The matter of religious exemptions from civil rights and labor laws is at the cutting edge of the contemporary political strategy of the Christian Right. We will continue to see this play out under the banner of religious liberty at all levels of public life for the foreseeable future and certainly throughout the 2016 election season.

That's the theme of my latest essay in The Public Eye magazine:  "When the Exception Is the Rule: Christianity in the Religious Freedom Debates."

A few broad stroke excerpts follow after the jump.

In early June, the Associated Press' Mary Clare Jalonick reported that a Montana woman interviewed by the FBI claimed that "her brother was sexually abused while in high school by [former House Speaker] Dennis Hastert, the wrestling coach who would become speaker of the House."

According to the AP story, Jolene Burdge of Billings, Montana, said "that the FBI interviewed her in mid-May about Hastert. She said her brother told her before he died in 1995 that his first homosexual contact was with Hastert and that the relationship lasted through all of his high school years."

Burdge, who in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" identified her brother as Stephen Reinboldt, "said Hastert had been a father figure to him at high school. But she also said she believed that relationship had caused irreparable harm. 'He damaged Steve, I think, more than any of us will ever know,' she told the morning show," AP reported.

When I began working for Americans United in 1987, one thing confused me: Why were there so many Southern Baptists hanging around?

Southern Baptists were the enemy - or so I thought. After all, they were extremely conservative and always advocating things like school prayer amendments and anti-LGBT legislation.

One week ago, the U.S. Supreme Court extended marriage equality nationwide. So where are we now?

To no one's surprise, leaders of the Religious Right and some of their political allies have been huffing and puffing. The U.S. Catholic bishops didn't much like it either.

A decade or so ago I was vacationing in Hot Springs,  Arkansas.  It was July 4th and I attended the First Baptist Church in the city.   The bulletin for the church stated the message would be a patriotic sermon about the nation.  I braced myself for what I feared would be some misguided attempt by clergy to mix the worship of God with the idolizing of the state.  I was pleasantly surprised.  The sermon dealt with religious liberty and how the nation was not founded by making the nation an official Christian enterprise, but the great American contribution to the world was the concept of separation of church and state.

This is a tricky time for the Christian Right. Immediately following the mass murder at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, some Christian Right leaders jumped onto the airwaves to claim the shooting was an example of the campaign against religious freedom in America. It turns out they were onto something, just not what they had thought it was. There has been an eerily-telling silence since then.

The horrific Charleston massacre in which nine people were killed has tended to derail the Christian Right's narrative of how faith and Christianity are under attack in America. On its face, this would seem to be an unlikely consequence of the episode, since it happened at a Wednesday evening Bible study at the church. This is significant in part because the constellation of dubious claims about the persecution of Christians and the threat to religious liberty in America is at the center of the Christian Right's approach to politics and public policy--and is increasingly the go-to gambit of conservative Republican politicians trying to demagogue their way into office - or out of a difficult issue of public policy.

Nevertheless, it would seem that this episode would fit the narrative: Christians killed right in their own church. Isn't that in line with what the Christian Right is saying about Christianity being under a wide-ranging siege in America?

For years now, Religious Right leaders have been whipping up hysteria by claiming that, should marriage equality become the law of the land, conservative churches will be forced to host same-sex marriages.

As arguments go, this one is just not very good. Several states have had marriage equality for years, yet no member of the clergy has been compelled to officiate at a same-sex marriage. As far as I know, no lawsuits like this have even been filed.

The conservative criticism of Laudato Sii, ("Praised Be"), Pope Francis's encyclical on the environment and poverty that began even before its release, has now reached a fever pitch.

It is of more than passing interest that many of the cadre of naysayers are members of the Catholic Right. And not coincidentally, many of them have strong ties to conservative Evangelicals. What is it that they truly fear about Laudato Sii? Is it the encyclical's inconvenient discussion of the disastrous implications climate change has upon the world's poor - or is it something else? To wit, does the Jesuit Pope Francis threaten to undermine the power of the Catholic Right-Evangelical political alliance?

I'd like to underscore the conclusion of this piece, which is crossposted from LGBTQ Nation.  The advance of civil rights for LGBTQ people is not to be conflated with religious persecution and martyrdom. What's more, no one gets to choose which laws they are going to obey. Not even conservative Christians. And certainly not in the name of religious freedom. -- FC

In 1964, hundreds of civil rights workers, many of them college students, traveled to Mississippi to help African Americans register to vote.  Over the ten weeks of what was called "Freedom Summer," more than a thousand people involved with the campaign were arrested, 80 Freedom Summer workers were beaten, 37 churches and 30 black homes or businesses were bombed or burned, four civil rights workers were killed, four people were critically wounded, and at least three black Mississippians were murdered.

Since then, summer campaigns on a variety of concerns have sought to subtly (or not so subtly) cast themselves in the heroic moral tradition of the Freedom Summer - though none has been as dramatic as the events of the summer of 1964.

Now the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is preparing a short summer campaign that is long on hyperbole. The Fortnight for Freedom is an annual two-week campaign (from June 21 to the Fourth of July) intended to highlight alleged threats to religious freedom in the United States.

These threats are said to come primarily from advances in LGBTQ rights generally and marriage equality in particular.

A provocative headline from Reuters news service last week caught my eye. "Irish plunge stake through Catholic Church's heart," it read.

The headline is perhaps a bit hyperbolic. The column, by John Lloyd, co-founder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, is a thoughtful analysis of how quickly the Catholic Church's influence has fallen in Ireland - and why that has happened.

So much of the contemporary religious liberty campaign being conducted by the Christian Right is demagogic fear-mongering designed to justify discrimination against other Americans, particularly LGBTQ people. While most of our attention is directed to larger-than-life marriage equality dramas being played out in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and major media outlets, the foundation is being laid for massive resistance to marriage equality and much more.

This is the story of one such effort that has received little attention.

American women today enjoy a right that for thousands of years of human civilization was virtually unheard of: The power to decide if they will have children and if so, how many they will have.

For that, you can thank lots of people, chief among them the scientists and researchers who invented and later perfected safe and effective forms of contraception.