Monthly Archives: February 2017

Corporations religious rights and President Donald Trumps executive order on immigration were among the topics of a recent lecture at Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville.

About 60 people attended the third and final talk in the Legal Issues and Ethics speaker series Sunday. In this installment, Micah Schwartzman, the Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law at the University of Virginia, spoke on Religious Freedom in the Supreme Court.

Schwartzman attended UVa for his undergraduate studies and for law school. He holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford and clerked for Judge Paul V. Niemeyer of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

Schwartzmans lecture contained four sections: corporate religious freedom in relation to providing contraception; religious exceptions to serving LGBTQ customers; Trumps executive orders on immigration and travel for citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries; and the nomination of Neil Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court.

The government shall not substantially burden you unless it has a compelling governmental interest, Schwartzman said of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993. The government has to have a really powerful reason and the policy it adopts that burdens your practice has to be what courts call the least restrictive means.

The professor then dove into the Hobby Lobby case, which stems from the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act. Overarching questions in the case, he said, include the extent of corporations human-like rights and the ramifications for future cases.

Hobby Lobby, a for-profit craft store chain, argued it should not have to pay for employees contraception because doing so would violate the family-owned companys religious beliefs. Hobby Lobby asserted that because corporations are people under the law, the company has the right of religious freedom.

There has been a big debate in this country about whether corporations are people, Schwartzman said. I have to tell you that this debate was lost a long, long time ago, probably in the late 19th century. Corporations are persons for all kinds of purposes The question that were really interested in is, can they have these particular rights: rights to freedom of speech, rights to freedom of religion The Supreme Court said that not only do they count as persons, they count as the kinds of persons that can exercise religious freedom.

Next, Schwartzman discussed corporate religious freedom in the context of gay marriage. In recent years, some businesses across the country have denied service to gay customers, refused to staff gay weddings and fired transgender employees.

Schwartzman said the issue is a natural extension of the Hobby Lobby decision. Hobby Lobbys progeny were a series of cases involving gay marriage and the rights of gay, lesbian and transgender people, he said.

Attendees at Sundays talk expressed concern over the presidents controversial executive orders. After the orders were signed, Schwartzman spoke to members of a Charlottesville mosque who expressed confusion and concern about whether their dual-citizen members would be able to visit family abroad.

Schwartzman argued that the orders violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, among other statutes.

The Establishment Clause, if it means anything, says that the government cant treat some religious groups better than others its not allowed to play favorites to engage in preferential treatment between people of different faiths , he said. This order discriminates amongst people in religious crowds. That seems to be [quite clearly] a violation of the Establishment Clause.

Finally, Schwartzman discussed Trumps Supreme Court nominee. He spoke about Gorsuchs educational and legal background, which includes an opinion in the Hobby Lobby case.

This is a very conventional, high-prestige nomination, Schwartzman said. Gorsuch is extremely well-educated. In fact, many people thought that he wouldnt be the pick because he is too well educated Hes a very conservative judge, hes congenial. People who know him like him, including his opponents.

Tom Gutherz, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Israel, invited Schwartzman to speak.

We, as a congregation, are fortunate to have many distinguished UVa law faculty among our members, including some who can share their expertise with the larger community and help to advance the conversations we are having among ourselves about some of the issues facing us today as a community and as a nation, Gutherz said in an interview before Sundays talk. The question of how the concept of religious freedom is being shaped by recent court decisions is one of these issues, and Micah Schwartzman is an expert in this field.

Gutherz said Congregation Beth Israel was pleased with the lecture series and hopes to continue such events in the future.

Weve got a few more lectures in the works for the coming months, on diverse topics, he said. Well do another round of Legal Issues next year.

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Religious freedom topic of local talk as Congregation Beth Israel wraps up lecture series - The Daily Progress

Hundreds of migrants are being given food and first aid by Spanish authorities and charities after storming and climbing over a six-meter barbed-wire fence to enter Ceuta, Spains enclave in North Africa, bordering Morocco.

Early on Friday morning, Ruptly news agency captured footage groups of ebullient males of apparent sub-Saharan origin, hugging and dancing, and encouraging fellow migrants stuck on the other side of the barrier. Many wrapped themselves in Spanish and EU flags, and chanted Freedom! Victory! and Viva Espaa!

Hours earlier, the same men used shears and clubs in a mass raid on the reinforced border fence. Local media reports suggest that the breach was organized well in advance, and occurred at four different points. As many as 300 were pushed back, but border guards were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers, and police said that security cameras showed up to 600 men entering Ceuta, though emergency services put the number at 500. Eleven officers were injured, and three had to be taken to the medical emergency ward in serious condition. No one has been arrested.

As the sun rose over the enclave, which is home to about 80,000 people, most of the migrants camped in a group by the roadside, where the Red Cross said it was treating 400 men, many of whom suffered gashes and cuts during the storm. Twenty-five have been transferred to Ceutas hospital.

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All newcomers will be housed by CETI, a 512-capacity temporary migrant center, which was already home to 620 people who had mostly arrived in the city without documents, either by climbing over the fence, hiding inside a vehicle, or swimming into the port.

The migrants will now be given regular meals, a bed, counselling, and Spanish lessons, as they file their applications for asylum. Many will be relocated to other similar centers on the mainland.

This is the third such attack since December, when the multiple entry-point tactic was first used by migrants. On January 1, 1,100 people attempted to breach the walls, overfilling CETI, which had to borrow army tents to accommodate the newcomers.

Spains State Security Secretary promised to develop a new protocol against the evidently successful tactic, but Frontex, the European border service, said that overall, only 1,000 people breached Ceuta, and Melilla, another enclave, in 2016, the lowest number in several years.

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'Freedom! Victory!' 500 African migrants celebrate after breaking through EU border fence (VIDEO) - RT

American flag and old church steeple reflect separation of church and state Photo Credit: Bobkeenan Photography

To read press coverage about it, one might think that religious freedom is a concern only for religious and political conservatives, and not one of the most liberatory ideas in history. One would also think religious freedom and civil rights are at odds with one another. Indeed, U.S. history is filled with examples of such competing claims, as resistance to everything from African American civil rights to marriage equality have been cast as matters of religious freedom. But stepping back from the heat of our political moment, there is a different, more fully accurate, story to be told, one I think that as progressives, we need to know and be able to tell.

Religious freedom is a powerful ideathe stuff from which revolutions are sometimes made. It includes the right of individual conscienceto believe or not believe as we choose, without undue influence from government or powerful religious institutions, and to practice our beliefs free from the same constraints. Its no surprise that the first part of the First Amendment guarantees freedom of belief. The right to believe differently from the rich and powerful is a prerequisite for free speech and a free press. Grounding our politics, journalism, and scholarship in a clear understanding of what it means and where it came from could serve as both an inoculation and an answer to the distorted, self-serving claims of the Christian Right.

It was religious freedom that allowed for Quakers, evangelicals and Unitarians to lead the way in opposition to slavery in the 19th Century. Religious freedom also allowed Catholics and mainline Protestants to guide society in creating child labor laws early in the 20th Century, and later made it possible for religious groups and leaders to help forge wide and evolving coalitions to advance African American Civil Rights and womens equality, to oppose the Vietnam war, and eventually fight for LGBTQ civil and religious rights.

Such coalitions arent always easy. When North Carolina Disciples of Christ minister Rev. Dr. William Barber, a leader in the progressive Moral Mondays movement, was asked about squaring religious freedom and marriage equality, he looked to the lessons of history and the wisdom of his own religious tradition. Working within a coalition that had long included LGBTQ advocates, Barber noted that the Christian Right was trying to divide our ranks by casting doubt either among the LGBTQ community or among the African American community about whether our moral movement truly represented them.

In the last century the NAACP had faced a similar challenge over the question of restrictions on interracial marriage. They ultimately opposed the bans, he wrote, as a matter of upholding the moral and constitutional principle of equal protection under the law. Faced with yet another fear-based tactic today, Barber wrote, our movements response had to be the same. He found his response in the First Amendment, which guarantees the right of churches, synagogues, and mosques to discern for themselves what God says about marriage, free from governmental attempts to enforce its preferred religious doctrines.

The Revolutionary era Virginians who created our approach to religious freedom, understood religious freedom to be synonymous with the idea of the right of individual conscience. James Madison wrote that when the Virginia Convention of 1776 issued the Virginia Declaration of Rights (three weeks before the Declaration of Independence), the delegates removed any language about religious toleration and declared instead the freedom of conscience to be a natural and absolute right. Madison was joined in supporting the rights of conscience by evangelical Presbyterians and Baptists who also insisted on a separation of church and state for fear that mixing would corrupt both.

Invoking the words of the Founders may seem hokey or sound archaic to some. But they knew that the freedom they were seeking to establish was fragile, and likely to be opposed in the future. Understanding the thru-line that connects the struggles for religious freedom at the founding of the country to todays helps us fight to defend the principle from redefinition and cooptation.

Such an understanding helped the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 2016 when it issued a major report on issues involving religious exemptions from the law. "Religious liberty was never intended to give one religion dominion over other religions or a veto power over the civil rights and civil liberties of others," said Commission Chair Martin R. Castro, who also further denounced the use of religious liberty as a "code word" for "Christian supremacy."

The Commission found that overly broad religious exemptions from federal labor and civil rights laws undermine the purposes of these laws and urged that courts, legislatures, or executive agencies narrowly tailor any exemptions to address the need without diminishing the efficacy of the law.

Religious freedom advocates of the colonial era faced powerful entrenched interests who actively suppressed religious deviance and dissent that might upset their privileges. In the Virginia colony attendance was required at the Sunday services of the Church of England, and failure to attend was the most prosecuted crime in the colony for many years. Members of church vestries were also empowered to report religious crimes like heresy and blasphemy to local grand juries. Unsurprisingly, the wealthy planters and business owners who comprised the Anglican vestries were able to limit access to this pipeline to political power. Dissenters from these theocratic dictates were dealt with harshly. In the years running up to the Revolution, Baptists and other religious dissidents in Virginia were victims of vigilante violence. Men on horseback would often ride through crowds gathered to witness a baptism, historian John Ragosta reports. Preachers were horsewhipped and dunked in rivers and ponds in a rude parody of their baptism ritual Black attendees at meetings whether free or slave were subject to particularly savage beatings.

This was the context in which Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777, which took nearly a decade to become law. The statute effectively disestablished the Anglican Church as the state church of Virginia, curtailing its extraordinary powers and privileges. It also decreed that citizens are free to believe as they will and that this shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. The statute was the first in history to self-impose complete religious freedom and equality, and historians as well as Supreme Court justices widely regard it as the root of how the framers of the Constitution (and later the First Amendment) approached matters of religion and government.

The principle of religious equality under the law was a profoundly progressive stance against the advantages enjoyed and enforced by the ruling political and economic elites of the 18th Century. Then, for example, as John Ragosta writes in Religious Freedom: Jeffersons Legacy, Americas Creed, Marriages had to be consecrated by an Anglican minister, making children of dissenters who failed to marry within the Church of England (or pay the local Anglican priest for his cooperation) subject to claims of bastardy, with potentially serious legal consequences.

Such abuses may seem like a relic of the past, but in recent years some Christians have tried to outlaw the religious marriages of others. In 2012 Christian Right advocates in North Carolina sought to build on existing laws limiting marriages to heterosexual couples by amending the state constitution, using language that would effectively criminalize the performance of marriage ceremonies without a license. This meant that clergy from varied religious traditions, from Judaism to Christianity to Buddhism, would be breaking the law if they solemnized religious marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. And the motive was explicitly religious. State Senator Wesley Meredith, for example, cited the Bible in explaining, We need to regulate marriage because I believe that marriage is between a man and woman.

This issue was part of the 2014 case General Synod of the United Church of Christ vs. Resinger, wherein a federal judge declared that laws that deny same-sex couples the right to marry in the state, prohibit recognition of legal same-sex marriages from elsewhere in the United States, or threatens clergy or other officiants who solemnize the union of same-sex couples with civil or criminal penalties were unconstitutional. It was an historic victory for a progressive version of religious liberty but one soundly rooted in the history of religious freedom. Clergy could now perform same-sex marriage ceremonies without fear of prosecution," said Heather Kimmel, an attorney for the UCC.

Jefferson and his contemporaries saw religious freedom as the key to disentangling ancient, mutually reinforcing relationships between the economic and political interests of aristocrats and the institutional imperatives of the church: what Jefferson called an unholy alliance of kings, nobles, and priestsmeaning clergy of any religionthat divided people in order to rule them. His Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom was intended to put down the aristocracy of the clergy and restored to the citizens the freedom of the mind.

A quarter-millennium later, we are still struggling to defend religious freedom against erosion and assaults by powerful religious institutions and their agents inside and outside of government. Aspiring clerical aristocrats debase the idea of religious freedom when they use it as tool to seek exemptions from the generally applicable laws of the United Statesparticularly those that prohibit discrimination.

Religious freedom and civil rights are complementary values and legal principles necessary to sustain and advance equality for all. Like Rev. Barber, we must not fall for the ancient tactic of allowing the kings, nobles and priests of our time to divide and set us against one another.

We have come a long way since the revolutionaries who founded our country introduced one of the most powerfully democratic ideas in the history of the world. The struggle for religious freedom may never be complete, but it remains among our highest aspirations. And yet the kinds of forces that struggled both for and against religious freedom in the 18th Century are similar to those camps today. We are the rightful heirs of the constitutional legacy of religious freedom; the way is clear for us to find our voices and to reclaim our role.

This article will appear in the Winter issue of The Public Eye magazine.

Frederick Clarkson is a senior fellow at Political Research Associates and a member of the Public Eye editorial board. He is the editor of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America, and the author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.

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Religious Freedom Is a Progressive Value - AlterNet

WASHINGTON The former U.S. religious freedom ambassador told a congressional subcommittee that leaked language of a proposed presidential executive order on religious liberty could cause constitutional problems.

I think it raises very serious equal protection issues, said Rabbi David Saperstein, who recently ended his tenure at the U.S. State Department.

According to The Nation, a leaked draft of a proposed executive order titled Establishing a Government-Wide Initiative to Respect Religious Freedom shows that on issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, gender identity and premarital sex, the Trump administration would allow exemptions for people with religious objections that are so broad it would legalize discrimination.

The language in that document says, Americans and their religious organizations will not be coerced by the Federal Government into participating in activities that violate their conscience.

Answering a question from Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., at a hearing Thursday, Saperstein said he was concerned the order could give government contractors discretion to refuse services based on their religious beliefs.

I think it raises significant constitutional problems, Saperstein told members of a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee.

Nadler, who along with Saperstein has been instrumental in the passage of religious liberty legislation, said laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act are designed to shield people from government imposition of religious beliefs.

However, it should not be used as a sword to enable you to impose your religious belief on someone else, said the congressman, who raised examples of interracial or same-sex couples being refused at a restaurant by proprietors with religious objections.

Kim Colby, director of the Christian Legal Societys Center for Law and Religious Freedom, said after the hearing that Nadlers examples are misguided because civil rights laws regarding restaurant discrimination were set more than 50 years ago.

An executive order cant change a law that Congress has passed, said Colby, who also testified before the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. So a lot of those hypotheticals just cant happen.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to President Trump urging him to sign the draft executive order, calling it a positive step toward allowing all Americans to be able to practice their faith without severe penalties from the federal government.

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Constitutionality of leaked executive order on religious freedom called into question - Deseret News

Oklahoma Christian University will bring a civil rights hero to the Oklahoma City community for the fourth year in a row.

Diane Nash, who co-founded the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and led one of the early Freedom Rides to protest segregation, will speak at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the school, 2501 E Memorial Road.

Nash's visit is part of OC's fourth-annual History Speaks program. Past guests have included Carlotta Walls LaNier and Dr. Terrence Roberts of the Little Rock Nine; bus desegregation activist Claudette Colvin; civil rights attorney Fred Gray; and Olympic heroes John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

Nash's involvement in the nonviolent movement began in 1959 while she was a student at Fisk University. In 1960, she chaired the student sit-in movement in Nashville, Tennessee the first southern city to desegregate its lunch counters and helped found SNCC.

In 1961, she coordinated the Freedom Ride from Birmingham, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, a story documented in the recent PBS American Experience film, Freedom Riders. Late civil rights activist Julian Bond once said the decision to march in Selma came from Nash rather than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We are extremely excited to have Diane Nash coming to our campus, said Gary Jones, OC's multicultural and service learning coordinator. "As someone who worked very closely with Dr. King, John Lewis and several other important civil rights figures, Diane Nash is a historical gem that comes along once in a lifetime.

Nash's History Speaks keynote, part of OC's McGaw Lecture Series, will be in Hardeman Auditorium.

Admission is free, but tickets must be reserved online at http://www.oc.edu/historyspeaks. For more information, call 425-5900 or email gary.jones@oc.edu.

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Fourth annual 'History Speaks' event brings Freedom Rider to metro - NewsOK.com