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INDIANAPOLIS - Paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis Inc. was filed Thursday – the same day Gov. Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act into law.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act would allow any individual or corporation to cite its religious beliefs as a defense when sued by a private party. But many opponents of the bill, which included business leaders, argued that it could open the door to widespread discrimination. Business owners who don't want to serve same-sex couples, for example, could now have legal protections to discriminate.
The filing comes as RTV6 political insider Abdul-Hakim Shabazz said on his blog, IndyPolitics.org , that the Colorado-based Green Faith Ministries believed it could expand its ministry into Indiana.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act prevents state government from "substantially burdening" a person's exercise of religion only if it can demonstrate that it is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest.
According to Levin's Facebook page, members of the First Church of Cannabis will be asked for individual donations of $4.20 a month.
originally posted by: eisegesis
For those who don't know marijuana is legal in Indiana for both medicinal and recreational use.
Indiana has some of the most draconian marijuana penalties in the country. Possession of even a single joint is punishable by up to a year of incarceration and a fine of up to $5,000.
Here is the back story: In Employment Division v. Smith (1990), two American Indians who worked as private drug rehab counselors ingested peyote as part of religious ceremonies conducted by the Native American Church, and they were subsequently fired. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the firing, with Justice Antonin Scalia saying that using a religious exemption in conflict of a valid law “would open the prospect of constitutionally required exemptions from civic obligations of almost every conceivable kind.”
A near unanimous Congress passed RFRA in 1993 and President Bill Clinton signed the law. RFRA said that “governments should not substantially burden religious exercise without compelling justification” and “the compelling interest test as set forth in prior Federal court rulings is a workable test for striking sensible balances between religious liberty and competing prior governmental interests.”
blog.constitutioncenter.org...
originally posted by: AK907ICECOLD
a reply to: eisegesis
First church of cannabis is in Amsterdam, years and years ago.
You mean in America then?
Different branches of Christianity favor their own naming conventions. The Catholics tend to use the names of saints, while some of the Protestant denominations are a little more straightforward and descriptive, and often use their location and the order they were founded in their names. That is, the “First Baptist Church of [Town]” got that name because it was the first Baptist church founded in that area.