Religion & Law

I have an essay in the current Commonweal titled Bad Faith: Blaming Religion for Proposition 8, in which I raise concerns about the church-targeting protests that have followed enactment of the same-sex marriage ban in California.  You need a subscription to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

My aim . . . is not to immunize churches against all criticism, but simply to highlight the dangers of using religious identity as a placeholder for political argument. To understand the danger posed by protests against specific churches, we need to understand the rationale for the protests. In most cases, the protesters? objective is not to persuade church members; it is to persuade nonmembers to reject the views with which the church is associated. Such measures are more properly seen as public shaming; and that?s not necessarily a bad thing. The lunch-counter sit-ins in the 1960s initially did little to change the minds of lunch-counter owners, but that was not their point.

Yet public shaming should give us pause when it is directed against churches. We encourage religious believers to translate their convictions into accessible political ideas because the alternative-a church making political appeals based on religious experience or authority-tends to foster mistrust, divisiveness, and exclusion. The public shaming of religious communities threatens the same sort of collateral damage, particularly since political actors tend to be most willing to "shame" those communities that are least powerful. Once the act of shaming Mormons over Proposition 8 is seen as part of our country?s long history of shaming Mormons in general, advertisements that show missionaries invading homes to rip up marriage licenses can be judged not only on their merits as an argument, but also in view of the damage they do to our hopes for an inclusive political community.

UPDATE: Cathy Kaveny has some questions about my argument; feel free to join that conversation.