As general counsel for the Diocese of Lansing, I’ve been making visits to parishes throughout the diocese. During these visits, one of the subjects I routinely discuss is religious liberty, encouraging our parishes, schools, and other Catholic entities to hold fast to the Catholic faith regardless of the pressures they may be facing from federal, state, or local governments, and promising to defend them should they be challenged. Bishop Boyea has himself been a leader in religious liberty, supporting several important religious liberty lawsuits in recent years. These lawsuits have protected Catholic Charities’ right to run their adoption programs in conformity with Catholic teaching regarding marriage as being between one man and one woman, have challenged the state’s revised civil rights law that extended protections for sexual orientation and gender identity but failed to include statutory religious liberty protections, and, most recently, have challenged the state’s law mandating that counselors affirm minors who are confused regarding their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Yet truly, these religious liberty lawsuits are a new phenomenon. It’s not that the diocese has not always strongly defended the religious freedom of Catholics — it has. Rather, it’s that, in recent years (and especially in the last 10 or so years since the Supreme Court’s approval of so-called “gay marriage”), the culture and laws have themselves changed as our society has abandoned Christian moral values once taken for granted — values regarding marriage, abortion, contraception, sterilization, euthanasia, homosexual behavior, and, most recently, even what it means to be a man or a woman.

It was not always so. In the 1990s, with little opposition, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, reiterating Congress’ commitment to protect the free exercise of religion from being burdened by government. Yet today, rather than uniformly defending the American value of religious freedom, many politicians have chosen to side with activists, abandoning their previous support for religious liberty and dismissing religious opposition to the revolutionary sexual agenda as bigoted. 

Just this year alone, federal agencies have proposed 15 new rules or draft rules advancing a radical agenda of abortion, contraception, sterilization, and gender ideology. And as bad as these rules are, they are far worse for failing to include what used to be standard religious liberty protections. 

While the bishop will continue to invoke legal defenses to protect religious freedom in our Diocese, it remains vital for Catholic voters to demand that their representatives support religious protections in legislation, vote for those who do, and oppose those who do not and who advance false ideologies contrary to the teachings of the Church.