Twitter Rains Hell on Jeff Sessions' New Religios Liberty Task Force
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Twitter Rains Hell On Jeff Sessions' New Religious Liberty Task Force
Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost Mon, Jul 30 9:03 PM EDT Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced Monday that the U.S. Justice Department is launching a “ religious liberty task force” — and Twitter erupted.
The new unit will aid the department in fully implementing the religious liberty legal “guidance” issued last year under President Donald Trump ’s direction, Sessions said in a speech at the Justice Department’s Religious Liberty Summit in Washington.
The attorney general charged that the freedom to practice religion in America has come “under attack” in the nation’s current “cultural climate.”
A “dangerous movement, undetected by many, but real , is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom .... It must be confronted ... and defeated,” he added.
“We’ve seen nuns ordered to buy contraceptives. We’ve seen United States senators ask judicial and executive branch nominees about dogma .... We’ve all seen the ordeal faced so bravely by Jack Phillips ,” Sessions added, referring to the Colorado baker who won a religious liberty challenge to LGBTQ anti-discrimination law in the U.S. Supreme Court after refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Sessions called freedom of religion “indeed our first freedom being the first listed right in the First Amendment” and said that the Trump administration is “actively seeking to accommodate people of faith.”
Sessions touted his department’s prosecution of attacks on religion, among them court actions shielding about 90 plaintiffs from Obama-era requirements that employer health insurance cover contraception, an amicus brief “we were proud to file” on behalf of Phillips, and indictments in an arson attack and threats directed at two mosques.
Twitter exploded, with critics charging that the Religious Liberty Task Force was a front to protect religious zealots attacking LGBTQ rights and an unconstitutional push to marry church and state on the altar of Christianity.
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U.S. Justice Department is launching a “ religious liberty task force
So much for the separation of church and state.
Removed This has ZERO to do with establishing a state religion. It’s about protecting first amendment rights which the left despises for everyone but themselves
Badfish, Why don’t you explain yourself for these so-called “sweeping generalizations”
You mean like the imaginary "right" to use superstition as an excuse to violate public accommodation laws, or the "right" of state-funded adoption agencies to use public money while denying adoptions to the people their superstitions tell them to hate? Or are you referring to the "right" of superstitious pharmacists to deny service to women and transgender folks?
What religious right of yours or anyone else's has ever been threatened by us progressive lefties?
Bueller................Bueller...................Bueller....................?
We just don't like you.
It's not just left/right. Many of us kind of hang out somewhere in the middle.
The gop's "Religious Freedumb" campaign is an attempt to re-institute a comprehensive form of Jim Crow...
"I don't believe like you do so I will not transport you or your kind in my ambulance". Remember Jim Crow?
If we open the door to legal discrimination based on belief there is no end to it. See The Handmaiden's Tale.
Used to work as a paramedic and never made a distinction. You needed my help and you got it.
Under the tissue paper thin guise of protecting "religious freedom" these fanatics hope to worm their perversion of "christianity" into a state sponsored cult. There really is nothing about our Constitution that they aren't prepared to destroy nibble by nibble then chunk by chunk until they achieve the "christian" version of Iran.
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." -- author unknown (but prescient).
The quote is from Sinclair Lewis and yes it is quite apropos regarding the here and now.
Lewis was a lover of communism
LFOD,
He was not. He really wasn't political at all, but if he was anything he was a socialist and those are two different things.
Marx defined socialism as the transition between capitalism and communism
Marx on Socialism as the initial or first step to Communism (Critique of the Gotha Programme)
Marx continued:
"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Marx not only most scrupulously takes account of the inevitable inequality of men, but he also takes into account the fact that the mere conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole society (commonly called “socialism”) does not remove the defects of distribution and the inequality of "bourgeois laws" which continues to prevail so long as products are divided "according to the amount of labor performed". Continuing, Marx says:
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged, after prolonged birth pangs, from capitalist society. Law can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby."
And so, in the first phase of communist society (usually called socialism) "bourgeois law" is not abolished in its entirety, but only in part, only in proportion to the economic revolution so far attained, i.e., only in respect of the means of production. "Bourgeois law" recognizes them as the private property of individuals. Socialism converts them into common property. To that extent--and to that extent alone--"bourgeois law" disappears.
However, it persists as far as its other part is concerned; it persists in the capacity of regulator (determining factor) in the distribution of products and the allotment of labor among the members of society. The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change.