RIGHT SPEAK: Indiana Court Murders The English Language And Law To Call Abortion ‘Religious Exercise’: Nobody Passed a Robust Statute Protecting Religious Freedom for the Purpose of Ensuring People Could Use the Law to Kill Their Unborn Children

Indiana Court Murders The English Language And Law To Call Abortion ‘Religious Exercise’:

Nobody passed a robust statute protecting religious freedom for the purpose of ensuring people could use the law to kill their unborn children.

An Indiana trial court made a deeply troubling decision that abortion may be part of the right to religious exercise under Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (“RFRA”). The March 5 decision reveals several problems with our current legal system, our understanding of what religion is, and how far we have come from the culture of the American founding era.
The lawsuit was filed by a couple of anonymous plaintiffs and a group called “Hoosier Jews for Choice,” who all allege that the Indiana law — which makes it a crime for doctors in the state to perform abortions in most cases — violates the plaintiffs’ religious exercise rights under the state’s RFRA.

At the outset, there are simply narrative problems left unchallenged by the court. For example, one of the plaintiffs “believes that, at least prior to viability, a fetus is a part of the body of the mother.” This is factually incorrect and is not a religious belief at all. Whether one calls an unborn child a “fetus” or a “zygote” or an “embryo,” it is scientifically not a part of the mother’s body up until some arbitrary point in time, such as “viability,” when it becomes something other than part of the mother’s body. From the moment of conception, the unborn child has DNA distinct from that of its mother. Religion does not entitle people to their own set of facts in this way.

Further, this argument leads to a disturbing slippery slope. There is no rational reason to proclaim that a “pre-viable” baby before a certain age is “a part of the body of the mother” and then becomes its own person separate from the mother at a later stage of pregnancy. This is completely arbitrary. If the court accepts this claim as a legitimate religious belief, I see no good reason why a different “religious” individual could not claim a religious belief that a nursing infant still attached to and dependent on his mother is also “a part of the body of the mother.” Is there a potential religious exercise right to kill a nursing newborn?

If the court accepts the first arbitrary claim, there is not a serious logical distinction that would lead to rejection of the second. Arguments for abortion lead inevitably to arguments for infanticide. Where does it end?

There are also problems related to the definition of religion within this case, problems which have been brewing and escalating for almost a century. For example, one of the plaintiffs “does not believe in a single, theistic god, but believes that there is within the universe a supernatural force or power that connects all humans and is larger than any individual person.”

Under the First Amendment, I think I have argued convincingly that this is simply not a religion. In the founding era, both lawmakers and the common man would have understood religion as “the duty which we owe to our Creator.” Someone who “does not believe in a single, theistic god” but rather in some vague notion of a powerful force in the universe may believe that in good faith, but it is not a religion for purposes of the First Amendment.

But what do we do with the RFRA? Indiana passed this law in 2015. Is the protection of the “exercise of religion” in this statute limited to true religion? Or does it encompass the 20th-century confusion of including all kinds of non-religious humanistic and philosophical belief systems in the definition of religion?
The modern fear of excluding anyone has left “religion” an unclear term that may refer to anything and everything. If lawmakers and courts are not clear about what religion is, we risk what we see here in Indiana: the expansion of “religious freedom” rights being used to protect and promote non-religious (and even evil and anti-religious) beliefs and practices.

This case displays not only a legal but a deep cultural problem. The two anonymous plaintiffs are both under the delusion that they have religious rights that leave them free to have a sexual relationship but not get pregnant. They think they have religious exercise rights that protect their ability to seek to get pregnant if they feel like it but then murder the unborn child if they decide they are high-risk or simply change their mind. One of the plaintiffs further claims she suffers legally cognizable harm (which used to mean actual injury to person or property) because her ability to be physically intimate with her husband is supposedly damaged by her inability to get abortions if she wants to.

This is nonsense. The fear of conceiving a child through sexual intimacy is not a legal harm. Killing an innocent child is not religious exercise, and being prevented from doing so is not denial of any right. This is a disordered desire to escape the natural consequence of marriage and sexual intimacy, which is openness to begetting children. This is an attempt to escape reality. --->READ MORE HERE