I
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t’s National Religious
Freedom Day again here in the United States—an ironic holiday, considering
that our present administration has dedicated itself to stamping out individual
religious freedom wherever it can, in favor of a sort of institutional
religious freedom which allows landowners to impose their beliefs on their
tenants, businesses to impose their beliefs on their employees and customers,
and the rest of us to look back nostalgically on the days when we, too—as
individual people, not employees or tenants—had religious freedom. The Virginia
statute of religious freedom—honored in the breach on this memorial day—referred
to “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as
ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have
assumed dominion over the faith of others”; today we might add to that the
impious presumption of fallible and uninspired arts-and-crafts store owners and
cake bakers who have arrogantly assumed dominion over the faith of others. It’s
a sorry comedown.
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