(The Center Square) - Oklahoma ranked among the top 20 states in an analysis of how states safeguard religious liberties.
Religious Liberty in the States 2022 was commissioned by the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy to gauge the status of religious freedoms in America, said Executive Director Trey Dimsdale.
States were measured using 29 items, forming six groups of safeguards. The items were chosen based on statutory or constitutional laws adopted by at least one of the 50 states that were specifically relevant to religious liberties.
Oklahoma ranked 16th, with a total score of 43%. It was one of only 23 states to enact a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the state passed an amendment to its RFRA last year “affirming religious institutions as places of essential services,” the report said.
Safeguards the report examined included absentee voting, childhood immunization requirements, and health-care provisions for providers, among others.
Oklahoma scored a “yes” for opportunities for absentee voting, exemptions from childhood immunization requirements, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and also a “yes” for employer exemptions from the contraceptive mandate.
The state had one out of five exemptions for marriage and wedding participation and three out of 20 exemptions for health care providers, all of which were under the umbrella of abortion refusal.
Categories where Oklahoma did not have exemptions for health-care providers were sterilization refusal, contraceptive refusal, and a general open-ended conscience provision.
“In our current legal and cultural landscape, there are seemingly unavoidable tensions, even competing rights claims, in many health-care, health-insurance, and marriage laws,” wrote the authors. “Some parties express a positive right to a health-care service, for example, and others, based on conscience, assert a negative right, refusing participation.”
The highest score received by any state was 81% by Mississippi. The lowest score was received by New York at 15%. However, the authors said these scores were subject to change in future iterations of the study as laws change and new ones emerge.
“More recent changes in laws—including antidiscrimination laws in employment and public accommodations, health insurance mandates, and others— have triggered more complicated and heated competing liberty claims. Although religious people are generally not the intended focus of these laws, those who believe that their religious living and practice extend beyond worship, narrowly defined, may nonetheless encounter obstacles to their religious liberty,” said the authors.
via Oklahoma's Center Square News