It’s Hoosier David versus rainbow-clad Goliath.

Indiana Governor Mike Pence recently signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in a small, humble ceremony—unlike the prideful, garish, gay ceremony that former Illinois Governor Pat Quinn staged for the signing of Illinois’ marriage-deconstruction law (invited 2,300 guests, used 110 pens, imported Abraham Lincoln’s desk from Springfield for the signing, and quoted from the Gettysburg Address.)

The contrast is marked. Pence has acted humbly in the service of truth. Quinn acted pridefully in the service of lies.

In the wake of Governor Pence’s courageous act, he and Indiana have been the recipients of blistering attacks, both verbal and fiscal.

As usual when blustery homosexual activism is involved, ironies abound. Marc Benioff, CEO of San Francisco-based company Salesforce has canceled “all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination” (while it continues its business dealings in China—the font and source of human rights protections).

Since the Indiana law is similar to the federal RFRA law sponsored in the U.S. House by New York Democrat Chuck Shumer, passed by the U.S. Senate 97-3, and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, what, pray tell, is Benioff worried about? Does he worry that during a business trip, his customers or employees will suddenly decide to order a wedding cake to be transported back to San Francisco?

John McCormack, writing on the Weekly Standard blog clarifies what RFRA will actually protect:

RFRA allows a person’s free exercise of religion to be “substantially burdened” by a law only if the law furthers a “compelling governmental interest” in the “least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.” 

The law does not provide absolute, unfettered freedom to people of faith to do just anything they want. Nor are people of faith seeking absolute unfettered freedom to do just anything they want. This law reinforces First Amendment protections against the increasing encroachment of government impelled most often by homosexual activists.

RFRA laws would permit religious liberty to be limited only if there exists a compelling government interest in doing so and only if the burden on religious liberty is the least restrictive means of furthering that government interest. Court cases have gone both ways. Sometimes courts have decided in favor of religious liberty; sometimes they’ve ruled against it.

Indiana’s RFRA is carefully worded to protect the right of people of faith who are engaged in commerce to allow their business decisions to be informed by their faith. Christians understand what many homosexual activists and their ideological allies seem not to, which is that the totality of life should conform to biblical principles. The free exercise of religion is not limited to hearts, homes, and pews.

Governor Mike Pence has the U.S. Constitution on his side. He has court precedent on his side. He has the precedents set in 19 other states that have RFRA laws, including blue Illinois. But opposition to this law include marauding bands of hate-mongering homosexual activists, arrogant Hollywood lemmings, and feckless captains of industry.

Homosexual activists, fancying themselves the heir apparent to the great civil rights leaders, are in the vanguard of the assault on the Hoosier state.

Following close behind is Hollywood—widely known for arrogance, ignorance, immorality, vanity, and cool-crowd-following.

And then bringing up the rear with powerful reinforcements are business leaders—rarely noted for their deep thinking on matters moral, ethical, or philosophical.  With their pockets lined with lucre, they’re responding to the vitriol from homosexual activists with reflexive knee jerks that enhance their pride in their own pretense of moral courage. Does anyone believe these business leaders have thought deeply about the First Amendment, homosexuality, or marriage? One of the chief goals of business leaders is to make business decisions that increase profits, but no responsible business leader can divorce profit from principle—and by principle, I mean right principle.

What is astounding in this brouhaha is the deceit of the Left. Homosexual activists and their media sycophants continue to proclaim—without evidence—that, for example, Christians owners of wedding-related businesses are seeking to refuse to serve homosexuals. But refusing to use their gifts, labor, and time to produce a product or provide a service for a celebration that violates their religious beliefs does not constitute a refusal to serve homosexuals. In fact, the cases that have been in the press actually expose the Leftist lie, because the owners of the wedding-related businesses have, indeed, served homosexuals on multiple occasions prior to the wedding-related requests.

Religious-owners of businesses should be allowed to discriminate between types of events and products when making business-decisions regarding the provision of their goods and services. Experiencing homoerotic desire and affirming a homoerotic identity does not give men and women absolute dictatorial authority to command what kinds of events religious owners of businesses will serve or what types of products they will make. Homoerotic desire does not supersede religious liberty—or in a sane and moral universe, it would not.

Christians, Jews, and Muslims should be allowed to refuse to provide goods and services for bisexuals’, polygamists’, or polyamorists’ commitment ceremonies or in the near future, weddings (which could be construed as discrimination based on “sexual orientation.”)

Christians and Jews should be allowed to refuse to provide goods and services for pro-Hamas events (which could be construed as discrimination based on religion).

Christians should be allowed to refuse to provide goods and services for events sponsored by eugenics organizations like Planned Parenthood (which in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of feminism that sees a war on women everywhere could be construed as discrimination based on sex).

And Christians should be allowed to refuse to provide services for GLSEN events. Though dogmatic Leftist ideologues would likely construe such refusal as discrimination against homosexuals, it would, in reality, reflect the kind of business decision that Mark Benioff thinks he’s making. Refusing to provide goods and services for a GLSEN event would reflect a principled objection to the event—not the people hosting it.

Other organizations threatening to reconsider their involvement with Indiana include, Eli Lilly, Yelp, Angie’s List, the NCAA, and (irony of ironies) the Disciples of Christ denomination, which apparently supports religious discrimination.

Where do we witness courage? We are witnessing courage through the heroic actions of Mike Pence and every Hoosier who defends him and this law with unwavering steadfastness in the face of withering assaults. Another biblical allusion comes to mind. It appears the citizens of Sodom are clamoring at Lot’s door.

But we can do something.

Take ACTION:  Express with courage, boldness, and grace your support for Governor Mike Pence.

1.)  Call  his office and thank him for standing for religious liberty and freedom.   His office telephone number is (317) 232-4567.

2.)  Get on social media.  Click here to access his Facebook page.  Send this article out by Twitter, include these hashtags in your tweet:  #StandwithIndiana  and  #RFRA

3.)  Contact Eli Lilly; Yelp (415) 908-3801; Angie’s List; the NCAA at (877) 262-1492 ; and, if you’re a member, the Disciples of Christ.

4.)  Support Indiana businesses.

The Truth Project

First Annual IFI Worldview Conference
featuring Dr. Del Tackett
April 10-11, 2015

CLICK HERE for Details

“Tumultuary”: Marked by confusion and disorder

Maybe there’s a silver lining to the cloud created by U.S. Senator Harry Reid’s tumult of confused and disordered thinking. Maybe he has just inadvertently made a case for his own political demise.

Reid, the U.S. Senate Majority Leader from Nevada, was thrown into a paroxysm of anger over the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the “Hobby Lobby” case, which held that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) protects the right of Christian business owners to refuse to be complicit in the deliberate killing of innocent human life. His anger resulted in Tumultuary Harry’s odd claim that “five white men” must not be permitted to  “determine” “women’s lives.”

How many ways can one sentence be wrong? Well, let’s add ‘em up:

• First, and most obvious, one of the five men is not like the others—including hue. Reid may need his vision checked. Or perhaps Reid is using “white” figuratively. Perhaps “white” is a metaphor for all things Reid hates. 

• Second, someone needs to tell Reid that he is…um, gulp…white. 

• Third, Reid has revealed not only his distaste for whiteness (aka self-loathing) but also his diminished view of women. In Reid’s confused worldview, women’s paths in life are set in stone (i.e., “determined”) if their bosses don’t subsidize their birth control. In Reid’s wacky world, poor widdoe girls can’t chart their own course if their mean bosses don’t pay for their IUDs. Reid views women as so impotent that the refusal of their knights in shining armor (aka employers) to pay for their contraception for their volitional sexual activity signifies an absolute loss of agency in their own lives. Maybe women aren’t so inherently powerful after all. 
  
  Instead of railing against the five “white” men who are attempting an existential coup of women the scope of which hasn’t been seen since the slave era, perhaps Harry could remind trembling women of the lives of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Betty Friedan, Coretta Scott King, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg whose fertile years were not ones during which contraception was subsidized by employers or the government. 

• Fourth, what does Reid think of other decisions by white men that have “determined” the lives of Americans some of whom were women, you know, men like Joseph Story, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Louis D. Brandeis, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, William Brennan, and Hugo Black.

Keep your chins up, women! Ignore the bespectacled, tumultuary, only-white-in-a-literal-sense man behind the lectern who thinks you’re feeble and dependent. You can do it! I know you can! You can eke out a life of meaning with even the little reserve of female power you have left after your Scrooge-y bosses withhold that 20 bucks a month. Your bossy patriarchal oppressors trampling on your uteruses (or in Deb Wasserman’s creepy description, “reaching into” your bodies) cannot keep a good woman down.

And, ladies, while you’re exercising your little remaining vestige of power, maybe you can figure out a way to give that confused white man the heave-ho.

Stand with Illinois Family Institute! 

While reams have already been penned examining the implications of last week’s Hobby Lobby decision, most of what’s been written, particularly in the liberal press, has missed the point entirely.

Though I’m mildly pleased that the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is not quite ready to take gasoline to both the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), signed into law by Bill Clinton, a liberal, in 1993, I am alarmed, and so too should you be, that only 56 percent of our sitting SCOTUS justices are still willing to give the U.S. Constitution a modicum of the respect, recognition and compliance it not only deserves, but requires.

America was dragged before Emperor Obama’s counter-constitutional, secular-”progressive” firing squad and remarkably, miraculously, they missed.

But it’s a false sense of security. As we Christians and conservatives celebrate with chest bumps and high fives, we remain bound, gagged and blindfolded while these “progressive” fascists reload. The next volley of cultural Marxist lead is but moments away.

Tick, tick goes the judicial-supremacy time bomb.

I don’t mean to throw a wet blanket on the party. There is much to celebrate, and this ruling’s broader implications are profound indeed. The opinion simply doesn’t go far enough.

Yes, Hobby Lobby was, in part, about the non-negotiable fact that government cannot compel religious business owners of private, closely held corporations to be complicit in abortion homicide. It was also, tangentially, about the self-evident reality that women are not, never have been and never will be, entitled to expect Christian men, who are not their husbands, to pay for their birth control and abortion drugs so that they can have consequence-free sex or otherwise murder their pre-born babies.

Hobby Lobby was chiefly about one of our very first freedoms: religious liberty.

How is it that this was a 5-4 decision? Even an elementary understanding of American history and a cursory analysis of both our U.S. Constitution and RFRA establish that this opinion should have been roundly unanimous. The majority decision merely recognized, in the weakest of terms, Americans’ God-given, inalienable, constitutionally guaranteed right to religious free exercise (yes, even for those pesky Christian business owners).

Still, while lovers of freedom rejoice across the nation, the reality is that there are at least four domestic “enemies within” currently sitting on the highest bench in the land, not the least of whom is Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Ginsburg tells you everything you need to know about Ginsburg: “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012,” she disgracefully vomited a couple years back in an interview about the fledgling Egyptian government. “I might look at the Constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights. … It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done. Much more recent than the U.S. Constitution.”

Ginsburg hates the America of our founding. She hates our constitution and, like all true “progressives,” endeavors to circumvent it at every turn.

And that’s the prism through which we must interpret the parade of hyperbolic horribles in her scathing Hobby Lobby dissent. She excoriated the constitutionalist majority for its ruling, calling it a “radical” decision “of startling breadth.” Still, when you cut through the alarmist tripe, she actually gets to the meat of the matter.

“In a decision of startling breadth,” she wrote, “the Court holds that commercial enterprises, including corporations, along with partnerships and sole proprietorships, can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Uh, yeah, and?

Here’s what Ginsburg actually meant: “I hate the First Amendment. It’s broad, inalienable, and I want to alienate it. Oh, and dead babies. Lots of dead babies.”

Ginsburg is right. This decision was “of startling breadth,” but only if you happen to be a secular elitist hell-bent on marginalizing Christians and wielding unchecked power over your fellow Americans.

Indeed, the secularist left’s utter meltdown over having but a small measure of control over others wrested away is highly instructive. Still, why would we expect lefties to understand the First Amendment when these Rhodes Scholars are calling a decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito “#ScaliaLaw” on Twitter?

In his concurring opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who more often than not gets it wrong, got one right:

In our constitutional tradition, freedom means that all persons have the right to believe or strive to believe in a divine creator and a divine law. For those who choose this course, free exercise is essential in preserving their own dignity and in striving for a self-definition shaped by their religious precepts. Free exercise in this sense implicates more than just freedom of belief. … It means, too, the right to express those beliefs and to establish one’s religious (or non-religious) self-definition in the political, civic, and economic life of our larger community.

Wow. And now for the pink elephant in the room: Although the Hobby Lobby decision did not directly address the raging cultural debate over counterfeit “gay marriage” and the irreconcilable friction this modern, sin-centric novelty has with the long-established and inalienable right to religious free exercise, it doesn’t take a Phi Beta Kappa to read between the lines and discover, as Ginsburg and Kennedy evidently agree, that the “startling breadth” of the decision most assuredly touches and concerns the debate head on. (And not in favor, I might add, of the homofascist “you-have-to-affirm-my-faux-marriage-or-go-to-jail” crowd.)

While Justice Kennedy is anything but predictable on these matters, this ruling makes it pretty clear that, as both the First Amendment and RFRA already assure, the Christian baker, photographer, florist or any other business owner, is protected from being forced, under penalty of law, into indentured servitude – from having to give their God-given time and talent to create goods or services that require they violate sincerely held religious beliefs.

In other words, both the First Amendment and RFRA trump any and all so-called “sexual orientation” laws. Or, as Ginsburg put it, private businesses “can opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.”

Darn skippy.

Furthermore, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act expressly protects religious free exercise while ignoring newfangled notions of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.”

When religious belief comes into conflict with sexual identity politics, religious belief wins every time. Period.

Let me be clear so there’s no misunderstanding. I’m a Christian. If I’m a business owner and someone comes in requesting goods or services that would require me to violate my conscience – especially my biblically based, sincerely held religious beliefs – I will not, under any circumstances, provide those goods or services. This is my absolute, non-negotiable, constitutionally guaranteed right.

No debate. No question. No compromise.

The language of the Hobby Lobby decision simply acknowledges this reality.