It’s the religious far-right’s “special snowflake” syndrome: conservative Christians thinking that because they believe God sanctions their particular brand of bigotry, they’re special snowflakes who shouldn’t be restrained by human decency, much less the pesky laws that the rest of us are obliged to follow. If you hate hard enough, the rules don’t apply to you because you are a special snowflake, who really, really believes in what you’re doing. Your feelings about something make you so special that the law just ceases to apply to special little you.
And it’s not like conservatives are going too far out on a limb in believing this. In some measure we’ve come to accept that belief should excuse you from following the law, even as it impacts others. With, for instance, Hobby Lobby, we see a shift toward the idea that your beliefs, even if factually wrong, simply exempt you from the law — even when, in practice, that has an impact on other people. We’ve moved away from the sensible idea that a person shouldn’t be held to laws that conflict with his beliefs where exemption won’t have an impact on others, to a world where religion is a valid excuse to get out of such obviously necessary things as driver’s licensing rules. So we’ve gone from “your career won’t be ruined for using a prohibited substance in your religious ceremony” to “you don’t have to provide health care coverage for medicine you don’t like”. Religion and religious belief has become the trump card: having a belief about something, in a sense, did make you a special snowflake, and you could get away with all sorts of things, regardless of the impact on other people, by virtue of how special you were.
All animals are equal, but animals who profess a strongly held belief are more equal.
Or so conservatives, and their overly broad interpretations of religious freedom, seem to have convinced themselves. … the only sensible view of religious liberty there is: we should all be free to live according to our consciences, up until the moment that consciences drive us to impose our beliefs on another person. In a world full of competing, often contradictory ideas, this is the only view of religious liberty that is feasible, or could possibly be evenly applied.
Rachel’s Hobbit Hole
via The “Special Snowflake” Syndrome of American Conservatives.