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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Thu May 4, 2017, 01:31 PM May 2017

Trump's Religious Liberty Executive Order Is a Triumph of Fake News

The Christian Right invented a non-existent problem: persecution by the government. By focusing on that, the president may have undermined their campaign against LGBT people.

JAY MICHAELSON
05.04.17 12:53 PM ET

President Donald Trump’s “Executive Order on Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty” is the triumph of fake news.

The order does not allow greater discrimination against LGBT people by those with a religious excuse. That absence speaks volumes, and may well portend a significant transformation in LGBT equality. But what the order does do is solves two problems that simply do not exist.

First, the order effectively nullifies the 1954 law called the Johnson Amendment, by directing the IRS to not enforce it. The law forbids all tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, including churches, from engaging in political campaigns, endorse candidates, or collect contributions to a political campaign.

Oh and guess what: the IRS hasn’t been enforcing the Johnson Amendment against pastors anyway. Since 2008, they’ve only audited one — one — pastor for violating the law, and even he wasn’t punished. And during that time, the “religious liberty” group Alliance Defending Freedom has been promoting “Pulpit Freedom Sundays,” encouraging pastors to openly break the law. Trump’s order changes nothing.

According to the Christian Right’s fake news machine, this common-sense law has muzzled the free speech rights of pastors, who can’t say anything political from the pulpit. Actually, that’s not true at all. Pastors can (and do) still talk politics, they just can’t overtly endorse a candidate. And remember, the law actually applies to all nonprofits, not just churches. This non-issue is just hysteria-mongering among national Christian Right organizations, designed to gin up outrage – and to allow them, not churches, to endorse political candidates.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/04/trump-s-religious-liberty-executive-order-is-a-triumph-of-fake-news

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