Calling individuals to a conscientious examination of values is a fitting role for religious people, and indeed, it's a worthy exercise for anyone concerned about personal and societal ethics. Much about this Declaration is positive, even noble and charitable. Its call for concern for the poor and vulnerable, to respect the freedom and dignity of all human beings, and to practice an ethic of love for all humans mirrors biblical principles and promotes compassion and social justice in the civic realm. However, once the Declaration authors have acknowledged these sorts of global values, what they call "the whole scope of Christian moral concern," they go on to effectively subordinate them to more specific concerns they are, in their words, "especially troubled" by, among these being abortion, homosexuality, and same-sex marriage.  

 

The language then becomes more targeted, and this is where the Declaration strays into questionable, if not dangerous, territory as it tries to address the confluence of morality, conscience and law and apply it to these specific concerns. Because it has a confused understanding of this confluence - - especially the intersection of religion and law under the U.S. Constitution - - the Declaration becomes self-contradictory at several points, threatening the very individual liberty its text praises. For example, it states in one passage that "freedom of conscience and religion are foundational principles of justice" and later adds that "immunity from religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience." Yet, it goes to great lengths to advocate for traditional one-man-one-woman marriage not as a principle of justice or individual conscience but as an "institution ordained by God" and says it is "the duty of the law to recognize and support" this definition [emphasis added]. So it asks that the law sanction only this one religiously based definition of marriage, thereby binding the entire citizenry to it, even though individuals may hold sincere but differing moral convictions on the matter. Such a resort to the force of law to impose a religious precept on everyone enervates the "unconstrained conscience" and "immunity from religious coercion" the writers claim to hold dear.