Overall, the updated memo doesnât really focus on protecting people from the harms of religion. Itâs all about giving religious zealots leeway to go even further with their desires; as long as they can claim what theyâre doing is an extension of their faith, the government is generally on their side. Even if that means discriminating against people or pressuring them to join your faith.
Todd Blanche's 2026 guidance expands religious exemptions, weakens safeguards, and treats faith as a trump card over other Americansâ rights
This memo tells the Justice Department they can weaponize conservative Christianity in order to use it against LGBTQ people, women, religious minorities, atheists, etc. An agency thatâs supposed to defend the constitutional rights of all Americans is now manufacturing legal arguments for Christian privilege. It acts like damn near every conservative Christian grievance is a potential civil rights emergency.
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The chilling effect isnât measured by the people who push back. Itâs measured by the silence.
In April, CBS lost a producer who couldnât do honest journalism there anymore. By July, they were paying off the president and canceling the host who said so. By fall, theyâd handed editorial control to a Trump donor and a Free Press founder. By winter, they were killing stories the administration didnât want aired and publishing stories the administration did. And now theyâre enforcing the governmentâs preferred censorship before the government has even formally imposed it.
CBS isnât being pressured anymore. Theyâve internalized it.
A year of capitulation, from paying off the president to killing stories to blocking interviews.
Colbert can do this because heâs already dead
Not literally. But professionally, at CBS, the show is over. It was over the moment they announced the cancellation last July. Heâs got three months left. He said it himself on Monday, tucked inside a joke about Matlock: âWatch it or donât watch it, I leave in May.â
Thatâs what made Monday night possible. Colbert could defy his networkâs lawyers on air, could say the thing they told him not to say, could draw Snoopy and call it James Talarico, because thereâs nothing left for CBS to take from him. They already took it. What are they going to do, cancel it again?
And the segment was good. It was genuinely funny and genuinely angry and it laid out the problem clearly enough that millions of people now understand what Brendan Carr is doing and how CBS is helping him do it. The YouTube interview got more attention than a normal Late Show booking ever would have. As an act of defiance, it worked.
But Colbert is the exception. He can do this because heâs a dead man walking at his own network. What about everybody else?
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Colbertâs Monday night segment was a man with nothing left to lose doing something nobody with a future at the network would dare to do. Thatâs not a free press. Thatâs a hostage situation where one guy is about to get released and decided to mouth off on his way out the door.
Good for him. I mean that. But he leaves in May. And then itâs just CBS.
I know it's more popular to view atheists as this massive group of people with all kinds of oppressive force, but the reality is that we're still denied opportunities in the current day because of religious discrimination.
Thereâs no good reason to force people to pledge an oath to God if they want to manage elections. Itâs discriminatory and a betrayal of the very Constitution these officials claim to defend. No one should be forcing citizens to invoke a deity as a condition of public service.
The stateâs insistence on poll workers saying "so help me God" has turned a civic service into a religious loyalty test
It says a lot that the only person who behaved with integrity in this saga is the graduate instructor who gave Fulnecky detailed, thoughtful feedback. And thatâs the only person whoâs now being persecuted.
Fulnecky is a conservative who sees herself as the Riley Gaines of essay writing. She demands to fail upwards because the alternative is admitting youâre just not that good compared to your peers. She thinks sheâs owed a top score even though she wasnât talented enough to earn it.
So she instinctively whined about her grade toâI shit you notâRepublican Gov. Kevin Stitt, the university president, the dean of her college, several reporters, and the anti-teachersâ union group now headed up by former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters.
Samantha Fulneckyâs Bible-filled essay earned her a failing grade. After whining to Republican leaders, the University of Oklahoma is caving
The standard is already the same. If a Muslim or trans student turned in an essay this useless, then they, too, would receive (and deserve!) a failing grade. Deevers is falling for the argument that the world is biased against Christians when the reality says conservative Christians just whine whenever they canât succeed on a neutral playing field. (Also, this is Oklahoma. You donât get to complain about anti-Christian bias in Oklahoma.)
Fellow Christian Nationalist State Sen. Shane Jett jumped in to argue that this was the fault of âDEIâ and that the universityâs president should be fired as a result of this student not being given a perfect score for her shitty paper.
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The email suggests none of this was an accident or the result of ignorance. This was a deliberate attempt to shove religion into a public school system. The conservatives involved in this case know damn well how this will play out: Either the Colorado Department of Education will refuse to give the district the money it says it deserves because they wonât count the students at the religious school, in which case ADF will file a lawsuit over it⌠or the CDoE will give the district money, at which point a church/state separation group might sue.
Either way, this is heading to court. That has always been part of the plan. The 30 children at Riverstone Academy are nothing more than pawns in a right-wing culture war battle. This is all a calculated effort by ideological actors to pry open the wall between church and state by using schoolchildren as leverage. They wonât stop appealing this case until they can get it in front of their allies on the Supreme Court.
The quiet approval process, the omission of religious references from the paperwork, the involvement of a national legal organization eager for a test caseânone of that is an accident. It is the blueprint. And in that blueprint, transparency and constitutional boundaries are treated as obstacles to be bypassed. Having failed in their numerous attempts to get Christianity promoted in schoolsâby hiring chaplains or forcing Ten Commandments posters on the wallsâthey want to litigate their way to precedent.
Maybe the most damning thing about this story is what it says about everyoneâs priorities. Children are being treated as subjects in a political experiment. The schoolâs religious mission is being hidden from those running the very system they expect will bankroll it.
Riverstone Academy isnât just violating church-state separation; itâs gambling with childrenâs education to advance a right-wing agenda that ultimately harms public school students.
Behind the scenes, a conservative legal group and district leaders crafted a challenge to church-state separation
In fact, over the past few decades, the IRS has only followed its own rules once. Just before the 1992 elections, a group called Branch Ministries ran full-page newspaper ads urging people not to vote for Bill Clinton. The IRS revoked the groupâs tax-exempt status. There was a lawsuit. The IRS won. (The Congressional Research Service, a government-backed public policy research institute, said another church also lost its tax exemption in 2012⌠but no further details are available.)
But thatâs it. 70 years of the Johnson Amendment⌠and maybe two ministries that were punished by the IRS for violating it.
So thatâs where we were at before today.
The Johnson Amendment was still on the books, but it was almost never enforced. And yet there was now a lawsuit pretending that the Johnson Amendment was hindering the supposed free speech rights of Christians.
The complaint argued that churches were forced into their 501(c)(3) status and were therefore âautomatically silencedâ by the government. For example, they said the plaintiffs wanted to speak out about the candidatesâ positionsâwhich theyâre already legally allowed to do!âbut they were too scared to do so because they feared the Johnson Amendment, as if their ignorance was a reason to strike down the rule. (They âengaged in self-censorship,â they wrote while the tiniest violin played in the background.)
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This lawsuit should have failed for a number of reasons .
First of all, the people who wanted to see the Johnson Amendment enforced wanted it applied across the board, not to benefit one side or the other. Itâs not like church/state separation groups were totally fine with it if a historically Black church endorsed a Democratic candidate. We want it applied universally and think the IRS should be funded to the point where it can investigate all these allegations.
The cherry-picked examples of unenforced violations were also laughable. Itâs true that there are examples of churches endorsing Democrats, but there are so many more examples of white evangelical churches endorsing Republicans, and this lawsuit seemed unconcerned about that pesky little fact. How could anyone fail to call out right-wing churches for the same behavior while arguing, with a straight face, that the IRS was selectively enforcing its rule?
Pastors can now promote candidates without losing their tax exemptionsâso long as itâs done through the "lens of religious faith"
So the game plan was pretty straight-forward. The Christians in this case wanted a Trump-appointed judge to strike down the Johnson Amendment. If there were appeals, they hoped this case would go all the way to the Supreme Court, where the right-wing super-majority could declare the Johnson Amendment unconstitutional and turn churches across America into extensions of the Republican Party.
But now, maybe they wonât have to do that at all.
On Monday, Jonathan L. Blacker, a Justice Department lawyer representing the IRS, in an attempt to settle this case, argued that churches could freely endorse candidates without penalty. The agency didnât consider that politicking.
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The order is extremely narrow, though. It would apply to houses of worshipâalmost all conservative Christian onesâbut not to non-profits in general. That means a Southern Baptist church could tell its members to vote for a Republican candidate, but Planned Parenthood would still be prohibited from telling its members to vote for a Democratic one. That could be grounds for a larger lawsuit.
Itâs also important because there are benefits to being associated with a religious group. Since religious beliefs must be accommodated, the same rationale that allows Christians in the military to gather for Bible study can be used by Humanists to meet up and talk about philosophy.
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Before 2014, there were a limited number of âfaith codesâ you could use to describe yourself. They included âMuslim, Hindu, Wiccan, Jewish, Buddhist, or one of more than 100 Christian denominations.â But non-religious soldiers could only choose from âatheistâ or âno religious preference.â
After 2014, the list was expanded to include âHumanist.â A hard-fought win that was years in the making!
In 2017, the list was expanded again to include even more specific non-religious categories like âHeathen,â âDeism,â âNo Preference,â and âNo Religion.â
Again, the goal was accuracy. There was finally an understanding that the spectrum of non-religious thought wasnât as simple as saying âIâm not.â Much like there are many denominations of Christianity, each of which has meaning for people who belong to those groups, there are non-religious people who believe âHumanistâ or âDeistâ or âAgnosticâ more accurately describes who they are and what they believe.
Thatâs where we were at after 2017. The military has always treated faith like itâs a net positive for good soldiers but they were finally using language that was less overtly Christian. And they were finally more open to the diversity of thought in an increasingly non-religious country.
But Hegseth is now blowing up that progress like itâs a harmless fishing boat in the Caribbean.
The Defense Secretary slashed the military's religious categories from 200+ to 31, making countless service members effectively invisible
He said he would âstreamlineâ the list of military religious affiliation codes. But how would that help chaplains âminister better to the flockâ? If anything, as I said earlier, having less specific information to work with would make their jobs harder. Republicans want to eliminate an expansion of religious codes that took over a decade to approve for the simple reason that they canât handle complexity of thought.
Itâs stupidity for the sake of stupidity.
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This unnecessary change is all the more infuriating because it solves a problem that doesnât exist while creating a bunch of new ones. No service members were harmed because the military allowed people to identify themselves accurately. No chaplain was overwhelmed because there were too many religious categories. If anything, the expanded list was a small but meaningful acknowledgment that the people serving this country come from a wide range of backgrounds and deserve to be treated accordingly.
