Friday, July 24, 2015

Walker takes away religious freedom for others with wacky sounding "1st Amendment Defense Act!"

Scott Walker is now pushing a bill on the national stage, that even red states Arizona and Indiana rejected after strong public opposition. Cap Times:
Scott Walker supports the First Amendment Defense Act — but what does it do?: "Absolutely. I mean, to me, protecting our constitutional rights shouldn’t just take a piece of legislation," Walker said when asked by the Christian Broadcasting Network in Iowa last week if he supports the bill.
The bill supposedly protects churches from doing something they’re not required to do; perform same sex marriages! So this is just more trash talk on taxpayer time just to energize the radical right wing low information voters:
In a press release announcing the bill, co-sponsor Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, noted specifically that the bill would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from stripping a church of its tax-exempt status. 
 Because the First Amendment Defense Act goes even further than protecting churches:
The bill protects anyone who "acts in accordance with a religious belief or moral conviction that marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman, or that sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage."

Lee, asked by NPR about a hypothetical scenario in which a university fires an unmarried woman for having sex with a man, offered this: "There are colleges and universities that have a religious belief that sexual relations are to be reserved for marriage … Those colleges and universities have the right to make that decision on their own … It is, again, a slim minority of those that do. But those that do have this ought to be protected in their religious freedom." He offered similar arguments involving a university denying employment to a person married to someone of the same sex.
Quicker than you can say “social engineering, big government Republicans are putting themselves in our bedrooms. And I’m not just talking about their membership in Adult Friend Finder or AshleyMadison either.
Kaylie Hanson, director of women's media for the Democratic National Committee: "First, we learn that Jeb Bush’s policy agenda called for publicly shaming single mothers for having children out of wedlock. Then we learned that Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Scott Walker all support legislation that would allow a woman to be fired for having premarital sex. Republicans should be ashamed of themselves."

1 comment:

  1. It is difficult to decide how to categorize this kind of nonsensical dogmatic religious posturing and the desire to codify it into a secular rule of law. This is xtian dominionism it and is akin to Scott Walker's and his ultra conservatives worst nightmares about what living under a Islamic sharia law would be.

    A potential way to counter this kind of attack on the first amendment as most of us believe it to exist, would be to figure out a legal definition of this kind of religious lobbying for preferential religious status and remove tax exempt status for specific groups claiming the tax exempt status now.

    You lobby for focused preferential religious treatment under the law and then you become something other than a religious organization and you lose tax exempt status.

    Obviously I haven't thought this all the way through, but what is most important to these pseudo, "religious," zealots? Their god, money, of course.

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