August 8, 2014
I would like to speak to you a little bit today about what Latter-day Saints need to know to preserve our first freedom, religious liberty. I will begin with a bit of doctrine, but we won’t have time to talk about all of the doctrine on religious freedom. I will then move on to talk about some apostolic calls by several of our church leaders on the subject. Then I’ll go into a survey of several prominent areas of concern right now, largely through the lens of litigation, which is what the Becket Fund does, but also to familiarize you, as a Latter-day Saint audience, with the various areas that are causes for concern in the battle for religious liberty.
I think often as Latter-day Saints, we think first of the issues surrounding same-sex marriage and the conflicting interests for religious liberty in that specific area, but the battle for religious freedom is so much broader than that. I hope today to be able to discuss some of these other areas and round out your understanding of where and what these key areas are.
The Latter-day Saint commitment to fight for religious freedom for people of all faiths actually began at our beginning. The Prophet Joseph Smith said, “The Saints can testify whether I am willing to lay down my life for my brethren. If it has been demonstrated that I have been willing…to die for a Mormon, I am bold to declare before Heaven that I am just as ready to die in defending the rights of a Presbytarian [sic], a Baptist, or a good man of any other denomination; for the same principle which would trample upon the rights of the Latter-day Saints would trample upon the rights of the Roman Catholics, or of any other denomination who may be unpopular and too weak to defend themselves.”[1]
Indeed, the Prophet Joseph Smith deemed religious liberty to be so central to our doctrine that he included it in the Articles of Faith, and it was also the subject of a revelation in the Doctrine & Covenants. The Eleventh Article of Faith talks about claiming the privilege of worshipping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience and allowing all men the same privilege.[2] Doctrine & Covenants Section 134 talks about rights of conscience and the importance of protecting the sphere of conscience for everyone.[3]
In our day, many apostolic messages on religious freedom have blessed our church and people of faith around the globe. LDS Church leaders and the Public Affairs Department have done a wonderful job of building networks with leaders of other faiths and have created online resources promoting religious freedom. I would encourage all of you to visit the LDS Newsroom, where there is a collection on their religious freedom page of some high quality resources, including video documentaries, one called “What is Religious Freedom,” some Mormon Messages, and print materials to educate members on these issues.[4] There is even a new Facebook page called “Supporting Religious Freedom,”[5] which I encourage those of you who are on Facebook to “Like” and follow. There’s also a comprehensive selection of all General Conference talks on this topic.
To highlight just two of those apostolic messages, I want to focus on a talk that Elder Quentin L. Cook gave at the BYU-Idaho Commencement in 2011, where he talked about the rising generation and the need for them to make their voices heard in defense of religious freedom. He said: “One of the reasons that the attack on moral and religious principles had been so successful is the reluctance of people of faith to express their views. Extraordinary efforts will be required to protect religious liberty. Our doctrine confirms what the U.S. Founding Fathers and political philosophers have advocated.”[6]
Then Elder Oaks, of course given his background in the law, has given several wonderful addresses on the topic of religious freedom. One of them was at Chapman University in Southern California, also in 2011, where he called on Latter-day Saints to unite with like-minded groups in this fight. He said, “It is imperative that those of us who believe in God and in the reality of right and wrong unite more effectively to protect our religious freedoms… All that is necessary for unity and a broad coalition along the lines I am suggesting is a common belief that there is right and wrong in human behavior that has been established by a Supreme Being. All who believe in that should unite more effectively to preserve and to strengthen the freedom to advocate and practice our religious beliefs, whatever they are. We must walk together for a ways on the same path in order to secure our freedom to pursue our separate ways when that is necessary according to our own belief.”[7]
I have the great fortune of working for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest law firm. It was founded in 1994 by a devout Catholic, Kevin “Seamus” Hasson. We are very committed to the principle of defending religious liberty for all people, as Elder Oaks encourages us to do, and we are the only such organization in America that fights for the religious liberty of all faiths. Since our founding, the Becket Fund has defended religious liberty for all, including the Amish, Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Native Americans, Sikhs, and Zoroastrians. In a pluralistic society, with many differing views on religion, we believe that protecting the basic civil right of religious expression is an essential part of constitutional order and our increasingly diverse modern society.
We do this by working in three areas:
- In the courts of law, where we litigate precedent-setting cases
- In the field of public opinion, where we appear in local and national media outlets to engage in public discussion
- In the academy, through publications and most recently through a newly-established religious liberty clinic within the Stanford Law School, where law students have an opportunity to participate in religious liberty cases.
So what are the pressing religious liberty issues that we face today? And what are the cases that we are litigating to push back against these threats?
1. The first area of concern is government mandates that force individuals, communities of faith, religious ministries, and family businesses to choose between violating the law and violating their religious convictions by paying for drugs and services that violate their faith.
The Becket Fund was the first law firm to file a lawsuit challenging the HHS mandate. The mandate was issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the new healthcare law. It required all employers, including religious objectors, to pay for contraception, sterilization, and what some believe to be abortion-inducing, so-called “emergency contraceptives.” This would include drugs such as Plan B, the “Morning After Pill,” and ella, the “Week After Pill,” and several IUDs that certain Christian faiths believe cause an early abortion by preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg. Under this mandate, there is a very narrow exemption for churches – but only churches or “houses of worship.” However, there are many religious organizations, including colleges, universities, schools, hospitals, and other charitable organizations that are religiously-oriented which do not qualify for the exemption from this mandate. If a religiously-oriented organization does not comply, they can be subject to crippling fines that are designed to force them into compliance.
The Administration gave a grace period to certain non-profit religious ministries, delaying the enforcement of the mandate for them while it sought to devise some sort of “accommodation.” Under this accommodation, the government proposed to shift the responsibility for fulfilling the mandate from the religious organization onto its insurance company. This is somewhat of an economic fiction where the religious institution would still bear the cost of these objectionable services in the form of higher insurance premiums. This so-called compromise by the government has not been well-received, to say the least, by many of these non-profit religious organizations.
While there was a brief reprieve for the non-profits, the Government did not provide an accommodation of any sort for for-profit businesses. So, the cases dealing with for-profit businesses progressed through the courts faster than the non-profit cases. That is why the Hobby Lobby case – which involved the Green’s closely-held family business – arrived at the Supreme Court first, because the Green family and Hobby Lobby did not receive any accommodation from the government.
We brought the Hobby Lobby case to the U.S. Supreme Court this last term. It was consolidated with another case called Conestoga Woods, which was from Pennsylvania. Those two cases, Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods, were argued in March by the former Solicitor General of the United States Paul Clement, and they were decided on the last day of the Supreme Court term on June 30th. As you may have read, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. The basis of the legal claim was a challenge under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, not a constitutional challenge under the First Amendment. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is a federal civil rights statute that was passed about twenty years ago with strong bipartisan support. Both Republicans and Democrats came together “across the aisle” to pass the bill almost unanimously. RFRA protects the rights of religious persons against the government imposing “substantial burdens” on their religious exercise.
Here, the first question before the Court was: “Is this for-profit business a ‘person’ protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act?” The court, in a 5-2 decision, left no doubt that private, closely-held businesses like Hobby Lobby are protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Now you might ask, “Why 5-2? I thought there were nine members of the Supreme Court?” Well, two members of the court, Justice Breyer and Justice Kagan, did not answer that question. Only Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissented on this point.
On the second question, the Court held on the merits in a 5-4 ruling, with Justice Kennedy as the deciding vote, that yes, the HHS mandate does violate RFRA’s terms, as it applies to closely-held family businesses. Specifically, the Court held that the threat of fining these businesses millions and millions of dollars if they don’t comply is surely a substantial burden on religious exercise. The Court said, “If these consequences do not amount to a substantial burden, it is hard to see what would.”[8] The Court then inquired whether the government had demonstrated a compelling governmental interest, using the least-restrictive means of accomplishing the interest. The Court said no, the government hadn’t shown that it utilized the least restrictive means. In other words, there are less-restrictive ways of accomplishing the government’s goal of providing contraceptives. The Court said that the government could just as easily pay for the contraceptive services themselves rather than force religious objectors to do so. It was a great victory for the Green family, for Hobby Lobby, for all closely-held family businesses that strive to run their business according to their religious beliefs.
Now, what about these religious non-profit ministries that are still challenging this mandate? What does Hobby Lobby mean for them? The Little Sisters of the Poor is an order of Catholic nuns that care for the elderly poor, and they continue to challenge the HHS mandate in the lower courts. We also represent another client, the Eternal Word Television Network, which is a Catholic media network founded by a cloistered nun, as well as Wheaton College, an Evangelical Christian college.
Under the accommodation for non-profit religious entities, the government requires non-profit religious objectors to sign a form that authorizes their insurance company to provide the objectionable drugs and devices in their stead. Many religious non-profit organizations cannot accept that accommodation because signing the form would still constitute complicity with evil, engaging in an action that would be endorsing and complicit in a grave sin. The U.S. Supreme Court earlier this year actually provided extraordinary relief to two of these religious non-profits: the Little Sisters of the Poor and Wheaton College. The Court told them that they did not need to sign that form. They could simply notify the government of their religious objection. So now, the government has to go back, rework its accommodation and figure out what it is going to do in these religious non-profit cases.
2. So let’s move on to the next topic, which is religious autonomy. The second area of concern is the effort by some to restrict the freedom of churches and other faith-based organizations to organize and choose their own leaders based on religious criteria free from government intrusion.
You may recall two years ago there was a really important case at the Supreme Court called Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC. We also represented Hosanna-Tabor at the Supreme Court, along with Doug Laycock, who is a professor at the University of Virginia Law School. The issue in that case was the “ministerial exception.” What does that mean? Well, for forty years, all the federal courts of appeals and many state supreme courts had recognized the existence of this ministerial exception, which is a constitutionally-based rule that exempts certain religiously-based employment decisions from the reach of certain employment laws. In Hosanna-Tabor, the Justice Department actually argued at the Supreme Court that the ministerial exception should not exist at all – that there were no special protections in the Constitution and the First Amendment that protected this very special relationship between churches and their ministers. This was a head-on attack, challenging the very existence of religious autonomy in the hiring and firing of ministerial employees.
During the oral argument in that case, several of the Justices, including Justice Kagan, who was appointed by the current Administration, found that position so remarkable that she said so during oral argument. Later, in its unanimous opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that position as extreme, remarkable, and untenable and simply not the way the First Amendment works. Instead the Supreme Court confirmed that this ministerial exception protects, very broadly, the right of churches and other faith-based organizations to choose their leaders free from government intervention.
So, if we won in Hosanna-Tabor, then why is this still an area of concern? Well, the reason is, there’s another Supreme Court case called Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. That was a case that did not turn out so well in the Supreme Court several years earlier. It actually upheld something called an “all-comers” policy at a publicly funded law school out in California that required student groups to accept anyone into their group’s membership and leadership ranks. So, if you were a Catholic student organization, you had to accept an atheist into your membership, and you even had to accept an atheist as the president of your group. The administrations at many state-funded and even at many private universities that are not specifically bound by this ruling are now using this decision to create and enforce similar policies. I read an article recently about how these types of policies are driving religious student groups off-campus at Vanderbilt University, for example. Student groups are simply not requesting official recognition anymore on campus because of these policies. So these types of policies are pushing religious groups away from campus, off-campus, and in some cases, into extinction.
3. The third area of concern is religious land use. Many Latter-day Saints are familiar with this topic because we are familiar with the Church’s struggle to get temples built in various areas around the world and perhaps to even allow spires of a certain height or Angel Moronis on top of those spires.
But this is an area that affects many different religious faiths. We represented the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, in Tennessee. This particular community of Muslims had been part of this local community for about thirty years, but in 2010 when they sought to build a new mosque to accommodate their larger numbers, their efforts were met with very hostile protests from a small group of local residents who claimed that this congregation was threatening simply because they were Muslim. This hostility actually included several acts of vandalism, as you can see depicted on this slide here it says “Not Welcome.” There were even some arson and bomb threats, which resulted in a federal indictment.
The opposition eventually reached the courts, as these types of cases often do, and those who opposed the mosque filed a state court lawsuit. Even though the county planning commission approved this new mosque at a regular meeting with regular public notice, the state court judge held that that regular notice was not sufficient in this case. Because of the “tremendous public interest” surrounding the mosque, the judge decided that the county planning commission’s decision in this matter should have met a heightened legal standard.
The Becket Fund filed a federal lawsuit. We were joined by the Department of Justice in this case, requesting that the Islamic community be permitted to complete the building permit approval process. We argued that applying a tougher legal standard than had been applied to all of the Christian churches in the area in previous years violated the Constitution. The federal judge agreed, and ordered that the mosque needed to be finished, which it in fact was, in time for the celebration of Ramadan.
4. The next area that I’d like to talk briefly about is, again, dealing with conscience rights, specifically those related to pharmacists that have a religious objection to dispensing certain drugs. Again, this involves some of the same objectionable “abortifacient” drugs involved in the HHS mandate: Plan B, ella, those sorts of drugs that some believe induce an early abortion. Here, we represent two different clients in two different states, one in Illinois and one in Washington State, challenging regulations that would require religious pharmacists to stock and dispense Plan B and ella, even when doing so would violate their religious convictions.
In Washington, the State Board of Pharmacy initially supported a rule that protected conscience for pharmacy workers and permitted them, if they had a religious objection, to refer customers requesting those drugs to other nearby pharmacies. But then, under pressure from the Washington State governor, the Board of Pharmacy reversed course. Even though the Board admitted that there was no evidence at all – and this is what is so significant – there was no evidence that there had been any patient that had been unable to obtain medication due to the objection of a religious pharmacist, despite this, the State Board issued a regulation that required these pharmacists to stock and dispense these drugs.
So, two religious pharmacists sued because they were forced into a position of choosing between their faith and their profession. One pharmacist had already lost her job and the other was threatened with losing her job. In the end, we were successful in persuading the trial court to find the Washington State regulations unconstitutional. That decision was appealed up to the Ninth Circuit and we are still representing those parties in the Ninth Circuit case. In the Illinois case, we were successful in having those regulations definitively struck down, and there was no appeal in that case.
5. The next category is redefinition of anti-discrimination laws. This involves state court decisions and new state statutes that redefine anti-discrimination laws to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual conduct but lack sufficient corresponding protection for religious freedom. For example, you may have read in the news that in Massachusetts, Illinois, and the District of Colombia, faith-based adoption agencies have had to stop placing children for adoption, and in some cases they have closed their doors altogether rather than capitulate to new legal requirements that violate their religious teachings on the family.
On the issue of same-sex marriage, the Becket Fund does not take a position on same-sex marriage per se, but we do take a position on the religious exemptions that should be built into these laws to provide a sufficiently robust protection for religious persons. In December of 2005, we convened a conference with noted First Amendment scholars representing the full spectrum of views on same-sex marriage, and they all agreed that there would be inevitable conflicts between same-sex marriage and religious freedom. Indeed we are seeing those conflicts come to pass.
This conference resulted in the publication of a book (available on Amazon) which remains the touchstone of scholarly discourse on the subject.
6. A sixth area of concern is the effort by some to expunge all evidence of religion from the public square. There are many examples of this. There are those who would strip the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance or discontinue this nation’s long tradition of legislative prayer. Indeed, there was a case at the Supreme Court earlier this year, Town of Greece v. Galloway, which dealt with this issue of legislative prayer and upheld the practice, due to our nation’s long history of legislative prayer. There are also cases that involve removing religious symbols, whether they be roadside crosses or statues of Christ established as veteran’s memorials.
For many years, the Becket Fund has defended the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance from California to New Hampshire to Massachusetts, and this summer, we’ve moved to intervene in a case in New Jersey. In the California case, we successfully argued before the Ninth Circuit that the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance actually affirms a foundational political premise in the tradition of American law and rights, namely that human rights are not bestowed by the state but are rather derived from a Source beyond the state’s control or discretion. Thus, the words “under God” in the Pledge do not unconstitutionally advance religion, but rather reflect the deeply-rooted political philosophy of the Founding Fathers, who believed that those rights derived from a Source greater than a government made of men.
7. A final area is the protection of religious liberty for prisoners. On October 7th, the Becket Fund will be back at the Supreme Court again with Professor Doug Laycock in a case dealing with prisoners’ religious rights. This case involves another federal civil rights statute: the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000.
Regarding this act, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said this in a joint statement: “Whether from indifference, bigotry, or lack of resources, some institutions restrict religious liberty in egregious and unnecessary ways.”[9] So, Congress held several hearings and found that many prisons barred Jewish inmates from wearing yarmulkes; they denied Catholics access to Sacraments; they shut down Evangelical Christian Bible studies; they denied Jewish prisoners Kosher food; and on and on. RLUIPA was passed to reinstate the very robust standard of “strict scrutiny.” Is there a compelling governmental interest? Does the government use the least-restrictive means when burdening the religious rights of prisoners?
Our case is Holt v. Hobbs, which deals with a Muslim prisoner who has been denied permission to grow a ½-inch beard that his Muslim faith requires, even though Arkansas already allows prisoners to grow beards for medical reasons, and even though a ½-inch beard is permissible in over 40 state prison systems and the federal prison system.
Holt originally represented himself, writing a hand-written petition to the Supreme Court. Justice Alito read it, thought there was merit to it, and sent it to the entire Court. The Court eventually granted the petition, and the case will be argued on October 7th. The case has the potential to be a very significant one interpreting this federal civil rights statute, the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
I’ll end with this quote from Michael Gerson, who was a speechwriter in the Bush Administration at the same time that my husband John was serving in the White House Counsel’s office. He wrote this in a Washington Post op-ed that dealt with the HHS mandate, but I think it encapsulates nicely the struggle in American society over religious liberty: “Liberalism, back to John Locke, has understood religion to be a fundamentally private matter. It has a difficult time understanding the existence of loyalties outside the law, and often views them as dangerous unless the demands of faith are harmless and picturesque, like the Amish. But this is not the way many religious people view religion. They view it as a grounding provision of justice, and the source of standards for a community of believers. It has been part of the American miracle to balance individual rights with institutional religious freedom.”[10]
I know that the “American miracle” – as Michael Gerson put it – was the creation of an all-powerful and all-loving Heavenly Father. I also know that we can be His hands here on earth to help protect and defend this cherished freedom. I urge each and every one of you to think of the ways you can be involved in your community to stand up for religious freedom, whether it is on your school board or on your library committee, or whether it is in other ways. Find ways where you can be involved and get out in the community to link arms with our brothers and sisters of other faiths, as Elder Oaks encouraged us to do, and to find ways to stand up in your own way for this, our first freedom.
I will now take questions.
Question: Does it concern or frighten you that the Supreme Court decision in Hobby Lobby was 5-4?
Answer: No, it doesn’t. I think the reason that you saw 5-4 rather than 9-0 is that the statute we were litigating under, RFRA, is a balancing test. It says you must balance the government’s interests with the religious interests in the case. So, different judges are going to weigh those interests differently. Indeed, the four more liberal Justices found that the balance should be on the side of the government in this case. So I’m not surprised, but you know, at the Supreme Court, you only need five votes, and we got them.
Question: Could you comment on the possibility that the Bill of Rights might be amended either judicially or legislatively to exclude religious liberty?
Answer: Constitutional Amendments are so difficult to adopt that I don’t think there will be any amendment to the Bill of Rights. However, there have been some calls, after the Hobby Lobby decision, to reform RFRA. There is a “dialogue” between Congress and the Supreme Court: Congress passes a statute, the Court interprets it, and if Congress doesn’t like the Court’s interpretation, then Congress can go back and re-legislate and change things if they want to. So, after Hobby Lobby, you saw a lot of fist-pounding about how “we need to change RFRA.” Personally, I don’t think those efforts are going to get very far, but that is the constitutional conversation that we have in our country, in our system of separation of powers.
Question: How does the Becket Fund have standing to file cases or do they always file as amicus?
Answer: We file cases on behalf of clients. So, when we see an issue that is significant, sometimes clients will come to us, sometimes we will go out and see if there is a client who is interested, but we will represent them as their attorneys. Other times we do file amicus briefs. We have filed amicus briefs in almost every case involving religious liberty at the Supreme Court for the last twenty years that we’ve been in existence. So we do file a lot of amicus briefs! For amicus briefs, we are not a party to the case; we just give legal arguments to the court for them to consider as they rule on the case. So that’s how being an amicus is different from being a party in the case.
Question: Does the BYU Law School or the Church through other means file amicus briefs or provide support in other cases where schools, municipal governments, the Boy Scouts, etc. are sued by the ACLU?
Answer: In Hosanna-Tabor, the case in 2012 that involved the ministerial exception, there was an amicus brief that was filed by the BYU Law School, Professor Cole Durham’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies. Kirton McConkie in Salt Lake City is very active in supporting our efforts and often times will draft amicus briefs, and the LDS Church will often join those amicus efforts.
Question: What might happen to temple marriages in Utah if gay marriage becomes totally legal here?
Answer: I think it is really important to recognize what is a problem and what is not a problem. Here, I don’t think that we are ever going to get to a place where the government would step in and say “you have to perform a same-sex marriage within the temple.” That is something that is so sacred and so much at the heart of the religious practice of our faith that it would likely never happen. So I don’t think that that is something that we need to be worried about.
Question: Sister Smith, thank you for defending us.
Answer: You’re welcome!
Question: There are a lot of same-sex marriage questions…
Answer: The same-sex marriage cases are going to be taken up to the Supreme Court. Many of those cases are currently in the process of filing cert petitions, which is the way that the Supreme Court selects cases. The Supreme Court has about 10,000 cert petitions that are filed every term. If you can imagine 10,000 petitions that the Supreme Court has to sift through, and they actually only decide about 80 cases each term on the merits; so there are only about 80 cases each year that are argued and then decided each year at the Supreme Court. Cert petitions on this issue will be evaluated by the Justices, and then if one is granted, the case will get oral argument. There will be some case in the near future that deals with this issue, because it is such a substantial issue of national import, that I am sure eventually the Supreme Court will grant cert in one of those cases; it’s just not clear which one, and they have to evaluate which one is the best – we call it the best “vehicle” – to evaluate the issues in the case.
Question: How far down the rabbit hole do the religious liberties of prisoners go? Can a Satanist prisoner sacrifice a chicken as part of his or her worship?
Answer: It’s really important to remember that, under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, again, it’s a balancing test: Is there a compelling governmental interest? Does the government use the least-restrictive means to further that interest? In the prison context, there will always be a very compelling interest in security. So, obviously in those types of situations where you’re dealing with that kind of a practice, there would be a compelling interest for security, and there’s always a balancing act going on here. In our case, a ½-inch beard doesn’t represent much of a security threat at all. The government has tried to argue in this case that you can hide things in a ½-inch beard, but they’ve yet to provide any examples of what could be hidden in a ½-inch beard. So there, you see the government providing something of a false “interest,” if you will, or an interest that is not well documented or supported by evidence.
Question: What is to prevent the Seventh Day Adventists from paying for blood transfusions? Is Hobby Lobby a slippery slope?
Answer: So I got this type of question a lot when I was doing media appearances after Hobby Lobby came down, and if you look at the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby, Justice Alito is very, very careful, and in fact went on for several pages to describe how limited the holding was in that case. He said this case only applies to the HHS mandate. It does not apply to blood transfusion cases, it does not apply to vaccination cases, it does not apply to race discrimination cases… So he actually went down the list of some of these areas where people had been saying “well this is a slippery slope and you’re just going to provide a huge exception for all kinds of these religious practices” but he was actually very careful in drafting a very narrow opinion that specifically discounted those concerns. Again, it’s a balancing test; in a vaccination case, you could have a very compelling interest in herd immunity, for example.
Thank you very much; you have been a wonderful audience today.
Notes
[1] Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Joseph Smith at 339–48 (2011), available at https://www.lds.org/manual/teachings-joseph-smith/chapter-29?lang=eng.
[2] Article of Faith 11, available at https://www.lds.org/scriptures/pgp/a-of-f/1.1-13?lang=eng#1.
[3] Doctrine & Covenants 134:14, available at https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/134?lang=eng.
[4] See http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/official-statement/religious-freedom.
[5] See https://www.facebook.com/SupportReligiousFreedom.
[6] Elder Quentin L. Cook, “The Restoration of Morality and Religious Freedom,” Dec. 16, 2011, available at http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/the-restoration-of-morality-and-religious-freedom.
[7] Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “Preserving Religious Freedom,” Feb. 4, 2011, available at http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/elder-oaks-religious-freedom-Chapman-University.
[8] Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 134 S. Ct. 2751, 2759 (2014).
[9] Congressional Record at 16699 (July 27, 2000).
[10] Michael Gerson, “Obama’s contraception mandate tries to fool Catholics,” (Feb. 4, 2013) available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-gerson-obamas-contraception-mandate-tries-to-fool-catholics/2013/02/04/9f74896c-6efd-11e2-ac36-3d8d9dcaa2e2_story.html.
