Translating Trumps Religious Liberty Order by Linda Greenhouse
'Some groups on the religious right are complaining that President Trump’s executive order on religion didn’t go far enough. That’s interesting, but what really has me worried is the tepid response from the mainstream.
It makes me wonder whether the post-inauguration predictions that Donald Trump would eventually be “normalized” are coming to pass: the warnings that even the president’s harshest critics, worn down by the endless barrage of unpredictable antics emanating from the White House, would inevitably adapt, greeting with relief actions that fall short of the breathtakingly outrageous. (That bar obviously was cleared by the president this week with his firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey.)
True, the May 4 order, entitled “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” didn’t live up to its scary advance billing. It did not endorse faith-based discrimination against gay people. Nor did it order the Internal Revenue Service, in so many words, not to enforce the statutory prohibition against electioneering by tax-exempt churches. But do those omissions make it “a Trump executive order to shrug at,” an “empty, symbolic act,” as Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School wrote for Bloomberg View? Does it mean that the executive order “turned out to be a big nuthin’,” as Professor Marty Lederman of Georgetown University Law Center wrote on the new and very useful Take Care blog?
Here is what the executive order did, admittedly in convoluted language that almost defies direct translation into English:'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/10/opinion/trump-religious-liberty-order.html?