First, an apology for a long delay (I have been on the road) getting to this important news topic — as in the hand grenade that Beto O’Rourke tossed, whether his fellow Democrats want to talk about it or not, into the 2020 White House race.
I am referring, of course, to his LGBT-forum statement that the U.S. government should strip the tax-exempt status of churches, synagogues, mosques and other religious groups that defend — even inside their own doors — ancient teachings on marriage and sex that do not mesh with modernized doctrines.
If you want to start a firestorm, that was the spark you would need in a nation bitterly divided on the role of religious faith and practice in the real world. Here’s the key quote:
“There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for any institution or organization in America that denies the full human rights and full civil rights of every single one of us,” he said. …
Will journalists keep asking about this or will that job be left to members of Donald Trump’s campaign advertising team? That was the topic we discussed during this week’s Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in).
To its credit, the team at Religion News Service did a basic follow-up report: “Buttigieg, Warren reject O’Rourke plan to link church tax status, LGBT policy.” Here’s a crucial chunk of that:
“I’m not sure (O’Rourke) understood the implications of what he was saying,” said Buttigieg, an Episcopalian who is married to a man. “That (policy) means going to war not only with churches, but I would think, with mosques and a lot of organizations that may not have the same view of various religious principles that I do.
“So if we want to talk about anti-discrimination law for a school or an organization, absolutely they should not be able to discriminate. But going after the tax exemption of churches, Islamic centers, or other religious facilities in this country, I think that’s just going to deepen the divisions that we’re already experiencing.” …
In a statement to Religion News Service on Sunday, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign also pushed back on O’Rourke’s remark.
So, for journalists who are paying close attention, it would appear that O’Rourke’s bold stance represents the left side of the Democratic Party, while Mayor Pete and Warren are trying to find a centrist stance.
Reporters: What is the content of that center stance?
That isn’t clear. For example, was Buttigieg saying that churches could preach old-of-favor doctrines, but that religious schools and nonprofits could not? It really isn’t clear what is what and who is who in that statement. That’s why reporters need to ask more questions.
It would appear that Buttigieg and Warren might have been saying — let’s paraphrase this — that the U.S. government should protect the freedom of “worship,” inside sanctuary doors, but not a full-blooded “freedom of religion,” as in the ability to for individuals and doctrinally defined voluntary associations to act on beliefs in ordinary life.
Does that sound familiar? Does anyone else sense a flashback to these famous words by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?
To fulfill their potential, people must be free to choose laws and leaders; to share and access information, to speak, criticize, and debate. They must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose.
As I wrote in an “On Religion” column back in 2012, that included commentary from Thomas Farr, at that time director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University:
Clinton's speech contained repeated references to freedom of "worship," but none to freedom of "religion." She also argued that "people must be ... free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose."
Thus, the secretary of state raised sexual liberation to the status of religion and other central human rights, said Farr. This evolving political doctrine is now shaping decisions in some U.S. courts.
"Powerful members of our political class are arguing," [Farr] noted, "that there is no rational content of religion; that religious freedom means the right to gather in worship, but not to bring religiously informed moral judgments into political life; that religious freedom must be balanced by the right to love as one chooses, and that to make religious arguments against that purported right is unconstitutional."
My question: Do journalists realize how explosive this issue could be in 2020, as it was in 2016? This is the rare issue that unites die-hard Trumpsters and the world of #NeverTrump. It might wake up the 40% or so of white evangelicals who didn’t vote last time.
Writing at The Atlantic, law professor John Inazu of Washington University in St. Louis dug deeper into all of this. Here’s the sobering double-decker headline on that piece:
Democrats Are Going to Regret Beto’s Stance on Conservative Churches
The candidate seems not to realize that eliminating tax exemptions for certain religious institutions would be catastrophic.
For example note this, concerning Beto’s blast:
The candidate’s view isn’t entirely new to Democrats. It echoes, for example, then–Solicitor General Donald Verrilli’s concession during his oral argument in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 that the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges and universities who hold traditional views of marriage was “going to be an issue.” And it aligns with the Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet’s policy recommendation to take a “hard line” with religious conservatives because, after all, “trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War,” and “taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.”
Note that this equates old-school First Amendment liberalism, on religious freedom law, with the regimes of Nazi Germany and World War II Japan?
So where do journalists go from here? Inazu offers a trilogy of questions for pollsters, reporters and other politicos to ask. This is long, but essential:
First, pollsters should ask voters about O’Rourke’s comments and the issue of tax-exempt status, both now and in the exit polls for the 2020 presidential election. We can be certain this issue will be used in Republican political ads, especially in congressional districts that Obama won in 2012, but that Trump won in 2016. And I suspect this issue and O’Rourke’s framing of it will lead to increased turnout of evangelicals in states that matter to Democrats, such as Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. O’Rourke’s comment may quickly fall out of the national news cycle, but it won’t be forgotten among churches, religious organizations, and religious voters. And if the Democrats lose in 2020, this issue and their handling of it will likely be a contributing factor. That will be true regardless of who the eventual Republican or Democratic candidates are.
Second, journalists should ask O’Rourke and every other Democratic candidate how this policy position would affect conservative black churches, mosques and other Islamic organizations, and orthodox Jewish communities, among others. It is difficult to understand how Democratic candidates can be “for” these communities — advocating tolerance along the way — if they are actively lobbying to put them out of business.
Third, policy analysts should assess the damage O’Rourke’s proposal would cause to the charitable sector. O’Rourke’s stance — if played out to its end — would decimate the charitable sector. It is certainly the case that massive amounts of government funding flow through religious charitable organizations in the form of grants and tax exemptions. But anyone who thinks this is simply a pass-through that can be redirected to government providers or newly established charitable networks that better conform to Democratic orthodoxies is naive to the realities of the charitable sector.
In other words: Gasoline? Meet fire.
Stay tuned. And enjoy the podcast.