by Jim Rose in liberalism, politics - Australia, war and peace Tags: democracy, democratic equality, Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, rule of law

An individual’s religious beliefs does not excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law of general application prohibiting conduct that governments are free to regulate.

Allowing exceptions to every law or regulation that directly or indirectly affects religion would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from legal obligations of almost every conceivable kind. Examples are compulsory military service, payment of taxes, polygamy, vaccination requirements, and child-neglect laws. some parliaments do provide exemptions and accommodations but that does not say they must.

Justice Frankfurter wrote in 1940:

conscientious scruples have not in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs. The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities

Religious freedom bars laws that prohibit:

the holding of a religious belief,

the right to communicate those beliefs to others, and

the right of parents to direct the education of their children.

This approach also has the advantage of not placing courts into the position of having to determine the importance of a particular belief in a religion or the plausibility of a religious claim when weighing it against other government interests and the objectives of the disputed law.

It might be said that there should be a compelling government interest before a religious objection can be overridden. Deciding what is a compelling government interest raises questions of public policy.

Men and women decide what is more or less important in the course of making legislation goes to the very heart of democratic decision-making. This clash of opinions and visions of the good society and what laws should be passed or not are all resolved peacefully through the ballot box and free speech even in the most desperate times.

This is not to say that a parliament may if it wishes exempt people from certain obligations on the basis of religious objections or making other accommodations. What it does require is that religions take their chances in democratic politics like the rest of us when seeking exemptions from a law.

Minorities with strong feelings about an issue regularly prevail in legislative battles because they are willing to vote as a block on one issue and trade their block support with other groups in the society to assemble the necessary majority for what they want.

Indeed, a major discontent with contemporary democratic politics is minorities and special interests have too much say, not too little.

It is up to the political process to decide whether to disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in, but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself. To quote Frankfurter again:

Its essence is freedom from conformity to religious dogma, not freedom from conformity to law because of religious dogma. Religious loyalties may be exercised without hindrance from the state, not the state may not exercise that which except by leave of religious loyalties is within the domain of temporal power. Otherwise each individual could set up his own censor against obedience to laws conscientiously deemed for the public good by those whose business it is to make laws… The validity of secular laws cannot be measured by their conformity to religious doctrines. It is only in a theocratic state that ecclesiastical doctrines measure legal right or wrong