A 15-Year Old Tunisian Girl Understands the Problem

• “I hate Christians and Jews. I don’t know why. I don’t have any apparent reason to hate them but I always hear my mom talking badly about them. She hates them too, and this is why I hate them, I guess. Mom has always told me that Muslims are Allah’s favorite people,” — F., a 15-year-old Tunisian girl.
• “They said that non-Muslims deserve to die; we should have no pity for them. They will burn in hell, anyway.” — M., a 16-year-old Tunisian boy.

Quotes from a Gatestone Institute article written by Tharwa Boulifi.  She doesn’t endorse what they are saying, but these are her peers on social media.

“The Sultan’s Harem”, a Turkish TV series popular in Tunisia, shows attractive concubines trying to seduce the Sultan by dancing, singing, and being obedient and submissive — all of which can encourage girls to join the “sexual jihad”, by which girls provide sex to jihadists.

I really hope that is not her name, because she has identified the direction that Islamic countries must take.  That’s not going to make her popular.

She says:

We always think that it is in Iraq or in Syria that we should fight terrorism. But the battleground is in schools, in homes, on TV and on social media. It is there that we need to fight extremist ideologies and racial and religious hate — they are the starting point of every terrorist.

I think the culture there will change when the price a country pays for the current path is too high.  I don’t think there are any easy, or non-violent solutions.

JUDGE ALSO ORDERS HAIR REPLACEMENT FOR LIBERAL BLOGGERS

Indy Star:

A mother who cited religious freedom as a defense for beating her son with a coat hanger will serve a year on probation.

After a doctor found 36 bruises on her 7-year-old son, Khin Par Thaing claimed her discipline method came straight from her evangelical Christian beliefs.

-snip-

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, enacted in 2015, says the government cannot intrude on a person’s religious liberty unless it can prove a compelling interest in imposing that burden, and can do so in the least restrictive way.

Her claim of religious freedom was followed by thousands of posts from leftist writers pulling out their hair and saying “see, this is what will happen if religious freedom laws are passed.”  

Religious freedom laws do not give someone the right to beat their kid with a coat hanger. They might give Christian civil servants the opportunity to serve God and their community without being forced to do things against their faith.

House Churches to be Regulated Out of Existence in China

Christianity Today:

Religious freedom in China could be about to dramatically worsen, campaigners have warned.

Tomorrow, the consultation closes for the Chinese public to respond to 26 new laws that would further restrict religious freedom in the country.

The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

The new rules have been drafted by the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) and will – according to an expert who spoke to ChinaSource – “in effect leave no space for the house or unregistered Church in China, and will significantly curtail many of the activities of the TSPM [Three-Self-Patriotic Movement, the state-controlled Protestant Church] as well”.

Russia has passed laws to clamp down on religion as well.  Depending on who you ask, the outlook for people of faith in the so-called Western world is bleak as well.

Brent Fulton, president of ChinaSource, told Christianity Today that should all go ahead, the new restrictions could come into law as early as the beginning of 2017.

“The threat at this point is real,” he said. “But the process is by no means straightforward, and it’s not clear where all this will end up.”

 

Religious Freedom is Non-negotiable

Russell Shaw, writing at Aleitia reminds us that at the beginning, our government could declare it had no business meddling in the religious freedom of Americans:

But an incident back in 1783 points to the most compelling reason for concern about these matters.

At that time the papal nuncio in Paris asked Benjamin Franklin, the American representative there, to sound out the Continental Congress on the establishment of a Catholic diocese in the then-emerging new nation. The Continental Congress replied that it had no “jurisdiction and power” over what the Church chose to do about that.

This was a historic turning-point. In a departure from the practice of centuries, religious freedom would be unfettered in the United States.

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I seem to be writing more and more about the religious parts of the  First Amendment.  All of that part of the Constitution is at risk.  But if religious freedoms are nibbled away by government and its liberal surrogates, we’ve lost it all.

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Shaw is writing about the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a Washington State case about a family pharmacy whose owners did not wish to dispense a drug which caused abortion. There were plenty of nearby drug stores which would dispense the abortifacient, but the government insists the family pharmacy also needs to dispense a drug which violates their religious principles.  By refusing to hear the case, the lower court’s decision against religious liberty stands.

Shaw also responds to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which through its chairman stated that “religious liberty” and “religious freedom”  are frequent code words for “discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia” and other reprehensible behavior. 

Here’s another case from Illinois:

Crisis pregnancy centers in northern Illinois have filed a federal lawsuit saying their employees’ freedom of speech and religious rights will be violated if the state forces them to give patients information about abortion services.  

The provision takes effect on Jan. 1 and requires health care providers with a “conscience-based objection” to have protocols in place by then for giving patients information about – or referrals to – other health care providers who will discuss or offer such services.

“The government shouldn’t be putting messages in people’s mouths,” Noel Sterett, an attorney for the centers, said this week.

The religious crisis pregnancy centers are being forced to provide information about abortion centers when asked by patients.  They are in effect telling religious people at church ministries to go against their consciences.

I don’t need “code words.”

Religious freedom is non negotiable.  Politicians and courts which meddle in church affairs do so at their own political peril.  

“Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King…”

Dwight Duncan, at The Boston Pilot.com

On Sept. 7, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report on reconciling nondiscrimination principles with civil liberties. The summary stated, “Civil rights protections ensuring nondiscrimination…are of preeminent importance in American jurisprudence. Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as … sexual orientation and gender identity…significantly infringe upon these civil rights.”

As the commission’s chairman, Martin Castro, said in an accompanying statement, “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

– snip –

As Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore, chair of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference Committee for Religious Liberty said in response to Chairman Castro’s statement, “These statements painting those who support religious freedom with the broad brush of bigotry are reckless and reveal a profound disregard for the religious foundations of his own work…. Men and women of faith were many in number during the most powerful marches of the civil rights era. Can we imagine the civil rights movement without Rev. Martin Luther King, Father Theodore Hesburgh, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel?”

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Can you imagine a positive, transformative movement without people of faith?  Hardly.

As for the ‘religious exemptions,’ they will be a part of law, no doubt.  When a Muslim woman working for the town recreation program says she really can’t sell tickets to the pig pickin, there will be an exemption.

Christians for the most part have stepped away from the notion of preventing gay marriage.    Those who hold out hope to end the practice are probably just working to prevent their denomination from adopting the practice.  

Is it so unreasonable that Christians and other people of faith explain that while they can’t do the ceremony, or make a cake or take delivery of the actual pig at the pig roast…there are others who can do the job.

Have there been a lot of stories of gay couples unable to marry, or buy a cake, or get fitted for tuxedos for their weddings?  I mean of course since the courts decided it is a new right?  Have I been missing these stories?

As early as the 1840s, Abraham Lincoln had occasion to join his voice to the cause of religious freedom when the nativism of the Know-Nothings was exhibiting a certain anti-Catholic strain: “The guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic, than to the Protestant, and…all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic or Protestant, either directly or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall ever have our most effective opposition.”

Religious folks are not nearly as mean as the members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission imagine.  It is Castro and his commission which has the ‘broad brush of bigotry’ firmly in hand.

I strongly believe this is part of a much broader attempt to chase faith from the public square.  Yeah.  Over my dead keyboard. — Dave