One Country, Two Sets Of Laws

What would you think of a country that has two sets of laws where one group of people does not have to follow the same laws as everyone else? They are exempt from the laws other have to follow.

Well that country is us as in U.S..

Seeing threat to religious freedom, Jeff Sessions announces special task force
National Catholic Reporter
By Yonat Shimron, Religion News Service
July 30, 2018

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced during a Department of Justice summit in Washington that he is creating a religious liberty task force to challenge what he called a dangerous movement "eroding our great tradition of religious freedom."

Sessions said Monday (July 30) the task force is an outgrowth of President Trump's executive order directing agencies to protect religious liberty, and he said it would help Justice Department employees remember that it is their duty to accommodate people of faith.

"This administration is animated by that same American view that has led us for 242 years — that every American has a right to believe and worship and exercise their faith in the public square," Sessions said at the summit. The Trump administration spent last week emphasizing religious freedom in a three-day State Department summit.
[…]
Without ever referring to LGBTQ people explicitly, Kurtz alluded to the need to protect faith-based adoption agencies' desires to deny service to gay or lesbian couples because of the Catholic faith's opposition to same-sex relationships.

It seems like AG Sessions doesn’t know his history or have selective blindness. 242 years we fled the Church of England and fought a war among other things shake the poke of religion. For 242 years the courts have ruled that laws had to be “religious neutral” that means that it cannot target any religion.

In the Pink News UK they write…

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions defends ‘religious freedom’ of anti-LGBT hate groups
By Nick Duffy
30th July 2018

The Trump administration’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions has insisted people of faith should have freedom to discriminate based on their beliefs.

Sessions, one of the strongest opponents of LGBT rights in the Trump administration, has filed multiple court briefs since coming to power arguing for the right to discriminate against gay people based on faith.

He cemented his view in a speech to a Religious Liberty Summit hosted by the Justice Department today, attended by anti-LGBT activists from evangelical lobbying groups that push an extreme message.

Calls for gay people to be imprisoned and comments linking homosexuality to paedophilia have led several fundamentalist groups – the Liberty Counsel, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council – to be designated hate groups by extremism watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And guess who have been appointed to the task force?

The Hill reported…

Sessions said the task force, co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Jesse Panuccio and the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, Beth Williams, will help the department fully implement the religious liberty guidance it issued last year.

There have been some reports that the members will include some like Michael Farris, James Dobson, and Tony Perkins.

For 242 years the courts have a history of striking down laws aimed at a particular religion but backing laws that are religious neutral such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Some of the challenges to civil rights are…

1964: The Supreme Court upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a valid exercise of Congressional power under the Commerce Clause in Heart of Atlanta Motel Inc. v. U.S. and Katzenbach v. McClung, thereby prohibiting private discrimination in public accommodations, such as motels and restaurants.
[…]
1968: In Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., the Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 bans racial discrimination in housing by private, as well as governmental, housing providers.

Then there are these landmark cases,

1987: In this landmark case for sex-based employment discrimination, the Court ruled in Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Serv., Inc. that the prohibition of sexual harassment applies to all objectively discriminatory conduct regardless of the victim’s gender.

And the famous Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins Supreme Court case in 1989 where the court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 also cover sex stereotyping which other courts have used to justify our protections under Titles VII and IX.

In one particle case the United States v. Lee the Supreme Court ruled on…

Can the U.S. government require payment of Social Security taxes from those who religiously object to the receipt of the attached benefits?
[…]
Yes. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote the majority opinion reversing and remanding. The Supreme Court held that the §1402(g) exemption only applied to self-employed individuals, not employers and employees like those involved in this case. The Court held that the tax was not unconstitutional as applied. By becoming an employer, Lee entered into commercial activity and accepted certain limits on the exercise of his beliefs.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a concurrence, stating that the tax objector has the burden of showing that there is a unique reason for allowing an exemption from a valid law when the objectors religious obligation and civic obligation are irreconcilable.

Now swap contraceptives for Social Security and you can see how the court has swung to the right in its ruling in the Hobby Lobby case.

Then there is the Ocean Grove Association case in New Jersey where,

The state Division on Civil Rights ruled Sunday a lesbian couple can move forward with a discrimination complaint against Ocean Grove for refusing to let them use an oceanfront pavilion for a civil union.

Since the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association regularly offered the pavilion to the broader public, it was bound by the state Law Against Discrimination from barring civil unions, division director J. Frank Vespa-Papaleo ruled. Because its action was voluntary, he added, use of the discrimination statute does not impair the association's "free exercise of religion."

You open your business to the public and you have to serve all of the public; compare this to the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court ruling. The pendulum has swung even further right.

One nation, one law!