“Freedom, I believe, is fundamental to the promise of America,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in Wisconsin on Tuesday. She was, of course, talking about the freedom to terminate a pregnancy by abortion, but she wanted to frame abortion freedom in a broader panoply of freedoms, which she then listed: “Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of assembly, the freedom to vote.”
There are a few nits to pick with that list — isn’t voting better described as a privilege of citizenship rather than a freedom? — but the most interesting detail is that Harris exhibits the same tic as Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama by saying “freedom to worship.”
The First Amendment, which Harris was citing with those first three freedoms, doesn’t mention the freedom to worship. Instead, it says that “Congress shall make no law … prohibiting the free exercise” of religion.
That is, we have the freedom to exercise our religion, which is a much broader thing than the “freedom of worship.”
I exercise my religion in many ways. Worship is one of them, and I guess I’m grateful that the vice president acknowledges that the government can’t stop me from worshiping how I please — this wasn’t true during the pandemic.
But worship isn’t the beginning and end of our exercise of religion. How and what we eat is part of our exercise of religion. Christians and Jews are obligated to love our neighbors, and so that is an exercise of our religion. We are obligated to honor our father and mother.
Crucially, we exercise our religion by living our daily lives in accordance with the moral teachings of our faith, and so the government infringes on the free exercise of religion if it compels a person to violate his conscience.
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Forcing a Quaker to take up arms violates the free exercise of religion. Forcing an observant Jew to work on Saturday violates the free exercise of religion. Forcing nuns to provide contraception to their staff or forcing Catholic nurses to be complicit in abortion violates the free exercise of religion.
Harris and Biden are talking a lot about freedom. It’s telling that Harris is trying to curtail one of them.