The Right of Conscience and Eternal Truths

In his latest column, Hadley Arkes notes that the continued claims to the right of conscience in the current day are, at bottom, meaningless, because they are untethered from unchangeable, objective truths.  Today, under the banner of conscience, people can claim a whole host of different beliefs, no matter the reasonableness of those beliefs themselves.

But that is precisely the problem.

We tend to relegate things that once could be judged right or wrong, justified or unjustified, to the realm of mere belief.  This creates a system in which, in the words of Justice Scalia, "each conscience is a law unto itself."  We forget that the law can judge on the legality of a widow throwing herself onto a funeral pyre because of religious obligations.  Could one reasonably kill one's own child and be protected from the force of law simply because they claimed to act out of religious duty?

Arkes explains here the original grounding of the right of conscience for the Founders:

 The law had a firmer clarity when it could simply take its bearings from James Madison’s understanding of religion:  “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.” That Creator was of course the God of Israel, and the duties were bound up with the Laws that sprang from that Lawgiver.     

With that understanding the law was anchored, not merely in beliefs, but in truths held with conviction about the Author of the Laws of nature and the moral force of those laws. The problem before us now is just what claims of “conscience” mean when they are detached from that body of truths.

Arkes closes by observing that those who are against abortion are not simply "forcing their beliefs on everyone else" as the saying goes.  In an odd paradox, those who claim the banner of private belief are the secularists in this debate.  Those who are pro-life are "planting in the law the premise that the right to abortion has been founded in the most grievous errors of reason." They are claiming that abortion is a wrong for anyone, regardless of any personally held belief; that it is a denial of the rights given to us by our Creator.