For Immediate Release: May 24, 2012

WASHINGTON, DC – Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on May 23, 2012 announced his appointment of Mary Ann Glendon to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).

“USCIRF welcomes Mary Ann Glendon, said Ambassador Jackie Wolcott, Executive Director of USCIRF.  “Given her remarkable depth of knowledge, experience, and commitment, I am confident that she will be a great asset to our Commission and its mandate, helping us advance the cherished right of freedom of religion or belief around the world and support its integration into our country’s foreign policy and national security strategy.”

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard University and President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.  She writes and teaches in the fields of human rights, comparative law, constitutional law, and political theory. Glendon is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991, the International Academy of Comparative Law, and a past president of the UNESCO-sponsored International Association of Legal Science.  She served two terms as a member of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics (2001-2004), and has represented the Holy See at various conferences including the 1995 U.N. Women’s conference in Beijing where she headed the Vatican delegation. Glendon has contributed to legal and social thought in several articles and books, and has lectured widely in this country and in Europe.

Comprised of nine commissioners, USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan federal body that is principally responsible for reviewing the facts and circumstances of violations of religious freedom internationally and making policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress. USCIRF offers policy recommendations to improve conditions at the critical juncture of foreign policy, national security, and international religious freedom standards. The President and leadership of both political parties in the Senate and House of Representatives appoint USCIRF Commissioners.

To interview a USCIRF Commissioner, contact Samantha Schnitzer at SSchnitzer@uscirf.gov or 202-786-0613.

Edwin Meese III, chairman of Heritage’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, joined Spalding in presenting the Salvatori Prize to Seamus Hasson during a luncheon in Colorado Springs, Colo., opening the leading Washington think tank’s 35^th annual Resource Bank gathering.

“An exemplar of principle and character, Seamus Hasson has devoted his life to advancing religious liberty, a cause at the heart of the American project,” said Matthew Spalding, vice president of American studies at The Heritage Foundation and director of its Center for Principles and Politics.

Heritage annually presents the prize, named for the late entrepreneur and philanthropist Henry Salvatori, to an American who advances the principles and virtues of the nation’s Founders. Recent winners include historian David McCullough and Princeton University professor Robert P. George.

Read more here.

*Photo by Shealah Craighead/The Heritage Foundation

In this morning’s Congressional House hearing, Sebelius admits she did not consult Supreme Court decisions on religious liberty or have a legal memo prepared before she drafted the mandate.  The mandate, unprecedented in American history, forces religious institutions to pay for contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-causing drugs, including the morning-after pill and the week-after pill, against their deeply held religious beliefs. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is the first and leading law firm to challenge this mandate–filing in four states and three circuits across the country.   Read more about our lawsuits here.

Features Representative Gowdy asking Sebelius about her often repeated statement on “balancing” religious liberty and preventative healthcare.

Sebelius admits she did not consult Supreme Court decisions on religious liberty or have a legal memo prepared before she drafted the mandate.

Read WSJ op-ed here

By WILLIAM ARMSTRONG, KEN SMITH, AND JOE AGUILLARD

We are presidents of three private, evangelical colleges throughout the country. Our colleges enrich each of our communities. We educate young men and women for virtuous and productive roles in society. We engage in service and charitable outreach. We provide jobs to many hundreds of citizens and provide their families generous health insurance.

But the Obama administration has passed a rule that will penalize our colleges with faith-based fines merely because we center our beliefs about the sanctity of human life on the Bible, not on the demands of federal bureaucrats. The administration’s mandate that religious employers provide coverage of abortion-inducing drugs for their faculty, staff, and students is a bridge too far in America.

This “conscience tax” is a blatant violation of the freedoms of religion and speech guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and affirmed by federal laws such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. This mandate would be unjust even if it applied only to those who accept government funding, but it does much more than that. It applies to private, religious employers just because they exist in American society, regardless of whether they receive government funding.

That is why our colleges have each filed suit in federal court to stop this illegal overreach.

Our suits are not directed at “contraception,” although some would like you to believe that. Rather, they are about the government forcing us and other religious organizations to provide access to drugs and services that violate our deepest religious convictions. Specifically, we would be forced to offer abortion-inducing drugs as a part of our insurance benefits, and that is a line we cannot cross.

Though our lawsuits are focused on the abortion-inducing drugs, we also respect the religious freedom of Catholics and others who do not want to facilitate access to contraception generally. The government does not have the right to tell anyone that they must sacrifice their religious freedoms and violate their consciences just to participate in American society.

Abortifacient drugs, although classified by the government as “contraceptives,” act to destroy life after conception. The FDA’s own drug labeling admits this. To require us to provide insurance coverage for such methods is abhorrent and unacceptable.

As Christians, we believe in the sanctity of human life. We believe that God knits each human together in the mother’s womb. We obey the Sixth Commandment—you shall not murder—and believe that abortion is not justifiable, although action can be taken to protect the life of a mother.

Forcing us to provide abortifacient drugs for our faculty, staff, and students through our insurance plans tramples on our deeply held Christian convictions to uphold life, as decreed by God Himself.

Defenders of this mandate say exemptions can’t be granted because the Affordable Care Act, sometimes referred to as ObamaCare, is “generally applicable,” meaning it applies to everyone. But the act is already riddled with exemptions, except to respect our consciences. It exempts the Amish, offers thousands of waivers to small businesses, grandfathers certain plans, and exempts churches if they only serve their own members. But the religious schools we represent are somehow not religious enough, according to the government. We trust that such an obviously bad argument will not succeed in court.

The administration’s recently touted “accommodation” solves nothing either. First of all, the First Amendment is not to be “accommodated,” it is to be respected. But a few hours after the president announced his “accommodation,” he codified his original discriminatory rule “without change” anyway. So nothing has changed.

The administration claims it will pass an additional rule shifting the mandate’s financial burdens to our insurers. But even if a new rule were enacted and our insurers agreed not to pass along the costs—a dubious proposition at best—it would only show that the president has missed the moral point. Our colleges will still be forced to provide plans that directly enable coverage of drugs and services to which we object on religious grounds. It would be like forcing us to provide cable television to our students, but alleging that the cable company, “not us,” will provide the Playboy Channel for “free.” We do not accept this shell-game theology, and the government cannot force us to adopt its conscience instead of ours.

So we, the presidents of Colorado Christian University, Geneva College, and Louisiana College, through our respective attorneys with The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the Alliance Defense Fund, are taking a stand. When the state oversteps its First Amendment bounds by forcing religious institutions and believers to violate their religious convictions, we must call the state to account, or else we risk being responsible for facilitating evils such as abortion.

We desire to serve both God and country, and we educate students who are prepared to serve their country and society out of love for and obedience to Christ. But in the end, as one of us has recently stated, we only have one Lord, and He does not reside in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Armstrong is president of Colorado Christian University in Lakewood, Colo.; Mr. Smith is president of Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa., and Mr. Aguillard is president of Louisiana College in Pineville, La. All three schools have filed suit in federal court against President Obama’s abortifacient mandate.

Colson was an intellectual giant whose contributions were honored with prestigious awards such as the Templeton Prize, the Presidential Citizens Medal, and numerous honorary doctorates.

In 2001, the Becket Fund awarded Colson its highest honor, the Canterbury Medal, for his contribution to the cause of religious freedom. Colson promoted religious freedom until his last days through his countless books and articles as well as through his influential radio and web presence, BreakPoint. In 2011, Colson delighted attendees of the Becket Fund’s Canterbury Medal Dinner honoring Eric Metaxas with the video below. Colson will be a sorely missed presence defending religion’s rightful place in American public life.

Ten distinguished figures in business, education, engineering, law, mathematics, media, medicine and the Catholic Church will join principal speaker Haley Scott DeMaria as honorary degree recipients at the University of Notre Dame’s 167th Commencement Ceremony May 20 (Sunday).

Kevin Hasson (doctor of laws) — A leading legal advocate of religious freedom, Hasson is founder and president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He created this nonpartisan public-interest law firm in 1994 to represent people of all faiths and has since advocated for clients ranging from Anglicans to Zoroastrians. A double major in economics and theology, he went on to receive a master’s degree in theology and a law degree in 1985 — all from Notre Dame. He served in the Justice Department and advised the White House on church-state relations and constitutional issues under then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General Samuel Alito. He has written many articles on religious liberty, as well as a book titled “The Right to be Wrong: Ending the Culture War over Religion in America.”

Read more here.

Washington, DC – Change is coming to public schools across the country, but teachers’ unions and other vested interests are fighting a furious rearguard action against it, and using 19th Century anti-Catholic laws to do it.  That’s why The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has just filed a friend-of-the-court brief combating the notoriously anti-religious legislation formed at keeping Catholics, Jews, and others out.

“These discriminatory laws must be stopped,” says Becket Fund Deputy General Counsel Eric Rassbach, “If they don’t end in Indiana a terrible precedent will be set for the entire nation.”

Last year Indiana enacted a comprehensive statewide school choice program called the Choice Scholarship Program. The law will help families of lesser means send their children to private schools of their choice and avoid failing public schools. However, teacher’s unions are adamantly opposed to providing scholarships to poor children and have sued to try and stop the program from going into effect. Their reasoning? Because some families may decide–of their own free will–to send their children to a private religious school, they say the program violates the Indiana Constitution’s prohibition on “aid” to religious schools. The plaintiffs lost in the trial court and now the Indiana Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.

On Wednesday the Becket Fund filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Indiana Supreme Court arguing that the Indiana state constitutional provision at issue should not be interpreted to shut down the Choice Scholarship Program. The Becket Fund’s brief argues that Article 1, Section 6 was adopted in a time of anti-Catholic agitation, just before the notoriously anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party came to power in the Indiana Legislature. The section was therefore custom-designed to promote Protestant “common schools” and keep out Catholics, Jews, and others. Because of its bigoted origins, Article 1, Section 6 is tainted law and cannot be used to shut down the Choice Scholarship Program. The Becket Fund filed the brief with co-counsel Kevin Koons of Kroger, Gardis & Regas in Indianapolis.

“Apparently it isn’t enough that the teachers’ unions want to deny a future to the children of Indiana, they also want to take us back to the bad old days when anti-Catholics ran the Indiana public schools,” says Rassbach. “Kids who attend religious schools should be able to apply for state scholarships on the same terms as everyone else, not sent to the back of the bus.”

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty  is a non-profit, public-interest law firm dedicated to protecting the free expression of all religious traditions. The Becket Fund has a 17-year history of defending religious liberty for people of all faiths. Its attorneys are recognized as experts in the field of church-state law, and they recently won a 9-0 victory against the federal government at the U.S. Supreme Court in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC.

 For more information, or to arrange an interview with one of the attorneys, please contact Emily Hardman, Communications Director, at ehardman@becketfund.org or call 202.349.7224.

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Additional Information:
Case Page
Becket Fund Amicus Brief

 The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty co-sponsored rallies organized by the “Stand Up for Religious Freedom” coalition to oppose the new mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that requires all employers provide free contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs through their health plans, even in violation of their consciences. The rallies spread to over 140 cities nationwide, and feature leaders representing a wide range of organizations that oppose the mandate.

Enjoy the photos from the DC rally below.

Photos taken by Emily Hardman, ehardman@becketfund.org

For Immediate Release – March 23, 2012

Washington, DC – The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is pleased to announce that Princeton University political philosopher, constitutional scholar, and Becket Fund Board of Directors member, Robert P. George has been appointed to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF).  The appointment was made by Speaker of the United States House of Representatives John Boehner on March 22, 2012.

The USCIRF was created by Congress as part of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 and reauthorized by Congress in 2011.  The nine members of the independent, bipartisan advisory body are appointed by the President of the United States and the leaders of both parties in the House and Senate.

The Commission’s principal responsibilities are to review violations of religious freedom internationally and make policy recommendations to the President, the Secretary of State, and Congress on actions that should be taken to advance greater protection for this fundamental human right.  Becket’s Director of International and Government Relations responded to the announcements, stating “Professor George’s expertise in America’s philosophical basis for and historic commitment to religious freedom will re-invigorate the Commission’s founding purpose.”

Robert George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.  He has previously served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the United States Commission on Civil Rights.  He has also served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST).

He is the author of numerous books and scholarly articles, and has also written for journals of opinion from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to First Things and the Boston Review.

A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, Professor George also earned a master’s degree in theology from Harvard and a doctorate in philosophy of law fromOxfordUniversity.  He holds honorary doctorates of law, letters, science, ethics, humane letters, civil law, and juridical science.

He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a recipient of the United States Presidential Citizens Medal and the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland.