Contrary to the views of Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, who spoke at a religious freedom summit at Cedarville University last week, standing up for his form of religious freedom would be imposing his beliefs on others.
The long drawn out saga of John Freshwater, the Mount Vernon Ohio middle school teacher who was fired for injecting his religious beliefs into his science classes, is officially over after the US Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal from a 2013 Ohio Supreme Court ruling that upheld his termination. Now he can move to the Bible and Chicken Dinner circuit playing the ‘martyr’ he believes he had become.
This Sunday, October 5th, Alliance Defending Freedom’s Pulpit Freedom Sunday will take place. They claim it’s about religious freedom when in fact it’s about creating a lawsuit they can use to try and get tax regulations against electioneering by churches tossed out as unconstitutional. Finally, this year they might get their lawsuit.
Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the members of the conservative block on the United States Supreme Court, gave a speech Wednesday where he seemed to be supporting the separation of church and state. Which is odd because he has been one of the justices who wants to limit the scope of the 1st amendment so narrowly that it really means nothing. Is Justice Scalia warming to separation of church and state?
Last month I posted about a settlement between the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over policing electioneering by churches. The IRS had for years dragged its feet in investigating complaints about churches violating the terms of the tax exemption rules by getting too political. Of course conservatives now claim, with the settlement, that a church’s first amendment rights will be violated. Such a claim is utter hogwash.
It is well known that some fundamentalist Christians, like their Muslim counterparts, The Taliban, don’t want democracy. They want to impose biblical law as the law of the land and be able to opt out of any laws that ‘conflict’ with their religious beliefs. The Ohio Christian Alliance is one such group. They want to see photo IDs be mandated for voting in Ohio while making it harder in general to vote. It seems their agenda is really typical undemocratic conservatism covered with fake religious trappings.
