearly a religious law.”

Cue the anti-Christian and anti-Catholic bigotry. One letter praising Cohen’s op-ed declared “What a wonderful notion: to give rational folks the same benefit of the doubt as religious folks…. When you stop to think about it, it does seem odd that anyone would feel the need to write an opinion piece in defense of being rational.” A few weeks later, a political cartoon by Michael de Adder titled “Separation of church and the state of Texas” portrayed the five Catholic Supreme Court Justices—Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Samuel Alito—as priests in the confessional, hearing the confession of a personified Department of Justice. The message was obvious: the opinions of Catholic judges are tainted (and thus delegitimized) by their religious beliefs.

The first problem with all of this is the anti-Christian trope that opinions that are in any way influenced by one’s religious beliefs are less legitimate than those based on secular rationality. For starters, there is no uniform “secular rationality,” either in America or anywhere else. As Alasdair MacIntyre expertly argues in his classic After Virtue, hundreds of years (and thousands of philosophers) after the Enlightenment, we are no closer to any consensus on the nature and contents of truth, being, or life’s meaning. Even a purely secular regime would be an irreconcilable mess of utilitarianism, positivism, materialism, nihilism, Freudianism, Marxism, postmodernism, and deconstructionism, among other systems. Indeed, even in the esoteric world of secular academia, philosophers are constantly accusing each other of irrationality. (Read more.)

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