Vision of Hate

Mark Thompson in reply to Jonathan McLeod says:

I think you’re giving Katherine’s point too little credit here.

The key, as Katherine pointed out, is that World Vision, a charitable and explicitly evangelical religious organization, requires its single employees to be abstinent. Now, we can argue whether, from a secular standpoint, that policy is a wise policy (it’s not), a fair policy (it’s not) or an abhorrent policy (it is) for an employer to implement. But it’s not an illegal policy for even a secular business to have.

In this case, though, the organization promotes itself as a religious ministry, and is in fact organized as such. It’s at least arguable that all or most of its employees are thus performing religious tasks, even though they’re barred from proselytyzing – there doesn’t seem to be much dispute that it should be allowed to hire only Christian employees such that it should be exempt from religious discrimination laws, and so far as I can tell, they require their employees to attend religious services during the work day. This looks an awful lot like a church to me, even if we take issue with their interpretation of Christianity. Surely churches may require that their actual ministers (ie, their religious employees) be good representatives of church doctrine, right? Surely, we would think it offensive if a church could not dismiss deacons found to engage in acts of adultery, would we not? What I’m saying is that religious organizations generally have a strong interest in having ministers that are exemplars of their religious doctrine – that is the very core of religious freedom, it seems to me.

We also recognize that religious marriage and civil marriage are two very distinct concepts, that the former is a religious sacrament and the latter a legal right. We further recognize that religions have an absolute right to determine their membership, who may receive their sacraments, and what rituals those sacraments entail. Without such a right, freedom of religion wouldn’t exist at all.

So we accept that a church may require its ministers to be abstinent without being hateful and that a church may (and indeed, inherently must) establish its own rules with respect to what constitutes marriage within that church without regard to whether something constitutes civil marriage.

Why then, is it necessarily hateful for the church to decline to create an exception to those rules for one particular type of civil marriage that it doesn’t recognize?

Don’t get me wrong – there are circumstances where I think such a thing absolutely could be regarded as hateful – specifically, where the organization appears to be cherry picking when it will and will not require its ministers to act in accordance with its religious doctrine. But Katherine’s point – and she seems to be correct – is that they’re acting pretty consistently in this regard rather than cherry-picking.

That doesn’t mean this is an easy case for religious freedom, either, though. I think there’s room for argument as to whether the employees in question are truly ministers or are instead really secular. If they’re secular employees, I think there’s a strong case to be made that the organization should be expected to accept the validity of the civil marriage.Report

Mark Thompson in reply to Jonathan McLeod says:

@jonathan-mcleod I got a little carried away with throwing in the legal analysis, but I still don’t agree with your characterization. Or at least, I don’t agree with it based on the facts that have thus far been put forth.

It doesn’t appear to me that they’re actively targeting gays here – as Katherine pointed out, it’s part of their abstinence policy, which they seem to enforce regardless of whether the person is gay or straight.

So I think the fairer characterization is whether it’s hateful of them to refuse to carve out an exception to their abstinence policy for gay couples who have entered into a civil marriage contract but who have not entered into a religious marriage.

I have a hard time concluding that it’s hateful for a religious group to say that it will only consider its ministers to be married if they have a religious marriage, and that’s all that this looks like to me. It’s conceptually no different from the Catholic Church defrocking a priest that openly keeps a mistress.Report

Mark Thompson in reply to Jonathan McLeod says:

@dan-miller
That depends:

(1) If a group says that simply being gay is a distinct sin in and of itself, then I can see that reasonably being called hateful.

(2) If they’re saying that gay sex is inherently a sin, then that may or may not be reasonably viewed as hateful, depending on their rationale: (a) If the rationale is that they view all non-procreative sex as sinful or all sex outside of religious marriage as sinful, and gay sex is no more than an instance, then I don’t think it’s inherently hateful. But (b) If their rationale is that gay sex is in some way its own category of sin, then I can see that reasonably being called hateful.

(3) And if they’re just saying that religious marriage can only be between a man and a woman, then it’s really hard to say that’s inherently hateful. It might be, it might not be, again depending on the rationale.

Look, tradition has value in a religious context that it doesn’t and shouldn’t have in a government context. Organized Religion specifically in many ways IS tradition – the Bible doesn’t explicitly or unambiguously command that there be a Pope, nor does it command that Christmas be celebrated on December 25, nor that all Christians celebrate Communion, nor that exemplars of the faith be sainted, nor that marriages are religiously valid only if performed in a church, etc., etc. Tradition does, and a lot of times the bases for those traditions aren’t even necessarily clear. Yet acceptance of those traditions are precisely what makes someone a Catholic rather than an Eastern Orthodox or a Lutheran, etc., etc.

In this specific case, the group has gone out of its way to express that its decision not to change its policy is based entirely on its belief as to what constitutes Christian marriage combined with its longstanding beliefs about abstinence generally. It’s gone out of its way to proclaim that it does not and will not discriminate solely based on sexual orientation.Report