Tag Archives: Freedom of Religion

News

Supreme Court hands Obama administration a major defeat on religious liberty

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From the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt: (most links removed)

The Supreme Court has rejected the Obama administration’s argument that it can dictate who churches hire as ministers or clergy in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The Obama administration unsuccessfully arguedthat the government can dictate who churches hire, as long as it also subjects secular employers to the same dictates regarding who they hire (so-called rules of general applicability). Taken to its logical conclusion, this argument would allow the government to ban a church or synagogue from hiring based on religion (defeating the whole purpose of religious freedom, which is to allow churches to promote their own religion) or sex (preventing the Catholic Church from having a male priesthood). No Supreme Court justice bought the administration’s argument, made on behalf of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The Supreme Court unanimously found that such government control over who churches can hire would violate the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

If federal antidiscrimination laws covered churches’ hiring of clergy, as the Obama administration demanded, they would have to not just avoid discriminating based on things like sex or religion, but would also have to radically alter sensible hiring criteria by eliminating longstanding, neutral church practices that have the affect of inadvertently screening out more members of a minority group than of other groups (so-called “disparate impact” or “unintentional discrimination”). For example, some branches of the Lutheran Church have hiring criteria for religious broadcasters on their radio programs, such as “knowledge of Lutheran doctrine,” and “classic music training,” that few minorities satisfy (only 2 percent of all people with Lutheran training are minorities, and only 0.1 percent of people with both Lutheran training and classical music training are minorities), given the Lutheran Church’s historical roots in overwhelmingly white areas like Scandinavia and Minnesota. Even though they are happy to have black applicants, and do not treat black applicants worse based on their race, the EEOC could easily sue them for racially disparate impact if the Obama administration’s argument had been accepted. (The religion clauses of the First Amendment not only protect who churches hire as ministers, but also other people who serve as “voices of the church,” such as theology professors, and religious broadcasters on behalf of a church.)

We previously wrote about ways that the Obama administration is attacking religious freedom and separation of church and state at this link. We described how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is wiping out jobs and discouraging hiring and job creation through onerous interpretations of federal employment laws, at this link.

Good news for religious liberty means bad news for Barack Obama.

Commentary

Are evangelical Christians less interested in religious liberty than Catholics?

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From First Things.

Excerpt:

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has responded vigorously to the restrictive and unworkable “conscience regulations” being imposed on health care providers by the Obama Administration’s Health and Human Services (HHS) Department. The Catholic Archdiocese for Military Service has said “no” to allowing priests in the Armed Forces perform homosexual “weddings,” now that the historic prohibition on homosexuals in the military has been lifted. And most recently, eighteen Catholic colleges and universities banded together and, through the Alliance Defense Fund, submitted comments to HHS citing a violation of religious freedom regarding the interim final rules on preventative services.

We applaud the efforts of America’s Catholic leadership in defense of religious liberty. But we do so with a certain measure of consternation. As Evangelical Protestants, we wonder: Why is organized Evangelicalism so silent?

Where is the National Association of Evangelicals?

Where is the (Evangelical) Council for Christian Colleges and Universities?

Where are the editorials and feature articles in Evangelical publications?

At a time when our religious liberty is being eroded by an Administration that insists on forcing its anti-Christian policies on American public life, why are so many of our leaders shuffling their feet and staring at the ground?

[…]Every Christian school in the nation that offers insurance to its employees or students will be affected by the 2010 health care law—as schools like the University of Dallas, Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Ave Maria University immediately recognized. While Evangelicalism does not have specific teachings on contraception in the way that the Catholic Church does, no Christian organization in the United States should be comfortable with the requirement that insurance must cover abortions. Since that is the intention of the Obama administration, why are Evangelical Protestant colleges and universities, and Evangelical leaders generally, not speaking out? Why are they not joining with Catholic leaders and institutions in opposition to these anti-religious liberty measures?

I try to talk about these issues on my blog, but I agree that evangelicals are disengaged. Evangelicals are the most conservative voters, but we have to do more than vote Republican. We have to think about these issues between elections. We have to vote in primaries. We have to knock on doors. We have to write blog posts and editorials. We have to get advanced degrees. We have to get involved in the debate. It’s not enough to have the right opinion, we have to be convincing.

Videos

Which companies discriminate against supporters of traditional marriage?

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Here’s a video in which Frank Turek explains how he was firfed by Cisco and Bank of America for supporting traditional marriage.

This video got me thinking – which companies would support firing people who support traditional marriage?

The Human Rights Campaign

You may have seen a logo on car bumpers that feature a yellow equal sign on a purple background. That logo is the logo of the Human Rights Campaign, which opposes traditional marriage and believes that children do not deserve to grow up with their biological mother or biological father. They also believe in firing people who support traditional marriage, as we shall see below.

Here is an example of what the Human Rights Campaign does to people who support traditional marriage.

Story from the magazine Down East.

Excerpt:

Larry Grard admits he had “a lapse in judgment.” But Grard – who’s been a reporter for thirty-five years, the last eighteen of them at the Morning Sentinel in Waterville – says the e-mail he sent from his personal account to a national gay rights group shouldn’t have been grounds for his dismissal.

Grard was fired by Bill Thompson, editor of the Sentinel and its sister paper the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, shortly after the Nov. 3 election in which Maine voters repealed a same-sex marriage law approved by the Legislature. Grard said he arrived at work the morning after the vote to find an e-mailed press release from the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, D.C., that blamed the outcome of the balloting on hatred of gays.

Grard, who said he’d gotten no sleep the night before, used his own e-mail to send a response. “They said the Yes-on-1 people were haters. I’m a Christian. I take offense at that,” he said. “I e-mailed them back and said basically, ‘We’re not the ones doing the hating. You’re the ones doing the hating.’

“I sent the same message in his face he sent in mine.”

Grard thought his response was anonymous, but it turned out to be anything but. One week later, he was summoned to Thompson’s office. He was told that Trevor Thomas, deputy communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, had Googled his name, discovered he was a reporter, and was demanding Grard be fired. According to Grard, Thompson said, “There’s no wiggle room.”

He was immediately dismissed.

[…]The week after Grard was fired, he said, his wife, Lisa, who wrote a biweekly food column for the Sentinel as a freelancer, received an e-mail informing her that her work would no longer be needed.

That’s what the Human Rights Campaign does.

Companies that support the Human Rights Campaign

I found a list of companies on the Human Rights Campaign web site that are also strongly oppose traditional marriage. Presumably, these are the companies that would fire people who support a child’s right to grow up with a mother and a father.

Platinum Partners:

  • American Airlines
  • Citi
  • Microsoft
  • Nationwide Insurance
  • VPI Pet Insurance

Gold Partners:

  • Bank of America
  • Deloitte
  • Ernst & Young LLP
  • Lexus
  • Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams
  • Prudential

Silver Partners:

  • Beaulieu Vineyard
  • BP
  • Caesars Entertainment
  • Chevron
  • Google
  • MGM Mirage
  • Nike
Bronze Partners:
  • Chase
  • Cox Enterprises
  • Cunard
  • Dell
  • Goldman Sachs
  • IBM
  • Macy’s Inc.
  • MetLife
  • Morgan Stanley
  • Orbitz
  • Paul Hastings
  • PwC
  • Replacements, Ltd.
  • Shell
  • Starbucks
  • TD Bank
  • Tylenol PM
And you can find the full listing of companies that promote discrimination against traditional marriage on the Human Rights Campaign web site. I notice that they have about 1 million people who like them on Facebook and 85 thousand Twitter followers.
Comments to this post will be strictly moderated in light of Obama’s signing of the hate crimes bill which prohibits free speech on controversial issues.