The chief of a major religious-rights litigator warns a Joe Biden administration will bring "massive amounts of litigation" to reverse the Trump administration's gains for religious liberty.
The Washington Examiner reported Trump and his aides "often cited religious liberty as one of their top priorities, and the executive branch frequently released guidance and executive orders protecting the freedom of conscience for religious people and created several departments dedicated specifically to religious freedom regulation."
However, if Biden assumes the Oval Office, the "opposite results" are forecast.
Biden, a Catholic who disavows the church's pro-life stance, repeatedly has criticized the Trump administration for supporting religious liberty.
He's threatened to remove the exemptions to the contraception mandate won in court by the Catholic charity Little Sisters of the Poor.
Under the Barack Obama administration, while Biden was vice president, the federal government required the nuns to violate their Christian faith by funding abortion.
But Biden's promise to go much further that anyone has before in creating special protections for "sexual and gender identity" will result in court fights.
"All of those things conflict with religious groups," said Kelly Shackelford, president and CEO of First Liberty Institute. "It's going to create massive amounts of litigation, where we're going to have to come in and protect religious groups or religious individuals or religious conscience."
The Examiner noted that at the heart of the debates is a disagreement over whether the term "sex" is defined by biology or gender identity.
"The Trump administration maintained the former position and, through the HHS and the Solicitor General's office, sided with religious groups disputing Obama or state-level mandates pushing in the other direction. Biden, on the other hand, has promised within his first 100 days to enforce the framework of the Equality Act, proposed legislation that understands sex as a gender construct, across all federal agencies. And if Democrats win Congress through the Georgia runoff elections, he promises to sign its legislative version into law."
Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch said recently that more such cases would arise. After he ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that companies cannot "discriminate" against LGBT people in hiring, the Fulton v. Philadelphia case arrived.
In the Fulton case, the city of Philadelphia contends it can ban a Catholic agency from its government foster-care program if the agency refuses to place children with same-sex couples, in violation of its faith.
Justice Bret Kavanaugh said: "It seems like we should be looking, where possible, for win-win answers. And it seems like neither side is going to win entirely, given the First Amendment on the one hand and given Obergefell on the other."
Obergefell was the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling, which Chief Justice John Roberts criticized at the time as unrelated to the Constitution.
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