Error and Religious Freedom

Unfortunately, what many secularists regard as religious freedom, e.g., Obama's contraception mandate, is actually an attack on religious freedom. Religious freedom, properly understood, is proper and good--past papal pronouncements notwithstanding.

It may well be that "error has no rights." But how does one know how to identify error in the absence of an unfettered marketplace of ideas? Those who insist the State has a role to play in defending truth are blindly infusing the State, aka the Territorial Monopolist of Violence, with what the late Roy Childs called "epistemological elitism." Freemasons, atheists, Islamists, Zionists and pagans can just as readily seize the machinery of State as can Catholics. What happens to the cause of truth then?

I take all papal pronouncements seriously, but only those strictly dealing with faith and morals impinge on my conscience. Statements regarding religious liberty are political. Popes are no more infallible when issuing political statements than they are when discussing the weather, economy, astrophysics, the historical accuracy of the orthodox Holocaust account, or which players should be admitted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.