by First Liberty Institute • 3 minutes
Vice President Kamala Harris once sponsored and supported legislation harmful to religious liberty.
As California’s senator in 2018, Harris introduced and was the lead sponsor of the “Do No Harm Act,” a bill aimed at gutting the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a landmark, bipartisan 1993 law that remains one of the most important federal safeguards for religious Americans. Harris claimed that the bill was necessary in order to prevent people from using those protections as a “license to discriminate.”
RFRA ensures religious Americans have an opportunity to seek relief in court when their religious freedom is violated. Harris’s proposed legislation would have taken away that core protection. People of faith would no longer have been able to rely on RFRA as a legal shield to vindicate their rights in certain cases.
Ryan T. Anderson, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, explained that the Do No Harm Act “threatened religious liberty, particularly in the context of abortion” because it would “withhold religious-liberty protections against abortion mandates.”
“The reality is that most of the current threats to religious liberty concern rights of conscience on the matters that would be specifically exempted by the Do No Harm Act. This bill targets countless faithful Christians and adherents of other faiths,” explained one of First Liberty’s legal experts in an op-ed back in 2018. “This country was founded on religious liberty. The Do No Harm Act strikes at the heart of that freedom.”
Harris was also an original cosponsor of the deceptively named “Equality Act.” First Liberty warned extensively about the dangers the bill posed to religious freedom. Similar to the “Do No Harm Act,” the “Equality Act” would have neutered religious protections under RFRA. And contrary to its title, this bill would have seriously damaged religious liberty, conscience rights and free speech rights for all Americans.
Far from promoting equal treatment or equality, the provisions would instead have punished and discriminated against any American with traditional, religious beliefs on matters of sex, gender, marriage or the sanctity of life. Plus, it would have put many vulnerable populations at risk by crippling faith-based organizations and their ability to deliver essential services to people in need.
“That measure would have stripped faith-based institutions like schools, charities and adoption agencies of their religious rights by enabling the government to prosecute them for discrimination for refusing to hire people who openly opposed their religious teachings,” reports the New York Post.
If supporting such legislation wasn’t alarming enough, then Senator Harris also took issue with a federal judicial nominee in 2018 over his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic service organization.
According to National Review, Harris tried to suggest that “belonging to a Catholic group with millions of members, which has been an important charity in the U.S. for more than a century, renders an individual unfit to serve as a judge.”
First Liberty sounded the alarm about Harris and other senators who were interrogating nominees over their religious beliefs. We made clear that a religious test for office is unconstitutional. Article VI of the Constitution clearly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Read More:
New York Post: Opinion | Bigoted Kamala Harris and her long history of faith-based discrimination
Deseret News: What would a Kamala Harris presidency mean for religious freedom?
Washington Times: Harris, Trump, and the fragility of religious freedom
Religion Unplugged: Harris, Walz And Shapiro: Election Faith Factors To Consider
Washington Times: Opinion | Kamala Harris policies aren’t just political positions, they directly challenge Christian values
Crosswalk: Kamala Harris’ Controversial Views on Religious Liberty Spark Concern among Christian Leaders
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