The Left’s Fake Conversion To Religious Liberty

The progressive legal establishment for years treated religious freedom exemptions as obstacles to be dismantled, threatening the livelihoods, consciences, and institutions of Christian business owners, healthcare workers, and even nuns.

Now, the left is embracing the very religious-liberty arguments it spent years working to defeat.

Religious exemptions have typically rested on one of two legal foundations: the First Amendment’s protection of religious exercise or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which requires the government to justify substantial burdens on religious practice under the strictest level of judicial scrutiny.

This shift on the left is not merely rhetorical. Hoosier Jews for Choice has sued for religious exemptions from Indiana’s abortion ban, arguing that the law conflicts with Jewish teachings about when life begins. The Latino Christian National Network and other Christian and Jewish organizations have invoked religious freedom in challenges to ICE enforcement near houses of worship and in efforts to protect faith groups that shelter illegal immigrants.

Safehouse, a Philadelphia nonprofit, is likewise pressing a religious-liberty claim for permission to operate a supervised drug-consumption site. The organization argues that its Judeo-Christian obligation to preserve life and care for the sick entitles it to an exemption from federal drug laws. Together, the cases show progressive organizations adopting the same legal protections their political allies have long sought to narrow when invoked by conservative Christians, according to The Guardian.

Constitutional and policy scholars, however, told the Caller the sudden pivot isn’t a genuine defense of conscience — it’s a tactical workaround that falls apart under legal scrutiny. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Trump’s DOJ Sues Blue County Over Gun Ban In Churches)

Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, told the Caller that many of the cases are “silly and cynical,” but legally shrewd.

He said the strategy emerged as it became clear the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, returning abortion policy to the states.

“Abortion is so important to the left, they had to find some way of protecting it, and they’ll use whatever tools are available,” Blackman said. “They replaced due process with an appeal to religion.”

Blackman added that the claims also give progressives a way to accuse conservatives of hypocrisy for supporting religious-liberty protections in earlier cases while questioning their use now.

Many earlier religious-liberty cases involved objections to government compulsion: a Christian baker declining to create a cake for a same-sex wedding, for example, or nuns resisting a mandate to provide contraceptive coverage.

The newer cases, by contrast, use religious-liberty claims to advance policy outcomes their proponents already supported on secular grounds. That distinction has led legal scholars such as Blackman to question whether the newfound commitment to religious freedom is principled or merely strategic.

Blackman, who has followed the Jewish abortion litigation for four years, said the plaintiffs may struggle to establish both the sincerity of their asserted beliefs and standing to sue — particularly where some of the women bringing the cases are not pregnant.

But, Blackman noted, “the problem is courts are very, very hesitant to probe sincerity.”

“The left is throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks,” Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ryan T. Anderson told the Caller, adding that “they have unfortunately not developed any newfound respect for religious freedom.”

Anderson said the left’s religious liberty claims are hardly comparable to those of the baker or nun, and instead “make a mockery of religious liberty.”

He compared the effort to self-described Satanists who claim a religious liberty right to obtain abortions, adding that “the attempts to use religious liberty protections to attack basic human rights protections for the unborn should be as successful as religious liberty claims to kill any other class of human beings.”

Anderson said many of the progressive religious liberty claims are opportunistic, noting that “they will ultimately fail either because the purported religious belief is not sincere or because the government has a truly compelling interest being pursued in the least restrictive way.”

The left’s new strategy marks a sharp departure from its earlier efforts to force religious groups to yield to progressive policy priorities, including repeated attempts to pass the Do No Harm Act across six consecutive Congresses — an effort championed in part by Kamala Harris during her Senate tenure.

The bill would have barred individuals and organizations from invoking RFRA to seek exemptions from federal laws governing civil rights, employment, healthcare and other areas where advocates argued religious claims could enable discrimination. Harris said the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom should “never be used to undermine other Americans’ civil rights or subject them to discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

The legislative push followed a major setback for progressives in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, in which the Supreme Court ruled that certain corporations could not be compelled under the Affordable Care Act to provide contraceptive coverage if doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

After failing to substantially narrow those protections through Congress, progressive advocates are now turning to the courts to invoke the same religious-liberty doctrines on behalf of abortion access, immigration sanctuaries and supervised drug-consumption sites.

While the left’s legal strategy may have changed, Anderson said its underlying goals have not “evolved,” pointing to New York state’s recent effort to force Roman Catholic nuns to participate in assisted suicide.

Blackman said most of the cases appear to be political or philosophical disputes recast in religious terms. Still, some could succeed if courts are reluctant to apply religious-liberty protections less generously to progressive plaintiffs than they did to conservatives in earlier cases. (RELATED: FBI, DEA Withhold Court-Ordered Files On Nigerian President’s Alleged Drug Trafficking Ahead Of Trump Meeting)

Progressive plaintiffs now stand on the opposite side of a religious-liberty debate that has divided the left and right for more than a decade. Their lawsuits will test how broadly protections once associated with conservative causes apply when invoked in pursuit of progressive ones.