I confess, when I first saw that the Georgia Senate had passed the “Georgia Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” I was thrilled. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges had outraged me. Once again the court had ignored the principle of federalism and took a controversial matter out of the hands of the states. The supporters of same-sex marriage deserved the right to try to convince the people of Georgia honestly to amend their understanding of marriage and, likewise, the supporters of the status quo deserved the right to not be convinced.
In thinking more about this religious freedom bill, however, I have some grave reservations, especially when I read the letter to the editor “Congress also thinks religion needs protection” (Feb. 25). In my opinion, this bill itself symbolizes a danger to religious liberty and indeed all our liberties for reasons that should concern both the Left and the Right. While this bill may in fact be necessary now, in the long run it is a dangerous step backward from the understanding of liberty fought for by our ancestors.
We have seen an increase in laws like this recently. These laws mean preemptively to protect liberty by making future unconstitutional laws illegal. But these laws tacitly concede that our liberty comes from some legislative body; as the Declaration of Independence asserts, our liberty comes from our Creator, not from government. Alexander Hamilton argued even against the Bill of Rights for this same reason. He wanted people to remember that their liberty comes from God and not from government, for if a government can pass a law to guarantee liberty, then that same government can legitimately take away liberty as well with impunity.
Why would we look to government to protect us from government? It has always been thought poor management to let the fox guard the hen house. Laws will no more protect us now than the Constitution has in the past, and if we’ve truly lost faith in the Constitution, then all we are doing is bargaining terms of slavery with a slavemaster. Until we are willing to take a stand on the Constitution and the laws we already have, no new law will protect us.
So where do we look for protection from tyrannical laws? I wish it were simple. I wish we could look to the people to protect their own rights and to rise up anytime their government tried to take their rights away. But today we live in a world where citizens’ understanding of liberty has been warped from that of the founders by many years of liberal legislation.
We must ask if we the people today have what it takes to defend our own liberty should the government threaten to take it away. If we conclude that we will simply allow tyrannical laws to be passed that infringe on our inalienable religious liberty, then we’ve got a much bigger problem on our hands, and we should seek to rectify that problem as soon as possible.
If, on the other hand, the people are not so far gone, perhaps we can buy ourselves some time by looking to legislators to protect our freedom for a little bit longer. In such a case I would support this bill, but only on one condition: that people realize that this is a step in the wrong direction. We must be ready to take our stand on our God-given freedom when anyone tries to come and take it. In his attack on the establishment of a state church, James Madison defended religious liberty and asserted a truth that many would find scary today: “Because it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties[,] we hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution.” We must rely ultimately on such a prudent jealousy matched with resolve to protect our liberties and not on laws.
We must never forget that our founding fathers, even those from Georgia who signed the Declaration of Independence, denied this fraudulent idea that freedom comes from government. They took a stand at the risk of their lives when they asserted that their rights came from God and not from a British parliament or king. Maybe we should pass this bill, but if we do, we should do so only knowing that we are conceding something that in the long run we must eventually overturn to regain and preserve our God-given liberty.
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