IRFA Staff, April 14, 2016

[The following is reprinted with permission from the April, 2016, issue of Cape Outlook, the monthly magazine of the Council for American Private Education.]

Dr. Carlson-Thies Talks on Religious Freedom to CAPE’s Leaders

Sex, religious freedom, and Alexis de Tocqueville. That’s the mixed stew of topics that Stanley Carlson-Thies covered during an address to leaders of CAPE’s member organizations and state affiliates March 14 in Washington, DC. Touching on themes from his acclaimed new book, Free to Serve, Carlson-Thies, director of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance, navigated the tricky waters of protecting the religious freedom of faith-based institutions while upholding the civil rights with which that freedom sometimes conflicts.

The sex part of the talk was rooted in the reality that “religious freedom controversies these days seem to be mostly about sex.”He cited several prominent illustrations, including the recent case of a Catholic school in Massachusetts that was found to violate a state employment law when it rescinded an offer for employment as a food services director to a person involved in a same-sex marriage, a relationship at odds with Catholic teaching.

Observing that different people, communities, and institutions in a pluralistic society have different views on “fundamental matters of human sexuality,”Carlson-Thies asked what society should do about these differences. Should it be legal for a private school to operate “on the basis of conservative morality”in matters like this, or should all institutions be forced to conform to the call for equality regarding sexual conduct?

As a path toward answering such questions, Carlson-Thies examined the issue of discrimination apart from sexuality. Is it “wrongful discrimination and should it be illegal”for an all-women college to admit only women, or for an all-boys high school to employ only male teachers? Similarly, it is proper for a Jewish school to hire only Jewish teachers or for a Muslim school to infuse the curriculum with Islamic values? For Carlson-Thies, all of these practices—even though they exclude some students and staff—are the necessary outcome of “a heterogeneous society in which citizens hold many different beliefs and in which we are committed to honoring each other’s convictions about how to live.”Labeling all those practices as discrimination fails to distinguish between “practices that are truly harmful and those that simply reflect diverse ways of operating.”

Proposing a reframing of the “discrimination discourse,”Carlson-Thies pointed out a fundamental difference between discrimination that actually prevents people from attaining a goal and discrimination that merely requires them to take another path toward that goal. For example, male students turned down by an all-women college are not prevented from going to college, they simply have to choose one that accepts men. If schools were not free to discriminate along certain lines, there wouldn’t be distinctive schools, whether same-sex schools or Montessori schools or schools that adhere to conservative moral values. Such institutions are not imposing their values or practices on others, they are simply requiring those who dissent from those values to find another option.

Another suggestion by Carlson-Thies for reframing the discussion is to recognize that while equal treatment is a fundamental value in society, another fundamental value is religious freedom. One value should not be routinely subordinated to the other. Thus, it is not right to “elevate progressive sexual ethics to privileged status by making it illegal for a faith-based school to operate consistently with its conservative sexual morality.”

A “diverse society requires diverse, and not uniform, institutions,”said Carlson-Thies. Orthodox Jewish institutions, for example, must be allowed to choose only Orthodox Jewish leaders, and the same applies to institutions run by Muslims, Mormons, Baptists, or atheists. “A diverse society must not apply non-discrimination laws in a way that makes it impossible for institutions to have diverse practices.”

So where does Alexis de Tocqueville fit in? Carlson-Thies spoke about de Tocqueville’s observation that Americans tended to turn to voluntary associations to address problems, unlike Europeans, who tended to turn to government. The wonder of associations, said Carlson-Thies, is that they provide “a pluralist alternative to government, an alternative that’s hospitable to diverse convictions and values.”Applying that attribute to private schools, he said part of the “great glory”of such schools is their great variety and distinctive profiles, with “different conceptions of how best to educate, how best to foster character and citizenship.”

Urging private schools not to hide their “light under a basket,”he said society will not “respect the distinctive contribution made by independent schools unless their presence is evident to the public.”