The danger of mixing law and religion, in two Alabama bills

A nurse holds a vial of COVID-19 vaccine and syringe. A bill in the Alabama Legislature would allow parents to declare their children religiously exempt from vaccination without needing to provide a reason or justification. (Getty Images)

We reap bitter fruit when lawmakers cross-pollinate religion and law.

It’s not just a question of elevating one belief over others. The law at its best gives fair treatment to competing interests and keeps them on the same path through the world. When one version of what lies beyond this reality gets into the law, the people clinging to that vision enjoy a privilege over any other need or desire in the broader community.

Two bills pending before the Alabama Legislature put particular beliefs on a pedestal. And in the process, they could subject public education and the health of our children to the schemes of zealots.

HB 342, sponsored by Rep. Susan DuBose, R-Hoover, would force local school boards to give academic credit to students participating in religious instruction programs.

And how does HB 342 define religious instruction?

It doesn’t. Nor did DuBose when Anna Barrett asked her about the bill last week.

“I don’t know that I have a more detailed description other than religious instruction,” she said. “Basically think of Sunday school class. It would be something like that.”

What kind of Sunday school class? Unitarian? Methodist? Flying Spaghetti Monster?

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing these questions in private. Faith deals with the unknown. Our struggles sometimes feel inexplicable. But the law must work with the grubby reality of the world.

So laws must be clear in their meanings and mandates. They should be easily understood; easily applied and fair to everyone.

That’s not going to happen under HB 342. Yes, it requires students to take core classes. But it makes it easy to undermine the point of that instruction. A student staying up late writing a paper explaining the forces that shaped the U.S. Constitution gets credit. But so does a student whose pastor tells her that God Did it.

Under HB 342, the state of Alabama must treat these academic outcomes equally. It tells students that the hard work of reading and reasoning matters less than nodding at what the clergy tells you.

And yet, that bill seems tame compared with SB 85, sponsored by Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur.

The legislation does two terrible things. It extends religious exemptions from vaccines to public colleges and universities.

This alone is a bad idea. College and university students live close to one another; spend long hours in work and study and deal with loads of personal, professional and financial stress. It’s a perfect environment to breed illness.

But the bill goes further. It explicitly states that a college student or the parent or guardian of a K-12 student can claim a religious exemption from vaccines without explaining why. And it prevents a school from determining if that objection is legitimate.

So if you think the MMRV vaccine will put mischievous elves in your child’s bloodstream, the state will shrug. If you think measles is the better option, and you smile when your kid gets that contagious and potentially deadly disease and spreads it to other children, SB 85 says your viewpoint matters more than the health of other people’s kids.

A medical exemption from a vaccine is one thing. But religious ones are highly suspect. No major religion expressly forbids people from taking vaccines. Not Judaism. Or Islam. Not the Catholic Church. Or the Methodists. Not the Southern Baptists. Or the Lutherans.

In fact, anti-vaxxers often exploit religious exemptions to prevent their children from getting vaccinated, regardless of what their actual beliefs are.

A move like this is especially reckless as Alabama’s vaccination rates fall into risky territory. Empowering people eager to put your family’s health at risk will lead to an uncountable number of preventable tragedies. We’re already seeing the dangers of vaccine denial in Texas, where (as of Friday) two people had died in a measles outbreak and hundreds more had been sickened.

It didn’t have to happen. And that’s the part that makes me angry.

You have a right to your religious convictions. Or believe nothing matters.

But education and public health must work from reality. They emerge from practices developed through hard experience. Teachers and health care workers train all the time to refine those methods and learn new ones. All to protect and elevate as many people as possible.

Your leaders should defend those systems. Instead, they’re abandoning their duties and giving charlatans legal perches to sicken us and wreck public education.

Religious belief does not trump every other consideration. One person’s destructive conviction does not mean we bow our heads in silence as they smash everything around us.

That’s not religious freedom. That’s straight-up nihilism. It trashes professional expertise and puts paranoid fantasy in its place. When we bend the law to accommodate it, the law is no longer rational. It no longer functions.

And instead of confronting the world as it is, we find ourselves subject to someone’s faith. With no way to reason with them.