Contra Mozilla

Friday, May 1, 2015

Secular Shariah

There is a sort of Shariah of the Left, of Secularist Shariah if you prefer, which is being slowly but surely enforced on society. For example, Rick Garnett writes on the Mirror of Justice blog that
"It seems clear to me that, in the coming years, a variety of means -- including conditions on accreditation, licensing, grants, contracts, funding, public-forum access, and tax-exempt status -- are going to be used to bring the practices of religious institutions into what Nancy Rosenblum and others call 'congruence' with the requirements of certain version of political liberalism."
Indeed. We actually already see something like this in the way that people of faith are treated in the marketplace, namely with lawsuits and heavy fines and shuttered businesses when they refuse to bend the knee to the secularist piety of "gay marriage" (by whatever name you want to call it). Ah, but those are just private citizens who are being hit with this, and so far are "isolated" cases. Perhaps they are isolated, because many more have already given in out of fear of suffering the same treatment.

Also, it's worth noting that there is a different sort of tactic being used to impose the Secularist Shariah against private individuals (and their businesses) than against religious institutions. The private businesses are targeted by a series of seemingly unrelated laws and regulation, which collectively have the effect of imposing this Shariah. For example, consider the case of the tyrannical HHS mandate--the one which requires employers to provide coverage for their employees to obtain contraception, abortion, and sterilizations. The counter-argument is all-too often*, "well, not all of an employer's employees may share his religious beliefs."

Set aside for the sake of argument that fact that these beliefs are not religious only (they are largely rooted in things like Natural Law Theory, which while not accepted by everyone, is also not limited to any one particular religion, even if the major modern proponents tend to be overwhelming Catholic). Also set aside for the sake of argument the fact that this is really a poor argument even if it could be reduced to a question of employers practicing their religious code of ethics at the price of making employees live under these: the mandate actually acts to force the ethics of the employees onto the employers, which is no better.

With these aside, it is worth noting that one reason why employers have employees whose beliefs differ from their own is because the Civil Rights Act (and its additions) prohibits a non-ministerial employer from choosing employees based on religious beliefs. This is done for better or for worse, but it will inevitably result in non-uniform sets of beliefs in a given company. So, these two seemingly unrelated rules--Civil Rights Act and HHS Mandate--work together to impose a specific set of ethics onto all people in the public square (which in this case consists of the marketplace). This is just another form of Shariah, for to disobey it is to become a second-class citizen just as in those countries and regions where Islamic Shariah is the rule. And as a bonus, there is in fact a double-standard which is often applied to the two "sides" in these things.


*Meanwhile, without a hint of irony, they are quick to say that we must be made to change our beliefs.

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