In law school, my Constitutional Law professor asked us to define the word rights, as in "What are the rights we possess?". As an intellectual exercise, it is a worthwhile one, even if often times the courts and legislatures in our country fail to differentiate the two. Still, I think that the distinction is not only possible, but necessary.
Rights are God-given and inalienable. In other words, we are born with them (or some might even argue, conceived with them, but that's another topic for a different post) and they cannot be taken away from us. The Declaration of Independence recognized some of those rights--life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness--and the U.S. Constitution enumerates others. But neither of those documents grants us the rights that we possess by virtue of our birth on this earth.
Privileges, on the other hand, essentially amount to permissions granted to us by government. When the government affords us the ability or authority to do something, it can also take it away. Thus, when we receive our driver's license, we are subject to the whims of the state on whether we can keep it.
These two distinct concepts are often conflated intentionally to muddy the waters, but there's a simple way to differentiate between the two. A right is incapable of jutting up against another right. Privileges don't have that, ahem, privilege. To illustrate this point, consider the right to free speech. My right to speak extends as far as I can stretch it, up until the point where it would interfere with your right to speak. Thus, I cannot use my right to free speech to silence you, nor can you use your right to silence me. We can both speak at each other and not accomplish a whole lot, but we are both still free to speak.
On the other hand, a privilege that is often branded as a right is health care access, specifically to prescription birth control. When the Department of Health and Human Services provided an exemption to numerous companies that held sincere religious or moral objections to providing birth control for employees, people shrieked at the shift in policy. But as the government giveth, so the government taketh away. The very requirement that companies provide birth control to employees was a government privilege enacted through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is more commonly known.
One of the high-minded debates that goes on in law schools and other academic circles, then, is what happens when rights run up against privileges? And today, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the Supreme Court of the United States will hear those very arguments. This is "the gay wedding cake" case, as it's colloquially known. However, the stakes in this case make it abundantly clear: "[it's] not about the cake."
This case pits the freedom of conscience embedded in our nation's founding against the government-granted dignity provided by anti-discrimination laws. For proof of the former, look no further than the thousands of people who fled England and Europe in pursuit of religious freedom to found America. For the importance of the latter, we can look to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and cases like Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States. In other words, no matter the outcome of the case, this nation stands to lose a large part of its identity.
A lot of people say that we have to think and speak and act a certain way. Whether it's believing that everyone stand for the national anthem, or the idea that a bakery open to the public ought to bake a cake for same-sex ceremonies, the central theme appears to be that a person’s thoughts and opinions are no longer his own. To think differently is to be intolerant. And tolerance above all else has become the end goal for many in society. Nonconformity is the new pariah, and there are plenty of Joseph McCarthys out there to cast aspersions on those who will not tow the lion.
It's easy to say that Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips is wrong and is simply using religion to discriminate. But people with such a simplistic view of the situation do not understand the battle going on within Phillips's conscience when he has to tell a gay couple he cannot make a custom wedding cake for them. The Bible tells us that the two greatest commandments are to love God with all of our heart, mind, and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourself (Matthew 22:35-40; Mark 12:28-34). But the Bible also tells Christians to live apart from sinful desires and to put on our new selves in the image of God (Ephesians 4:17-24). And for many Christians, although same-sex marriage is now a legal reality in the United States, it is still a sin against God (1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:9-11). Therefore, forcing someone to participate in a same-sex marriage ceremony by baking a cake--a symbolic and edible representation of the union--is to force that person into celebrating a sin, and thereby violate his or her conscience.
In the 1943 case West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, the Supreme Court ruled that schools cannot force students to pledge allegiance to the flag (much to the chagrin of many Republican politicians today, I'm sure). The Court's reasoning is something that can serve as a beacon of hope amidst this tidal wave of social tolerance washing over us:
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.
Our dignity does not lie in the privileges granted to us by government, or on the misguided hope that we can have our cake and eat it too. Trusting in government to provide us with dignity will only set us up for a greater fall down the road, when it's no longer convenient for us to be dignified. Instead, we should find our sense of worth in the rights that God bestows on us from birth. Only when we recognize the value that He sees in us will we begin to see the value in each other, and that cannot be given to us by government.
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