From the editor’s desk

In defence of conscience

28 January 2012

President Obama has made a serious mistake. He is demanding that Catholic hospitals must make contraceptives available to their staff as part of their health-care packages. The new rules are part of the health-service reforms, which are the greatest achievement of his presidency so far. He appears to have been taken in by the fact that most American Catholics do not have personal moral objections to contraception. He has failed to understand that what they mean by this is that contraception should be a matter for individual consciences. That is not compatible with imposing access to contraception by government regulation. As a result, he has alienated the Catholic Health Association, the body that represents Catholic health-care providers and whose support was crucial as his health-care reforms went through Congress in the teeth of opposition from Catholic bishops. He has placed all that progress at risk. Now he risks alienating millions of Catholic voters, moderate as well as hard-line.

Why do secular politicians so often fail to understand the position taken by individuals or bodies motivated by religious faith? It happened when the Labour Government enforced on British adoption agencies the requirement to treat homosexual couples exactly as they would heterosexual couples. It made the simplistic assumption that opposition must be because of homophobia, and hence could be discounted. The secular agenda seems to have no room for conscience, nor for the right of agencies in civil society to determine their own ethos. The same may be about to happen regarding the English law of marriage, with the easy assumption that those who oppose extending marriage to homosexual couples are unacceptably prejudiced, so their views can be ignored.

The point secular opinion fails to grasp is that there are some things that should – must – be beyond the reach of state power, such as the freedom to make available contraception to employees of Catholic hospitals or not, or the freedom of Catholic childcare agencies to decide whether to accept gay couples as possible parents in adoption cases. Similarly, marriage, which stands at the core of civil society, is not something the state is free to tinker with. The fact that Britain’s Churches emphatic­ally think that does not ipso facto make them homophobic.

The former Labour Home Secretary Charles Clarke, in his introduction to a series of debates on the role of religion in society (see page 6), puts his finger on the issue. “I don’t think that Government has yet been able to find a good and constructive way to debate these difficult issues with the main religions in this country,” he says. “Some of these debates are reasonably objective and factual in nature. More often, sadly, they revolve around polemic, distortion or loose generalisations, which disguise or mislead. Sometimes debate about religion generates contempt and disdain rather than respect for faith.”

Pope Benedict recently told a group of visiting American bishops “of a worrying tendency to reduce religious freedom to mere freedom of worship without guarantees of respect for freedom of conscience”. Those guarantees in defence of conscience set boundaries to what the state may legitimately do. In other words, once a progressive ideology is imposed by the state, regardless of conscience and of the rightful autonomy of civil institutions, it becomes secular totalitarianism, which is a danger to the freedom of everyone.