Keeping the faith on free speech

“Our freedom of religion is not a #LicenseToDiscriminate. @POTUS, we will see you in court, again.”

Whenever the ACLU gets riled up, I feel all warm and fuzzy inside. So when I saw that tweet informing President Trump that the legal dance will continue, I had to smile. Those adorable little freedom fighters, they’re so cute when they’re annoyed. The most recent reason for the ACLU meltdown is Trump’s executive order on religious freedom. More specifically, the president signed an order called “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.”

The order mandates the issuance of regulations which would help implement the protections announced by the Supreme Court in Hobby Lobby three years ago, as well as other legal decisions providing for religious and conscience waivers for faith based individuals and organizations. It doesn’t specifically exempt entities that would discriminate against LGBT citizens, although an earlier draft of the executive order did.

In other words, the Supremes may have said that Hobby Lobby doesn’t have to pay for its employees’ condoms and birth control pills (sorry, Sandra Fluke), but the executive order would provide the company with an actual, tangible way to exercise that right of conscience. Presumably, this executive order would also help organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor, who will become much poorer if they have to subsidize the birth control of their sexually-active employees.

The executive order also takes a hit at the Johnson Amendment, which made it illegal for tax-exempt organizations from engaging in speech or political activity.

The order would ease some IRS restrictions on the amendment, although it doesn’t have the effect of overturning it. Still, it gives churches and other faith-based organizations a powerful megaphone, one that many argue (this writer included) is completely consistent with the First Amendment.

I’m certain Martin Luther King Jr. and all the other eloquent orators in the civil rights movement who moved mountains from the pulpits of their churches would agree as well.

There is something offensive in the idea that just because an organization is grounded in faith, it must remain silent or lose its tax exemptions.

Religious organizations are subject to restrictions that other organizations, like Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and many of the more progressive groups that rail against religion in the public square can escape.

And while it’s not just the Christian churches and organizations that bear the burden of that legislative muzzle, the vast majority of the groups that are disadvantaged have crosses on their walls (with the exception of the historic black churches which frequently invite politicians to come to their services and deliver rousing secular sermons from the Gospel of Resistance.)

I sympathize with those who say it’s not fair to both demand a voice, and insist on tax exemption.

There should be a middle ground, whereby certain types of political speech would in turn strip the religious speaker from the full range of tax exemptions. The counter argument is that the exemptions permit those organizations, non-profits as they are, to assist their members and the greater communities with a wide array of social services.

Again, there has to be a happy medium there. But the idea that a religious organization assumes the status of a second-class citizen is offensive to everyone who thinks that religion is not something that should be hidden, shamed into silence, pushed into a corner where the rest of the country doesn’t have to deal with its looming, unnerving presence.

And that is exactly what this executive order seeks to change, the sense that people who have a definite religious identity don’t have to shut up to be respected, don’t have to censor themselves when a political actor or issue challenges their beliefs and threatens their livelihood.

Contrary to what the ACLU maintains, this is not a license to discriminate.

It is in fact, the opposite, an unleashing of the full panoply of civil rights for all Americans. After all, the preamble doesn’t read “We, The Secular People.”

It doesn’t mention “God,” but as everyone who supports gay marriage and abortion can tell you, that’s just a technicality.