Separation is not Denial
Stop using “separation of church and state” to mean you can’t advocate for nobler plans inspired from your own beliefs. It doesn’t mean that. What it does mean is maintaining respect for other people’s beliefs in the civil square. It also means expecting everyone to execute on laws on the books intended to keep the civil peace if their nobler ideas are not persuasive enough to prevail.
Issues like abortion are difficult not because religious people abandon separation of church and state, but because unborn children are potential people, at a stage of defenselessness, that arguably deserve protection by civil governments committed to the value of individual lives. The idea of defending the defenseless to achieve a nobler civil peace, even though it requires sacrifice of privilege from some, can be advocated in the civil square persuasively and may even become law, without abandoning the separation of church and state.
The issue of transgender bathroom rights is similar. It pits the civil need of transgender people to use a public bathroom in safety against the civil needs of women and girls for safety in an environment rife with predators. One does not need to abandon separation of church and state to advocate for either position. Without individual bathrooms and maybe even with them given the recent articles about surreptitious cameras in restrooms, someone will be unsafe — and we need to sort through the risks and determine protections.
Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. could have advocated his positions without violating the separation of church and state, even as his faith informed his values. But he may not have. If the sole reason he advocates for laws is his belief a group of “other” has made inferior life choices or have an inferior genetic constitution — that is a violation. That is because the constitution recognizes each human’s inherent value and seeks to provide civil peace for all people, so long as they are not violating someone else’s civil peace.
Thus a state must ensure publicly available services are offered to all of good standing, that bathrooms are offered to all in good standing. Separation of church and state doesn’t inform where life begins or the rules for being a citizen of the state in good standing. In the USA we respect the right of the people to vote with their consciences to determine these issues, with a safeguard in the judiciary to assure a majority cannot violate a minority’s right to civil peace.
Even if he would have the Vatican set the law of the land in flagrant violation of the separation of church and state, Senator Eddie Lucio, Jr. is on very weak ground if he uses Catholic faith “rules” about sex to deny transgender people safe access to public bathrooms. The Catholic faith clearly recognizes the individual worth of all people, of even a sinner’s right to human dignity. Such a view violates the constitution’s spirit of the individual right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as well. He doesn’t at that point violate the separation of church and state, he violates both the spirit of the Catholic Church AND USA as a state.
Is it possible we should avoid overly detailed laws dictating who enters which gender of bathroom? Focus instead on giving people emergency access to protection should their person actually be threatened or violated. Then let individuals make the choice natural to them. Sometimes a rule can be more powerfully just when it leaves interpretation up the local situation. Such a view has little to do with the separation of church and state, and more to do with a different principle our nation was founded on: the rule of subsidiarity, of making decisions in the most local context possible.
