Religious Freedom

By abusing religious exemptions, anti-vaxxers aren't just risking public health, they're endangering the public square.

Courts are more often recognizing the arguments of religious-freedom advocates.

DeVos seeks to remove administrative approval for religious schools’ waiver from the 1972 gender parity law.

The noted public intellectual stumbles in an interview.

The absurd logic of hyper-individualism is upon us.

It’s a bit disconcerting that a church would see litigation as an acceptable way to pursue its mission here on Earth. Yet last fall the Archdiocese of Washington sued the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, and we must say that it did so on pretty good grounds.

Facebook users have flagged a recent article announcing new legislation that “makes it legal for atheist doctors and nurses to refuse care to religious patients.”

In case you haven’t finished reading the 429-page House Republicans tax bill, go to pages 427 and 428 to see what it proposes to do regarding the Johnson Amendment. Passed in 1954 and named for its chief sponsor, Senator Lyndon Johnson, the amendment prohibits politicking by tax-exempt nonprofits,…

President Donald Trump’s judicial nomination of Amy Barrett has become a religious-liberty flashpoint in recent weeks, with Democratic senators arguing that her conservative Catholicism would interfere with her ability to uphold the law. Sen. Jeff Flake defended Barrett on the Senate floor Monday…

No contemporary political issue is more emotionally fraught: The LGBT lobby, enjoying its new political ascendancy, worries that religious conservatives wish to diminish the self-definition and harm the dignity of the wider LGBT community; meanwhile, religious conservatives, feeling beleaguered,…

Tim Gill is best known as the Denver-based mega-donor who bankrolled the successful national campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. In June, Gill sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone. He was asked about the future of the gay rights movement. If you had any doubt that Gill and other…

No contemporary political issue is more emotionally fraught: The LGBT lobby, enjoying its new political ascendancy, worries that religious conservatives wish to diminish the self-definition and harm the dignity of the wider LGBT community; meanwhile, religious conservatives, feeling beleaguered,…

Tim Gill is best known as the Denver-based mega-donor who bankrolled the successful national campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. In June, Gill sat down for an interview with Rolling Stone. He was asked about the future of the gay rights movement. If you had any doubt that Gill and other…

On Tuesday evening, Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal group dedicated to protecting religious liberty. A lawyer that works with the organization, David Cortman, recently represented Trinity Lutheran in its case before the Supreme Court…

Ting Xue, a committed Christian, is a refugee who fled from religious persecution in his native China. He now lives in Denver with his wife, a lawful permanent resident who likewise hails from China, and their young daughter. Xue has a job, pays taxes, and is active in a local evangelical church.…

In a major victory for religious freedom, the Supreme Court ruled today that states cannot exempt churches from benefiting from state programs solely because they are a church.

Soon after President Trump issued his executive order on "Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty," which includes potential "conscience protections" for those with religious objections to certain health insurance mandates, Planned Parenthood issued a press release noting that some "faith…

Today on the Daily Standard podcast, frequent contributor and Hoover Institution scholar Adam J. White discusses Justice Gorsuch's relatively aggressive start to his term on the court, as well as a key religious liberty case coming this week.

At a middle school in Texas, a nurse's aide plastered her office door with a festive handmade poster quoting Linus's scripture recitation from A Charlie Brown Christmas:

Among all the uses conservatives can think of for a Trump executive order or Supreme Court nominee, there's one, too often forgotten, that ought to come first. Religious freedom—scholarly and practical advocates say, in a nod to the founders—is not just the first freedom in the Bill of Rights but…

In a case awaiting review by the Supreme Court, the Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a friend-of-the-court brief making an argument for one of the nation’s fundamental principles—the equal protection of the law.

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…

A bill targeting California's religious colleges was effectively declawed on Wednesday, after sustained vocal opposition from legal scholars, lawmakers, faith leaders, and university presidents.

The California state assembly is seeking to weaponize Title IX, the Higher Ed Act's anti-discrimination rule, against religious colleges. The proposed legislation, SB 1146, seeks to require religiously affiliated colleges and universities to advertise their exemption from Title IX, and would expose…

In this election we have a candidate who has said some incredibly ignorant things that run counter to the long established principles of the party that he represents. Huge numbers of people that might otherwise be inclined to vote for him are baffled by the fact he's going out of his way to…

Two years ago, students and administrators successfully obstructed a debate about abortion at Oxford. Last year, Stanford students tried to cancel a campus conference on the sexual revolution. Mary Eberstadt argues that groups at each university, separated by an ocean and a continent, joined ranks…

Law professor and legal commentator Richard A. Epstein has published a new article on legal rulings involving religious liberty in the Hoover Institution publication, Defining Ideas. Epstein's assessment of the reasoning behind a federal judge's injunction against a Mississippi law protecting…

Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia decried having to "veto a so-called 'religious freedom' bill. It's such an oxymoron," on WTOP radio Wednesday.