The American tradition of religious freedom has long included exemptions from laws that impose a burden on the exercise of faith. The Volstead Act implementing Prohibition, for example, made an exception for the sacramental use of alcohol. In recent years, though, liberals have started to turn away from that tradition — and come up with ever more inventive ways to justify doing so.

Democratic-appointed judges are voting to deny religious exemptions on spurious grounds. The ACLU says it no longer supports the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law that passed nearly by acclamation in 1993. It is still enthusiastic about protecting Sikhs in prison who don’t want to have their beards shaved. But it doesn’t want Christian conservatives to use the law to avoid paying for their employees’ contraception.

Most liberals don’t want to think of themselves as hostile to religious liberty, or to say that they’re only against it when it’s invoked by conservatives. So they’re telling themselves a story in which conservatives are abusing the religious-liberty tradition to make new and dangerous demands. Liberals, on this view, are “standing by conscience while recognizing its new role in culture-war conflicts,” to quote an essay by Reva Siegel and Douglas Nejaime in The American Prospect, a liberal magazine. But this story doesn’t withstand modest scrutiny.

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Read the article “ANALYSIS: Liberals Abandon Religious Liberty” on bloombergview.com.