The latest Becket Religious Freedom Index shows that 71% of Americans either “Completely” or “Mostly” support the freedom to believe that certain behaviors are immoral. Becket reasonably includes religious opposition to abortion as part of the “certain behaviors are immoral.”
At the same time, 94% either “Completely” or “Mostly” believe that individuals should have the right to practice religion in daily life without facing discrimination or harm from others.
This showing of simultaneous support for the condemnation of abortion and individual religious freedom challenges the view of some Adventists that opposing abortion threatens religious liberty.
Decades ago, then president of the Adventist Church State Council, John V. Stevens, warned me that opposition to abortion could trigger Sunday laws. Stevens was concerned that my litigation to free pro-life teachers from supporting the pro-abortion teachers’ union imperiled his religious liberty work for the Church.
One of my prominent cases before the United States Court of Appeals was of particular concern to Stevens. I represented a pro-life Catholic professor who had been fired from the University of Detroit (a Jesuit university) because of the professor’s religious belief that he must not support a pro-abortion union. This Catholic would not compromise what he thought God and the Catholic Church required of him, and the result was that a Jesuit priest fired him.
John Stevens was so opposed to my litigation to vindicate the rights of this professor that he sought to get the Adventist Church to file a friend of the court brief against me and in support of the University of Detroit. Thankfully, the other PARL officials did not support him, and no opposition brief was filed by the Church. (I always smirked at the optics of our Church joining with Jesuits to ensure that an employee fired for his faith would stay fired.) I was not privy to the conversation among the PARL officials, but perhaps they saw this same problem.
We won our case against the University of Detroit and the teachers’ union. The lawyers for the union decided not to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review our win. Because of this precedent, teachers who were not Seventh-day Adventists were given a legal path to freedom against pro-abortion labor unions. No Sunday laws flooded in as a result. The Becket report gives us a reason why.
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Bruce N. Cameron is the Reed Larson Professor of Labor Law at Regent University School of Law. He is also on the litigation staff of the National Right to Work Legal Defense and Education Foundation. The case referred to in this article is one of hundreds of religious freedom cases made possible by Foundation funding.