How Is Planned Parenthood Like a Christian School?

In his April 19 Briefing on the church/state case Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer, Dr. Mohler, following  George Will, asked,

“Why in the world would the separation of church and state have to lead to children with scraped knees? ... practically speaking, that’s the issue.”

Recall that the State of Missouri had refused to include religious schools in a program to provide a rubber surface made from recycled tires for school playgrounds – thus the reference to scraped knees. Under the program the state reimbursed public and private schools for the cost of this improvement, but Missouri’s constitution forbid it from making direct payments to religiously affiliated institutions, stating: “No money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion.”

The church and its supporters have argued that a rubberized surface does not, in itself, promote religion, so – despite the state’s constitution – this discrimination against a church school is unjustified, and indeed violates the U.S. Constitution, constituting an infringement on freedom of religion. But it could be argued (although no one to my knowledge has) that, since money is fungible, a payment for playground improvements made by the state frees up church resources to fund its religious activities. Another clause of the Missouri Constitution reads,

“That no person can be compelled to erect, support or attend any place or system of worship, or to maintain or support any priest, minister, preacher or teacher of any sect, church, creed or denomination of religion....”

But using tax dollars to indirectly fund a church in this way would do just that, it could be argued.

If this argument seems familiar it may be because Dr. Mohler recently celebrated passage of a bill allowing states to defund Planned Parenthood based on the same reasoning. You might ask,

“Why in the world would opposition to abortion have to lead to women being deprived of birth control pills, STD tests and clinical breast exams from their preferred health care providers? Practically speaking, that’s the issue.”

After all, the funding proposed for elimination was never used for abortions – it was “neutral” in that respect – so why should funding for these other services be affected by the abortion issue?

As Dr. Mohler argued explicitly on April 14, the funds reimbursed to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion-related services nevertheless “gave institutional support with taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood,” whose whole purpose for existence, Dr. Mohler frequently and vehemently affirms, is to perform abortions. Therefore, the argument goes, all government funding to Planned Parenthood should be eliminated.

Likewise, the whole reason for the existence of religious schools is to promote their religion. If Planned Parenthood can be deprived of non-abortion-related funds because those funds support an abortion-related institution, and thus indirectly support abortion, then religious schools should be able to be deprived of non-religion-related funding because such funding provides indirect support for the institutions’ religious mission.

A related argument for cutting off Planned Parenthood is that taxpayers whose religion forbids them from supporting abortion in any way should not be forced to pay taxes which are used to support an institution like Planned Parenthood which participates in abortion, even though the funds were being paid out for neutral, purely health-related purposes.

The same argument can be used to protect non-religious people or people of other religions or sects from being forced to pay for the promotion of a religion they do not believe in, even if the payments are made for something as harmless as the prevention of scraped knees – or, for that matter, to fund non-religious studies at religious schools. Because, practically speaking, scraped knees or courses in chemistry are not the issue at all. The issue is whether anyone can be forced to pay – directly or indirectly – to support institutions devoted to the promulgation of a religion they believe to be false.

Dr. Mohler and George Will make much hay over “Blaine amendments” (which, like Missouri’s constitution, prohibited public funds from going to religious sects), associating them with anti-Catholic bigotry. But the notion that citizens should not be taxed to support religious institutions was arguably part of the original meaning of the establishment clause, going back to Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, a forerunner of the First Amendment, which stated, “That to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions, which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.” Even if Blaine amendments originated during a period of anti-Catholic prejudice, it does not follow that the amendments themselves were illegitimate. Even if it is true that public schools at the time conducted Protestant prayers, Blaine’s amendment did not simply express Protestants’ resentment against “Catholic immigrants founding parochial schools,” as George Will says, it expressed their refusal to pay for them, and this was solidly in the Jeffersonian tradition. Sometimes we don’t see a wrong we are doing ourselves until it is done to us (and even then we may still fail to see our own).

I was brought up in a Jewish household. I went to Hebrew school and Sunday school. Later, Jewish day schools appeared in our community, although I never attended one. All these were paid for by the Jewish community. I remember my father opposed state funding for Catholic schools. It wasn’t because he had any animus toward Catholics. But our government belonged to everybody, including us, and Jews did not want to support the training of Catholics as Catholics. If Catholics wanted to train little Catholics – or Lutherans little Lutherans – they should do so on their own dime. (Jews felt the same way about Christian prayers in public schools.) Recently, with the growth of Jewish day schools and the breakdown of the church/state barrier under the rubric of “school choice”, some Jewish organizations have abandoned their long-held opposition to public funding for parochial schools. Others, like the Anti-Defamation League, continue to hold the line.

Dr. Mohler, following George Will, denigrates the Blaine amendments as the product of a period of anti-Catholic animus, “a bit of 19th-century bigotry” in Will’s words. Now, Mohler says, “the divide is very different. It’s no longer Protestant versus Catholic, it is rather secularists versus the defenders of religious liberty,” where by “secularists” he means what he calls “the secular left” – that is, the other side in the culture wars. But I think this gets the history of this issue wrong, along with the relevant meanings of secularism and religious liberty.

The model of the Blaine amendments, namely the law that Jefferson penned proclaiming “no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” was called, after all, the Virginia Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. Secularism, in this sense – observance of a wall of separation between church and state (in Jefferson’s words) – was considered to be an essential bulwark of religious liberty, not its enemy. The Protestant/Catholic conflict which gave rise to the Blaine amendments was only one more chapter in a long saga. In Virginia, the conflict to which Jefferson’s statue put an end was between Anglicans on one side, Presbyterians and Baptists on the other. In fact (as explained here) the statute was only passed after a law establishing a tax supporting all Christian sects (which was intended to be a moderate compromise ) was vehemently opposed by Christian dissenters, including Baptists. Church goers of non-majority churches chose religious liberty by separation of church and state over government funding of their churches.

The issue in the current case is not between enemies and defenders of religious liberty. The issue is how best to strike a balance between the religious liberty of a church school seeking public funding and the religious liberty of taxpayers who don’t share its faith.

During oral arguments in this case Justice Kagan, defending the religious liberty of the school, said,

There's a constitutional principle. It's as strong as any constitutional principle that there is, that when we have a program of funding -- and here we're funding playground surfaces -- that everybody is entitled to that funding ... whether or not they exercise a constitutional right; in other words, here, whether or not they are a religious institution doing religious things.

It is the current law of the land that women have a constitutional right to abortion, and Planned Parenthood has a constitutional right to perform them. So if Justice Kagan is correct, then defunding Planned Parenthood for performing non-abortion-related health services, on the sole basis that it is exercising its constitutional right to perform abortions, violates a strong constitutional principle just as surely as refusal to fund Trinity Lutheran does.

If Trinity Lutheran wins, then any bill defunding Planned Parenthood because it provides abortions should fail.

Dr. Mohler and the Devil

When I heard Dr. Mohler’s response in his 4/11/17 Briefing to Scott Simon’s NPR piece “A Meditation on ‘Evil’”, it was clear to me that he had missed Simon’s point. Simon’s daughter asked of the Syrian gas attack, “Why would anyone do that?” Her question was about cause. Simon added,

“I was of a generation educated to believe that “evil” was a cartoonish moral concept, a word we used only when we didn’t know what madness or imagined infraction might drive human beings to commit murder, even on a mass scale.”

Notice once again Simon is talking about causation, what might “drive” people to do such things. Possible natural causes he lists are insanity and “imagined infraction” (that is, false attributions of wrong-doing which can foment terrible acts of revenge or retribution.) The “cartoonish moral concept” of evil his generation had rejected was the concept of evil as a cause in human affairs, a hidden but active force – or even a Being. That concept was the ‘evil’ Simon was meditating on.

But Dr. Mohler never once speaks of evil in this sense. Instead he takes up the subject of “the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil.” But ‘evil’ in the sense of ‘wrong’ is not a cause; it is an attribute. Mohler says,

“The modern age did not begin by denying the distinction between good and evil. To the contrary, modernity was born in an Enlightenment confidence that human beings could, on the basis of reason alone, come to distinguish what was true and what was false, what is good from what is bad, what is righteous from what is evil. As it turned out that was an implausible proposition from the very beginning. It turns out that human rationality is not enough to anchor the distinction between good and evil.”

But Simon was NOT saying that his generation had any trouble telling right from wrong, or recognizing great crimes as evil, much less that it denied moral distinctions, as Dr. Mohler implies. It was not the concept of evil as “wrong” that Simon’s generation found “cartoonish”, and his point had nothing to do with post-modernism or moral relativism. It was the concept of evil as cause – as active force or agent – that was no longer taken seriously. Dr. Mohler’s historical account of the Enlightenment and modernity ignores the fate of that other concept. An important step toward modernity was the rejection of witch trials – those disastrous searchings out of devil worshippers. Courts ceased recognizing supernatural evil as a cause of wrong-doing, and the Devil disappeared from public discourse. Evil became natural, and, as Simon said, only when natural explanations seemed to fail in the face of some enormity did the old spectre threaten to raise its fabled head.

After listening to the Briefing I followed Mohler's link to Simon’s NPR piece and was shocked to find something the Briefing had not prepared me for: Simon himself, in his meditation, had brought up the devil, the personification of evil, recounting the impressions of a general who said he had “shaken his hand.” So this was not just a misunderstanding on Dr. Mohler’s part. He could not have missed Simon’s point, yet he ignored it, and changed the subject. Why?

I am not a Christian, nor was I raised as one, so there is a lot I don’t understand about Christians, their sects, schools and denominations. Can anybody tell me why Dr. Mohler seldom if ever mentions the devil, although his followers (on Facebook) often do? And why would he choose for a topic a meditation on evil as a cause – a force or a person – but fail to confront or even acknowledge the question of whether events like the Syrian gas attack are the work of the devil? He says evil is “a theological term”, but evidently this does not mean for him that it is supernatural.

I’m certainly not advocating talk of the devil. I don’t believe in evil as an active force, let alone a person. It is natural for humans to personify what they don’t understand. It may sometimes be useful, but it is definitely dangerous. Once our adversaries become (in our minds) devils or the devil's servants, we can do anything to them. That’s why I despise the cheap violence of Lord of the Rings movies. Because the Orcs are personifications of evil and serve evil, they are ugly, and their deaths count for nothing, and can be rejoiced in. Perhaps we have this image of “the evil other” in our minds from prehistory when we evolved in tribes at war with other tribes. It might serve survival to see outsider enemies as inhuman monsters in need of killing, as opposed to members of our own tribe, whom we must not kill. But such perceptions perpetuate horrors.

Title VII and Sexual Orientation

In the 04-06-17 Briefing Dr. Mohler discusses the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling “that workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964” as a legal event – a matter of how the law as written should be interpreted. And he describes the decision in vaguely apocalyptic terms as “an unexpected bomb that goes off in the middle of our culture” whose “ramifications ... are absolutely massive.” But omitted from his analysis is any explicit mention of the MORALITY of what the court is finding to be illegal.

Very often in discussions about gay rights and religious freedom, Christians insist that the desire to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation – to deny LGBT people service or housing or employment merely because of who they are – is the furthest thing from Christians’ minds. They merely desire the freedom to practice their religion and to abstain from behaviors that would violate their consciences. They would never ever mistreat people just because they were gay or lesbian, or treat them unfairly.

But this ruling is about exactly that – a lesbian’s claim that she was denied promotion and then employment because she was a lesbian. So I repeat the question I posed earlier, in response to the 4/05/17 Briefing:

“Quite apart from politics and legalisms, I’m curious to know whether Dr. Mohler believes their religion requires Christians to refuse to employ or sell to or rent to LGBT people. Is that a “religious liberty” they need? Should Christians rejoice in the defeat of laws which protect LGBT people from being fired or refused service or accommodations on the basis of their sexual orientation” as happened in North Carolina?

To that I’d now add, should Christians be upset when courts find that laws protect people from being fired or refused service or accommodations on the basis of their sexual orientation? Should Christians oppose passage of such laws? Or, on the contrary, out of sheer humanity and concern for human dignity, should they support them?

Turning to the legal questions surrounding this decision, Dr. Mohler takes the ruling to mean that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is “no different than” discrimination on the basis of sex, and concludes that this implies that sexual orientation, like biological sex, is “an immutable characteristic”, even though that is now disputed by many LGBT people themselves. But the ruling itself stated,

“The question before us is not whether this court can, or should, “amend” Title VII to add a new protected category to the familiar list of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” ... Obviously that lies beyond our power. We must decide instead what it means to discriminate on the basis of sex, and in particular, whether actions taken on the basis of sexual orientation are a subset of actions taken on the basis of sex.”

So this is not about comparing sexual orientation to biological sex and saying they are somehow morally equivalent, and each separately deserving of protection from discrimination. It is about what discrimination on the basis of sex consists of. Here are two points made in the majority opinion:

1) The Supreme Court has already held that an employer who discriminated against women for behaving in too “masculine” a way – no makeup, no jewelry, no fashion sense – was guilty of sex discrimination. The test was a comparative one: “holding all other things constant and changing only her sex, [would the plaintiff] ... have been treated the same way?” In this case of a lesbian, the question became, if she had been a man married to a woman (or living with a woman, or dating a woman) and everything else had stayed the same, would her company have refused to promote her or fired her, as it did? If not, then such treatment constitutes discrimination on the basis of her sex.

2) If an employer discriminates against an employee because he or she is married to a person of a different race, courts have found that this violates Title VII, because it is discrimination on the basis of the employee’s race. Likewise, it is argued, if an employer discriminates against a woman because she has a female partner instead of a male partner, this is discrimination on the basis of her sex. Therefore, this ruling held, it violates Title VII, which prohibits sex discrimination.

Is this reasoning really so “astounding and revolutionary” as Dr. Mohler claimed? Is it a “bomb” thrown into our culture? Or is it a reasonable way of ensuring fair treatment in a diverse society?

Assisted Suicide, Organ Donation and the Trolley Problem

Here are two comments I made on Dr. Mohler's Facebook page in response to a segment in the March 31 Briefing called "The horrifying intersection of assisted suicide and organ donation: Culture of death advances in Canada." In it he condemned a Canadian proposal to allow those who choose aid in dying (which he calls assisted suicide) to donate their organs.

First I wrote this:

Why does Dr. Mohler only speak of money and profit when it comes to organ donation? Why not speak of the lives saved? This could have been an opportunity to tell his listeners what a wonderful life-saving gift organ donation is, and of the thousands of desperate patients on waiting lists. Organ donation is a way of making something good come out of a dire situation, but you don't have to wait until you're dying to donate. Nearly everybody has an extra kidney. Organ donation is pro-life.

He says in the Briefing, "it would be absolutely sensible to say that there could be no meaningful consent given by someone who’s under the emotional duress of making a decision for physician-assisted suicide." But this makes no sense at all. The ONLY way assisted suicide can go forward is if the patient CAN give meaningful consent. If someone has always been in favor of organ donation at their death, why should they be deprived of this choice if the way they finally do die is voluntary? (That is mainly what assisted dying is -- a choice by terminally ill patients of the WAY they will die.) I recognize that there is a RISK that allowing organ donation in this situation could lead to the wrong motivations coming into play, and pressure being exerted. But that should be the issue -- whether and how this can be protected against -- not the organ donation itself.


Soon after I followed it up with this:

I just had a thought about the core issue here – the morality of aid in dying, as the Canadians call it. I think this terminology is appropriate when the person is terminally ill, and the question is not whether they will die in the immediate future, but only how.

Here’s my idea. It starts off with “the trolley problem”. This is a dilemma of recent interest to moral philosophers and psychologists. The original trolley problem goes like this:

“There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two options: 1) Do nothing, and the trolley kills the five people on the main track. 2) Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the most ethical choice?” (Wikipedia “Trolley Problem”)

About 90% of people choose to throw the switch.

Now change the situation. This is more like a dream than reality, because you are the witness at the switch and you see beyond the fork in the tracks two versions of yourself, representing two possible futures. One is tied to the tracks, and one is standing next to a vat of ether. If you do nothing, the trolley will very soon crush you under its wheels, and you will die horribly. But if you pull the switch, the trolley will go down the side tracks and hit the vat of ether, it will spill, and you will succumb to the anesthetic, fall into unconsciousness, and die painlessly.

Is it wrong to pull the switch? And is it suicide, or is it exercising voluntary choice over how you will die, but not choosing to die?