The Jeff Sessions "Religious Liberty Task Force"

[vulcanlogician]

Generally speaking, I advocate for religious liberty, so (on paper) a task force whose purpose was to ensure "the free exercise thereof" is no problem for me. 

So long as your religious rites do not harm others (ie unlike the Satanism example a few pages back), nobody should be allowed to infringe upon your ability to worship or profess your beliefs to others.


But let me ask my original question again: What contemporary issue concerning religious liberty is so pressing that it warrants a task force?

That there isn't a clear answer to that question is one of my main issues with the proposal.

So then your objection is just one of economy and not of principle then.   Would you agree?   That is, your not against, it, other than you just think it is unnecessary? 

I can understand if they are dumping a lot of money into this, and they are essentially doing nothing, where that may be of concern.  However I think that we are starting to see censorship Assembly Bill 2943 of California which would censor speech.   I've also heard of Pastors in Texas being asked to submit their sermons to the government.   And as was mentioned in the link that Mr. Brewer provided, attacks on Mosques.  In the masterpiece cake shop case, the supreme courts ruled largely against the lower governments bias towards the owners religious liberties.

I can understand the concern, if the argument is just that you think it's frivolous.  I wouldn't object to an audit of what they are accomplishing vs what they are spending after some time.

No. I would not describe my position as one of economy. I don't see a great need for a religious liberty task force--yes. That's part of it. But my position doesn't boil down to just that.

Refer yourself to RobValue's comments above or the pie chart above. Christians make up a majority of the population. Around 70%... many of whom think that "America is a Christian nation."--- ie. "This nation was built upon Christian principles for Christian people. All other groups should exist in the margins;"--"The Constitution protects religious liberty within Christianity only"-- In other words: "Christianity's cultural dominance should go unchallenged. Any attempt to challenge it is an infringement upon the rights of Christians."

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Two in three Americans (67%) say they consider the United States to be a Christian nation — down just slightly from 71% in March 2006 but up significantly from the percentage who said so a decade ago. In 1996, 60% of Americans tied the nation’s identity to Christianity; by 2002, the figure had climbed to 67%, and since then views on this question have remained fairly consistent. Seculars are the only religious classification among whom fewer than a majority see the U.S. as a Christian country, although even among seculars nearly half (48%) view the U.S. this way. More whites than blacks characterize the United States as a Christian country (by 70% to 58%), and people over age 50 are more likely to express this view than are younger people (by 74% to 63%).

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/200...an-nation/

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Now granted, the belief the the US is a Christian nation is little more than a basic belief for many, a statement which has no real meaning at all. Perhaps to most people it merely means that Christians are a majority in this country. Only the foulest of Tennessee holy rollers wants to subjugate all nonchristians. It would seem that the "ugly" interpretation of America being a Christian nation is really only strong in the fringes of the religious right. But that's not quite accurate. Newt Gingrich, for example, has argued the view that the First Amendment was only meant to apply to religious liberty within Christianity, and I consider him fairly mainstream.

Look at it this way: rural Mississippi, even in contemporary times, is plagued by residual racism from "the good old days." Institutional racism in rural Mississippi is far worse than it is in, say, San Francisco. I remember a few years back, I was watching C-SPAN's call-in show in which Bill O'Reilly was a guest. One caller was a black man from Mississippi. He said he was "as conservative as they come" but "Mississippi has a race problem. You have got to be white, or you aren't getting anywhere" (I'm paraphrasing, btw, but that's close enough to his actual words that I feel that quotation marks are warranted). Bill O'Reilly advised him to move away from Mississippi and that little can be done to change something so ingrained in the culture.

What does this have to do with a religious liberty task force? Well, imagine how you might be suspicious of a "white person liberty task force" if it were instituted by the State of Mississippi. I believe that white people's liberties deserve protection just as much as anyone else's. But a "white person liberty task force" in Mississippi would give me pause. Not only do whites not need specific protection there, by-and-large, other cultural groups need protection from their cultural influence.

It's a bit of a hyperbolic example, but it sums my concerns about a "religious liberty task force" being founded in America by someone with an obvious old school Southern Christian bent. Christianity is culturally dominant in the United States--period. I believe that Christians' religious liberties deserve protection as much as anyone else's. But (for the reasons stated above) Jeff Sessions's religious liberty task force gives me pause.