Don your armor, culture warriors. The War on Religion is beginning once again.
When I first heard the cries against the War on Religion taking place in America, I was expecting to see waves of rainbow-clad LGBT troops being led by the ghost of Christopher Hitchens in attempts to turn churches into abortion clinics and prosecute Christians everywhere.
Surely, the proselytizers in Free Speech Plaza would be swept away at the very least.
Alas, the purported “war” has revealed itself as merely a talking point propped up by conservative pundits and religious officials. The timing of its recent resurgence is simply due to the election year.
The cries began again after Catholic groups denounced a provision in the Affordable Care Act which mandated that religiously-affiliated organizations provide contraception coverage to their employees. In response to the criticisms, the Obama administration changed the mandate to have insurance companies foot the bill for the coverage.
The issue was admittedly a legitimate one. Organizations should not be forced to buy services that go against their beliefs. However, employers denying coverage to their employees is oppression of a smaller scale.
Obama’s compromise didn’t limit religious freedom. It increased it by allowing people to choose how they would act despite their employers’ beliefs.
But that hasn’t stopped pundits and the Republican presidential candidates from running with claims of a “war on faith.”
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney promised to end any regulation that “attacks our religious freedom,” and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has repeatedly denounced what he calls Obama’s “secular-socialist machine.”
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has stated that Obama “has reached a new low in this country’s history of oppressing religious freedom,” and has an “overt hostility to faith in America.”
These attacks are obviously pandering to the Republican religious base with a persecution complex. Comedian Jon Stewart painted the picture well when he said social conservatives have confused a “war” on religion “with not always getting everything you want.”
Real persecution would be if Obama was closing down churches or forbidding the open practice of religion.
Forbidding employers from forcing their morality on their employees is not persecution.
In fact, if any group is being persecuted, it is definitely not the Christian base of the Republican party.
One can argue that it is the religious right doing the most persecuting today.
The LGBT community is demonized and treated as second-class citizens by the Christian right. Women are criticized for being sexually active and not following the “morality” that the religious right preaches.
Yet, fundamentalists continue to attack “godless secularism” as encroaching on their freedom — not because it’s anti-religious, but because it doesn’t promote their values to a position of privilege.
Santorum has become the poster boy for this type of thinking in the presidential race.
In December, Santorum criticized Obama for having “secular values that are antithetical to the basic principles of our country.”
However, what Santorum and his social conservative base does not understand is that the country was founded on those
secular principles.
The First Amendment spells out clearly that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Freedom requires letting everyone pursue any lifestyle they see fit as long as they don’t harm others.
The entire premise of secularism is that giving all religions equal status in public life creates a freer society.
Many on the right like to claim they are on the side of freedom, yet promoting one set of religious values over all others is contradictory to that claim and represents a true assault on
individual autonomy.
You cannot promote liberty while simultaneously denying rights to others.
The cognitive dissonance must be deafening.
David Scheuermann is a 20-year-old mass communication and computer science sophomore from Kenner. Follow him on Twitter at @TDR_dscheu.
 
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Contact David Scheuermann at [email protected]