Religious Rights

Today, on Constitution Day, it is alarming that the fundamental right to a vote - the one that generations fought so hard to expand and protect, first with Amendment 15’s Race No Bar to Vote, Amendment 19’s Women’s Suffrage, and Amendment 26’s Voting Age – is now under attack by the Republican Party.  This is ironic given the Republican Party’s constitution-centric platform.

I’ve been a small business owner for more than 25 years. So it’s fair to say I’ve been around the block. I also happen to live in the Chicago metro area, so I know a thing or two about hard-nosed politics.

Kuwait’s parliament has just passed draconian legal amendments that impose the death penalty on Muslims for blasphemy. The move to stiffen the penalty came after Hamad al-Naqi, a Shi’a Muslim, was arrested in March and taken into custody for allegedly cursing the Prophet Muhammad on Twitter.  The fate of the amendments and of Naqi rests in the hands of Kuwait’s emir.
 
This action is the latest sign of an alarming trend, not just in Kuwait, but across the Middle East and parts of North Africa. From Tunisia to Kuwait, blasphemy bans increasingly are being enforced and expanded. These bans threaten individual rights to freedom of religion and expression and often have led to human rights abuses.

The first clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees the freedom of religion. Not the second clause or the third amendment - but the first clause of the First Amendment. It was clearly an important issue for our founding fathers.

In keeping with those protections, throughout our history multiple groups across the United States have been exempted from certain laws due to their beliefs or traditions. Indians, Aleuts and Eskimos living in Alaska are exempted from provisions in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The Amish aren’t required to pay Social Security taxes. Uniform restrictions regarding head coverings were relaxed for Jewish troops in our Armed Forces.

The uproar over the regulation requiring contraception coverage as part of the package of preventive health services guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act, and the exemption that allows religious institutions to refuse to provide it, has taken on an air of unreality that some have attempted to exploit for partisan political advantage.

Recently, Republican Party Committee Chairman Reince Priebus wrote in Politico earlier this month, “[t]he president’s contempt for the constitutional restraints on power was evident before.  His disdain for respecting those limits, including freedom of religion, is now on full display.”

As one of the architects of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, I take seriously the government’s obligation to respect, and to accommodate, the religious beliefs and practices of all Americans. Read more...

In recent days, Americans of every faith and political persuasion have mobilized in objection to a rule put forward by the Obama administration that constitutes an unambiguous attack on religious freedom in our country.

This rule would require faith-based employers – including Catholic charities, schools, universities, and hospitals – to provide services they believe are immoral. Those services include sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs and devices, and contraception.

Just as pop and country music writers’ and publishers’ livelihoods have been decimated from the growth and proliferation of illegal Web sites making copyright infringement easy, the writers and publishers from within the church and religious music publishing marketplace have been impacted just as severely.

It is often noted that digital theft is “devastating” or “bad for jobs and the economy”, and this is true.  Too often, however, the true impact of the problem on communities all across America is discounted and overlooked because the red carpets and the fancy costumes of a handful of “mega-stars” form people’s impression of the music industry. Let me paint a more realistic picture.

The Church Music Publishers Association, founded in 1926, currently represents 46 member publishers. A diverse group, our membership includes representation from the publishing houses of almost every major church denomination, the publishing companies or affiliates from every major contemporary Christian record label, the church music divisions of several major secular publishing houses, several independents, both small and large, as well as publishers who are involved primarily in educational markets, just to name a few.

As John Feehery pointed out in his article “Obama and the Catholic vote,” there are some “regulations run amok” in the recent Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decision to mandate contraception coverage in employer insurance plans. The problem is not, as he suggested, because contraception and Catholicism are somehow mutually exclusive. The otherwise sound regulation goes awry because of the refusal clause that has been written into the rule.
 
The amended regulation infringes on no one’s conscience, demands no one change her or his religious beliefs, discriminates against no man or woman, puts no additional economic burden on the poor, interferes with no one’s medical decisions, compromises no one’s health—that is, unless it includes a refusal clause. For all these reasons, millions of Catholics, including Catholics for Choice, support the IOM’s recommendation, but not an implementation by HHS that would deny some women access to preventive healthcare they need.
 
Government should indeed listen to what American Catholics want. But they should let Catholics speak for themselves. Most U.S. Catholics disagree with the bishops and their lobbyists who claim to speak for us—notably, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have used a form of birth control prohibited by the Vatican. When Catholic voters considered healthcare reform in 2009, more than six in ten supported health insurance coverage—whether it is private or government insurance—for contraception and family planning.

On July 9, the world will witness the birth of a new nation and a triumph for religious freedom and related rights. The people of South Sudan chose independence in a January referendum mandated by a comprehensive peace agreement (CPA), of which the United States was the primary broker. Signed in 2005, the agreement ended Sudan’s 22-year north/south civil war.

The war was triggered by the brutal attempts of the Khartoum regime in the north to impose its extremist version of Islam, leading the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), on which we serve, to deem it among the world's most egregious religious freedom abusers. Of the two million Sudanese dead, four million driven from their homes, and many forced into slavery, most were southern Christians and followers of traditional African religions, as well as hundreds of thousands of Nuba Muslims declared apostate and targeted in the same conflict by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s regime.

Read more...

This week, as chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, I introduced legislation, cosponsored with Reps. Keith Ellison and André Carson, recognizing the cultural and religious significance of Eid al-Adha.

I wish all Muslim Americans and Muslims around the world a prosperous holiday and stand with them in recognizing the importance of sacrifice, freedom and justice.  Muslim Americans contribute substantially to the success and pluralism of the United States, making significant strides in all areas of national discourse, development and diplomacy.  As award-winning scientists, doctors, engineers, athletes, artists, ambassadors and an estimated 10,000 Armed Service men and women, Muslim Americans continue to serve the greater good of our county. Read more...