Earlier this week, I was traveling in Indiana. It was a beautiful day, and I stopped for a meal at Chick-fil-A. As I waited in line, it did appear that everyone was being served their meals. But based upon the hysteria in the media, I had expected to find Indiana to be under the control of ISIS. But it seemed quite peaceful. The media firestorm about the Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (hereinafter “RFRA”) is, of course, full of misinformation and madness, which is partly why many Americans have record-low confidence in television news or newspapers, and in Big Business. In recent days, I had a number of conversations about RFRA with leftist friends. As they opined to me about the hatemongers in Indiana, I asked them a few simple questions: Should a Jewish baker be forced to bake a cake for Nazi banquet? Should a Moslem caterer be obliged to serve roast piglets for a Serbian Orthodox slava? Should an African-American restaurant owner be constrained to serve a Ku Klux Klan banquet? Should the atheist florist be required to provide flowers for the “Jesus is Lord” foreign missions dinner? Should it be mandatory for an abortion-rights supporter to provide cakes for a pro-life fund-raiser? Should the homosexual photographer be compelled to photograph a Westboro Baptist Church protest? At this point, I would simply say, “You see that it isn’t quite as simple as you make it sound.” And in the world of ideas, and not emotion, their response was always silence.

RFRA affirms what we find in our Constitution’s First Amendment: religious freedom and belief is respected. RFRA provides that any state or local governmental action that infringes on an individual’s religious liberty will apply strict scrutiny, the highest level of judicial review. The use of the term “strict scrutiny” is a legal term of art to determine the constitutionality of certain laws. Under “strict scrutiny,” a law must further a “compelling governmental interest,” and the law must be narrowly tailored to achieve that governmental interest. Thus, it is a high standard that restricts laws that limit religious liberty, or any other fundamental liberty. Despite the assertions of the mainstream media, RFRA is not a “license to discriminate” against homosexuals. Some people might not realize that there is also a federal RFRA. The federal RFRA….are you sitting down for this??….was introduced in the Senate by the late Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy and in the House of Representatives by then Congressman Charles Ellis “Chuck” Schumer, the now presumptive successor to Harry Reid as Senate Democratic Minority Leader. Further the federal RFRA was signed into law by then President Bill Clinton in 1993, after passing unanimously in the House of Representatives, and with an affirmative vote of 97-3 in the Senate. At the time, it had the support of groups as diverse as the Christian Coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union. A number of years later, after the federal RFRA was determined by the Supreme Court not to apply to the states, many states adopted RFRA-like statutes, while others established the same principles under their case law. Even Illinois has a RFRA that was supported in 1998 by then state senator Barack Hussein Obama. It is commonly ignored by the media and homosexualists that the conscience protection afforded to closely-held private companies in last summer’s Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby was based upon the federal RFRA. Hillary Clinton, a possible presidential contender, who opposed homosexual “marriages” until March 2013, recently tweeted, “Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today.” (Prior to March 2013, was Hillary discriminating against homosexuals and lesbians? Will she ever be asked this question? And will our media ask Mrs. Clinton whether Bill Clinton discriminated against homosexuals and lesbians when he signed into law the federal RFRA? But I digress.)

In addition, feckless CEOs of Big Business have piled on with the mainstream media against the Indiana RFRA. Few CEOs are known for their deep thoughts and insights on questions involving morality, ethics, and philosophy. Angie’s List announced it will pull out of a proposed $40 million headquarters expansion project that promised 1,000 jobs in Indianapolis as a result of the Indiana RFRA. However, media reports have omitted the important fact that Angie’s List hoped to expand its headquarters with $18.5 million in tax subsidies. However, this tax subsidy was in question because Indiana officials were concerned that the company wasn’t sufficiently profitable enough to merit the use of taxpayer funds. (Were Angie’s List executives too clever by half in blaming RFRA in their attempt to obtain taxpayer subsidies?) In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Apple CEO Tim Cook, a flaming hypocrite, called Indiana’s new law “dangerous.” However, Apple sells its products in dozens of countries where homosexual conduct is severely punished. In fact, Apple operates in Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Uganda, where homosexual intercourse can be punished by death. I suppose those countries are not quite “dangerous” enough for Apple as compared to Indiana. (Hey, Mr. Cook, when was the last time you objected to a single act of discrimination in any of these countries?) Marc Benioff, CEO of the $4 billion San Francisco-based cloud computing company SalesForce, has cancelled “all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination.” This hypocrisy knows no bounds as SalesForce operates a branch in China, which is hardly a model of protecting fundamental human rights under its Communist government. Mollie Hemingway recently observed:

If SalesForce CEO Benioff is going to be consistent, he’s not only going to have to lay off everyone who works out of his Chicago, Indianapolis, Tampa and Northern Virginia offices, but he can’t even do business in Alabama, Connecticut, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.

We will see whether Indiana and a similar Arkansas RFRA will actually ever go into effect, but at the grave risk of telling some unpleasant truths, it is quite obvious that many homosexualists and their allies in the media and Big Business are intolerant of any person who holds traditional cultural and religious views. Today, in Obama’s America, Christian believers are now required to bow their knee to an agenda that supports homosexual “marriage” and abortion on demand. As Erick Erickson astutely observed recently:

The gay rights movement cannot abide . . . a free exercise of religion for a simple reason – homosexuality is not normal in nature, in historic relationships, or in the sacred texts of almost all religions. The gay rights movement must therefore censor and subjugate dissent. Any who point out the lack of historic or religious acceptance or the lack of its ready existence in nature or, for that matter, the lack of scientific evidence showing homosexuality is a birth trait as opposed to a choice or external factors, must be shut up. Homosexuals and the gay rights movement crave not tolerance, but the veneer of normalcy. . . . Around the country, gay rights activists have attacked Christians for daring to put their faith ahead of the wants and desires of homosexual marriage advocates. The Christians must be silenced and punished. Their faith cannot be respected. Legislation designed to allow diversity of religion and the free exercise thereof must be stopped, and must be decried as discrimination.

Emphasis added. Of course, whatever happens at the Supreme Court this June regarding nationalizing homosexual “marriages” will not end this conflict. If successful at the Supreme Court, then homosexualists must then push churches to marry homosexuals because that is where most people marry. Conservative, Bible-believing churches and parishes that adhere to traditional marriage will lose their tax exemption, and then if they persist in their traditional views, then they will be forced to close their doors for being “hate” groups. And can we not easily envision a time in our country in the not-too-distant future when Christian parents who dare to raise their children to be orthodox Bible-believing Christians will routinely see their children taken from their homes by an all-powerful Leviathan in an effort to “protect” children from the views of their Christian parents? In his essay, Mr. Erickson concludes as follows:

You will be forced to pick a side. If you remain true to your God, you will be outside the bounds of acceptable conduct. You will be made to care. If you pick the wrong side, you will be punished. . . . . [But] the religion that withstood Nero and even now withstands ISIS can withstand a bunch of angry people.

During this Holy Week, let us remember the words of my favorite psalm, Psalm 37:12-13, “The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth upon him with his teeth. The Lord shall laugh at him: for he seeth that his day is coming.” Amen! Let us prepare ourselves with courage and faith for the dark days that lay ahead for those who refuse to bow a knee to the dark forces of evil. Happy Easter to my dear brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ for indeed He is risen.



