Coalition to protect religious freedom shows its fault lines

[rug]

Lauren Markoe | May 30, 2013

WASHINGTON (RNS) In a conference full of people who champion traditional religious values, Amardeep Singh knew that everyone might not appreciate his recounting of the “uncomfortable” cab ride he had taken the previous day.

Singh, a featured speaker at the second annual National Religious Freedom Conference in Washington on Thursday (May 30), told the several hundred attendees that his D.C. taxi driver had the radio tuned to a religiously minded commentator, who was explaining that women become lesbians because they had been abused.

At the National Religious Freedom Conference in Washington Thursday (May 30), advocates included, from left, Amardeep Singh, director of programs for the Sikh Coalition; the Rev. Eugene Rivers, pastor of Boston’s Azusa Christian Community and senior policy advisor to the presiding bishop to the Church of God in Christ, and Shaykha Reima Yosif, founding president of Al-Rawiya, an organization that advocates for Muslims women. RNS photo by Lauren Markoe

His cab story — both his telling and the reaction to it — reveals fault lines in the coalition of Americans concerned that government and popular culture are eroding religious freedom, and trying to banish religion from the public sphere.

http://www.religionnews.com/2013/05/30/coalition-to-protect-religious-freedom-shows-its-fault-lines/

[Dawson Leery]

1. Religious Bigots Gather at National Religious Freedom Conference

http://www.politicususa.com/religious-bigots-gather-national-religious-freedom-conference.html

[rug]

2. These are the speakers.

8:45 a.m. Opening Address

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik, Director, Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought, Yeshiva University



9:30 a.m. Legislative Panel: Engaging Government Leaders to Protect Core Liberties

Honorable Rebecca Hamilton, Oklahoma House of Representatives

Jennifer Kraska, Executive Director, Colorado Catholic Conference

Honorable Curt McKenzie, Idaho State Senate

Alan J. Reinach, Executive Director, Church State Council

Gene C. Schaerr, Chair, Nationwide Appellate Litigation Practice, Winston & Strawn LLP



**9:30 a.m. Media Q&A with Top Religious Leaders**



10:30 a.m. Religious Leaders Roundtable: Many Faiths, One America

Raymond Arroyo, EWTN News Director and Host of “The World Over Live”

Rabbi Abba Cohen, Vice President for Federal Affairs, Agudath Israel

The Very Reverend Dr. Chad Hatfield, Chancellor/CEO and Professor of Missiology, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary

Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III, Pastor, Azusa Christian Community; Senior Policy Advisor to the Presiding Bishop, Church of God in Christ

Amardeep Singh, Director of Programs, Sikh Coalition

Elder Lance B. Wickman, General Counsel, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Shaykha Reima Yosif, Founding President, Al-Rawiya Foundation



1:00 p.m. Special Address: Renewing Religious Freedom for 21st-Century Diversity

Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, President, National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference



1:30 p.m. Joint Panel: Threats to Religious Freedom in the U.S. & Europe: Concerns of Majority and Minority Communities*

Dr. David Little, Retired T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict, Harvard Divinity School

Jasjit Singh, Executive Director, Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund

Hannah Smith, Senior Counsel, The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Dr. Roger Trigg, Senior Research Fellow in the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford; Scholar of the Religious Freedom Project, Berkley Center



*Panel session sponsored in collaboration with The Religious Freedom Project of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs



7:30 p.m. National Religious Freedom Award Dinner

William A. Galston (Award Recipient), Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, and The Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, Brookings Institution

Dr. Barry C. Black (Invocation), Chaplain, United States Senate

Matthew J. Franck (Master of Ceremonies), Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution, Witherspoon Institute

Dr. Richard Land (Award Presenter), President, Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; President-elect, Southern Evangelical Seminary

Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett (Keynote Address), President, Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice

http://religiousfreedomnews.org/fact-sheet-2013-national-religious-freedom-conference-20130520

I estimate less than half are bona fide bigots.

[dimbear]

3. My takeaway: if a group of religionists preselected for comity can't get along, then who can?

It's as if there were an underlying reason for friction.

[Jim__]

4. The examples they offered as evidence of a deterioration of religious rights don't seem ...

... particularly convincing to me.

Among the evidence of a deterioration of religious rights offered during the daylong meeting sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center: the Obama administration’s rule requiring employers to provide insurance coverage for contraception; several state universities’ refusal to accept student groups that require their leaders to accept certain tenets of a faith; and companies that are allowed to relegate Muslim women with headscarves to jobs where the public will not see them.

I think the insurance coverage issue is more an issue of religious organizations wanting to control the private lives of employees than any breach of religious freedom.

The issue with state universities acceptance of certain student groups is probably a constitutional issue that will be worked out in the courts.

I would have expected that the issue about wearing certain religious items while performing a job as a representative of an organization would have already been addressed by the courts. If the courts were to rule that employers can restrict what you wear while you are acting as a representative of a company, I really wouldn't see that as a big threat to religious freedom. Most religions probably already put some limit on the types of jobs that you can accept - for instance, I would hope that religious beliefs would stop people from accepting jobs with unscrupulous collections agencies - so these restrictions would just add to the list of jobs that some religious people won't accept.