People today see their faith eviscerated daily by pundits and politicians. They see tenets of their belief system — the sacredness of marriage, for instance — talked about as if it had no importance. They see the freedom in how they run their businesses being dictated by judicial rulings.
They’re scared of what’s coming next. They’d like someone to stop the runaway train of forcible inclusion, but they don’t know what to do.
That fear has led to a series of religious freedom bills across the country which would protect individuals and businesses from infringement based on religious beliefs.
Some of the proposed bills prohibit discrimination in general on the basis of religious views or expressions, others involve the treatment of students over their religious expression, others allow the denial of service based on religious beliefs, and still others protect individuals from any action that violates their liberty of conscience based on biblical authority.
The latest one is in Georgia, where the Senate on Thursday approved a bill that would forbid state government from infringing on a person’s religious beliefs unless the government can prove it has a compelling interest.
Some of the bills are written to, in some capacity, deal with same-sex marriage, the approval of which would have been against nearly every faith tradition in the United States until a scant few years ago.
Now one poll — of many that say widely different things — says 56 percent of people approve of such, up from 11 percent in 1988.
Most people, no matter their views on same-sex marriage, don’t hate homosexuals. They just don’t want to be told how they have to run their lives if it violates their religious beliefs.
But many of the new bills raise as many fires as they may tamp down. Imagine using such a law to protect, say, the harsh punishment of children, the tight control of a wife by her head-of-the-household husband or the refusal of medical treatment for a sick family member.
So the bills may not be exactly the right answer, and they may die a quick death as similar bills have done in other legislatures, but they weren’t proposed for no reason. They come from people who were minding their own business but were suddenly told how they had to think and act. And that’s not the America they remember.