Is sexual liberty the new first freedom of the United States?

The Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco is facing a backlash stemming from a proposed contract with Catholic schoolteachers that requires them to affirm or believe Church teaching on issues of sexual ethics.

Some of the issues are generally Christian, and some are specifically Catholic. But here’s the point: The archbishop essentially wants Catholic schools to be Catholic, and that apparently creates a problem for some in the government of California.

So some lawmakers in Sacramento are pushing for an investigation into possible employment discrimination.

I asked John Stonestreet of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, who is overreacting here?

“What an incredible story,” he said. “The Catholic archbishop strangely wants the Catholic institutions of education to be in accordance with Catholic doctrine. It’s not like the archbishop suddenly invented new sexual morals after 2,000 years of church history.”

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is just trying to ensure Catholic school teachers don’t publicly disagree with Catholic doctrine, and not just on LGBT issues, Stonestreet said.

“But again, what we found is that specifically because it dealt with LGBT issues, that becomes the unforgivable crime these days,” he added.

The archbishop pushed back by asking Democratic lawmakers if they would hire someone for their staff who went against the Democratic party platform they held to. Of course they wouldn’t, Stonestreet said, and they shouldn’t be forced to: “So if Democrats are allowed to be Democrats when it comes to a political office, why wouldn’t Catholics be allowed to be Catholics when it comes to their own schools?”

The situation in San Francisco is just the latest in a string of incidents involving Christian institutions being challenged politically or in the courts for setting policies based on their beliefs. And it all stems from this new understanding of religious liberty as freedom of worship, something entirely different.

“Religion used to be considered someone’s deeply held conviction that basically shaped how they interacted with the world,” Stonestreet said. “But in a secularist mindset, religious convictions have to be kept private and personal, because that’s how secularism sees religion. It sees it as a personal, private preference, not as anything to be considered true about life and the world. It seems as though sexual liberty has replaced religious liberty as the first freedom of the United States.”

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