Defenders of Freedom

Introduction

The Founders’ perspective on the relationship between religion and politics was predicated on a separatist approach. Despite other differences in political theory, the Republican justifications for the exclusion of religion from the political process are analogous to liberalism's justifications for a similar inclusion of religion (Pangel, 1988). For a considerable time, the two viewpoints of America have created political tension because of the opposing views of Christian society proper. Conservatives insisted a Christian state required some official recognition and support for churches. By contrast, separatists contended state support of an established denomination infringed upon freedom of individual conscience and of other religious traditions (Kammen, 1980).

Some studies of legislative behavior have included measures of religious affiliation to capture the preferences of individual legislators (Benson & Williams, 1982; Gohmann & Ohsfeldt, 1994; Green & Guth, 1991). As a result, legislators do not simply disagree over an instrumental policy goal; the fundamental issue frame is in dispute. What for one group is clearly a religious wrong is clearly for another a civil right. In that context, legislators become defenders of a way of life—a divinely ordained way of life. These arguments represent the types of wedge issues that divide families, parties, and states and challenge governance (Lowi, 1969). These are conflicts over morality and are defined by “clashes of first principle,” or arguments over fundamental values, on “technically simple and salient public policy issues with high citizen participation” (Mooney, 1999).

In the past few decades, the question of whether and how civil society should recognize committed intimate relationships between two people of the same sex has been an example of a prominent and divisive policy issue. Marriage can be conceived of as an institution, as it embodies both formal legally enforceable rules (i.e., rights and obligations related to financial benefits, parental rights, immigration status, or medical decisions) and a broad array of informal arrangements. The latter includes social norms about how intimate relationships, reproduction, and children’s socialization should be organized (Lauer & Yodanis, 2010), along with recurrent social practices (i.e., family names, ceremonies, or rings).

Since institutions are containers of moral values and templates (Hall & Taylor, 1996) that determine which actions and behaviors are considered “right” or “wrong” (Hacker et al., 2015), authoritative decisions affecting the core values upon which the institution of marriage was founded, such as the adoption of marriage equality, can be regarded as an instance of institutional change (Mariani, 2020). Disputes as to who is allowed to contract marriage belong to so-called “morality policies,” that is, contentious public issues that induce value conflicts over “first principles” and battles between “right and wrong” (Engeli et al., 2012).

Due to its principled nature, morality elicits a counter-response, seeking not just to withstand the policy but to eradicate it altogether whenever it succeeds (Hollander & Patapan, 2017). Morality policies are thus fertile ground to examine how processes aimed at redefining policy problems and redirecting policy solutions through ideas and discourses are interactive and oppositional.

In the wake of marriage equality for same-sex couples, this chapter discusses increased efforts by legislators, due to their opposition to homosexuality, to introduce and pass laws that provide religious exemptions for certain services for members of the LGBTQ community.