The Daily Signal - Mark Rienzi on Why Religious Liberty Succeeds in America

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

There is still hope religious liberty will prevail in America even though many wish to tear it down, including some in government, according to the president of the religious freedom law firm the Becket Fund. Many religious liberty cases succeed because they tap into the “live and let live instinct” of Americans, Mark Rienzi told Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. On today's show, we share Roberts' conversation with Rienzi as they discuss the success of religious liberty in America. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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This is the Daily Signal Podcast for Friday, October 27th. I'm Virginia Allen. We are changing things up a little bit today on the Daily Signal podcast, and we're bringing you a conversation between Heritage Foundation President, Dr. Kevin Roberts, and the president and CEO of the legal organization Beckett, Mr. Mark Rianzi. Beckett is a nonprofit, public interest, legal, and educational institution with a mission to protect the free expression of all faiths. and protecting that free expression of faith could never be more important than it is right now.

So let's go ahead and get to Dr. Roberts' conversation with Mr. Mark Rienzi after this. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country. Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively. We develop talent, and we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense, so join us. To learn more about the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern.

Welcome back to the Kevin Roberts Show. You are in for a treat today, and you'll understand why I'm so excited. You know, I'm excited about every guest, but this guest is someone who I think is one of the most important legal minds and American patriots today. I really do mean that. an institution that I led Wyoming Catholic College directly benefited from his expertise and his courage.

We'll talk a little bit about that, but the much more important story is what he is doing to save religious freedom in the American Republic. My guest this week is a professor of law at Catholic University of America. He is also the president and CEO of the Beckett Fund, one of the great organizations on the planet.

My friend Mark Rienzi, thanks for being here. Great to be here, Kevin. So against my better judgment, I've invited a lawyer onto this show. I'm glad you smiled for people just listening. Yeah, you've heard jokes are good jokes. Yeah, they're good jokes. They're good jokes.

Even my attorney colleagues here at Heritage think they're pretty funny. All kidding aside, we have a heavy topic to discuss. But it's an important topic. And in fact, it's a glorious topic. It's only heavy because of attacks on it by the radical left. And that's religious liberty. We're going to talk about cases that you have taken the lead on, cases that you are taking the lead on.

I want our audience also to know about Beckett, which is one of the most, truly, it's one of the most important institutions in America today. But before we get there, Mark, I want you to tell us your story because not at all being patronizing. You have a very impressive resume. You're someone, for those of us who have the privilege of being other leaders in this movement,

know that we can count on. We can count on your organization. But for our audience, sometimes people just kind of want to know the story behind the story. How in the world did you get to do what you're doing? Sure. I consider myself very blessed and lucky to get to do what I'm doing. I grew up in New York.

I'm Italian, Irish, and Catholic. Quite a combination. It's quite a combination. It's a common combination in New York. And I went to law school. And as I got out of law school, I looked around the world, and I thought one of the things that is really important to my country and really important to fight about is religious liberty.

And it was at a time when religious liberty was starting to get controversial when I was getting into it. This is maybe 20-ish years ago. And it was often intersecting with fights over abortion or gay rights and things like that. And I just started to get into doing some pro-life, religious liberty and free speech cases when I was working at a law firm, big law firm in Boston and NDC 20 years ago. And I worked on those cases, and I realized that there were really important things to work on for God, for my fellow citizens, for my country, and that it was something important for the country to get right. The truth is that's really the story of American religious liberty from before the founding until now.

We have always been wrestling with this question of what do you do with people who've got different religious beliefs, right? They've got different beliefs about important things. How do we live together in peace? We've been fighting about that since the Quakers, since the Pilgrims, and we've been working to get it right. And I actually think it's probably more important to get it right now than it's ever been before.

The good news is it's working. We're getting it right. We're getting good results. So would you say, thinking about that last point that you made among the other great ones, that in spite of all the attacks on religious liberty, which are prevalent, that there still is great success, not just in the courtroom, but also socially and culturally, as it relates to Americans' belief in religious freedom? I think there is.

I know you can see surveys talking about the rise of the nuns, and people don't like religion, and those things have been flow over time. But in the main, I think America has been doing a pretty good job. with religious liberty. We can always do better. We're always going to fight to do more. But yeah, things have been going well on religious liberty. There are some places where you might be led to believe by the headlines that these are, you know, locked heads. We can never, we can never sort that out. It'll never, it'll never resolve. But actually, if you step back and take a look, you can see some of these things resolving and landing and people learning to live in

peace with someone who's got different beliefs from them. So there's actually a whole lot of success to talk about in the past 15 or 20 years. So it sounds like the implicit advice you're giving us is, in spite of the large number of lawsuits that might be filed against people who are advocating for their religious freedom, that if we were to dial back from that, a click or two, and look at the pattern of legal decisions as well as what has been, in spite of whatever churchgoing data shows, a persistent belief in religious liberty, that it's okay in spite of those attempts. Yeah, it's downright. We love optimism. Yeah, we love optimism. Religious liberty is doing well. America is doing well on this front.

And I actually think it's going to help us. We've got a lot of conflict in society right now, of course. And I think a good respect for religious liberty is going to help us navigate that. I think the Supreme Court, actually, all nine justices, understand that point and get it much of the time. For the aspiring attorneys or young attorneys in the audience, would you encourage them to think about developing an expertise in religious liberty. In other words, the motivation of that question is, given your leadership role in that space, do you see over the next generation that there would continue to be job security for people who are doing that? Yeah, look, I think every good citizen should come to

understand religious liberty, not just lawyers, not just people who want to go fight about it, but it's really a core part of the American commitment to who we get to be, right? I mean, like you can imagine in America where the government could tell you all the right answers to all the big questions and make everybody have those opinions. And that would have some benefits, right? We'd have less friction if we all, we all had the same government-approved set of views. But I don't think any of us really wants to live in that world. We all want to live in the place where we've got the freedom to think for ourselves about the biggest and most important things. And so if you imagine having a society where people are allowed to think for themselves about really important questions,

of course we're going to have disagreements. Of course you're going to come to different beliefs than what your neighbor might come to. But the lovely, thing about America when we're doing it right is that we've got good legal protections in place and good social ways of dealing with differences that allow us to navigate that. Religious liberty is just an important part of it. It's an important part of the commitment that says you and I can be neighbors, we can be friends, we can be fellow citizens. We don't actually have to agree on everything about God or about the universe to do that. And we can both say that the government should have punished either one of us for having the quote-unquote wrong beliefs about God or anything else. And in spite of

all the challenges to religious liberty over America's history, it seems as if the persistent belief in that, the reality of it is what I really should say, is a sign of the health of the American Republic in spite of a lot of its challenges. And so I was kind, I was mildly expecting you to be not pessimistic, but perhaps less hopeful about the present and future of religious liberty. I'm sure a lot of our audience members were as well. So I'm really glad to hear, especially given your experience, that you don't

see it that way. However, I also know that you're very comfortable with the devil's advocate question. Sure. We're going to get into some specific cases, but I thought we just kind of set the table here. And this isn't really a question for me, but it's a question that I often feel, because heritage is so outspoken as Beckett

is on these matters. And it is, what does it matter? I mean, it's not quite that flippant, but And sometimes these questions are, like Kevin, come on, the world's burning. We have all these hotspots in the world. America has a lot of problems. We're not educating our kids. This is often how it's formulated.

We get religious liberty, but why are all these resources spent on it? Yeah, well, you know, it matters because it really, really matters. Let me just give you a few examples, right? Take a recent case, Fulton versus Philadelphia, one that we handled for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. There are more foster kids in Philadelphia than they. they know what to do with. They can't find enough homes for them. But because the government was obsessed with culture wars over sex, they decided to chase the Catholic Church, Catholic charities, out of doing foster care. They didn't just chase the Catholic Church out. They

chased any family that had been working with the Catholic Church. They said, we can't place any children with you again. So in the middle of a foster care crisis, they got more kids than they know what to do with children from homes that are going through hard times, and they need someone to love them and take care of them. And you've got the families and Catholic care of them. And you've got the families and Catholic charities sitting there saying, I'll help, I want to help take care of those kids. Government said no because it got stuck on a stupid culture war fight about sex. And if religious liberty weren't there for that fight, what happens is the Catholic agency gets shut down. That's what Philadelphia tried to do. They tried to shut the agency down. Instead, we fought back with

religious liberty. It took a few years, but we won, and we won nine nothing at the Supreme Court because we were clearly right. the end result? I'm happy to report the end result is Catholic charities and all of those families for the past few years are back in the game. They're caring for children who need their help that without religious liberty, they wouldn't be. And here's another optimistic point. After we won that case 9-0-0-0-0-0. Philadelphia had the option. There were ways that they could have kept the fight going. But they didn't. The 9-0-0-win was strong enough to make them back off and resume working with Catholic charities. That was great. The ACLU was part of that lawsuit

and the ACLU had the option to keep it going. But they quit. They decided to back off and not have that fight. And the ACLU had similar cases against us in Michigan where they could have continued the fight. And they didn't. They backed off, right? So the truth is, you can use religious liberty to win some fights

and you can win them big enough and strong enough that the enemies of religion and the enemies of religious liberty will actually walk away, they'll walk off that playing field, and they'll go fight about something else. sure, they'll always have something to fight about. We will probably always have ideological conflict in America. It's a free country.

And in a free country, free people allowed to think for themselves are going to have different ideas. Great. But with wins on religious liberty, you can actually make the other side back down and walk away from some fights. And that's good. That's good for freedom.

That's good for taking care of people. I'd hate to think about what our world would look like without it. Yeah, I mean, it's so fundamental. It's impossible, actually. think about Americans' conceptions, as they would put it, of rights. I might say natural law, ordered liberty without it. So thanks for that response. I'm curious, I was going to say this may sound like an odd question.

It is an odd question, but our audience has gotten accustomed to me having these stream of conscious questions because I don't have a lot of time to ask smart people these questions. It's a question about the law's view toward Satanism. How does that relate to religious liberty? Yeah, so often, not always, but often. Is that an odd question? Yeah, it's a question. You're not the first person to ask me.

Okay, I feel a little bit better. So I've kicked it around before. I'd say often the quote-unquote Satanists are not real. I think they're insincere. So I think most Satanism cases that you see in the news, I think, are actually insincere, and they are designed to mock religion. They don't actually have a belief in a higher power. It's not actually religion.

It's mockery. And there's nothing in the Constitution or in civil rights law that says the government's got to respect mockery. That's what it is most of the time. I ask you that question because I've been asked that question a half dozen times this year. Yeah. As people read about, like thoughtful people read about religious liberty cases. Thanks for dealing with that and for your forbearance. What was the first case in your career on religious liberty where you thought, oh, I'm going to be doing this the rest of my life?

Yeah, it's a case called Morfitz v. Blago. You knew right away. It's a good memory. Morfitz versus Blagojevich. It's back when Rod Blagojevich was going to be maybe a Democratic presidential nominee, darling of Planned Parenthood. He enacted a rule, right, just sort of administrative power. The legislature didn't do this.

Blagojevich did it. The governor of Illinois enacted a rule that said all pharmacists have to provide the morning after pill, right, pills that will cause early abortions. And I had some clients in Illinois who said, look, I've invested my whole life in my whole professional career and being a pharmacist. can't give that up, but I also can't hand out a pill that's going to abort a baby. Blagojevich said, well, then you should just find another profession, right? He's got the right answer, you've got the wrong answer, go find another profession.

Well, we sued him, and it took five or six years, but in the end, we won, and the answer was, the government doesn't have the authority to tell the pharmacist, you can't be a pharmacist unless you give out the morning after pill. And in fact, when you looked at it, like one of these guys was a pharmacist. in Chicago. Think about what a stupid fight that is. Like the governor, the government of Illinois is sitting there saying, we need to get emergency contraception to women in Chicago. And we need that one pharmacy to do it. Like there's, I haven't done the math, but there's 50, 100, 200 pharmacies in Chicago, you don't need that guy. And in fact, Blagojevich's answer was to shut that guy down,

so he gives no heart medication, no cancer medication, no nothing, right? But they're so stuck on their culture war fights about sex and life and things like that, that they just, they can't see past it to the, to the big harm they would be doing if they took these people out of, out of their communities and out of their town. So we fought that. It was a, it was a great example of a government regulation that was utterly pointless. Like, if the government of Illinois wants to give that to every woman in Illinois, they can do that. It's not hard for governments to give stuff out. They do it all the time. They have figured this out, right? They figured it out. Federal governments figured it out, too. So they didn't need this guy,

but they were willing to crush his career. They're willing to ruin his professional life in the middle of his career just to prove a point. And that just struck me as a place where it's like, okay, the other side is really obsessively stuck on this point. And they're not willing to live and let live. And this is what I think religious liberty is often about,

why we really win so often. Because we're tapping into what I think is the basic American live and let live instinct. And very often these cases come up where some government actor or some government entity forgets that and thinks that we should have a my way or the highway approach, right? Rod Blagojevich has the one and only one idea about how you can be a good pharmacist, and if you're not going to do it, then you're going to lose your job, right?

Just like years later, President Obama would have one idea about how you can run a nursing home and it's sisters, you better be given out contraception or you're not allowed to do it. Those are bad ideas. They typically lose, and they should lose, and we have a much better country when we fight back and win those things and really preserve the freedom for people to pursue all sorts of careers for the common good without having to give up who they are. Yeah, I mean, as I listen to that summary,

it strikes me that someone of little or no faith could appreciate the importance of that framing and of course the reality of that framing, right? Even though they themselves may not, in fact, be very religious. Yeah, look, a country without religious freedom is not a free place whether you believe in God or don't. You don't really want to live in the countries without religious freedom. And history bears that out. I mean, I can't think of a case that that would challenge that claim. So

where, when you and I became acquaintances is on a case that was related to the one you just described. And that case was Little Sisters of the Poor. And you argue that case. I'm asking you to tell us that story. I was leading Wyoming Catholic College and that college and our Catholic bishop, the Bishop of Cheyenne, became involved. And we were very grateful for your expertise and your victory there. But that That's a case where the government was doing something preposterous. It's a great word for it, preposterous, stupid, dumb. I got a lot of adjectives for you. But it was ridiculous, right?

If you had asked anybody in 2010 and said the federal government wants to come up with a program to get contraception to people, nobody ever would have said, okay, call the Little Sisters of the Poor. Have the nuns come help? That's idiotic because nobody would go down that path. Yet the Obama administration went precisely down that path and spent almost a decade in court, insisting to courts that they needed the nuns. They needed the help of nuns to give out contraception. There are so many ways that that's a foolish position, but let me just name a few.

One, the federal government already gives contraception out to anybody who can't afford it through Title X. Millions of people in this country get it through the federal government. Millions more get it through state and local governments. There's no difficulty accessing contraception in this country. But even if you thought that wasn't enough and you said, well, you need to be able to get it through your own insurance plan. The Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, created an entire system of these separate exchanges where you could go to buy your health insurance

if you didn't want what your employer was offering. So if anybody didn't like, if anybody was surprised when they looked up, they said, oh, the little sisters of the poor, I actually worked for Catholic nuns. I didn't know it, right? I don't think that really happened to anybody. But if it did, the answer is, well, there's a website at this address where you can just go get insurance

with whatever you want. But the Obama administration was so steadfast on it that they insisted that they should be able to find the little sisters of the poor out of existence. They wanted to hit him with $75 million a year in fines. And I should back up one step. The little sisters of the poor are Catholic nuns. And all they do, they have one mission. All they do is they care for the elderly poor. And they love them, they take them into their homes, and they love them until God calls them home.

Right. And they view those elderly poor people as Jesus Christ. to them and they try to be Jesus to them. And that's all they do. And the idea that the Obama administration couldn't relent even over that, right? It's not just Blagojevich, you can't be a pharmacist unless, right? It's, you can't

do anything unless you will buy people abortion-inducing drugs and contraception and sterilization. And so we fought that for the little sisters. We said the obvious, which is, of course, the United States government, right, which can put mail in a little box outside of my house every day in my life and can put

a man on the moon. Of course the United States government could get contraception to anybody it wants to, right? But what they couldn't do is they couldn't give up the fight because it really was an ideological fight. They needed to make the sisters kneel at the altar of contraception. And I'm proud to say we've represented the sisters for more than a decade now. They have never had to provide those drugs against their will. They have never paid a penny in fines. We've won three different versions of the case of the Supreme Court so far. We're actually still fighting it in California and Pennsylvania because after the federal government came around and realized that they should give a religious exemption, this is under the

Trump administration, then all the blue state attorney generals because they have to sue over anything that Trump does. They all sued. So like we're in court against 20-something states in California trying to take away the little sister's federal exemption with states saying that it violates the law for the federal government to give Catholic nuns an exemption from the federal law. that's insane. We'll win that one too. And it just goes to show the, you know, this is not sensible stuff. This is not that the government of California can't figure out how to get people contraception. This is a culture war fight. They need to crush, they need to crush the bad guy. To them, the bad guy is the Catholic nuns. But they're not going to do it. We win every time.

We'll continue to win. It's a great opportunity for me to ask you to highlight the work of Beckett. You've been there a long time now leading the effort, which is wonderful. Tell us, in case there's someone in the audience who might not be as familiar, with your work. What the thrust of Beckett's work is? Yeah, so the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty's been around for 30 years. It's founded by a brilliant visionary lawyer named Seamus Hassan, who left a lucrative, big law, private firm career to start the Beckett Fund. And Beckett is committed to defending religious liberty for all. So we defend religious liberty for people of all faiths. We've had cases for people of all different,

all different faiths, and we really believe the principle is worth defending for everyone. So we've represented the Little Sisters of the Poor. We've represented Yashiva University when the state courts in New York wanted to pretend that Yashiva University, which is an Orthodox Jewish university, they wanted to pretend it wasn't actually a religious school. We've defended Muslim prisoners on death row. We've defended people of all different faiths because we believe that religious liberty is important to defend. It's important to defend it for everybody. If you lose your religious liberty, mine is not far behind. It's important for it to be protected as a real important national commitment that we have, and I'm very proud of the work that we've done to protect it.

As you said before, it's under attack. There are people who are attacking it. But the good news is most of the time we can take those attacks and we can turn them into victories that set important precedents for the future. So we're trying to build that up as best we can in these times. You know, one of the things I learned being a layman, a non-attorney, when I was leading an organization in Texas that had a litigation center, one of the things I learned from my attorney colleagues was the intricate process of, you know, you know,

selecting a case, getting the right plaintiff, but then also the importance after the fact of making sure you had a communication strategy around that. And it seems as if Beckett is not only very good at those two, but perhaps might set the standard for it. Give us a little inside baseball view into both of those. You know, what's the good sausage-making process inside Beckett for selecting a case and deciding to really pursue it? Yeah, so we look hard at every case that comes our way, and we are looking for cases that will set important precedents, will drive home important points that we think are publicly important. We're looking for cases that will help get the law to the right place. And that means we turn down a lot of cases that are otherwise good cases where we think somebody

should win, but we have to pick and choose where we use the resources. You're right that we do have a phenomenal communication shop, and we work hard on being able to tell the stories of our clients and tell the stories of our cases to the public. We think it's important for people to know about the cases, right? People should know that the federal government harassed these Catholic nuns for 10 years over a meaningless fight. People should know during COVID how absurd some of the government regulations are that are stopping people from worshiping at a time when they really could use chances to go to church and synagogue. So we'd like to tell that story.

We think it's important that it not just be confined to the courtroom, but that people ought to know. Again, this is something that's part of our country. it's good for citizens. It's not just the job of lawyers and judges. We want everybody in the country to know and care about religious liberty, even if it's not your own, even if it's for your neighbor. I think it's an important part of who we are as a country. So you talk about little sisters, Little Sisters of the poor case. Beckett has taken on a lot of cases. Is there a case right now you're particularly excited about? Sure. Can I do too? Yeah, that's sort of like asking a man, you know, tell me your favorite child. Yeah. You could talk about all of them, Mark.

Well, there we go. Let me start with one called Mahmood versus McNight. It's a case out of Montgomery County, Maryland, so just up the road from here. And it's a case where the public school district in Montgomery County decided that they were going to do away with the right of parents to opt their kids out of teaching about sexuality and gender. And so under Maryland law and under Montgomery County law, the rules had always been that if the school is going to be teaching your child about sexuality and gender, gender issues, you had the right to say, actually, I want to teach my kid that myself. I don't want the government to be instructing my child on it. But Montgomery County was pushing forward with a new, what they called the Pride curriculum, which for children as young as three

and four in pre-K. And it was designed to teach them things like, you're not actually born a boy or a girl. The doctor just guesses, but you know best, you know, sort of what you would imagine for a pride curriculum in 2023. And initially, they allowed the parents to opt out, just like the law says you should. But too many parents were opting out. Too many parents were saying, actually, I don't want the teacher teaching the gender ideology to my four-year-old. And so then the school board said, okay, no more opt-outs for anybody. And they took away the right of all the parents, including the religious parents, to say,

I don't want you to teach that to my child. And they even said, we're not going to give you notice of which books we teach and when we teach. them to your three and four-year-olds. So the parents don't even know what they need to teach against or what topics are being introduced to their three and four and five-year-olds. So we represent a diverse group of parents. It's really, you know, I think it's an indication of how far some of these issues have gone that we're representing Muslim and Jewish and Christian parents who said, that's not right. I'm sending my child to the public school, but I am not consenting to the government trying to teach all these things to my children,

where we're going to be arguing that at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in early December. And I think that's a case that ties together religious liberty rights, parental rights. It's really outrageous for the school to say, we need to supplant the parents. The parents can't even know what we're teaching their little children in school. Sorry for the interjection. It's like enrolling our kids in public school means that we're signing away our rights to parenthood. I mean, that's basically the position of the school system. Agreed.

And I'm Catholic. I have the privilege of my parish runs a grammar school, right? I have the privilege of a set of schools that if I look at it and I say, I'd rather not put my kid in the public schools, my religious group runs a set of schools right there. A lot of people don't have that. They don't have that to go to. So the government makes you educate your kid. That's a good thing. I'm glad. But they tell you, here's the school we're going to do it at. And then they say, but while they're here, we're going to tell them X, Y, and Z about sex and marriage and biology. And we're not going to let the parents know when we do it. It's a terrible price for the government to exact. Constitutionally, they can't do that. And so I expect us to win, either at the Fourth Circuit or at the Supreme Court. I said I do two. I'm not going to limit you to one. Great, great.

One other one where we had a huge win this past weekend is for our client, Bella Health, out in Denver, Colorado. And this is a case over a treatment called abortion pill reversal, which is if somebody takes the first abortion pill and either changes, their mind or didn't want to take it in the first place. Doctors have figured out that you can help them stave off that abortion. If they say, actually, I don't want the baby to die just by giving a woman some progesterone. And progesterone is a natural hormone.

It's been in use in pregnant women for decades. Nobody disputes progesterone is really safe. But in the aftermath of Dobbs, in some places the governments are so eager to show how much they love abortion and how much they hate the pro-lifers that in Colorado, they passed a law to ban helping women in this way. So even if a woman's been forced to take the abortion pill, which sadly happens sometimes, some people get forced, some people get tricked, some people just take it and regret it. But whatever the reason, my clients out in Colorado say, look, if that woman calls me and says, can you help me? I have to offer her progesterone because I know that that can

help her keep her baby. And they've got experience doing this, and they know that it works because they've held the babies at the end. It's really beautiful. They've helped women in this position. have their beautiful live babies. Colorado tried to make that illegal. They singled it out. That's the one and only off-label use of any drug. It's the one and only use of progesterone that Colorado wanted to come after.

And that is unconstitutional. It's unscientific. It's frankly just really mean and nasty to women who find themselves in a very bad spot. I'm delighted that on Saturday night, we got a big win from the district court out in Colorado saying that the government had violated the free exercise rights.

I should have said, our clients is a Catholic clinic, and they view it as a religious obligation to help women in trouble like this. And the court issued an order that said it's not legal for the government to stop you from doing this, and you can go ahead and keep on doing that. And that's lovely because there are women in our care, even now, who are getting this treatment and whose babies are surviving, and we just want to help. Great case, great success thus far. What do you expect the next step to be on that case?

We're waiting to see if Colorado is going to appeal that to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals or keep fighting. I'm not really sure what they're going to do. They have no valid reason to try to stop this health care. It really is just it got caught up in the abortion fights, and they needed to lash out after Dobbs. That's honestly what the government's doing here. There's no scientific reason to stop this from happening.

You've also been involved in at least one really important case on COVID mandates. Yeah, you're in Washington, D.C. A few COVID cases. You tell us about all of the markets. We've already established that precedent. But I will say, just as a little bit of context, when I started at the Heritage Foundation nearly two years ago,

I realized moving from the free state of Texas to the non-free federal district of Columbia. Yep. That the rules and laws were different. But one thing was not different, and that was I wasn't signing any stupid COVID mandate for my employees, up to them about what they do, right? Yeah.

That's especially true in a conservative organization like yours and like mine. When you hire conservatively minded people who are virtuous, care not only about their own rights, but also about the well-being of their colleagues and their family and their friends, it's amazing when you believe in self-governance that your own employees can exercise self-governance without some government telling them what to do. All of that to say, the first request I made of the Board of the Heritage Foundation literally before my first day

was, please don't make me sign this because I'm not. And to their credit, we refused. And that's that's a related lead up to the case that you're about to explain, but also some preemptive gratitude for the work that you've done on that from all of us in heritage. Well, thanks. We've had, you know, COVID, COVID is a real challenge to liberty, right? Anybody who cares about liberty should really care about what happened during COVID and should make up their minds not to let it happen again the next time somebody tells you there is an emergency. So the COVID case you're talking about is one we had on behalf of the Archdiocese of Washington. But to go back, one case before it, we represented Agudith Israel,

Jewish synagogue, group of synagogues in New York when Governor Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, was, you know, enacting his COVID restrictions. And his COVID restrictions, you can go back and look this up. He would draw maps and he would actually red line, like literally in red. He would draw red lines around all the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods and put that in one zone. And at the time, he was saying, well, this is because of the science. A month or two later, there were articles in the New York Times about how all the science people were saying, that wasn't the science. That was just what Cuomo's political office people thought. So it was really, yeah, but you were told it's the science.

A lot of times you're told it's the science and it's not the science. So Cuomo did that and we eventually got that to the Supreme Court at Thanksgiving in 2020. And the Supreme Court said, well, you can't have, I mean, Cuomo had rules that were more restrictive of religious worship than anything else. So you could have more than 10 people in a department store. You'd have more than 10 people in a restaurant. You'd have more than 10 people at the stock exchange in New York. Those 10 people couldn't go from the stock exchange to a synagogue or a church, right?

Because then they'd be over the limit because worship was somehow more dangerous. We took that to the Supreme Court and we won it just before Thanksgiving. But after that, in a lot of places in the country, they wouldn't let go. They wouldn't let go of very restrictive anti-worship rules, really, during COVID. Which is really sad because if you think about one of the things from COVID is an enormous, you know, of mental health and spiritual toll that being locked away from other people took on many people, on all of us, I suspect. And it was bad. It was bad for these governments to take away religious worship from people and to act like it was more dangerous somehow than other things. So we had to

fight in D.C. to reopen the churches before Christmas and Hanukkah, the churches and synagogics before Christmas that year. I teach at Catholic University and on the campus we have the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. It's a gigantic church. You could fit the Statue of Liberty inside it twice. It's very large. But under D.C.'s rules, because of what zone it was in, you couldn't have more than 50 people in that gigantic church, even if they're wearing masks, even if they're all in families of five. You know, they'd each have like a basketball court worth of space in that building. And somehow, D.C. was saying you couldn't do that. The rules were different if it was a health club. So we actually did this, and I think our

communications department that you've mentioned sketched this out. But if we converted the basilica into a health club, we wheeled out the pews and we rolled in exercise bikes, you could have 750 people riding the bikes and huffing and puffing and sweating in the same space. And D.C. would have said, that was totally fine for COVID, but not if you're going to sit there and worship God. And I'm delighted to say that we won that case too. And to me, that's COVID's a good example of where religious people having an external set of values, right? Their values are not just set by the latest election. It's not just beholden to what the mayor or the governor thinks.

They've got external sets of values. They've got things that they hold to and believe that are separate from, you know, whatever Twitter or Facebook or something tells them to believe. And it was really the religious people standing up and having those fights about COVID that broke the back of the COVID lockdown restrictions. Once those breakthroughs happened at the Supreme Court and in the lower court, those things melted away, and I think they'll be hard to bring back the next time. And I think, you know, that's another place where religious liberty winning turns out to be

good for everybody. Yeah, that's music to my ears, because it's not so much as we sit here, but a month or two ago, especially in cities like Washington, D.C., there were reverberations of some of the COVID nonsense returning, and I know a lot of us here at Heritage were growing concerned. I mean, there was a time when I could not get a burrito because I would not take that stinking vaccine. I couldn't go out and buy a takeout burrito in this city. That's pretty absurd.

Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty absurd. It is absurd. I think the audience of this show is used to my COVID screed. So I'll resist the temptation to talk about experiences I had for similar reasons. And I guess I'll ask you the last question, but I hope to have you back many times over the years. Actually, two questions.

The next one is, in case our audience doesn't know, how do they follow the work that you're doing and that your colleagues at Beckett are doing? Sure. You can always find us at becketfund.org. Becketfund.org is our website. And we're also on Twitter and Facebook and things like that. And we try not to be too hard to find. So if you Google the Beckett Fund, you should find us. And we'd love people to find our work and support it and meet our clients and see what we're doing.

Because we wake up every day to do it because we think it's important for the country in the world. It is. I have experienced that firsthand in Heritage Council on y'all. Last question is what I call a homework assignment question. Sometimes the last question on the show, Mark, is tell me why you're hopeful about America. Your hopefulness just exudes through your answers, so I don't have to ask that question. That's a real high compliment from us. It's a question for our audience, or rather maybe a suggestion for our audience, and that is, what can they do to help?

Whether that's Beckett specifically, you've answered that, but what can they do to participate in not just the defense of religious liberty, but as I like to put it, how can we be on offense? not to be offensive, not to be insulting, but to be on offense about our first freedom. It's a great question, and I think the answer is really to go authentically live your life and don't be afraid and think you have to put your faith under a bushel basket. I think that a lot of times when things go wrong, it's that there's an aggressive 10 or 20 percent, and then there's like 50 or 60 percent of people who are a little bit uncomfortable with it, but are a little bit too afraid to speak up and speak out and stand up for what they believe in, And so they just kind of go along.

I think we're starting to see this kind of come back a little bit in a good way on the transgender stuff. So I think the Mahmood case in Maryland, I'm not sure five years ago, the parents would have been comfortable enough to stand up and say, look, like, I don't hate anybody. But I don't want you telling my child that he or she may not be a boy or a girl or the doctor just guessed and could be wrong. Right. So I think people have to not be afraid of what they believe and not be afraid to want to pass it on to their children and to say it, politely and kindly and with love, but honestly, and not feel like you have to put it away. I think too often when things are going badly, they go badly because good people don't stand up and good people just don't speak their mind and raise their hand and say, well, wait a second,

that's just really wrong and we shouldn't do that. We need more people to do that. We live in a better country, a better place when more people do that. In other words, we can have the courage of our convictions without being angry about it. Absolutely. We should have the courage of our convictions. and we should do it with a smile. Mark Rianzzi, this was a pleasure.

I was really looking forward to this for reasons that our audience now understands. I remain very grateful for what you've done for this country, truly. I personally, my colleagues at Wyoming Catholic College, all of my colleagues at Heritage, you are a national treasured. Thank you.

We're happy to do it, and we appreciate the great work you all do as well. You bet. I told you it would be a great conversation, and I can practically guarantee that you're more hopeful about the future of religious liberty than you might have been when we started this conversation.

So that's off to Mark and all of our friends at Beckett Fund for what they do. And for you, in spite of all of the challenges that America is facing, keep your chin up. We're not just going to win. We are winning. Take care of. Well, with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. If you are interested in hearing more conversations from Herod Foundation President

Dr. Kevin Roberts, you can find all of his podcast conversations by checking out the Dr. Kevin Roberts podcast of the Kevin Roberts. Robert's podcast wherever you like to listen to podcasts. But thanks for being with us today. We hope that you all have a wonderful weekend and make sure before you start your weekend that you catch up on all of the news that you need to know with the Daily Season Top News Edition that comes out every day around 5 p.m. And thanks so much for joining us.

Have a great rest of your Friday. We'll see you right back here around 5 p.m. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Lewy and Kate Trinko. Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheris. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geiney, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.