(Freedom.news) Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana on Wednesday rescinded an order protecting religious liberty and signed a separate edict establishing outsized protections for the LGBT community.
In a signing statement overturning previous GOP Gov. Bobby Jindal’s order, Edwards said that “discrimination is not a Louisiana value.”
“We are fortunate enough to live in a state that is rich with diversity, and we are built on a foundation of unity and fairness for all of our citizens,” Edwards said in the statement. “We respect our fellow citizens for their beliefs, but we do not discriminate based on our disagreements.”
Unless, of course, you’re a liberal who is essentially redirecting the discrimination against citizens’ fundamental religious beliefs.
Edwards’ order comes as a number of other states have moved in the opposite direction, the Washington Times reported, by enacting legislation that protects religious objections to same-sex marriage following a U.S. Supreme Court decision last summer striking down bans on the practice.
Missouri is one of them. But lawmakers there are planning to take it out of state government’s hands and let their citizens decide the issue instead.
As reported by The Daily Signal, lawmakers are preparing a ballot measure that would likely be ready by fall to allow Missourians to vote on whether they want to ensure businesspeople and individuals alike are protected from predatory government actions and lawsuits for following their religious beliefs.
“Because of the recent Supreme Court decision, because of the whole same-sex marriage [thing] and where religious liberties are protected and where they’re not protected, it’s really created a lot more questions than it’s answered,” state Rep. Paul Curtman, sponsor of the legislation in the House, told The Daily Signal. “What makes us different is, we’re recognizing all of that, and the legislature is vetting legislation for our Constitution, but then, ultimately, the idea is to let the people to continue to be the final arbitrator of this issue.”
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This is a creative approach, to be sure, but it is eliciting the same outcry from the usual suspects we’ve come to expect: Businesses and LGBT militants threatening boycotts and protests if the measure passes.
Who really loses? Americans with strongly-held religious beliefs. And the Constitution.
As in other states considering such measures, Christians, it has become rather obvious, are getting short shrift and zero consideration as businesses and LGBT activists cry foul and threaten to pull their operations out. They say they are all for “equality” and “diversity,” but that’s a lie – they want what they want, which is iron-fisted compliance with a certain political and social agenda, and they want to punish anyone who does not comport with their ideology.
That’s not equality. That’s tyranny.
By its very nature religious freedom is discriminatory or, more precisely, discriminating, but not in the “civil rights” sense. Religious practices, tenets and beliefs center around a core set of principles and values; if they are malleable and subject to the whims of secular society, then there is no core set of principles and values upon which the religious practice was built and, therefore, no religion.
Our founders and subsequent congresses and federal courts understood this for the majority of our nation’s existence, as did the American people. Only in recent times has the hard-and-fast constitutional guarantee of being able to observe and practice the religion of our choice become dependent upon a radical anti-religious movement that has been given outsized constitutional consideration by politically motivated politicians and courts.
But what of the Constitution’s discrimination prohibitions?
As I’ve discussed before, we are at a point where we must have constitutional clarification on amendments that appear to be in conflict: The First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause, and the 14th Amendment’s equal protections clause. Thanks to politically motivated social change factions, what was once clear has intentionally been rendered uncertain.
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