It wasn’t just Tea Party groups that the IRS harassed, delayed, and audited. Some religious groups were too, including some that already had the non-profit exemption. See the list after the jump. [Read more...]
Deporting homeschoolers
February 18, 2013 By 74 Comments
Homeschooling in Germany is illegal and is punished harshly with fines, imprisonment, and even the taking away of children from their families. A family that suffered that persecutionfor homeschooling their children came to the United States seeking religious freedom, as so many other immigrants have done, and an immigration judge recognized their jeopardy in their home country and granted them asylum. But Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Homeland Security are disputing that ruling and are seeking to deport the homeschooling family. [Read more...]
Accommodation on Obamacare mandate?
February 4, 2013 By 20 Comments
The Obama administration released new guidelines meant to resolve the issue of religious institutions having to provide free contraceptive and abortifacient coverage under Obamacare. This will have no effect on businesses run by pro-life individuals, who will still have to provide the coverage. Read details after the jump. So is this a solution? [Read more...]
Hobby Lobby owes $1.3 million a day
January 14, 2013 By 43 Comments
Having lost its court case, Hobby Lobby is refusing to pay for abortifacient drugs, as mandated by Obamacare. So since January 1, it has been racking up fines of $1.3 million every day. There is a company that is putting its money where its convictions are. Does anyone know any other companies owned by pro-life individuals that are resisting the law and paying the price like this?
By Friday Hobby Lobby would have racked up $14.3 million dollars in fines from the IRS for bucking Obamacare. The company is facing $1.3 million dollars a day in fines for each day they choose not to comply with a piece of the health care law that was set to trigger for them on January 1.
The craft store chain announced in December because of religious objections they would face the fines for not providing certain types of birth control through their company health insurance.
via Hobby Lobby’s $1.3 million Obamacare loophole – CNN Belief Blog – CNN.com Blogs. [Read more...]
Good news/bad news on abortifacient mandate
December 26, 2012 By 135 Comments
An appeals courts has given a victory to Christian colleges suing over Obamacare’s requirement that they provide free contraceptives and morning-after pills. But another appeals court has upheld the requirement for Christian-owned businesses.
A federal appeals court on Tuesday sided with Wheaton College and Belmont Abbey College in a decision related to the ongoing court challenges to the Obama administration’s birth control mandate. The court said it would hold the Obama administration to its promise to never implement the current birth control mandate and to create a new rule by August, as part of the court decision.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to give it updates every 60 days, beginning in February, until a new rule is issued in August. The lawsuits will be held in abeyance until that time.
“There will, the government said, be a different rule for entities like the appellants,” the court wrote, “and we take that as a binding commitment. The government further represented that it would publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for the new rule in the first quarter of 2013 and would issue a new Final Rule before August 2013. We take the government at its word and will hold it to it.”
Sebelius first issued the rule in January. As part of the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” she ruled that employers must cover contraception, sterilization and some abortifacient drugs in their health care insurance for employees. There is a religious exemption, but the exemption is so narrow that most religious employers, including religious schools, are not exempt. There have been about 40 lawsuits related to the mandate.
via Christian Colleges Score Win: Court Orders Rewrite of Birth Control Mandate.
No such good news for Hobby Lobby, whose owners are devout pro-life Christians:
A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to shield Hobby Lobby Stores from the Obama administration’s contraception mandate — and the fines that come with it for not complying — in a blow to the largest employer to challenge the ObamaCare rule.
In response, the Christian-owned company vowed to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
CEO David Green, who had taken his case to the appeals court after losing in a lower-court ruling, had argued that his family would have to either “violate their faith by covering abortion-causing drugs or be exposed to severe penalties.”
The mandate requires businesses and organizations, with some exceptions, to provide access to contraception coverage — Hobby Lobby was most concerned about coverage for the morning-after pill, which some consider tantamount to an abortion-causing drug. Hobby Lobby has refused to comply, while saying the fines could add up to $1.3 million a day. . . .
There are currently more than 40 cases pending against that rule, though the Supreme Court has not yet stepped into the fray.
In its ruling, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals said the company did not prove the rule would “substantially burden” its religious freedom. Though the mandate has exemptions for religious entities like churches, the lower court ruled that Hobby Lobby is not a religious group.
Fired for signing a gay marriage petition
October 18, 2012 By 78 Comments
The Maryland state legislature has legalized gay marriage. Some citizens, though, as is their right, have circulated a petition calling for a referendum on the issue. So the D.C. area gay newspaper, The Washington Blade, published the names of the people who signed the petition, opening them up to harrassment, intimidation, and punishment.
T. Alan Hurwitz, the president of Gallaudet University, the federally-funded college for the deaf, learned from a Lesbian couple on his faculty that one of his employees, Angela McCaskill, the college’s diversity officer for 24 years, signed the petition. So he suspended her from her job.
McCaskill, a deaf African-American, insisted she was not anti-gay; rather, she is pro-democracy, thinking that a question like gay marriage needs to be decided by the people as a whole. She said she signed the petition at her church.
She said, via signing, “I am dismayed that Gallaudet University is still a university of intolerance, a university that manages by intimidation, a university that allows bullying among faculty, staff and students.”
See Gallaudet worker: ‘Pro-democracy,’ not anti-gay – The Washington Post.
Should citizens be in jeopardy for their employment for exercising their political rights?
What does this case suggest about how opponents of gay marriage will be treated? Do you believe those who oppose gay marriage, including pastors and churches, will be tolerated once gay marriage becomes the law of the land?
Individuals and the Obamacare mandate
July 27, 2012 By 42 Comments
Discussion about the Obamacare contraception/abortifacient insurance mandate has centered on the religious liberty of church-related institutions. But what about the religious liberty of pro-life individuals who own businesses? That, in fact, is the case before the courts that might have a ruling today. (I’m on the road so I might have trouble monitoring it. If anyone hears about a ruling, mention it in a comment.) Here are details about that case, with a rather chilling statement about how the Obama administration sees religious liberty:
Hercules Industries is a Colorado based corporation that makes heating and air conditioning equipment. Hercules is a family-owned business. Its owners, the Newland brothers — William (pictured), Paul and James — and their sister, Christine Ketterhagen, take their Catholic faith seriously. The business provides good jobs for 265 people and Hercules Industries tries hard to be a good member of the community. The siblings who operate the business have always assumed that they had the right to live according to their faith, like other businesses across our nation.
In those parts of New York City that have a high percentage of residents who are Orthodox or Hassidic Jews, businesses close when the sun sets on Friday and stay closed until sunset on Saturday, in observance of the Sabbath. Kosher butchers do not sell pork and Kosher delis do not make pork sandwiches. This sort of religious freedom is not peripheral to religious Americans of all professions. It is central to their idea of the American dream.
This is consistent with what the Newlands believe. The health benefits packages that Hercules Industries provides to its employees is very generous, but it does not include sterilization, artificial contraception or abortifacients. Individuals who work for the company are free, of course, to obtain these at their own expense or to secure insurance coverage outside the company health plan that covers those types of expenses.
The Newlands have brought suit against Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius for regulations she has promulgated that require that any company employing more than 50 people must include those medical procedures and drugs in the health plan. The Hercules Industry lawsuit states:
The Catholic Church teaches that abortifacient drugs, contraception and sterilization are intrinsic evils. Consequently, the Newlands believe that it would be immoral and sinful for them to intentionally participate in, pay for, facilitate or otherwise support abortifacient drugs, contraception, sterilization, and related education and counseling as would be required by the Mandate, through their inclusion in health insurance coverage they offer at Hercules.
The Obama administration has resisted the Hercules lawsuit by claiming that the company is secular, and therefore entitled to no First Amendment protection, with the Department of Justice telling the court:
The First Amendment Complaint does not allege that the company is affiliated with a formally religious entity such as a church, nor does it allege that the company employs persons of a particular faith. In short, Hercules Industries is plainly a for-profit, secular employer. By definition, a secular employer does not engage in any “exercise of religion.” It is well established that a corporation and its owners are wholly separate entities, and the Court should not permit the Newlands to eliminate that legal separation to impose their personal religious beliefs on the corporate entity or its employees.
UPDATE: The court issued an injunction against the government penalizing the company. Click here for details.
Government persecution of Chick-fil-A
July 27, 2012 By 32 Comments
Michael Barone summarizes a number of pundits criticizing the mayors of Boston and now Chicago for seeking to deny business licenses to Chick-fil-A because its owners don’t believe in gay marriage.
Their point is simple, and based on Supreme Court rulings: it’s wrong and unconstitutional under the First Amendment for government to deny business licenses because of an applicant’s speech and beliefs. As the Globe rightly notes, “If the mayor of a conservative town tried to keep out gay-friendly Starbucks or Apple, it would be an outrage.”
As a conservative on most issues and a supporter of same-sex marriage, I find it fascinating that liberal politicians are so ready to clamp down on others’ speech. It’s certainly permissible to refuse to patronize a restaurant because you dislike the owner’s beliefs and to encourage, by means short of violence or intimidation, others to do so. It’s also kind of foolish and in my view would be a waste of time to have to research owners’ or managers’ political views before going somewhere to eat. But for public officials to penalize people because of their expressed beliefs—well, I wouldn’t go as far as blogger Elizabeth Scalia does when she titles a blogpost “this is how fascism works,” but it’s pretty nasty stuff.
via Liberal officials penalizing free speech | WashingtonExaminer.com.
UPDATE: The Boston mayor has backed down from his effort.
Freedom of worship or freedom of religion?
June 13, 2012 By 22 Comments
Terry Mattingly points to a shift in language and of thinking that could be devastating to religious liberty:
With the sounds of protests echoing across the campus, President Barack Obama knew his 2009 commencement address at the University of Notre Dame would have to mention the religious issues that divided his listeners.
“The ultimate irony of faith is that it necessarily admits doubt,” he said. “It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what He asks of us.”
With this sweeping statement Obama essentially argued that religious faith contains no rational content and, thus, offers no concrete guidance for public actions, noted Thomas Farr, director of the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. This would shock America’s founding fathers or anyone else who has used religious doctrines and arguments in favor of human equality or in opposition to tyranny.
The president’s views were even more troubling when combined with remarks weeks earlier at Georgetown by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said Farr, during a conference sponsored by the American Religious Freedom Program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. The daylong event drew a variety of scholars and activists including Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mormons and others.
Clinton’s speech contained repeated references to freedom of “worship,” but none to freedom of “religion.” She also argued that “people must be … free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose.”
Thus, the secretary of state raised sexual liberation to the status of religion and other central human rights, said Farr. This evolving political doctrine is now shaping decisions in some U.S. courts.
“Powerful members of our political class are arguing,” he noted, “that there is no rational content of religion; that religious freedom means the right to gather in worship, but not to bring religiously informed moral judgments into political life; that religious freedom must be balanced by the right to love as one chooses, and that to make religious arguments against that purported right is unconstitutional.”
via tmatt.net » Blog Archive » Freedom of “worship” vs. “religion” — again.
Mattingly goes on to discuss the recent manifestation of this shift from “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship”: The Obamacare contraception/abortifacient mandate, which exempts “houses of worship” but not religious individuals or religious institutions that minister to outsiders.
The 50 top persecutors of Christians
March 29, 2012 By 102 Comments
Take a look at this list of the top 50 countries that persecute Christians: World Watch List Countries | World Watch List.
By my count, 37 of them are Islamic. 8 are Communist or recently-Communist that have kept their persecuting habits. 3 are Buddhist. 1 is Hindu.
The worst is North Korea. The next worse is our client state of Afghanistan. Then our close personal friend Saudi Arabia. Then Somalia. Then Iran.
Just about all of the Muslim states are somewhere on the list. I can’t think of a single Muslim nation that doesn’t persecute Christians to some extent. That includes Turkey, which comes in at #31.
No predominantly Christian society persecutes Christians of different persuasions, with the possible exception of Belarus, where the Orthodox Church is the only one permitted, though I chalk this one up to former Communist habits.
In some of the countries, such as India (#32), the persecution is not legally sanctioned but happens from mobs and cultural practices.
Can you draw any other conclusions from this list?
HT: Doug Bandow, one of my writers in my old editing days at WORLD, who offers some good discussion of the list at the American Spectator.
Follow Patheos
Evangelical: