Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, member of RFI’s Board of Directors, commented this week in The Hill on Attorney General Todd Blanche’s updated religious freedom guidance issued last month to federal agencies (Blanche was serving in an “acting” capacity at the time but has since been confirmed by the Senate). Picciotti-Bayer, who directs the Conscience Project, writes:

The bulk of [Blanche’s Memo] does what these memos usually do. It walks agencies through a decade’s worth of Supreme Court decisions — Carson v. Makin, Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist., Fulton v. City of Philadelphia — and tells them to comply with the Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on the front end rather than be dragged back into court for the inevitable.

One instruction stands out: Agencies must now also account for precedent confirming that the Constitution protects parents’ authority to direct their children’s upbringing. That is a notable thing to say out loud, given where the Civil Rights Division previously spent its time on matters affecting the family. Its most visible civil rights initiative in recent years was not protecting parents but preventing people from becoming parents in the first place. 

Picciotti-Bayer then turns to providing an overview of the ways the 1994 FACE Act has been enforced through the years, including how its provisions have sometimes been abused and at other times neglected. She also explains the effects of the Dobbs (2022) decision on the scope of the law. She concludes:

The [Justice Department’s] acknowledgment that the Constitution protects parents raising children by their own convictions, not the government’s, paired with a reckoning over how selectively the law was wielded against people peacefully practicing their faith on public sidewalks, is a start toward treating parents as seriously as it once treated abortion clinics’ security perimeter.

Read the full article: “Blanche’s Justice Department has finally put parents’ rights ahead of abortionists.”