John Adams Center for the Study of Faith, Philosophy and Public Affairs<\/a> about a year ago to raise awareness among LDS and other religious believers and their friends concerning the inevitable moral stakes of political re-definitions of \u201crights.\u201d<\/p>\nRights are obviously never absolute; they are necessarily limited by some shared, authoritative priorities, some implicit understanding of \u201cthe good.\u201d\u00a0 The recognition of new \u201crights\u201d always reflects a shift in this background understanding of the good, and thus always involves some trade-offs.\u00a0 The expansion of one kind of rights always involves a shifting understanding of the good, and thus the restricting of other kinds of rights.\u00a0 For example:\u00a0 the civil rights laws of the 1960s that (rightly, in my view) made it illegal to deny public accommodations on the basis of race, while, obviously (and again, rightly, in my view), adding a restriction to certain property rights.<\/p>\n
Returning to the more contemporary issue: \u00a0a number of anti-Prop 8 activists considered the majoritarian victory of Prop 8 as illegitimate, since the \u201cdiscrimination\u201d involved in the heterosexual understanding of marriage could, on their view, be explained only as sheer \u201cbigotry.\u201d\u00a0 Now, the opinions of \u201cbigots\u201d are precisely those that do not deserve protection as \u201crights.\u201d\u00a0 In the long run, the victory of the homosexual-rights faction would be incompatible with the religious freedom of those who oppose such rights \u2013 the freedom, for example, to teach one\u2019s children that homosexuality is wrong and not conducive to ultimate happiness, or to run a private university in which the practice of homosexuality is grounds for dismissing a student or an employee.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The public space in which American religious freedom has operated, a space defined by implicit dominant assumptions concerning \u201cthe good,\u201d has happily been quite wide by any historical standards, open to considerable diversity.\u00a0 But every such space has limits, implicit boundaries that are always being re-negotiated.\u00a0 To imagine the public sphere can be morally neutral is simply to abandon the definition of the moral grounds of rights to activists who are confident that morality (such as the morality of unlimited individual self-expression) is on their side.<\/p>\n
But what do you think?\u00a0 Again, you may exercise your right to agree or disagree with me on the particular, substantive issue of a \u201cright\u201d to homosexual \u201cmarriage.\u201d\u00a0 But I would be particularly interested in responses to the second-order thesis I have stated here: that the defining or re-defining of particular \u201crights\u201d always involves a reshaping of a dominant substantive morality, and thus that no morally neutral settlement in terms of “rights” is possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0OK, now that we\u2019ve basically cleared up any confusion surrounding the ontological status of agency and atonement, let me see what you think about something a little more\u2026 political. For many years friends and I had considered the possibility of some kind of political-philosophy oriented educational foundation that would try to help religious people, and LDS in particular, to navigate the world of ideas as these concern politics, broadly understood.\u00a0\u00a0 What finally got some of us off the dime with this concern was the controversy surrounding the Church\u2019s efforts in favor of Prop 8 in California. Let me first satisfy your curiosity, if you have any, by stating simply that I favored and I favor the proposition, as well as the LDS Church\u2019s efforts on its behalf.\u00a0 This has been much discussed, and we can discuss it more if you like.\u00a0 But maybe it will be useful to go back behind (or above, or beneath) this particular issue to some questions about religious convictions in the public square.\u00a0 Here is what I found in conversations with many young and smart LDS (BYU students and others) during or in the wake of the Prop 8 business:\u00a0 many were convinced (on religious […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12697,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12696\/revisions\/12697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}