According to an annual report about religious liberty released earlier this week, there has been a small but steady uptick in hostility towards religious liberty in the last year. First Liberty, a law firm that defends religious freedom, started compiling “Undeniable: The Survey of Hostility to Religion in America,” in 2011. Since then, they have documented 1,400 attacks on religious freedom and there’s been a 15 percent increase in legal cases that affect religious freedom over the past year.
The report includes descriptions of people battling for their own religious freedom in all walks of life and in a myriad of situations. From a high school football coach fired for kneeling in prayer after games, and a bakery shut down for declining to create a custom cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding, to a Navy chaplain disciplined for counseling members of the military from the Bible, clearly the religious liberty war is no respecter of employer, occupation, or title.
On a teleforum call with media recently, First Liberty CEO Kelly Shackelford explained the beginnings of the expansive “Undeniable” report. He said in 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, heard about hostilities to religious freedom (a number of First Liberty clients testified) and the senators, assuming the incidents were isolated, wanted confirmation. “Undeniable” grew out of the need to understand and document every attack on religious liberty published.
Even First Liberty was “shocked at how pervasive the issue was.” Shackelford recalls, “This was in every community of every state in the country.” When First Liberty sent their first edition of “Undeniable” to the senators, they were shocked as well.
Alexia Palma’s story is featured in “Undeniable”; she also spoke on the call to members of the media. Palma was fired for her faith while working as a health educator at a clinic for low-income patients. She taught classes about becoming a mom and was required to discuss birth control.
As a Catholic who opposed birth control, Palma asked her superiors if she could show a video instead of speaking about it. Her employer was fine with that until new management took over and she was told to put her “religious beliefs aside if she wanted to continue being a health educator.” Palma was terminated, solicited the help of First Liberty, and reached a friendly settlement with her former employer.
Though she experienced a positive result to religious discrimination, not everyone does.
Hostility toward religious freedom appears to be rising everywhere but slightly more in education, the military, the workplace, and religious institutions. The right to worship freely (or not at all) is not only one of America’s most important, but landmark, freedoms. Without this pressing need, America as a country would not exist as it does, if at all.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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