Should The Bible Trump America’s Laws?

As conservatives grapple with the reality of gay marriage and the Supreme Court weighs whether companies should be forced to offer birth control to employees, it’s very clear: The conflict between religious freedom and gender/sexual equality has become “the most important civil rights issue of this time.”

So says Professor Katherine Franke, director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School and one of the driving forces behind the school’s Public Rights/Private Conscience Project, a new initiative that seeks to shift the way people look at religious and secular values — and to bridge a divide that has come to seem insurmountable. Here, Franke talks with ProPublica’s Sex and Gender reporter, Nina Martin.

NM: Let’s start with why these two things — religious belief and civil rights — have come to seem so at odds.

KF: Part of the problem is the way we’re currently framing the issue. On the one hand, we have the free exercise of religion, which is largely based in an appeal to revelation, to the truths of religious texts and religious doctrine. And on the other hand we have rights of equality and liberty, which are based in rational arguments — what are people entitled to as a matter of their humanity because we should all be treated equally under law. It’s an incommensurable confrontation between revelation and rationality. What ends up happening is that religion ends up like a trump card — you throw it down, it’s a conversation stopper, and we don’t know how to get out of this impasse. Law is really ill equipped for adjudicating between the claims of revelation and the claims of rationality.

NM: How did we get to this point?

KF: In part it’s historical. Really since the late 19th century, when opponents of expanding notions of equality have lost in the public arena, their plan B has been to seek refuge in religion. We first saw it in racial equality cases, and more recently in the areas of reproductive rights and gay rights. When Congress or a state legislature or a federal court mandates the integration of public schools or upholds sex equality in the workplace or allows same-sex couples to marry, opponents of those efforts fall back on religion to say, “You can have those laws, they just don’t apply to me.”

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Should the Bible Trump America’s Laws?