Posts Tagged ‘Religious Liberty’
How the Respect for Marriage Act will heal of one of America’s most toxic divisions | The Hill – Column
The Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), which codifies protection for same-sex marriage, is about to be signed by President Biden. It protects hundreds of thousands of families, but it does more than that. It is a step away from America’s political polarization. That’s not just because Congress managed to get something important done on a bipartisan…
Read MoreElena Kagan and the Supreme Not-A-Court | The Hill Column
The Supreme Court is supposed to decide questions based on the law, not public opinion. Yet its power consists solely in its ability to issue pieces of paper, which have no effect unless other officials, the ones with guns and money, respect it and are willing to enforce its decisions. Justice Elena Kagan and Chief Justice John…
Read MoreReligion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb | The Hill Column
An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it. That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans…
Read MoreReligion and the wrong defense of abortion rights | The Hill Column
It is commonly claimed that restrictions on abortion illegitimately impose some people’s religious beliefs on the rest of us. This is the wrong way to defend abortion rights. It implies that religious motives have no legitimate place in lawmaking. In fact, we all have normative commitments that we have trouble articulating – you could call them matters of…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy — The Hill Column
The Supreme Court has effectively authorized schoolteachers to pressure their students to pray. Kennedy v. Bremerton held that football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to engage in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called a “short, private, personal prayer” on the 50-yard line after games. The court held that forbidding that prayer improperly discriminated on the basis of religion,…
Read MoreBiden’s gay rights/religious liberty opportunity — The Hill Column
Democrats need another political win — preferably one that appeals to wavering Republican voters. The fraught issue of gay rights and religious liberty offers an opportunity, one that could also help fix the toxic polarization of American politics. Sooner or later the extremists who now dominate the U.S. Supreme Court will confront that issue, and will almost certainly…
Read MoreOriginalism and the football coach’s prayer — The Hill Column
Amid the recent Supreme Court argument over a high school football coach’s demand to lead his players in prayer, the judges lost sight of one of the central purposes of the First Amendment’s prohibition on “establishment of religion” — a purpose that should be of particular concern to the court’s self-styled originalists. The justices’ questions…
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