When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, his campaign strategist James Carville gave him the formula for success: Focus on the economy. In Carville’s famous words, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Today, President Donald Trump could easily campaign with a similar mantra, since many Americans are pleased with the economic uptick under his leadership.

But, in terms of a lasting legacy, in terms of societal impact, the real mantra should be, “It’s the courts, stupid.” You can be assured that Trump and his Republican colleagues have a good grasp on this already.

And now, with a strengthened majority in the U.S. Senate, the sky is the limit with the good they can do.

As noted (with great concern) by Jennifer Bendery in the Huffington Post, “With a newly strengthened Senate majority, Mitch McConnell can plow ahead with reshaping the nation’s courts.”

Yes, “McConnell has said all along that judicial confirmations are his No. 1 priority as Senate leader. That won’t change going forward.”

And this, in fact, is a major reason many of us voted for Donald Trump: U.S. Supreme Court appointees and, more broadly, federal court appointees at all levels. Transforming the courts was our No. 1 concern.

How much has been done already?

Bendery writes, “To date, the Republican leader has confirmed two U.S. Supreme Court justices, 29 circuit judges and 53 district judges. He’s confirmed so many circuit judges, many of whom are strongly anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights and anti-voting rights, and nearly all of whom are ideologues handpicked by the conservative Federalist Society, that 1 in 7 seats on the U.S. circuit courts are now filled by judges nominated by Trump.”

Some might say, “But this is not healthy. The courts will now become distinctly conservative. They’re supposed to be neutral and impartial.”

To the contrary, the goal is to get the courts back to where they’re supposed to be, namely, rightly interpreting our Constitution rather than creating new laws. Yet for decades, many of the courts have swung dangerously left, leading to rampant (and dangerous) judicial activism.

Judicial activism, in turn, has become a direct threat to our freedoms. (For Mark Levin’s now classic exposé, see here.)

A lengthy, 2013 article published by the Heritage Foundation gave three glaring examples of judicial activism whereby the courts were guilty of “Contorting the Text” (meaning the First Amendment), “Playing Legislator,” and “Abusing Precedent.” (For the liberal argument that it is conservatives who are the judicial activists, see here. For an effective rebuttal to this position, see here.)

Since 2013, we have seen the courts redefine the very nature of marriage (in 1,000 lifetimes, the Founders would have never envisioned this) as well as rule against fundamental freedoms of conscience and speech. And it was judicial activism that made abortion legal in 1973.

Sixty-million slaughtered babies later – far more than the population of Canada (about 38 million), even more than the population of England (about 55 million), and roughly equal to the population of Italy – our nation is still reeling from this unjust and unconstitutional ruling.

It’s about time we had a reformation in our courts.

More recently, what if the U.S. Supreme Court had ultimately ruled against Hobby Lobby? Against the Little Sisters of the Poor? Against Jack Phillips?

Back in 1962, without any legal precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court removed organized public prayer from our schools.

Fifty years later, on June 16, 2012, the Saturday Evening Post ran this story: “Atheists v. Evangelists: The School Prayer Decision of 1962.”

“50 years ago, school prayer was declared unconstitutional, causing Billy Graham to wonder if we were becoming a spiritually-bankrupt nation.”

The article begins with these simple but striking lines: “How much has America changed in the past 50 years? Imagine kids in American public schools now starting each day with a prayer.” (For my answer to the question of how much America has changed since the early 1960s, see here.)

Earlier in the year, Graham had warned Post readers that “if the Court decrees negatively, another victory will be gained by those forces which conspire to remove faith in God from the public conscience.

“American democracy rests on the belief in the reality of God and His respect for the individual. Ours is a freedom under law. But it is also a freedom that will evaporate if the religious foundations upon which it has been built are taken away.”

Of course, he was right, although he had no idea of just how radically the society would be transformed in the decades that followed.

As for prayer in the schools, from the founding of our nation until 1962, it never occurred to the courts that this was a violation of separation of church and state. It was judicial activism that made this landmark decision.

And even though the prayer itself was quite generic and any student could opt out of praying, it was the symbolism that mattered. Prayer no longer belonged in our schools.

All of which leads us back to where we started: It’s the courts, stupid.

Thank God President Trump is keeping his promise to nominate conservative justices – meaning, Constitutionalists – to the courts. Keeping this up for two more years (or, better still, 6 more years) could well be his greatest legacy, not to mention the greatest legal bulwark against the loss of our fundamental freedoms.

As for those who protest, “Trump and the Republicans have no right to do this!”, to the contrary, the American people elected them to office.

They are doing what we the people have empowered them to do.

This article was originally published at AskDrBrown.com.

Written by Samuel Smith

A federal court has granted a Christian liberal arts college in Pennsylvania a permanent injunction against the Obama-era abortion pill mandate that required the school to be complicit in providing health care coverage that violated its religious convictions.

On Thursday, Judge Joy Flowers Conti of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania granted permanent relief to Geneva College, a liberal arts school affiliated with the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America.

Conti ruled that the Department of Health and Human Services Obamacare contraception mandate violated the college’s rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) by requiring the school to facilitate coverage of services to which it has religious objections.

“[T]he court finds that Geneva is entitled to declaratory relief that defendants’ enforcement of the mandate … and implementing regulations against Geneva and requiring its compliance with the accommodation procedure with respect to providing, paying for, making accessible, or otherwise facilitating or causing access to coverage or payments through an insurance company or other third party for contraceptive coverage services to which Geneva College has religious objections … violates Geneva’s rights under RFRA,” the court document reads.

Last week, President Donald Trump announced that his administration will exempt employers who have religious or moral objections to providing contraceptives, including drugs that can cause abortions. This is an important action to restore religious liberties that were stripped away in the Obamacare HHS mandate.

The Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties brought the Obamacare violation of religious freedom to the national spotlight when they fought the mandate at the U.S. Supreme Court. The sincere religiously informed consciences of the owners of Conestoga Wood and Hobby Lobby played heavily into the opinion of Justice Samuel Alito, which upheld religious liberty and freedom of conscience.

“Our legal team went to court in 2012 to fight this unjust mandate on behalf of the Hahns, a Mennonite family and owners of Conestoga Wood Specialties,” said Michael Geer, President of the Pennsylvania Family Institute. “Thankfully, in 2014, the Supreme Court victory granted relief for the Hahns and the Green family (owners of Hobby Lobby) in a landmark ruling. We’re glad now to see that other religious employers and ministries will be protected as well, thanks to the President’s actions.”

“President Trump deserves to be thanked for upholding his promise on religious freedom,” said Paul Weber, President of Focus on the Family’s Family Policy Alliance. “And we’re grateful for the team of attorneys brought together by the Pennsylvania Family Institute that paved the way to this victory through their outstanding work that led to the Supreme Court win.”

Randall Wenger, Chief Counsel for the Independence Law Center, was interviewed by a local Fox affiliate outside of Conestoga Wood to discuss this policy improvement. “The first liberty in our Bill of Rights is the free exercise of religion, and what this mandate is doing is protecting the rights of conscience not only for religious people but for non religious people.”

In response to Leftist hysteria over this minor change, National Review’s David French explains that “Totally ignored by these borderline-apocalyptic assessments of what was, in fact, a modest rollback is the reality that birth control has only very recently come to be viewed as an entitlement.”

IFI joins other pro-family groups across the nation in applauding this important action by President Trump. Moreover, we stand in full agreement with his statement on the issue: “No American should be forced to choose between the dictates of the federal government and the tenets of their faith.”

Oct. 27th – IFI Annual Banquet with Lt. Col. Allen West

Join us in Hoffman Estates for IFI’s annual banquet on Friday, Oct. 27th.  This year we are celebrating our 25th Anniversary with American hero Lt. Col. Allen West as our keynote speaker. Space is limited, don’t miss this special event. Click HERE for more information.

Call (708) 781-9328 for more information.

American courts are being told that certain outrageous activities are actually normal, constitutionally protected, Islamic religious behavior.

• In a Michigan court doctors are accused of mutilating young girls, some as young as seven years old, through cutting off parts of their genitals. A defense lawyer claims that this Islamic practice must be allowed, stating “I believe that they are being persecuted because of their religious beliefs and I do not make that allegation lightly.”

• A lawyer for the state of Hawaii claims that President Trump’s attempted travel ban is unconstitutional. Executive Order 13780 includes a request to collect
  

  “…information regarding the number and types of gender-based violence against women, including so-called “honor killings” in the United States by foreign nationals…”

  The lawyer argues that gathering this data discriminates unconstitutionally against Muslims.

Are these lawyers correct? In the name of religious freedom must America accommodate violent Islamic behavior? Should people here be allowed to govern themselves by Islamic law? In considering these questions we will examine:

• What it would mean to have active sharia courts.

• What virtues God requires of government.

• How American courts handle a collision between religion and civil law.

• How to prevent or neutralize Islamic courts.

Islamic law is always biased towards Muslims

A Muslim society wants to be governed by Islamic sensibilities, which are manifested in sharia. The result is a religious government, favoring Islamic believers and discriminating against non-Muslims. According to Wikipedia, sharia is

“…derived from the religious precepts of Islam, particularly the Quran and the collection of books known as the Hadith.”

Under Sharia, plaintiffs come to a religious elder, called an imam. After hearing their testimony the imam uses the Quran, with other holy books, to craft decisions to be enforced by officials.

Some elders, called mufti, are allowed to declare a fatwa. This is a pronouncement about how Muslims should handle a particular circumstance. A Muslim anywhere, not just in the jurisdiction of that mufti, can decide to obey the fatwa or ignore it. Fatwa examples include:

• Condemn the author  to death. Rushdie wrote a book that enraged Muslim sensibilities. The Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa that Rushdie must die. In response to the book and the fatwa, rioters burned bookstores, Rushdie’s associates were attacked, and he himself went into hiding.

• Ban the use of polio vaccines. No, polio vaccines are OK. Both fatwas were issued.

• Forbid viewing movies about Islam.

• Wives must not leave the house except in emergencies.

Sharia is biased towards Muslim concepts of justice, rights, and equality. Americans hear these words but don’t realize how Muslims interpret the concepts. Here are some examples of sharia justice.

• A Muslim man’s testimony in court is always believed more than that of a woman (Quran 2:282, Sahih Bukhari (a Hadith book) 6:301).

• A man can be convicted of rape only if there are multiple male witnesses against him (Quran 24:4). But if a female accuses a man of rape then the female gets punished. Her testimony isn’t valid against the man, but is a confession of her having sex outside of marriage.

• Non-Muslims are barely tolerated in society. They can live only by continual payment of ransom (jizya, Quran 9:29). They must also watch what they say: witness an Indonesian governor, a Christian, convicted of blasphemy for suggesting that Muslims could vote for him.

• A Muslim can’t leave the faith without incurring a death sentence.

• If a man kills a Muslim it isn’t a criminal matter. Rather, the offender must work out a deal with the deceased’s family, perhaps buying them off with blood money (qisas, Quran 2:178). If that doesn’t work the deceased’s family may personally kill that offender.

• If a man kills a non-Muslim deceased’s family has fewer paths to justice than do Muslims (Sahih Bukhari 9:83:50).

According to American courts, Sharia is not actually a legal system. In successful arguments before the United States Tenth Circuit court the plaintiff argued:

Furthermore, plaintiff has presented testimony that “Sharia Law” is not actually “law”, but is religious traditions that provide guidance to plaintiff and other Muslims regarding the exercise of their faith. Plaintiff has presented testimony that the obligations that “Sharia Law” imposes are not legal obligations but are obligations of a personal and private nature dictated by faith. Plaintiff also testified that “Sharia Law” differs depending on the country in which the individual Muslim resides… Based upon this testimony, the Court finds that plaintiff has shown “Sharia Law” lacks a legal character, and, thus, plaintiff’s religious traditions and faith are the only non-legal content subject to the judicial exclusion set forth in the amendment.

Because Sharia isn’t based on legal precedent, you might present a Sharia court the same argument multiple times and get a different decision each time. The court relies on the judgment of its imam, who isn’t required to be consistent.

Because of its pro-Muslim bias, an unprepared American plaintiff coming before a Sharia court ought to be in for quite a shock. But even if the plaintiff appeals the verdict to regular civil courts, a Muslim tendency to “take the law into their own hands” might make any appeal moot.

Freelancing Islamic justice

Regarding justice, existing Muslim societies have a dual personality. On one hand is the usual deference to rulers and established government. On the other hand is an acceptance, even encouragement, of vigilantism. It is fairly easy to find instances of mob action, where people are attacked, and even killed, for defaming Islam. No trial, just the lynch mob.

Encouragement to autonomous action is built into Islam. Here the Quran says:

“And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.” (Quran 9:5)

This verse spurs continuing attacks on non-Muslims, including Christians. It is just one verse among a multitude that encourage action independent of judges and courts.

A recent European development is the appearance of Sharia patrols. These gangs roam through neighborhoods, intimidating and assaulting residents into sharia-compliant behavior. There were even attempts to start these in Minneapolis and Dearborn.

Once you recognize this tendency towards independent, often violent, action you’ll better understand why there are so many “lone wolf” attacks, and “you offended Islam” riots, by Muslims around the world.

Honor killing is another aspect of this vigilantism. Somehow, Islamic or family honor is restored if you kill a rebellious child, the daughter who is seeing a non-Muslim, or somebody who insults Islam. Some scholars think that Islamic support for honor killing arises from an Islamic parable about Moses (Quran 18:65-81). Through its lawyer, the state of Hawaii claims that honor killing is part of Islamic religious expression.

Whether or not honor killing is explicitly supported in Islam, it is accepted in Islamic societies. This is evidenced by the lack of Muslim mass outrage, and the absence of condemnation from imams, when such killings occur. Because of sharia’s concept of qisas (killing is a civil, not government, problem) there isn’t anything there that discourages taking revenge through independent action.

This tendency towards freelancing the verdicts of Islamic justice suggests why authorizing sharia courts could be dangerous to American communities.

• In a Philadelphia mosque its leaders detained a man accused of theft. They tried to chop off his hand, a sharia penalty for theft. They were unsuccessful, the man was hospitalized with severe cuts, and one of the mosque leaders was arrested.

Had the mosque leaders succeeded in their punishment the man would certainly have recourse in state courts. He’d also be permanently without his hand, something no legal appeal can fix.

Godly government and American law

God told us what He requires of a righteous society and its government. I touched upon this topic in a previous article. In summary, the rulers must:

• Provide even-handed and truthful justice (Amos 5:12).

• Give judgments that don’t favor either the rich or the poor (Leviticus 19:5).

• Be even-handed in our treatment of the aliens in our midst (Deuteronomy 10:17-19).

This is God’s standard for Christian society, Islamic society, and indeed any society.

American law is deeply rooted in English common law, which grew from the Christianized English society. Judges still look to common law when making decisions. Why, then, worry about Islamic courts if America has a Christian foundation? Because American Christians have, by and large, abandoned the public square. We tell ourselves, and are told by others, to leave our religion in the church building. Without the continual guidance of God’s church, which is a preserving salt to society, its guiding light (Matthew 5: 13-16), we’ve accepted all sorts of nonsense and called it justice.

Rulers are to be a terror to wrongdoers, and God’s servants in avenging wrongdoing (Romans 13:3-4). How will our rulers and judges know what must be avenged unless they understand God’s mind on the matter? And who will tell them if the Christians don’t (Romans 10: 14)? It’s high time we again do our duty to preserve and guide American society.

When religion and civil law collide

Soon a judge must decide if an Islamic practice, or a Sharia court, should be allowed in America. The framework used to make this decision will be the Lemon test. From Wikipedia:

• The statute must have a secular legislative purpose. (Also known as the Purpose Prong)

• The principal or primary effect of the statute must not advance nor inhibit religion. (Also known as the Effect Prong)

• The statute must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion. (Also known as the Entanglement Prong)

The government’s claim of compelling interest in its law is measured by these three tests. The law is upheld if it passes all three tests; otherwise, the law’s restrictions are deemed unconstitutional.

The claim of government compelling interest has been tested many times. Here are a few important decisions.

• The Mormons are persistently banned from practicing polygamy in the United States. Utah couldn’t become a state until polygamy was officially banned there. Among the many points of the points that were decided is (from Wikipedia):

“The Court recognized that under the First Amendment, the Congress cannot pass a law that prohibits the free exercise of religion. However it held that the law prohibiting bigamy did not meet that standard. The principle that a person could only be married singly, not plurally, existed since the times of King James I of England in English law, upon which United States law was based.”

• The state of Oregon passed a law insisting that all children must attend public schools. Leaders of Catholic church schools objected and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law. From Wikipedia:

“He stated that children were not “the mere creature[s] of the state” (268 U.S. 510, 535), and that, by its very nature, the traditional American understanding of the term liberty prevented the state from forcing students to accept instruction only from public schools. He stated that this responsibility belonged to the child’s parents or guardians, and that the ability to make such a choice was a “liberty” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.”

• When instituting Obamacare the government insisted that all health plans must include contraceptive coverage. The Little Sisters of the Poor objected to this requirement, citing long-standing Catholic opposition to these products. After many court fights the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor, remanding the case back to a lower court where the Little Sisters could negotiate a plan not having the objectionable requirement.

• A non-Christian religious group sued for the right to use a certain tea, deemed to be a prohibited Schedule 1 drug, in their worship services. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in their favor.

“The Court found that the government was unable to detail the government’s compelling interest in barring religious usage of Hoasca when applying strict scrutiny as the RFRA demands of such regulations.”

The lawyers opposing Islamic practices, such as sharia courts, will need to prove that the government has a compelling interest in banning them.

Preventing or neutralizing Islamic courts

Muslims coming to America bring with them their possessions and their cultures. Those that successfully assimilate learn what part of their cultures must change in their new home. The others try to recreate their cultural practices here. One of those practices might be a sharia court.

The successful establishment of sharia courts, rendering enforceable judgments, amounts to colonization, replacing the existing civil authority with their own. Of all of a government’s compelling interests, keeping its own sovereignty is utmost. What approaches can we take to prevent or neuter sharia courts?

No sponsored, or parallel, sharia courts

Sometimes a sharia court is called an arbitration council, which provides advice voluntarily followed by its participants. However, changing its name doesn’t change its character. A sharia court is an Islamic religious proceeding, and government must have nothing to do with it.

• A government body that works with a sharia court, refers clients to it, or accepts results of its judgments, breaches the U.S. Constitution’s Establishment Clause. It favors one religion over another.

• The sharia court renders its judgments by Islamic standards. A plaintiff acting on the court’s advice will inevitably hurt someone else who expected an action compliant with civil law.

• The sharia court is abetting breaking the law if its “voluntary counseling” causes people, knowingly or not, to use it to evade the civil courts. This “parallel law” court challenges the sovereignty of the existing government. If a sharia court is a conduit for law evasion then its use must be somehow blocked.

If you can’t ban the sharia court, ban its results

Many states have tried banning sharia. However, such bans might not stand up to legal scrutiny. The state of Oklahoma forbade its courts from considering or using sharia. Its ban was overturned by the Tenth Circuit court, largely because it violated the Establishment Clause. That ban mentioned sharia by name, targeting one religion while not affecting any other.

The plaintiffs in the Oklahoma case successfully argued that the ban didn’t define sharia well enough to target it. With that guidance in mind, we should ensure that harm can’t arise from sharia court judgments. If all a sharia court did was provide a chance for Muslims to get together and argue then it would be harmless. Only when its decisions spur criminal action does it become dangerous. If a fear of prosecution deters such actions then the sharia court is neutralized.

Here are approaches that are religion neutral and serve compelling government interest:

• Honor killing: Stripped of its emotional content, this is cold-blooded murder. It’s also premeditated, thanks to the imam’s decision, and the court’s participants can be prosecuted for being co-conspirators. There is no “religious practice” exemption for murder. Aggressive investigation and prosecution can deter honor killings. However, plea deals would merely tell these Muslims that the government is willing to accept a form of blood money (qisas).

• Acid attacks: This is an ambush attack, dousing someone’s face with a caustic substance. This disfigures the victim and demoralizes the community. Europe is subject to a plague of them. These attacks aren’t a religious practice, but grow in number where vigilantism goes unpunished. Because the resulting disfiguring severely alters the victim’s life there must be strong laws that cover these attacks. I pray that smart police street work can detect perpetrators before they can ambush their victims.

• Female genital mutilation (FGM): This act is done on very young girls with the complicity of her parents. Doing this procedure is already a federal crime, but that shouldn’t prevent states or localities from passing their own laws proscribing it. The government has a compelling interest in preventing child abuse. Detecting that the crime has occurred involves cooperation between doctors, hospitals, school officials, and perhaps others in the child’s life. They can look for behaviors and signs that a girl might be suffering from this deed.

• Sharia patrols: These patrols are just a street gang. Time for the police anti-gang squad.

No blasphemy laws

Muslims worldwide have called for a ban on speech critical to Islam. To the Muslim world criticizing Islam is blasphemy (Quran 33:57-61). Some people hope to ban criticism in the United States by framing it as a ban on “hate speech.” Such a ban would restrict religious freedom and free speech, and a law banning Islamic criticism runs afoul of the Establishment Clause.

Finale

The best defense against sharia in America might be aggressive enforcement against evils done in the name of Sharia. Do we have the fortitude and persistence to prevail?

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A proposed rule – a copy of which was leaked on Wednesday – would protect groups like Little Sisters of the Poor from being forced to provide contraception and abortion-causing drugs. The interim rule would honor constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, not protected by Health and Human Services under ObamaCare.

Attorney Mark Rienzi of The Becket, which represented Little Sisters of the Poor, says the rule is fine – as far as it goes.

“Congress did not impose this requirement in the first place, the agency [HHS] did,” he explains. “And there’s nothing unreasonable or wrong about the government saying … We’ve got a requirement that we’ve already chosen not to impose on big corporations and we’ve also decided we’re not going to crush Little Sisters of the Poor for their unwillingness to comply with it.”

Rienzi says the proposed rule would be only the first step in correcting the problem.

“And the second part,” he adds, “would be an order from the court making clear what I think the interim final rule essentially acknowledges, which is that the federal government doesn’t have authority to force religious groups to do this.”

Otherwise another “progressive” president in the future might order HHS to reverse the rule and impose it on religious organizations once more.

This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

Baseball season gets underway this week, a welcome distraction from the political battles in Washington.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate is warring over the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.  The Republicans say he’s a stellar nominee, a judicial umpire who calls balls and strikes as he sees them.  Democrats, led by New York’s Charles Schumer, however, say the judge is a creature of “special interests” who would slide into a base with spikes up and who deserves to be filibustered.

Who are those “special interests” you might ask? Well, they would be anyone who disagrees with progressives, which the November election indicated is at least half the country if not more.

The Republicans say Judge Gorsuch will help the Court return to constitutional principles.  Democrats claim that he will “undo the gains” made by decades of liberal jurisprudence.  We can only pray that they’re both right.

Over the years, federal courts – especially the U.S. Supreme Court – acquired an out-sized role in the nation’s affairs, especially during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.  Think of the federal government as a three-bodied creature, with one of the bodies in a black robe towering over the others with a giant Nancy Pelosi gavel.

Restraining the U.S. Supreme Court’s power, even slightly, has been a non-starter.  Congress is packed with lawyers who dream of serving on or before the highest bench someday.  It’s also an open secret that many politicians are relieved when hot button issues slide off their plates and directly onto the Court’s docket.

Nonetheless, given the Court’s near-omnipotence, the central question of what constitutes lawful authority will dominate public discussion in years to come, especially if there is a conservative majority.  Right now, “lawful authority” is in the eye of the beholder on many levels.

For example, progressives applauded a federal judge in Washington State in February for overruling President Trump’s order temporarily barring immigrants from seven terror-prone Muslim-majority nations.  The judge snapped his fingers, extending constitutional rights to foreigners not even in this country and accused Mr. Trump of racist motives for good measure.  Another judge in Hawaii piled on last week by ruling against Mr. Trump’s re-written order affecting six countries. Progressives again cheered.

On the other hand, when a federal judge in Texas ruled in 2015 that President Obama had usurped congressional authority with executive actions shielding five million illegal immigrants from deportation, progressives pledged resistance and urged people to take to the streets.

Progressives look with favor on the 500 or so “sanctuary” cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration laws and procedures.  Conscience, they say, overrides mere lawfulness.  Except, of course, when it comes to Christian bakers, florists, wedding planners and photographers. They must be forced by law to violate theirs.

Only a few months ago, progressives cheered an edict from the Obama Administration ordering all school systems in America to accommodate female-identified males in girls’ restrooms and locker rooms or risk losing federal funds.  Can’t these schools follow the rule of law?

And what about those scoundrels, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or Hobby Lobby and other Christian-owned businesses that don’t want to obey Obamacare’s abortifacient mandate?  What are they trying to do, provoke anarchy?

When the U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United restored collective political free speech, President Obama pilloried the justices in person during the 2010 State of the Union address, badly misrepresenting the facts of the ruling.  Fellow progressives vowed to see the opinion overturned.

But when the U.S. Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges invented a “right” to same-sex marriage in the penumbras of the Constitution in 2015, overriding state marriage laws – 31 of them constitutional amendments approved by voters – progressives instantly pronounced it “settled law.”

They said the same about the Roe v. Wade ruling in 1973 that struck down abortion laws in every state – “settled law.”

If these examples leave you confused about what is actually lawful authority, don’t worry.  We have an omniscient media to explain it to us.  If they feature lots of people “hailing” a ruling or order, you can bet it’s about another judicial or executive demolition job on America’s heritage, the Constitution, founding values and genuine civil rights.  If they quote lots of people condemning the ruling or order as an abuse of authority, it’s a clear victory for constitutional governance.

To progressives and the lockstep media, legitimate authority means only advancing progressive causes.  If so, it’s no big deal for liberal presidents or judges to run outside the baselines when they need to score some runs.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

Obamacare is a complex regulation mandating universal insurance coverage. It also contains deliberate offense against Christians, requiring that everyone purchase insurance having “contraceptive coverage.” All employer health plans must provide this coverage. In practice this means plans that provide abortifacient products like IUDs and Plan B pills. [i]

But never fear, your religious objections will be catered to. An employer can avoid providing these products. All it must do is to fill out a little four page form. After that the contraceptive products are provided directly by the insurers and the employer is no longer in the loop. [ii] Everybody happy?

The Little Sisters of the Poor, which provides charitable services to elderly people, saw through this scheme right away. They recognized that they were still indirectly authorizing the provision of the abortifacients. They saw that they weren’t being allowed to select an insurer that itself wouldn’t provide them. The Little Sisters still felt culpable for possibly supplying abortifacients to its employees. So they objected both to providing the products and to filling out the little form. Their legal objection has gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has asked for the parties to try again for a compromise solution. [iii]

What is this form, seemingly so unobtrusive and yet so objectionable? It’s a modern version of the pinch of incense offered to Caesar. Through it you affirm that your beliefs aren’t substantial enough to materially affect the world about you. After all, we can’t have religion affecting government policy, can we?

This is just another round of the fight about who will rule, Christ or Caesar. Compared to the troubles that Christians face in the Middle East or in Asia our troubles seem trivial. Yet these forms, the legal rulings against florists or proclamations about restrooms point the way to larger troubles. What can we do to keep our leaders from asking us to choose some invented “government compelling interest” [iv] over Christ?

First and always we must pray for national revival. Its coming will be God’s doing and His timing.

Next, remember that these are still the United States. Christians are not second class citizens, prohibited from advocating in society for Christ and his people. We can educate, petition, vote, organize, march, rally and otherwise tell and show our officials where they are stepping on our religious rights. We can also file lawsuits, just as the Little Sisters did, when the government demands an unrighteous obedience. Remember that judges also read election returns.

The church is already called to enlighten the world. We are a lamp set on a hill – not self-setting but put there by the Lord – providing light to all who are around it. [v] How will society know what is right or wrong unless we approve the right and admonish the wicked?

The U.S. Constitution encourages our advocacy. The First Amendment doesn’t say “separate your religion from politics”, it says “government, don’t interfere with religion”. [vi] Government must not favor a denomination but otherwise must get out of the way. This reading might shock you but it is what the amendment says.

If we don’t want to give to the government the things that are God’s then we will have to tell our politicians and judges – again – what they can’t touch. Telling them over and over again is a good start to reclaiming the public square for Christ. [vii] 

Footnotes:

[i]       One provision in the Obamacare law mandates that health insurance cover “additional preventive care and screenings” for women, as specified in regulations to be issued by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA).  PPACA (not in service at this moment) 2713, (a)(4) The contraceptive mandate is result of HHS regulation.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#Coverage_for_contraceptives

[ii]      HHS administrative rules provides for birth control services even if the employer doesn’t want to directly provide them.  https://newrepublic.com/article/100636/obama-announces-contraception-accommodation-bishops-catholic-hospital-exemption

[iii]     The Little Sisters case before the Supreme Court was sent case back to Appellate Court to negotiate a compromise.  http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/435446/little-sisters-poor-just-beat-obama-administration-supreme-court

[iv]    Obama administration policies have asserted a compelling interest in reproductive rights. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-woodman/hobby-lobby_b_5029820.html

[v]     Matt. 5:14-16

[vi]    First portion of text: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, …

[vii]   James 2:26

Written by Kathryn Watson

Lawyers filing an amicus brief on behalf of Little Sisters of the Poor before the U.S. Supreme Court claim federal health officials were working behind the scenes years ago to make as many religious organizations as possible subject to Obamacare’s contraception coverage mandate.

Internal government emails from October 2011 and July 2012 obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials obsessed over which Catholic universities are exempt from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage for students and staff.

Judicial Crisis Network chief counsel Carrie Severino said the emails reveal federal officials defined religious organizations narrowly and arbitrarily by the tax code, rather than broadly and based on a desire for religious freedom, in order to make the maximum number of such organizations subject to the contraception coverage mandate.

“The fact that these officials are drawing these distinctions without having any relationship to the real, actual religious freedom concerns shows they’re not actually interested in religious freedom,” Severino told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “They were just trying to cover as many people as they could possibly cover.”

An Oct. 12, 2011, email from CMS’s Alexis Ahlstrom to colleagues advised them to “see last question on what student health plans at Catholic universities cover today” and asked “can we reach out to our sources at Aetna and Nationwide to see if they can answer the question? Thanks.”

Severino told TheDCNF that the email “was showing they were trying to figure out, is this going to cover Catholic universities.”

Little Sisters of the Poor, a Michigan-based group of Catholic nuns, is leading one of the most prominent religious liberty challenges against the Obamacare contraception mandate, which the U.S. Supreme Court will hear during its Spring 2016 term. Severino and the Judicial Education Project are filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Little Sisters of the Poor on Monday.

The Judicial Education Project contends that the federal government should define exempt religious organizations under a portion of the Civil Rights Act concerning religious freedom, rather than under a the ever-changing federal tax code.

The federal government currently exempts churches and their “auxiliaries” like church-run schools or programs. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision last year declared that “closely held” corporations can be exempted from the contraception mandate for religious reasons.

But the tax code requires even explicitly religious organizations unaffiliated with a specific church to apply for an exemption from the mandate. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals told the Little Sisters they still have to require a third-party to provide contraceptive coverage in July. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed last November to hear the sisters’ case this Spring.

Severino said federal agencies defined exempt religious organizations under the tax code because they were “just trying to find a neutral reason so they can say that they’re not targeting these groups.”

“Religious freedom in America is under attack,” Severino told the DCNF. “This (case) is going to be very important. This administration is trying to limit religious freedom as much as possible.”

This article was originally posted at the DailyCaller.com

Written by Dr. Daniel Boland, Ph.D.

I have tried to make sense of Mr. Obama’s latest utterance about religious freedom. I am having a difficult time celebrating his rhetoric.

Somehow the president’s recent words to the Islamic community in Baltimore about his regard for the religious freedoms of Americans fail to persuade and fall heavily upon the ear with a resounding lack of authenticity. His words of praise for religious freedom are again weighed down with multiple contradictions: witness his administration as it seeks to force the Catholic religious order, Little Sisters of the Poor, to provide birth control to their employees.

This politically correct attempt on the part of the Obama Administration to force the Sisters to act against their deeply-held, historically validated religious beliefs is morally and theologically repugnant to all faithful Catholics and should be so to all aware Americans. It seems beyond outrage that such a crass political act should be levied against the Little Sisters, a religious Order of Catholic sisters whose only work for 177 years has been–and remains–giving shelter and aid to poor, abandoned, and dying elders around the world.

By this act, our government violates the religious freedoms of these Sisters and exhibits legalistic disregard toward the manner of service and selfless care, self-restraint, and extraordinary moral behavior which is the daily rule of life for these extraordinary women. The Little Sisters of the Poor offer countless personal examples of explicit, public religious professionalism which is the basis of their profound generosity to those who cannot help themselves. Their lives and work provide constant and consistent examples of religious belief and commitment in action in their most admirable public form.

It is, thus, an indefensible travesty on the part of the Obama Administration, representing America, that these religious women are now forced to seek judgment from the Supreme Court to protect their fundamental moral and religious beliefs which run life-long deep in their Catholic culture and in the Church from which they draw their inspiration and support.

President Obama explicitly told his Muslim audience at the Baltimore mosque that he was speaking in his official role as President of the United States. During his presidency, he has repeatedly expressed great concern about and affiliation with the Muslim community both in America and around the world, even proclaiming Islam as a central ingredient of American history. Since the first attribute of authenticity is consistency, one is compelled to wonder to what extent Mr. Obama actually believes what he says–especially when he speaks to a select audience about their religious freedom and at the same time compels the Little Sisters of the Poor to seek costly judgment from the highest legal authority in the land.

Mr. Obama ended his speech by reminding Muslim Americans, “You are not alone, your fellow Americans stand with you.” And he reminded others that the country’s diversity “is not a weakness, that is one of our greatest strengths.” It would be reassuring to many Americans to hear Mr. Obama address the Little Sisters in similar fashion.

Because of his inconsistency in word and action, Mr. Obama–even at this late stage of his fading presidency–has yet to persuade many Americans that he truly believes the Constitution’s principles of guaranteed religious freedom do indeed apply to all American citizens. Many Americans remain unconvinced that our president is authentically concerned about the religious freedoms of all American citizens, including such politically incorrect miscreants as the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Written by John Zmirak

The U.S. Supreme Court has announced that it will hear another Obamacare case, this one connected to the Obama administration’s mandate that religious employers help their workers buy contraceptives, including abortifacients such as the “morning after pill.” In this case we can see the stark outlines of the struggles Christians will face over future decades in America. Can we maintain any freedom of action in a country where a massive and growing federal government believes that it has a mandate to impose a godless utilitarian worldview into every nook and cranny of life? Or will we have to settle for a narrow “freedom of worship,” which covers a couple of hours every Sunday?

When Obamacare was proposed, it received broad support from naive religious leaders because it rectified a supposed injustice: unequal access to health care in America. Some, like Chicago’s Archbishop Blaise Cupich, still argue that supporting an egalitarian system of health care is the genuinely pro-life position to take: Since better health care can save lives, if you aren’t willing to do whatever it takes to offer everyone the same level of health care, then you are really not much different from doctors who abort unborn children.

This kind of sloppy thinking smooshes together the intentional murder of unborn children for convenience with the sad but stubborn fact that in a fallen world, man is mortal. There is a radical, absolute difference between directly killing someone, and not diverting all your resources to postponing his death. Otherwise, every time you switch the channel away from some hunger appeal on TV, you might as well have hired a hitman to knock off a neighbor — since either way, people die. To use “pro-life” this way is to make it mean everything and nothing, which is handy if your other political priorities make you lean toward the rabidly pro-choice Democratic party.

Conservative critics, many of them Christians, warned that federalizing health care would pose a grave threat to the independence of employers — including religious employers, such as Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor — to follow their consciences and make their own free decisions on how to spend their own money, time and talents. And the Obama administration’s fierce fight over this subject proves that conservatives were right. The Democrats know that letting religious employers opt out of paying for abortifacients won’t “force” working women into pregnancy. They are fighting on principle, the principle that no citizen’s conscience can be permitted to trump federal policy. If the mandarins in Washington, D.C., decide that a practice is in the best interest of the masses, then the masses will comply. They must be forced to be free.

It was independence of conscience which our country’s founders thought that they were declaring in 1776. They rejected those systems of government which tried to micromanage the religious and moral decisions of their citizens “for their own good,” like the Inquisition’s Spain or Calvin’s Geneva. Our government would not be closing churches because they taught the “wrong” doctrine, nor banning books because they spread “pernicious” ideas that led people astray.

Nor would our government try to iron out all the inequalities that naturally arise among human beings, who freely choose to use their talents wisely or squander them, to save their money or waste it, to run marathons or to smoke cigarettes, to invest in health insurance or face the tender mercies of the public emergency ward (which should offer a basic, minimum level of care to all comers). Instead of viewing its people as hapless children to be coddled and protected from themselves, America’s leaders were supposed to see its citizens as their equals, moral equals who could make their own decisions and face the consequences, like grown-ups. And grown-ups can decide where they want to work, who they want to hire, and what kind of priorities govern the way they run their businesses. They can also decide how to pray, and how to obey their consciences, so long as they do not violate the fundamental rights of others.

Inflate and distort those rights in the name of equality, and you take away that freedom. If everyone has the right to equal health care, why not equal housing? Interchangeable education? Equally well-cooked, nutritious food? Equal amounts of healthy exercise? That all sounds lovely at first blush, very small “c” Christian. Such a vision appeals to college sophomores still living on their parents’ dimes in spaces kept “safe” from pointy, dissenting ideas. But what such a vision yields in practice is a gray world of uniform public hospitals, public schools, mandatory gymnastics and federal cafeterias in government dormitories, where no one’s talents or choices matter since everyone’s outcome is the same. Such a system, created in the name of equality, once dominated half the world. We fought the Cold War to stop it from conquering the rest.

Our new battle is not with overt Marxist tyranny, but with something more subtle — an irreligious government that wants to agglomerate ever more power over our lives in the name of making things fairer and keeping people happier, of smoothing over our differences and soothing our fragile egos. If two men want to get married, then it is the Supreme Court’s job to protect their “dignity” and open the way for them — and the state’s job to punish those florists, caterers, or preachers who won’t cooperate. If an employee wants the abortion pill (and in five years, if the Democrats win you count on it, a sex change operation), then Mt. Zion Baptist or Our Lady of Sorrows will have to pay for it. There is no logical stopping point for this kind of radical secularism and statism. It is an ideology, which means that its appetite only grows, the more that it feeds.

Because our government is by its very nature secular, the larger the sphere of government action, the less freedom there is for Christians — full stop. The only free spaces for conscientious action by believers are those that we carve out by cutting the state down to size. Like kudzu, this invasive species won’t give up, but will keep growing back, trying to smother us. So keep your weed-whacker fueled. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

This article was originally posted at Stream.org.

Tie her tubes, or we’ll sue you for sex discrimination, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told a Catholic-affiliated hospital in California.

So after first declining to do so, Mercy Medical Center in Redding has now slated a tubal ligation for a woman after her scheduled C-section to deliver a baby in late September.

The ACLU’s demand is cut from the same cloth as the Obama Administration’s order under Obamacare to the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their beliefs and provide contraceptives and abortifacients or pay crushing fines. That case is still in litigation.

The latest manifestation of the Left’s war on the First Amendment’s religious liberty guarantee began when Rachel Miller, a 32-year-old attorney, was rebuffed by hospital officials after she asked them to sterilize her following a planned live birth. In an Aug. 17 letter, the ACLU threatened to sue Mercy Medical Center, a facility run by the Sisters of Mercy and part of Dignity Health, which operates 40 hospitals — 22 of which are Catholic — in California, Nevada and Arizona, according to CNSNews.

Directive 53 of the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops states:

“Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution. Procedures that induce sterility are permitted when their direct effect is the cure or alleviation of a present and serious pathology and a simpler treatment is not available.”

Directive 70 states:

“Catholic health care organizations are not permitted to engage in immediate material cooperation in actions that are intrinsically immoral, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and direct sterilization.”

Tough, said the ACLU, which regards all of the above as routine medical care, even though the procedures involve either taking an unborn child’s life, deliberately killing patients, helping them kill themselves, or rendering people sterile.

The ACLU noted that, ‘”getting one’s tubes tied,’ is the contraception method of choice for more than 30 percent of U.S. married women of reproductive age.”

Well, it’s one thing to voluntarily undergo it, as many do, but it is quite another to force others to perform it regardless of their beliefs. Given a deadline to respond by Aug. 24 or face a lawsuit, the hospital reversed its decision. In a brief statement, the hospital did not explain the about-face, other than to note, “tubal ligations are not performed in Catholic hospitals except on a case-by-case basis where a formal review by a committee of physicians and others gives permission to perform the procedure.”

The turnabout came even though the ACLU acknowledged that, “Miller’s insurance company had offered to cover her delivery at the UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, which would allow her to obtain the tubal ligation, but that hospital is more than 160 miles away.”

In a triumphant press release, the ACLU made it clear that this is only a small part of a larger campaign to break faith-based institutions to secular values.

“The reality remains that there is a clear conflict between the best interests of patients and the directives of the Catholic hospital system,” said Elizabeth Gill, senior attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. “Religious institutions that provide services to the general public should not be allowed to hold religion as an excuse to discriminate or deny important health care.”

The ACLU has also sued hospitals in Michigan and Washington State over their refusal to perform abortions, and has sued the federal Department of Health and Human Services to obtain documents that it claims show that Catholic relief agencies will not provide abortions or referrals to abortionists for unaccompanied immigrant children crossing America’s southern border.

On June 15, a federal district court dismissed the Michigan case as an unwarranted intrusion into religious doctrine. The ACLU has appealed.

In Washington State, in the face of an ACLU threat, the Skagit County Hospital District decided not to partner with a Catholic health provider. Later, the ACLU sued the district anyway on behalf of a woman who takes an acne drug that might cause birth defects and who wanted the option of abortion if she were to become pregnant.

This is the brave new world brought to us by social engineers who are turning the medical profession into an arm of the Left’s progressive agenda.

Don’t be surprised if the ACLU’s next move is to try to force the Sisters of Mercy to facilitate sex-change surgeries.

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com