Fred Clark talking about John Rogers about Marriage, Defenders of:
I think the main reason that the MDs disagree with Rogers’ paraphrase is that they also disagree with Jefferson’s original statement, “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
In the terms of the First Amendment, the MDs seem to believe that their own free exercise of their religion requires a minimal establishment of that religion and its “family values.” Without such a protective canopy, enforced by the state, they believe their own religion, their own way of life, is threatened. This protective canopy is eroded when other citizens with other religious perspectives — those neighbors who may believe in “20 gods or no God” — are allowed to freely exercise their religion.
We see a similar, if more extreme, dynamic playing out in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. Certain devout, fundamentalist Muslims believe that their religion requires that women wear a head-to-toe burkha while in public. It does them little good if this practice is left as a matter of the free exercise of religion, because allowing pluralism would mean allowing those women who do not share their beliefs to appear in public without the burkha. This would be perceived by the fundamentalists as an assault on their own religious freedom — which they believe requires a public square devoid of temptresses flashing their sultry ankles and wrists. They thus see their own right to the free exercise of religion as requiring the legal establishment of their own religious values.
This argument for the religious hegemony of Sharia law has a certain logic. It almost certainly would be easier for fundamentalist believers to practice their religion freely in a homogenous society in which everyone believed — or was forced to act as though they believed — the same thing. But this logic is anathema to the whole idea of religious freedom.
It also presumes that the faith of the fundamentalist hegemonists is extremely fragile. Worse than that, it nurtures and reinforces this fragility — ensuring that their faith is a flimsy hothouse flower that cannot survive in the outdoor climate of a pluralist society.
This same logic is at work here in America. The more overtly religious “defenders of marriage” argue this explicitly, but it is also implicit in the supposedly secular “sociological” argument against same-sex marriage.
The real motive at work here, I suspect, has far less to do with any actual or perceived threat to the “institution of marriage” than it does with the terrifying suspicion that their own fundamentalist faith is too flimsy to survive in a pluralist public square. Their faith is so weak, so fragile, that the mere existence of other viewpoints — and the public acknowledgment of them — is as frightening as the idea of “gay people paratrooping in to occupy the vestry.” Such timid faith can only be exercised freely under the canopy of legally established religion.
Must not be very good revealed truth if it can’t stand up to a little scientific inquiry, mockery, or dissent, now is it?