Your Religion Is False

In the Wall Street Journal, lawyer Eric Rassbach has an op-ed piece explaining his latest case, in which he defended his client’s religious right to kill goats at his suburban house:

I then explain, often to dubious ears, that Mr. Merced is a priest of the Santería religion and must sacrifice goats in order to ordain new priests. Without goat sacrifice, his religion would die out. Sometimes my questioners nod in agreement, sometimes they don’t.

One reaction I haven’t heard yet is “Oh, of course. What a great idea!” Yet that’s what anyone who takes religious liberty seriously should say.

Fortunately, I don’t take “religious liberty” seriously, because I’m pretty sure that I’m not capable of commending his client. The idea that you need to kill a goat in order to make someone a “priest” is stupid, and I can’t imagine describing it as anything other than “stupid.”

Nonetheless, Rassbach won his case:

Last week the federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans put itself on the side of freedom of conscience, ruling for Mr. Merced and telling the city he lives in–Euless, Texas–to let him start sacrificing goats again. The Court did not decide whether Mr. Merced’s beliefs were right or wrong, orthodox or unorthodox. It simply held that as long as he is not endangering public health or safety, the government had to leave those beliefs up to him and his gods.

Would that such “freedom of conscience” were extended to the non-religious! There are plenty of illegal things I’d like to do that don’t endanger public health or safety:

• buy more than 6 boxes of Sudafed at a time
• jailbreak my iPhone
• smoke plants that aren’t tobacco
• pay a radio station to play my rock opera about a blind pinball wizard, tentatively titled “Your Religion Is False”
• sell my absentee ballot
• get a product placement for my book on a French television program

(Note to the authorities: I am not actually considering doing any of these, except maybe the payola and the French television placement.)

And yet no one wants to defend my freedoms, simply because my desire to do all these things is rooted in the common-sensical “I think they’d make my life better” rather than the ludicrous “the wisdom-spirit Agbonniregun, second calabash to god, told me during my last Ifá divination that I’m required to if I want access to a steady source of the divine life force Ashe in the afterlife!”

Needless to say, I will not be joining Rassbach on his anti-caprid crusade.

Tags: agbonniregun, animal sacrifice, ashe, eric rassbach, freedom of conscience, goats, ifa, iphones, jailbreaking, lukumi, orunmila, payola, pinball wizard, product placements, religious freedom, religious liberty, rock opera, santeria, smoking, sudafed, tobacco, vote selling