Religious liberty at heart of freedom

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the most important decision for religious liberty in decades.

The case was Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. The question was whether the Obama administration could force citizens to violate their religious and moral convictions as the price for doing business in America.

I was one of the attorneys for Hobby Lobby, and I am pleased to say that the Supreme Court rebuked the Obama administration's executive overreach and affirmed again Americans' fundamental right to practice their faith in the workplace. But the aftermath of the Hobby Lobby victory has revealed a new danger: that the left will abandon our venerable, bipartisan tradition of religious freedom.

Religious liberty is in fact the oldest of Americans' political traditions. It is the reason so many of our forebears ventured to this continent in the first place. It motivated the colonists' struggle for independence (and against King George III's government-established church). And when our founders met in Philadelphia to frame a new Constitution, their commitment to religious liberty helped give our system of government its defining character: the Philadelphia drafters denied the federal government authority over church life, over belief and personal conscience. They gave us instead a limited government possessing only carefully defined powers.

The Constitution's protections for civil society and personal freedom stem directly from our founders' determination to keep government out of religious belief and practice.

Over the years, the American left has repudiated the constitutional tradition of limited government, but until recently, it still voiced support for religious liberty. In 1993, Democrats in Congress joined with Republicans to adopt the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (or RFRA), one of the two or three most important pieces of federal legislation of the last 20 years. When President Bill Clinton signed the law, he called it a landmark for freedom. This was the statute that decided the Hobby Lobby case.

But now some on the left want to abandon it — and religious liberty more generally. In the days following the Hobby Lobby decision, a group of Democratic senators introduced legislation to roll back RFRA's liberty protections. The so-called Murray-Udall bill would overturn the Hobby Lobby result and force business owners of faith to provide abortion-inducing drugs.

And that's just the beginning. The bill would deny religious freedom rights to employees, employee organizations, insurers, individuals and families. It would strip conscience protections from federal law, including long-standing conscience clauses on abortion. Indeed, it would allow the federal government to force business people to finance late-term abortions in the future.

Meanwhile, other liberal groups have announced new opposition to any form of religious exemptions in law on the theory that religious liberty is simply a cloak for bigotry and discrimination.

These are troubling developments. It's not just people of faith who benefit from religious liberty protections. All Americans do, because the right to religious liberty keeps government power in check and personal freedom secure. The right of every person to follow his or her own conscience in a peaceful manner prevents the government from imposing its moral vision on the populace or otherwise attempting to stamp out minority views it dislikes or finds inconvenient.

Abandoning religious liberty invites not social progress, but social uniformity. It augments not personal freedom, but government power. The best way to protect the rights of individuals and minorities, and our society's valuable pluralism, is to protect the religious liberty at the heart of our constitutional order.

My nonprofit organization, Missouri Liberty Project (libertyprojectmo.com), is leading the fight to protect religious liberties in our state and around the nation. If you believe in religious freedom, let's you and I stand together.

Joshua Hawley is a constitutional lawyer, law professor and the founder of Missouri Liberty Project. He helped represent Hobby Lobby Stores at the U.S. Supreme Court.