TREAD NOT ON CONSCIENCE

Regulations from the Department of Health and Human Services that require religious organizations having employees to buy them health insurance that provides birth control and abortion drugs are labeled unconstitutional by Christians, Jews and others fighting them in court. But there is a more basic reason to fight, and perhaps, a more basic reason for the fight to be won.

Conscience.

“[N]o man has the right to require another to be less than a man, to demote him to the status of non-moral agent, like a beast, or a cog in a machine,” writes Anthony Esolen in a Crisis magazine piece commenting on a book by Robert P. George. “No man may steal my humanity, by demanding treason against that stern monitor, my conscience. But this is exactly what is happening before our eyes, in what used to be a free country. We are demanding obeisance to and participation in things that until eleven o’clock last night almost everyone (and all Christians and observant Jews) believed to be evil, and believed it with strong reasons prescinding from the nature of man and from revelation.”

Esolen, a professor of renaissance literature and western civilization at Providence College, did not mention the HHS or any other controversy in his review of Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism by George, professor of jurisprudence at Princeton. Nonetheless, current legal and moral questions concerning the HHS mandates clearly fit his observation.

His article is illustrated with a frame from the 1966 motion picture, “A Man for All Seasons” and begins with a scene from C.S. Lewis’s The Hidden Strength that tells of an atheist sociology professor being instructed to step on a crucifix. A voice tells him not to do it despite his non-belief, and he refuses. Conscience also guides Thomas More in the history-based play and movie.

Thomas More is a saint of the Catholic Church because he chose beheading over sanctioning Henry VIII’s usurpation of ecclesiastic powers and his illicit marriage. More defied government out of conscience.

Conscience is at the heart of the several legal challenges to HHS mandates. The First Amendment provides constitutional grounds with its right to free exercise of religion. Exercising equates with the dictates of conscience. The courts will have to deal with conscience; take judicial notice of a power inherent in the human psyche.

Esolen writes, “. . . as George notes, conscience is not a ‘permissions department.’ It commands and proscribes; and that’s why we spend so much effort trying to circumvent it, muddle it, or stifle it altogether.” Another literary citation from Esolen: Mark Twain’s Huck Finn protects runaway slave Jim because of something deep inside rather than follow the law and turn Jim in.

Some people might believe that something is permissible although it is evil. They see themselves as being good because of the benefits their evil confers on mankind, he says. “So it is that snuffing out the lives of unborn children, in the minds of some, is more than permissible; it is a great and glorious good . . . Conscience can be unformed or deformed; conscience does not determine what is good or evil, but must hearken to the truth of the matter, even if the person cannot articulate just why he must do what he would prefer to leave undone, or why he must not do what he would dearly like to do.”

And, further Esolen writes: “To forbid someone to do what his conscience commands him to do, or, worse still, to compel him to do what his conscience instructs him he must not do, is thus to work violence upon him at the core of his being.”

He concludes: “The ‘enemies of conscience,’ as Professor George calls them, simultaneously and incoherently deny the existence of moral truths that bind the conscience --- other people’s consciences, while they reserve for themselves a moral right to bind and loose those other people, mechanically, pragmatically, to bring about some vague ideal society. In such a world, everyone is a god or an ant, but not a man.”

So there it is: an argument, difficult to contest, why the government that exists with the consent of the governed, shall not determine the consciences of its individual citizens.

Our unelected regulators, interpreting law and converting it to binding rules, may believe they truly are working for the good of the country. But they may not overturn what their interior voices command or proscribe --- to act or not to act, to do or not to do. Thus, they may be following their consciences, but for a cause that religious groups believe is evil. That would be a deformed conscience on the part of some regulators, while other regulators might find their work in crafting rules to enforce laws inimical to their consciences.

Esolen’s essay, while not dealing with those contingencies directly, does give examples that might be applied (without equating the actors). When dealing with “wicked” actions, the writer says, “Many an SS officer’s conscience was comfortably silent on the issue of slaughtering Jews.” And when dealing with a “heavier burden of justification” to override a person’s conscience, “not by compelling him, but by taking the reins ourselves by doing what he will not do; that’s the case when we give blood transfusions to infants in imminent danger of death, over the wishes of parents, who object.” [Italics appear in original.]

This is basic stuff. The courts must be careful where they tread; our regulators have not been. Conscience and what that entails is at the core of this HHS controversy. Conscience must not be ignored.