Every week, it seems, I receive a mailing
bemoaning the fact that the Federal Government is eroding into our freedom of
speech and freedom of religion, which are guaranteed by the First Amendment to
the Constitution. I must admit that most of the dire warnings I just shrug off,
because these things do not impact my life directly. But…I cannot ignore these
warnings any longer; they are just becoming too big!
1)
Recently I have learned that a U.S. District
Court Judge, Barbara Crabb has ruled the National Day of Prayer
unconstitutional. She has compared the National Day of Prayer to practicing
magic!
2)
At the Hastings College of Law in San Francisco,
the student chapter of the Christian Legal Society was denied any status on
campus because it would not abandon its requirement that members commit
themselves to Christian norms regarding sexual morality. The U.S. Supreme
Court, in a 5-4 ruling in 2010 held that the student group’s rights were not
violated by a “take all comers” policy.
3)
Following this lead, Vanderbilt University has
rewritten its student organizations policy and effectively chased every
traditionally Christian student group off campus, denying them regular access
to campus facilities.
4)
At the University of Illinois, an adjunct
professor of religion, hired to teach a course on Catholicism, was let go
because a student complained about his patient explanation of the Catholic
Church’s natural law teachings on human sexuality. (He was later restored to
his teaching duties, but at the expense of the Newman Center, not on the state
payroll.)
5)
Authorities in Washington state and Illinois
have attempted to force pharmacists, against their conscience, to dispense
“morning after” pills when other pharmacists short distances away make these
abortifacients available.
6)
New York City has barred church
congregations—and them alone—from using public school buildings outside school
hours.
7)
In New Mexico, a Christian wedding photographer
was fined for violation of a state “human rights act” because she refused to
take the business of a same-sex couple who claimed to want her services at
their civil union ceremony.
8)
In Massachusetts, Illinois, San Francisco, and
the District of Columbia, the adoption and fostering agencies of Catholic
Charities have been shuttered because they will not place children with
same-sex couples, as the local authorities demand.
9)
The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court recently ruled
that a Wisconsin public high school could not rent space for its annual
graduation exercises in a local church lest it be seen as “endorsing religion”
and “coercing” its students to view Christianity in a positive light.
10)
In 2010, Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S.
District Court in San Francisco ruled that Proposition 8, preserving marriage
in the California constitution as the union of one man and one woman, was
unconstitutional. He held that the affinity between traditional religion and
the moral case against same-sex marriage was reason enough to strike down the
popular referendum and went so far as to say that religious doctrines holding
homosexual acts to be sinful are in themselves a form of “harm” to gays and
lesbians.
11)
In 2009, an Iowa Supreme court held that the
state’s law restricting marriage to a man and a woman was an expression of a
religious viewpoint, and for that reason unconstitutional.
12)
In 2009, President Obama spoke at a Notre Dame
commencement and opined that to disagree with his views on abortion and other
social issues is fundamentally irrational, and thus to be relegated to the
private sphere; he ruled them out of order in public debate.
13)
The administration has been opposed to
legislation that protects the conscience statements of military chaplains and
other military personnel who continue to hold and to express the view, on
religious grounds, that sexual relations are morally permitted only in a
marriage between a man and a woman.
14)
In the recent term of the Supreme Court, the
administration’s lawyers took the position that there should be no “ministerial
exception on religious freedom grounds for employers such as religious schools
from federal anti-discrimination laws. Church schools and other religious
institutions, they argued, have only as much protection as non-religious
institutions do on “freedom of association” grounds—as though the religious
clause of the First Amendment added no ground whatsoever for a unique religious
freedom claim. Fortunately, the Supreme Court threw out the administration’s
argument by a 9-0 decision. The Court held that the Obama Justice Department’s
view was “remarkable,” “untenable, and “hard to square with the text of the
First Amendment, itself.”
15)
And of course, there is the infamous Health and
Human services “contraception mandate,” which is designed to force people of
faith, and particularly Catholics to provide drugs for contraception and for
producing abortion to early pregnancies. The use of these drugs clearly
violates the religious consciences of many people in the United States, and not
Catholics only. Protestants, Catholics, Jewish, Mormon, and Muslim peoples have
joined together to oppose this blatant violation of the First Amendment.
Our
society and government is demonstrating a blundering impatience whenever
countervailing claims are made in the name of religious conscience, the
integrity of religious institutions, or the foundational character of religious
communities, as part of American civil society. The government is failing to
perceive the legitimate contribution of religion to public discourse and the
establishment of moral and ethical policy.
I
just wonder where all this Constitutional violation is going to end. Our
government is openly taking away primary and basic freedoms from our people. I
hope something changes at the next election to counter this trend toward
godlessness in America.
(Much of this blog post was excerpted
from Imprimis Sept 2012, Vol. 41, Number 9.)
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