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The Daily Signal
Congress Has a
Plan to Defend Your First Amendment Rights After Court’s Marriage Ruling
Sen. Mike Lee
June 29, 2015
In the wake of Friday’s 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court in the
marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, many of the millions of Americans
who voted to define marriage as an exclusively male-female institution
in their state constitutions will be wondering: What does this mean for
me?
Congress must move swiftly to pass the First Amendment Defense Act.
If five judges on the Supreme Court have pronounced, in a breathtaking
presumption of power, that all 50 states must redefine marriage, what
does that mean for the countless institutions within our civil
society—churches and synagogues, charities and adoption agencies,
counseling services and religiously affiliated schools—that are made up
of American citizens who believe marriage is the union of one man and
one woman?
Will federal government agencies follow the heavy-handed approach taken
by the present majority of Supreme Court justices—say, by revoking the
non-profit, tax-exempt status of faith-based schools that continue to
operate on the basis of their religious beliefs about marriage?
Nowhere in the majority’s 28-page opinion will you find a reliable
answer to these questions. In his dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts
explains why.
“Federal courts are blunt instruments when it comes to creating
rights,” Roberts writes, because “they do not have the flexibility of
legislatures to address concerns of parties not before the court or to
anticipate problems that may arise from the exercise of a new right.”
It’s true that Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority,
acknowledges—as if in passing—that “The First Amendment ensures that
religious organizations and persons are given proper protection as they
seek to teach the principles that are so fulfilling and so central to
their lives and faiths,” including their conviction that marriage is
the union between one man and one woman.
But this may prove to be little consolation for those who have
conscientious objections to the redefinition of marriage. For the
remainder of Kennedy’s opinion, like much of today’s jurisprudence, is
based on the pretension that the role of judges is not merely to
resolve cases and controversies in the law, but to apply their own
“reasoned judgment” to define for each successive generation the
“nature of injustice” and divine the “meaning” of liberty.
That’s why I recently introduced a bill, with Rep. Raul Labrador,
R-Idaho, in the House, called the First Amendment Defense Act that
would prevent any agency from denying a federal tax exemption, grant,
contract, accreditation, license, or certification to an individual or
institution for acting on their religious belief that marriage is a
union between one man and one woman.
In light of the Supreme Court decision, Congress must move swiftly to
pass the First Amendment Defense Act and clarify in federal law what
five justices left ambiguous in their legal opinion: that the right to
form and to follow one’s religious beliefs is the bedrock of human
dignity and liberty that must be forcefully defended from government
interference.
Read this and other articls with links at The Daily Signal
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