Keyword: religiousfreedom
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At Tuesday’s oral argument in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission—which will decide whether baker Jack Phillips can be forced by the state to design and create a cake celebrating a same sex wedding—it became apparent quite early on that the Court was grappling not merely with Jack’s case, but with a number of potential conflicts between religious freedom and same-sex marriage on its hands.Recognizing that the issues Jack faces in this case are sure to arise again, the justices struggled with where to draw the line for a constitutional rule which will protect First Amendment rights in light...
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President Trump is fulfilling his promise to bring back “Merry Christmas” to the White House by including the phrase in his 2017 White House Christmas card. The Trump family is taking a different approach with their holiday greeting than the Obama family, who opted to use the more generic phrase “Happy Holidays” in their greetings, according to the Daily Mail. The White House unveiled the card, which is signed by President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, and their 11-year-old son Barron Trump, on Monday in the White House “Bookseller’s” area after revealing the Christmas decorations to the public. A gold...
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Can people of good will believe that LGBT people should not be denied services based on their sexual orientation and, at the same time, support the rights of a baker such as Jack Phillips to refuse to use his creative talents in ways the violate his deeply-held religious beliefs? The answer is yes - because I support LGBT rights and Jack Phillips, too. Eleven years ago, I helped lead a statewide campaign in Colorado to provide basic legal rights to the LGBT community. As a conservative Republican, I took at lot of heat, which I happily accepted — just as...
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https://conservativetribune.com/atheists-coach-not-pray/
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USDA beefs up protections for free speech, religious freedom New policy lifts threat issued during previous administration to shut down meatpacking facility over religious article on breakroom table Monday, November 06, 2017 WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Agriculture has issued new policy guidance within its Food Safety and Inspection Service regarding freedom of speech and religion. The guidance removes the threat of a government-dictated shutdown of West Michigan Beef Company, a Grand Rapids–area meatpacking company owned by Donald and Ellen Vander Boon that employs 45 people, over religious literature on a breakroom table. The threat of government closure of...
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House Republicans have finally unveiled their new tax reform bill. Despite some delays, Republican leadership insists they are still on schedule to have the bill on President Trump's desk by the end of the year. "Our goal in the House is to get this bill out of the House, passed on the floor by Thanksgiving," House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers told CBN News. The hold-up centered on a proposal to end the federal income deduction for state and local taxes utilized by high tax states like New York and California. GOP lawmakers in those states are hesitant...
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The new German parliament only met for the first time at the end of October and already the first impasse has been reached. The other parties are refusing to accept the Alternative for Germany (AfD) nominee for Bundestag vice-president. Is this petulance or principle? […] According to a law passed in 1994, each party represented in the parliament gets to have a deputy Bundestag President. The vice-BPs meet with the BP every week to discuss issues which affect the running of the parliament. […] As their candidate for vice-BP, they nominated Albrecht Glaser, a 75-year-old veteran local politician from Frankfurt....
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Three-quarters of the world’s people live in countries that either restrict the right to religion or belief or have “a high level of social hostility involving religion or belief,” the U.N. special investigator on religious rights said Tuesday. Ahmed Shaheed told the General Assembly’s human rights committee that religious intolerance is prevalent globally — and rising around the world. He said over 70 countries currently have anti-blasphemy laws that can be used to suppress dissenting views, in violation of international human rights standards. […] Some forms of discrimination are direct, such as prohibiting some or all religions or beliefs, he...
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Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), along with 35 of her Democratic colleagues in the Senate, introduced a bill Thursday that would repeal the Trump Administration’s recent broadening of exemptions from the Obamacare contraceptive mandate for employers with religious and moral objections. The “Protect Access to Birth Control Act” is brief, stating that the religious and moral exemptions “shall have no force or effect, and shall be treated as though such rules had never taken effect.” “President Trump wants to make birth control about ideology, but let’s be clear: for women and their families in the 21st century, birth control is about...
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President Trump said this morning that his administration is “stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values” in a rousing speech at the Values Voter Summit. In his first major speech to a socially conservative conference since his election, Trump addressed parental rights, religious liberty, the right to life, and the importance of God over government. “This morning, I am honored and thrilled to return” as the first sitting president, he said. Trump joked that he didn’t even need to ask attendees to vote for him, but he was still there. “Religious liberty is enshrined in the very First Amendment in...
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The Trump administration published sweeping new guidelines Friday to protect religious freedom. The 26-page memo “interpret[s] religious liberty protections in federal law.”Much of the memo incorporates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. That act was passed in 1993 with almost unanimous support from both Republicans and Democrats. It was signed into law by President Bill Clinton. At the signing, he called religious freedom “perhaps the most precious of all American liberties.”He Democratic successor, President Barack Obama, did not agree. His administration’s most famous assault on religious freedom was the “contraception mandate.” Bureaucratic rules tried to force religious bodies to fund contraception...
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Arguing for protection of religious freedom, the Trump administration has opened the door for employers to withdraw from the Affordable Care Act mandate requiring them to provide birth control coverage at no cost to employees. Under new rules issued by Department of Health and Human Services, religiously affiliated institutions that find the requirement opposed to their religious principles, or nonreligious employers who find it morally objectionable, can stop providing this coverage. The birth control mandate when first issued under the ACA exempted only houses of worship. This provoked a host of lawsuits among which was that of Hobby Lobby, a...
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The Justice Department issued legal guidance across the federal government Friday that will shape how the Trump administration interprets religious liberties protections, interpretations expected to come into play in a number of ongoing lawsuits. The memo, issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, does not resolve any specific ongoing litigation, but it will serve as a baseline for how the Justice Department will interpret current federal laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Among 20 principles outlined in the memo, the Justice Department finds that RFRA protections extend not...
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October 7, 2016. It’s been almost one year since Dr. Andrew Brunson was unjustly imprisoned without charges in Turkey. Imagine spending a year in a Turkish prison as a hostage. Unfortunately, most Americans have no idea what is really happening in Turkey. Turkey has long been an ally of the United States, but has chosen to complicate and weaken its relationship with the United States and other free nations of the world through its increasingly oppressive policies. On August 25, 2017, the Turkish government issued two new emergency decrees. Article 74 of decree 694 states that “with the exclusion of...
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The whole idea of a free society is based on a very simple idea that is very hard to live by: People have the right to be wrong. This idea has ancient roots, but it was always and everywhere a minority opinion, unpopular with both the masses and the rulers, until relatively recently. In the "modern" era, its status as one of the defining ideas of Western civilization can be traced to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. After a century of bloody religious wars between Catholics and Protestants -- with Jews often getting caught in the crossfire -- the...
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The political optics were some of President Trump's best — as he prepared on May 4 to sign an executive order defending freedom of conscience. "With this executive order," Trump told the crowd in the Rose Garden, "we also make clear that the federal government will never, ever penalize any person for their protected religious beliefs." He did not say most of the time or almost always. He said "never, ever." Nor did he say any group or religious order. He said "any person." This was a categorical promise.
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Senate Democrats came dangerously close to crossing a constitutional line regarding religious faith during an inquisition of one of President Trump's nominees for the federal court. Senators grilled federal judicial nominee Amy Barrett -- demanding to know how her faith would influence her decisions from the bench. Barrett is a professor at Notre Dame Law School and a devout Catholic. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), expressed grave concerns that Barrett is a Catholic in good standing. "When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that's of concern when you come to...
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"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values. The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs. But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the left. The left...
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One of the nation’s most-respected evangelical Christian leaders denounced a federal court ruling regarding a Washington state coach who was punished for praying after a football game. On Wednesday the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Bremerton School District was justified in suspending Coach Joe Kennedy after he took a knee and prayed silently at midfield after a football game. “When Kennedy kneeled and prayed on the fifty-yard line immediately after games while in view of students and parents, he spoke as a public employee, not as a private citizen, and his speech therefore was constitutionally unprotected,” the...
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Early this month, the state government in Jharkhand, northern India, introduced a new Freedom of Religion Bill. At first glance, the name of this bill suggests an important step forward in human rights for India, but it’s actually the opposite. The bill is a cleverly disguised anti-conversion law, and it’s not the first to be introduced in the country. Despite the fact that the Indian constitution clearly defines and protects the freedom to practice and propagate religion, radical members of both national parties — Congress and the BJP — have already managed to pass anti-conversion laws in the states of...
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