Cole Durham is Emeritus Professor of Law at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, where he held the Susa Young Gates University Professorship. He is founding Director of the Law School’s International Center for Law and Religion Studies. From its official organization on January 1, 2000, until May 1, 2016, Professor […]

Hannah Smith is senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which is representing employers in several legal challenges to the birth control mandate.

Read a Feb. 9, 2012, article at Slate.com on how, historically, the issue of contraceptives divided Catholics and Protestants.

Read the text of President Obama’s 2009 speech at Cairo University on the civil rights of Muslims.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder also released a statement to coincide with Obama’s Cairo University speech, stating that the Justice Department is “committed to using criminal and civil rights laws to protect Muslim Americans.”

In April 2009, the Los Angeles Times reported that the FBI monitored gyms throughout Orange County to gather intelligence on local mosques.

Read remarks made Feb. 24, 2006, (scroll halfway down the page) by Mark Everson, who was IRS commissioner at the time, about his agency’s role in monitoring charitable groups’ election activities. The IRS stepped up its education and oversight efforts “to address what we saw as increasing political intervention” by tax-exempt groups in 2004, he said. […]

Read IRS rules for charities on political and lobbying activity.

Read a background page about churches, charities and politics on the Internal Revenue Service website.