[…][Congress] today introduced the First Amendment Defense Act (FADA) to guarantee such a scenario never becomes “an issue.”
This bill, introduced by Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, is good policy in part because it is so simple. It says that the federal government cannot discriminate against people and institutions that speak and act according to their belief that marriage is a union of one man and one woman. That’s it in a nutshell.
[…][G]overnment should respect those who stand for marriage and the First Amendment Defense Act would do so by specifically prohibiting bureaucrats from retaliating against individuals, family businesses, charities and schools because they refuse to change their deeply held views on what marriage is, no matter what the Supreme Court or politicians may say about it in the coming days.
Now you might be thinking, “everything is going to be fine for Christians” or “we can trust the Democrats to not act like Nazis”, but let’s not talk in generalities, let’s look at the facts with a specific example where the government went after Christians:
[…][I]n July 2014, Obama issued an executive order barring federal contractors from what it describes as “discrimination” on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. The order contains extremely narrow accommodations of religious freedom and no exceptions for contractors who conscientiously judge sexual conduct to be relevant to their mission, purpose or bathroom policies.
Such radical changes in policy in effect exclude legions of taxpayers from being eligible for federal contracts funded with their own tax dollars because they hold conscientious beliefs about sexuality and biology that run counter to the administration’s.
Similar threats to religious freedom and conscience in licensing and contracts are mounting at the state level.
Facing coercion by state governments to place children with same-sex couples, faith-based adoption agencies in Massachusetts, Illinois and Washington, D.C., have been forced to end foster care and adoption services rather than abandon their belief that children do best with a married mother and father.
In those states, refusing to place children in same-sex households would have meant forfeiting necessary contracts with the state government for foster care services or, in some situations, even losing state licenses to place any children for adoption.
So, do you think that adopted children would be better off in a home where they have an adoptive Mom and an adoptive Dad? Well, there is a lot of evidence from studies showing that both moms and dads help a child’s development in different, complementary ways. But the Democrats think either moms or dads are dispensable to kids, and so yes, they do go after Christian organizations who put the needs of the children over the needs of selfish adults. And what happens to those organizations? They shut down. And what happens to those kids? They don’t get adopted.
We have an election coming up in 2016, and it will be a time for pro-marriage voters to consider where the candidates stand on religious liberty issues. Make sure you make it a priority to find out, and to get involved in getting pro-religious-liberty candidates elected.
To answer that question, let’s look at the latest from The Weekly Standard by Johnathan Last.
It says:
You may recall Brendan Eich. The cofounder and CEO of Mozilla was dismissed from his company in 2014 when it was discovered that, six years earlier, he had donated $1,000 to California’s Proposition 8 campaign. That ballot initiative, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, passed with a larger percentage of the vote in California than Barack Obama received nationally in 2012. No one who knew Eich accused him of treating his gay coworkers badly—by all accounts he was kind and generous to his colleagues. Nonetheless, having provided modest financial support to a lawful ballot initiative that passed with a majority vote was deemed horrible enough to deprive Eich of his livelihood. Which is one thing.
What is quite another is the manner in which Eich has been treated since. A year after Eich’s firing, for instance, Hampton Catlin, a Silicon Valley programmer who was one of the first to demand Eich’s resignation, took to Twitter to bait Eich:
Hampton @hcatlin Apr 2
It had been a couple weeks since I’d gotten some sort of @BrendanEich related hate mail. How things going over there on your side, Brendan?
BrendanEich @BrendanEich
@hcatlin You demanded I be “completely removed from any day to day activities at Mozilla” & got your wish. I’m still unemployed. How’re you?
Hampton @hcatlin Apr 2
@BrendanEich married and able to live in the USA! . . . and working together on open source stuff! In like, a loving, happy gay married way!
It’s a small thing, to be sure. But telling. Because it shows that the same-sex marriage movement is interested in a great deal more than just the freedom to form marital unions. It is also interested, quite keenly, in punishing dissenters. But the ambitions of the movement go further than that, even. It’s about revisiting legal notions of freedom of speech and association, constitutional protections for religious freedom, and cultural norms concerning the family. And most Americans are only just realizing that these are the societal compacts that have been pried open for negotiation.
He co-founded the company, invented the most widely-used client-side programming language used on the Internet, and he had to step down for making a donation to the cause of male-female marriage. This guy is a hundred times the programmer that I will ever be. And yet he has not found a job since he was thrown out of the company that he co-founded and made successful.
That’s why I have an alias. Because I want to be able express my convictions about issues ranging from abortion to marriage to intelligent design to climate change without losing my job. I need my job to be able to help other Christians, and to have any chance at all of getting married and having children.
The Weekly Standard article traces the progress of the gay agenda, quoting from gay activists in Slate, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Economist, The New Republic, etc.
Let’s look at one of them: Jonathan Rauch writing in The Daily Beast:
Then Rauch turned to the question of whether or not the creation of same-sex marriage was an obvious extension of liberty—as gay rights advocates have always insisted—or something much bigger:
Virtually all human societies, including our own until practically the day before yesterday, took as a given that combining the two sexes was part of the essence of marriage. Indeed, the very idea of a same-sex marriage seemed to most people a contradiction in terms. . . .
By contrast, marriage has not always been racist. Quite the contrary. People have married across racial (and ethnic, tribal, and religious) lines for eons, often quite deliberately to cement familial or political alliances. Assuredly, racist norms have been imposed upon marriage in many times and places, but as an extraneous limitation. Everyone understood that people of different races could intermarry, in principle. Indeed, that was exactly why racists wanted to stop it, much as they wanted to stop the mixing of races in schools. In both intent and application, the anti-miscegenation laws were about race, not marriage.
Why should this distinction matter today, if both kinds of discrimination are wrong? Because asking people to give up history’s traditional understanding of marriage is a big ask. You don’t expect thousands of years of unquestioned moral and social tradition to be relinquished overnight.
[…]The First Amendment carves out special protections for religious belief and expression. That does not mean, of course, that Christian homophobes can discriminate as much as they want provided they quote the Bible. It does mean, at least for a while, courts and legislatures will strike compromises balancing gay rights and religious liberty, something they did not have to do with black civil rights. This makes gay marriage more complicated—legally, socially, and even ethically—than interracial marriage. And it means gay-marriage supporters will hit a constitutional brick wall if we try to condemn our opponents to immediateand total perdition.
Got that? Gay activists do “expect thousands of years of unquestioned moral and social tradition to be relinquished” – just not overnight. Courts and legislatures can compromise on annihilating freedom of speech and religious liberty – at least for a while. The generous gay rights activists won’t condemn those of us who think that children need a mother and a father to immediate punishment of the sort that Brendan Eich got. Or the punishment that the Oregon bakery got. Or the punishment that the Washington florist got. Or the punishment that the New Mexico photographer got. Only some people will need to be punished – as an example to the others to fall in line.
Are you getting this? This is fascism.
There are three things to do to make it safe for people who believe in natural marriage to speak out without fear. First, never vote for any Democrats ever again, and make sure that the Republicans you vote for are supportive of religious liberty and free speech. Second, we need to get informed in order to be persuasive on the marriage issue. Read a book on pro-marriage apologetics. Read another book on the sociological evidence that shows the importance of mothers and fathers to children. And then read another book on the sociological evidence for the harm caused to children raised by same-sex parents. Then you will know what you have to know to be a change agent for marriage where you are. Finally, it’s never a bad idea to donate to the Alliance Defending Freedom, the team of lawyers who defend Christians in court.
A majority of Americans (57 percent) continue to say it should be legal for same-sex couples to marry, although that’s down three points from a high reached in February. Most Democrats (66 percent ) and independents (61 percent ) think same-sex marriage should be legal, while most Republicans (61 percent ) do not.
Still, just over half of Americans (51 percent) think small business owners should be allowed to refuse wedding services to same-sex couples if it violates their religious beliefs; 42 percent think those businesses should be required to provide those services. There are sharp partisan differences on this issue.
I found the numbers in this poll troubling – it seems to me that the support for same-sex marriage over religious liberty is worse than I thought.
According to this Washington Examiner article, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz appear to be the toughest defenders of religious liberty, with Walker and Rubio in the second tier.
It says:
Evangelical Christian voters are facing an unusual problem: they may have too many choices when it comes to the 2016 presidential election. Several Republican candidates are vying for their support, viewing the voting bloc as a key stepping stone to the nomination.
More than ever before, evangelical sources say, candidates will need to focus on the issue of religious liberty to win this crucial vote, especially in states like Iowa. Many evangelicals felt Indiana Gov. Mike Pence failed to stand up for his state’s Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, which animated conservative Christians across the country.
Steve Deace, a leading talk radio personality in Iowa, believes the impact of Pence’s decision on voters in his state cannot be understated. “There’s a better chance Hillary Clinton will be the [GOP] nominee next year than Mike Pence,” Deace told the Washington Examiner. “Religious freedom is going to be the biggest issue. It has become a transcendent issue. It’s bigger than life, it’s bigger than marriage.”
[…]Bob Vander Plaats, the CEO of the social conservative group the Family Leader, is a kingmaker of sorts in Iowa who has gained influence in the state by leading the effort to remove three Iowa Supreme Court judges from office because of a decision in favor of gay marriage. In 2008, he endorsed former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. In 2012, he picked former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa.
This time, Vander Plaats expects to endorse someone around the Thanksgiving holiday, and said Huckabee, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz are the Republicans that have already impressed him.
[…]Deace said that after the candidate forum he moderated in Des Moines, Iowa, last month, he believes Cruz and Jindal to be the early favorites among evangelical voters. But many evangelical voters, he says, have interest in Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, and have not yet made a decision. Unlike recent elections past, Deace says evangelical listeners who are loyal members of his audience want someone who has the organization and financing capable of winning the Republican nomination.
“They’re tired of the false choice of choosing between the guy who believes in something and the guy who raises a bunch of money,” Deace said. “They want the guy who believes in something to raise a bunch of money. … They’re not necessarily looking for the nice guy, or the guy who says ‘Jesus’ the most.”
Evangelicals have several good candidates this time in the primary. I am still favoring Jindal and Walker above all the others, and I’m happy to see that they are seen as solid on religious liberty.
WINTERY KNIGHT 