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Judge blocks Washington requirement for priests to report child abuse disclosed in confession (washingtonstatestandard.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/seattle@lemmy.world
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[+] -14 points 1 year ago* (13 children)

A clearly unconstitutional law. I'm surprised that state legislators thought it could possibly be constitutional. Maybe they didn't but they preferred to vote for it anyway and let the courts fix their mess rather than giving their opponents in the next election ammunition against them.

(I suppose practicing Catholics aren't a major voting bloc?)

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    It's constitutional for therapists, I don't see how this is different just because they're cult leaders.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    The constitution doesn't have special protection for therapists the way that it does for religious expression.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I truly can't believe I have to say this: Child rape is not a valid form of religious expression.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    No one is saying that it is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    If that wasn't your implication, you should be clearer in your language. I've reread your previous comment multiple times now and still can't get any other meaning out of it.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not reporting a crime is not the same thing as committing that crime. The issue here is that Catholic priests have a religious obligation not to report crimes they find out about in certain specific circumstances, and this law would prevent them from fulfilling that obligation. There's no claim that actually attacking children is a religious obligation, or that it would be constitutionally protected if it were.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Not reporting a crime is not the same thing as committing that crime.

    That's only true of certain situations and I'm of the opinion that this is not one of them. I've had this exact discussion on here recently so sorry if I skip all the Wikipedia hyperlinks, feel free to trawl through my comments if you really need them lol. Suffice it to say aiding & abetting laws and criminal accessory laws both provide means of charging people with knowledge of criminal activity with the crimes committed, circumstantially of course. I see absolutely no reason why the guys helping rapists feel better about raping shouldn't be held criminally liable. Freedom of religion, like freedom of speech and the press and assembly and all that, is not absolute and necessarily has limits. It's why you don't see a lot of human sacrifice-based religions in the US. At least not mainstream ones. Your freedom to express yourself religiously ends weeeeell before my freedom to not have my children raped.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just cause it's something religious doesn't mean it is ungovernable. There are a lot of things that religious institutions can't do because of the law, this seems like an arbitrary line to draw.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I wouldn't say that letting Catholics practice their sacraments is arbitrary. The idea of religious freedom, as understood at the time the Constitution was written, was developed in large part as a reaction to two and a half centuries of brutal religious war and oppression between Protestants and Catholics (and between different Protestant sects) with non-Christian religions as an afterthought. Therefore, the right of Catholics to practice their religion is a central example of what is protected by the First Amendment. Religious freedom isn't absolute and where the line is drawn is to some extent arbitrary, but Catholicism is well within any reasonable line.

    Edit: I forgot to mention that the secrecy of confession is also required by the Episcopal Church. It was definitely on the minds of the authors of the Constitution, most of whom were Episcopalians.

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