Pew: Religious Restrictions on the Rise ? Campus Notes

The Pew Forum has released its annual report detailing the state of religious freedom in the United States. And the news isn?t good.

The bad news is that The United States has been moved from Pew?s ?low? to ?moderate? category of restrictions on religious freedom.

The worse news is that the report doesn?t even take into account the most recent year of activity from the federal government which includes the infringement of religious liberty that is the HHS Mandate.

The United States was among the 16 countries whose scores on both the Government Restrictions Index and the Social Hostilities Index increased by one point or more in the year ending in mid-2010. This was the first time scores for the U.S. increased on both indexes during the four-year period covered in this study.

Pew detailed a number of incidences where government agencies discriminated against religious groups.

In May 2010, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that the Boulder County Commissioners had discriminated against the Rocky Mountain Christian Church by denying it permits to expand its school and worship facilities even though the commissioners had issued permits to a nearby secular school for a similar expansion. . . .

The Justice Department ? in a report marking the 10th anniversary of the passage of RLUIPA ? noted that 31 of its 51 land-use investigations from 2000-2010 involved Christian groups; most of the remaining 20 investigations involved religious minorities, including Muslims (seven investigations), Jews (six), Buddhists (three) and Hindus (one).

The thing to notice (and be wary of) from this report is that the restrictions of religious liberty that the Obama administration is attempting to enforce are not anomalies but only the latest increment towards transforming freedom of religion into a much more restrictive ?freedom of worship.?

HT First Things

Source: http://blog.cardinalnewmansociety.org/2012/09/24/pew-religious-restrictions-on-the-rise/

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