Tag Archives: Christian ministry

Hoisted On Your Own Petard

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I love it when karma shows up. The New York Sun posted an editorial yesterday about a religious freedom case argued before the Second United States Circuit Court or Appeals. I have absolutely no background in law, so I am going to rely heavily on what was stated in the editorial.

The editorial states:

When a case called New Hope Family Services showed up on the docket of the Second United States Circuit Court or Appeals, we perked up. It’s not just that we keep a weather eye for religious freedom cases (this one involves New York state’s attempt to force a Christian ministry to choose between its doctrine and its ability to place children in foster homes). We also perked up because of the three judges on the appeals panel.

They included two Democrats and a Republican — Edward Korman, a senior district judge sitting on the circuit bench; the legendary José Cabranes, probably the most senior active judge in the Circuit; and Reena Raggi, about whom we last wrote when we suggested she’d be an ideal candidate for the Supreme Court. It would be, we suspected, like watching a judicial version of “Field of Dreams.”

The New Hope Family Services was warned that if it did not state a willingness to place children with same-sex couples or unmarried couples, it would have to go out of business. The New Hope Family Services is a Christian group that believes in the teachings of the Bible, so obviously to agree to this would have been against their Biblical beliefs.

The editorial continues:

It was, at least to us, a shocking threat. It put New Hope, which is not government funded and has been in business for decades, in an impossible position. The pettifogging was too sophisticated for us and we started nodding off — until we heard the lawyer for New York state say, “It’s not a question of a Jewish family coming to the agency and being turned away because they’re Jewish.”

“But,” Judge Cabranes pointed out, “there’s no question that you’re preventing consideration of whether the adoptive parents are a same-sex couple as a result of the religious views of the agency.” Replied New York’s lawyer: “Yes.” Which prompted Judge Cabranes to ask: “You don’t think that there’s a suggestion here that the regulation is targeting religious groups?” New York state’s lawyer proceeded to reply: “No.”

“Because,” the state’s lawyer, Laura Etlinger, continued, the Second Circuit itself had said “the fact that there may be a disparate impact on religious organizations because of factual matters, they are the ones more likely to be affected, is not evidence of discrimination.” This is when Judge Raggi pointed out that the entities in that earlier case were not mainly religious.

In contrast, she noted, New Hope was contending that discovery in its case would disclose that the “vast majority, if not all” of the foster care and adoption agencies that “have had to go out of existence” are religious organizations.

“Do you dispute that?” Judge Raggi demanded.

“Well, in — it’s not in the record,” Ms. Etlinger replied, seeming to sense, suddenly, that she had been drawn into a trap.

The reason it wasn’t in the record, after all, was that the district court had dismissed New Hope’s complaint out of hand. Ms. Etlinger suggested that “to the extent there is an impact, because religious organizations are the ones that have a view about placement with same-sex couples does not mean that the agency was targeting those —” Her words hung in the air.

“Well,” Judge Raggi said, “isn’t that what discovery might reveal?”

The principle in question here is disparate impact as proof of bias. It is a legal principle often used by the political left to twist the law to get what they want. Please follow the link to read the entire editorial. It is wonderful to see the tactics of the political left used against them.

The editorial concludes:

Disparate impact is by no means the only angle the Second Circuit considered in New Hope. Nor is it our intention here to suggest that same-sex or unmarried couples are unsuitable for adoption. It is our intention to savor the irony that such a liberal concept as disparate impact might yet illuminate the First Amendment violations of a state trying to force a religious ministry to choose between, on the one hand, its beliefs and, on the other, its religious mission in respect of foster parenting and adoption.

 

A Hate Group That Claims To Be Fighting Hate

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Last week I posted an article about a donation given to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) by George and Amal Clooney. The donation was made in response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was given ‘to combat hate groups. As I explained in the article, according to the SPLC, a hate group is any group of people who do not share the same beliefs as the SPLC. That is the danger of designating hate groups–there may be a few we all agree on, but there is also a lot of room for disagreement.

PJ Media posted an article yesterday reporting that the SPLC is being sued by some of the groups it has designated as hate groups.

The article reports:

Now, some of the groups slandered by this organization have begun to fight back — and it’s not just Christian groups like D. James Kennedy Ministries and Liberty Counsel.

“The SPLC, who made their money suing the KKK, were set up to defend people like me, but now they’ve become the monster that they claimed they wanted to defeat,” Maajid Nawaz, a British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam foundation, declared in a video announcing his lawsuit against the SPLC for defamation.

“They have named me, alongside Ayaan Hirsi Ali, on a list of ‘Anti-Muslim Extremists,'” Nawaz said. “I am suing the SPLC for defamation and I need your help to win.”

The article notes:

In June, the charity navigation website GuideStar adopted the SPLC “hate group” list, marking each profile of the targeted organizations as a “hate group.” ABC and NBC  parroted the SPLC’s “hate group” label against Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) last month, and CNN published the group’s “hate map” online.

But the SPLC does not deserve this widespread trust, support, and publicity. The organization is a “cash-collecting machine” that spreads libels against religious organizations and has been connected to two domestic terror attacks.

There have been two domestic terror attacks that have connections to the SPLC. The first was the shooting of Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.) early this summer (James Hodgkinson had liked the SPLC on Facebook. The SPLC had attacked Representative Scalise for giving a speech to a white supremacist group.) The second attack occurred in 2012 when Floyd Lee Corkins III broke into the Family Research Council (FRC), aiming to kill everyone in the building. The article reports that during an FBI interrogation, the shooter said he targeted FRC because it was listed as an “anti-gay group” on the SPLC website.

The article at PJ Media centers on the lawsuit by Maajid Nawaz, a British politician and founder of the anti-Islamist organization the Quilliam foundation.

The article reports:

In the video announcing his lawsuit, Nawaz declared that “placing my name on a list like this not only smears my name, but also puts me in physical danger.” He noted that “the Left has descended into violence, whether that’s punching people on the street, throwing explosives and attacking people in protests and riots or assassination attempts on Right-wing politicians by leftist fans of the SPLC.”

Whatever their intention was at their inception, the SPLC has become a political hate group that has discovered a way to make money through lawsuits and gifts from people who want to feel good about ‘combating hate.’ It is my hope that a few lawsuits will convince them to find other ways of making a living.

Please follow the link above to the PJ Media article. It is chilling that an organization that claims to be fighting hate can be so misused by the political left. At the moment, the SPLC is being used as a weapon to stifle Christian beliefs and conservative speech. That is not a direction America should be moving in.