Contrived controversy: Furor over religious freedom law shows liberal hypocrisy

Given the furor that’s erupted, you’d think Indiana was the first state, not the 20th, to pass a law to protect religious freedom.

The Indiana law would permit discrimination against gays, wrote Apple CEO Tim Cook in a Washington Post op-ed. Singer Miley Cyrus and actor Ashton Kutcher said much the same thing, more crudely.

Apple “will never tolerate discrimination,” Mr. Cook said. Apple does business in four of the 10 countries where homosexuality is punishable by death and it builds many of its products in China, where Christians are persecuted. But Mr. Cook is by no means the only hypocrite among critics of Indiana’s law.

Illinois passed its Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 1998. State Sen. Barack Obama voted for it.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy said he’ll prohibit state-sponsored travel to Indiana. Connecticut passed its own, somewhat stronger version of the RFRA in 1993.

“The anti-Indiana backlash is a perfect storm of hysteria and legal ignorance, supercharged by the particularly censorious self-righteousness of the left,” wrote National Review Editor Rich Lowry.

Indiana’s law, like those in 19 other states, mimics the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act that was approved by Congress nearly unanimously. States passed their own because the Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that the federal RFRA was generally inapplicable against state and local laws.

The federal RFRA was prompted by a 1990 Supreme Court ruling against Native Americans who were fired after ingesting peyote in a religious ritual, noted Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University who supports gay marriage, laws prohibiting discrimination against gays and RFRAs.

“We should be wary of using the coercive powers of government to compel our fellow citizens to participate in rites that violate their religious beliefs,” Mr. Prothero wrote. “We would not force a Jewish baker to make sacramental bread for a Catholic Mass. Why would we force a fundamentalist baker to make a cake for a gay wedding?”

RFRAs are about accommodating religious belief, not authorizing discrimination, wrote Washington Post blogger Jonathan Adler, who teaches law at Case Western Reserve University. Indiana’s law “merely requires that state laws meet a demanding but hardly insurmountable test before infringing upon the religious practice or conscience of religious believers,” Mr. Adler wrote.

Essentially all the laws do is permit people to argue in court that a law imposes an excessive burden on the practice of their religious beliefs. Judges may — or may not — accept that argument.

“RFRA doesn’t stop government from limiting religious freedom,” wrote Tobin Grant of Religion News Service. “It simply states that government can’t do it if there is a less restrictive way to accomplish the same goal.” There has yet to be a single instance in which someone used an RFRA to get around civil rights laws.

Conservatives aren’t trying to circumscribe the rights of gays, blacks or anyone else. The left — which no longer pretends to support pluralism and tolerance — is trying to suppress traditional religious belief. They’re fascists, not “liberals.”

“We shouldn’t hold Ashton Kutcher and Miley Cyrus entirely responsible” for their abysmal ignorance of the law, wrote John McCormack of the Weekly Standard. “Their job, after all, is to make bad music and bad movies, not report the news.” But journalists have no excuse.

Neither do President Obama, who must remember voting for Illinois’ RFRA, or Hillary Clinton, who no doubt recalls the moving speech her husband made when he signed the federal law.

This manufactured controversy indicates that the Democratic Party today is comprised chiefly of a few utterly dishonest people at the top who cynically manipulate a larger bunch of arrogant ignoramuses.

Most younger Americans don’t know the liberties they enjoy are derived from the long struggle for freedom of conscience because many of our schools have all but abandoned teaching history and civics.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” Thomas Jefferson said.

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.