>> i have a standing or i do not robby.the pope' or as brian says, the topic which we propose to discuss for the next hour and 50 minutes, perhaps the key word is unprecedented. it is no secret that this conference arises from the convergence of two senses that

something is happening with religious liberty and the country that is new and different and is a cause for concern. call that an unprecedented threat. i sense is that something needs to be done. it is not just a matter of getting together but rather to talk about what is happening, what needs to be done, that is the genius of this project, and that it is not just another academic gathering but also appeared to understanding the situation in america. we use the word unprecedented. it could be false. i do not assume that everybody

agrees there is an and press -- unprecedented threat today. it is morally neutral. it literally it means for the first time. there is a first time for everything and doing something for the first time can be fined. it tended to want to the david letterman show. the guinness world book of records. an australian stunt woman managed to reach a speed of 48 miles an hour in a motorized store law. -- toilet. it is something more than that. we mean new, different, and in some sense, from a moral perspective, threatening

intrusion. something new is happening that is threatening religious liberty. or not. unprecedented can be a welcome, referring back to our friend robert george. he is not the first holder of that distinguished chair. two of his predecessors were among the greatest constitutional lawyers in our history. more distant predecessors include a man who went on to even bigger things, woodrow wilson. that is the first hole but i daresay he is the unprecedented person because he is the first holder who was also taught a bluegrass cd. here it is. i propose to auction it off.

you cannot imagine woodrow wilson doing this. i wish to turn to our panelists now. there are many of us. i pledged to enforce our time limit. 12 minutes for each of the speaker. if i just there is enough time remaining, i will come back and say a few words myself. the next thing on our agenda, which is to invite comments among the panelists, the speakers, for about 15 minutes and then we will turn, with 25 minutes left, to q&a from the audience. we have a fair amount of time. there is what to do but i think we can get a lot done. i am the person to enforce the time limit. i remind all of you, i was a

prosecutor in manhattan for several years. , was the pimp prosecutor. i'm not tough but i know a lot of stuff people. each of our speakers will speak for about five minutes from their seats and i will briefly introduce each of them before each one of them speaks. they're not necessarily going to speak in the order from right to left or from left to right. i wish to turn now to our first speaker, she is now chief counsel for the leading, most effective religious liberty law firm in the country. hannah has served two clerkships.

she is a graduate of princeton and a search for two years as an al diaz missionary in europe. as i understand the rules about living as an lds missionary, you are on task 24/7. you do not watch tv. i take it that was heard a lot for two years. whether she is better or worse, and she can say. she made up for it when she returns to the u.s.a. and she seems intent on appearing as as many programs as is possible. hannah is one of our leading religious liberties lawyers and she will speak first. [applause] >> thank you. can you hear me? is the microphone on? thank you for that introduction.

it is great to be here today. my job is to give you an overview of the threats to religious freedom. i'm going to do this through the lowlands of litigation. the fund is a nonprofit litigation shop and what we do is defends religious liberty all around the country. i'm going to talk about a few of the recent cases that we are litigating to defend religious freedom. i'm going to focus on three primary threats. those threats are first to the government mandate that forces at religious institutions to act contrary to their conscience, the threat to economy of religious organizations to choose their leaders and threats to the right of conscious for individual professionals. i thought i would start with the hss mandate from government

mandates to require individuals and institutions to purchase drugs and services that are contrary to the religious doctrine. as a distinguished professor at harvard wrote in a wall street journal op-ed, she said, "of the main goal of the mandate is not as it claims to protect women's health. rather it is a move to constrict religious organizations." let's make sure we know what this mandate is and how it will play out. it requires all health plans, every employer is that offers one, to provide contraception and sterilization to their employees as well as counseling about all those services. there is a religious employer exemption and you have to satisfy all of four prongs of that exception. it is one of the narrowest to

date in federal or state law. you have to be a nonprofit entity that is exempt from paying taxes and from filing a tax return. you also have to integrate religious values as your primary purpose and you have to employee and serve people of your own fate. many organizations, including schools, colleges, social services, are not going to meet this definition and are not going to be exempt from this regulation. i would remind all of us that exemptions are not new. they're part uprooted law making. -- part of prudence lawmaking. our country has a long history of exempting religious believers from actions that violate their conscience. some of those include exemptions for quakers to not fight in the military, those who could not

work on certain days of the week, corrections workers who could not be involved in capital punishment, and health care personnel who could not be involved in abortions. we have this history of recognizing that religious conscience is sacred and we need to provide it sanctions to protect it. we have heard the administration attempt to justify this mandate by saying that it only does what most states already do. i want to break that down and talk about why that is false. there are some states said that past contraception mandates but as compared to the state mandate, the fed gerbil -- federal mandate is broader than state mandates. those 19 states with an exemption only three of them, california, new york, and oregon, define it as narrowly

as the federal one. even in those states, there is the opportunity for religious organizations to opt out through self insuring or not covering prescription drug benefits. even in the states where there are a narrow exemptions, there is an option to opt out. even in states where there is a contraception mandate, there is a similar opportunity to opt out through not covering prescription drugs. these federal mandate predict -- allows none of these options and that is why it is less protective of religious freedom than any of the comparable state laws. this assertion we have heard repeatedly that the mandates do what states top party down, it is simply false. what is the penalty for noncompliance? if a religious organization does not comply, they will be forced to stop providing health

insurance and issued a penalty for $2,000 per employee. these crippling fines are designed with a course of intent. we have heard a lot about a compromise in the news recently and much has been talked about it. was it a compromise? let's talk about what happened this year. in january, there was an announcement that there would be no changes to the exemption but they would give religious organizations an additional year to comply with the mandate. this set off a firestorm of opposition that resulted in a press conference with the president himself. although it sounded like the compromise had been struck, albeit ministration did was finalized a row without change and finalize -- finalize the rule without change and left

intact the provisions. what was announced during the press conference were two promises. by a yearbe ldelayed and the second promise was that insurance companies would be forced to pay for abortion inducing drugs and contraception instead of the religious organization. the problems are many. anyone who understands economics knows the insurance companies are not going to offer the services for free. employers will be paying for these services against their conscience. some have argued in the press that insurance companies would cover the services because it helps their bottom line but if that were the case, why haven't they been doing it? if providing contraception really reduces the total cost,

economic pressure would have party solved this problem. the second problem with of the so-called compromise is that hundreds of religious organizations have self insured plans and that means they are the insurance company. the new compromise offers them nothing. many of these organizations and became self insured to deal with the contraception mandate because under the state regime, you are exempted from the mandate. i think there is no evidence that even under the new proposal, exempt organizations will have their liberties protected at all. we saw a notice of proposed rulemaking issued to promulgate the so-called compromising rule and it lays out several ideas, at practice in public brainstorming, and to fund the mandate but all of these

proposals have been analyzed by people in the insurance industry and they have serious practical and moral flaws. a major insurance company as are being called the mandate unworkable and inadvisable. today we stand no closer to a remedy to the infringement on religious freedom and we did before the ferber press conference. it is it february press conference. the lawsuits challenging this mandate last fall when we lost a lawsuit in d.c. we have added three since then and there are now a total of 23 lawsuits spread throughout the 15 states, including the district of columbia, that represents 55 plaintiffs. there are three for-profit companies among those and three nonprofit institutions. it is important because we want to understand this is not simply

a catholic issue. this affects people of all faiths. a couple of final observations and then i will move on to my last two threats. this notion there is a religious war on women flies in the face of recent polling. if you look at a new york times poll conducted in march during the firestorm surrounding the hss mandates, if you look at the statistics for women, women fored with exemptions employers that have objections to the mandate. for any employer, religious or not, they should get an exemption. 46 prince were in favor. -- 46% were in favor. schools and hospitals, should they get an exemption.

53-38. this idea that women are opposed to exemptions is simply not borne out in the polling numbers. if you look at the statistics, they are even more compelling. for any employer, they should get an exemption. 51% favor that. combine the men and women, 57%. my last observation is that this notion the government has considered all of the interests involved and struck a balance, which we have for them say, is difficult to believe because the secretary before a congressional hearing has acknowledged that she did not consult president and she asked for no legal advice from the justice department while making her decision on the mandate. this is shocking for and a

mission like this that there was no legal memo prepared about the constitutional implications of this mandate for religious freedom. despite the fact that it receives thousands of commons warning of the illegality of the mandate. she said i am not a lawyer and do not pretend to understand. i think it former bush speechwriter, who now writes for the washington post, said it best when he wrote on tuesday, "the only thing worse than indifference to religious liberty is casual ignorance." i'm going to touch on the second threat, the attack to the liberty of churches in choosing their leaders. i'm referring to the case which was decided earlier this year in january.

i should mention that bp represented the lutheran church in this case. a think we saw an unprecedented attack on this right of the economy and churches to choose their own leaders. notwithstanding the fact that the federal courts of appeals had recognized an exception to the anti-discrimination laws that allowed religious organizations to be free to choose their leaders as they saw fit, the solicitor general came in and for the first time argued before the supreme court they should be no exception at all. that was their first line of attack. this was a challenge against the existence of religious autonomy in the hiring and firing employees. it became clear a majority of justices rejected this. they said even if there is an

exception, it did should be limited to those employees who perform religious functions. it was a funny to those of us in the audience that the chief justice's response to that was this, he said that cannot be the test. those are important and so he is not a minister? in the actual opinion in january, the court rejected both of these extreme arguments, calling them extreme and untenable. they held that the exception protects this right of churches to choose their leaders. the third threat i would like to discuss puzo's requirements of students and health-care workers to perform certain acts that violate their conscience. there are many examples. i will name a few. religious pharmacists or required to provide abortion and

using drugs. wedding photographers who are fine for declining to photograph a homosexual wedding ceremony. nurses forced to perform late term abortions or risk losing their jobs. a graduate students are threatened with expulsion of they do not counsel homosexual clients. and religious clerics were forced out of a job because they cannot sign marriage to tickets on behalf of homosexual couples. i would like to talk about a case that we prevailed in earlier this year in washington state. many of you may be familiar with this case. it involves dispensing abortion inducing drugs. we introduced two wittman pharmacists and a quarter generation family of pharmacy the did not want to have to choose between their profession and their fate. the board of pharmacy initially

supported a rule protecting the conscience of pharmacy workers to refer clients to other nearby pharmacies if they were not able to dispense the drug themselves. under pressure from the governor, the board reversed course and even though the board admitted they found no evidence that anyone in the state had ever been unable to find a drug they needed because of the objection of any pharmacist, they issued a regulation that required them to stop dispensing medication even if it violated their conscious. even though there were exemptions for other secular reasons. if they did not want to do it because that had a short shelf life or for other reasons or secular. that was fine. if there was religious, that was not accessible. they sued to prevent them from having to choose between their jobs and their fate. one of these pharmacists had

already lost her job and the other one was threatened. this district court judge in washington held that these regulations violated the first amendment. we continue to represent them on appeal and i want to say there are many other threats out there to religious freedom. many of them are documented in the rising threat to the document you have been your materials that were distributed to date. some of them include restrictions on the use of private property by churches, synagogues, and mosques. other include intense to scrub out all references to religion in the public square and redefinition of laws that lack productions for religious freedoms. i hope you can see the threats are growing in number but we are countering many of them and their confident that a rule of law will continue to stave off these attacks to our freedom.

>> very much. -- thank you very much. >> thank you for the presentation and the good work that you do. our next speaker, he is the chief of medicine and physician in chief columbia university presbyterian hospital. you can read more about him in the conference brochure. if you're in front of the computer and you google him and have a half an hour you can read the rest of his cv. you will discover that don is uniquely accomplished. it would be on the level of any middle career scholar. not just and medicine but basic

research. i think i don has done pioneering research in the biochemistry of cocaine addiction. at the same time, he is near the pinnacle of the practice of medicine by holding the positions that he does a columbia presbyterian. he is also the holder of 10 u.s. patents, and among his other accomplishments is membership in 1) that i raise an eyebrow about. he entered the salt and water glove. i do not know what that is. i know a saltwater is and i was once a member of the scotch and water club. but this one really stuns me. if you could take that up, among other things. [applause] >> a sum many of the stress that

you were hearing about have the medical aspect to them. i suppose that is why i am here. i will talk about the aspects of that profession. if you think about a medicine over the past few decades, we are witnessing the culmination of a decade-long process. it is a process, not a conspiracy, but a process that has marginalized and suppressed and eliminated those who do not subscribe to the dominant liberal ideology. those who do subscribe to the traditional religious and moral values. the results of this substantial ideological provocation, it

really is that. we hear about the ideology of college professors. this process is far advanced in madison. the broader population at a practical level, if you think about your physician, unless you die in your sleep for your hit by a truck, you come up against the medical profession. you would like a profession to have some grounding in moral values that resonate with yours. we have a situation where a% have shifted to one side of the debate. certainly traditional values may be more highly express.

it would also be the case then obgyn, it is almost a entirely up to the extreme ideological left. in such a situation, dissent is highly surprised. one of the things i worked on was an alternative method for generating embryonic stem cells. it was a method that spare embryos. it did not require their destruction. the presentation was given in neutral terms and i presented it to schools. the interesting thing that represented is the whispered approval in the hallways afterward. it is not the kind of thing that can be expressed openly. there is enormous suppression of anything that does not adhere to

the extreme liberal orthodoxy. one imagines the ultimate expression of dissent is the assertion of a conscientious objection. it becomes more difficult in such an environment. i have become an advisor to residents from other institutions who feel that in their evaluations are separate because they have asserted an objection to performing some of the extreme procedures that are now routinely required. i was on the president's council a few years ago on bioethics. there was testimony by a governing body that medical practitioners do not have a right to conscientious objection.

there is no limit. in that absence of laments, it is no longer a limit based on conscience as a radical extreme position. madison today, one of ascribe to the ideologies of victimhood, you could claim it is a hostile working environment for the men and women of fate. in terms of law title of this session, and president entrance to rights of conscience, absolutely. thatnot because it has occurreda but because we

are reaching a crescendo of a long, extreme, and yielding process. those are my brief comments. thank you. [applause] >> unnoticed he sidestepped the salt and water question. our next speaker is not a member of the salt and water clubs and is not an aficionado of scotch and water, either. but he has been for about a quarter century. in that capacity in over those 24 years, he has become a

fixture of the public discussion of issues concerning religious liberty, even more generally a discussion about the most moral the linkedin tissues in american life and a fixture in a positive sense. he has become an important public resources and a highly visible and influential spokesperson. he has been on the united states commission on international religious freedom and embodies what to this conference is about because it richard land has done his share in participating in washington confabs. he is also a doer. he served as an interim pastor at a baptist church in chattanooga, tennessee. this is a man who is not only accomplished in a public resource and a pastor, he also holds a b.a. from princeton.

i suspect we can use the word unprecedented about richard land in this respect, my guess is that nobody else holds degrees from princeton and oxford but also in masters from the baptist theological seminary -- seminary. richard. >> thank you. this sunday will be my last sunday as the interim pastor. they have a new pastor and they are very excited about it. sometimes people ask me, do you preach every sunday? i said that as the last thing i would give up. it is the thing i look forward to the most. it is the thing i find the most fulfilling every week, preaching to the same people and being in touch with the local body of christ. that leads me to say, i am not a

lawyer. i am a baptist minister and an ethicist. i think there are unprecedented threats to our religious freedom today. 20 years ago, i was in debates with people in my own denomination and in american christianity in general. they were concerned about what they saw as threats to the establishment. i said i am sorry. i do not see any significant threat to the establishment clause in my lifetime. but i do see a rising threat to the free exercise clause from a growing secularism that is influencing the opinion making segments of our society and is intolerant of religious expression. i am reminded, as i looked at

the landscape of america, of the comment by peter berger when he was told there was a worldwide research done to discover the degree of religious belief or religious practice and societies around the world. when they finished tabulating all the data, they found that the most religious country of the world was india. the least religious country was in sweden. when peter berger was told the results he said that america was a nation of indians ruled by swedes. [laughter] it is still true to a significant degree. when we hear the word unprecedented, i can think of no other time in the history of the united states when the justice

department of the united states would go before the supreme court of the united states and make an argument, as it did, that there are no particular and special protections for religion in the first amendment. and that the churches have no more protections under the first amendment than a country club. john roberts, who is developing quite a reputation for succinct remarks, said in his opinion, i find the administration's position to be remarkable considering the fact that religion is mentioned twice in the first amendment. they would find no particular and a special recognition of religious beliefs. if you look at the history of the first amendment, the first amendment is there to protect

religious freedoms and freedom of conscience. the other freedoms are there to help protect their freedom of conscience. it is the first freedom. as late as 1944, when the supreme court was protecting the rights of americans said that the freedom of conscience was the north star of american freedom. i would long for such a court to release today. the administration's position was so extreme, that it lost 9- 0. do you realize how difficult it is to get all nine of our justices to agree on anything? but there rejected this in a 9-0 decision. in nashua, where i live, one of our finer universities has gone

amok. it is like alice through the looking glass. christian organizations cannot require that the leaders of the organizations adhere to the tenants of the face. that is beyond comprehension. it shows you that political correctness can be due to the loss of logical thought. when it comes to the government mandate, i want to talk about it in obamacare. this shows either a hostility to religious freedom or a complete ignorance of the first amendment. this debate is not about contraception, it is about coercion. it is not our catholics, it is about conscience. it is about religious freedom,

not reproductive freedom. this is about principle, not pelvic politics. make no mistake about it. this is only incidentally about reproductive freedom. it is about the roof freedom of religious organizations to practice their faith. we believe as americans that every human being has a god- given right of freedom of faith and conscience. due to our forefathers persecutions and insistence, this freedom is acknowledged and recognized in the first amendment of the constitution of the united states. the free exercise of religion goes well beyond the freedom of worship concept so often ballyhooed by secularists today in our culture. for them, freedom of worship is restricted to church and home

and maybe not even there. we have cases of the time of a zoning commissions that try to restrict how many people a couple can have in their home for a bible study. because it causes traffic congestion. it is far more robust and includes the right to share one's faith and to live out the implications of one's faith in the social and economic spheres. in other words, the freedom to exercise and not to be coerced. we must not stand by and allow our god-given rights to religious freedom guaranteed by the bill of rights to be atrophied and confined in restricted to mere freedom of worship. as the cardinal has said in his letter to his fellow bishops, the obama administration has attempted to reduce this exercise to a privileged granted

as an exemption from an all encompassing extreme form of secular arisen. i think i could make an argument that this extreme a mindset embodied in the mandate violates not only the first amendment's free exercise clause but the establishment clause as well. when the federal government asserts the right to universally mandate actions, trample religious convictions, and then grant exemptions to those it chooses, the government is behaving like a secular 3 autocracy granting indulgences to a chosen few. our forefathers knew how tenuous and intolerant such toleration could be. he said man has no power to make

was to bind conscience and went on to say that forcing a conscience was a rape of the soul. thomas jefferson, the chief drafter of the equity -- declaration of independence argued in 1779 during the campaign for the virginia act for establishing report -- religious freedom, that to compel a man for the promulgation of opinions is tyrannical. when our country was in its greatest peril ever, in 1775, when an invasion fleet of 200 ships and 35,000 troops, the largest to leave a great britain until normandy, left england to reconquer the colonies, and every able-bodied man was needed, the continental congress granted a aright of

conscientious objection to those quakers who believed that violence was always wrong. from our beginning, even before declaration, before our constitution, this has been the north star of american it believes that no one has a right to interfere with another person's relationship with his or her guard. and try to do so is soul rape. there are three to our freedom. one is around the sanctity of every human life. the idea that we are all in doubt by our creator with certain unalienable rights and among these is a right to life,

whether we are normal or not, whether we are terminally ill or not, and whether we have been born or not. if we are a human being we have a right to life. and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. and the basic foundation of a unit of american society, of human society, the family. and of religious freedom. i believe we can win this fight to defend our rights as they were driven down to us but will be must be willing to stand up and tell the government know. the government does not have ultimate authority over people of faith. that is one reason secularists do not like people of faith because the ultimate authority for us is not the state. we render unto caesar the things that are cesar's. we render unto god the things better cause.

thank you. >> thank you, richard. the next person to speak will follow me to the podium. the next beaker is described in the durocher as the public faith of orthodox judaism in washington. it is accurate and complete. being the public faith does not always pay well. he draws a paycheck are working as the executive director of public policy for the union of orthodox jewish congregations. he began a successful career in an hannan -- in manhattan.

he has become a fixture, a public resource, on all matters affecting religious liberty and moral issues of public policy. our next speaker is nathan diament. he has become not only respected and they go to person of orthodox judaism, but i think it is worth adding that his reputation is -- he is an editor and a journalist as well as someone in the trenches. he is known for non-partisan contribution to this highly contentious area of public debate. he is a person who is called upon, guided by republicans and democrats alike. he is taken to be neither liberal nor conservative, but jewish.

nathan? [applause] >> thank you for that introduction, gerard bradley. i also want to add my congratulations to brian and ed on this conference and project. king solomon famously wrote "there is nothing new under the sun." i suppose i am here to counter the thesis of our title, unprecedented threats to religious liberty that we face. i am here to tell you that they are not unprecedented. i am not saying that to comfort you. they are not unprecedented but they have -- recent controversies have given them more visibility.

what do i mean? i am an attorney by training. the other confession i will make is i have a day job as a lobbyist. it is what i do on behalf of the community. that gives me a perspective of what has been going on in the trenches and the legislative arena which i think is instructive in setting the context for the threats that we face today in religious liberty. i want to take us back to 1990 when the supreme court handed down a decision. in the opinion, the court threw out the notion of free exercise and religion, that free religion advocates fought prevailed for many, many years. before then, in order for a government law that was generally neutral, not targeted at religion, but a neutral law -- in order for it to burden

the free exercise of religion and not be struck down, it had to be -- the government had to show it was showing a compelling state interest and the means were the least restrictive on religious liberty. the issue at hand was whether native americans could be using peyote as a part of their religious services. could the government restricts that -- restrict that in outlawing hallucinogenic drug use? what happened in that case was that the compelling state interest was thrown out. and the standard was reduced for the protection of free exercise.

if you had a general law not designed to discriminate against religious freedom, the government had a rational basis. that would be sufficient. what was the reaction? a broad coalition stretching from the far left to the far right gathered together, worked with bipartisan champions in congress, in the senate ted kennedy, to move a piece of legislation which passed in 1993 overwhelmingly. the congress saw to legislatively reinstate the compelling interest standard. a few years later, the supreme court gets to say, thank you, congress, we get the last word. in 1997, striking down the religious restoration act. in one of its early rehnquist era decisions designed to

contracts congressional federal power to some degree with regard to the states. so, the coalition gets back together. let's get back together and write a new law which we can pass through congress which we will try to tailor to the new principles that the supreme court put forward. then the fissures began to become evident. everybody in between, secular and multi-faith. started designing a statute to substitute the previous. this again would have been a broad reinstatement of a standard across all kinds of cases and issues.

it would have sought to reinstate the standard that government can only infringe upon religion in the least restrictive means possible. then the coalition fractured. because by this point in the late 1990's, a number of folks who were advocating for women's rights and for gay rights in particular saw a broad standard like that as being counterproductive to the agenda that they were pursuing. if you had a broad standard to which government laws had to overcome, that would inhibit, if not prevent, initiatives put forward by women advocacy groups and gay rights advocacy groups from being able to go forward.

as their power mounted politically, that resulted in the congress which had previously passed the religious freedom restoration act overwhelmingly caused the support in congress to begin to wane. the broad bill was able to be passed through the house of representatives by a majority vote. but then it stalled coming over to the senate because of these political tensions. fast forward to the end of this chapter. the coalition had to go back to the drawing board. the statute that was passed is called the religious land use and institutionalized persons act. and only reinstates the compelling governmental interest dan beard with regard to categories of laws. land use because there was a

lengthy pattern in this country where zoning and land-use laws have been used in a discriminatory fashion against houses of worship. if you want to use a zoning statute to try to prevent a church or synagogue from coming into your community, you have to meet this test. also institutionalized persons have had a unique set of issues. the coalition could not hold to reinstate the principles across all kinds of categories or issues -- health care, employment, so on and so forth. they could not hold that coalition together or that bipartisan support together to reassert that standard by the time we reached the year 2000. president clinton signed the

more restrictive land-use institutionalized persons act into law before he left office. in this pattern can also be seen in another piece of legislation in the employment context which we worked on for many years. to protect religious people in the workplace. for many years, we were pursuing a religious freedom act amending an act of 1964 to reinstate a high level of protection for people of faith in the workplace. it would have encouraged and prodded and their employers to accommodate their religious needs in the workplace so individuals who have scheduling needs to observe religious holidays could be able to have their schedules shifted to accommodate their holiday schedules so people who need to

wear religious clothing could wear that in the workplace. so conscience issues in the workplace or lawyers who do not want to work on death penalty cases or anybody else in between, if they had an objection -- they could not walk in and say "you need to let me off with no consideration whatsoever," but it tilted the balance in favor of accommodation. this was founded on a bipartisan basis. john kerry and rick santorum. you did not see those two coming together very often. we had support left to right. it was again stymied by the same groups that identified before. by a women's advocacy groups who did not want to see accommodation for pharmacists in the pharmacies. they did not want to entertain

the notion that a pharmacist could say, "i do not want to dispense morning after pills against my conscience." another pharmacist on duty would have provided it, filling the prescription. there would not have been any loss in that scenario. that was not acceptable. there were similar hypothetical or even real world objections from the gay rights community as loud. if you are a licensed clerk in the city of boston and you do not want to issue licenses for same-sex marriage couples, someone else at the desk and do it. your conscience is protected. this piece of legislation was stymied and stalled because of these tensions. the last example i want to give it is more recently what

happened with one of the priorities of the gay rights community, called the employment nondiscrimination act which would ban discrimination in the private sector on the basis of sexual orientation. before 2006, when that legislation was introduced, year after year, it contained an exemption for religious employers. it said "this act shall not apply to religious employers." post-2006, the congressional elections changed and there was an emergence of greater political power. they took that one sentence exemption and they rewrote eight into three paragraphs. you do not need to be a lawyer to understand that turning it into three paragraphs makes it

more complicated. they wanted to dramatically restrict the exemption for religious employers with regard to whether or not they could be on the hook for hiring or not hiring people on the basis of sexual orientation. we had to go through a legislative fight. we had to go to the hill and to others and say you cannot move this legislation forward without a proper exemption for religious institutions. we were able to prevail and have a more robust protection in there. so we had a small victory there, but the legislation has not passed. the threats we see today of the issues that have been mentioned, these other things mentioned, these other things that are