Tag Archives: religious

Cardinal Defends Hobby Lobby: "All You Have to Do Is Walk into a 7-11" for Contraceptives

by DarnellFlick Posted on April 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Sunday, New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, culture warrior extraordinaire, made a curious argument for why the Supreme Court should allow Hobby Lobby to eliminate the morning-after pill from its employee health care plan: if you want contraceptives, “all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them.”

The East Coast’s top Catholic made his comments Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation. “I think they’re just true Americans,” he told host Norah O’Donnell of Hobby Lobby’s owners, who claim that providing emergency contraceptive pills violates their religious beliefs. “Is the ability to buy contraceptives, that are now widely available—my Lord, all you have to do is walk into a 7-11 or any shop on any street in America and have access to them—is that right to access those and have them paid for, is that such a towering good that it would suffocate the rights of conscience?”

Couple of things:

The owners of Hobby Lobby are proposing to eliminate one kind of contraception from the company’s employee health care plans: the morning-after pill. The Greens, who own the company, do not have a problem with all contraception. In fact, the company plan still covers birth control pills.
Birth control pills are a form of contraception that isn’t available without a prescription. They are not sold on any shop on any street in America.
If Dolan is talking about emergency contraception, we would note that only one type of morning-after pill for sale in the US without a prescription: Plan B One Step and its generics.
These are also not sold on any shop on any street in America.
These are not sold at 7-11.

It’s almost as if Dolan doesn’t know very much about the contraceptives he opposes. Either that, or he hasn’t been to a 7-11 since giving up Go-Go Taquitos for Lent.

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Cardinal Defends Hobby Lobby: "All You Have to Do Is Walk into a 7-11" for Contraceptives

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This Tea Party Leader Seems Pretty Confused About the Hobby Lobby Case

by GuadaluStarns Posted on March 25, 2014

Mother Jones

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When the tea party movement first emerged, with its laser focus on fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget, it never really distinguished itself with a deep understanding of economic issues or the operations of government. Now that it’s joined the culture wars and shifted into divisive social issues it once eschewed, the movement doesn’t seem to have any better handle on law or policy than it did when it was warning President Obama to “keep your hands off my Medicare.”

Case in point: the Tea Party Patriots effort to insert itself into the religious freedom wars surrounding the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. On Tuesday, the group held a rally at the US Supreme Court to “stand up for the right to choose,” during the oral arguments in the biggest case on the docket this year, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby. The case involves a for-profit corporation with 13,000 employees and $3 billion in annual revenue that’s arguing the Obamacare requirement that the company’s health insurance plan cover most contraception violates its religious freedom. At the core of the case is the dubious contention that a corporation can hold religious beliefs.

Calling the event a “Freedom of Choice” rally, the tea partiers are co-opting the language of the reproductive rights activists who are arrayed on the other side of the case. On the Tea Party Patriots’ website, the groups insist that the case “isn’t about what Hobby Lobby, Inc. is or isn’t willing to provide to their employees. This is about everyone’s right to practice their religion without the government stepping in and telling them what to do.”

It’s obvious from Tea Party Patriots’ simplified description of the Hobby Lobby lawsuit and other statements that the group’s leaders are pretty clueless about the case (and the law). In a press release today, Martin claimed:

It is quite astonishing that the U.S. government, after forcing the health care law on the American people who overwhelmingly opposed it, has taken the further action of bringing a beloved family business to court to force them to violate their constitutional rights. The owners of Hobby Lobby have said repeatedly that they have no desire to make health care decisions for their employees. Why is the government forcing them to do so?

Emphasis mine. In fact, Hobby Lobby is in court precisely because its owners want to make health care decisions for employees—by denying insurance coverage for contraception to which it has religious objections. And the government has never forced a “beloved family business” to violate its constitutional rights. Leaving aside the fact that it’s not legally possible for a business to violate its own constitutional rights, there’s nothing in the Affordable Care Act that requires a company to provide health insurance for its employees, much less a plan that clashes with the religious beliefs of its owners.

As Georgetown law professor Martin Lederman has discussed extensively here, while the ACA includes an individual mandate that requires people to purchase insurance, there’s nothing in the law that requires their employers to provide it. But if a company does provide a plan, it must cover most forms of birth control, including the emergency contraception Plan B and Ella. If Hobby Lobby wants to avoid having its insurance plan cover these sorts of drugs, it can simply drop its insurance plan, pay a modest tax, and let employees buy their own plans on the insurance exchanges. (To be nice, the company could raise their pay to cover the cost of the insurance.) As government social programs go, the ACA has a pretty light touch.

The tea party’s framing of the issues in Hobby Lobby reflect the movement’s attempt to square its libertarian roots with its active courtship of the religious right. Not long after hitting the national political stage, fledgling and underfunded groups like Tea Party Patriots actively sought out evangelicals, particularly their deep-pocketed donor base. In turn, the “teavangelicals,” as Christian activist Ralph Reed dubbed them, demanded that GOP candidates, and the tea party itself, not ignore their pet issues like abortion and gay marriage in favor of more libertarian budget-related issues, and the culture wars were back in full flower.

Mark Meckler, a Tea Party Patriots co-founder who has since left the group, was initially adamant that the tea party would not engage in fights over social issues like the ones in the Hobby Lobby case. By the tea party’s heyday in 2010, he was telling a religious-right conference organized by Reed that tea partiers’ motivating force was not the national debt but anger over “this idea of separation of church and state. We’re angry about the removal of God from the public square.” Tuesday’s rally at the Supreme Court is evidence that the social issues the tea party initially vowed to avoid is really all that’s keeping what’s left of the movement alive.

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This Tea Party Leader Seems Pretty Confused About the Hobby Lobby Case

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Is the Right’s "Religious Liberty" Campaign About to Backfire?

by WolfgangSwank Posted on February 26, 2014

Mother Jones

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At the state level, Republican legislating comes in waves. After the 2010 midterms, there was a big wave of voter ID laws. For a while, it seemed as if every Republican-controlled state in the union had suddenly decided to pass the exact same laundry list of provisions designed to minimize the turnout of Democratic voters. That was followed by a wave of anti-abortion laws, again eerily similar. Now there’s a new wave: “religious freedom” laws designed to allow businesses to discriminate against gays. It’s the latest frenzy among conservative legislatures. “By my count,” says Steve Benen, “there are now 15 states — nearly a third of the country — where Republican state lawmakers have at least proposed a right-to-discriminate measure.”

In some cases, the similarity of the laws is easy to explain: a group like ALEC writes model legislation, and that becomes the basis for laws all over the country. It’s all a very well planned operation. Other times, it’s apparently more organic. That seems to be the case with right-to-discriminate measures, which are mostly a case of conservatives getting a whiff of something that appeals to the tea party and then all trying to one-up each other.

Ed Kilgore and Josh Marshall suggest that the “religious liberty” campaign represents a sort of Waterloo for right-wing nutbaggery. These laws tend to “elicit less sympathy than ridicule from the non-aligned,” says Kilgore. “The whole thing appears to have collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculousness in Arizona,” says Marshall, “and not just its ridiculousness but the fact that resisting the changing mores of acceptance and equality is bad business and bad politics.” But a friend emails to push back on this. The best evidence that right-wing cultural overreach isn’t backfiring, he writes, is when pundits on the left all start speculating that a big backlash is coming without any objective evidence that it’s really happening:

To me, the AZ and MO and other bills are not some indication of last gasp, panic, or something else. No, they are a sign of strengthening radicalism and a demonstration, once again, of the relatively nonexistent societal penalty for advocating heinous laws. We’ve made advances and broken barriers, but those aren’t the end of the struggle, nor the turning of the tide. They are just a changing of the battlefield.

Andrew Sullivan’s article “Goodbye to All That” was a classic of this effort. Sullivan interpreted Obama’s promise as essentially closing the door by rendering irrelevant the cultural wars of the 60s that have been fought for decades now. Instead, we get a rise in voter suppression laws; a reactionary political party that brings the country to a grinding halt; and a continuous, deeply problematic inability to grapple with and confront the growing radicalism on the right side of the spectrum.

We just have to be sober about this stuff and not wish it away — as appealing as that may seem, especially for content producers looking for any kind of social cues to let them write dramatic, eyeball snagging announcements of enormous societal shifts.

The AZ law is not a victory for the left. It’s a sign that the left either isn’t being heard or has a glass jaw.

I’m not actually sure who I agree with here. On the one hand, I think my friend is right: even if these religious liberty laws fail, and even if they generate some ridicule, it won’t have any real effect. The tea partiers will just move along to a new fight as soon as one of them gets a bright idea. On the other hand, there really is a point where the Old Testament wrath starts to backfire—or, at the very least, distracts attention from potentially election-winning strategies.

If this year’s midterms get fought on the battleground of hating on gays rather than on Obamacare or lower taxes, Republicans are going to perform pretty poorly and tea partiers are going to get the blame. It’s already pretty obvious that the GOP leadership is fed up with the tea party faction leading them into unwinnable battles, and doing it again when control of Congress seems within their grasp might be the final straw. If right-wing Kulturkampf really is starting to backfire, November will tell the tale.

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Is the Right’s "Religious Liberty" Campaign About to Backfire?

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Georgia Wants to Allow Businesses to Kick Gay People Out of Diners

by LynneFitebilqd Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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A bill moving swiftly through the Georgia House of Representatives would allow business owners who believe homosexuality is a sin to openly discriminate against gay Americans by denying them employment or banning them from restaurants and hotels.

The proposal, dubbed the Preservation of Religious Freedom Act, would allow any individual or for-profit company to ignore Georgia laws—including anti-discrimination and civil rights laws—that “indirectly constrain” exercise of religion. Atlanta, for example, prohibits discrimination against LGBT residents seeking housing, employment, and public accommodations. But the state bill could trump Atlanta’s protections.

The Georgia bill, which was introduced last week and was scheduled to be heard in subcommittee Monday afternoon, was sponsored by six state representatives (some of them Democrats). A similar bill has been introduced in the state Senate.

The Georgia House bill’s text is largely identical to controversial legislation that passed in Arizona last week. The Arizona measure—which is currently awaiting Republican Gov. Jan Brewer’s signature—has drawn widespread protests from LGBT groups and local businesses. One lawmaker who voted for the Arizona bill, Sen. Steve Pierce (R-Prescott), went so far as to publicly change his mind.

Georgia and Arizona are only the latest states to push religious freedom bills that could nullify discrimination laws. The new legislation is part of a wave of state laws drafted in response to a New Mexico lawsuit in which a photographer was sued for refusing to work for a same-sex couple.

Unlike similar bills introduced in Kansas, Tennessee, and South Dakota, the Georgia and Arizona bills do not explicitly target same-sex couples. But that difference could make the impact of the Georgia and Arizona bills even broader. Legal experts, including Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, warn that Georgia and Arizona’s religious-freedom bills are so sweeping that they open the door for discrimination against not only gay people, but other groups as well. The New Republic noted that under the Arizona bill, “a restaurateur could deny service to an out-of-wedlock mother, a cop could refuse to intervene in a domestic dispute if his religion allows for husbands beating their wives, and a hotel chain could refuse to rent rooms to Jews, Hindus, or Muslims.”

“The government should not allow individuals or corporations to use religion as an excuse to discriminate or to deny other access to basic healthcare and safety precautions,” Maggie Garrett, legislative director for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, wrote in a letter to a Georgia House Judiciary subcommittee on Sunday.

State representative Sam Teasley, the first sponsor listed on the bill, did not respond to request for comment Monday.

“The bill was filed and is being pushed solely because that’s what all the cool conservative kids are doing, and because it sends a message of defiance to those who believe that gay Americans ought to be treated the same as everybody else,” writes Jay Bookman, a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Passing it would seriously stain the reputation of Georgia and the Georgia Legislature.”

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Georgia Wants to Allow Businesses to Kick Gay People Out of Diners

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Inside the Conservative Campaign to Launch "Jim Crow-Style" Bills Against Gay Americans

by KeeleyMarryat Posted on February 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kansas set off a national firestorm last week when the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would have allowed anyone to refuse to do business with same-sex couples by citing religious beliefs. The bill, which covered both private businesses and individuals, including government employees, would have barred same-sex couples from suing anyone who denies them food-service, hotel rooms, social services, adoption rights, or employment—as long as the person denying the service said he or she had a religious objection to homosexuality. As of this week, the legislation was dead in the Senate. But the Kansas bill is not a one-off effort.

Republicans lawmakers and a network of conservative religious groups has been pushing similar bills in other states, essentially forging a national campaign that, critics say, would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Republicans in South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon, and Tennessee recently introduced provisions that mimic the Kansas legislation. And Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Mississippi have introduced broader “religious freedom” bills with a unique provision that would also allow people to deny services or employment to LGBT Americans, legal experts say.

“This is a concerted campaign that the Religious Right has been hinting at for a couple of years now,” says Evan Hurst, associate director of Truth Wins Out, a Chicago-based nonprofit that promotes gay rights. “The fact that they’re doing it Jim Crow-style is remarkable, considering the fact that one would think the GOP would like to be electable among people under 50 sometime in the near future.”

Several of these measures have sprung up within a short period of time. The Kansas bill was introduced by Republican State Rep. Charles Macheers on January 16. On January 28, Idaho state Rep. Lynn Luker (R-Boise) introduced a bill that would prohibit the state from yanking the professional licenses of people who deny service or employment to anyone (including LGBT customers) on the basis of their religious beliefs. (There’s an exception for emergency responders.) Luker has since pulled that bill back into committee, to address concerns about the language being discriminatory.

On January 30, a coalition of Republican senators and representatives in South Dakota introduced a bill that would have allowed a business to refuse to serve or people due to their sexual orientation, or be compelled to hire someone because of their sexual orientation. Under this measure, a gay person who brought a lawsuit charging discrimination based on sexual orientation could have faced punitive damages no less than $2,000. The bill also declared that it is protected speech to tell someone that his or her lifestyle is “wrong or a sin.” The bill was killed this week by the state senate judiciary committee.

On February 5, Republicans introduced legislation in both chambers of the Tennessee legislature allowing a person or company to refuse to provide services such as food, accommodation, counseling, adoption, or employment to people in civil unions or same-sex marriages, or transgender individuals, “if doing so would violate the sincerely held religious beliefsâ&#128;&#139; of the person.” (Government employees are excluded.) State Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), tells Mother Jones that he sponsored the bill because “a person shouldn’t get sued for choosing not to participate in a person’s wedding.” But this week, the bill’s lead sponsor in the senate, Sen. Brian Kelsey, (R-Germantown), shelved the measure until next year, after facing heavy criticism. And in Oregon, voters could have the opportunity this year to vote on a ballot initiative that would also allow people to refuse on religious grounds to support same-sex couples.

In addition to these bills, lawmakers in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Hawaii, and Mississippi have recently introduced Religious Freedom Restoration Acts with a provision that could also allow discrimination against LGBT Americans. These state-sponsored RFRAs, which aim to stop new laws from burdening religious exercise, are nothing new—29 states already have some kind of RFRA in place through legislation or court action. But legal experts say that these particular bills are unique in that they allow individuals and in some states, businesses, to cite religion as a defense in a private lawsuit. In the past, courts have been split on the issue. But in 2012, in New Mexico, a photographer tried to use religion in court as grounds for refusing to photograph a same-sex wedding. Last year, the photographer’s studio lost its discrimination lawsuit. The bills are a direct reaction to that lawsuit, say multiple legal experts. “The Kansas bill is more obvious, but some of these RFRAs will have similar effects…they’re just as bad,” says Maggie Garrett, legislative counsel for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

The RFRAs and the bills that target same-sex marriage have been pushed by Republican lawmakers, but in some cases, they were first promoted or drafted by a network of conservative Christian groups. According to the Wichita Eagle, the American Religious Freedom Program (ARFP)—which is part of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative organization founded in 1976—crafted the language for the Kansas bill. Brian Walsh, executive director of the ARFP, which supports religious freedom measures, acknowledges that his group consulted with the legislators on the bill, but he says that lots of other groups did as well: “We gave them suggestions and they took some of them.” Walsh says that ARFP was contacted by legislators who wrote the Tennessee bill and that the group frequently talked to legislators in South Dakota about “religious freedom” but not the state’s specific bill. Julie Lynde, executive director of Cornerstone Family Council in Idaho, one of many state groups that are part of Citizen Link, a branch of Focus on the Family, told Al Jazeera, “We’ve been involved in working on the language” of the Idaho bill. Another member of Citizen Link, the Arizona Policy Center, has been active in supporting the Arizona bill. And the Oregon ballot initiative was proposed by Friends of Religious Freedom, a conservative Oregon nonprofit.

Walsh told Mother Jones he believes these bills, particularly the one in Kansas, have been misunderstood, and the aim is not to facilitate discrimination against the LGBT community. “Our goal—and we suspect the goal of others—has been to try to find the right balance between fully protecting religious freedom and other civil liberties so that both sides of the marriage debate can co-exist harmoniously,” he says. But Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU, takes a different stance: “These bills are discriminatory, pure and simple.”

“This seems to be a concerted Hail Mary campaign to carve out special rights for religious conservatives so that they don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else does,” says Hurst, from Truth Wins Out. “In this new up-is-down world, anti-gay religious folks are ‘practicing their faith’ when they’re baking cakes or renting out hotel rooms to travelers. On the ground, these bills hurt real, live LGBT people.”

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Inside the Conservative Campaign to Launch "Jim Crow-Style" Bills Against Gay Americans

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Quote of the Day: Mammograms Shouldn’t Be Pawns in a Religious War

by Sherri20Cxlfidz Posted on February 13, 2014

Mother Jones

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From Aaron Carroll, responding to the deluge of lame criticisms aimed at a recent study showing that mammograms don’t do much to reduce mortality from breast cancer:

I leave you with one final thought. If you’re not going to be swayed at all by a randomized controlled trial of 90,000 women with 25 year follow up, excellent compliance, and damn good methods, it might be time to consider that there’s really no study at all that will make you change your mind.

This really has taken on the nature of a religious war. But eventually we have to face facts. If you have a family history of breast cancer, or some specific markers of vulnerability, or if your doctor thinks you need one, then of course you should get a mammogram. But despite what we’ve all been taught for the past several decades, the evidence is becoming overwhelming that a blanket recommendation of routine annual mammograms for everyone over the age of 40 just isn’t good medicine. This isn’t coming from people who are anti-woman or who are just trying slash budgets. Nor is anyone saying that mammograms are useless. That just isn’t what’s happening.

What’s happening is routine science. And unlike religion, the answers change now and then when you do routine science. That’s sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes scary. But that’s the story here. Right now, the answers are changing, and we need to change along with them.

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Quote of the Day: Mammograms Shouldn’t Be Pawns in a Religious War

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Charts: Catholic Hospitals Don’t Do Much for the Poor

by mlodyseo7 Posted on December 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Catholic hospitals have been on a merger spree over the last few years, as Mother Jones reported earlier this year. Ever-expanding swaths of the country are now served only by a Catholic hospital, where patients have no choice but to receive care dictated by Catholic bishops whose religious edicts don’t always align with what’s best for a patient. Catholic hospitals generally follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care, which restrict abortion even in cases where a fetus isn’t viable, for instance, a practice that has resulted in hospitals denying proper care for women suffering from miscarriages. The ACLU recently filed suit against the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on behalf of a Michigan woman who was suffering a second-trimester miscarriage and was sent home twice by a Catholic hospital, developing a serious infection because the hospital refused to even talk to her about the possibility of an abortion. Her baby died two hours after she miscarried.

Despite this heavy mixing of theology and health care, Catholic hospitals in 2011 received $27 billion—nearly half of their revenues—from public sources, according to a new report put out today by the American Civil Liberties Union and MergerWatch, a reproductive rights advocacy group. And that figure doesn’t even include other tax subsidies the hospitals receive thanks to their nonprofit status.

The hospitals have long justified their tax status and restrictions on care by pointing to their religious mission of serving the poor and their delivery of charitable care. But the new ACLU/MergerWatch report suggests, and the chart below illustrates, Pope Francis might be on to something when he’s said that the church needs to shift its priorities to focus less on abortion and more on the poor. MergerWatch data show that Catholic hospitals, where executives often earn multimillion-dollar salaries, aren’t doing any better providing charity care than other religious non-profit hospitals that don’t restrict care. They’re barely any better than ordinary secular nonprofits.

ACLU/MergerWatch

The charitable care figures also don’t give a complete picture of how well Catholic hospitals serve the poor and uninsured because it doesn’t include patients who are covered by Medicaid, the government health care plan for the low-income and disabled. As it turns out, Catholic hospitals, which in 2011 had more than $200 billion in gross patient revenue, had the lowest percentage of revenue from Medicaid of any type of hospital. Even for-profit hospitals earned more revenue from Medicaid than Catholic hospitals.

ACLU/MergerWatch

All of these numbers suggest that as Catholic hospitals have merged and expanded into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, they’ve moved far beyond their religious mission and become like any other large corporation. Given those trends, and the hospitals’ reliance on public funding, it’s hard to see how they can continue to justify their mixing of Catholic doctrine with health care, especially when it disproportionately violates standards of care for women.

The ACLU/MergerWatch report calls on the US Department of Health and Human Services to crack down on Catholic hospitals and to insist that they follow federal law requiring all hospitals that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to provide emergency treatment to any patient, even if that care requires an emergency abortion. Other advocacy groups have made similar requests in the past few years, but HHS thus far has refused to pick a fight with the Catholic Church, which has turned into one of the Obama administration’s biggest foes thanks to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. The church has proven to be a powerful enemy—a wealthy special interest in a holy war—and even the new Pope seems unlikely to persuade it to give up this particular fight.

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Charts: Catholic Hospitals Don’t Do Much for the Poor

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

by Jane Adams Posted on December 11, 2013

Mother Jones

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The percentage of privately insured women who didn’t pay a dime for birth control pills almost tripled this year, rising from 15 percent in 2012 to 40 percent in 2013. That’s according to a new study from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that backs abortion rights. The study, which was published in the journal Contraception, examined the effects of an Affordable Care Act rule requiring private insurers to cover contraceptive products and counseling with no co-pay.

This same rule has come under sustained, delirious assault by Republicans who paint it as an attack on employers’ religious beliefs. During the debt ceiling crisis this fall, some House Republicans were willing to let the government default if the final financial deal did not include a “conscience clause” allowing employers to sidestep the mandate if it violated their religious beliefs. (The Obama administration has already exempted a narrowly defined set of religious institutions.)

That battle will come to a head this spring, when the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. Citing their Christian beliefs, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores are refusing to provide their female employees with insurance that covers contraceptive services. A decision in favor of Hobby Lobby could blow a hole in the contraception mandate, allowing any private employer to withold birth control coverage simply by citing their religious beliefs.

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Millions of Women Now Pay Nothing for Birth Control. Thanks Obamacare!

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George W. Bush Still Plans to Appear at Jews-for-Jesus-like Event Tonight

by MichelineWorth Posted on November 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Despite an uproar in the Jewish community, former president George W. Bush is still slated to deliver the keynote address to a fundraiser for the Messianic Jewish Bible Institute in Irving, Texas, tonight. The MJBI trains people to persuade Jews to recognize Jesus as their messiah. Followers of the group believe that if enough Jews are converted, Christ will return to Earth.

After Mother Jones broke the news about Bush’s appearance last week, “a small shitstorm…kicked up over the President’s decision,” writes Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

“I have yet to meet a Jewish person who hasn’t heard about this,” Tevi Troy, Bush’s White House liaison to the Jewish community from 2003 to 2004, told CNN Wednesday. Troy had high praise for Bush’s support of Israel and the Jewish community, but, he added, “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed.” A spokesman for the Republican Jewish Coalition did not respond to a request for comment.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas, the Jewish Community Relations Council, and the Rabbinic Association of Greater Dallas issued a statement Tuesday expressing their disappointment regarding Bush’s scheduled appearance: “Support of this group is a direct affront to the mutual respect that all mainstream religious groups afford each other to practice the principles of their respective beliefs.”

Bush’s decision to raise money for MJBI “is really painful to so many in the Jewish community,” Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said on MSNBC, because MJBI’s “primary purpose is to convert all Jews to a different religion. How do you have a respectful relationship if the measure of success of one group is the ending of the other group by having them convert away from their own religion?”

Saperstein, who has worked with Bush on religious freedom issues, described Bush’s decision as “mystifying.” That’s a sentiment shared by conservatives, including Commentary magazine’s Jonathan Tobin, who writes that Bush, who has largely avoided political controversies since leaving the White House, has “stepped into one with both feet.”

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George W. Bush Still Plans to Appear at Jews-for-Jesus-like Event Tonight

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