Conscientious Objection, Conscience Clauses, and Religious Exemptions: Debating Rights, Obligations, and the Public Sphere, 1973–74

In 1973 and 1974, Congress passed three laws that included exemptions for individuals, groups, and organizations with religious or moral objections: The Public Health Services Act, which exempted health care personnel and institutions with religious or moral objections from providing or performing abortions or sterilization procedures; the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, which required that states include religious exemptions to child neglect regulations; and an amendment to the National Labor Relations Act,, which exempted employees who are members of religion or sect opposed to labor organizations from paying union dues. That same Congress considered but did not pass the World Peace Tax Fund Act, which would have allowed taxpayers to designate the payment of their income taxes to a fund that would not be appropriated for any military purposes.

These religious exemptions each have their own particular histories that can be traced back to debates over conscientious objection during the Revolutionary War and forward to debates over the contraceptive mandate to the Affordable Care Act. This paper, though, analyzes the passage of these laws together at a particular moment in time as a way of understanding how debates over Vietnam, abortion, and the “rights revolution” generated new ways of conceptualizing and legislating conflicts between private beliefs and public policies. Examining how the particular issues at stake in each of these exemptions produced different alliances of supporters and opponents, and considering why certain claims for religious exemptions were recognized as legitimate while others were not, this paper analyzes the 93^rd Congress’s debates over conscience and religious exemptions as a way of understanding how the relationship between individual rights, the obligations of citizenship, and the public sphere was being imagined and reconfigured in the 1970s.