Author: Michael Peabody

History tells us that it would not be a debate between Christians and atheists. If Christianity won predominance over every other religious system in the nation, it would be a debate between Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, Pentacostals, and any other denomination you could name. Then it would be between the liberals and conservatives, and ultimately between conservatives or between liberals, the powerful – not the faithful – would control.

  On July 1, 2009, Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law.  Introduced in February, House Bill 1598 requires Tennessee courts to apply the “compelling […]

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.

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 […]

In recent months, it has become increasingly clear that religious freedom, or any individual liberties for that matter, are best respected in lands where private property and financial resources are […]

University of Toledo law professor Howard M. Friedman has compiled a list of Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s rulings on religion clause issues at his blog, Religion Clause. Sotomayor has served on the Second Circuit since 1998. She served as a federal district court judge in the Southern District of New York from 1992 to 1998.

With the news this week that the United States House of Representatives has passed, H.R. 1913, the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, there is some concern about […]

Scott Ritsema tackles the current controversy surrounding issues of faith and political power in his new book, The Way, the Truth and the Sword: A New Christian Civics in an […]

[Given the recent state of the economy, it is important to explore whether there is a strong correlation between religious freedom and economic freedom, or individual property rights and the interest […]

An epic battle played out on two levels at the California Supreme Court on March 5. On a surface level, attorneys fought over a technical issue of whether the Proposition 8 prohibition on gay marriage represented a revision or an amendment. On the deeper level, the question asked was whether there are any limits on the majority to impact the rights of the minority.