Free Republic

Conservatives were effusive in their praise on Tuesday evening for President Donald Trump’s choice for the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch. - Faith & Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed said: President Trump won 81 percent of the evangelical vote in no small measure because he made an ironclad pledge that if elected he would fill the vacancy on the US Supreme Court with a strict constructionist who would respect the Constitution and the rule of law, not legislate from the bench. We never doubted then-candidate Trump’s sincerity or commitment, and by nominating Judge Gorsuch, he has now kept that promise....

Washington President Donald Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, fulfilling his campaign promise to nominate a documented judicial conservative to the nation's justiceship. Gorsuch currently serves as a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. If confirmed by the Senate, he will take the seat of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, considered a lion of the law and a hero of the political Right. Scalia died over a year ago, leaving a vacancy on the nine-judge court. But Republican Senate leadership refused to entertain then-president Barack Obama's choice for...

Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor. Their names were synonymous with major Supreme Court battles to stop the Obama Administration from forcing them and others to pay for drugs that cause abortions. And when it came to their religious freedom to opt out of Obama’s abortion agenda, Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch agreed. In a significant ruling in a major landmark case, Gorsuch outlined a broad definition of religious freedom that could point to how he would rule in similar cases regarding abortion if confirmed by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ultimately sided with Hobby Lobby and...

Hobby Lobby founder and CEO David Green authored a USA Today op-ed on Thursday, denouncing Hillary Clinton’s militant opposition to traditional Christian beliefs and insisting that her Supreme Court picks would rule against Christians’ rights. He also announced that he is endorsing Donald Trump to ensure a Supreme Court that will uphold Americans’ First Amendment rights under the Constitution.

The prominent conservative founder of Hobby Lobby on Sunday endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for president while ripping apart GOP front-runner Donald Trump David Green, founder and CEO of the arts-and-crafts chain store, said he will vote for Rubio this week in his home state of Oklahoma, which is one of a dozen states holding primaries on Super Tuesday. "Marco Rubio has impressed us with his preparation and the way he carries himself. But most importantly, Marco regularly exhibits humility and gives the glory to God," Green wrote in a statement. "I don't see humility in Mr. Trump, and that...

The National Mall may be the nation's front lawn, but even at holiday time the museums that line it are only lightly decorated with Christmas trees and lights and not with any religious displays. But a new privately-owned museum is going up just a few blocks away - the Museum of the Bible - that only wants to celebrate Scripture.

As the world’s foremost collector of rare biblical artifacts, Steven Green may have made a deal with the devil - helping to preserve Iraq’s disappearing Christian heritage by allegedly buying black market items plundered by the Islamic State. Green, whose family-owned Hobby Lobby company clashed bitterly with the Obama administration over federal health care laws that required it to cover reproductive services, is being investigated by Customs & Border Protection reportedly for attempting to smuggle as many as 300 age-old cuneiform tablets from Iraq into the U.S. via Israel, labeling them "tiles." It was not clear if the probe centers...

The billionaire owners of craft giant Hobby Lobby are under federal investigation for allegedly looting hundreds of ancient artifacts from the Middle East for use in their personal “Museum of the Bible,” according to a report. The Green family has been under investigation since 2011, the Daily Beast reports, when Memphis customs seized nearly 300 clay tablets en route to the Hobby Lobby headquarters in Oklahoma City. …

One of America’s most famously Christian businesses is amassing a vast collection of Biblical antiquities. The problem is some of them may have been looted from the Middle East. In 2011, a shipment of somewhere between 200 to 300 small clay tablets on their way to Oklahoma City from Israel was seized by U.S. Customs agents in Memphis. The tablets were inscribed in cuneiform—the script of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, present-day Iraq—and were thousands of years old. Their destination was the compound of the Hobby Lobby corporation, which became famous last year for winning a landmark Supreme Court case on...

When the Green family, founders of U.S. retail chain Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., purchased their first biblical artifact in November 2009, they never expected to assemble in only a few years what is now one of the world’s largest private collections of rare biblical texts, objects, and artifacts. Known as the Green Collection, the compilation of around 40,000 objects includes some of the rarest and most significant biblical texts and artifacts ever assembled under one roof. NOW THEY WANT TO SHARE THAT WITH ALL AMERICANS, BUILDING A BIBLE MUSEUM JUST IN THE HEART OF OUR NATION. The museum in Washington,...

A National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge ruled that agreements signed by employees of Oklahoma-based arts and crafts company Hobby Lobby requiring them to submit to arbitration rather than go to court in work disputes are unenforceable. The ruling by the government's labor enforcement agency, announced Wednesday, could potentially undermine a common practice used by employers to avoid litigation under federal labor laws. "This is a dramatic decision," said David Rosenfeld, attorney for the Committee to Preserve the Religious Right to Organize, the group that brought the charges against Hobby Lobby. "If the board affirms it and the courts...

At the risk of sounding like Paul Krugman — who returns to a handful of cherished topics over and over again in his New York Times column — I want to revisit one of my hobby horses, which I most recently raised in my discussion of Hobby Lobby. My own cherished topic is this: Liberalism's decline from a political philosophy of pluralism into a rigidly intolerant dogma. The decline is especially pronounced on a range of issues wrapped up with religion and sex. For a time, electoral self-interest kept these intolerant tendencies in check, since the strongly liberal position on...

While the Supreme Court of the United States ruled Friday that same-sex marriage is legal in all 50 states, several religious leaders in Corsicana said Monday they will not hold a same-sex wedding service in their churches. ... Pastors of several churches cited Biblical teachings for their stance. ...

Come on. How many will truly be surprised to see the American Civil Liberties Union backpedal away from an enumerated civil right in the Constitution, now that the cognoscenti considers it a form of bigotry? I feel so old. I remember when the ACLU was a civil liberties organization. http://t.co/oe1EiYAXja— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) June 27, 2015 @Popehat @Lorienen @ACLU well now that Christians use it the ACLU can't support it— Clarence Whorley (@ClarenceWhorley) June 27, 2015 The organization that once went to court to ensure that the American Nazi Party could parade through Skokie, Illinois in an exercise of free...

The Heritage Foundation's Ryan Anderson (with whom I happen to disagree on same-sex marriage) appeared on Ed Schultz's MSNBC program (cough) last night to discuss Indiana's religious freedom law, and the resulting conversation culminated with the host instructing producers to silence Anderson's microphone. End of Discussion: Schultz advances one false or misleading narrative after another, then loses his composure when Anderson (or "Mr. Ryan," as Schultz calls him at one point) replies with rapid-fire factual corrections. Schultz interrupts Anderson's first answer almost immediately to contest the statement that Indiana's law is effectively the same as other RFRAs, including the federal...

Some intriguing details from NPR: In Washington, D.C., construction is underway on the Museum of the Bible, an eight-story, $400 million enterprise funded by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green.Green is a Pentecostal known for donating to conservative evangelical universities and developing a public school curriculum based on the Bible. After the craft store’s controversial victory in this summer’s Supreme Court ruling over contraception, some people worry the new museum will come across as evangelical propaganda. But organizers behind Green’s latest venture say it won’t be a memorial to evangelism.The Museum of the Bible will house the more than 40,000 artifacts...

his past summer, Toronto comedian Megan MacKay, uploaded a mockery video of Christians she called the, “Hobby Lobby Makeup Tutorial.” “This closely held corporation called Hobby Lobby which is a craft store company,” she begins, “recently went to the Supreme Court and said,’ We don’t want to have to pay for a woman’s contraception because we are Christian and we don’ believe in that and the Supreme County said ‘sure…” We could certainly debate her analysis of the Hobby Lobby case and what it was about another time. For this blog, we are pointing out MacKay’s outright disrespect of Christianity...

The Supreme Court is heading in the wrong direction by allowing a corporation to impose its religious beliefs on its employees, according to David Gans, the director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights, and Citizenship Program at the Constitutional Accountability Center.Gans co-authored the new book titled Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution with Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute.“This is the first time the Supreme Court has said corporations have this right in more than 200 years in our nation’s history,” Gans said during an event at...

Faith-based nonprofit organizations that object to covering birth control in their employee health plans are in federal court Monday to challenge a birth-control compromise they say still compels them to violate their religious beliefs. The plaintiffs include a group of Colorado nuns and four Christian colleges in Oklahoma ... The groups are appealing to the 10th Circuit in Denver, the court that ruled last year that for-profit companies can join the exempted religious organizations and not provide the contraceptives. The U.S. Supreme Court later agreed with the 10th Circuit in the case brought by the Hobby Lobby arts-and-crafts chain. The...

An Oklahoma school district is reportedly walking back plans to begin offering students an elective course on the Bible after facing pressure from a major atheist group. The class, called “The Book: The Bible’s History, Narrative and Impact,” was developed, in part, by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green, and it was set to launch in Mustang Public Schools, Raw Story reported. The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) said on its website Tuesday that the district canceled the class after Hobby Lobby allegedly did not provide the district with the final curriculum for approval and did not “commit to providing legal...