Conscience Creep

What’s so wrong with conscience clauses?

 Just before they shut down the federal government this week, opponents of President Obama’s health care law attempted to tweak the thing with a one-year delay of Obamacare, a repeal of the medical-device tax, and a "conscience clause" that would have allowed employers to decline to offer their workers birth control coverage if it offended their religious or moral preferences. As Amanda Marcotte noted Tuesday, this effort reinforces the “view of the employer-employee relationship, in which apparently your boss' beliefs and views are supposed to be in the mix when you're making personal decisions about how you have sex and procreate.”

 But what’s really wrong with conscience clauses? We all have consciences and laws that exist to protect us from being forced to violate our religious and ethical principles should be welcome on the left and right. The problem isn’t conscience clause legislation so much as what we might call conscience creep: a slow but systematic effort to use religious conscience claims to sidestep laws that should apply to everyone. Recalibrating who can express a right of conscience (i.e do corporations have a conscience?) and what the limits of that conscience might be, may well be the next front in the religious liberty wars being waged in courts around the country.

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