A rebuke to religious fear-mongering

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7 hours ago • JOHN NICHOLS | The Capital Times | jnichols@madison.com

The right-wing messaging machine assembled by Republican stalwarts and their conservative allies to defeat President Obama and the Democrats in 2012 has for more than a year been carefully constructing a campaign to gin up fears that the Obama administration is mounting a war on “religious freedom.” It’s part of a broader project of raising concerns that might break loose economically populist but socially conservative voters in the swing states that will decide whether Obama is re-elected. But the voters of North Dakota — not exactly a bastion of anti-clericalism — have offered evidence that this cynical gaming of the age-old debate over church-state relations might not get much traction.

A statewide referendum designed to create sweeping new exemptions for religious activity in secular life — based on the precept that “government may not burden a person’s or religious organization’s religious liberty ” — was soundly rejected by the red state’s voters on June 12.

North Dakotans defeated the referendum by a vote of 107,186 to 60,129.

The result was a surprise to activists on all sides, who had presumed that North Dakota, a culturally conservative and Republican-leaning state, would be one of the easiest places in which to scare voters into believing that adherence to the First Amendment of the Constitution, and to the founding vision of the republic, might somehow threaten their right to follow their faith.

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