religious freedom

The “Equality Act” Would Mark the End of Religious Conscience

The mis-named “Equality Act,” also known by its bill number, HR 5, is due for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives next week. The bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s list of protected classes, but its real impact will be to significantly change America’s legal landscape, as we have detailed elsewhere.

Perhaps HR 5’s most egregious—and intentional—effect will be to eradicate religious conscience as a defense to acts of government coercion that seek to force businesses and religious institutions to comply with the bill’s radical sexual ideology against their conscience. It’s a blatant attempt to drive faith-based entities from the public life of the nation.

How would this happen?

The bill includes a small paragraph toward the end that says this:

“The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S. C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”

Let’s break down what that innocuous-sounding language really means.

When the federal government forces someone to act contrary to their religious beliefs, that person usually has two defenses: The First Amendment’s religion clause, or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, also known as RFRA.

But the U.S. Supreme Court decided in a 1990 case that the First Amendment’s religious freedom protections do not apply to protect religious conscience from what it called “neutral laws of general applicability.” That would include nearly any law that doesn’t target religion by name. That court-created loophole in the First Amendment so motivated a bi-partisan Congress at the time that it passed RFRA in 1993 by a voice vote in the House and by 97-3 in the Senate.

RFRA protects all of us, including faith-based entities and businesses (see the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision) from any government action that “substantially burdens religious free exercise” unless it furthers a “compelling government interest” by the “least restrictive means.” Since 1993, 21 states have also adopted RFRAs of their own.

What HR 5 does is to remove—in most cases—the last religious freedom defense available—RFRA—against the imposition of the bill’s sexual ideology across the nation. Wedding vendors like Jack Phillips will be back in court again with no religious conscience defense to support their refusal to create a wedding cake for same-sex nuptials. Employers would have to provide insurance for abortion and so-called “sex-reassignment” procedures. Doctors and nurses and hospitals will have no defense for refusing to provide controversial medicines such as puberty blocking drugs or cross-sex hormones to people suffering from gender dysphoria, or for declining to remove healthy organs from such people in a vain attempt to change their sex.

Yes, there are conscience laws in other federal statutes and agency regulations that currently offer some conscience protection to religious institutions and healthcare professionals, but those won’t last long if HR 5 is passed. In fact, a court one day could rule that HR 5 supersedes any existing federal conscience protection that might otherwise apply.

This conscience-killing bill would relegate the free exercise of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, to secondary status outside the public square. For those of us who are concerned that the current anti-Christian worldview we’re witnessing in politics and in the culture is meant to silence the Christian voice completely, the “Equality Act” will become our worst fears realized.

The Satanic Temple is Now a Tax-Exempt “Church” Says the IRS

This story is bound to raise a few eyebrows: The IRS just gave the Satanic Temple (ST) full tax-exempt status. The ST, not to be confused with the Church of Satan, has only been around since 2013. According to its website, members don’t actually believe in the supernatural or worship Satan. In fact the organization’s leader, Lucien Greaves, calls it more of a “resistance movement,” one that, like its more benignly named counterparts such as the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) or Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU), opposes what it sees as Christianity being too cozy with government.

In other words, it’s a secularist group that strongly supports the “separation of church and state” and sees a theocracy under every high school football game prayer or Ten Commandments monument. It’s basically just another anti-Christian group with a penchant for litigation and garnering media attention.

So why did the ST apply for an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) designation as a “church?” In its own words from an announcement on its website: “This [IRS] acknowledgment will help make sure the Satanic Temple has the same access to public spaces as other religious organizations, affirm our standing in court when battling religious discrimination, and enable us to apply for faith-based government grants.” Not exactly a blood sacrificing, howling at the moon sort of organization.

The IRS has criteria it applies when deciding whether an organization can be called a church, including a creed, doctrine, literature of its own, a religious history, established “places of worship,” etc. An organization attempting to qualify needs to meet most, but not all, of the criteria. We’re not sure how the ST qualified, but if an online store where you can buy satanic mugs and hoodies is a factor, they’ve got that covered.

The ST likes to make publicity waves by offering statues of Baphomet to state and local governments which have monuments like the Ten Commandments on public grounds, or offering to start an “After School Satan Club” at public schools that have Christian clubs. They make outlandish offers to gain media attention.

The latest IRS news, therefore, is just another attempt to get attention (and attract tax-deductible contributions, no doubt) rather than act as a signal that the U.S. government is endorsing satanic worship.

Cornell Group Invites, Then Disinvites Pro-Life Speaker Over Her Religious Views

Jannique Stewart is a pro-life speaker who received an invitation in January to speak about abortion—from a pro-life perspective—at an event the Cornell University Political Union (CPU) was going to hold in April. The CPU holds itself out as “a diverse group of undergraduates passionate about politics, active on campus, dedicated to elevating minority voices, and committed to finding common ground by engaging in respectful discussion and debate.”

On March 23, Ms. Stewart posted that she had received a phone call from someone at the CPU disinviting her because of what she calls her “outspoken beliefs regarding biblical sexuality,” meaning that sexual activity should be reserved for marriage, and that marriage is defined as the union of one man and one woman. She alleges she was told that allowing someone like her to speak on campus was “tantamount to allowing a racist to speak who held pro-slavery and pro-holocaust views.”

That’s when things got interesting.

The CPU denies disinviting her because of her religious beliefs about sex and marriage. It alleges that it was concerned about security costs of bringing a conservative speaker to campus, and that the issue was discussed with Ms. Stewart. But Stewart says the security issue was discussed in a general way back in January, but not in the conversation where she was disinvited.

Then a Cornell sophomore, Brendan Dodd, resigned as CPU’s Vice President of Finance, and in a letter to Cornell’s student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, pretty much backs Ms. Stewart’s version of the disinvitation, with the exception that he never heard anyone likening Ms. Stewart’s beliefs to promoting slavery or denying the Holocaust.

Where does the university stand on all this? Joel M. Malina, Vice President for University Relations at Cornell issued a statement distancing the Administration from the actions of the CPU:

“As we have frequently noted, free speech is an essential part of Cornell University’s commitment to the discovery of truth, and the University’s leadership is resolute in upholding the principle of freedom of expression on our campuses.

“Recently, we learned that an independent, student-run organization, the Cornell Political Union, had already decided to rescind an invitation to a speaker for an event on our Ithaca campus. They made this decision without engaging with the administration on event planning or security. The University in no way requested or suggested that any guest be excluded from attending this campus event, and to date we have made no recommendation related to potential university costs associated with supporting the event.”

What we are left with, then, is a tale of how a student group, formed for the very purpose of engaging with controversial ideas, decided to bail on an invited speaker not because her topic was too controversial, but because her religious views on an unrelated issue were. And they weren’t even honest enough to come clean when called on it, but made up an entirely different story.

Since a member of CPU’s own executive committee blew the whistle on its bigoted actions, the group’s attempt at a cover-up is all the more pathetic.

Perhaps these students will, by the time they graduate, have a better appreciation for the values their organization, and their university, espouse.