Civil Rights, Religious Accommodation, and the Challenges of Diversity

Dec 2, 2016 by

by Steven Smith Public Discourse:

In many ways, so-called progressives are comparable to lunch-counter segregationists, and proponents of religious exemptions are the heirs of civil rights activists.

Over the past several years, bakers, florists, photographers, and marriage counselors who are religiously opposed to same-sex marriage have taken part in highly publicized court cases. Thus far, courts have declined to accommodate the religious objectors, leading some to perceive an alarming retreat from the nation’s longstanding commitment to religious liberty.

Progressive critics are typically dismissive of these concerns. For the progressives, the current controversies leave a sense of déjà vu: they are simply reruns of the civil rights conflicts of the 1950s and ’60s. We know how those conflicts worked out then, and hence how such conflicts ought to work out today. In this spirit, a historian friend told me recently that he hasn’t studied the current cases closely and doesn’t see the need to study them. “They’re just the old ‘lunch counter’ conflicts all over again, aren’t they?”

The assumption that current controversies are basically reenactments of the civil rights struggles exerts formidable rhetorical power. In an age in which shared moral moorings are scarce, one of the few propositions that can claim any sort of consensus among Americans is that “Jim Crow” segregation was a national disgrace—and that the Civil Rights movement that ended that unjust regime was a manifestation of national righteousness. So if the Christian bakers and florists and photographers who object to celebrating same-sex weddings today are like the segregationist merchants who excluded black customers from their lunch counters, the outcome of the current controversies seems foreordained.

But are the religious objectors truly the heirs of the lunch counter segregationists? Are the activists and academics who would force a Christian photographer or florist to participate in celebrating a same-sex wedding the legitimate successors to the civil rights activists of the 1960s?

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