A Vermont girls’ high school basketball team deemed ineligible to play in future activities after forfeiting a game against a team with a transgender student-athlete is now suing educational authorities in the state for religious discrimination, arguing they are punishing the school for its religious beliefs.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in U.S. District Court on Nov. 21 stating that an ordinance passed by the City of Brookings in 2021, which limits the number of days per week organizations can feed the hungry, may have “substantially burdened” a local church’s religious freedoms.
“The ultimate goal of the enemy is silencing the Gospel," the Republican said in 2004 after Jewish parents sued a school for pushing Christianity on their kids.
Thirty years since the passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, religious liberty rights remain essential, but they’re increasingly devalued and misunderstood, according to Sen. James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma. For some lawmakers and community leaders, issues like ending anti-LGBTQ discrimination and protecting abortion rights now take precedence over defending people of faith, which puts religious freedom’s future at risk, Lankford said Thursday during a webinar on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act hosted by the Orrin G. Hatch Foundation. To defend religious freedom today requires consistently making the case that conscience rights benefit everyone, said Lankford and other panelists.
LifeGem is a company that extracts carbon from cremated human remains and transforms it into diamonds to remember loved ones. Handout/LifeGem via Getty ImagesDeath may be inevitable and universal, but the ways people deal with it most certainly are not. Whether doing Tibetan Buddhist sky burials, attending a graveside service dressed in black or putting one’s parents’ ashes in the sacred Ganges, each culture has its own ways to deal with death and mourning. Yet death rites around the world do sh