On January 10, the Saskatchewan Court of Appeals in Canada released an opinion holding that marriage commissioners in Canada could not refuse to perform same-sex “marriage” ceremonies on the grounds that doing so would violate their religious beliefs.  The case arose after some marriage commissioners objected to performing same-sex “marriage” ceremonies.  The government asked the courts whether it would be lawful for the marriage commissioners to refuse to perform the ceremonies on the grounds that doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

The court held that allowing marriage commissioners to refuse to perform same-sex “marriage” ceremonies would violate the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” because it “would violate the equality rights of gay and lesbian individuals.”  In a summary of the opinion, the Court described its holding by stating, “The Court held that accommodating the religious beliefs of marriage commissioners could not justify discrimination against gay and lesbian couples.”

Well what about the religious freedom afforded Canadians in its Charter? The Court had a chilling answer to that as well.  It said that “the obligation to solemnize same-sex marriages does not affect or interfere with the core elements of a commissioner’s religious freedom: the freedom to hold beliefs and the freedom to worship.”

This decision is concerning on many fronts but it illustrates what ADF has been saying for many years.  The conflict between the homosexual agenda and religious freedom is real and carries grave consequences for religious freedom.  As Kevin Theriot pointed out in his recent blog, the current Commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Chai R. Feldblum, was questioned about instances when religious liberty and homosexual “rights” conflict.  She stated that she would have “a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.”

That type of philosophy should concern every freedom-loving American.  The decision in Canada, though, attempts to make short shrift of those concerns.  The judges, in their eminent wisdom, assure us all that religious freedom remains intact because you can still believe whatever you wish and worship however you wish.  That’s cold comfort for Canadians, though.  Being told by your government that it will allow you to believe whatever you wish even though you cannot act on that belief is totalitarianism plain and simple.  What good is the right to belief if you cannot act in accordance with those beliefs?

Wake up America!  We are not very far removed geographically from Canada and some of our very own government officials have such a twisted view of our own First Amendment that they believe religious freedom should take a back seat to “equality.”  We would be naive to believe that what just happened in Canada will not find its way into our own system of law.  Especially considering the penchant some of our courts have for looking to international law to justify their decisions.

The time is short.  The warning signs are not just on the horizon anymore – they are coming into sharp focus.  God told Ezekiel, “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me.” (Ezek. 33:7).  I believe that God is giving pastors the same task today.  Pastors must warn their people of this threat to religious freedom.  I can’t say it better than this:

“If the Church in America will educate her people to stand against government-imposed sexual immorality, our leaders will lose the political will or power to merrily continue on this road to debauchery. But if this trend of rejecting biblical sexual morality continues, it won’t be long till it’s illegal to even preach against it. It is time for American pastors to unleash the light – lest we find ourselves where Europe and Canada have already landed.”

Instead of wrestling with the repeated warnings from chaplains, endorsing agencies, and service members that military religious liberty will suffer if the existing law on homosexual behavior is dismantled, the recent Pentagon “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” report only gives it lip service.

The report, compiled by the Comprehensive Review Working Group, merely acknowledges the problem’s existence and then passes it off by stating that it will not be as bad as predicted, assuming existing regulations protecting religious liberty are followed.

Horribly misleading, to say the least.

Under-Secretary for Defense and Personnel Readiness Clifford Stanley (who is a member of the CRWG) has already rejected such a solution under oath. In his affidavit to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in Log Cabin Republicans v. Gates, the retired major general stated that the tear-down would require the changing of “dozens” of regulations, including those protecting the “rights and obligations of the Chaplain corps,” to avoid “significant disruption to the force.” His words echo those of over 60 high-ranking veteran military chaplains who have described the potentially devastating effect of dismantling the law, 10 U.S.C. § 654. These chaplains provided the CRWG with a letter (PDF) that, among other things, described the numerous instances where legally normalizing homosexual behavior has resulted in significant losses of religious liberty.

The report tries to avoid these consequences by stating it does not recommend that abolishing the law be followed by making “sexual orientation” a class that receives non-discrimination protections similar to those for race. But this statement is misleading. While some limited protections granted to classes like race would not be available under the CRWG’s recommendation, the CRWG still recommends ambiguous protections that prevent “discrimination” or “harassment” on the basis of sexual orientation.

This type of system is just what chaplains and endorsing agencies have warned can be used to limit religious liberty for chaplains and service members, basing their warnings on many real-life examples that have already occurred in civilian circles and in foreign militaries.

Further, the report—in its attached “Support Plan for Implementation”—admits that current religious liberty regulations create “boundaries that are not always clearly defined.” In that same section, the report specifically admits that the CRWG recommendation would allow a complaint to be filed on the basis of “sexual orientation discrimination” against a chaplain who had preached a sermon teaching that marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

While the report suggests that such a complaint has little likelihood of success, it ignores the obvious fact that (1) unclearly defined regulatory boundaries will push chaplains toward self-censorship to avoid even specious complaints, (2) the proposed complaint resolution system—where the local chain of command resolves complaints on an ad hoc basis—could worsen that chill on religious speech by having inconsistent applications of unclear rules, and (3) even where a complaint is dismissed, the investigation process itself can create pressure to avoid religious teachings on sexual ethics to avoid being branded as a “troublemaker” or seen as “not a team player.” And given that commanders can be criminally punished for failure to prosecute sexual orientation discrimination or harassment complaints, there’s a significant likelihood that even baseless complaints will be exhaustively investigated.

At least some of this harm could have been relieved by encouraging Congress to adopt detailed and comprehensive religious liberty protections—which are often common additions to laws that give sexual orientation special non-discrimination protections—if it chooses to tear down the current law. The CRWG requested and received model legislation from religious liberty groups, based on existing federal legal protections that are available to civilians, that would have helped limit the damage to religious liberty. But, ignoring both that model legislation and its own recognition that current regulations are unclear, the report simply advocates relying on existing regulations.

And this is despite the overwhelming feedback from the survey the CRWG conducted that service members and chaplains are acutely concerned about repeal’s effect on religious liberty.

The existence of this strong emphasis on religious liberty concerns is itself notable because the CRWG survey of 400,000 service members failed to ask a single direct question about that issue. The CRWG’s script for the many discussions with groups of service members similarly failed to inquire about the concern.

And the one notable time that the CRWG did directly solicit input about possible effects on religious liberty—by contacting chaplain endorsing agencies—the majority of respondents emphasized their opposition to dismantling the law and expressed their concern with its effect on religious liberty. One reliable source has indicated that nearly 75 percent of the responding endorsing agencies opposed repeal.

That the CRWG is content to simply recognize the existence of a problem without doing a thing to avoid it is highly troubling. The report does not nearly address the many difficult concerns that endorsing agencies and chaplains have been raising for months, and which they specifically brought to the CRWG’s attention, such as:

Will the Army Chaplaincy’s Strong Bonds program, which exists to strengthen Army marriages, be forced to include same-sex couples? Will chaplains be allowed to offer advice on sexual ethics to commanders? Will chaplains with orthodox beliefs be able to teach ethics courses at military schools, as they do now? Will chaplains be able to reference their beliefs when hiring civilians for military ministry positions? What will happen when chaplains are approached by a service member engaged in homosexual behavior and asked to provide counsel on that behavior? Can chaplains counsel such a person to cease the homosexual conduct, like they can counsel service members to cease adulterous conduct?

The report’s response: silence.

While the report laudably rejects the argument that opposition to homosexual behavior is the same as racism by noting both that “skin color and sexual orientation are fundamentally different” and that the chaplaincy helped lead racial integration efforts in the 1940s, the report nonetheless creates a different erroneous comparison.

It says that since chaplains and service members have been able to handle the moral issue of abortion without loss of religious liberty under existing regulations, they will be able to do the same with homosexual behavior. But this is wrong for at least two reasons.

First, military regulations did not prevent President Clinton from trying to silence chaplains about abortion in the 1990s. Rather, it took a federal court which recognized in Rigdon v. Perry that his efforts violated the chaplains’ rights protected by the First Amendment.

Second, people who choose to have an abortion are not a protected class in the military, unlike the practical effect of the report’s recommendations regarding people who choose to engage in homosexual behavior. In fact, military bases are banned from performing abortions, and military doctors are given special conscience protections regarding abortion.

In fact, the abortion example’s only useful function is to highlight that chaplains are willing to minister to anyone, including those who make moral decisions with which they disagree. But that is true for chaplains in the context of homosexual behavior as well, as chaplains and endorsing organizations opposed to repeal have repeatedly stressed. Their concern is not who they will be ministering to (since they are happy to minister to everyone), but rather how they will be allowed to minister in the wake of crushing the existing law. And nothing about the CRWG Report addressed that concern.

So, the report does make some important contributions to religious liberty concerns by compiling data and recognizing the distinction between homosexual behavior and innate, innocuous characteristics like race. But because the report’s religious liberty analysis is misleading and inaccurate, it will lead to a loss of that liberty. We should not jeopardize the religious liberty of those who fight to protect our own.

This post originally appeared as a column on Townhall.com, 12/17/2010.

Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts or follow us on Facebook to join the conversation. http://www.facebook.com/SpeakUpChurch.

There is currently a trend in our courts to rely on foreign legal precedent from – especially Europe – when ruling on important social issues in the U.S. The most notable case, Lawrence v. Texas, used foreign precedent in 2003 to justify striking down a law criminalizing homosexual behavior. This should be alarming for many reasons, but one of the most important is Europe’s increasing hostility to Christians.

A report issued on December 10, 2010 titled Shadow Report on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe chronicles many of the acts of discrimination against Christians in Europe in the last five years.  I’ve listed some of these below. But before reviewing them, it’s significant that the non-profit group who compiled the report concluded:

“Such intolerant and discriminatory behaviour results from opposition to individual traits of the Christian faith or moral positions that are intrinsically part of the Christian faith, or from　a negative categorical bias against Christians or Christianity as a whole. It leads to attacks on the social level (such as negative stereotyping or social exclusion), on the legal level (for example through a discriminatory law or a bias court verdict) and on the　political level (exclusion from the public sphere; a resolution of a parliament; etc.).”

In other words, Christians are being discriminated against in Europe because of biblical beliefs regarding moral issues. Some examples from the report are:

France, January 2005: French member of parliament, Christian Vanneste, sentenced to payments for homophobic insults”. 

United Kingdom, January 2006: Member of the Scottish Parliament asked Strathlyde Police to investigate remarks made by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Glasgow. The Archbishop had defended the institution of marriage in a church service.

Spain, November 2008: Judge Fernando Calamita was sentenced to 18 years of occupational ban for exercising conscientious objection and thereby delaying the adoption of a little girl by the lesbian partner of her mother.

United Kingdom, January 2009: Brighton Council requests care home for elderly Christians to ask its residents about their sexual orientation and cuts funding when rejected.

Turkey, June 2010: Turkish attorneys are now in the fourth year of prosecuting two Christians for allegedly slandering Islam. Despite the lack of any concrete evidence to support their claims, Turkish courts are continuing prosecution.

We can expect the same kind of persecution of Christians here in the U.S. soon if our courts continue to be enamored with foreign laws.

Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts or follow us on Facebook to join the conversation. http://www.facebook.com/SpeakUpChurch.

ADF Senior Counsel Joe Infranco writes:

One intriguing question in the Perry arguments was whether voters had done something wrong in “taking away” same-sex couples’ brief opportunity to enter into marital unions. To give some context to this line of questioning, the court was focusing on a brief window of approximately four months between the effective date of the California Supreme Court’s (CSC) infamous ruling redefining marriage to include same-sex couples and the effective date of voter-enacted Proposition 8, an amendment to the state constitution that restored the definition of marriage in California.  Since some same-sex couples took advantage of the court’s creation of a new definition of marriage during this time, the claim is that mean-spirited voters obviously intended to take away this “right.” In other words, the voters knew about this newly invented definition of marriage, didn’t like it, and acted accordingly. Plaintiffs’ lawyers even cited the ballot language as further proof of voter meanness: the ballot summary read “eliminates right of same-sex couples to marry.”

The problem is that the claim holds no water. First, the ballot process was started well before the state high court decision redefining marriage. The initiative went through a laborious process of organizational steps, culminating in collecting over 1.1 million signatures on petitions. In fact, those 1.1 million signatures were submitted Apr. 24, 2008 – prior to the CSC May 15, 2008 decision.  It’s clear the people pursuing the amendment were concerned with the definition of marriage, and not “taking away rights” that did not even exist at the time the effort began. When the CSC issued its decision, the proponents of Prop 8 immediately requested that the effective date be stayed a few months until after the election, to avoid exactly this situation. The court refused, in a 4-3 vote, and pushed for the earliest possible effective date. Oh, and yes – neither the governor nor the legislature asked the court to delay the effective date; all branches of state government apparently wanted marriage redefined, and wanted it done quickly, regardless of the amendment pending on the ballot.  

How about the ballot summary that supposedly demonstrates the voters’ bad motives? It was changed from its prior neutral description (“Limit on Marriage Constitutional Amendment”) to the “eliminates right of same sex couples…” language by Attorney General Jerry Brown – yes, the same Jerry Brown who refused to defend Prop 8. The proponents of Prop 8 were outraged by this unfair description and sued over it, but a court decided it fell in Brown’s very broad discretion. So Attorney General Brown, an avowed opponent of Prop 8, gets to describe what motivated the voters and Prop 8 opponents have naturally manipulated this. But why let facts get in the way of a good argument?

Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts or follow us on Facebook to join the conversation. http://www.facebook.com/SpeakUpChurch

Author: Gary McCaleb - ADF Senior Counsel

On Oct. 12, one federal judge wrested control of the American military from the other two branches of government and ordered the immediate worldwide acceptance of open homosexual/bisexual behavior in the military. Two days later, the Department of Justice appealed that deeply flawed decision in Log Cabin Republicans v. Gates—a decision that should never have been made. The lower court should have honored the constitutional separation of powers that vests Congress and the President with control of the military.

The very next day, the leftist homosexual advocacy group, Servicemembers United, fretted that the DOJ appealed the Log Cabin case but chose not to appeal a ruling in an Alliance Defense Fund lawsuit that struck down an unconstitutional National Park Service speech regulation.

Indeed, SU deemed the government’s decision to appeal the Log Cabin case while not appealing the ADF case to be “incomprehensible.” But to borrow a line from The Princess Bride with regard to a similar term, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Indeed, the DOJ’s decision is entirely comprehensible.

First, the ADF case that the DOJ let stand was issued by a federal appeals court, unlike the lower district court decision in Log Cabin. So, the ADF decision had already been rigorously reviewed on appeal and was so well grounded in existing Supreme Court law that only a terminally bored (and marginally competent) attorney would dream of seeking further review.

Second, the one-judge district court decision in the Log Cabin case will create chaos in the military: even President Obama, who has relentlessly demanded that the military normalize homosexual behavior, admits that such radical change cannot happen instantaneously. At a dead minimum, the military will have to burnits precious time to figure out things like who will bunk with whom in barracks and whether to continue enforcing the regulatory ban on adultery when the court just ordered accommodation of “bisexual” behavior.

Third, the Log Cabin case did not consider the impact on the military chaplaincy and its critical role in teaching morals and ethics to all service members. If anything, that failure is what’s “incomprehensible,” as the DOJ did not forcefully present the issue despite both the President and the Pentagon knowing that the conflict will arise if homosexual/bisexual behavior is normalized.

Fourth, the Log Cabin decision shreds the constitutional principle of judicial deference to professional military opinion when it comes to running the military—and, under binding Supreme Court authority, courts must defer to the military on a broad, programmatic level. Instead, the district court flipped the deference principle upside down.

Consider the issue of adultery between a man and a woman: is it unreasonable for the military to say that adultery undercuts the morale of its troops by devastating families that are already deeply strained by the obligations of service? Of course not. And it scarcely strains one’s reason to say that a court should defer to that professional opinion across the board. But what the Log Cabin approach would do is require the military to prove that a specific act of adultery undercuts military readiness—and if it can’t, the home-wrecking adulterer gets away scot-free. The lower court’s error opens a Pandora’s Box of litigation that could paralyze the military even while two hot wars roil on.

Bear in mind that DOJ attorneys cannot look at a case in isolation. If they decide to throw the case by not appealing now, they are subjecting their clients to the consequences of each of the issues I just touched on. DOJ attorneys, like all other attorneys, are obligated to represent the best interests of their client. When a decision is as dangerous and as flawed as is the one in the Log Cabin case, then the reasonable and ethical choice is to appeal—and appeal swiftly.

Suffice it to say that, with even a quick look at the facts, SU’s lack of comprehension is what’s truly incomprehensible.

_______________________________________________

As seen on townhall.com

Please leave a comment below to share your thoughts or follow us on Facebook to join the conversation. http://www.facebook.com/SpeakUpChurch.