The Left’s Religious Liberty Fig Leaf Is Slowly Falling Off
A recent report from the United States Commission on Civil Rights shows how the political fig leaf covering up the LGBT lobby’s assault on religious freedom is slowly starting to rot away.
According to a story published Thursday at the Washington Times, the USCCR — an independent, bipartisan commission — released a report in which Chairman Martin R. Castro referred to Americans’ first freedom as “code words” for simply opposing the agenda of the sexual identity movement:
The phrases “religious liberty” and “religious freedom” will stand for nothing except hypocrisy
so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia,
Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.
Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions, or a veto
power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others. However, today, as in the past, religion is
being used as both a weapon and a shield by those seeking to deny others equality.
“Progress toward social justice depends upon the enactment of, and vigorous enforcement of, status-based nondiscrimination laws,” wrote commissioners Castro, Achtenberg, Kldaney and Yaki — every Democrat on the commission — later in the report. “Limited claims for religious liberty are allowed only when religious liberty comes into direct conflict with nondiscrimination precepts.”
And make the following recommendations:
RFRA [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] protects only religious practitioners’ First Amendment free exercise rights, and it does not limit others’ freedom from government-imposed religious limitations under the Establishment Clause.
Federal legislation should be considered to clarify that RFRA creates First Amendment Free Exercise Clause rights only for individuals and religious institutions and only to the extent that they do not unduly burden civil liberties and civil rights protections against status based discrimination.
States with RFRA-style laws should amend those statutes to clarify that RFRA creates First Amendment Free Exercise Clause rights only for individuals and religious institutions. States with laws modeled after RFRA must guarantee that those statutes do not unduly burden civil liberties and civil rights with status-based discrimination.
Clearly the targets here are corporations and institutions that don’t necessarily fall under the government’s narrow view of a “religious institution.” These would be entities like the bakery owned by Aaron and Melissa Klein, which is still going through a legal battle after the state of Oregon shut it after the owners declined bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. Or the Little Sisters of the Poor, who despite being an order of consecrated religious sisters in the Catholic Church, were being forced to go against their conscience with the Obamacare contraception mandate.
Of course – as Castro states – the sort of provisions for which the report calls should only get narrower and narrower and the enumerated right to free expression outlined in the First Amendment will be legally redefined to freedom of worship. This would, of course, be akin to telling a protestor that they’re still free to carry a picket sign in their backyard, so long as they have the proper government permits to demonstrate in said backyard.
Furthermore, the fact that report comes from an independent, nonpartisan commission ought to help us realize that this assault won’t magically go away once Barack Obama is out of office, and it won’t simply be staved off by preventing a Hillary Clinton administration. The idea that millennia-old faiths should lose out when their tenets clash with the whims of a decades-old political agenda, that thought has permeated nearly every sector of our government.
But it does show that the argument that conservative Christians and the LGBT movement’s political agenda could somehow balance out the enumerated constitutional rights of the former with the judicially-manufactured ones of the latter was nothing more than a fig leaf. The real end goal of policies like these — or, at least, their natural logical end — is to enforce an over-sexualized brand secularism as a de facto state religion.
Finally, the title of the USCCR report — “Peaceful Cooexistence” — is nothing short of ironic, because what its authors demand is anything but peaceful. A truly peaceful coexistence is where people engage in free association, and don’t resort to using government force when they get their feelings hurt. A truly peaceful coexistence between people of different views looks like a story from earlier this week in which a baker refused to make a Trump cake for a girl’s 18th birthday party. Rather than seek out ways to harness the government’s coercive power for her own ends, the woman simply found another bakery to do the job. Just like with the Klein’s, it clearly wasn’t a matter of discrimination; it was a matter of the specific services rendered.
Free to believe, free to express, free to associate, free to find another vendor — that’s how it works.
This isn’t just a matter of acceptance, or even peaceful coexistence; this is a matter of coercion. This is a matter of making sure that people who have adhered to the same set of values and beliefs for thousands of years don’t get in the way of creating the Left’s brave new world. (For more from the author of “The Left’s Religious Liberty Fig Leaf Is Slowly Falling Off” please click HERE)
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