What the USCCB's New "Religious Liberty" Initiative Took from Evangelicals

BY SARAH POSNER

Laurie Goodstein reports on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' new "religious liberty" initiative, which recasts their opposition to reproductive and LGBT rights "as a struggle for 'religious liberty' against a government and a culture that are infringing on the church's rights."

USCCB president Archbishop Timothy Dolan charged, according to Goodstein's report, that "We see in our culture a drive to neuter religion," adding that "well-financed, well-oiled sectors" were trying "to push religion back into the sacristy."

Ah, the unnamed well-financed, well-oiled sectors. Who are they? Dolan, whose USCCB had an operating revenue in excess of $220 million last year, according to an audited financial statement, and who garnered an off-the record meeting with the president of the United States to discuss his religious liberty concerns, doesn't say.

As part of that orchestrated campaign against churches' religious liberty, Congress did them the favor of exempting them from lobbying disclosure laws. So the Bishops don't have to make public how much they spent lobbying Congress, who they lobbied, and what they lobbied on. Talk about religious liberty.


The Bishops, it seems, have taken a page from their evangelical friends, who long have attempted to enshrine their belief that rights for LGBT people, for example, infringe on their religious liberty, an argument they press relentlessly in court and in popular culture. In 2007, I wrote a piece about the Alliance Defense Fund and its efforts to undo long-standing jurisprudence on the Establishment Clause, which prohibits government endorsement of a particular religion or religious view, and to elevate the Free Exercise Clause, which guarantees freedom of religion, above it:

Over the past several years, ADF has seized on "viewpoint discrimination" to put the gay rights movement in its cross hairs. Gay rights, in ADF's view, cannot coexist with its version of Christianity. Anti-harassment codes at schools and universities, gay rights events, and other expressions of freedom or equal rights for LGBT people, necessarily silence Christians, who, ADF insists, are biblically compelled to condemn homosexuality. The "homosexual agenda," then, is ipso facto anti-Christian. Alan Sears, ADF's president, told the Family Research Council's Values Voters Summit last fall that "the homosexual agenda and religious freedom are on a collision course." He scoffed at what he called "propaganda about so-called oppression" of gays, countering that the "homosexual agenda" not only seeks to silence religious speech but it "probably includes the abolition of marriage."

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