The Left's war on Christianity, civilisation, and sanity becomes more and more blatant!
From Catholic World Report
By CNA Daily News
Washington D.C., Nov 4, 2019 / 12:13 pm (CNA).-
Democratic primary candidate Pete Buttigieg has said that religious
freedom must be curbed if it is used to “harm,” prompting calls for
clarification about what the presidential hopeful considers grounds for
restricting religious practice.
Adam Wren, a reporter for Indianapolis Monthly, tweeted on Sunday
that he asked Buttigieg “how he would approach religious freedom
broadly.”
Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and candidate for
the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, responded that “[t]he
touchstone has to be the idea that religious freedom like any other
freedom is constrained when it becomes a rationale for doing harm.”
“You know the original doctrines and federal legislative law go back
to, I think, substances in rituals among Native Americans says about
freedom to undertake a religious practice,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg continued that when religious freedom is invoked to
practice “hiring discrimination,” that would make the issue “tough, and
sticky.”
The matter of “constraining” religious freedom when it is invoked to
do harm “would move us further than we’ve moved so far,” Buttigieg said.
“In terms of enforcing for example anti-discrimination expectations,
even on private organizations, and I think that bar goes even higher
when we’re talking about anybody seeking federal funds,” he said.
Luke Goodrich, senior counsel at Becket, a law firm that defends
religious freedom, said that Buttigieg’s comments were “vague” and
demanded clarification on just what situations he would see as
justifying limitations on religious freedom.
“I still see it as it’s a vague and popular talking point right now,”
Goodrich said of the concept of religious freedom being invoked to do
harm. He added that “the devil really is in the details, and the
candidates need to clarify precisely what kinds of harm they would seek
to punish.”
The Supreme Court has already ruled that religious organizations “can
hire people who agree with their core religious practices even when it
‘harms’ people who don’t get hired,” Goodrich noted, referring to
Supreme Court decisions in 2012 and 1987 in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC and Corp. of Presiding Bishop v. Amos, respectively.
In Hosanna Tabor, the Court ruled unanimously that the federal
government cannot intervene in the hiring or firing of religious
ministers. In Amos, the Court ruled that religious organizations could
make hiring decisions for non-religious positions based on religious
beliefs.
In response to a request for comment, the Buttigieg campaign said his words “speak for themselves.”
The concept of religious freedom being invoked to “do harm,” which
Buttigieg referenced, is behind the Do No Harm Act, a bill introduced in
Congress in 2017 and again in 2019 to limit the application of current
federal religious freedom law.
The 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA)—which passed the
House unanimously and the Senate by a vote of 97 to 3, and was signed
into law by President Bill Clinton—created a test for when a federal law
infringes upon a person’s free exercise of religion.
The law was enacted in response to a 1990 Supreme Court decision,
Employment Division v. Smith, where two Native Americans who lost their
jobs due to a failed employment drug test said they had used the drug
peyote as part of a Native American religious ritual. The Court ruled
against the two Native Americans and sided with the government in the
case.
Under RFRA, the government cannot “substantially burden a person’s
exercise of religion” unless it provides proof of a “compelling
interest” and that its action is the least-restrictive means of
furthering that compelling interest.
The proposed Do No Harm Act lists whole areas of law where RFRA would
no longer apply, including provision of health care items or services
and government contracts.
The recent comments from Buttigieg are the latest in a series of
statements calling for the restriction of religious freedom,
particularly in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity.
According to a June 13 report by Wren in Indianapolis Monthly,
Buttigieg praised the bipartisan outcry over Indiana’s Religious Freedom
Restoration Act in 2015, calling the act “social extremism.” The law
originally signed by then-Governor Mike Pence mirrored the federal RFRA,
but a coalition of politicians, celebrities, and businesses rallied
against it.
In response, the state legislature passed, and Gov. Pence signed, a
“fix” to the law that mostly exempted sexual orientation and gender
identity anti-discrimination protections from the law’s application.
Religious freedom advocate Ryan Anderson called the change a “wholesale
repeal” of the original law.
“And the business Republicans revolted right alongside us
progressives,” Buttigieg said of the backlash against the original law.
“So that shows me that there is a belief in just decency that really
does stand against that kind of social extremism.”
Buttigieg did oppose the idea of stripping churches of their tax
exempt status for not supporting same-sex marriage, in an interview on
CNN’s “State of the Union” on Oct. 13, but he added that schools and
other non-profit organizations should be held accountable for their
views on marriage.
“So if we want to talk about anti-discrimination law for a school or
an organization, absolutely,” he said. “They should not be able to
discriminate.”
Buttigieg supports the Equality Act, a bill passed by the House that
would make sexual orientation and gender identity protected classes in
federal anti-discrimination law.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) opposed the bill for
conflating a person’s actions with their identity and human dignity. The
bill would threaten religious free speech, conscience, and the exercise
of religion, the bishops said.
Buttigieg’s website also says he would “give the White House Office
of Faith-Based and Community Partnerships a mandate to work with faith
and community leaders who support LGBTQ+ people.”
The candidate says he would also “examine existing religious
exemption policies” in the federal government, including “offices that
were put in place to enable discrimination.”
In recent years, the Trump administration created a new conscience
and religious freedom division at the Department of Health and Human
Services, to support conscience rights of health care professionals in
matters such as opting out of performing or assisting with abortions or
gender transition surgeries.
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