Michigan Camp Meeting 2024: As For Me and My House

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

True and False Religious Liberty

Jonathon Cherne

01 The True Image

02 The Counterfeit Image

03 Pray for America Again - True Revival

04 Make America Pray Again - Counterfeit Revival

05 Current Religious Liberty Issues in America

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2024 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Father in Heaven, Lord, thank you so much, Lord, for your love that you give to each 1 of us, Lord, and that you sustain us, Lord, give us life and breath every day, Lord, and for minds that can think and reason and understand, Father.

And Lord, we just want to understand your will for each 1 of us, Lord, and Lord, we want the desire and the ability to do that will.

We ask that you be with us now as we look at some of the things that are happening in our courts today and in our government, Lord.

And may our eyes be open to the religious liberty issues, Father.

Okay, did anybody see last night the slides?

I was like, whoa, the church is doing something as well.

I guess Pentecost next year is a big year, so get ready, buckle up.

But I was like, man, that goes right along with the quote from Ellen White about how Satan will endeavor to prevent the revival by introducing a counterfeit revival.

So it's interesting that Pentecost falls on Sunday, next year, 2025, but the church is doing something as well to baptize and revitalize.

So we want to be part of that true revival.

Anybody see the World Health Assembly met last month?

Yeah, so all 194 countries got together there, the World Health Assembly.

And the director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, was trying to pass a new treaty.

And this treaty would give the Hu the power to declare when there is a pandemic.

And then, conveniently, they would also have the power to declare how countries were to respond to the pandemic.

Countries were a little concerned about giving up their autonomy to the WHO.

And so fortunately that didn't pass, but I'm sure they're not going to give up.

This is from last year, the 303 Creative case where the website designer in Colorado did not refuse to create a website for a homosexual couple's wedding And the state targeted her business because of it.

And the Supreme Court found that the First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to create expressive design speaking messages with which the designer disagrees.

The state cannot force us to give speech that we don't agree with.

And so we're also seeing in this term that free speech is a key issue.

There's not a whole lot of religion cases this term in front of the Supreme Court, but we we do have some free speech cases and 1 of those recently was the Case involving the NRA the National Rifle Association and the state of New York the Department of Financial Services Was targeting the NRA but not directly What they did was they went to Lords of London, NRA's big insurance provider, and said, man, It sure would be a big shame if you drop the NRA as your client, you know, and if you guys want special privileges from us here in the state of New York, you know, you might want to look into that wink wink and Put that in an email anyways, And so the state was pressuring these private companies to drop their services to the NRA because they didn't like the NRA's message.

And so I don't know what you think about the NRA, but it doesn't matter, you know, because we know at some point they're not going to like our message, right?

And so maybe they're going to go to your church's bank and say, look, I think you shouldn't allow these people access to their funds.

In fact, I know of a Seventh-day Adventist church that was targeted by their local bank who froze their funds and kept having problems that they couldn't explain.

And finally the church went to another bank and didn't have any problems.

And so you do see this targeting already.

And so the lower courts had thrown out the NRA's case and the Supreme Court said that it could go forward, that the state of New York possibly violated their First Amendment right by coercing regulated entities like insurance companies to terminate their business relationships with the NRA in order to punish or suppress the NRA's speech.

Now this isn't the only speech case this term.

We also see a couple cases where the Biden administration has tried to regulate speech through social media And these cases have not been ruled on yet.

In fact, we might be getting decisions right now.

They now or next week, They typically release rulings on Thursdays and Friday mornings.

And then the Supreme Court term ends at the end of June.

So it'll be interesting to see what the government rules, what the Supreme Court rules as to whether the government can dictate to social media what speech they allow or don't allow on their platforms.

Now that was dealing with COVID and other issues, but we know that with our sort of understanding of prophecy that this could all impact our message and our speech in the future.

Now we had a great case last term, this was my case actually, Groff versus DeJoy, Postmaster General, and my client, Gerald Groff, was a postal worker.

He was a rural route carrier that delivered mail and he was a Sunday keeper.

He believed that the entire Sunday was the Sabbath and he refused to carry mail when Amazon and the USPS struck a deal for them to deliver on Sundays.

And so he was transferred to another post office in order to accommodate him.

But then that new post office that was more rural started delivering packages on Sundays as well.

First he got a write-up, and then He got a seven-day suspension, and then he got a 14-day suspension.

And so after that, he quit, and we filed a lawsuit because if you're terminated from federal employment, you can't get a job with the federal government again.

And so he was also afraid it might impact his retirement.

So he went ahead and quit and we filed a lawsuit for failing to accommodate his religious beliefs.

And that law is, it's not a constitutional law, but it's Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

And what that says is that it is unlawful, an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment because of such individuals religion and also race and sex and national origin and other protected categories as well.

And so if you're having problems in your workplace or you know somebody that is, maybe you're not getting promoted or hired or you're not getting your Sabbaths off, that's a violation of the Civil Rights Act.

And you have a right to hold your employer accountable for violating the law.

And so this is what I do a lot of, primarily, this is my focus in my law practice, is for people who are being discriminated against in the workplace.

And so if you're having those problems I'd be happy to talk with you and help you.

But an employer, though, doesn't have to accommodate you if it would be an undue hardship on their business to do so.

In this clause, it says, unless an employer demonstrates that he is unable to reasonably accommodate an employee's or prospective employee's religious observance or practice without undue hardship on the conduct of the employer's business.

And so an employer has to accommodate an employee's religious belief unless they can prove that it would be an undue hardship on their business.

So this is what my case with the post office revolved around, was this an undue hardship on the post office to allow Mr.

Couldn't he deliver the packages on Monday?

Or someone else could deliver those packages.

Would that have created an undue hardship?

Well, what made the case difficult is that the Supreme Court in 1977, in a case called TWA v.

Artisan had defined undue hardship as anything more than a de minimis cost.

And so basically, the court has said, if it would be more than a de minimis cost on the employer, that's an undue hardship.

And so the court was saying anything more than a minimal or trivial cost on the business would be an undue hardship.

Now has anybody here ever suffered a hardship?

Now has anybody here ever suffered an undue hardship?

And yet, the court here said it's anything more than de minimis, more than trivial.

And so, you know, they don't really, you know, match up.

It doesn't take, you know, a rocket scientist to see that more than de minimis doesn't equal undue hardship.

And so this is the law that we've been operating under.

Series

True and False Religious Liberty

05 Current Religious Liberty Issues in America

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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