Recently, Indiana’s Child Services were called in to deal with a 7-year-old boy who came to school one day with 36 bruises on his body. His mother has been charged with child abuse. The mother’s lawyer, for puzzling reasons, is asking for the case to be dismissed under the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), because the “guiding values” behind defendant Kin Park Thaing’s abuse of her son were supposedly Christian.
It’s an absurd defense. It’s absurd to claim that child abuse is a Christian value. And it’s absurd to claim that Indiana’s RFRA law is applicable here. Nonetheless, the national media are going with the story in a big way. Here’s the Washington Post’s tabloid headline: “She beat her son with a hanger — and said Indiana’s religious freedom law gave her the right.” Here’s more absurd coverage from CBS and the Huffington Post, and there are many more stories on the case where that came from.
But the prize for maybe the most irresponsible thing I’ve read in a major publication all year has to go to the Daily Beast. Author Jay Michaelson and everyone there should be embarrassed and ashamed that this made it to print: “Mom Beats Son 36 Times With a Coat Hanger, Mike Pence’s Religious Freedom Law Will Probably Get Her Off.” Then there’s the alternate headline: “Why will Indiana’s child-beating mom likely win in court? Mike Pence’s ‘religious freedom’ law.”
That Michaelson asserts it’s “likely” this woman is going to get the charges against her for beating her son dropped because of religious freedom strikes me as brazen dishonesty designed to discredit the law. If you read the piece, Michaelson, despite employing a considerable amount of hyperbole, seems to have an understanding of how the law works.
For instance, early on in the column Michaelson writes, “Legally speaking, [RFRA] requires laws [infringing on religious liberty] to have a ‘compelling state interest’ and be ‘narrowly tailored’ to achieve it.” This is essentially correct, but it completely undermines his own point. Is Michaelson seriously arguing that the state won’t find a “compelling interest” in preventing and punishing child abuse? If not, why hasn’t Indiana dismantled its child services division that was called into protect Kin Park Thaing’s abused son? And the broader claim that RFRA laws allow people to get away with crimes doesn’t bear any scrutiny, which is why Michaelson doesn’t provide any evidence besides misleading innuendo:
“Not all of those cases win”? Did any of them? Aside from the federal RFRA, signed into law by President Bill Clinton and shepherded through the Senate by Chuck Schumer, there are 21 states with existing RFRA laws. Given the controversy that surrounded Indiana’s religious freedom law when it was passed, we would have heard if there were egregious examples of RFRA providing get-out-of-jail-free cards. And if you can’t cite any cases of this happening, RFRA isn’t really “putting its thumb on the scale”, is it?
Again, if you want to know what RFRA laws are about, I encourage you to read John McCormack’s explainer. But the bottom line is that if claims of religious freedom conflict with the law, RFRA laws provide absolutely no guarantee that the side claiming religious freedom will win in court. And nor should it, as the case of Kin Park Thaing amply demonstrates. But it also doesn’t mean that RFRA laws aren’t needed, either. Earlier this year, “the federal government returned the eagle feathers it had seized nine years prior from a Native American religious leader and famed feather dancer Robert Soto. He had appealed the seizure of the eagle feathers, for which he faced 15 years in a federal penitentiary and a $250,000 fine, on Religious Freedom Restoration Act grounds.”
However, I suspect providing an accurate understanding of what RFRA laws are was not what the coverage of Kin Park Thaing’s spurious defense was about. The Atlantic had the best story on the matter, and the headline and sub-headline are quite perceptive—”Religious Freedom Doesn’t Protect Child Abuse: An Indiana woman’s claim that she beat her son because of her faith is unlikely to succeed in court, but it could have implications for how Americans perceive these kinds of arguments in the future.”
Progressive activists, and their abundant allies in the media, clearly want people to perceive religious freedom laws as only being invoked by scoundrels. They simply hate the idea that RFRA laws could possibly be used to successfully defend Christian pharmacists who don’t want to prescribe abortifacients or Christian grandmothers who serve gay customers but draw the line at providing floral arrangements for gay weddings. Not only is there no compelling state interest at all to force people to do these things, actively undermining religious freedom and conscience rights damages all free expression protections.
But when you look these facts, you realize accurate reporting on RFRA laws might make readers sympathetic to them. Instead, major publications are disingenuously presenting the facts to make it sound like “religious freedom” is a credible defense of child abusers, and that’s a stunning indictment of the media.
