RFRA Madness: What's Next for Anti-Democratic 'Religious Exemptions'

With wins in federal and state legislatures, Republicans gear up to exempt religious conservatives from any laws they don’t like (especially the ones about gays and women).

11.16.14
Jay Michaelson

Elections are funny things. They’re often about issues that governments cannot actually control: jobs, cultural shifts, viruses. And yet, they result in massive changes in what government does control—like the makeup of the federal courts, or environmental regulations. Or, this year, the ways in which religious liberty (both real and imagined) is balanced against civil rights.

Few voters, it’s safe to say, cast their ballots based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Yet, the headline-grabbing religious liberty conflicts of 2014—the Hobby Lobby case, Arizona’s “Turn the Gays Away” bill—have not cooled off. On the contrary, with the results of this year’s elections, they are about to heat up.

Here are four developments we’re likely to see in 2015.

State RFRAs.

Say it after me: RFRA. Riff-rah. It stands for “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” The federal RFRA was passed in 1993, nearly unanimously, with liberals and conservatives uniting in response to a Supreme Court case, Employment Division v. Smith, which upheld anti-drug laws being used against Native Americans ingesting peyote. Outraged by this intrusion on a minority religious practice, RFRA provided that the government can only “substantially burden” the exercise of religion if it has a “compelling state interest.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/16/rfra-madness-what-s-next-for-anti-democratic-religious-exemptions.html

That's the finest pun I've seen in a long time.