FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Wayne Besen, Executive Director
Phone: 917-691-5118
E-Mail: wbesen@truthwinsout.org

Contact: John Becker, Director of Communications
Phone: 920-265-6023
E-Mail: john@truthwinsout.org

TWO Debunks Fake ‘Religious Freedom’ Lie With Groundbreaking Full-Page Ad

Ad Is In Response To New York Marriage Clerk Who Refused To Marry Lesbian Couple Under the Guise of ‘Religious Freedom’

Burlington, Vt. – Truth Wins Out announced today that it would place a groundbreaking full-page ad (see below) in the Ithaca Journal on Saturday that debunks the Religious Right’s latest strategy of claiming they are victims of religious discrimination when asked to follow the same laws as other citizens. TWO’s hard-hitting ad is headlined “Special Rights Masquerading as Religious Freedom” and signals that this fraudulent argument, increasingly used by anti-gay activists, will be vigorously challenged and exposed as a lie.

TWO’s ad is in response to the unethical actions of Ledyard, NY town clerk Rose Marie Belforti, who refused to issue a marriage license to a lesbian couple. Belforti disobeyed the law and then justified refusing to do her job by claiming she was a victim of religious discrimination.

“The private religious beliefs of public workers should be respected,” said Truth Wins Out Executive Director Wayne Besen. “However, agents of the state are not entitled to pick and choose which members of the public they serve or which laws they obey. Refusing to serve entire classes of people based on religious objections will lead to chaos. It creates a slippery slope where self-appointed moral scolds serve as the gatekeepers to our freedom.”

Until recently, anti-gay activists argued that LGBT people were not entitled to equality because it was contrary to the will of the people. As recent polls show a sea change in support for marriage equality, particularly among younger demographics, the extreme right has switched its strategy. They now try to pose as martyrs whose beliefs give them the special right to discriminate and ignore the law.

“Belforti’s twisted version of ‘religious freedom’ comes at the expense of liberty for everyone else,” said TWO Communications Director John Becker. “It creates a balkanized nation that divides people based on sectarian differences. We must reject the unfair notion that some people have a special right to discriminate based on religious beliefs.”

TWO’s ad points out that allowing fundamentalists to follow their own rules would create chaos and undermine societal cohesion. The ad gives several examples of where this false notion of “religious freedom” might lead:

• Will town clerks use their fundamentalist beliefs to refuse issuing marriage licenses to divorced people who wish to remarry?
• Will town clerks use religion to justify turning away interfaith or interracial couples who want a marriage license?
• Will postal workers refuse to carry mail they find objectionable, or refuse to deliver to households whose religious beliefs they disagree with?
• Will religious public school teachers choose to educate only students who share their faith?

This latest effort is part of TWO’s Center Against Radical Extremism (TWOCARE), which debunks right wing propaganda and misinformation campaigns. TWOCARE also monitors and reports on extremist organizations and launches campaigns to spotlight their dangerous views.

(This ad is costing $2,500. If you like it, please kindly consider a tax-deductible contribution to help us pay for it)

Casting itself as a defender of religious freedom, Focus on the Family warned on Friday that a federal commission for religious freedom faces dissolution.

But the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is not an advocate for religious freedom at all.

The USCIRF was founded by U.S. evangelicals to shield the foreign activities of right-wing Christian missionaries, not religious minorities. The commission has advocated for military interventions, not to defend religious diversity and freedom of individual religious expression, but rather to advance Christian missionary objectives.

The Indian press have accused USCIRF of grossly mischaracterizing Hindu-Muslim conflicts and of doing little or nothing to defend the freedom of anyone other than Christian evangelicals.

In Egypt, Coptic Christians have accused USCIRF of antagonizing their Muslim neighbors in a politically motivated effort to smear Egypt.

And federal religious-freedom “ambassador” Robert Seiple criticized USCIRF’s emphasis on the punishment of (anti-Christian) religious persecution over the promotion of religious freedom.

Given USCIRF’s betrayal of non-evangelicals, its anticipated dissolution next month can’t come soon enough. Focus on the Family’s defense of special rights for evangelicals — at the expense of other Christians and the world’s non-Christian religious minorities — is another indication of that organization’s disingenuous selfishness.

The governor of Maryland, Martin O’Malley, will lay out a strategy tomorrow to get marriage equality passed in his state:

Activists have been working for months to persuade him to put his name on the controversial bill and include it in his legislative agenda. “I supported it last year,” he said. “I support it now.”

[...]

O’Malley this morning noted that the recently enacted gay marriage law in New York shows “that we can protect religious freedoms and equality of civil marital rights at the same time.”

Much of the lengthy debate on the issue in Maryland centered on ensuring that churches, synagogues and other religious institutions could opt-out of performing ceremonies their faith does not condone. Supporters accepted amendments in committee and on the Senate floor to beef up that section of the bill — making it clear that churches would not have to change their practices to accommodate gay members.

As is typical, anti-gay marriage factions wanted special rights to discriminate in areas outside the practice of their religion, and they will want them again, but hopefully the New York law will provide a decent blueprint for how Maryland and other wavering states can get this done.

In an article today for Focus on the Family, writer Catherine Snow contends that respected Christian and Jewish groups are actually “a ‘who’s who’ of Leftist, humanist, abortion and gay organizations.”

Focus warned that “liberal groups” were asking President Obama to repeal a 2002 executive order that allows Focus and similar groups to collect and abuse taxpayer dollars for the purpose of enriching favored religions and discriminating against religious and sexual minorities.

But Focus drastically shortened the coalition’s membership list: It removed most of the Christian and Jewish groups, and presented the edited result as a liberal conspiracy against Christians. To its credit, Focus offers its readers a link to the coalition‘s actual letter (PDF) to President Obama, but the link is buried in footnotes.

Here is the coalition membership list that Focus didn’t want Christians and Jews to see: (Read More)

Peter LaBarbera, in the middle of a wordy whine about the Illinois civil unions law:

These sad developments in the Land of Lincoln constitute further proof that homosexuality-based “rights” and religious freedom cannot co-exist. “Gay” activism – empowered by Illinois’ “sexual orientation” law and the new Civil Unions law — will drive out the free expression of religion and morality, which must include the right to oppose sexual behavior historically regarded as disordered and sinful.

They also define the word “oppose” incorrectly.  You see, Peter is free to oppose gay people all he wants.  If he opposes marriage equality, he is free to live by the confines of his religion and stay with his wife, refraining from marrying a leather daddy at one of the fetish conventions he photographs.  He simply doesn’t have to do it!  Nobody will make him.  Just like I “oppose” religious fundamentalist nutjobbery.  I’ll speak out and show people how in-your-face stupid religious fundamentalism is, how a perfunctory glance at reality is its simplest negation, etc.   But I won’t try to take away their rights to be idiots.

But.

To the religious fundamentalist, their “religious freedom” trumps everybody else’s constitutional rights, because they [hilariously] think they are superior [even though they contribute little to nothing to society].  So when Porno Pete uses the word “oppose,” he means that he should be able to act to take away other peoples’ freedoms and rights, that he should be able to use his pretend moral authority, derived only from his 4th grade interpretation of an old book, to hurt other people.

Not gonna fly in America, Peter.  Convert to Islam and move to Iran if that’s what you want.  The only difference between your religion and the fundamentalist Islam practiced in that country is that your side occasionally drops an obligatory reference to Jesus and y’all aren’t allowed to hang people in this country [anymore].

Because, see, we on the side of reason don’t want to take anything away from people like Porno Pete.  Oh sure, we know it hurts their fee fees any time they confront any piece of reality that, by its very existence, laughs at their beliefs.  Fossils, for instance.  They’re not protected against being made to look stupid, or like social pariahs, in the Constitution.  But we don’t want to take away their fundamental rights.  They do want to take ours away.

So we are at an impasse.  We will continue to fight for our rights to be treated as equal citizens, in an American way that seeks to deny our opponents nothing, and they will continue to fight to hurt us in an extremely un-American way, deceived as they are into believing that this is “their” country and theirs only.

Oh, and they will continue losing, and we’ll just keep on winning.

The Religious Right likes to moan about their “religious freedom.”  When they do this, it is useful to remember two things:

1.  They do not care about anyone’s religious freedom but their own, because for them, “religious freedom” is actually code for their belief that the true practice of their religion necessarily includes lording it obnoxiously over everyone else.

2.  They actually believe that they speak for a majority of religious Americans.  They don’t. 

But you see, the times are changing.  Many churches in the South perform same-sex weddings!  There are several in my neighborhood, in fact.  They may not be legally sanctioned, but as church rites go, they’re just the same as heterosexual marriages.  The Religious Right wants to have it both ways, though.  They want to have their rights to perform only the marriages they want protected [as they should], but they also want to butt into state affairs and decide who can and cannot get married in a civil contract.  Meanwhile, they also seek to deny loving churches the ability to perform same-sex weddings if they so choose.

A church in Kentucky has decided to take a stand.  Think Progress:

Members of Douglass Boulevard Christian Church, located in Louisville, KY, unanimously voted to stop signing marriage licenses for heterosexual couples until same-sex couples are afforded equal marriage rights. The decision comes at the same time that a CNN poll shows that a majority of Americans now support legalizing same-sex marriages, the fourth poll to show similar results in the past eight months.

In 2008, Douglass Boulevard Christian Church (DBCC) decided to designate itself an Open and Affirming Community of Faith, signifying its “commitment to full acceptance of all people, regardless of race, gender, age, or sexual orientation,” and this decision keeps it in line with those values, church leaders said. The church will continue to perform religious wedding ceremonies but will no longer sign official licenses, according to an official release on its web site.

Read the whole piece, because all too often the Religious Right pretends that it speaks for religious Americans.  That is a laughable claim.  The bigots of our society dwindle in number every year, either due to changed hearts and minds or due to the fact that, as a segment of the population, they skew much older.  Meanwhile, religious congregations all over the country are unable to treat their parishioners equally when it comes to something as simple as marriage.  And as the polls have been showing, the public officially supports marriage equality.  It’s sad that this church has been put in this position, but we applaud them for their principled stand.

Every so often, a decision is made in another country with marriage equality, which the Religious Right in the United States then adds to its whining arsenal, which they use to frighten their followers about What Will Happen when marriage equality comes to this country.  I predict that this will be one of those court cases.  It’s actually a completely sensible ruling:

Saskatchewan’s top court has said marriage commissioners cannot use religion to say “no” to nuptials for same-sex couples.

The Appeal Court had been asked by the government to rule on a proposed provincial law that would have allowed commissioners to cite religious grounds in refusing to marry gays or lesbians.

The appeal panel’s unanimous decision released Monday said the law would be unconstitutional and would amount to discrimination.

[...]

[President of the Gay and Lesbian Community Cory] Oxelgren said marriage commissioners perform a civil service and are not supposed to discriminate.

“If the government allows that to go ahead, what’s there to stop another person in another department or another agency from saying, ‘Well, I don’t agree with this so I would like to opt out.’ The answer is you can’t. You are an agent of the government and you follow the laws.”

It really is that simple. Just as in the United States, religious congregations are pretty much able to do what they want within their churches, but don’t get to make up new rules when they act as part of secular society [see: Catholic charities, that pavilion in New Jersey, etc.], this court case isn’t infringing on what churches are able to do and believe. It’s simply saying to commissioners who work for the government, “You have a job you were hired to do, and these are the laws. Don’t like it? Get a new job.”

One of the judges made a really interesting point in her opinion:

Justice Gene Ann Smith said the religious objection was secondary.

“These marriage commissioners are not themselves compelled to engage in the sexual activity they consider objectionable. Their objection is that it is sinful for others to engage in such activity,” wrote Smith.

“It is therefore arguable that the interference with the right of marriage commissioners to act in accordance with their religious belief … is trivial or insubstantial, in that it is interference that does not threaten actual religious beliefs or conduct.”

Imagine that! The religious lives and practices of the Religious Right don’t automatically include the lives and practices of other people who don’t share their beliefs? It’s so sane…Tony Perkins will never accept it.

Exodus International lashed back today at meager efforts by professional therapists to confine the rampant youth abuse and anti-parent scapegoating that occur among Exodus’ network of antigay counselors.

While allegations of sexual abuse continue to hover over George Rekers and Exodus’ longtime Michigan ex-gay counselor Mike Jones, spokesman Randy Thomas seeks to change the topic with a fresh attack upon religious freedom and mental health. Of course, Thomas claims to defend both, even as he’s undermining them in his revealing blog post.

Among Thomas’ revelations: Of Exodus’ 240 individual and church chapters, just 40 have any professional qualifications for counseling. By Thomas’ own admission, these antigay therapists have been lobbying the California Association of Marriage and Family TherapistsÔªø to ignore patient welfare, medical ethics, and solid mental-health research in favor of “traditional views on marriage and sexuality.”

Quoting LifeSiteNews, Thomas expresses faux outrage at the “bullying” tactics of just two small groups of professional therapists whom he and LSN falsely characterize as “the gay-rights community” and “lobbyists.” While a letter from CAMFT stood up to these tactics, the same letter expressed support for marriage equality and other social-justice efforts.

Having made a sweeping mischaracterization of mainstream therapists, Thomas then tries to portray Exodus as a heroic alternative. Yet — typical of Thomas — he undermines his own case through a series of transparent falsehoods. (Read More)

The Boston Globe reports today that state officials stopped a United Church of Christ volunteer program from distributing soup to homeless people on the streets after diners got sick eating food that had been prepared in volunteers’ home kitchens.

The church swiftly acknowledged its responsibility to the public, and its obligation under the law, to ensure that food is prepared in safe, licensed kitchens.

Now let’s contrast the UCC’s law-abiding response to the reactions of antigay activist Maggie Gallagher, the Roman Catholic Church, and the ex-gay movement, when their churches are urged to protect the public health and obey the law like everyone else.

1. When the same state, Massachusetts, last week considered legislation to regulate the medical practice of circumcision, Gallagher lost her nerve and proclaimed that Jews were being threatened with religious persecution — a facetious claim, largely unsupported by the state’s Jews, that merely served as a token effort by Gallagher to drag Jews into her holier-than-thou war against the religious freedom of sexual minorities.

2. After social-justice advocated urged the Pope to condemn antigay genocide in Uganda — out of respect for international law, public health, and common human decency — the Pope did the opposite last week:

…In his address to the bishops of Uganda last Friday, Benedict XVI made no reference to the anti-gay bill or the international outcry surrounding it.

Instead he called on the bishops to “encourage the Catholics of Uganda to appreciate fully the sacrament of marriage in its unity and indissolubility, and the sacred right to life” — the latter a reference to abortion. He also urged them “to resist the seduction of a materialistic culture of individualism which has taken root in so many countries” — a reference to concerns about an encroaching cultural influence from Europe and North America.

Far worse than the UCC’s well-intentioned serving of spoiled food, the Roman Catholic Church in Uganda has greased the wheels of a church-state death machine: A barbaric apparatus to sweep up thousands of LGBT people and their relatives for indiscriminate mass execution at the gallows. The Pope’s naked repudiation of life (when it isn’t heterosexual and preferably Catholic) is an act of negligent homicide against Ugandan minorities. The Pope’s silent affirmation of genocide also plainly repudiates international law regarding nation-states’ obligations to stop genocide, and finally the Pope’s ongoing promotion of abstinence-only public policy promises to accelerate the growing loss of human life that has occurred since conservatives began to silence Uganda’s comprehensive education, prevention, and treatment programs for HIV/AIDS in 2003.

3. Finally, when Tennessee intervened to stop youth sexual abuse and negligent treatment at Exodus’ flagship Love In Action residential facility back in 2007, Exodus responded by declaring that so-called “ministries” enjoy a blanket religious freedom to (mis)treat children — under the guise of phony pseudo-medical marketing — as their religion dictates. In the end, to the chagrin of concerned regulators, Tennessee’s conservative Baptist politicians agreed: Where the potential for medical malpractice and sexual abuse is concerned, churches are largely above the law.

What is it about the Christian Right family of political organizations that prompts them to defy law and health in order to preserve the same — and to deny religious freedom to all but themselves?

There is a stark difference between churches that obey humanitarian law, serve the public good, and respect public health — versus those that accumulate power by repudiating law, undermining human rights, sickening the public, and deliberately harming their chosen enemies.

One side believes that it should act on the assumption that God is love, while the other acts on the assumption that God is fear, sadism, and avarice.

Focus on the Family today applauded a Missouri senate panel’s endorsement of legislation which Focus claims would merely protect religious freedom.

In fact, the legislation does the opposite:

The legislation, Senate Resolution 31, establishes a ballot issue to amend the state constitution. The amendment would permit conservative Christians to impose official prayer and official religious symbols in public schools — against the will (and the faith) of Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, atheist, and liberal Christian parents.

The Resolution would violate the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It is poorly written and, while likely to increase litigation, may be difficult to enforce, according to Leigh Hunt Greenhaw in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The real purpose of the law is to scare conservative voters into believing, falsely, that their right to pray is under fire so that they will go to the polls and vote for extremist candidates who are intolerant of religious minorities. The Post-Dispatch writer observes:

The proposed amendment to Section 5 could be a partisan strategy. If voters hear our right to pray is endangered and that an amendment to the Missouri Constitution is needed to protect it, they might come out to vote for it. And those that do might well favor candidates and parties that have supported the amendment.

Focus and its Missouri affiliate hinted at this true intent in today’s statement:

Joe Ortwerths, executive director of the Missouri Family Policy Council, said his group promoted Senate Joint Resolution 31, because groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union, for example, are trying to convince public school officials that freedom of religious expression cannot be permitted in public settings.

The Christian Rightists deliberately mischaracterize the ACLU’s defense of individual religious freedom — in particular, the freedom of minorities to pray as they wish without official school interference or official religious indoctrination.

The “religious freedom” that Focus and Missouri’s Christian Right seek is a freedom from the religion of others, not religious freedom for all.