Showing posts with label Religious Liberty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Religious Liberty. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2015

[VIDEO] Rand Paul on Clerk's Arrest: 'Absurd to Put Someone in Jail for Exercising Religious Liberty'

(CNSNews.com) -- In reaction to the arrest and imprisonment today of county clerk Kim Davis because she refused to grant marriage licenses to homosexual couples, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said it was "absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberty."  He added that the heavy-handed "bully force" step by the state in this case was "a huge mitake" and would set the "movement back" for those trying "to redefine marriage."
Kim Davis is a clerk for the state of Kentucky in Rowan County.  She has steadfastly refused to grant marriage licenses to homosexual couples because of her Christian beliefs. Federal District Court Judge David L. Bunning rejected Davis's appeal to her religious faith, saying it was "simply not a viable defense." Davis was arrested and imprisoned today, Sept. 3.
Asked by CNN's Brianna Keilar for his reaction to Davis's incarceration, Sen. Paul said, “I think it’s absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberty. If you want to convince people that same-sex marriage is something that’s acceptable, I would say try to persuade people."
"But if we’re going to use the federal government and we’re going to get involved in every state locality, you know what’s going to happen?" he said.  "It’s going to harden people’s resolve on this issue. They’ll be no open-mindedness on this."
"I think it’s a real mistake to be doing this," said Sen. Paul.  "I think what’s going to happen as a result of this is states and localities are just going to opt-out of the marriage business completely."
"This is really the problem when from on high, from the federal level, we decide to get involved in a situation that has always, throughout our history, been a local issue," said the senator.

Monday, August 10, 2015

3 Historical Developments That Explain Our Current Religious Liberty Battles


In recent political memory, religious liberty was a value that brought together conservatives, libertarians, and progressives. As recently as 1993, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act was passed by a nearly unanimous Congress and signed by a Democratic president. Today, the same value is a political liability. Bakers, photographers, and florists are being ruined, adoption agencies shuttered, schools threatened with loss of accreditation and nonprofit status. So what happened? Why is religious liberty now losing so much ground?

As I explain in my just-released book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, three historical developments explain our current predicament: a change in the scope of our government, a change in our sexual values, and a change in our political leaders’ vision of religious liberty. An adequate response will need to address each of these changes.
First, government has changed. The progressive movement gave us the administrative state. Limited government and the rule of law were replaced by the nearly unlimited reach of technocrats in governmental agencies. As government assumes responsibility for more areas of life, the likelihood of its infringing on religious liberty increases. Why should government be telling bakers and florists which weddings to serve in the first place? Why should it tell charities and religious schools how to operate and which values to teach? Only a swollen sense of unaccountable government authority can explain these changes.
Second, sexual values have changed. At the time of the American Revolution, religion and liberty were so closely linked that Thomas Jefferson could affirm, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” Meanwhile, his French contemporary Denis Diderot, expressing sentiments that would culminate in a very different revolution, declared that man “will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” In our own time, however, the sexual revolution has shattered the American synthesis of faith and freedom, setting religion at odds with “liberty”—or more accurately, license. Now bakers, florists, adoption agencies, and schools that uphold what Americans have always believed about marriage find themselves at odds with the law.
Third, religious liberty has changed. Our Constitution protects the natural right to the free exercise of religion. But some liberals are trying to drastically narrow that right by redefining it as the mere “freedom of worship.” If they succeed, the robust religious freedom that made American civil society the envy of the world will be reduced to Sunday-morning piety confined within the four walls of a chapel. They have even gone so far as to rewrite the U.S. immigration exam to say that the First Amendment protects “freedom of worship” rather than the “free exercise of religion.”True religious liberty entails the freedom to live consistently with one’s beliefs seven days a week—in the chapel, in the marketplace, and in the public square.
These three changes represent a rejection of the American Founding. Progressive politics and a radical view of human sexuality are combining to coerce compliance at the expense of a bedrock human right. And of course much of this has been enabled by judicial activism, as in Obergefell.
S
o how do we fight against this onslaught? We start by fighting for courts to interpret and apply our laws fairly. Without a sound judiciary, no amount of public debate can ensure sound policy on issues like marriage and religious liberty, for the courts will always be able to refashion or discard what the people (through their representatives) have achieved. This is why the work of groups such as the Federalist Society, which opposes such judicial activism, is so important.

Outside the courtroom, our best strategy for fighting governmental overreach is to fight for more limited government. The less power government has, the less room there is for abuses of power. The alliance between social and economic conservatives is not just a marriage of convenience. They share important principles, and they face a common enemy—the expansion of government beyond its proper scope. This is why the work of an organization such as the Heritage Foundation, which opposes ever-expanding government, is so important.
Limited government and religious liberty are best served when human laws reflect the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it. All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with a right to life. Mankind is created male and female, and marriage, by nature, is the union of man and woman. Only by redefining these concepts according to desire rather than nature is it possible to concoct a “right to choose” that extends even to the killing of an unborn child or an endlessly malleable concept of “marriage.”
Restoring a sound understanding of human nature and the laws of nature will be the work of the many organizations and groups—churches and synagogues, primary schools and universities, for example—that constitute civil society. Among these groups, public interest law firms such as the Alliance Defending Freedom have an important role. We need groups like this to push back on the sexual revolution and remind people of the law written on their hearts—a law that points the way to true, ordered liberty, not license, when it comes to human sexuality and the family.
B
oth the Bible’s moral principles and reason require us to conform our desires to transcendent moral truths grounded in our nature as human beings, rational animals. The followers of postmodernism seek to re-create nature in accord with their desires, while the followers of progressivism use the power of government to make everyone else con- form to the desires of elites, who know best. These ideologies promote the satisfaction of desire even while trampling true natural rights and liberties like the free exercise of religion. And that’s where the work of groups like the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty proves so crucial. They insist against limiting religion to worship, and they defend its free exercise against encroachment in the name of untrammeled desire.

So the three steps that have undone core elements of the American Founding—progressive government and the administrative state, the sexual revolution’s elevation of desire, and the whittling of religious free exercise down to the freedom to worship—all need to be countered. Political organizations, religious and civic organizations, and legal organizations will have to play their roles in empowering the citizenry to reclaim their government and culture. I offer a roadmap for these groups to follow in Truth Overruled.
Without a return to the principles of the American Founding— ordered liberty based on faith and reason, natural rights and morality, limited government and civil society—Americans will continue to face serious and perplexing challenges. The dilemmas faced by bakers and florists and charities and schools are only the beginning.
Ryan T. Anderson is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and author of the just-released book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, from which this essay is adapted. Follow him on Twitter @RyanTAnd.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Conservatives Plot to Get Religious Liberty Bill to Obama’s Desk

Conservative members of Congress appeared confident today that a new bill designed to prohibit the federal government from taking “discriminatory action” against a person or institution based on his or its religious beliefs about marriage will reach the president’s desk sooner, rather than later.
The bill, called the First Amendment Defense Act, was written in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision. It would bar the federal government from punishing religious schools, organizations or individuals for their stance against same-sex marriage, or for believing that sexual relations are reserved to marriage, by revoking their tax-exempt status, for example.
During the Supreme Court arguments in Obergefell v. Hodges, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli conceded that if the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country, religious schools’ tax-exempt status could be threatened if the schools opposed gay marriage.
The legislation has already garnered 130 co-sponsors in the House and 36 in the Senate.
Conservatives, like Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., co-chair of the Values Action Team, say the measure provides “the most basic protection.”
“It’s sad that we even need such a bill,” said Hartzler in a press conference today held by the Republican Study Committee.
But not every Republican is on board, as some apparently fear “another Indiana.”
After speaking at the Capitol Hill press conference, Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a co-sponsor of the legislation, told The Daily Signal that some Republicans are hesitant to support the First Amendment Defense Act, which he introduced with Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, in light of the backlash Gov. Mike Pence faced over his religious freedom law earlier this year.
Although the two laws are very different—one is a state Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the other seeks to bar very specific actions taken by the federal government against individuals or institutions concerning marriage—they share at least two critics, the LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Council and the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the case of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, LGBT organizations, along with big businesses like Angie’s List, Apple and American Airlines, argued the law allows private business owners to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation. However, “no one has ever successfully used Religious Freedom Restoration Act to defend such actions,” wrote Heritage Foundation’s Ryan T. Anderson and Sarah Torre earlier this year, noting that “no one is interested in refusing to serve gays and lesbians simply because of their sexual orientation.”

Saturday, July 11, 2015

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION DEFIES SUPREME COURT, ISSUES FINAL CONTRACEPTIVE MANDATE RULE

Despite repeatedly losing its cases over the Obamacare contraceptive mandate at the U.S. Supreme Court, the Department of Health and Human Services announced Friday that it will continue to force religious organizations to distribute contraceptives – including the “week-after pill” – to their employees.

As a news release at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty states, the Obama administration has been handed “multiple losses in contraceptive mandate cases at the Supreme Court,” including the Hobby Lobby decision, and cases involving the Little Sisters of the Poor and Wheaton College.
Last week, the Supreme Court ordered the Obama administration not to enforce the contraceptive mandate against Catholic organizations from Pennsylvania, making this case the government’s sixth loss in a row at the Supreme Court. Currently, four petitionsare before the Supreme Court asking for final resolution of the issue by June 2016.
“The government keeps digging the hole deeper,” said Adèle Auxier Keim, legal counsel at the Becket Fund. “Just last week the Supreme Court ordered HHS not to enforce the exact rules they finalized today. But the government still won’t give up on its quest to force nuns and other religious employers to distribute contraceptives.”
“Especially after the Supreme Court’s recent King v. Burwell decision allowed the government to expand its healthcare exchanges, there is no reason at all the government needs religious employers to help it distribute these products,” she added.
As Keim observes, the Obama administration has already told thousands of businesses they need not comply with the HHS mandate at all.
“So why is it continuing to go out of its way to force religious objectors, from nuns to business owners, to do something it is more than capable of doing itself?” she asks.
Via: Breitbart
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Saturday, October 13, 2012

ORGS FILING SUIT AGAINST HHS MANDATE DEBUNK BIDEN'S DEBATE DEFENSE


In a statement released on Friday, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced that some of the leading Catholic institutions in the United States are filing a brief in support of the Becket Fund’s appeal to the D.C. Circuit on behalf of Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College as they challenge the HHS mandate.

The Becket Fund represents many of the religious institutions and Catholic organizations currently suing the Obama administration over the mandate that requires all employers, including religious institutions, to provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortifacients to all their employees through their health insurance plans. In its press release, the Fund indicates that The Catholic University of America, the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, D.C., and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. have all urged the courts, in their brief, to address the violation of religious liberty as presented in the HHS mandate.
According to the Becket Fund, the brief filed by these Catholic institutions “comes less than one day after the Vice President of the United States stated” during his debate with Congressman Paul Ryan:
[L]et me make it absolutely clear. No religious institution—Catholic or otherwise, including Catholic social services, Georgetown hospital, Mercy hospital, any hospital—none has to either refer for contraception, none has to pay for contraception, none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact. That is a fact.
“But the facts are exactly the reverse,” asserted Kyle Duncan, General Counsel of the Becket Fund. “Under the mandate, nearly every Catholic hospital, charity, university, and diocese in the United States—along with millions of institutions of other faiths—must refer for, must pay for, and must act as a vehicle for contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. If they do not, they face millions in fines. That is a fact.”
In addition to the Catholic institutions, thirteen states, The Cato Institute, the American Civil Rights Union, The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Center for Law and Justice, and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, among others, have also filed on Friday on behalf of Wheaton and Belmont Abbey colleges.
Currently, there are now over 35 separate lawsuits that challenge the HHS mandate.

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