Conscientious Objections: Psychology’s Productive Ambivalence toward Religious Exemption Laws

• In Event: Embodied Narratives of Health, Self, Care, and Knowledge

Abstract

In political discourse on religious freedom and legal discourse on religious exemptions, “conscience clauses” have emerged as conservative legal strategies to allow corporations and, increasingly, health care providers, to deny services to customers or patients based on religious beliefs. As various U.S. states began to enact conscience clause legislation targeting psychological training and practice over the past decade, the American Psychological Association convened a working group that has produced a series of statements, resources, and position papers regarding psychologists’ obligation to provide affirmative care to all while also protecting students’ and practitioners’ freedom of speech under the First Amendment. Virtually all debates about religious freedom in psychology center around multicultural training and specifically, sexual and gender minority (SGM) issues—and, therefore, SGM people. Drawing on feminist and intersectional STS approaches to sexuality and gender in science and medicine, I track “official” psychological discourse on conscience clauses for the production of epistemic values. Notably, psychologists’ frame their concern with conscience clauses as un-controversially reflective of established scientific principles and ethics; I suggest that the growing archive of APA’s response to conscience clauses (i.e., professional guidelines, policy statements, committee reports) are productive, rather than merely reflective. Further, I suggest that these statements function variously as boundary objects at the nexus of psychological science and the law, whereby the substance of mental health service is co-produced by professional psychology’s apolitical norms and conservatives’ efforts to instantiate and protect discrimination.

Author

• Patrick R Grzanka, The University of Tennessee