Thursday the Center for American Progress hosted a panel event entitled “Religious Liberty: What It Is and Isn’t.” The event featured Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute, Sammie Moshenberg of the National Council of Jewish Women, Melissa Rogers of Wake Forest Divinity School, and openly partnered homosexual Episcopal Church Bishop Gene Robinson. The panel ran the gamut of religious liberty issues, but mainly focused on same-sex marriage and contraception. Robinson set the tone for the event with his opening words: The “evidence that religious liberty is being attacked is a […] red herring and it is interesting that it is coming from one side.”
The panel discussion showed the deep philosophical divide that runs between liberal and conservative religious people on the definition of religious liberty and the future of religion’s role in the public square. While the United States has maintained a robust religious public life in its civil activities, the definition of religious liberty offered by Robinson and the others betrayed an alignment with a European sphere-based model. This bias was very clear in the questions about same-sex marriage. Repeatedly, the New Hampshire bishop said that “marriage is a civil issue.” He explained his own same-sex ceremony in his church. First, he and his partner were “married by our female Jewish lawyer” at the back of the church where, as he put it, the secular meets the sacred. Then, after they were married, they walked down the aisle to be blessed by the Episcopal Church. This decision was lauded by the other panelists. Rogers agreed that civil marriage and religious marriage should be separated and Robinson went so far to say that the word “marriage” should be “given to the civil culture.”
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