By Steven Ertelt
Life News
The Trump administration has created a Religious Liberty Task Force, led by pro-life Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in order to protect and promote religious liberty.
The new task force is important for pro-life Americas as it will work to protect the conscience rights of medical professionals who don’t want to be forced to promote or perform abortions. Pro-life groups have also faced discrimination because of their Christian views and pastors have been unable to fully engage pro-life election issues in the pulpit for fear of reprisal from the government.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom. There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated. This election, and much that has flowed from it, gives us a rare opportunity to arrest these trends. Such a reversal will not just be done with electoral victories, but by intellectual victories.”
“We have gotten to the point where courts have held that morality cannot be a basis for law; where ministers are fearful to affirm, as they understand it, holy writ from the pulpit; and where one group can actively target religious groups by labeling them a “hate group” on the basis of their sincerely held religious beliefs,” he added.
Leading pro-life advocates applauded the creation of the Religious Liberty Task Force.
Liberty Counsel’s Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said,
“The establishment of a Religious Liberty Task Force is an historic and positive step by the Trump administration to protect religious freedom and the rights of conscience. Today’s announcement by the Department of Justice is encouraging, and the Trump administration is to be commended for making this 180-degree turn from the past administration which used the federal government to violate religious freedom and conscience rather than protecting our first freedom. This task force sends a strong message that there is a commitment to protecting religious freedom.”
Sessions added:
“This President and this Department of Justice are determined to protect and even advance this magnificent heritage. Freedom of religious is indeed our “first freedom”—being the first listed right of our First Amendment. This has been a core American principle from the beginning. It is one of the reasons that this country was settled in the first place.”
“But in recent years, the cultural climate in this country—and in the West more generally—has become less hospitable to people of faith. Many Americans have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack. And it’s easy to see why. We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives,” he added.
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By Rep. Lamar Smith
Life News
Americans deserve the facts, objectively reported. They know media bias is pervasive. A recent Morning Consult poll found that only a quarter of voters now trust the media to tell them the truth, a record low.
The media savages President Donald Trump and portrays his administration in the worst possible light. Over 90 percent of his network news coverage has been negative, higher than any other president.
The muting of conservative voices by social media also has intensified. Social media companies have repeatedly censored, removed, or “shadow banned” conservative journalists, news organizations, and media outlets that do not share their liberal political views.
Facebook’s new algorithm for what users see on their timeline has disproportionately harmed conservative publishers. They’re getting fewer readers while their liberal counterparts haven’t been impacted to the same degree.
Recently, Google’s employees easily convinced the company’s management to cut ties to contracts with the military.
And Google has long faced criticism from fact-checkers over manipulating search results to slight conservatives. Google also has deleted or blocked references to Jesus, Chick-fil-A, and the Catholic religion. When will it stop?
Also alarming are the guidelines being written by these companies to define “hate speech.” Facebook’s newly published Community Standards, which determine what content is allowed, define these terms for the American people.
It violates Facebook rules “to exclude or segregate a person or group.” So a conservative organization calling for illegal immigrants to be returned to their home country could be labeled a hate group by the platform and their content removed altogether.
Some platforms have allowed liberal interest groups to determine what information is available to the public. The Southern Poverty Law Center is allowed to influence platform guidelines and sometimes censor content that it deems “hate” speech.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has a “hate map” that lists over 900 organizations. These include pro-life, religious freedom, and border security groups—all popular with the American people. And all are unfairly targeted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
It’s no secret that social media organizations are typically controlled and run by individuals who lean liberal, sometimes radically so. It will require a constant effort by these entities to neutralize this relentless bias if, in fact, they really want to do it.
All media entities should give the American people the facts, not tell them what to think.
LifeNews Note: Rep. Smith is a Republican who has represented Texas’s 21st Congressional district since 1987. This originally appeared at Daily Signal.
By Micaiah Bilger
Life News
Canadian leaders are creating “second-class citizens” by chipping away at religious freedom, Montreal Archbishop Christian Lépine said recently.
Lépine spoke with Crux about two recent moves by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government that restrict religious freedom. One involves the Canadian Summer Jobs program, which provides grants for summer jobs for students. Last year, the Trudeau administration decided to force groups to say they support abortion if they want to receive the grants.
Such requirements treat pro-life Christians and other religious people as “second-class citizens,” Lépine said.
“It is a sign of diminishing freedom of religion and conscience,” he said. “Some might say it’s not very much, but Pope Francis talks about ‘polite persecution,’ and it could possibly lead to that.
“I don’t think that is the intention of the law, but if neutrality of the state is used to exclude the public manifestation of certain religious beliefs, somehow, you are moving in the direction of creating second-class citizens,” Lépine continued.
Another concern is Bill 62, which requires that people show their faces if they want to receive public services. While the legislation primarily affects Muslims who wear niqabs or burkas, Lépine said people of all religions should be concerned.
By chipping away at religious freedom for some, the government is putting religious freedom for all in danger, he said. Rather than equally respect every person’s beliefs, the government is saying that some beliefs are more worthy of respect than others, he continued.
“In the example of the Summer Jobs Program, I would call it a form of exclusion. It says: ‘You are a part of society, but there are certain aspects of who you are that you should keep private, and we don’t want them to be part of society.’ Our Charter of Rights was not made for that; it was made to prevent us from creating second-class citizens,” Lépine said.
He said the Canadian Charter of Rights was modeled after the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which affirmed the “inherent dignity of every human person.”
“It wasn’t about using the Declaration to create a belief system to judge other belief systems or to diminish them,” he told Crux. “It’s about creating a society which includes different belief systems and respects them. It’s not about imposing your belief system on others.”
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