By Jason Le Miere / International Business Times
This is an abbreviated version of the story. For the full story, click here.
Since the start of the election campaign, Rabbi Jill Jacobs has seen swastikas graffitied at a subway stop near her Manhattan home and Jews subjected to a stream of abuse online suggesting Adolf Hitler was right all along. So when asked if she trusts that President Donald Trump truly cares about the religious liberty he vowed last week to “do everything to defend,” she has a very clear response.
“We have to stop calling it ‘religious freedom,’” she told International Business Times. “The executive order that was leaked or any bills that are likely to come out, they’re not about religious freedom, they’re about imposing one particular interpretation of Christianity on the entire country. It’s profoundly un-American.” …
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True religious freedom is a delicate balance between “whether there’s a burden on religion and whether the government has a compelling interest in burdening that religion,” said Holly Hollman, the general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
While the name of the education and advocacy organization might suggest they would be in support of all religious liberty cases, the Baptist Joint Committee issued a friend-of-the-court brief defending the sufficiency of the government’s religious accommodation in mandating contraception coverage in the 2016 Supreme Court case Zubik v. Burwell, which aimed to take the Hobby Lobby victory a step further. Hollman said such cases and legislation like the proposed executive order from Trump could ultimately end up doing huge damage to one of the founding and most treasured principles of the country.
“Efforts that purport to advance religious liberty and yet would harm other important civil liberties or would put the government in the position of advancing religion ultimately threaten religious liberty as we have known and benefited from,” Hollman said.
Click here to read the article on the IBT website.
