Preach Liberty
The message the pope should take to America
THIRTY years ago, I slid a piece of paper across a table at a secret meeting with the fabled French maritime explorer Jacques Cousteau. In it were dozens of names, all political prisoners in Fidel Castro’s gulags where I spent 22 years of my life. Months later, when Cousteau visited Cuba for research and Castro wanted to scuba dive with him, Cousteau leveraged the release of 80 of those prisoners in exchange. Cousteau used the gift of his fame to change the lives of Cubans for generations to come.
When Pope Francis arrives in the United States this month, he will not barter pictures and backslaps for political prisoners. America is still a nation where its citizens can publicly oppose their political leaders without fear of incarceration. At least for now. But in his unprecedented address to a joint session of Congress, he should protest against the ongoing creation of a new class of prisoners in our society: religious conscientious objectors.
Conscientious objectors have long enjoyed great freedom in America. As George Washington wrote in his seminal Letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, “All possess alike liberty of conscience,” and the newly formed United States had created a place where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
The American founding was premised on the sacred right of conscience, and that right has persevered here despite tumultuous periods in American history including protests, riots and wars.
Castro’s Cuba was and is premised on the opposite. His rise came at the expense of anyone who wouldn’t march in lockstep with everything about his revolution. His specialty is chipping away at the human conscience.
For refusing to say three little words, I was thrown in jail and tortured. All I had to do was say, “I’m with Fidel,” and I would be free. But I would not, and it cost me more than two decades of my life, and the lives of countless friends, many of whom were religious conscientious objectors themselves.
My story seems entirely alien to the experience of most Americans. And yet more and more Americans are going on trial just to defend their right to live according to their most basic beliefs.
The Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns bravely defended pro bono by lawyers at a firm called the Becket Fund, have devoted their lives to caring for the most indigent and hopeless of people in their dying years. And now they have also had to divert their attention and resources to fight the government in court.
The government says they just want one signature. One little signature, to authorize on their behalf the provision of contraceptives to which they are opposed.
But to these humble women, who have given up everything and asked for nothing in return, that signature and their beliefs are all they have. To sign would be to assent to something that violates their most deeply held beliefs. It would be to sign away their consciences, their Godgiven dignity.
The legal protection of conscience rights is relatively new in the scheme of human history. The persecution of the human conscience is as old as time. Belittling the magnitude of conscientious objection is a particular trademark of dictators.
America, perhaps more than any other nation in the world, understands and defends the sanctity of the human mind and the beliefs that flourish and guide it. We are still a beacon to the men and women that languish in their jail cells for holding steadfast to their beliefs and for refusing to violate them despite intimidation in places where tyrannical thugs or ISIS zealots reign with terror.
Pope Francis will arrive here from Cuba, which still houses many of the world’s political prisoners. As he will see, the flight is short. So too is the distance between freedom and totalitarianism.
When he speaks to President Obama, to a joint session of Congress and to an increasingly complacent American public, he must use some of that startling power that has come to define him. He must warn America that we cannot drift one inch closer to Cuba in its treatment of religious conscientious objectors.