In June, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer requested that the state legislature enact a version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and recently, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver submitted a proposal for just that. It's one thing to try to provide exemptions for people with sincere conflicts of conscience, but quite another to create two classes of people: religious believers who can be excused from following many laws and non-religious people who must bear the burden of community rules and regulations.

The Institute for Humanist Studies opposes this bill and has released a statement explaining why it's both wrong and unnecessary:

"Gov. Spitzer, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno are pushing for legislation that discriminates against the 1.9 million nonreligious New Yorkers," said Jennifer Lange, legislative liaison of the Institute for Humanist Studies. "This proposed legislation is flying fast and under the radar. New Yorkers need to know just how dangerous this bill could be if passed into law."

"By creating a two-tier standard of law, which gives special rights to religion, RFRA may embolden people to start using religion as an excuse to break laws that were made to protect society," said Lange. "This is a Religious Excuse Act."

"At the very least RFRA is unnecessary because it is redundant on both the federal level and state level. Our right to religious freedom is already protected in the Bill of Rights and the New York State Constitution," Lange said. "The real motivation behind this bill may be to ensure that certain organized religions gain access to goods, resources and services that are not available to the average citizen."

Some exemptions are also designed to simply deny to people access to goods and services which some religious groups object to. Pharmacists trying to close off access to emergency contraception is just one example of this, but the overall pattern is perhaps made most plain here: where religious activists have failed to change the law, they are determined to use religious exemptions to undermine it and/or make it practically ineffective.

Constitutional scholar Marci Hamilton is cited as arguing that RFRA laws burden otherwise neutral laws with a great deal of scrutiny when it comes to religious believers. The areas of law affected include: "abortion regulations; child neglect, abuse and support laws; statutory rape and minimum age marriage laws; laws against domestic violence; zoning and building codes; antidiscrimination laws; fair housing laws; open space laws; and laws regarding religion in public schools."

Can't ban emergency contraception or abortion? Then make it harder for people to obtain them. Can't stop laws banning discrimination against women or gays? Then get a religious exemption and continue your faith-based discrimination anyway. So many conservative religious believers still haven't come to terms with the fact that the world has moved on to a point where liberal, secular democracies are able to provide people with higher standards of living, more liberty, more justice, and more autonomy than anything any faith-based political or social system was ever capable of.

Why are these exemptions becoming such an issue now? In the past Christians wrote laws in accordance with their own needs, so they didn't have to ask for exemptions; religious minorities were too powerless and intimidated to expect equality. Today, laws are more secular and liberal so conservative Christians are experiencing what they put everyone else through in the past; minorities are now confident enough to demand equality.

What's missing in all of this is any sense of community and shared burdens. Religious believers demand that their religion not be burdened, but aren't we all burdened in various ways by communal laws and regulations? Rather than argue that some things are not a proper state function, believers are simply claiming that their own religious rules trump proper state function and community laws. The RFRA laws take this further by establishing the presumption that the religious believers' claim is correct.

Compare this to the most legitimate and most easily defended case of exemption: conscientious objector status. Here, the presumption is on serving in the military so the burden of proof is on the person asking for an exemption. If they lie, they are punished. Even if they succeed, they are not allowed to just walk away from their community obligation and must instead provide an alternative form of service — in the case of battlefield medic, that service might be more dangerous that what they would have done otherwise. It's disingenuous that current religious exemption laws are defended through references to conscientious objectors when the two systems have so little in common.