By Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr., www.albertmohler.com.
The vast high-velocity moral revolution that is reshaping modern cultures at warp speed is leaving almost no aspect of the culture untouched and untransformed. The advocates of same-sex marriage and the more comprehensive goals of the LGBT movement assured the nation that nothing would be fundamentally changed if people of the same gender were allowed to marry one another. We knew that could not be true, and now the entire nation knows.
The latest Ground Zero for the moral revolution is the state of Indiana, where legislators passed a state version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence then signed into law. The controversy that followed was a free-for-all of misrepresentation and political posturing. Within days, the governor capitulated to the controversy by calling for a revision of the law — a revision that may well make the RFRA a force for weakening religious liberty in Indiana, rather than for strengthening it.
Business, political, and civic leaders piled on in a mass act of political posturing. The federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act became law in 1993 in a mass act of bipartisan cooperation. The Act passed unanimously in the House of Representatives and with 97 affirmative votes in the Senate. President Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, celebrating the Act as a much needed protection of religious liberty. Clinton called religious liberty the nation’s “first freedom” and went on to state: “We believe strongly that we can never, we can never be too vigilant in this work.”
But, that was then. Indiana is now.
Hillary Clinton, ready to launch her campaign for President, condemned the law as dangerous and discriminatory — even though the law in its federal form has not led to any such discrimination. Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the pages of The Washington Post to declare that the Indiana law “would allow people to discriminate against their neighbors.” For its part,The Washington Post published an editorial in which the paper’s editorial board condemned a proposed RFRA in the state of Georgia because the law would prevent the state government “from infringing on an individual’s religious beliefs unless the state can demonstrate a compelling interest in doing so.”
So, The Washington Post believes that a state should be able to infringe on a citizen’s religious liberty without a compelling interest? That is the only conclusion a reader can draw from the editorial.
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Newman vs. Piggie Park Enterprises
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newman_v._Piggie_Park_Enterprises,_Inc.
Southern Baptist restaurant owner Maurice Bessinger argued that “his religious beliefs compel him to oppose any integration of the races whatever.”
This law in Indiana was somewhat of self-inflicted wound, if they had just put the language in the original to what they revised it to, you would not have heard a peep. Wecome to the 2016 Presidential race.
The Reverend Gardner Taylor died this Easter. Listening to some of his messages I was struck by this “when a pulpit becomes an echo of the pew it loses all of its reasons for existence” I think similarly when the church becomes an echo of popular culture it loses all of it’s reasons for existence.