 |
| Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (left) and Donald Trump (middle) think religious liberty means receiving federal funds while discriminating against taxpayers and then not showing common courtesy to those they are taking the money from. |
Senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) must really miss the days of Barack Obama, when faith-based groups were treated like second-class citizens when it came to government programs. Every time a member of the president's team rolls back a rule and levels the playing field, the northwest Democrats kick and scream. For people who talk about equality so much, Senate liberals sure don't understand it.
Nothing really sums up the Left better than the first line of their protest letter to Secretary Alex Azar. "We write to strongly oppose the Department of Health and Human Services' proposed rule, 'Ensuring Equal Treatment of Faith-Based Organizations." In other words, what they support is the unequal treatment of faith-based organizations -- something the last administration had become quite good at. The pair of senators tries to argue that Trump's policy reinstating religious freedom is actually a secret attack on it -- a suggestion that would be funny if it weren't so outrageous.
"The proposed rule -- developed under the guise of religious liberty -- is actually... yet another step taken by President Trump to greenlight federally-funded discrimination," their letter claims. No one is quite sure how, since the whole point of the regulation is to make sure every organization -- religious or not -- is treated the same. What Obama's team liked to do was burden religious groups with special reporting or referral requirements, creating ridiculous hoops that no secular organization had to jump through. Of course, the idea was to persuade faith-based groups it was too much trouble -- or worse, too steep a compromise, to comply.
The new rule, just posted last month, guarantees that every qualified government organization has a seat at the table -- no matter what they believe. It appears by the words of Murray and Wyden not everyone believes in that kind of neutrality. They want religious groups to be disqualified from any government interaction before it starts! "We demand the Department put the American people first and withdraw the proposed rule," they write. But putting the American people first means engaging all of the diverse options for health care, education, adoption, and disaster relief. If the Trump administration listened to those on the Left, it would be jeopardizing billions of dollars in social services.
 |
| Richard Grenell |
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that President Donald Trump intends to tap Richard Grenell as acting Director of National Intelligence. Grenell, who currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Germany and would be the first openly gay man to serve in Trump’s cabinet, is a hard-right partisan and a loyalist to the president — a sharp contrast from Dan Coats, who was ousted from ODNI last year over disagreements with Trump.
In his current role, he caused an uproar in Germany after he threatened to use his office to help far-right political parties win elections in Europe — a flagrant departure from the apolitical conduct U.S. ambassadors are generally expected to follow abroad.
 |
| The Boy Scouts of America have declared bankruptcy and the Family Research Council wants to blame gays for it. |
It's one of the saddest, most predictable "I-told-you-so" moments of our generation. The Boy Scouts, where future moon walkers and presidents learned the virtues and value of leadership, has finally collapsed. Turns out, the decade of compromise hasn't been kind to the Scouts, who turned in their moral compass seven years ago to chase the approval of critics it could never win. Now, deep into the BSA's self-imposed identity crisis, the group is filing for bankruptcy -- an unhappy ending we all warned was coming.
For those who knew the Scouts through their proud and honorable days, the demise has been slow and painful. But this is what comes of throwing up your hands on a century of conviction: irrelevance and, ultimately, insolvency. For 103 of its 110 years, the Boy Scouts were a pillar of principle -- not that it was easy. As most of us know, the fight to live out your beliefs in this world can be an exhausting one. The Scouts spent years in court just for the freedom to stick to their moral code. They won -- but to the organization's dismay -- the battle didn't end. Waves of LGBT activists kept coming. The pressure built and built until finally, in 2013, under the leadership of Rex Tillerson, headquarters gave into the lie that compromise would be their salvation. Seven years later, the irony is: there's nothing left to save.
More than a half-decade into this radical experiment, the group that counted Martin Luther King, Jr., George W. Bush, and Buzz Aldrin as members is barely recognizable. A handful of local councils have managed to squeak by on solid reputations, but after the organization opened its arms to kids and leaders who identify as gay or transgender, membership became anemic. Then in a failed effort to fill the ranks they began recruiting girls, which not only angered its base -- but pitted the organization in a legal war with Girl Scouts USA. Now, a program that used to be America's finest, is knee-deep in Chapter 11.
If you're wondering where raising a white flag on core values leads, this is it. The Scouts are a case study in moral compromise -- the story of anyone who exchanges the truth for cowardly conformism. Leaders at the BSA dropped their moral mandate to accommodate what they don't believe. In the current climate, that's called "inclusion." To everyone else, it's considered betrayal.
 |
| Some people want to pretend that the LGBTQ community made no historical contributions. |
