The National Day of Prayer was the perfect backdrop for the signing of the Trump Administration’s Religious Liberty Executive Order except that the order itself has disappointed both sides of the debate.
FoxNews.com is reporting on the executive order which is intended to ease IRS restrictions against political activities by religious organizations, to “protect and vigorously promote religious liberty,” and to order federal agencies “to exempt some religious organizations from Affordable Care Act requirements that provide employees with health coverage for contraception.”
“No one should be censoring sermons,” President Donald J. Trump said at a Rose Garden ceremony this morning. “We will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced again and we will never stand for religious discrimination.”
Groups who have been targeting religious organizations, such as the ACLU and LGBT activist groups condemned the order.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called it “a broadside to our country’s long-standing commitment to the separation of church and state” that will divide the nation and permit discrimination.
“President Trump’s efforts to promote religious freedom are thinly-veiled efforts to unleash his conservative religious base into the political arena while also using religion to discriminate. It’s a dual dose of pandering to a base and denying reproductive care. We will see Trump in court, again,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero in a statement.
Even though the final draft of the order is far less sweeping in the protections it affords religious individuals targeted by LGBT groups, gay activists still picketed outside the White House during today’s signing ceremony.
The order was received even more tepidly by conservative groups who say the language of the original order was significantly changed and now affords not nearly enough protection for religious liberty.
“The current outline of the Religious Liberty Executive Order released by White House officials recalls those [Trump] campaign promises but leaves them unfulfilled,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Gregory S. Baylor.
First, no specific relief is offered to families who are threatened with the effective closure of their family-run business for simply expressing a religious point of view on marriage that differed from that of the federal government.
Second, the outline directs the IRS ‘to exercise maximum enforcement discretion to alleviate the burden of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches from some political speech.
“But Americans cannot rely on the discretion of IRS agents, some of whom have abused that discretion for years to silence pastors and intrude into America’s pulpits,” Baylor says. “Nor does the outline do anything to prevent a future, hostile administration from wielding its power to penalize any church who dares exercise its constitutionally protected freedoms in a manner that displeases those in authority.”
The only way to fix this problem is legislatively through the passage of the Free Speech Fairness Act.
Third, the outline will “provide regulatory relief for religious objectors to Obamacare’s burdensome preventive services mandate, a position supported by the Supreme Court decision in Hobby Lobby.”
Baylor writes: “A pledge to ‘provide regulatory relief’ is disappointingly vague, especially given the long existence of an obvious means of solving the problem: crafting an exemption that protects all those who sincerely object on religious and moral grounds so that they can continue to serve their communities and the most vulnerable among them. We encourage the administration to pursue that course of action and to do so promptly so that it can resolve the dozens of cases still pending against it.”
Attorney David French, writing for National Review, is calling upon religious leaders to pressure the Administration for more.
“It’s time for those Evangelical leaders who jumped on the Trump Train, the ones who are now oh-so-close to that coveted ‘room where it happens,’ to speak with a single, united voice. Tell the president that the nation’s first liberty demands more respect — and more protection — than the dangerous nothingness of this executive order.”
The U.S. bishops say today’s executive order “begins the process” of alleviating the burden of the HHS mandate. They promise to continue to advocate for permanent relief from Congress on issues of critical importance to people of faith.
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