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.
News spread with angels singing.