The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was a bipartisan attempt to protect individual freedom to practice truth and justice without the government or other individuals infringing that right. For-profit corporations are not churches where individuals form a community of shared values, nor should a company be considered a person under the law - resulting in institutionalized discrimination. If you care about your freedom and believe human beings have an intrinsic right to life, please join me in reversing this trend. Otherwise, America will no longer be a republic, but a commercial oligarchy. This reference has many great facts, but subtly assumes that businesses equal persons under the law as is the current state of things. There are two ways to resolve this dilemma. Either get bosses out of the business of deciding religious practice for all their employees as a class, or create a Single Payer system of insurance so all individual choices are preserved. RFRA helps to protect against administrative abuses of delegated rulemaking authority, as seen over the past two years in the numerous challenges to the HHS Mandate, including challenges by for-profit corporations and their owners. As Professor Laycock has shown in his amicus brief on behalf of the Christian Legal Society, RFRA’s protections encompass a for-profit corporation if it can show that the government has placed a substantial burden on its religious exercise, and if the government cannot demonstrate a compelling interest unachievable by a less restrictive alternative. Once again, RFRA’s broad scope protects “minority” faiths: excluding religious minorities from businesses and professions has been an historic means of religious persecution. In the long term, RFRA maximizes social stability in a religiously diverse society and minimizes the likelihood of political divisions along religious lines. The reason is simple. As Laycock puts it, “religious liberty reduces social conflict; there is much less reason tofight about religion if everyone is guaranteed the right to practice his religion.” In other words, RFRA implements the Golden Rule in the context of religious liberty: in protecting others’ religious liberty, we protect our own religious liberty. Just as controversy frequently flares when free speech protections are triggered for an unpopular speaker, so controversy will sometimes accompany a particular application of RFRA. But our society has prospered by protecting all Americans’ free speech, and it will prosper only if all Americans’ free exercise of religion is protected. American Tradition and the Right to Seek Truth Religious liberty is embedded in our nation’s DNA. Respect for religious conscience is not an afterthought or luxury, but the very essence of our political and social compact. RFRA embodies America’s tradition of protecting religious conscience that predates the United States itself. In seventeenth-century colonial America, Quakers were exempted in some colonies from oath-taking and removing their hats in court. Jews were sometimes granted exemptions from marriage laws inconsistent with Jewish law. Exemptions from paying taxes to maintain established churches spread in the eighteenth century. Perhaps most remarkably, when America was fighting for its liberty against the greatest military power of that time, the Continental Congress stalwartly adopted the following resolution: As there are some people, who, from religious principles, cannot bear arms in any case, this Congress intend no violence to their consciences, but earnestly recommend it to them, to contribute liberally in this time of universal calamity, to the relief of their distressed brethren in the several colonies, and to do all other services to their oppressed Country, which they can consistently with their religious principles. Perhaps most importantly, religious exemptions allow human beings to seek the truth. As Professor Richard Garnett eloquently posits, “human beings are made to seek the truth, are obligated to pursue truth and to cling to it when it is found . . . this obligation cannot meaningfully be discharged unless persons are protected against coercion in religious matters.” Therefore, “secular governments have a moral duty” to protect “the ordered enjoyment of religious freedom.” thepublicdiscourse/2014/06/13391/
Posted on: Wed, 02 Jul 2014 21:30:40 +0000