Attacking Religious Freedom In Massachusetts

CBN News posted an article today about the battle for religious freedom in Massachusetts.

The article explains the timeline of the events:

Four churches in Massachusetts are suing the state over a new anti-discrimination law that provides no exemption for churches.

Instead, the statute restricts speech that might conflict with government views on gender identity and forces churches to open their bathrooms and locker rooms to people based on their perceived gender identity.

…The state legislature added gender identity as a protected class to the state’s public accommodation law in July 2016. On Sept. 1, the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination issued a “Gender Identity Guidance,” which determined that a church would be considered as a place of public accommodation “if it holds a secular event, such as a spaghetti supper, that is open to the general public.”

Alliance Defending Freedom is handling the case for the four churches. The four churches are Horizon Christian Fellowship in Fitchburg, Abundant Life Church in Swansea, House of Destiny Ministries in Southbridge, and Faith Christian Fellowship in Haverhill.

The article reports:

“All events held at a church on its property have a religious purpose and the government has no authority to violate the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of religion and speech,” Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel Christiana Holcomb said.

The law went into effect Oct. 1.  But opponents of the law celebrated a major win late Tuesday in their efforts to repeal it.  The Massachusetts secretary of state has certified the required number of signatures needed to put a repeal measure on the 2018 ballot.

It will be interesting to see if the issue makes it on to the 2018 ballot, even though it has the necessary signatures. A number of years ago, the voters of Massachusetts collected enough signatures to put gay marriage on the ballot, but somehow that never happened. The gay marriage law that took effect in Massachusetts was the result of a court decision–not a vote of the people. Unfortunately, I think this issue may be resolved the same way.

 

We Saw How Well It Worked For The Indians

Today’s Daily Caller posted an article about a suggestion the Obama Administration has made to change the legal system in Hawaii.

The article reports:

President Barack Obama’s administration has quietly suggested it is willing to create a two-tier race-based legal system in Hawaii, where one set of taxes, spending and law enforcement will govern one race, and the second set of laws will govern every other race.

The diversity proposal is portrayed as an effort to create a separate in-state government for people who are “native Hawaiians.”

The problem with this suggestion is that it is unconstitutional:

But the proposed measure to increase legal diversity is illegal because the president doesn’t have the power to grant one group of Americans the status of a separate government, she said.

“There is no constitutional basis for conferring such status, and Congress has repeatedly refused to confer this status,” said Carissa Mulder, a spokeswoman for two members of the federal Commission on Civil Rights.

“This seems to be yet another case of the Obama administration ignoring the law to achieve its policy objectives,” she added.

This proposal will not bring unity to Americans–it will separate a group of Americans along racial lines. That sort of separation is not good for the country or the people involved. We saw how well it worked for the Indians.

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The Foxes Are Guarding The Henhouse Again

Breitbart.com posted an article yesterday that included the following letter:

EnlargedLetterI realize that the letter is hard to read; you can find a larger copy at the link above. The bottom line here is simple–the person investigating the mistreatment of the Tea Party by the IRS (Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney within the IRS’s Civil Rights Commission) is a significant donor to President Obama and Democrat campaigns. It is difficult to believe that Ms. Bosserman will conduct an investigation that will not be influenced by  her politics. It would have made so much more sense to choose someone who was not a political donor. The choice of Ms. Bosserman may be entirely unrelated to her politics, but like so many other things in the Obama Administration, it appears to be a conflict of interest.

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An Unfortunate Choice Of Nominee

Yesterday’s Washington Times posted an article stating that present and former justice department attorneys do not support the nomination of Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez to be secretary of labor. It seems as if some of Mr. Perez’s actions as Assistant Attorney General were not in full compliance with the law.

The article reports:

“People should be raising serious questions about this nomination,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a veteran Justice Department lawyer who formerly served as counsel to the division. “This is a man who misled both Congress and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

“He was the focus last week of the most devastating indictment of a federal government agency I have even seen,” he added, noting that the Justice Department’s office of inspector general in a 258-page report documented widespread intimidation, harassment and even threats of violence under Mr. Perez’s leadership.

 This does not sound like someone we want in charge of the Department of Labor.

This is another part of this story that is deeply troubling.  Mr. Perez intervened in a legal case involving the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. The case involved St. Paul’s agreement to drop its appeal in exchange for an agreement by Justice not to join a fraud lawsuit against the city. The case had the potential to return more than $180 million in damages to the U.S. treasury.

The article reports:

They (Three House members — Rep. Darrell E. Issa, California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee; Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee; and Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, North Carolina Republican and chairman of the House Oversight financial services subcommittee) said they were “shocked to learn” that Mr. Perez — over the objections of career Justice Department attorneys — had enticed the city to drop its lawsuit that he “did not want decided by the Supreme Court.” They said Mr. Perez was concerned that a decision in the city’s favor “would dry up the massive mortgage lending settlements his division was obtaining by suing banks for housing discrimination based on disparate effects rather than any proof of intent to discriminate.”

 We have seen this problem in other areas. One of the reason that Congress has not really gone after the big banks is that the fines that can be levied against the banks for various charges are an easy flow of money into the treasury. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the ultimate source of that money is the consumer. Another reason Congress hasn’t done much about the banks is that an investigation of the bank’s roll in the 2008 collapse would also reveal the part the Congress and the Community Reinvestment Act played in the collapse.

 At any rate, Mr. Perez is not a good nominee, and his name should be withdrawn. He is another potential part of gangster government.