tbh "religious liberty" always felt like a uniquely weak reason that you should be allowed to do something. "I know it seems bad, but have you considered that I'm doing it because it's important for no reason?"
idk like. even modern secular liberal societies display such a common penchant for using innocuous feature of religion as an excuse to harass and legally punish the other that an instinct to carve out protections for religious practices seems indisputably useful? otherwise you get situations like France's "muslim women can lose their jobs for wearing hats, even ones required to do said job," nominally coming from a place of secularism and no state religion and feminism and in fact just an excuse to harass muslim women.
so i think understanding "religious liberty" as providing a degree of presumptive (but not infinite) protection is a good instinct for society to have bc people are always trying to figure out new excuses to be dicks to members of social groups they don't like and religion is a major axis along which this dickish behavior occurs.
The other thing is, religious liberty frequently protects choices and behaviors over which people are willing to defy the state at great personal cost.
Insofar as we take "liberalism as armed truce between competing ideologies" seriously, it makes sense to be especially demilitarized on topics where people are especially willing to escalate.
I think the responses here are missing the point. Something like “religious liberty “ can be a good policy but a bad justification.
Why should people need a “good justification” for wearing hats?!
No, really, why?!
Muslims should be allowed to wear the hijab, because anyone should be allowed to wear a hijab, because it’s a fucking hat, and the government has no business whatsoever legally mandating what amounts to a personal fashion choice!
Let’s seriously run with the way OP phrased this, ok? “I know my decision to wear a hat on my head seems bad–” DOES IT?! Does it REALLY?!
In isolation, headscarfs are completely morally neutral! There is nothing at all about deciding to wear a scarf on your head that is uniquely and inherently repressive – as evidenced by the fact that countries which ban the hijab aren’t banning women from wearing hats for non-religious reasons. The only argument that you can possibly make that putting a piece of cloth on your head is a harmful activity that the government should get to control is that when a person does so as a Muslim, that fact so completely changes the act of putting that cloth on their head that now there’s suddenly, magically, a compelling government interest in banning it.
So no, religious liberty is not “a good policy but a bad justification”. Religious liberty is a good justification against objectively discriminatory policies. That’s what the concept is meant to protect against, and talking about it as though you can separate it out from that discriminatory context is disingenuous at its core.
It’s true that there need to be limits to this. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose – religious liberty should not extend to things like murder, or child abuse, or plenty of other unjustifiable actions. And yes, it’s also true that there is some grey area there, too, because what qualifies as a real societal harm is not entirely clear cut.
But don’t give me any of that mealy-mouthed “why is religious liberty even a concept~?” BS. You know why. We all know why. The excesses of those who exploit expansive religious liberty protection regimes no more define the nature of religious liberty as a concept than racefakers who steal scholarships define affirmative action.
When did I say anything about “wearing hats”?























