Health Care Laws and the Failure of Minimal Toleration

Yuval Levin writes about the HHS mandate and the meaning of religious freedom

So basically, the religious institutions are required by the government to give their workers an insurer and that insurer is required by the government to give those workers abortive and contraceptive coverage, but somehow these religious employers are supposed to imagine that they’re not giving their workers access to abortive and contraceptive coverage. If religious people thought about their religious obligations the way HHS lawyers think about the law, this might just work. But they don’t.

And that’s just the point here. This document, like the versions that have preceded it, betrays a complete lack of understanding of both religious liberty and religious conscience. Religious liberty is an older and more profound kind of liberty than we are used to thinking about in our politics now. It’s not freedom from constraint, but recognition of a constraint higher than even the law. It’s not “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” but the right to answer to what you are persuaded is the evident and inflexible reality of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. It’s not the right to do what you want; it is the right to do what you must.

Governments have to recognize that by restricting people’s freedom to live by the strictures of their faith they are forcing them to choose between the truth and the law. It is therefore incumbent upon the government of a free society to seek for ways to allow people to live within the strictures of their consciences, because it is not possible for people to live otherwise.

There are times, of course, when the government, in pursuit of an essential public interest, simply cannot make way for conscience, and in those times religious believers must be willing to pay a heavy price for standing witness to what they understand to be the truth. But such moments are rare, and our system of government is designed to make them especially so. Both the government and religious believers should strive to make them as rare as possible by not forcing needless confrontations over conscience. And in this case, I think it is just perfectly clear that the government has forced a needless and completely avoidable confrontation and has knowingly put many religious believers in an impossible situation. It is no secret that most of America’s largest religious denominations are opposed to abortion, and that some are opposed to contraception as well. And there are many alternative means by which the government can (and does) make abortive and contraceptive drugs and procedures available to people. The purpose of refusing to provide a religious exemption from this rule would therefore appear to be to force religious employers themselves to make those drugs and procedures available—to bend a moral minority to the will of the state. It is not only a failure of statesmanship and prudence, it is a failure of even the most minimal toleration.

--Yuval Levin, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/339566/new-round-intolerance-yuval-levin