Conscience Clauses
Conscience is something that religion bangs on about to get special privileges
and unfair benefits under the law.
Conscience to the religious person is the voice of God. The idea is that God
programs a moral sense into you but if you think without regard to him or let
yourself be misled or make a mistake then this voice is distorted and dulled.
Conscience to the non-religious is about being part of society and thus a nice
thoughtful person. It is the voice of human nature as in society not the voice
of God.
A secular state can only respect and care about the latter kind of conscience.
For the religionist, it is hard to have any regard for such a conscience for it
is about assuming God does not matter. The religionist fears what it may lead to
for there is no God to refer to or help from him to fix it.
Sure enough it is virtually only the religious conscience that looks for
exemptions in the name of conscience.
An example is if the Queen of England refused to sign abortion into law on the
basis that it contravened her Christian conscience. Elizabeth II signed in
Britain's liberal abortion legislation despite claiming to be a devout
Christian. It is true that the Queen can only delay laws she disagrees with but
she cannot stop them but a real Christian would resign first. She got no
conscience clause so why should anybody else?
The Roman Catholic Church says that doctors must never perform an abortion. They
cannot even delegate other doctors who have no conscientious objections to
abortion to do it for them. That is a sin too. This an alarming interference by
the Church in the medical profession and shows how it is willing to force
pregnancy on women.
Courts that argue that the Catholic Church funds its own hospitals and so should
not be forced to provide abortion or birth-control insist that this can only be
allowed if the hospital can send anybody who needs those services elsewhere. But
even that is a violation of the Catholic conscience. The Church herself violates
the conscience of those who have no problem with abortion or birth-control and
see them as virtuous at least under certain circumstances. It may be that the
Catholics running the hospital have a shift in opinion and do not deeply oppose
abortion or birth-control or at least keep changing their minds and feelings
about them. You cannot make laws based on conscience when you cannot prove that
what a person says is their conscience really is their conscience.
Religion argues for freedom of conscience in order to force the law not to force
it to say let gay orgies be organised in the Church hall or force it to perform
gay marriage. The difficulty in that is, we all have to do things we consider
bad. If you are an employee, you may consider it wrong that you have to part
with your much needed money for a pension fund. We all have to compromise.
In the USA, employers may get a conscience clause that allows them to refuse to
fund birth control for their employees if it offends their religious principles.
But clearly this suggests that you must consider the boss's feelings in
something that is none of her or his business.
The problem with conscience clauses that they set off an insidious and slow
process to sidestep laws that seek to confer equality. An example is how in the
name of freedom of speech, a religion can promote bloodthirsty scriptures as
God's truth while anybody else publishing hate and violence like that in the
name of God will be arrested. Another example is how you can be arrested for
neglecting somebody but it is okay for a health professional to neglect to help
a woman who needs the morning after pill after being raped. The professional's
profession of religion is put before her well-being and her conscience.
Here are examples of people who demand conscience clauses from the law.
Hotels that oppose same sex relationships.
Bakers who will not make cakes for same sex couples who are marrying.
Counsellors who will not tell AIDS patients about using clean needles and
condoms. They are more worried about their own conscience rights than the
conscience of the society they belong to and the organisation than employs them.
Foster care agencies who refuse to place children with same-sex couples.
In America, some Catholic universities demand exemption from regulation under
the Wager Act.
Giving conscience rights to religions and corporations will lead to the
consciences of the individual members being sacrificed.
Conscience clauses award more respect to some consciences than others. Many
religious people want special treatment. Mormons were never allowed to
discriminate against blacks though their religion endorsed discrimination. So
why should there be conscience clauses so that Catholic nurses can refuse the
morning after pill to a desperate 12 year old girl who has been raped?
It is a strange kind of conscience clause that discriminates against one
religion and not another? Why is discrimination not a matter for conscience
then?
A Mormon believes that if he does wrong he will not go to Hell forever. The
Catholic believes that if she commits certain sins - such as missing Mass on
Sunday or facilitating contraception - she will go to Hell for it. Since you
can't please everybody, are we to start putting the Catholic's conscience before
the Mormon's? After all hers is more severe. She doesn't worry only about the
"wrong" of missing Mass or facilitating contraception but also the infinite
wrong of choosing everlasting hate for God and everybody else in Hell. Clearly
if there should be clauses for consciences and you cannot please everybody then
she is the one that should be given the conscience clause more than the Mormon
in principle. If the Mormon health professional and the Catholic health
professional both oppose contraception, then clearly if a conscience clause is
set up so that they don't have to facilitate contraception then it is set up
more for the Catholic's sake than the Mormon's. The conscience clause makes a
slippery slope essential.
And some people get a buzz from getting special treatment. Are some of them
using conscience as an excuse for getting their own way? Maybe the Catholic who
won't pay for his employees to get contraception under healthcare laws is only
pretending that he thinks contraception is wrong. Maybe he just hates women!
Doctors may be allowed to refrain from giving a desperate woman the morning
after pill but they are not allowed to tell her lies to make her believe it is
sinful and wrong to use the pill. They are not allowed to give her Bible texts
or papal letters to convince her that taking the morning after pill is gravely
sinful. The conscience clause then has limits. The Christian conscience that
decrees that God's truth must be presented to all is trampled upon. The
conscience clause is fundamentally incoherent.
Conscience clauses do not respect the conscience of the client or patient and
others. For example, a doctor who rejects the morality of abortion will claim
the right not to refer a patient to a doctor who will consider abortion as an
option. She or he will claim that right even if the patient may die if the
pregnancy continues.
Conscience clauses should not be created unless checks are made to make sure the
persons claiming rights for their conscience verify that they have researched
carefully in the process of forming their conscience. It would be a problem if
the law considered the rights of a conscience that might not be there at all.
You cannot risk a woman being refused the morning after pill by a professional
who claims to be following their conscience when their true motive is just
religious bigotry.
Conscience clauses are not the great respecter of religious freedom that they
pretend to be.
Those who avail of them get away with it by claiming they are sorry they have to
obey their conscience. If abortion is murder, how could a doctor really be sorry
if he will not refer his patient to an abortion clinic? If sex between males is
an abomination, how could the relationship counsellor tell a gay couple she is
sorry he cannot accept them as clients? If you are doing the right then you
cannot regret it and you cannot say you wished your conscience would let you do
differently. The compassion and the sorries are just sheer manipulation and
hypocrisy. If you are sorry for following your conscience then you should not
get any conscience clauses. Conscience by definition is the feeling that some
deed is morally wrong and intolerable.
The faithful believer has no problem approving and supporting a hypocritical
religious and political system that tells lawyers who know they are defending
evil monsters and trying to get them off the hook to condone the evil and tell
themselves that the monsters are good people. After all, a good lawyer has to
believe his or her own lies to be convincing and to convince others.
Christianity does not really believe in freedom of conscience and virtue except
when it suits its prejudices. A good lawyer aims to have witnesses under oath
trip up so that it looks like they lied under oath. He does not care if they
really did but just cares that it looks like they did. Also, he will take on the
case when he feels that the accused has a reasonable chance of talking her or
his way out of trouble.
Conscience clauses imply that choices come first. But what about the choices of
others? If choice comes first then goodness or what is best for the person does
not.
It is a pity that people won't leave their religions and stop having tax-payers'
money and politicians' time taken up over the problems they cause by being part
of a religion. It costs money and lives. The process of giving doctors the right
to refuse to help a raped 12 year old who needs the morning after pill and
giving them the right to refuse to refer her to a doctor who will help is costly
and that money would be better in a hospital fund.
Let us think about conscientious objections on religious grounds.
The Christian Church in its Catholic and Protestant forms has ensured that in
wartime, if you are an atheist, your conscientious objection does not matter and
you will be conscripted. This poisonous and murderous decree is replicated in
most countries of a Christian background. In the United States, the following
definition of conscientious objection applied: "A firm, fixed, and sincere
objection to participation in war in any form or the bearing of arms, by reason
of religious training and/or belief." It is up up to the state to decide if a
person is really sincere in their faith. And how do you prove a person really is
firmly anti-war unless they have got chance after chance to fight but refused?
So it is biased in favour of religious doctrine in that way. And there is no
concern if your objection is ethical and not religious. It discriminates even
against religious people if they do not base their objection on religious
grounds but on ethical or humanitarian ones. The implication of the definition
is that unless you go to Church regularly your objection to war means nothing
and you must be compelled to fight. In fact ethical objections to fighting
should be what matter in a secular state not religious ones. And it would mean
that anybody could form a religion of one or two people to get out of fighting
for a worthy cause.
Conscientious objections on religious grounds must not be encouraged but they
must be merely tolerated - in serious matters. For example, doctors should not
be forced to perform abortions unless they are very early abortions. Pharmacists
must not be permitted to conscientiously object to dispensing abortion pills or
the contraceptive pill. Registrars must not be allowed to opt out of performing
gay marriages. Gay marriage is not a serious enough matter even if it is wrong.
We have to avoid having to tolerate conscience clauses which raises questions
about what do you do when you are recruiting people to public services in the
first place. You cannot see if anybody really is motivated by faith in God
though they may say they are. The problem is that they violate God a thousand
times a day so why do they demand certain legal exemptions in the name of God?