Religious Liberty

Religious conservatives in the United States  have been complaining that developments in the political arena - the Obamcare contraceptive mandate, the progress of same-sex civil marriage - threaten religious freedom. They're crying wolf, but similar alarums in the Mother Country make a bit more sense.  Because England has an established church, some of whose bishops sit in Parliament, the political question of same-sex marriage has religious reverberations that  don't sound here.

WASHINGTON - Judges across the country are increasingly split over whether private employers and their companies can cite their religious beliefs as a valid reason for denying birth control coverage to their employees. Earlier this month the Obama administration proposed a compromise for some nonprofit religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and colleges, that would allow them to avoid paying directly for such insurance. But the administration refused to consider a similar exemption for private, for-profit employers.

WASHINGTON - Judges across the country are increasingly split over whether private employers and their companies can cite their religious beliefs as a valid reason for denying birth control coverage to their employees. Earlier this month the Obama administration proposed a compromise for some nonprofit religious organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and colleges, that would allow them to avoid paying directly for such insurance. But the administration refused to consider a similar exemption for private, for-profit employers.

Religious conservatives in the United States  have been complaining that developments in the political arena - the Obamcare contraceptive mandate, the progress of same-sex civil marriage - threaten religious freedom. They're crying wolf, but similar alarums in the Mother Country make a bit more sense.  Because England has an established church, some of whose bishops sit in Parliament, the political question of same-sex marriage has religious reverberations that  don't sound here.

A recent State Department-backed conference on problems of religious freedom internationally has stirred a bitter domestic religious debate and raised questions of whether the meeting amounted to improper church-state entanglement.

The old Spanish-style church of weathered stone, perched proudly on a rise above this town's main street, sits at the center of a dispute that is likely to determine the reach of religious liberty in this nation. In the narrow sense, the battle here is over zoning. Although picturesque from the street, St. Peter's Catholic Church is cramped and plain inside. "We can't fit in it anymore. It seats 220 people and we have 1,050 families," Father Anthony Cummins said.

The nation's schools will be offered a new curriculum on religious liberty that aims to circumvent a minefield of controversies by focusing on the historical role of religion in society, project officials said Wednesday. "A constructive handling of religious liberty is essential to good teaching about religion, democratic first principles and American common core values," said Charles Haynes, president of the National Council on Religion and Public Education.

The glowing reviews began tumbling in at once: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's speech on faith was powerful and convincing, analysts said -- sincere, effective, hit all the right notes. But will it help Romney, a Mormon, win over the key voting bloc of conservative Christians? The broad consensus: probably not. "I'm not sure it's going to work for evangelical voters," said Collin Hansen, editor-at-large at the evangelical monthly Christianity Today.

The Supreme Court ruled last week that since Oregon could prohibit the religious use of the hallucinogenic drug, peyote, it could deny unemployment compensation to persons discharged for such use. Thus stated, the decision appears unremarkable. In fact, the court's opinion opens up a constitutional fault of San Andreas proportions. Many times before, the Supreme Court, and all lower courts, have issued rulings telling us that our First Amendment freedoms are not absolute.

Congressional hearings on the Branch Davidian siege are raising thorny questions about whether the government owes unconventional and insular religious sects as much religious freedom as that granted more mainstream faiths. Many religion scholars see the Waco case as a colossal government failure to balance a group's 1st Amendment rights to practice its faith freely with the government's imperative to intervene when it suspects laws are being broken.

There is, apparently, no escape from the presidential campaign. Most regular churchgoers say their clergy have been talking about the election, according to a new poll , although few appear to be endorsing candidates from the pulpit. The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said 52% of regular churchgoers have heard their clergy talk about the importance of voting in the election, but only 19% say there has been talk about specific candidates. Under federal law, houses of worship risk their tax-exempt status if they take sides in a partisan race.

Bless you, Father, for you have not sinned against the separation of church and campaign. Cardinal Timothy Dolan's decision to offer the closing prayer at the Democratic National Convention as well as the Republican convention is a shrewd way to tamp down controversy about the Catholic hierarchy's seeming transformation into the Republican party at prayer. The real shrewdness, of course, came from the Democratic Party, which called Dolan's bluff by inviting him to invoke God's blessing on what many Republicans consider a godless party.

The intersection of politics and religion can sometimes resemble one of those spaghetti freeway interchanges. Cars go in and cars go out, but not always in ways you might expect. Take the recent case of the fight between President Obama and the nation's Roman Catholic bishops. A new poll has found that Catholics who are familiar with the issue tend to side overwhelmingly with the bishops. That is, they agree that the Obama administration is threatening their religious liberty by mandating that some church-affiliated institutions, such as schools and hospitals, provide free contraceptive services to their employees, in violation of church teachings.

Two of my favorite writers, Andrew Sullivan and the Washington Post's Charles Lane, have been blogging recently about a German court ruling that circumcision shouldn't be performed on boys too young to give consent. Basically, Sullivan (who was born in England, where circumcision isn't as common as it is here) describes  the medical-cum-cultic procedure as “infant male genital mutilation” and scoffs at the idea that a ban would violate the religious liberty of Jews and Muslims.

Because of the scarce print space allocated among the 60 to 70 letters to the editor that run each week, submissions replying to other letters are only occasionally published on the regular pages. When an unusually high volume of "letters on letters" are sent to letters@lames.com , a selection will run in this space. This week, more than three dozen readers weighed in on other letters, most of them responding to discussions on freedom of religion vis a vis the Obama administration's rule on mandatory contraception coverage, and on Israeli President Shimon Peres' take on a two-state solution.

WASHINGTON - Conservative icon Rep. Michele Bachmann called the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the healthcare law the end of economic and religious liberty in America as she rallied disheartened activists. “We lost religious liberty - that is a fundamental right under the constitution,” she said to a crowd outside the Supreme Court building Thursday. “We lost economic liberty - that is a fundamental right under the constitution. We lost our individual liberty to set our course in this country.” “This court has forced us now to pay for their utopian dreams,” she added.

Hearing oral arguments in a major religious liberty case, several Supreme Court justices suggested Wednesday that Congress may have overstepped its bounds when it sought to reverse the court's recent ruling on the "free exercise of religion." Justice Anthony M. Kennedy commented that the court had properly concluded religious claimants should get equal treatment under the law but not special exemptions.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced Friday that she is creating a high-level post in the State Department to ensure that concerns about religious liberty around the world are addressed in all aspects of U.S. foreign policy. The step was recommended by the Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad, and Albright endorsed it only minutes after receiving the panel's report.

Re "Freedom of religion is safe," Editorial, June 17 As a provider of comprehensive women's healthservices, I applaud The Times for supporting the federal regulation that requires employers' health insurance plans to include contraception services. I see women of many faiths, including Roman Catholics. For all of my patients who have children, readily available access to safe and affordable birth control is crucial to their ability to care for themselves and their families.

ATLANTA - Stung by criticism that they are engaging in partisan attacks in a presidential campaign, the nation's Roman Catholic bishops insisted Wednesday that their fight with President Obama has nothing to do with party politics or contraception, and everything to do with what they see as a fundamental assault on religious liberty. The bishops did not shrink from attacking the administration in a dispute that has become their signature issue, one involving what Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton called "the most serious intrusion of government that we have ever experienced.