To the editor:

It is a pleasure to sort through the tortured logic of a recent letter regarding Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

1) Freedom of Religion is not a law, it is a constitutional right of citizenship (see the First Amendment).

2) Freedom of Religion was not sacred, “worthy of religious veneration,” and no nation held that it was until the U.S. Constitution so proclaimed and bettered the world (see the First Amendment).

3) There is no need for “Restoration,” which presumes something was lost, because there is already a federal law in place intending to protect individual religious freedom from government action and, of course, the Constitution (see the First Amendment).

4) The Indiana law justifies religious discrimination by giving business corporations First Amendment rights (see the Constitution) but corporations are not citizens and are only allowed to exist by being chartered by a state. It is strange logic to “restore” to corporations a right they never had so they can abridge the rights citizens already have which is certainly unconstitutional (see the Ninth Amendment).

5) Freedom of Religion is our first and most fundamental of rights to protect citizens from government interfering in the free exercise thereof. It follows that citizens also shall be protected from corporations interfering in that free exercise thereof as well (see the First Amendment).

TOM MOENCH

Bainbridge Island