[COMMENTARY] During his visit to the U.S., Pope Benedict XVI spoke to and met with 200 leaders of the world’s other major religious faiths — Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish. Though he clearly intended his speech to sound a note of conciliation, from the standpoint of someone like me, standing apart from all those religious traditions but keenly aware of how religious dogma has undermined liberty throughout the ages, it sounded more ominous than ecumenical.

The pope’s words sounded all the right notes. He called for the major religions to cooperate to achieve greater religious freedom:

This country has a long history of cooperation between different religions in many spheres of public life. Interreligious prayer services during the national feast of Thanksgiving, joint initiatives in charitable activities, a shared voice on important public issues: these are some ways in which members of different religions come together to enhance mutual understanding and promote the common good. I encourage all religious groups in America to persevere in their collaboration and thus enrich public life with the spiritual values that motivate your action in the world.

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Yes, it sounds like an enlightened call for expanding liberty. Unfortunately, the pope’s own past statements and actions have demonstrated that he believes religious liberty belongs only to religious people, not to the non-religious. Worse yet, he believes that the limits of freedom are determined by the feelings of the religious. Let me give some background and then present the evidence for my accusation.

In Israel the last few years, there have been yearly gay pride events in Jerusalem, events that have not only been controversial but marked by violence from religious groups. Sadly, one of the few things that ultra-conservative Jewish groups and radical Islamic groups agree on is that they hate homosexuals and wish to deny them equal rights and do them harm. In 2006, reactionary Jewish leaders and reactionary Muslim leaders held a joint press conference calling on Muslims and Jews to “fight a common battle for traditional values.” They demanded that the event be canceled and promised to do anything necessary to prevent it from taking place.

In 2005, those efforts included one of their followers stabbing three parade marchers and declaring that he was doing the will of God. Rabbi Yehuda Levin, leader of the American-based group Jews for Morality, actually excused the murderer’s actions, declaring it to be the fault of “left-wing politicians and the left-wing judiciary, who forced this abomination on an unwilling populace.” Members of the ultra-orthodox Haredi sect in Jerusalem have attempted to stone the mayor of Jerusalem in protest of the event, they’ve set fires all over the city and even planted a bomb at a police station. If this is an example of cooperation between religions, we can do without it.

What does that have to do with the pope? Also in 2006, the Vatican instructed its ambassador to Israel to lodge an official complaint about the government allowing the march to take place. Here is what the Vatican said in a statement to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“The Holy See has reiterated on many occasions that the right to freedom of expression … is subject to just limits, in particular when the exercise of this right would offend the religious sentiments of believers,” the Vatican said.

“It is clear that the gay parade scheduled to take place in Jerusalem will prove offensive to the great majority of Jews, Muslims and Christians, given the sacred character of the city of Jerusalem,” it said.

Here the pope declares himself and all religious believers to be the ones who determine what others can and cannot say. According to them, the limits of free speech are defined by whatever causes offense to them or any other religious person. Why does the offense of a religious person take precedence over the offense of a non-religious person? Good question, and good luck getting a rational answer.

I’m offended by the Vatican’s irrational and absurd ideology. I’m offended that they think they have the authority to decide what I can and cannot say. I’m offended that they think that religious views are automatically afforded more protection from criticism and offense than non-religious views. The difference between me and the Vatican (and the radical Muslims who think the proper response to a book they don’t like is to kill the author, and the ultra-orthodox Jews who think that if they’re offended by something they can plant bombs and set fires) is that I don’t think my offense gives me the authority to censor their views. Unlike them, I support the rights of conscience for myself and for others.

Nor is this notion of the religions getting together to eliminate anti-religious speech merely an academic concern. Less than three weeks ago, the U.N. Human Rights Council showed that they have no understanding at all of the notion of human rights when they adopted a resolution offered up by a coalition of Islamic countries calling for laws in every nation prohibiting “religious defamation.” The ambassador from Saudi Arabia, of all places, complained that Islam had become one of the “victims of aggressions under the pretext of freedom of expression.” A nation where they have roving gangs of religious police beating women on the streets for not living up to their twisted medieval moral code, where freedom of expression is all but non-existent, is going to lecture the rest of the world on the limits to free speech? In a sane world, such a suggestion would prompt only ridicule. In this world, the United Nations endorses such lunacy.

The Saudi king has something else in common with Pope Benedict: Both like to blame the ills of the world on the growth of atheism and secularism. Like Pope Benedict, King Abdullah recently called on the religions of the world to come together on the pretense that “atheism has increased,” which he called “unacceptable behavior to all religions.” The pope likewise likes to talk about the dangers of “secularism”, and he often contrasts the infallible moral authority of the church with the “relativism” that, he argues, will result if the authority of the Church is undermined. Last fall, the Catholic World News reported on an address given by the pope when he accepted the credentials of a new envoy from Ireland. It included this statement:

Moreover, the Pontiff continued, if the Church is not allowed to proclaim the truth in public, “relativism takes its place: instead of being governed by principles, political choices are determined more and more by public opinion, values are overshadowed by procedures and targets, and indeed the very categories of good and evil, and right and wrong, give way to the pragmatic calculation of advantage and disadvantage.”

Moral relativism? You mean like the kind showed by your church for decades when you transferred dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pedophiles from parish to parish rather than turning them in to the police as any moral person would do? Talk of erasing the categories of good and evil from the same church that burned heretics at the stake, declared pogroms on the Jews and repeatedly tortured and imprisoned those who challenged their authority? Moral relativism, indeed.

Beneath these flowery words of ecumenism and togetherness spoken by the pope lies a very real danger. The reactionary elements of the world’s religions agree on little other than that those who are not religious should not have the same rights as the religious. The leader of the world’s Catholics, the Islamic radicals, Christian reconstructionists and Jewish fundamentalists all agree that their ideas should be protected from scrutiny and criticism and that they have a right to prohibit anything that offends them. This is a union of convenience that can only end with the destruction of liberty itself.