Sunday, March 26, 2017

Trump Considering An Order To Legalize Discrimination

(This caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

The following is part of an excellent article in The Nation by Sarah Posner:


A leaked copy of a draft executive order titled “Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom,” obtained by The Investigative Fund and The Nation, reveals sweeping plans by the Trump administration to legalize discrimination. . . .


The draft order seeks to create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious or moral objections to same-sex marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity, and it seeks to curtail women’s access to contraception and abortion through the Affordable Care Act. . . .
Language in the draft document specifically protects the tax-exempt status of any organization that “believes, speaks, or acts (or declines to act) in accordance with the belief that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, sexual relations are properly reserved for such a marriage, male and female and their equivalents refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy, physiology, or genetics at or before birth, and that human life begins at conception and merits protection at all stages of life.”
The breadth of the draft order, which legal experts described as “sweeping” and “staggering,” may exceed the authority of the executive branch if enacted. It also, by extending some of its protections to one particular set of religious beliefs, would risk violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
“This executive order would appear to require agencies to provide extensive exemptions from a staggering number of federal laws—without regard to whether such laws substantially burden religious exercise,” said Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert on church-state separation and religious freedom.
The exemptions, Lederman said, could themselves violate federal law or license individuals and private parties to violate federal law. “Moreover,” he added, “the exemptions would raise serious First Amendment questions, as well, because they would go far beyond what the Supreme Court has identified as the limits of permissive religious accommodations.” It would be “astonishing,” he said, “if the Office of Legal Counsel certifies the legality of this blunderbuss order.”
The leaked draft maintains that, as a matter of policy, “Americans and their religious organizations will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.”
It sets forth an exceptionally expansive definition of “religious exercise” that extends to “any act or refusal to act that is motivated by a sincerely held religious belief, whether or not the act is required or compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief.” “It’s very sweeping,” said Ira Lupu, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Law School and an expert on the Constitution’s religion clauses and on the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). “It raises a big question about whether the Constitution or the RFRA authorizes the president to grant religious freedom in such a broad way.”
In particular, said Lupu, the draft order “privileges” a certain set of beliefs about sexual orientation and gender identity—beliefs identified most closely with conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians—over others. That, he said, goes beyond “what RFRA might authorize” and may violate the Establishment Clause.
Lupu added that the language of the draft “might invite federal employees,” for example, at the Social Security Administration or Veterans Administration, “to refuse on religious grounds to process applications or respond to questions from those whose benefits depend on same sex marriages.” If other employees do not “fill the gap,” he said, it could “lead to a situation where marriage equality was being de facto undermined by federal employees, especially in religiously conservative communities,” contrary to Supreme Court rulings.

5 comments:

  1. One person's non-discrimination is another person's discrimination.

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    1. I disagree. Equal rights is not a zero sum game. Eliminating discrimination does not take away anyone's rights, but allowing some to discriminate certainly does.

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  2. Any person who is opposed to religious liberty is a person deceived. People have a right to live out their faith according to their religious principles. Protecting religious liberty is all about protecting THE TRUTH. It seems to me that the secular progressives like Alan Simpson (including over half of the SCOTUS) want to steal what they like about Christianity, divine laws in particular, (marriage, Genesis 2:24-25; symbol of the first divine covenant, the rainbow Genesis 9:13), and change them to have the opposite meaning. They ensured that “new non-discrimination laws” deliberately contradicted the Christian doctrine and, therefore, calculated conflict to preemptively and falsely label dissenters as hateful bigots and falsely label religious liberty as "a license to discriminate.”

    The American dream of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are then stripped from Christians who run small family businesses according to their faith, suing them for everything they have. Christians are punished if they don't surrender their faith. You know something is desperately wrong when nuns are even hauled into court. True Christians, though, are proving they are warriors for Christ in this societal crisis. True Christians will never surrender and they refuse to be deceived because this has eternal consequences.

    This is an attempt to deceive believers, and a lot of them have been fooled already, just as Jesus said would happen. However, He told us ahead of time to not allow ourselves to be deceived. And he said it over, and over again. Now I know why.

    The progressive agenda is loaded with falsehoods and lies. There is no truth in the progressive agenda -- it's all lies! For example, they will try to make you think that if a man surgically adds breasts to his body, that he has somehow become a real woman and should now be referred to as "she." This is a flat out lie. They say it's a "civil right" that boys share bathrooms and showers with girls if they "identify" as a girl. Well this just isn't true.
    The courts rule it “equality” when a man who thinks he is a woman can run in the Olympics against real women and win, and it just isn't true. The real women have been cheated because the truth is they lost to a man. They lie and say that the African American struggle is like homosexuality, when it just isn’t true. It is very insulting to Black's and their ancestors to minimize and equate their dreadful historical experience to homosexuality. The difference is Blacks have irreversible, innate natural traits that THEY EMBRACE. Blacks were enslaved through no fault of their own and suffered and endured unspeakable terror, against their free will. Homosexuals outright reject who they naturally are and instead embrace an unnatural false fantasy, created by their own design and their own free will.

    The bottom line, it is the truth vs the lie, and a lie will never equal the truth and ultimately the truth will win. it always does.

    The SCOTUS is squarely to blame for this mixed up social crisis in America. After all, they took oath to always seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that is their sworn duty. But they have LIED to The People of America. If they do not reverse the same sex decision, which they had no authority to rule in the first place, The People of faith must demand they be impeached because they failed to do their job. Marriage is purely religious and the SCOTUS does not have authority over marriage or the Holy Bible -- it belongs to God. The People of faith do not have to relinquish their beliefs to support a lie that mocks their faith in the process. The Justices who enacted the same sex marriage law must be impeached because they breached their oath by knowingly ruling in favor of a lie over the truth.

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    1. That's ridiculous. No one is taking away your religious freedom. You have the right to worship as you please. What you do not have the right to do is discriminate and hate your "neighbor". Your Jesus never said to do that. He said to love your neighbor (your fellow citizens). He would be very disappointed to find you have twisted his teaching to justify your own hate.

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    2. And by the way, christians didn't invent marriage. It existed long before either the jewish or christian religions did.

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