The circus is leaving North Carolina — but not the one locals wish would go. Cirque de Soleil packed up its tents in a huff over H.B. 2 and took off for Kentucky, which — hypocrisy alert! — also doesn’t have the bathroom mandate they’re supposedly supporting! Like Pearl Jam and Boston and every other group they’re claiming are pulling out of the state, Matt Walsh writes, “the irony here is so thick I might choke on it.”

“They are following their conscience and boycotting to overturn a law that allows people to follow their conscience. They are exercising their First Amendment rights in order to make a statement against First Amendment rights. They are discriminating in response to ‘discrimination.’ If a baker cannot withhold his services because of his conscience, why should [Bruce Springsteen] be allowed to withhold his for the same reason?” Even more mind-boggling, the North Carolina debate isn’t about discrimination! But apparently, these celebrities can’t be bothered to learn about the law before protesting it. If businesses like PayPal want to open their bathroom doors to a gender free-for-all, H.B. 2 won’t stand their way. But it will stand in the way of any government that wants to punish companies with a different policy.

That fact seems lost on most people, including the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights — which [Monday] made the astonishing decision to condemn North Carolina’s H.B. 2 and Mississippi’s religious liberty law. “In the past,” Chairman Martin Castor wrote, “‘religious liberty’ has been used to block racial integration and anti-discrimination laws. Those past efforts failed, and this new attempt to revive an old evasive tactic should be rejected as well.” In perhaps the most stunning statement, Castor insists that “the North Carolina and Mississippi laws… perverts the meaning of religious liberty… and has no place in our society.”

Thankfully, not everyone on the eight-member Commission feels as he does. And in a split vote, two dissenters wrote powerful rebuttals to the outrageous assertion that our First Freedom has no place in a nation founded on it. “Unfortunately,” Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow fire back in a joint statement, “it is not entirely clear that the statement’s signatories have actually read the relevant legislation. We have. Moreover, we have tried as best we can to reflect on the complexities of the policies they embody.” In Mississippi, they note,

“the purpose of this legislation is not to deny same-sex couples the opportunity to celebrate their weddings. Such couples have many alternative sources for wedding services. The purpose is to avoid coercing unwilling individuals into participating in something they do not believe in. As Nelson Mandela once said, ‘When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw’ …Toleration is all about leaving people alone to live their lives as they see fit; it is not about forcing people to take part in other people’s lives. Whatever it is that our Commission colleagues are standing up for, it is not toleration.”

As for North Carolina, the duo goes on, “Weirdly, few seem to have noticed that such businesses can still choose to designate its restrooms and changing rooms by ‘gender’ rather than biological sex if they desire to… we do not believe gender-specific as opposed to sex-specific restrooms and changing facilities work well, since they make it difficult to prevent voyeurs and pranksters… We regret the level of hysteria that has accompanied H.B. 2, especially any contribution to that hysteria made by the Commission majority’s statement.”

While the White House uses its appointees on the Commission to make a statement, the president could make the biggest one of all. If he wanted to, Obama could open up every federal building and park to the kind of gender chaos liberals are demanding. Why doesn’t he? For the same reason that TSA still asks if you’re male or female: public safety is popular! A full 70 percent of North Carolina voters thought the Charlotte ordinance Governor Pat McCrory (R) overturned was “unreasonable” and “unsafe.” So Hollywood, corporate elites, and liberals can shake their fist at laws like North Carolina’s, but when push comes to political shove, President Obama knows where voters stand — and it isn’t with his phony majority.

Originally published here.

An Open and Shut Kasich

The First Amendment is 225 years old, so you’ll have to excuse America for not wanting to “get over it.” But that’s exactly what Ohio Governor John Kasich (R) is calling for in his strange campaign to abolish religious liberty. “What I’d like to say is, just relax,” said Kasich on CNN. “If you don’t like what somebody’s doing, pray for them, and if you feel as though somebody is doing something wrong against you, can you just for a second get over it? You know?”

While liberal activists haul families into court, shutter their businesses, vandalize their property, and threaten to take away their homes, jobs, and life’s savings, not many people feel like the GOP’s most unpopular presidential candidate. “If we just kind of calm down here, I think things would settle down.” Christians are calm. And things haven’t settled down yet. Still, the governor insists, it’s time for men and women of faith to swallow their values and “make a cupcake!” Sound familiar? It should. President Obama shares the same view. Fortunately for voters, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) isn’t about to let the march of intolerance steamroll his freedom — or yours. “I suppose King George could have given the same message: ‘get over it, while I strip your freedom,’” Cruz fired back at Kasich, “But thankfully the American people answered that demand with musket shot.”

It’s one thing to hear an LGBT activist say that Christians’ freedom has to give in this clash against sexual liberalism, but a Republican candidate for president? Cruz is just as surprised as the rest of us. “I don’t think the American people are willing to get over our basic liberties. We fought a bloody revolution to protect our religious liberty,” he told the Conservative Review. “This nation was founded by men and women fleeing religious oppression, and seeking a land where every one of us could seek out and worship God almighty with all of our hearts, minds and souls, free of the government getting in the way.”

Of course, the idea of exercising our First Freedom didn’t used to be so controversial. In 1993, the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act sailed through Congress almost unanimously. “Today, when states pass laws virtually identical to that original legislation,” Ted went on, “the modern Democratic Party is so radical, so extreme that it’s decided that there is no room for religious liberty. That’s radical. That is un-American. Religious liberty is something that protects all of us. It applies to Christians, it applies to Jews, it applies to Muslims, it applies to atheists.”

Originally published here.

Big Hypocrisy on Little Sisters

If liberals are as concerned about discrimination as they say they are, why aren’t they on the front lines of the Little Sisters of the Poor case? These nuns are the real victims of intolerance and inequality — yet you don’t see the Left picketing Health and Human Services with the same ferocity they’re pulling out of North Carolina and Mississippi. Why? Because people like President Obama think that only the people who agree with their views should be free to exercise them. That became painfully clear in the Obamacare mandate, when organizations, businesses, schools, churches, and even monasteries were ordered to pay for pills and procedures that violate their conscience.

The clash between the administration and these nuns has been one of the most embarrassing fallouts from the president’s law, as people on both sides of the political spectrum fail to see why HHS is demanding that even Little Sisters should have to pay for birth control. At the heart of the case now before the Supreme Court is a clever little accounting gimmick that HHS concocted that would supposedly spare religious groups from the choice of violating their faith or the law. The only problem is that the “compromise,” which drives the coverage through a third party, doesn’t solve anything. It still makes men and women complicit in the act and payment of the coverage. Most Americans understand that. It’s a shame the White House doesn’t.

In a new Marist poll, people were asked if they thought the government is “being unfair in its treatment of Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious employers.” By more than a 20-point margin, Americans agreed the “accommodation” was unfair. Like us, the Knights of Columbus’s Carl Anderson said, they don’t think it’s reasonable “for the government to demand that some — and only some — religious employers engage in activity that is totally unnecessary to the government’s stated purposes of providing elective and morally problematic drugs to employees.”

This is what religious freedom is all about! The same First Amendment that gives Little Sisters of the Poor the right to object to this health coverage is the same First Amendment that gives photographer Elaine Huguenin the right to walk away from a same-sex wedding job. To “get over” that, as Governor John Kasich (R-Ohio) has suggested, is to get over what it means to be American!

Originally published here.