Another great piece from The Federalist, this time from an atheist:
I am an atheist, which puts me firmly on the secular right. There aren’t a whole lot of us, but we’re out here, in some surprising places.
Yet I consider the current campaign against religious liberty—the attempt to coerce Christians into providing service to gay weddings or to provide abortifacient drugs to their employees, against the dictates of their faith—to be a deep cultural crisis.
On the difference between freedom and triumphalism:
The second big argument in the current battle over religious liberty is that Christians may have a private right to religious liberty, but they give that up when they start a business and enter the “commercial sphere,” at which point they must submit to unlimited regulation of their activity by the state.
All that this demonstrates is the artificiality of the left’s historic division between property rights and all other rights. The left has always had something of a transactional relationship with free speech; they love it when they need it to protect themselves and forget about it when somebody else’s neck is on the line.
I would add that it isn’t only the left that can suffer this disorder. Read the whole thing here: An Atheist’s Case for Religious Liberty.
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