Will "Do No Harm Act" Do Any Good In Religious Liberty Battle?
BY STEPHANIE RUSSELL-KRAFT
MAY 19, 2016
Two Democratic congressmen this week introduced the “Do No Harm Act,” a proposed amendment to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), the once bipartisan law that’s now at the center of the culture wars. It doesn’t have a chance in hell of passing, but its introduction is an important milestone in the backlash against RFRA’s expanded use.
When it was first passed in 1993, RFRA had the support not only of religious organizations but of civil rights organizations, all of which thought the law could restore the religious freedoms they saw as impaired by a 1990 Supreme Court decision that denied unemployment benefits to an individual fired for using peyote, even though it was for a religious ritual.
The problem, according to current critics, is that the law actually went beyond the First Amendment and ushered in a new era of “extreme” religious liberty. Over the course of the past 20 years, RFRA and similar state laws have been used to grant religious individuals and institutions exemptions from laws covering child protection, anti-discrimination, land use, marriage, schools, prisons. In these areas, many of these exemptions have institutionalized discrimination against women, LGBT individuals, and others, critics say.
So this is where the “Do No Harm” amendment, sponsored by Reps. Joe Kennedy III (D-Ma.) and http://kennedy.house.gov/sites/kennedy.house.gov/files/Do%20No%20Harm%20Act%20Bill%20Text.pdf, comes in. If passed, the act would prevent RFRA from authorizing legal exemptions that impose “meaningful harm, including dignitary harm” on third parties.
http://religiondispatches.org/will-do-no-harm-act-do-any-good-in-religious-lib-battle/
Text of the amendment:
http://kennedy.house.gov/sites/kennedy.house.gov/files/Do%20No%20Harm%20Act%20Bill%20Text.pdf
