Written by Don Byrd
A bill that promises to protect clergy from having to perform marriage ceremonies that violate their religious beliefs is moving forward in Florida. A house subcommittee approved the “Pastor Protection Act” on Wednesday, sending it to the full Judiciary Committee. A similar measure was passed in Texas earlier this year.
It sounds important, protecting the religious autonomy of churches and ministers to determine whom to marry, and it is important. All sides seem to agree, however, that the First Amendment already provides robust protections for such religious liberties. As the Baptist Joint Committee emphasized in response to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, “[c]hurches will continue to make their own decisions about the marriage ceremonies they conduct.”
So why pass state legislation that purports to deliver the kind of protection the First Amendment already clearly provides?
Reporting for the Christian Science Monitor, Patrick Johnson asks exactly that question and poses an interesting answer: It’s a matter of trust, he says.
The legislative push for new legal protections for clergy underscores the sudden sense of vulnerability and disorientation among many social conservatives and others who have long enjoyed the kind of legal protections that LGBT Americans, for example, have not. In short, they don’t trust that the courts will rule in their favor anymore, and so are trying to build as strong a bulwark as possible.
Pastor protection bills “ultimately have to do with the organization of society and the sense of what is normative, where people feel the ground has been torn out from under them,” says Robert Tuttle, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University Law School.
Do legislative pushes like the “Pastor Protection Act,” however, play a role in fomenting that lack of trust? Would the public be better served by efforts to assure them, correctly, that pastors are already protected, than by efforts to scare them into believing they are not?
