News

Indiana RFRA “fix” is a full repeal, religious liberty will be no defense

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CNS News analyzes the “fix” proposed by Indiana Republicans.

Excerpt:

Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma and Senate President Pro Tem David Long announced Thursday that they would submit a new versionof the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to Gov. Mike Pence to counter criticism that it discriminates against gays and lesbians.

“It was never intended to discriminate against anyone,” Long told reporters. “That perception led to the national protests we’ve seen.”

But a lawyer for The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty says the proposed legislative “fix” is not only unnecessary, it would undermine the religious rights of Hoosiers and leave them vulnerable to criminal prosecution for following their religious beliefs, the opposite of what RFRA was intended to do.

“We think the Indiana law is a very good law which is modeled on what has worked at the federal and state level for 20 years, and which is similar to constitutional provisions that are backed up by 50 years of jurisprudence,” Becket legal counsel Daniel Blomberg told CNSNews.com. “These laws work very well to protect the religious rights of minorities.

“All the Indiana law does is the same thing that’s been working very well for a long time,” he pointed out. “Today the Indiana legislature proposed a ‘fix’ that we think is 1) unnecessary; and 2) itself is broken and would create a very dangerous change in Indiana law.

“Individuals asked to be part of a same-sex wedding who decline because they feel it violates their religious beliefs would not be able to raise the RFRA under the ‘fix’,” Blomberg told CNSNews.com. “It would leave them defenseless. It also makes specific allowances for criminal prosecution. So not only is the ‘fix’ not helpful, it should not be accepted.

“We have a choice on how to handle these situations. We can allow government to drive religious people out of business, fine them and possibly imprison them, or we can allow religious people to have their day in court, and let the courts balance their religious claims against other competing values.”

Gary Bauer explains what’s at stake:

“Gov. [Mike] Pence is going through a rhetorical lynching,” Gary Bauer, former Republican presidential candidate and president of American Values, told CNSNews.com. “This is what we were warning about in the [Manhattan] Declaration, and why the Declaration was written.”

Besides upholding the “sanctity of life” and the “dignity of marriage,” the Manhattan Declaration, which was signed by Bauer and a number of other religious and political leaders in 2009, championed “religious freedom”. “No one should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions,” the Declaration stated.

It warned that “freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.”

Such restrictions “undermine the viability of the intermediate structures of society, the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting in the soft despotism [Alexis de] Tocqueville so prophetically warned of,” the Declaration continued. “Disintegration of civil society is a prelude to tyranny.”

“It’s becoming clearer and clearer that the tolerance movement used by the cultural Left in recent decades was just a poll-driven strategy and not an actual commitment to tolerance,” Bauer continued, adding that the Indiana law is being used to cut off debate and redefine anyone with traditional moral values as a bigot. “Every pastor and every parent should be deeply worried about what is happening in Indianapolis,” he said.

I guess I blame the church for this. I go to church. I know what goes on in there. It’s a sermon on the gospel every week. There is about 20 minutes of singing. Current events are never mentioned. The existence of God and the resurrection are never explained or defended. The Bible is just assumed to be true, and no issues outside it are ever discussed. Objections to Christian theism are never named, much less defended against. Reasons and evidence are never provided for the Biblical view on topics like abortion or same-sex marriage, much less economics, the environment, etc. The emphasis is on comforting people. The emphasis is on not judging. The emphasis is on making people feel good and leaving them free to do whatever makes them feel good.

I just don’t see young people having any interest in defending Christianity any more against the culture. I mean, I am seeing “pro-life”, “pro-marriage” evangelicals voting for Democrats because they want a bigger secular government.  They want more money to be transferred from Christian families to Solyndra so we can fight the global warming monster. They believed Obama about keeping your doctor, keeping your health plan, and not funding abortions – but Obama lied on all three of these. They want to vote for Obama’s promise that health insurance premiums will drop $3000 in 2008, and then vote for the same guy again in 2012 when the premiums have actually gone up $2500. They voted for Obama saying that he supported traditional marriage, but then his Justice Department declined to defend the Defense of Marriage Act.

Young Christians just don’t care about marriage as Jesus defined it – one man, one woman, for life.  They say they do, but then they vote for the party that opposes religious liberty when they get the chance. Global warming and raising the minimum wage are more important. Why? Because the secular culture told them so. And that’s their authority when it comes to voting.

Young Christians just seem to be completely disloyal to God as he really is. I don’t think that Christians really want to have to think about what would work to defend God’s reputation and character from these attacks. They just want to do their own thing, and get the praise from men, rather than the praise from God. In my own case, I am now in my upper 30s and still very much respecting the Biblical standards around sex: no pre-marital sex, no adultery, no frivolous divorce. Why is it such a difficult standard for younger evangelicals to accept and to defend? They seem to believe that chastity, natural marriage, and natural child-bearing are all unimportant things. The only rule now is to have fun with sex, and to never judge anyone for breaking the rules. That’s not what the Bible teaches, but that’s what young Christians believe. Who is going to talk to them about it? Not the pastors. Not their parents. And not their friends.

News

Islamic terrorists murder nearly 150 mostly Christian students in Kenya

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Map of Africa
Map of Africa

While the mainstream media was protesting religious freedom laws, they neglected to make a big deal out of a terrorist attack by Islamic terrorists against Christian students in Kenya.

Let’s read about it in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.

It says:

Elosy Karimi curled up in a crawl space, immobilized by fear.

Her classmates were flooding out of the dorms, in boxer shorts and thin nightgowns. Gunfire was ringing all around her. People were screaming. It was predawn and pitch black.

“If you want to survive, come out!” the militants yelled. “If you want to die, stay inside!”

In the terrifying confusion, Ms. Karimi, 23, decided to risk it inside, she said, and stayed hidden in the ceiling above her bunk bed for the next 28 and a half hours.

“I knew those guys were lying,” she said at the hospital, having just arrived to be checked after the ordeal.

New details emerged on Friday about how a handful of fighters from the Shabab militant group, with just a few light weapons, managed to kill nearly 150 students in Kenya’s worst terrorist attack since the 1998 bombing of the United States Embassy in Nairobi.

Survivors said many students had fallen for the militants’ trick, voluntarily leaving their dorm rooms and obeying commands to lie down in neat rows, only to be shot in the back of the head.

One of the militants appeared to be a trained sniper, some witnesses said, picking off several Kenyan soldiers and critically hampering the rescue effort, giving the gunmen hours more to keep killing.

The militants seemed especially cruel and gleeful, ordering some students to call their parents on their cellphones and tell them that the attack was payback for Kenya’s military intervention in Somalia.

Students who hid during the attack said they had heard their classmates whimpering as the militants taunted them. Then a single gunshot. Then silence.

“They were shooting people as they came out; they were making others lie down,” said a doctor who was not authorized to speak publicly. “They had so many people lying in one place, it was easy killing.”

I am contrasting this story with the photos of the people marching around in Indiana for their right not to be refused gay marriage services from Christians. They were not marching for the Christian students who were murdered by terrorists in Kenya. Oh no – they have much higher priorities. The journalists who spent hours and hours lying about the religious liberty law also had different priorities. What a strange world where people think that it is more important to compel others to celebrate their behavior instead of condemning something that is truly evil. I guess it’s too much to ask that entitle secular leftist bullies would care about the basic human rights of others. They want a happy life for themselves, but there is no morality underlying any of their rhetoric.

As an aside, I think this story shows the important of America having a strong military and having the will to use it. It’s one thing to read about stories like this, but if you go to the polls and vote for Democrats to cut our defense budget and neuter the army with politically correct policies, then there is nothing we can do when things like this happen. The bad guys in this story only understand one thing, and that’s men with guns standing between them and their intended victims. No shrieking anti-war activist in pink could have helped the victims, but our military could have.

Commentary

When speaking to non-Christians, do you use any of these Christianese terms?

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I found this article by J. Warner Wallace and thought it was appropriate because it’s Easter, and there are always questions.

First, the list of Christianese: (not his term)

  • #1. “God has put you (or something) on my heart. / God told me.”
  • #2. “Be ‘born again.’ / Have a spiritual rebirth.”
  • #3. “You need to come to repentance. / Experience a conversion.”
  • #4. “Deal with your sin.”
  • #5. “Invite Jesus into your heart.”
  • #6. “Make Jesus the Lord of your life.”
  • #7. “Have faith.”
  • #8. “Be saved.”
  • #9. “Be washed by the blood of the Lamb.”
  • #10. “Be Sanctified.”
  • Bonus Expression #11. “Enjoy fellowship.”

This article is pretty funny, but it ought to be because I think we really need to shame church Christians when they talk like this.

Here’s the one I liked best:

#5. “Invite Jesus into your heart.”
You mean like a boyfriend? What exactly does that mean to have “Jesus in my heart?” I’m not an emotional kind of guy, so please don’t ask me to sing songs or hold hands with Jesus, especially in public. Do I have to emasculate myself to become a Christian? If so, thanks for reminding me why I’m not a Christian.

Try this instead: “When we admit our imperfections, believe Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our mistakes, and accept His sacrifice, we can start a new relationship with God.”

Indeed. It’s a wonder that any rough and tough men become Christians after what they find in church.

I think that a lot of Christians struggle with explaining “sin” to non-Christians, but I have an approach that works for me. I just ask them how much effort they have put into looking for the evidence for and against God. How much effort into cosmology, especially. How much into the origin of life. How much into the fine-tuning. Usually, the answer is “I watched every episode of Star Trek” or “I watched a documentary on the Pyramids on the Discovery Channel”. I try to show them that God has left fingerprints in the natural world, and by avoiding that evidence they are, in fact, avoiding God. Keeping him at arm’s length by dancing away from the evidence and focusing instead on having good feelings. Collecting stuff. Having thrills and adventures. Making people like them. Etc. I call this refusal to try to seek God and adjust to him “sin”. It’s rebellion against the obligation to know God. And to know God is to love God. And to love God is to make decisions that reflect his character, even when it’s difficult.

Wallace concludes:

I understand the importance of our theologically rich Christian language, and as a Christian I often use similar words when talking with Christians. But when I’m talking with unbelievers, I try to think about how I used to hear and interpret these words before I became a Christian. How do I share what I believe? I take the time to translate important Christian concepts for those who might be willing to entertain the ideas if only I was willing to speak their language.

I think that there is a real need for churches to train Christians in how to bring up topics that are of interest to Christians in public. The approach I’ve always taken is to have a broad worldview, including areas like economics and policy, so that I wouldn’t just sit there silent while other people are talking. I can ease into discussing spiritual things much more easily because I can start the conversation from politics, economics and current events. You have to show that you have knowledge in real-world areas before anyone will listen to you about other things. That’s my approach anyway. You really have to establish your credentials before you start to speak about spiritual things.