Access to Birth Control, Abortion and LGBT Marriage are All First Amendment Rights

Here is a letter I wrote to Anthea Butler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Butler has a lot to say about religion's role in the public sector. I wrote this letter to Dr. Butler because I'd like to see SOMEBODY talking about the issues of SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, ACCESS TO BIRTH CONTROL and ACCESS TO ABORTION as a FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHT. Before I wrote to Dr. Butler I wrote to Marty Rouse of the Human Rights Campaign. Neither person ever wrote back. We need to change the conversation surrounding these issues. They are all First Amendment issues, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Let the conversation begin!

Dear Dr. Butler,

I am a Jewish chaplain working at a hospice in Denver. I am also
Lesbian. I have been watching the debate on the legality of homosexual
marriage but I want to do more than just watch. I want to change the
national conversation we are having. I also want to unite the effort
to maintain access to birth control (and abortion) to the effort to
legalize same sex marriage. Here's why:

Every argument I have seen against these issues is religiously based.
Homosexuality is a sin, marriage is between one man and one woman and
life begins at conception. These are all arguments which the Far Right
says come from the Bible. The First Amendment of the US Constitution
says that government can make no rules which respect one religion over
another. I am having trouble understanding why no one is saying that
religiously based laws have no place in our constitutional system. As
I watch the public debate I am beginning to realize that no one is
seeing what is going on because we are talking about Religion—and yet
when we talk about Religion, we do not talk about how religion has
changed—and I see two religious systems at play: I see the pre-modern
concept and I see the post-modern concept of religion.

We on the religious left are not making any headway with the religious
right because we are talking past them. In essence we are having two
religious conversations. We must understand how religion has changed
over the last years in order to frame this conversation correctly. The
religious right sees themselves as being philosophically pre-modern.
Anything that smacks of post modernism is thus shunned and ignored. We
must bring this out into the open--begin talking about how we cannot
base our society on the Bible in the way we used to base our society
on the Bible--without even thinking about it.

We on the religious left are spending our time talking about how
religion and the Bible DON’T discriminate against gays and women—and
yet the Bible is chalk full of these examples. The Bible hasn’t
changed.  Rather it is we who have changed. We no longer base our
Truth on Bronze Age ideas—ideas which were extant BEFORE the concept
of “zero” even took hold.  As liberal clergy, we must begin to frame
the conversation—embracing the modern concept of religion—because for
the first time in history, religion now has the possibility of being
about a relationship with the Divine, when before religion was about
control.