Free Republic

A federal judge in Cincinnati granted a temporary order this week blocking Air Force action against 18 service members including 11 who currently or recently served at Wright-Patterson in Dayton who are fighting the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. A federal judge in Cincinnati is stopping Air Force action against 18 servicemembers fighting the COVID-19 vaccine including 11 who currently or recently served at Wright-Patterson in Dayton. The servicemembers sued earlier this year over the denial of religious accommodations for refusing shots. The First Amendment and Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA) does, in fact, apply to the military, contrary to...

Helsinki, Finland, Mar 30, 2022 / 05:05 am (CNA). The verdict in the closely watched trial of a Finnish Christian MP was announced on Wednesday. A court in Helsinki dismissed all charges against Päivi Räsänen, a physician and mother of five, and Juhana Pohjola, a bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland. The court said in a unanimous ruling on March 30 that “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” The court said in a unanimous ruling on March 30 that “it is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts.” It ordered...

All 4,000 Navy members seeking a religious exemption to the abortion-tainted jab have been granted a temporary reprieve.FORT WORTH, Texas (LifeSiteNews) — A federal district court judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Navy from requiring 4,000 service members to take abortion-tainted COVID jabs. Judge Reed O’Connor issued a preliminary injunction on Monday against the Department of Defense (DOD) jab mandate. He previously stopped the DOD from enforcing it against dozens of Navy SEALs in a January 3 ruling. The ruling covers the 3,320 active-duty sailors and 864 reserve sailors who have religious objections to the COVID vaccines....

Advances in Religious Freedom Under Trump vs. Biden’s War on Faith: An NFAB AnalysisWhen Donald Trump was sworn in as president, many of us were doubtful that he would keep the promises he made to the religious community during his campaign. We had heard similar promises before by many elected officials who only made those promises to garner our votes. But they left us abandoned and disillusioned. Trump was a political outsider and a man of action. So we held hope that he might be different.Not only were we not disappointed, we were very often amazed. No president in recent...

On Monday the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the Navy's request to reinstate the U.S. Navy's COVID-19 vaccine requirement. In November, dozens of U.S. Navy SEALs claimed they were wrongfully denied COVID vaccination exemptions on religious grounds. The suit, which lists 35 unnamed service members, argues that that the Defense Department's mandate violates their First Amendment rights. While the percentage of vaccinated active duty personnel in each service is at 95 percent or higher, the number of unvaccinated personnel is close to 30,000. The Navy itself has previously said that it has not granted an exemption to any...

In U.S. Navy Seals 1-26 v. Biden, (5th Cir., Feb. 28, 2022), the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the Navy a partial stay of an injunction issued by a Texas federal district court protecting 35 special warfare personnel who object on religious grounds to complying with the military's COVID vaccine mandate. The court said in part: Defendants have not demonstrated “paramount interests” that justify vaccinating these 35 Plaintiffs against COVID-19 in violation of their religious beliefs. They insist that “given the small units and remote locations in which special-operations forces typically operate, military commanders have determined...

There is good news from the federal courts on the First Amendment’s guarantee of the right of every American to express and practice their religious faith (or lack thereof), but things look much worse in the executive branch. Let’s look at the good news first: Mat Staver’s Liberty Counsel won an important step forward in forcing the Department of Defense to stop blatantly discriminating against members of the U.S. military seeking religious exemptions from submitting to the COVID-19 vaccine shot. U.S. District Court Judge Steven Merryday granted temporary restraining order sought by Liberty Counsel on behalf of a Lt. Colonel...

Dulles, Virginia – A federal courthouse is not typically the terrain on which Navy SEALs fight on behalf of their fellow Americans, but this week it proved to be a decisive venue for them. On January 3, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor issued an injunction against the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Navy, barring them from taking adverse action against 35 servicemembers who sought a religious exemption from DoD's vaccine mandate. The group includes Navy SEALs and other members of the Navy Special Warfare Command who hold strong religious convictions preventing them from taking the vaccine while remaining true to...

‘Ambassador Hussain is well placed to advance the US government’s promotion of international religious freedom,’ said the chair of a religious freedom watchdog. (RNS) — Rashad Hussain has been confirmed as the U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, making him the first Muslim American in the role. Hussain was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Thursday (Dec. 16) by an overwhelming vote of 85 to 5. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom hailed the decision on Hussain, who has been director for partnerships and global engagement at the National Security Council. “With his years of knowledge and experience, Ambassador...

By Andrew Chung (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected challenges brought by a group of Christian doctors and nurses and an organization that promotes vaccine skepticism to New York's refusal to allow religious exemptions to the state's mandate that healthcare workers be vaccinated against COVID-19. Acting in two cases, the justices denied emergency requests for an injunction requiring the state to permit religious exemptions while litigation over the mandate's legality continues in lower courts. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted the injunction. The Supreme Court previously rejected other challenges...

It may sound harmless, but the Canadian Senate’s decision to fast track and pass a bill prohibiting “Conversion Therapy” is terribly dangerous and, to date, without precedent worldwide. How on earth did this happen? An article on Canada’s CTV news referred to “the harmful practice” of conversion therapy, noting that this will now be banned for people of all ages, part of a promise made to “the LGBTQ2S+ community” by the current government. As to why the bill was fast-tracked, Sen. Leo Housakos, a member of Canada’s Conservative (?!) Party, explained, “I think we have to get to the reflex...

Americans have endured a lot over the last two years. During the global pandemic and lockdowns, we lost our ability to gather in person to learn and work, to celebrate with family, and to worship in community. As we struggled with social distancing, many turned to faith in God. In a study including 95 countries, Google searches for prayer went up by 50%. Faith communities seized opportunities to care for their neighbors’ bodies, minds, and souls through food banks, emergency clinics, and by counseling the grieving. The witness they bore in their communities showed that the intrinsic good of religion...

Before you start throwing things, I’m not suggesting that people with religious concerns about the vaccines should ignore those concerns. They may be serious and valid, and for those people, should be pursued. I could even add one: 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? 20 For you have been bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body. (1Co 6:19-20 NAS)The idea that you might deliberately allow the injection of a harmful agent...

A year ago, Serbia and Kosovo signed a normalization agreement in the Oval Office. Now, those terms are expiring and Biden could care less.One year ago on September 4, the world celebrated the signing of the Kosovo-Serbia Economic Normalization Agreement in the White House Oval Office. President Trump had brought President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia and then-Prime Minister Avdullah Hoti of Kosovo together to take an enormous step towards resolving their historic conflict. It was Donald Trump’s vision for Kosovo and Serbia to normalize their economic relations and help usher-in a complete Balkan-wide revitalization. President Trump believed that the perceived...

The Death of Religious Freedom by a Thousand CutsThe Biden administration’s position on religious freedom grows more and more narrow. In a grim measure of its unwillingness to defend religious freedom, Biden’s Department of Justice last week dropped a lawsuit filed against the University of Vermont Medical Center for allegedly forcing a nurse to assist at an abortion.When the lawsuit was filed last December, Trump’s Department of Justice accused the hospital of an egregious violation of religious freedom. Eric Dreiband, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division at the time, called the hospital’s treatment of the nurse “the...

"Freedom of speech is the air that any thinker breathes; it's the fuel that ignites the fire of an intellectual's thoughts." Raif Badawi dared to write such things in Saudi Arabia. And he exercised his own freedom of speech, asking questions about faith and challenging extremism in that country -- so he was imprisoned for apostasy for 10 years. He was flogged, although he's not yet received the 1,000 lashes he was sentenced to, because a doctor determined it was too much. He's been separated from his young family since his detention in 2014. His legal team has written of...

Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has urged the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to consider placing Canada on its Watch List due to its continued lockdown restrictions, arrests of Christian pastors and seizure of church property. Hawley called out what he deems as the government's “systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom,” adding that he's deeply concerned that “freedom is in peril across our nation’s northern border." Some congregations in Canada have seen the forced closure of church buildings, arrests of pastors, in addition to stiff fines and jail time for church leaders over their defiance of...

I've been writing about Colorado cakemaker Jack Phillips' fight against cultural authoritarians for a long time. This past March, I noted that Phillips would probably be badgered into the grave. And this week, Denver district judge A. Bruce Jones again found that the state could compel speech, claiming that Phillips had acted unlawfully when refusing to create a cake that celebrated the alleged gender transition of a Colorado activist. When Phillips declined to participate in the wedding of David Mullins and Charlie Craig back in the summer of 2012 -- this was before Obergefell v. Hodges and before gay marriage...

Samantha Power, President Biden’s choice to head the U.S. Agency for International Development, literally wrote the book on America’s poor record of fighting genocides around the world even as the nation’s leaders have promised “never again” after the Holocaust. Power’s “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide” earned her a nonfiction book Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and helped launch her out of academia to eventually become President Obama’s U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Despite Power’s history of fighting human-rights violations around the world, some foreign policy experts and former Trump administration officials worry that the Biden...

On April 22, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed SB215, the Montana Religious Freedom Restoration Act (full text). It provides in part: State action may not substantially burden a person's right to the exercise of religion, even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability, unless it is demonstrated that applying the burden to that person's exercise of religion: (a) is essential to further a compelling governmental interest; and (b) is the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.Christianity Today reports on the new law.