Written by Don Byrd
The Baptist Joint Committee’s Brent Walker weighed in today on briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in the contraception mandate cases. Writing for ABP, he rejects the argument raised by a lawyer for the Freedom From Religion Foundation that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the law at the heart of the contraception dispute, is unconstitutional. Walker makes the case that RFRA is a perfectly acceptable means of strengthening religious liberty guarantees.
As the Court has made clear, there is “room for play in the joints” between what the Free Exercise Clause requires and the Establishment Clause forbids. Hundreds of religious exemptions populate federal and state law strengthening religious liberty without impermissibly establishing religion.
If Congress can grant religious exemptions on a case-by-case basis, what is wrong with making these accommodations, as it did in RFRA, all at once? In fact, one could argue that this wholesale approach to accommodation is even less likely to risk establishing religion than the case-by-case retail version. The latter creates outright exemptions from government regulation; RFRA does not.
Read the whole thing.
