Religion
Related: About this forumNebraska Senate Nominee Says Religious Beliefs Can Justify Breaking Any Law
Heres a screenshot of the relevant part of Sasses website:
The question of when religious belief exempts believers from following the law is at the forefront of our national debate right now, with the Supreme Court poised to decide whether religious business owners can refuse to offer birth control coverage as part of their employer-provided health plans, even when doing so would violate federal law. Yet, even the plaintiffs before the Supreme Court acknowledge that religious liberty is not an absolute right to violate any law at any time. As the crafting chain Hobby Lobby says in its brief to the justices, the government may limit religious believers actions when it uses the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest. This is the standard set by federal law, although there is some uncertainty about how the justices will interpret this legal standard in its Hobby Lobby decision.
Sasse, however, apparently believes that this law does not go far enough, even if the Court gives Hobby Lobby everything it is asking for. His proposed rule that government cannot require someone to act counter to their religious beliefs under any circumstances would mean that literally any law could be ignored by someone who held a religious belief counter to that law. According to National Geographic, for example, [h]undreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family honor, and while this practice goes across cultures and across religions, some of the perpetrators of honor killings are motivated by their religious faith. Under Sasses formulation of religious liberty, a person who killed his own sister because he believed he was under a religious obligation to do so would be immune from prosecution for murder.
Similarly, religious beliefs have been used to justify discrimination against racial minorities, women, and LGBT Americans at different points in American history. In an opinion upholding Virginias ban on interracial marriage, a state judge wrote that Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. Former Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett offered a similar view in 1960, claiming that the good Lord was the original segregationist. The conservative Bob Jones University drew a similar connection between religion and racism to justify excluding African Americans entirely until the early 1970s, and then to justify a ban on interracial dating and marriage among its students.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/05/14/3437587/nebraska-sasse-absolute-religious-liberty/
trotsky
(49,533 posts)sinkingfeeling
(51,457 posts)SamKnause
(13,107 posts)I am so sick of this shit !!!!
I wish the "rapture" would occur and cleanse this planet.
atreides1
(16,079 posts)That he and others like him would be "raptured", I tend to think that a sex worker has a better chance of going to heaven then someone like this idiot!
SamKnause
(13,107 posts)That is why I put in in quotes.
I can dream.
I agree.
Many will be surprised at being left behind if the "rapture" happens.
justhanginon
(3,290 posts)a head of cauliflower can vote for some one like this. And then people wonder why nothing gets done in Washington. Put this religious whack job in the Senate and it will just be a constant litany of religion based objections to anything that may be proposed. Views like his do not belong in the country much less in our government!
atreides1
(16,079 posts)...up until someone shoves a sword in his gut, claiming that they were practicing their religion!
Promethean
(468 posts)However following it here is tremendously scary. "Ben Sasse believes that our right to the free exercise of religion is co-equal to our right to life." That is one tiny step away from religion becoming more important than our right to life. Even more scary is that history has shown that to have been the status quo at some points and it still is in some areas of the world now.
struggle4progress
(118,290 posts)I expect most of us will agree that it may sometimes be justifiable to break the law, and I expect most of us might be hard-pressed to expound a clean theory predicting neatly the exact circumstances under which we would consider law-breaking a defensible act
Can (for example) a law be so morally repugnant that one might have no moral choice except to break it? I think the answer to that question must be yes; and I can imagine circumstances in which the best explanation one could give is simply, This is so contrary to my moral beliefs that I cannot cooperate! -- on its face, an entirely inadequate and irrational reaction, but a reaction that might still be appropriate
Of course, in Sasse's case, there is something screwball about someone running for office in a democracy, on a platform of breaking the law, rather than on a platform of reforming it