There Is A Test Case Coming

How many times have you heard “religious Freedom” being used against us? Well now there is a test case to see how board the law is… does it cover more than LGBTQ+ people.

Does freedom of religion protect Americans who have a religious duty to shelter migrants?
Quartz
By Ephrat Livni
October 19, 2018

Scott Warren is active in a Unitarian Universalist faith-based Arizona humanitarian aid group called No More Deaths. His beliefs compel him to help people in need, he argues—and that includes helping migrants who cross the US-Mexico border into Arizona, and make their way to “The Barn,” a private building in the desert that serves as a base camp for the aid group, where Warren was arrested in January for illegally “harboring illegal aliens.”

Warren is charged with two counts of felony harboring and one count of felony conspiracy after he helped two men who sought refuge in the Barn. The federal complaint against him states, “After finding their way to ‘the Barn,’ Warren met [the men] outside and gave them food and water for approximately three days. [One of the migrants] said that Warren took care of them in ‘the Barn’ by giving them food, water, beds and clean clothes.”

They have been left alone until… three guesses until when?

But with the escalating crackdown on illegal immigration prompted by the Trump administration, however, agents are destroying life-saving supplies left by the group in the deadly desert. The Barn is being raided, and activists are increasingly targeted and arrested. “The targeting of our work is part of a larger governmental push to punish and abuse migrants and those who stand in solidarity with them,” No More Deaths writes on its website.

Now under the current administration “religious freedom” has been their rallying cry.

In another article that covers this topic…

Unitarians in the desert: A few basic facts go a long way in explaining religious freedom lawsuit
Get Religion
By Bobby Ross Jr.
December 6, 2019

[…]
But the Journal doesn’t require readers to do their own background research. Keep reading, and the paper outlines the legal arguments:

A central question in the case is whether the defendants are protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a bipartisan law signed by President Clinton in 1993.

The law expanded religious protections beyond the First Amendment and its guarantee of the right to practice one's faith free of government interference. Under the statute, the federal government may not hinder a person from exercising sincerely held religious beliefs without a compelling and unavoidable reason.

Department of Justice lawyers say enforcement of the permit rules serves important government interests: protecting the wilderness character of Cabeza Prieta–the third largest national wildlife refuge in the continental U.S.–and deterring illegal immigration. Accommodating the relief workers would lead to a flood of religious-exemption requests that would create regulatory chaos and threaten wildlife, the government has argued.

Prosecutors have also questioned whether the defendants' relief missions are truly religious in nature, suggesting the defendants were motivated by political or "purely secular" philosophical concerns.

So we are about see if “religious freedom” is purely universal or just aimed at LGBTQ+ people.