In my last post I commented on an attempt by the Justice Department to conceal the pro-sexual-identity message of vandals who put graffiti on an Islamic center. Others have speculated that the Department’s motivations were political. I speculated that the motives were more straight-forwardly grounded in a principled commitment to sexual identity rights. And I suggested that those rights are inherently hostile not only to the conscience rights of Christians and Jews but also Muslims and all other persons who perceive the unique and intrinsic value of natural marriage.
Without speculating on the motivations of pro-sexual-identity activists, one can perceive the inherent hostility of their activism simply in the nature of the rights asserted by the activists, and by contrasting those assertions with the liberties claimed by people of conscience.
People of conscience are asking for others to respect their liberties. A liberty is legal-scholar jargon for what many people call a negative right — the right to be left alone. It imposes on other people what jurisprudence thinkers call a duty of abstention, a duty to refrain from acting. You enjoy a liberty from being punched in the face because the rest of us owe you a duty not to punch you in the face. Your liberty does not require any of us to do anything. We can comply simply by not doing the thing that is forbidden. Liberties are rights to get along with others in peace without conflict and without coercion.
A liberty of conscience is a right not to have to do anything and to be free of others’ coercive interference. It is a right not to participate in an action that one’s conscience says is intrinsically evil (such as slavery), or not to communicate something one knows to be untrue (slander, defamation, or simple falsehood), or not to worship a false god (Molech or money). And it is a right to participate in those actions that one knows to be right and good (worshipping, paying a tithe, feeding the poor, etc.) without being prevented from doing so.
The correlative duty that a conscience liberty imposes on everyone else is a duty not to coerce the participation in the evil action and not to prevent the participation in the good action. People who claim a right of conscience are (generally) asking to get along with others in peace and without coercion.
Sexual identity rights, on the other hand, are what many people call positive rights. By contrast to the liberty of conscience, which imposes on others a duty of abstention, contemporary sexual identity rights impose on others duties of action. In law-scholar speak, these rights are known as affirmative claim-rights and powers. They are rights not to be left alone or to get along with others in peace, but rather rights to make other people do things that they do not want to do.
When asserted by sexual identity claimants, these rights do not avoid conflict and coercion; they generate conflict and coercion. The unmarried, fornicating couple who claim that the landlord unlawfully discriminated against them by not leasing them an apartment assert a right to force the landlord to lease them an apartment, and thus to violate his own conscience about what is good and right. Same with the same-sex couple who assert a right to force a Christian baker to bake them a same-sex wedding cake, the transgender person who asserts a right to force others to refer to him by his chosen pronoun rather than the one that corresponds to his biological sex …
When one contrasts the liberty claimed by people of conscience, especially Jews, Christians, and Muslims, with the claim-rights and powers asserted by sexual identity activists it becomes apparent that the sexual identity activists are the aggressors in the current culture wars. And, contrary to the narrative preferred by this administration, the news media, and the other elites who are ascendant in American society at the moment, sexual identity claimants are hostile not just to a handful of conservative, evangelical Protestants but rather to all people who understand marriage to have an inherent nature, and human sexuality to be oriented toward that nature.
When one surveys the landscape of American culture and society, one does not see American Muslims persecuting same-sex attracted people. Indeed increasingly, one does not see any people of theistic faith persecuting them. And apart from a few fringe elements whose views are abhorrent to the faith traditions in which they claim to partake (e.g., the Westboro protestors), religious people are not even harassing or bothering those who identify with a particular sexual preference, orientation, or identity.
What one does see are sexual identity activists, and their collaborators in federal and state governments, harassing and persecuting people of theistic faith for not wanting to participate in the activities and politics of sexual identities (see, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, among many examples.) Sexual identity claimants are increasingly totalizing in their ambition, and unconstrained in their willingness to use coercive powers, vandalism, and even violence in their efforts to make everyone participate in their sexual identity formation.
It is therefore no surprise that Muslims are also coming under attack. The vast majority of American Muslims are people of good faith.
Adam J. MacLeod
Adam J. MacLeod is a member of the Maine and Massachusetts (inactive) bars and an Associate Professor at Faulkner University, Jones School of Law. He is the author of “Property and Practical Reason” (Cambridge University Press) and dozens of articles in journals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, many of which can be accessed at his website.
