Religious liberty belongs to everyone, not just the religious right | TheHill

These attacks on religious liberty involve conservative academics, pundits, politicians, and a variety of Religious Right organizations. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has provided legal counsel for the Hobby Lobby case, and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF, formerly Alliance Defense Fund) is one of the architects of the bills in Arizona, Mississippi, and other states. ADF attempts to soft-peddle their radical redefinition of religious freedom as a defense of the conservative religious beliefs of business owners, who are legally barred from discriminating against LGBTQ or other customers to whom they might object—or what ADF calls “coercing [them] to violate their sincerely held beliefs.” The Religious Right’s campaign to redefine religious liberty was conceived and designed as a back door to limit the reach of marriage equality, employment non-discrimination laws, and Roe v. Wade. However, their Orwellian inversion of the meaning of constitutionally protected religious freedom more broadly threatens the rights of individuals and communities. Once codified, exemptions to laws can beget more exemptions.

If corporations enjoy exemptions from federal laws in the name of religious freedom, the rest of us may be compelled to cede our personal liberty to the views and whims of our employers—forcing us to choose between our livelihoods and our consciences.

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The Becket Fund, ADF, and many other leaders of the religious right portray themselves as avatars of religious liberty and faithful adherents to the original intentions of the Framers. But despite their rhetoric, the battle for the meaning of religious liberty is not between Christianity and secularism but between pluralism and authoritarianism. However strong their convictions may be, the Religious Right leaders’ campaign is less about religious liberty than winning the government-backed right to impose their religious beliefs on others. The Framers called that tyranny.

Religious liberty belongs to everyone, not just the religious right | TheHill