BETWEEN THE LINES

THE WAR ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

Exclusive: Joseph Farah says protective state laws shouldn't even be necessary

To read the press in the last few days, you would think Indiana just declared open season on homosexuals instead of reaffirming what the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution made clear in 1789:

• “USA Today’s headline: What you need to know about Indiana’s ‘religious freedom’ law.” (Note the quote marks.) The lead? “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed by Indiana Gov. Mike Pence last week has been condemned by tech, business and political leaders on the grounds that it is anti-gay and a detriment to hiring the best and the brightest for jobs.”
• Washington Post headline: “What will the Indiana religious freedom law really do?” The lead? “The enactment of a state religious freedom law in Indiana has provoked a firestorm of protest. Although the law is quite similar to those on the books in over a dozen other states, as well as the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), some claim that the law authorizes discrimination against homosexuals and same-sex couples and trumps state-level nondiscrimination laws. According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, this law will ‘allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.’”
• Los Angeles Times headline: “Indiana governor won’t say whether businesses can refuse gay customers.” The lead? It’s a simple question – but also one of the most contentious in Indiana, which is under siege by LGBT activists urging a boycott of the state. Can Indiana business owners legally refuse to serve gay and lesbian customers if homosexuality is forbidden by their religious beliefs?

It didn’t take long for the Indiana boycott threats to be issued – nor for the compliant, agit-prop media to jump on the bandwagon.

What really happened in Indiana?

The state enacted a religious freedom law based on a federal version signed, with great fanfare, by Bill Clinton in 1993. His goal, however, was specifically designed to protect the right of Indian tribes to smoke peyote as part of their religious beliefs.

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The law protects people from being forced to do things that conflict with their religious convictions – pure and simple. You shouldn’t even need a law to do that, given the First Amendment’s protections. But that’s a sign of the times in which we live.

What promoted the latest legislation is pretty straightforward: Christians are being fined, losing their businesses and being harassed and blacklisted for refusing to take part in same-sex marriages as florists, bakers, caterers, photographers and videographers. Their deepest-held religious convictions tell them doing so is sinful. And no one in America, as we all once agreed, should be compelled, coerced or harassed into violating their religious principles.

By the way, if you don’t think this war on religious freedom is being carefully orchestrated, you are completely in the dark.

In each case I’ve studied, homosexual activists have specifically and deliberately targeted business owners who they know are Bible-believing, committed Christians. Anyone needing a photographer, a videographer, a caterer or a wedding-cake baker to commemorate their same-sex marriage vows should have no problem finding many eager for their business. This is not about “anti-gay discrimination.” This is about religious discrimination, religious bigotry, coercion and punishment targeted against individual believers and, in fact, a class of people based on their religious beliefs.

The ball really got started with George Stephanopolous grilled Pence last Sunday as host ABC’s “This Week” program, a position he is ill-qualified to hold as a political hack who once championed anything and everything Bill Clinton did – and I do mean anything and everything.

To Stephie, it’s all very simple: Recently contrived “anti-discrimination laws” designed to advance the so-called “gay rights” agenda trump religious freedom and even the Constitution. If you missed the interview, I urge you to watch it for yourself. It says a lot about what we are facing as a nation today and where the “enlightened progressives” want to take us in the future.

[Watch the ABC Pence interview:]

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/04/the-war-on-religious-freedom/#VUGptJYlMVQUUM5B.99