The abortion pill mandate coerces religious employers, but those employers aren't asking to coerce anyone.
How to reconcile the right of private religious institutions and private individuals to function effectively in the public square (for example, the right of a Hillel house or a Christian fraternity to limit membership to those who share its religious views) with the equally important rule that government may not coerce religious observance in public institutions is not an easy question.
And that is the view, no doubt, of many readers here, some of whom will be delighted at the prospect of the law coercing religious organisations into changing their understanding of marriage and will rejoice at the expulsion of more conscience-stricken Christian or Muslim teachers.
They've made clear, through Air Force Instruction 1-1 and myriad DoD regulations, that it's improper for commanders to use their power to coerce religious practice or promote a particular religious viewpoint.
Consequently, there was no risk in those cases that citizens would be coerced into religious participation simply to curry favor in a setting where they were actually asking for something from state or federal officials.
These plaintive pleas for help have included forced attendance at military Holiday Balls with clear, Christian sectarian religious themes, the coerced swearing of religious oaths, mandatory "spiritual fitness" testing and a veritable plethora of other "spiritual rape" grievances large and small across the entirety of the United States armed forces home and abroad.
By coercing the religious charities, it is teaching the faithful to distrust government, to segregate themselves from bureaucratic overreach, to pull inward.
But what to make of USCIRF's listing of Egypt this year for the recent riots involving Coptic Christians; or Nigeria for anti-Christian violence or India, specifically because some states in that country have tried to regulate the practice of coerced and mass religious conversions driven by dollar-rich American evangelical churches?
The photo also strongly indicates that this administration has no qualms about coercing others into religious displays, without respect for their religious orientations.
