I saw the tweet from Ted Cruz (Yes, I follow Ted Cruz.  Good for insights; bad for my blood pressure.) and I thought my head would explode.  He was trumpeting an Ohio court’s ruling in favor of Francis and Philip M. Gilard as a triumph for religious liberty.  The Gilards are two brothers who did not want to provide contraceptive care to their employees because it went against their Catholic beliefs.

Now I’m not even going to go into my theory of how outraged Senator Cruz will be the first time a court upholds the rights of a Muslim or a Buddhist over a Christian.  There’ll be time aplenty for that.  We don’t need to further establish that for Cruz, his father and most tea partiers “religious liberty” means Christianity über alles.  I have another axe to grind.

Can we just get clear on this:  Freedom of religion includes all religions AND agnosticism AND atheism.  These are all valid points on the spectrum of religiousness.  Contrary to what I’ve been hearing from the extreme right and those who fear them, choosing to be personally spiritual without joining an organized faith or believing in a higher power that’s not reflected in contemporary faiths or believing that God is a hoax doesn’t mean you have opted out of the protection of the First Amendment.

Simply put, while I respect the Gilards’ right to their beliefs in their own lives, since their companies – Freshway Foods and Freshway Logistics – aren’t religious organizations, they do not have the right to impose any of them on employees whose faiths may not include the same strictures or whose lives are not guided by church interpretations at all.  Everyone in this scenario has the right to religious liberty and the Gilard brothers don’t have enhanced standing because they choose to follow a guy in a white dress.

Personally, I find myself in the middle of this spectrum.  Raised what I call “Christian unspecified” by my lapsed Catholic mother and Mormon-by-chance father, I am now somewhere between that generalized Christianity and agnosticism.  I don’t hate religion and I’m not out to undermine it.  I am, however, strongly pro-choice I would expect my view of the world to be every bit as validated and recognized as that of my employer.

Sure this is asking the Gilards to pay for something to which they have a major objection.  Welcome to the real world, boys.  In any country in the world, the citizens have to pay for things to which they object or in which they personally see no value.  I helped pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were predicated on lies and cost monumental amounts of money that would have been much better spent at home.  For years my tax dollars were at the ready to defend the Defense of Marriage Act and to drum good citizens out of military service under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  Would I have loved to withhold my money from those efforts?  Yes!  Was I able to?  Absolutely not.  If we are going to have a society, we all have to suck it up and pay for some things we don’t like.  If not, I want a line-item veto on my income tax.

The fact that the Gilards’ desire not to provide contraception to their employees is faith-based does not give it greater validity in the public marketplace.  Once again, the United States is a democracy, not a theocracy.