This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Some say that the freedom of religion in the United States is under threat. The suggestion is that said threat is coming from the outside, from secular activists and government agencies.
Maybe. But the acts that do the most damage to the idea that religious groups and individuals should be left to make their own decisions are the startlingly poor choices made by some people and their insistence that their faith excuses any number of illegal or improper activities.
Witness the efforts of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Its leaders, including the one who is now a fugitive from justice, are trying to use the constitutional freedom of religion in general, and the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act in particular, to make civil and criminal charges against them go away.
They should not be allowed to get away with it.
Back in 1993, members of Congress were worried that some U.S. Supreme Court decisions had gone too far in ruling that religious beliefs could be made to yield to state and local laws and administrative decisions.
They overwhelmingly passed, and President Bill Clinton signed, the RFRA in an attempt to steer the courts toward giving religiously motivated acts — one motivating example being the use of otherwise illegal peyote in Native American religious rites — a wider exemption from the law.
But even that statute hands to the courts much of the chore of determining what is and what is not an undue burden on the exercise of religion.
For example, federal courts are being asked to decide if leaders of the FLDS have a First Amendment right to take and distribute the benefits of federal food stamps the way they like, not the way federal law requires. Or if that same group's religious freedom exempts it from having to obey child labor laws.
The RFRA says the law can supercede religious belief when there is a "compelling government interest" in enforcing the rule equally.
It is hard to see how there could be a more compelling government interest than to ensure that federally funded benefits are distributed in accordance with the law rather than in ways that clearly benefit a few at the expense of the many. Or than to protect children from the greed of adults.
People who want government to respect the freedom of religion should hope that the FLDS loses these cases. Because if such behavior is allowed to define freedom of religion under RFRA, then that freedom will have even fewer friends than it had before.