Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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Lots of good examples of the obvious hypocrisy:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions ... story.html
The Catholic sisters in the order of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ announced this month that they plan to petition the Supreme Court to consider whether their religious-freedom rights are being violated by the construction and pending use of a natural-gas pipeline on their land in Pennsylvania. They argue their faith commits them to “believe that God calls humans to treasure land as a gift of beauty and sustenance that should not be used in an excessive or harmful way.” Lawyers representing the federal government have vigorously opposed the nuns’ right to assert a religious-liberty claim in federal court.

The government’s position in the Adorers case is surprising, given that Vice President Pence announced in July that “religious freedom is a top priority of this administration.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions echoed those remarks a few days later: Under “this administration, the federal government is not just reacting — we are actively seeking, carefully, thoughtfully and lawfully, to accommodate people of faith. Religious Americans are no longer an afterthought.”

You can count on the government’s support if you’re a cake baker who considers same-sex marriage to be an abomination, or a nun who believes that contraception is murder, or a school administrator whose faith tells him that a person’s sex is fixed by God at birth. In these cases, Justice Department lawyers will show up like the cavalry, ready to go down fighting.

But not so much for Unitarians , whose faith drives them to leave water and food in the desert for migrants who will die without help. Or Catholic activists who believe that nuclear weapons are a death pact with the devil. Or the “Adorers,” who oppose the building of a gas pipeline on their property. Or Muslims in almost any context.

When you pay close attention to the litigation strategy pursued by the federal government’s lawyers, what you see is that this administration is not committed to an overarching principle of religious liberty — or even rights for Christians, in general. Like so much of the current political climate under President Trump, the administration is not defending a neutral constitutional principle — religious liberty — for all people, but rather only for those who share the administration’s political perspective. In fact, this government has weaponized the notion of religious liberty, not for its own sake, but rather to advance a blatantly partisan, conservative agenda.

For instance, the Justice Department is aggressively prosecuting faith-based humanitarian volunteers with the organization No More Deaths, a group affiliated with the Unitarian Church in southern Arizona. Its mission includes leaving water and food for migrants crossing the scorching-hot Sonoran Desert, where hundreds of people die every year. The government lawyers have trivialized these faith-based humanitarians’ religious-liberty claims, calling them scoundrels. This prompted a group of law professors who are experts in law and religion, myself included, to file a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, pointing out to the judge how the Justice Department has misconstrued religious liberty law in this case.

The No More Deaths volunteers have been criminalized for “feeding the hungry and caring for the sick” — the same activity Pence praised of religious groups in July. Now, faith-based groups in the Southwest that run soup kitchens and homeless shelters worry they’ll be targeted if they provide food and shelter to undocumented people as an act of humanitarian aid.

With one hand, Sessions has become the standard-bearer of the administration’s aggressive defense of religious liberty, arguing in case after case that a person’s sincerely held religious beliefs entitle them to an exemption from laws that conflict with those beliefs. Yet with the other hand, his office is ridiculing faith-based actors, parsimoniously interpreting the reach of religious-liberty rights to defend the administration’s partisan policy goals.

When citizens are moved to act as an exercise of their religious beliefs to challenge the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies — policies that degrade the environment or the government’s massive funding for the instruments of war — the administration seems to forget its pledge that “an individual’s relationship to God is a natural right and precedes the existence of the state, and is not subject to state control . . . There can be no doubt that we are stronger as a nation because of the contribution of religious Americans,” as Sessions declared.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly noted that religious-liberty rights are not absolute, yet they should be given serious consideration in light of the government’s other compelling interests. What we see from this government is the evangelization of its own policy goals, accompanied by the demonization of its critics. In no way was this what religious liberty meant to the nation’s founders, nor should it be what it means today.
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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Theocracies are NEVER are for religious liberty, even if they mouth the words. They are for strict enforcement of THEIR religious beliefs as they interpret them.
Remember: The Southern White Baptist Church built its foundation on justifying racism, slavery, and segregation, tacitly endorsing the "Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan". Jeff Sessions is a direct descendant of that horrid tradition, even if it's cleaned up a bit.

AFAIK, the Unitarian Church has always been welcoming, open, anti-racist, abolitionist in its time, and diametrically opposite to the dogma of the Southern Baptists.
And, in the South, Roman Catholics were sneered at as "papists" and nearly as despised as People of Color and Jews.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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The idea that the United States has always been a bastion of religious freedom is reassuring—and utterly at odds with the historical record

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... -61312684/
From the earliest arrival of Europeans on America’s shores, religion has often been a cudgel, used to discriminate, suppress and even kill the foreign, the “heretic” and the “unbeliever”—including the “heathen” natives already here. Moreover, while it is true that the vast majority of early-generation Americans were Christian, the pitched battles between various Protestant sects and, more explosively, between Protestants and Catholics, present an unavoidable contradiction to the widely held notion that America is a “Christian nation.”
It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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In fact, this government has weaponized the notion of religious liberty, not for its own sake, but rather to advance a blatantly partisan, conservative agenda.
And an "anything business wants it gets" agenda and it's businesses who are building the pipeline and most likely also users. It very much favors fundamentalist, evangelical, and conservative religions over mainstream Protestant denominations and the progressive wings of Judaism and Catholicism.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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HuckleberryFun wrote: Sat Sep 29, 2018 11:01 am The Pilgrims came here for religious freedom —for themselves— all others were persecuted. Catholics begone! Burn witch!
Hypocrisy has been in our DNA since the beginning.
Don't forget: The Pilgrims didn't come from England, they came from Holland, where they HAD religious freedom! They went from England, where they were persecuted, to Holland, but that was too liberal for them (even then).

72 years after they landed on Plymouth Rock they were hanging each other as witches in a giant land and power grab.
"Even if the bee could explain to the fly why pollen is better than shit, the fly could never understand."

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat Sep 29, 2018 12:10 pm
HuckleberryFun wrote: Sat Sep 29, 2018 11:01 am The Pilgrims came here for religious freedom —for themselves— all others were persecuted. Catholics begone! Burn witch!
Hypocrisy has been in our DNA since the beginning.
Don't forget: The Pilgrims didn't come from England, they came from Holland, where they HAD religious freedom! They went from England, where they were persecuted, to Holland, but that was too liberal for them (even then).

72 years after they landed on Plymouth Rock they were hanging each other as witches in a giant land and power grab.
Absolutely right. They decided to get out of Holland because, amongst other things, they worried about assimilation.
Accounts of the time worried that their children were becoming too Dutch. Much like the horror with which conservatives now see some of us looking to Holland for progressive-satanic ideas. Hail Socialist Van Satan! Can I have some free godless Socialist chocolate?
:w00t:
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Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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The Evangelical religious right are all for Kavanaugh. They want him on the court so they can bring forth their ideas and force them on others.
President Donald Trump’s top evangelical advisers have weighed in on the side of his embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

After hours of angry denials from Kavanaugh and emotional testimony from Christine Blasey Ford, the woman accusing him of sexual assault, the evangelical leaders took to Twitter and Fox News to voice their opinions.

Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Dallas Church in Texas, said that by believing Kavanaugh’s accuser, Democrats are “trying to destroy the very foundation, not only of our American legal system, but of all of human civilization since the days of Moses.”

“Once we take that presumption [of innocence] away from the accused and give it to the accuser, we’re going to have nothing but chaos,” Jeffress said during an interview on Fox Business on Thursday night.

Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, called Kavanaugh’s testimony “forceful, eloquent, substantive, and compelling.”

Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, also found the judge’s testimony “compelling.”

Franklin Graham, son of the famed evangelist Billy Graham (and unrelated to Jack), called the hearing an embarrassment.

The leaders, many of whom are part of Trump’s informal evangelical advisory board, have often chimed in on social media to support the president’s policies and decisions.

Overall, white evangelical Protestants have long been one of Trump’s most reliable groups of supporters. Kavanaugh’s nomination brought many evangelicals closer to a vision they held as they voted for Trump in 2016 ― a Supreme Court packed with conservative justices who could together restrict abortion access and promote other conservative Christian issues.

A new Marist poll demonstrates just how far some evangelicals are willing to go to fulfill that vision. One question posed to the nearly 1,000 people surveyed between Sept. 22 and Sept. 24 asked whether Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court if Blasey’s allegations against the judge are true. Of the 19 percent identified as white evangelical Christians, 48 percent said he should, while 36 percent said he shouldn’t and 16 percent were unsure.

Some evangelicals fear that their fellow believers’ reactions to Blasey’s allegations set a dangerous precedent for sexual abuse survivors. Rachael Denhollander, the first woman to speak out against former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, has said part of the reason she waited for years to report her abuse was that she had watched fellow evangelicals “eviscerate” victims who spoke out against much-loved political candidates, pastors, teams or ministries.

In a tweet thread last week, she said that her community’s reactions showed her what they really thought about abuse and about victims.

“I knew it meant if faced with a choice between a survivor and their favorite ‘whatever,’ they’d attack the survivor,” she wrote.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tr ... 41eba0d4b9

These Evangelical will align themselves with anybody they think will allow them to advance/force their beliefs on others.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Religious freedom for me, but not for thee

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YankeeTarheel wrote: Sat Sep 29, 2018 6:34 pm I wonder how many of these religious fascists are themselves sexual predators, with their own criminal secrets.
How many Catholic Priests have been caught? Now consider the Catholic Chruch has a definite command structure where the priest is under the supervision of another higher rank priest. The Evangelical preacher answers to no direct person in many cases or just to a board of whatever they like. In some cases they answer to the convention as in the Southern Baptist convention. But they can’t remove the preacher in many cases that is left up to the congregation. Some Evangelical churches the preacher is the sole leader of his congregation and is de facto ruler. What little leaks out when somebody leaves the fold or it gets so blatant the state authorities step in and it becomes exposed. There is a high level of abuse if you consider how much is not caught because it is hushed up or the victim feels they are made to feel they guilty party.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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