Religious exemption laws (AKA âI wonât serve you because of my deeply held religious viewsâ) will take a 180 turn when someone citing that basis refuses to serve a Christian customer. These goobers canât conceive of that happening, and will be shocked when it does (and it willâŚ).
When that happens, watch for the attempts at narrowing of these laws to cover only the deeply held religious views of Christians. The rest can go pound sand.
And, as always, take note that God, Christian, Christianity, Jesus, etc. are completely absent from the Constitution.
It is fine and dandy for some of these people, and it is not about religous freedom, they certainly would be opposed to Sharia Law.
Wait, what?! Theyâre claiming pedophilia as a tenent of their religious practice?
The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee claimed that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment protected it from liability claims by the victims of pedophile priests.
Not allowing the use of Peyote by Native Americans stands out as a reach to deny the practice of a religious ritual. But then Scalia saw everything thru his Catholicism as superior.
The HRC has been around long enough to form a huge bureaucracy with rules, lots of rules. So they do funny things in the eyes of their savior. Parishioners are advised to never question the authority of a priest, and also, too, keep a very close eye on their kids.
The anti-Muslim wing of the GOP claims that âkill the infidelsâ is a basic tenet of Islam. If that were true, if it were a âsincerely held religious belief,â then they should be exempt from secular laws against homicide that infringe on their religious practice and every prisoner in Guantanamo should be released with a profound apology and reparations.
All snark aside, the real act of turning religious freedom on its head came in Hobby Lobby when the Court conflated your right to practice your own religious beliefs with an imagined and unconstitutional right to impose your religious beliefs on others.
Exactly. Imagine the uproar of holy indignation if someone refused to serve Mitt because of their deeply held belief that Mormons are a bunch of offensive heretics and to serve them⌠Or a Catholic Health system refuses to serve Protestants.
personally; I donât care if parents refuse to vaccinate their kids. I have seen what polio, measles , whooping cough, diphtheria, etc., does to childrenâŚI vaccinated my kids and they got the booster shots, the fools think their kids are protected by âherd immunityââŚeventually, that will disappear as more and more parents assert their control over their kids healthâŚgood luck, foolsâŚyou will need it⌠oh, and I read where some kid is suing the parents for neglect and endangerment over their vaccine issueâŚkids are not stupid, they do not want to get sick, die or become disabledâŚ
actually, it s good idea to be aware of what religion owns the hospitals in your areaâŚsome do not recognize DNRâs and similar documentsâŚand will treat patients according to whatever doctrine the hospitals adhere to.
Unvaccinated kids should not be allowed in day care centers and schools.
Fortunately all the Hospitals in my area are Government or not for profit secular.
(Yes folks, your University Medical School / Hospital system is a Government Hospital.)
Iâm fine with religious exemptions.
But they have to be means-tested.
You canât claim a religious exemption for vaccinations if your religion doesnât support your claim. The Catholic church, for example, has cleared the use of vaccines despite origins of the genetic material.
You canât claim to be Christian, then refuse to serve a couple because they are gay. Thereâs no teachings of Jesus that say to shun your neighbor.
Shouldnât be an issue. Parents should be arrested for child abuse and neglect, take the kids and jab them up, put in foster care.
Itâs nothing more than a shady way to create the authoritarian theocracy that the Talibangelicals have been praying for for the last 40 years.
Waldmanâs piece is too cynical about Scaliaâs position. Scalia made a principled stance that he well understood could affect Christians as well as Native Americans. His point was that it wasnât for the Supreme Court to grant exemptions. If a religious group wants an exemption from a neutral law, it has to petition the state for an exemption. Even small minority religions had already won many exemptions at the time Scalia wrote Employment Division v. Smith.
The key thing that has changed the politics of exemptions is not minority vs. majority religion. Itâs that exemptions are now being used by the religious to constrain the rights and liberties of people who donât accept their religion. There is a vast, vast difference between a peyote exemption for Native Americans conducting religious rituals, and a religious exemption for an employer who doesnât want to pay for insurance that covers workersâ contraceptive services. The first exemption affects no one but the believers. The second one imposes a theocratic patriarchy on employees who reject it. And it gets much worse than this. An underreported story is that pregnant women are, in effect, being put to death if their ambulance delivers them to a Catholic hospital that forbids abortion under any circumstances, including saving the life of the mother. People who donât vaccinate their kids due to religious reservations inflict possible death on their kids and others exposed to them. Transpeople have been secretly denied health care by doctors who donât reveal that they are refusing care because they object to transpeople.
I think progressives would be ok with exemptions as long as they donât endanger others or otherwise violate their rights. But the religious right is using exemptions to impose their religion on other people, to their grave harm.
Itâs pretty simple: define the power you want first, then develop some legalistic means second. In effect the conservative religious bigots shot an arrow and drew a target to declare a bullseye that gives their bigotry free reign. Anything else is sophistry, yakking about how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin, to disguise and disarm. And if anybody uses logic to prove the hypocrisy of their beliefs and strategies, the mystery of faith comes to the rescue.
I would suggest that âturning religious freedom on its headâ is not whatâs happening here, except in terms of positioning. It is common for right wingers to adopt a term like this and wrap it in the verbiage of civil liberties, in direct response to how they perceive the other side. For example, a Catholic church shouldnât have to marry a same sex couple. But when someone says âmy religion forbids me from serving peopleâ or âIâm not going to provide womenâs health coverage to my employeesâ is a different thing altogether. And a lot of the claims are idiotic. The ultra-orthodox sect mentioned in the article is committing an act that would land most people in jail followed by a permanent stint on the sex offender registry. You just tell them no.
And itâs pretty clear that this faction sees no limit to their reason. Iâm already told that my advocacy of GLBTQ rights, and even the use of the term GLBTQ, impedes their ability to practice their religion. The underlying mentality here is that they think their religion is an absolute truth and always overrides both secular law and common sense.
All the Constitution says is:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We are being hoisted on the second clause, prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
Iâm not Pierre de Fermat, and I donât have an analysis of the problem thatâs just a little too big to fit in this comment. But I will note this: all rights come with responsibilities, and all Constitutional rights have limitations.
Hereâs a thought experiment: imagine an alternative reality in which President Polkâs splendid little war resulted in the US annexing all of Mexico. Next, suppose that a cult of Neo-Aztecs arose around Polk City (in our reality known as the Distrito Federale, Mexico City). They want the right to practice human sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl with obsidian knives.
Will the United States of North America permit that free exercise of religion?
Herd immunity is real, but it should be used to protect those who cannot be vaccinated. Vaccine-related injuries are also real (and Iâm thankful that they are rare): those who suffer them should be compensated â they took a small hit to keep us all safe.
So I do care if parents refuse to vaccinate their kids. They are abusing their own children and inflicting potential misery on the rest of us by contributing to an environment in which contagion can thrive. I expect itâs going to take a few cases of measles encephalitis or rubella-associated deafness to awaken these selfish fools.
(BTW, I believe this strongly enough that when I get my physical next month Iâm going to ask my doctor if I should be getting a measles vax. I had the measles once, and that is more than sufficient for one lifetime.)