Against the claim that religious dogma is harming ourselves and others, we must insist that it is the secularist vision of the good life, not shared by many other persons, which will deny society the service and talents of Christians. Religious freedom should protect all, even the adherents of exclusivist religions, not merely those who agree with the liberationist vision of the cultural left.

No cry in the culture war is so impassioned as the cry that social conservatives are “imposing their views” on society, yet the threat to liberty of conscience makes clear that it is social liberals who are “imposing their views” on anything they really care about.

Officials of the United Church of Christ (UCC), long in the vanguard of social liberalism, offered two excellent examples of this in recent days. UCC clergy are supporting a legislative proposal in New Hampshire that would ban “reparative therapy,” for minors, i.e., counseling to enable a homosexually inclined person to overcome their inclination and develop an orientation to the opposite sex. Secondly, an article by the UCC General Minister and President, John Dorhauer, declared that American religious freedom was never intended to protect conscientious objection against homosexuality or abortion, because the freedom of homosexuals and women who want abortions requires that they be assisted in what they want.

How it happens that liberal/left partisans cannot see the incoherence and hypocrisy in their claims is difficult for this writer to understand. Perhaps the claims are only being advanced for rhetorical effect. Do people have a right to self-determination, to the life and view of reality they want, without others “imposing their views?”

Most societies, including our own before the mid-twentieth century, would have said no, some things are so clearly wrong that they cannot be tolerated. And even our own society cannot practically accept the plea of “who are you to judge” – murder and theft, for instance, cannot be tolerated.

But on sexual ethics, it’s held, as the Supreme Court has since 1965, that things are just too personal for judgment by any external authority. It does no good to speak of possible physical or emotional harm from sexual liberation, instead life and society should be ordered to make sexual choices safe. And this self-determination is protected to the extent that even the taking of unborn or newly born life is allowable to secure it. It would seem that sexual self-determination is an absolute right for anyone who can make it past the womb (or a day or so, or six months, or three years, or whenever the arbitrary cutoff point is set for sanctioning what would otherwise be recognized as homicide).

But apparently not for homosexuals wishing some other inclination. The attempt to ban reparative therapy is not necessary for homosexuals who do not wish reorientation, but is directed at counselors, patients, and parents who are acting on their sincere religious convictions and giving voice to their beliefs as the Constitution guarantees them the right to do in order to determine what their lives will be. What they are determining is to live in obedience to God, as they understand his commands to be. It matters not whether liberal opinion and the psychiatric profession (under intense pressure to accept and advance homosexual liberation since the 1970s) consider this to be oppressive; by social liberals’ own doctrine of self-determination it must be legal.

At this point in the incremental and frighteningly successful struggle against any freedom that conflicts with homosexual liberation, it is the counseling of minors which is under assult

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