ACLU: ‘We Can No Longer Support Federal Religious Freedom Law’

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In an op-ed at the Washington Post, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Louise Melling writes that the organization will no longer defend the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA).

With the militant LGBT rainbow flag incorporated into a map of the United States on its website, the ACLU — whose stated mission was once "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States" — now states that while the organization supported the RFRA when it was passed, "we can no longer support the law in its current form" because "it is now often used as a sword to discriminate against women, gay and transgender people and others."

Anticipating the Supreme Court's ruling to legalize same-sex marriage, Melling wrote: "Efforts of this nature will likely only increase should the Supreme Court rule … same-sex couples have the freedom to marry."

Congress passed the RFRA in 1993 following the Supreme Court's rejection of a claim under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by two Native Americans who were fired from their jobs because they used peyote, an illegal substance, in their religious observances. Congress did not concur with the Court's decision and passed the RFRA almost unanimously.

Melling went on to criticize the use of RFRA by the Supreme Court last year in the Hobby Lobby decision, which, she said, denied "employees insurance coverage for contraception, a benefit guaranteed by law, if those businesses object on religious grounds and there is some other means of furthering the government's interests."

The intolerant ACLU apparently cannot abide "religiously affiliated nonprofit organizations" whose free exercise of religion is compromised when they are forced by the government to provide contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs to employees through health insurance plans.

Read the rest at Breitbart.com.

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