Say this for Mike Lee: the man knows how to extrapolate on a militant leftwing issue, and he doesn't let any moss grow betwixt his toes:
Senator Mike Lee says a bill he introduced would prevent the Internal Revenue Service from denying tax-exempt status to any person or group that refuses to perform gay marriages.
"What we're talking about here is the freedom of religious belief, the freedom of a church, for example, to adhere to its own religious doctrine so that it cannot be discriminated against by the government," the Utah Republican said in an interview with Newsmax.
It's a telling thing about the state of the nation that such a bill has to even be introduced at all. But you can just see the Obama Regime using the IRS to stamp out Christian religious liberties by forcing pastors to perform sodoweddings, just as the Lavender Lobby is forcing bakeries to sell "wedding" cakes to homosexual "couples".
Of course, you can also see O completely ignoring Lee's bill and using the IRS to effectively shut down churches by Executive decree regardless of what the law and Constitution say, too. Which indicates that the purpose of Lee's bill isn't so much to change the law, since it won't go anywhere in this Congress, but to "raise consciousness," as it were, about this issue.
Lee said the federal government's failure to protect religious liberty — citing ObamaCare mandates for contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs — was a key motivation for him to introduce the "Marriage and Religious Freedom Act," which protects clergy from being punished if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
"This is something that the overwhelming majority of Americans would support and the overwhelming majority of Americans would be disappointed if they discovered Congress would be unwilling to pass something like this," Lee said.
Translation: With ObamaCare becoming an Extinction Level Event for Democrats in 2014, perhaps enough panicked Donks might be recruitable to Lee's cause that it could actually pass the Senate. Though I still can't see Dirty Harry allowing a vote on it, much less The One signing it if it ever got to his desk. Still, it is a worthwhile thing to do, and it lays the groundwork for passage in the next (Republican) Congress, if not this one. The only sense in which "hit 'em constantly" makes any strategic sense.
BTW, Senator Lee isn't the only one who thinks the M&RFA is necessary:
Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, says the protections under Lee's bill are necessary, Catholic World News reports.
"Increasingly, state laws are being used to target individuals and organizations for discrimination simply because they act on their belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman," Cordileone said.
"Such prejudice must not be allowed to spread to the federal government."
Too late, I'm afraid. But this is, in military terms, preparing the battlefield in advance of an anticipated battle. And with the anti-A&E/pro-Phil Robertson blowback tsunami inundating the Left at the worst possible time, this is a battle more than worth having.
Still, I think the day is fast approaching when civil disobedience will become necessary, and Christian pastors will be frog-marched out of their churches in handcuffs for their stand for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Word of God. The more unpopular Barack Obama becomes, the less he'll have to lose from letting his inner despot run free and wild, signaling for one and all to see that the Old Republic is well and truly dead.
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