(Mosaic Intelligence Report: May 15, 2009) Pope Benedict XVI prays for peace in the Holy Land but his trip is mired with controversy. Why are Muslims and Jews upset with the Holy See? And what does the future hold for Palestinian Christians living in Jerusalem?
The Wolfson Center for National Affairs at The New School presents a conversation with Wilfred McClay, senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the University of Tennessee and co-author of Religion Returns to the Public Square, and Jacques Berlinerblau, with the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and author ofThe Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously.
Keynote address by Noah Feldman at the Mormonism & American Politics conference entitled Persecution and the Art of Secrecy: An Interpretation of the Mormon Encounter with American Politics.
Lawrence W. Reed is president emeritus of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Midland-based research and educational institute on September 1, 2008. The Center’s mission is to equip Michigan citizens and other decision-makers to better evaluate Michigan public policy options and to do so from a “free market” perspective.
When I first took the podium to deliver the speech reprinted here, I was addressing the Detroit Economic Club, a world-renowned forum for sharing ideas. But even with my natural optimism and the publicity associated with that prestigious venue, I never imagined the amount of attention the “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy” would receive in the days and years that followed.
By last count, I’ve given this address in about 100 different places, including probably 20 states and a dozen foreign countries. The text has been translated into at least 12 foreign languages, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish and Kiswahili. In a twist stranger than fiction, I was invited to deliver this speech at the People’s University in Beijing. Readers familiar with my views or with the seven principles will no doubt be struck by the irony — and the victory — inherent in my espousing these principles in the heart of the world’s largest communist state.
Why has interest in the “Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy” exceeded all expectations? Looking back, I think it was due to a gamble I took when I first wrote and delivered this address. At the time, I began by telling the audience:
“I know that (the Detroit Economic Club) has heard many policy addresses by many leaders in government, business and academia — policy addresses that dealt in some detail with specific pressing issues of the day, from transportation to education to health care and countless other important topics. At the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, our specialty is researching and recommending detailed prescriptions for today’s policy questions, and I thought about doing that very thing here today.
“But upon reflection, I decided instead to step back from the minutiae of any particular issue and offer you something a little different: a broad-brush approach that is applicable to every issue. I’d like us all to think about some very critical fundamentals, some bedrock concepts that derive from centuries of experience and economic knowledge. They are, in my view, eternal principles that should form the intellectual backdrop to what we do as policymakers inside and outside of government.”
The reception the speech received that day and in the years since suggests that at bottom, people value a serious attempt to deal with issues that matter. They recognize that principles that can be expressed in simple words are not necessarily simplistic.
Moreover, they realize that approaching issues with an open mind does not mean approaching them with an empty one. After all, we’ve learned a few things over the centuries. It’s not uninformed bias that prompts us without debate to accept the notion that the sun comes up in the east. It isn’t blind ideology that tells us that a representative republic is superior to dictatorship or monarchy. The general assumption that private property and free-market economies are superior to state ownership and central planning is no longer just an opinion; rather, it is now a settled truth for people who value reason, logic, facts, evidence, economics and experience.
The seven principles of sound public policy that I want to share with you are pillars of a free economy. We can differ on exactly how any one of them may apply to a given issue, but the principles themselves, I believe, are settled truths.
These principles are not original with me; I’ve simply collected them in one place. They are not the only pillars of a free economy or the only settled truths, but they do provide a solid foundation. In my view, if the cornerstone of every state and federal building were emblazoned with these principles — and more importantly, if every legislator understood and attempted to be faithful to them — we’d be a much stronger, much freer, more prosperous and far better-governed people.
One
Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
Ever wonder about those stories of $600 hammers and $800 toilet seats that the government sometimes buys? You could walk the length and breadth of this land and not find a soul who would say he’d gladly spend his own money that way. And yet this waste often occurs in government and occasionally in other walks of life, too. Why? Because invariably, the spender is spending somebody else’s money.
Economist Milton Friedman elaborated on this some time ago when he pointed out that there are only four ways to spend money. When you spend your own money on yourself, you make occasional mistakes, but they’re few and far between. The connection between the one who is earning the money, the one who is spending it and the one who is reaping the final benefit is pretty strong, direct and immediate.
When you use your money to buy someone else a gift, you have some incentive to get your money’s worth, but you might not end up getting something the intended recipient really needs or values.
When you use somebody else’s money to buy something for yourself, such as lunch on an expense account, you have some incentive to get the right thing but little reason to economize.
Finally, when you spend other people’s money to buy something for someone else, the connection between the earner, the spender and the recipient is the most remote — and the potential for mischief and waste is the greatest. Think about it — somebody spending somebody else’s money on yet somebody else. That’s what government does all the time.
But this principle is not just a commentary about government. I recall a time, back in the 1990s, when the Mackinac Center took a close look at the Michigan Education Association’s self-serving statement that it would oppose any competitive contracting of any school support service (like busing, food or custodial) by any school district anytime, anywhere. We discovered that at the MEA’s own posh, sprawling East Lansing headquarters, the union did not have its own full-time, unionized workforce of janitors and food service workers. It was contracting out all of its cafeteria, custodial, security and mailing duties to private companies, and three out of four of them were nonunion!
So the MEA — the state’s largest union of cooks, janitors, bus drivers and teachers — was doing one thing with its own money and calling for something very different with regard to the public’s tax money. Nobody — repeat, nobody — spends someone else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.
Six
Government has nothing to give anybody except what it first takes from somebody, and a government that’s big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you’ve got.
This is not some radical, ideological, anti-government statement. It’s simply the way things are. It speaks volumes about the very nature of government. And it’s perfectly in keeping with the philosophy and advice of America’s Founders.
It’s been said that government, like fire, is either a dangerous servant or a fearful master. Think about that for a moment. Even if government is no bigger than our Founders wanted it to be, and even if it does its work so well that it indeed is a servant to the people, it’s still a dangerous one! As Groucho Marx once said of his brother Harpo, “He’s honest, but you’ve got to watch him.” You’ve got to keep your eye on even the best and smallest of governments because, as Jefferson warned, the natural tendency is for government to grow and liberty to retreat. You can’t wind it up and walk away from it; it takes eternal vigilance to keep it in its place and keep our liberties secure.
The so-called “welfare state” is really not much more than robbing Peter to pay Paul, after laundering and squandering much of Peter’s wealth through an indifferent, costly bureaucracy. The welfare state is like feeding the sparrows through the horses, if you know what I mean. Put yet another way, it’s like all of us standing in a big circle, with each of us having one hand in the next guy’s pocket. Somebody once said that the welfare state is so named because in it, the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare.
A free and independent people do not look to government for their sustenance. They see government not as a fountain of “free” goodies, but rather as a protector of their liberties, confined to certain minimal functions that revolve around keeping the peace, maximizing everyone’s opportunities and otherwise leaving us alone. There is a deadly trade-off to reliance upon government, as civilizations at least as far back as ancient Rome have painfully learned.
When your congressman comes home and says, “Look what I brought for you!” you should demand that he tell you who’s paying for it. If he’s honest, he’ll tell you that the only reason he was able to get you something was that he had to vote for the goodies that other congressmen wanted to take home — and you’re paying for all that, too.
Seven
Liberty makes all the difference in the world.
Just in case the first six principles didn’t make the point clearly enough, I’ve added this as my seventh and final one.
Liberty isn’t just a luxury or a nice idea. It’s much more than a happy circumstance or a defensible everyday concept. It’s what makes just about everything else happen. Without it, life is a bore at best. At worst, there is no life at all.
Public policy that dismisses liberty or doesn’t preserve or strengthen it should be immediately suspect in the minds of a vigilant people. They should be asking, “What are we getting in return if we’re being asked to give up some of our freedom?” Hopefully, it’s not just some short-term handout or other “mess of pottage.” Ben Franklin went so far as to advise us, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Too often today, policymakers give no thought whatsoever to the general state of liberty when they craft new policies. If it feels good or sounds good or gets them elected, they just do it. Anyone along the way who might raise liberty-based objections is ridiculed or ignored. Today, government at all levels consumes more than 42 percent of all that we produce, compared with perhaps 6 percent or 7 percent in 1900. Yet few people seem interested in asking the advocates of still more government such cogent questions as, “Why isn’t 42 percent enough?”; “How much more do you want?”; or, “To what degree do you think a person is entitled to the fruits of his labor?”
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I yearn for the day when all Americans practice these seven principles. I think they are profoundly important. Our past devotion to them, in one form or another, explains how and why we fed, clothed and housed more people at higher levels than any other nation in the history of the planet. And these principles are key to preserving that crucial element of life we call liberty. Thanks for the opportunity to share them with you today and thanks for whatever you may do from this day forward to put these principles into common practice.
whatever you may do from this day forward to put these principles into common practice.
Free people are not equal, and equal people are not free.
First, I should clarify the kind of “equalness” to which I refer in this statement. I am not referring to equality before the law — the notion that you should be judged innocent or guilty of an offense based upon whether or not you did it, with your race, sex, wealth, creed, gender or religion having nothing to do with the outcome. That’s an important foundation of Western civilization, and though we often fall short of it, I doubt that anyone here would quarrel with the concept.
No, the “equalness” to which I refer is all about income and material wealth — what we earn and acquire in the marketplace of commerce, work and exchange. I’m speaking of economic equality. Let’s take this first principle and break it into its two halves.
Free people are not equal. When people are free to be themselves, to be masters of their own destinies, to apply themselves in an effort to improve their well-being and that of their families, the result in the marketplace will not be an equality of outcomes. People will earn vastly different levels of income; they will accumulate vastly different levels of wealth. While some lament that fact and speak dolefully of “the gap between rich and poor,” I think people being themselves in a free society is a wonderful thing. Each of us is a unique being, different in endless ways from any other single being living or dead. Why on earth should we expect our interactions in the marketplace to produce identical results?
We are different in terms of our talents. Some have more than others, or more valuable talents. Some don’t discover their highest talents until late in life, or not at all. Magic Johnson is a talented basketball player. Should it surprise anyone that he makes infinitely more money at basketball than I ever could? Will Kellogg didn’t discover his incredible entrepreneurial and marketing talent until age 46; before he struck out on his own to start the Kellogg Company, he was making about $25 a week doing menial jobs for his older brother in a Battle Creek sanitarium.
We are different in terms of our industriousness, our willingness to work. Some work harder, longer and smarter than others. That makes for vast differences in how others value what we do and in how much they’re willing to pay for it.
We are different also in terms of our savings. I would argue that if the president could somehow snap his fingers and equalize us all in terms of income and wealth tonight, we would be unequal again by this time tomorrow because some of us would save our money and some of us would spend it. These are three reasons, but by no means the only three reasons, why free people are simply not going to be equal economically.
Equal people are not free, the second half of my first principle, really gets down to brass tacks. Show me a people anywhere on the planet who are indeed equal economically, and I’ll show you a very unfree people. Why?
The only way in which you could have even the remotest chance of equalizing income and wealth across society is to put a gun to everyone’s head. You would literally have to employ force to make people equal. You would have to give orders, backed up by the guillotine, the hangman’s noose, the bullet or the electric chair. Orders that would go like this: Don’t excel. Don’t work harder or smarter than the next guy. Don’t save more wisely than anyone else. Don’t be there first with a new product. Don’t provide a good or service that people might want more than anything your competitor is offering.
Believe me, you wouldn’t want a society where these were the orders. Cambodia under the communist Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s came close to it, and the result was that upwards of 2 million out of 8 million people died in less than four years. Except for the elite at the top who wielded power, the people of that sad land who survived that period lived at something not much above the Stone Age.
What’s the message of this first principle? Don’t get hung up on differences in income when they result from people being themselves. If they result from artificial political barriers, then get rid of those barriers. But don’t try to take unequal people and compress them into some homogenous heap. You’ll never get there, and you’ll wreak a lot of havoc trying.
Confiscatory tax rates, for example, don’t make people any more equal; they just drive the industrious and the entrepreneurial to other places or into other endeavors while impoverishing the many who would otherwise benefit from their resourcefulness. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said, “You cannot pull a man up by dragging another man down.”
Two
What belongs to you, you tend to take care of;
what belongs to no one or everyone tends to fall into disrepair.
This essentially illuminates the magic of private property. It explains so much about the failure of socialized economies the world over.
In the old Soviet empire, governments proclaimed the superiority of central planning and state ownership. They wanted to abolish or at least minimize private property because they thought that private ownership was selfish and counterproductive. With the government in charge, they argued, resources would be utilized for the benefit of everybody.
What was once the farmer’s food became “the people’s food,” and the people went hungry. What was once the entrepreneur’s factory became “the people’s factory,” and the people made do with goods so shoddy there was no market for them beyond the borders.
We now know that the old Soviet empire produced one economic basket case after another, and one ecological nightmare after another. That’s the lesson of every experiment with socialism: While socialists are fond of explaining that you have to break some eggs to make an omelette, they never make any omelettes. They only break eggs.
If you think you’re so good at taking care of property, go live in someone else’s house, or drive their car, for a month. I guarantee you neither their house nor their car will look the same as yours after the same period of time.
If you want to take the scarce resources of society and trash them, all you have to do is take them away from the people who created or earned them and hand them over to some central authority to manage. In one fell swoop, you can ruin everything. Sadly, governments at all levels are promulgating laws all the time that have the effect of eroding private property rights and socializing property through “salami” tactics — one slice at a time.
Three
Sound policy requires that we consider long-run effects and all people, not simply short-run effects and a few people.
It may be true, as British economist John Maynard Keynes once declared, that “in the long run, we’re all dead.” But that shouldn’t be a license to enact policies that make a few people feel good now at the cost of hurting many people tomorrow.
I can think of many such policies. When Lyndon Johnson cranked up the Great Society in the 1960s, the thought was that some people would benefit from a welfare check. We now know that over the long haul, the federal entitlement to welfare encouraged idleness, broke up families, produced intergenerational dependency and hopelessness, cost taxpayers a fortune and yielded harmful cultural pathologies that may take generations to undo. Likewise, policies of deficit spending and government growth — while enriching a few at the start — have eaten at the vitals of the nation’s economy and moral fiber for decades.
This principle is actually a call to be thorough in our thinking. It says that we shouldn’t be superficial in our judgments. If a thief goes from bank to bank, stealing all the cash he can get his hands on, and then spends it all at the local shopping mall, you wouldn’t be thorough in your thinking if all you did was survey the store owners to conclude that this guy stimulated the economy.
We should remember that today is the tomorrow that yesterday’s poor policymakers told us we could ignore. If we want to be responsible adults, we can’t behave like infants whose concern is overwhelmingly focused on self and on the here-and-now.
Four
If you encourage something, you get more of it; if you discourage something, you get less of it.
You and I as human beings are creatures of incentives and disincentives. We respond to incentives and disincentives. Our behavior is affected by them, sometimes very powerfully. Policymakers who forget this will do dumb things like jack up taxes on some activity and expect that people will do just as much of it as before, as if taxpayers are sheep lining up to be sheared.
Remember when George Bush (the first one) reneged under pressure on his 1988 “No New Taxes!” pledge? We got big tax hikes in the summer of 1990. Among other things, Congress dramatically boosted taxes on boats, aircraft and jewelry in that package. Lawmakers thought that since rich people buy such things, we should “let ‘em have it” with higher taxes. They expected $31 million in new revenue in the first year from the new taxes on those three things. We now know that the higher levies brought in just $16 million. We shelled out $24 million in additional unemployment benefits because of the people thrown out of work in those industries by the higher taxes. Only in Washington, D.C., where too often lawmakers forget the importance of incentives, can you aim for 31, get only 16, spend 24 to get it and think that somehow you’ve done some good.
Want to break up families? Offer a bigger welfare check if the father splits. Want to reduce savings and investment? Double-tax ‘em, and pile on a nice, high capital gains tax on top of it. Want to get less work? Impose such high tax penalties on it that people decide it’s not worth the effort.
Right now in both state and federal legislatures, much attention is being given to the question of how to deal with deficits due to recession and declining revenues. At the Mackinac Center, we believe that government ought to deal with such circumstances the way you and I and families all across the state deal with similar circumstances: curtail spending. That’s especially true if we want to stimulate a weak economy so it will produce more jobs and more revenue. When the patient is ill, the doctor doesn’t bleed him.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may discuss his proposal to create a new world currency when he meets counterparts from Brazil, India and China this month, Natalya Timakova, a spokeswoman for the president, told reporters by phone today. Russia’s proposals for the Group of 20 meeting in London in April included studying a supranational currency.
“We need some kind of universal means of payment, which could create the basis of a future international financial system,” Medvedev said in a June 1 interview with CNBC. “Naturally, because of the crisis in the American economy, attitude to the dollar has also changed.”
Regional reserve currencies are an “unavoidable” part of “regionalizing” the global financial system, Deputy Finance Minister Dmitry Pankin said in Moscow today.
At a time when religion and politics are increasingly sharing the same vocabulary and functioning in the same sphere, Aslan writes that we must strip this ideological conflict of its religious connotations and address the actual grievances that fuel the Jihadist movement.
There is presently much debate about gay marriage in California, and the roots for the argument come from several directions. In 1967 the United States Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether marriage was a fundamental right. Granted it had to do with people of the opposite sex, but the arguments for the State of Virginia which forbade interracial marriage were primarily religious in nature.
When you think about it, 1967 was not very long ago. If you are older than 42, if your parents were from sixteen states, including Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Delaware, South Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, and were from different races their marriages would have been illegal. In California, interracial marriage was illegal until 1948.
Evan Wolfson in his book Marriage Matters describes the Loving v. Virginia case as follows:
It was in a 1967 case brought by a black woman, Mildred Jeter, and a white man, Richard Loving. The couple had had to leave their home state, Virginia, in order to get married where their love was allowed. The law in Virginia, like that of many other states, provided: “All marriages between a white person and a colored person shall be absolutely void without any decree of divorce or other legal process.” An interracial marriage was considered a non-starter, contrary to the very “definition” of marriage.
Back from their honeymoon, the Lovings were arrested one night in their own bedroom—with their wedding certificate hanging over their bed—and prosecuted for the “crime” of “evading” their state’s discriminatory law and violating Virginia’s same-race restriction on marriage. Mildred and Richard were convicted of marrying the “wrong” kind of person, their marriage was pronounced an un-marriage, and they were given a choice of a year in prison or twenty-five years exile from their home state. They chose exile, got a lawyer, and sued to defend their family. The Lovings lost in state courts all the way up; the trial judge went so far as to declare: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay, and red, and he placed them on separate continents[.] The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” The Virginia Supreme Court upheld the discriminatory “definition” of marriage, and the case came before the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed, declaring, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” [Emphasis added]
This was 1967! There are different moral reasons why people may not agree that homosexual marriage is proper, but understanding the Loving v. Virginia case is essential to understanding why people are nervous about the injection of religious language into the marriage debate and why many feel as strongly as they do about the right to marriage.
After the California Supreme Court upheld the validity of Proposition 8 based on a California Constitutional Right of voters to change the constitution, two attorneys made famous by their opposition on the Bush v. Gore case in 2000, Ted Olson and David Boies teamed up to dispute the findings of the California Supreme Court and they are using the Loving v. Virginia case as the basis for their argument that it violates the Constitutional Right for everybody to be treated equally under the Constitution.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: Based on the decision, reproduced below, do you think Olson and Boies will prevail? What was the State of Virginia’s reasoning for outlawing interracial marriage? Based on this precedent, do you think that the United States Supreme Court will find that gay marriage is unconstitutional? Is there a fundamental right to marry?
Note – Some parts of the decision have been emphasized by the addition of bold text that does not appear in the original. Please also note that religious liberty litigation in federal court relies on the “due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” which forms a significant part of the reasoning in this case. Editor
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed by the United States Senate, she will be the 6th Catholic among the 9 United States Supreme Court justices. Doug Kmiec, my constitutional law professor in the area of the Bill of Rights at Pepperdine University, discusses what this will mean in a recent interview with Suzanne Sataline of the Wall Street Journal . Kmiec is a former White House adviser under both President Reagan and the first President Bush and a devout Roman Catholic. Michael Peabody, Editor RLTV
EXCERPT:
Hi Professor Kmeic. So what will be the impact of having Catholics comprise two-thirds of the justices on the Supreme Court?
The Catholic understanding is that the nature of the office has to be respected and the judicial office . . . should not be a policy making position and the church does not assume it is . . . . It would be an entirely improper criticism for any churchman to make of Judge Sotomayor that she needs to rule in a way that is dictated by the faith. She is to follow the law as it is given to her and that is the oath she takes.
…
In what sorts of cases can we see those beliefs in action?
[Kmiec said he’s read about 50 or 100 of her rulings, perhaps a quarter of her authored opinions.] She does seem to be particularly sensitive to freedom of religion issues. She protected inmates in prison, for instance, who asked to have their faith traditions accommodated.
BY VOTE OF 38-21OREGON’S WORKPLACE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ACT PASSES IN OREGON’S HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES!
Mark it down on your calendar, because this bill effort was a “historic,” if not a heroic, testament of God’s divine providence and power working through human instruments!
May 29, 2009 will long live in the memory of the leadership and support team of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association (NRLA) as Oregon Representative Dave Hunt (D-Gladstone District), the Speaker of Oregon’s House of Representatives, took apart each of the specific arguments of three of his colleagues in his closing remarks during the vigorous debate on the House floor. Opponents argued that current federal law was sufficient, and that the “minimal cost” and administrative “inconvenience” standards to define an “undue” business “hardship” were appropriate for employers to use when denying religious accommodation requests in the workplace.
However, the 65 and 63 percent that voted in favor of the bill in Oregon’s House and Senate chambers respectively, agreed with Speaker Hunt that current law provides employers with little basis for defending the decision to accommodate or to deny accommodation. As a result, they exclaimed that employers often wave the claim of “undue hardship” like a magic wand without having to 1) define, explain, or demonstrate what that “undue hardship” is to the employee, or 2) how it really adversely affects their business in administrative terms, or in dollars and cents. Speaker Hunt, the chief sponsor of SB 786-A, further argued that some employers today continue to regularly define “undue hardship” as anything that causes a business “inconvenience,” and use it as a false legal pretext to refuse, as a matter of policy, to accommodate religious requests.
Speaker Hunt reminded his colleagues that a few unfortunate Supreme Court decisions, beginning with TWA v. Hardison, 432 U.S. 63 (1977), reduced the definition of “undue hardship” to a “de minimis” or “inconvenience” standard in favor of the employer. As a result, it significantly placed people of faith at a disadvantage in the workplace and created unnecessary unemployment hardships for them. That is why “undue hardship,” he argued, must be defined more coherently as a “significant difficulty” and “expense” and that such language, in turn, would also help relieve employers of so many discrimination claims against them.
What This Bill Does
What this bill does is clarify the responsibility of employers to accommodate the scheduling of leave time for the observation of religious holy days, or for the wearing of religious apparel in the workplace unless it poses a “significant difficulty or expense” to their business(es). More specifically, it restores the original federal Title VII legal standard involving religious discrimination which obligated employers to demonstrate that they reasonably attempted to accommodate the sincerely held religious beliefs and practices of their employees before claiming that such beliefs and practices posed a “significant difficulty” and “expense” for their business(es). This bill, once law, will help thousands of people of faith in the workplace who many times are forced to choose between their faith and putting food on the table for their family.
The Next Step
Oregon’s Workplace Religious Freedom Act now goes to the Governor’s desk for his signature. The Northwest Religious Liberty Association, Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon, and the Oregon Jewish Federation of America, have been invited to join House Speaker Dave Hunt and Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian to join him at the signing photo-op with the Governor. This historic event should occur sometime between the middle and end of June.
According to Geoff Sugerman, the Communications Director of Speaker Hunt’s office, “I don’t anticipate that Governor Ted Kulongoski (D) would veto a bill that caters to enhancing and protecting workers’ rights while balancing the rights of employers under Title VII involving religious accommodation and discrimination claims.” Speaker Hunt’s office is fairly certain that Governor Kulongoski will sign the bill into law. But we must not take this last important step for granted. Therefore, please continue to keep this historic legislative Act in your prayers, and specifically pray that the Governor will decide to sign it without reservation.
Divine Providence and An Organizational Note
A few professional observations may be worthwhile.
From Left - Trevor Sleeman (Legislative Aide to Speaker Hunt), David Miller, Shani Balverio, Tara Gonzales, Greg Hamilton, Speaker Dave Hunt, Rhonda Bolton, Michael Peabody, and Douglas Clayville
It has been a tremendous blessing to be a first hand witness to Representative Dave Hunt’s commitment to religious freedom, and particularly in championing religious freedom in the workplace. Speaker Hunt, whose meteoric rise to power and influence as a practicing Baptist in a notoriously liberal state, demonstrated to all discerning observers that he had truly been “called for such a time as this” (see the Scriptural allusion to Esther 4:14).
Indeed, the passage of this bill in both the Oregon Senate (April 9) and House represents nearly eleven years of painstaking lobbying efforts; first with attempts to pass an Oregon Religious Freedom Act affecting the area of constitutional law involving free exercise of religion at the state level (1999-2005), and second with Oregon’s Workplace Religious Freedom Act addressing federal Title VII workplace discrimination law standards and applications at the state level (2007-2009). We failed in the first effort, but succeeded in the second. In a diplomatic sense, battle worn and weary, with anxiety attacks and knots in our stomachs, is one way to describe our experience on Friday, May 29. Sweet resignation and satisfaction, like after successfully climbing to the top of a huge mountain peak, is another that comes to mind.
A number of lessons were learned along the way involving a lot of awkward moments as well as planned, spontaneous and satisfyingly hard earned successes. Learning to be adaptable to political realities and various language compromises, while keeping the overall intent and effectiveness of the bill intact, were the key lessons learned throughout this experience.
On an organizational note, having worked closely with Representative Hunt since 2003 when he was a freshman in the Oregon House of Representatives, and with a bipartisan group of influential Senators since 1999 who directed us to him – including Senator Jason Atkinson (R-Medford District), an aspiring candidate for Governor in 2010 – speaks to what it takes to get a historic bill like this passed.
Building positive working relationships with legislators through an immense amount of meaningful “face time” is the most significant factor. Other terms to describe successful lobbying practices is “on the ground presence” and “real player,” which represents the enormous amount of time, sacrifice, and labor that it takes. In this sense, the entire government relations team of the Northwest Religious Liberty Association (NRLA) has been “called for such a time as this” in the states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. While we always have improvements to make, our team of Capitol Pastors, attorneys, and administrative advisors, do excellent work and serves as a mighty testament as to why more excellent government relations programs like ours need to be developed in a truly serious and professional way in every state.
A special “thank you” to the entire team who helped us with our efforts is in order. They include 1) Attorney Michael Peabody, who testified with yours truly in a convincing and eloquent manner at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing; 2) Attorney Steve Green, Law Professor at Willamette College of Law, who was simply brilliant; 3) Oregon Labor Commissioner, Brad Avakian, a powerful advocate in our corner, along with Speaker of the House, Dave Hunt, who testified together with me at the same table at the House Judiciary Committee hearing; 4) David Miller, a faithful Seventh-day Adventist truck driver who testified at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing; 5) Shani Balverio, a faithful Seventh-day Adventist food service specialist, who also testified at the same hearing; 6) Douglas Clayville, our Capitol Pastor or Representative, who made numerous and much appreciated scheduled “team visits” to legislators with me; and 7) Rhonda Bolton, NRLA’s much appreciated Administrative Assistant, whose coordination and editing services were invaluable when it came to issues of timeliness, coherence, and professional copy appearance of all lobbying materials and official documents.
The Future
With the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act now in place, over the next couple of legislative sessions the Northwest Religious Liberty Association (NRLA) plans to initiate similar legislative bill proposals in each of the other Northwest states. If the United States Congress enacts federal legislation mirroring Oregon’s example, then such a state-by-state effort may be unnecessary.
What the Oregon bill accomplishes is a narrowly tailored model for the federal government to follow in its efforts to see similar protections put forward for people of faith, including religious minorities. If adopted at the federal level, it would promise to help all people of faith and employers in each state of the country.
Last year, when I was in Washington, D.C., making scheduled visits with lawmakers, it was indicated to me by the chief legislative advisor in US Senator Orin Hatch’s (R-Utah) office that both he and Senator John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) were watching closely (and debating over) the legislative effort in Oregon as a model to follow. This is because the Oregon model narrowly addresses religious accommodations involving 1) holy days and 2) the wearing of hazard-free religious apparel or clothing, and not the big “kitchen sink” approach that has often included other specific religious exemptions treating accommodation requests with distinctively moral concerns in the workplace (i.e., the dispensing of the Plan-B pill by Pharmacists and other health care concerns). Political realities, as such, however, caused the Northwest Religious Liberty Association (NRLA) to take a different path, believing that such moral concerns, while important, should be raised in separate bill proposals so as not to year-after-year continually disable, defer, and defeat the narrow but equally worthy need to satisfy the larger purpose of Workplace Religious Freedom Act efforts, both at the state and federal levels, which is to specifically address holy day accommodation requests in the workplace which drives the vast majority of religious discrimination claims.
Some will argue to the contrary, but Oregon’s Workplace Religious Freedom Act is not an unconstitutional “affirmative action” bill for religious minorities and thus a governmental establishment of religion, even though religious minorities are incidentally benefited. [See Estate of Thornton v. Caldor, Inc. (472 U.S. 703) 1985.] The clear intent of the bill is that it will be equally representative of accommodation requests that emanate from all people of faith in two specific areas – holy day and religious apparel accommodation requests. While it may exclude other religious or morally related accommodation requests, particularly in health care related areas, it does not exclude anyone of faith in regard to holy day and religious apparel accommodation requests. While it may incidentally benefit religious minorities in the workplace, the language of the bill is inclusive and directly benefits all people of faith, as well as employers in terms of lowering the number of litigation claims against them, as has been demonstrated in New York since 2006.
Once the Oregon Workplace Religious Freedom Act becomes law, it is bound to face some tough legal challenges in the courts, state and possibly federal. But that is to be expected. Our efforts in providing a more coherent standard for religious accommodation requests on the one hand, and “undue business” standards for employers on the other, was a proactive one and an intelligent step forward.
Thank You!
In conclusion, THANKS SO MUCH FOR YOUR UPLIFTING PRAYERS AND SUPPORT! We could not have done it without you and without God’s guiding hand! Thanks again!
The Northwest Religious Liberty Association, organized in 1906, and reorganized in 1991, serves the states of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington through its team of government relations representatives and attorneys. The Northwest Religious Liberty Association partners with the North American and International Religious Liberty Associations to defend religious freedom here and abroad. Visit the Northwest Religious Liberty Association online at http://www.nrla.com
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