Tag Archives: freedom of religion

A Backlash From The Catholic Church

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The Catholic Church has come out strongly in protest of the recent ruling announced by Heath and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on January 20.

As I previously reported (rightwinggranny.com):

The Health and Human Services Department recently announced it will require all employers (with few exceptions) to provide health insurance to their employees which includes subsidized contraception, sterilization and coverage for abortion-inducing drugs.

This meant that religious institutions, like Catholic colleges and hospitals, or other Christian institutions would  be compelled to violate their conscience by cooperating with that which they believe to be wrong. Currently many of these institutions purchase health-insurance plans which do not provide free coverage of these services. 

This ruling matters to you even if you are not Catholic–everyone’s freedom to practice (or not practice) the religion of their choice is now under attack.

CNS News reported today that Representative Nancy Pelosi has stated:

Pelosi: “First of all, I am going to stick with my fellow Catholics in supporting the administration on this. I think it was a very courageous decision that they made, and I support it.”

The Catholic Church has released a statement stating:

“In so ruling, the Administration has cast aside the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. And as a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing do). The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.

“We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law.”

Nothing this political happens by accident. I can’t help but wonder what the motive of the Obama Administration is in starting this fight at this time. I know that many Catholics do not agree with their Church on the subject of birth control, but many Catholics share the Church’s believe on abortion. This needs to be watched–there may be more coming that will impact other people of faith.

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The Supreme Court Rules On Lutheran School Teacher Firing

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On Wednesday, Christianity Today posted an article about the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the firing of a school teacher in a Lutheran School. The court ruled that the teacher was a ‘minister’ and could not sue the church after she was fired in 2005.

The article reports:

“The First Amendment provides, in part, that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous opinion. “We have said that these two Clauses ‘often exert conflicting pressures,’ and that there can be ‘internal tension … between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause.’ Not so here. Both Religion Clauses bar the government from interfering with the decision of a religious group to fire one of its ministers.”

This is an important ruling. The article points out how this ruling may impact some recent decisions regarding religious groups on college campuses:

If the government can’t tell a church or religious group to accept or reject a minister, he asks, “How then it can be constitutional for a public university to tell religious student groups what criteria they can and cannot use in selecting their leaders? Does this decision have a penumbra that strengthens the freedom of religious organizations more broadly? That remains to be seen–yet the language and the unanimity of the decision are encouraging.”

Kim Colby, senior counsel for the Christian Legal Society’s Center for Law and Religious Freedom, was similarly encouraged. “This decision should help religious groups that are being charged with ‘religious discrimination’ when they require their leaders to agree with their statement of faith,” she said. “In a conflict between nondiscrimination laws and religious liberty, religious liberty prevailed. Nondiscrimination laws serve vital and good purposes in our society. But they have been increasingly misused to harm religious liberty in a number of contexts over the past decade.”

The CLS lost a Supreme Court battle last year when the justices ruled 5-4 that a California law school can bar groups that require leaders to sign a statement of faith.

The battle for freedom to allow religious groups to be religious is just beginning. If I started a bridge club, I would want the people joining to be interested in playing or learning to play bridge. It makes no sense to allow someone to join a bridge club if they are only interested in playing hearts or poker (or even volleyball). That is not discrimination–it is common sense. Sometimes you have to discriminate–not because you are being unfair, but because you are protecting a common interest. A bridge club that plays hearts or poker (or volleyball) really does not make a lot of sense. 

 

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This Looks Innocent But It Isn’t

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CBN News reported today on U.N. Resolution 16/18, a U.N. Resolution supported by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The resolution sounds very practical until you examine it closely. The resolution seeks to limit freedom of speech when dealing with Islam.

The Center for Security Policy reports:

The Obama administration started down this ill-advised road by cosponsoring in 2009 an OIC-drafted resolution in the UN Human Rights Council that condemned “defamation of religion” – read, Islam.  That initiative helped advance the Islamists’ twelve-year campaign to “prohibit and criminalize” such defamation in accordance with the “blasphemy laws” that are part of the totalitarian doctrine they call shariah.

Then, as more and more of the Free World began awakening to the danger posed by such efforts to compel them to submit to shariah, Team Obama helped engineer a new document at the Human Rights Council.  Adopted in March, Resolution 16/18 focused, instead of banning defamation, on getting the world’s nations to combat “intolerance, negative stereotyping and stigmatization, and  discrimination, incitement to violence and violence against persons based on religion or belief.”  

The countries in the OIC that are sponsoring this are countries where a person can be put to death for converting to Christianity or encouraging anyone else to become a Christian. Do we really believe that they are for preventing discrimination based on religion?

The article at CBN reports:

Sekulow (Jordan Sekulow, director of policy and international operations for the American Center for Law and Justice) says his organization is fighting to keep the resolution from becoming adopted because it could backfire and be broadly misinterpreted country by country.

“Just the building of churches … having a cross outside your door can be inciting violence,” Sekulow explained.

“So if you let them define these definitions when there is no problem coming from the minority faiths, this is somehow going to ‘green light’ their suppression,” he added.   

We need to remember that freedom of religion is not a right in many countries around the world. Letting a group of countries where freedom of religion does not exist pass a law about religious discrimination is simply not smart–the intentions of those countries may be very different than the intentions of the countries in the world where all faiths are welcome.

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