Freedom from religion and protection of the few
It’s got to be tough to be an elected official charged with balancing the wishes of the many and the rights of the few. Sometimes, however, they can’t be balanced, so elected officials must choose one over the other.
That was all too clear last week when the American Fork City Council postponed voting on two proposed city ordinances that would have provided civil-rights protections for homosexuals in matters of housing and employment.
Beginning a public hearing before the council’s decision, American Fork Mayor James Hadfield said, “We have all received reams of emails both for and against (the anti-discrimination ordinances) in the past week or 10 days. I think we have a pretty good idea of where the public stands.”
That’s all he had to say to those present to have a pretty good idea, too, and the public hearing confirmed it: By and large, the public was very much against the ordinances.
The whole matter exposes one of the great struggles in American society and politics. As a quasi-democracy, we’re supposed to be a majority-rules society. Yet we are also a society that seeks to protect the rights of the few when the majority would otherwise trample upon them.
It’s unclear when, or even if, the American Fork City Council will again take up the ordinances for a vote. When they do, however, they ought to look to the precedent set by our Founding Fathers, who took pains to ensure that the majority — or, “where the public stands” — would not rule in all cases.
As the Utah Legislature pointed out a short time ago, the United States is not a true democracy. We are a representative republic. One of the major reasons the Founding Fathers opted that way, rather than for strict democracy, was to prevent democracy from becoming mobocracy. The public at large could be ignorant, biased and downright prejudiced — not the proper basis for sound decision-making.
The public — even a majority of the public — can sometimes be wrong. Indeed, there’s some evidence that suggests some of our Founding Fathers (Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among them) thought the majority of the common public could be wrong more often than right.
Decisions, therefore, were not to be based simply on majority public sentiment, but on fact and information. Our forefathers knew this, leading them to establish a representative republic, rather than a pure democracy.
And they also knew there must be protections, at times, for minorities.
That is why they developed the Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Several states conditioned their ratification of the Constitution on the inclusion of those amendments. Without the Bill of Rights to protect the rights of the few from the many or the powerful, it’s likely the United States of America, as we know it, would never have been established.
Our history had shown (and unfortunately still does) that the few needed to be protected from the many. Much of the time in early colonial America, such instances included a religious majority that persecuted a minority of another religion.
That’s why the freedom of religion was one of the first three freedoms to be guaranteed in the Bill of Rights.
The majority-religion (whatever it is, wherever it is) usually doesn’t like to hear this, but freedom of religion requires freedom from religion, as well.
That’s why it was ironic that the opponents of American Fork’s anti-discrimination propositions often cited freedom of religion as the reason why the council should vote against the ordinances.
I cannot recall where, in LDS or Christian doctrine, God requires his followers to treat others badly who don’t follow God the same way, or who do things the followers believe God would rather they not do.
(Now, I suppose we could go to the Old Testament for that, but I don’t think we want to get mired in the reductio ad absurdum argument which would necessarily follow — Do today’s Christians really intend to exterminate everyone who does not exactly follow God the way the “faithful” think they should?)
I believe it was Jesus — yes, that very same Jesus that LDS and other Christians claim to follow — who said, “Judge not,” and “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” and “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
That’s a freedom of religion that I wish today’s religious were freer about practicing.
But religion aside, our history — and the very form of government our forefathers chose — shows that courageous public officials must sometimes go against the flow of popular sentiment in order to make decisions that are just, informed, and fundamentally right.
I appeal to the American Fork City Council to do exactly that.
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