From LifeSiteNews

By Matt Lamb

Priests are automatically excommunicated if they break the Seal of Confession, according to canon law.

The Washington state Senate passed legislation to throw priests in jail for almost a full year for maintaining the Seal of Confession.

Senator Noel Frame, a Democrat, is on her third attempt to force priests to divulge what they hear during Confession if it concerns abuse. Last year, a bill backed by the Washington Catholic Conference, though not by all bishops in the state, died.

This year, Frame’s bill includes no exemptions at all for the religious liberties of priests. It passed the state senate 28 to 20 – all but two Democrats voted to violate the religious freedom of Catholics and remove the clergy-penitent privilege. All Republicans voted against the measure on February 28. A House version is now in committee waiting a further vote.

Senate Bill 5375 and House Bill 1211 in the state of Washington are “no exemption” bills that remove all protections for what priests hear in confession when it comes to alleged abuse. Frame said the bill will not compel priests to testify but only to report abuse.

However, that is not written in the text of the law. Furthermore, a priest would presumably have to reveal the name of a person admitting to the abuse in the confessional in order to alert authorities to what child allegedly might be at risk, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.

Frame’s office did not respond to an inquiry from LifeSiteNews on March 3. LifeSiteNews asked if an attorney had reviewed the legislation for potential religious freedom issues.

Frame previously dismissed religious freedom concerns during a hearing. “I have tried really hard over the last couple of years to find a balance and to strike a careful compromise,” she claiming before saying “sorry” for not being willing to “make a compromise anymore.” She criticized efforts to protect clergy-penitent privilege “in the name of religious freedom.”

Priests are automatically excommunicated if they break the Seal of Confession, according to canon law.

Canon 1386 states, “A confessor (priest) who directly violates the sacramental seal incurs a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See; he who does so only indirectly is to be punished according to the gravity of the offence.”

Efforts to force priests to do so, including Montana and Washington this year, have drawn condemnation from Catholic groups as well as several legal experts.

Catholic group calls bill ‘egregious violation’ of First Amendment

“This bill is an egregious violation of the First Amendment, and we can only hope that the courts will waste no time in striking it down,” the Catholic League told LifeSiteNews via email on Tuesday. “Given the political landscape of Washington State, it is, unfortunately, pretty much a done deal.”

Contra the Democrats claims about the bill being just about preventing child abuse, the Catholic League pointed out there are efforts to weaken protections for children, stating:

What is even more galling is that in Washington State they have steps to water down provisions on the public schools to report sexual abuse to parents. Washington State House Bill 1296 seeks to undo much a voter-backed (AND PASSED!) parental rights initiative. In the current legislation, there is a provision to allow public schools to take up to 48 hours before notifying parents if their child is sexually abused. When efforts were made to remove the language that gave schools this ridiculous leeway, the Democrats successfully blocked those efforts. A simple amendment that requires Washington State’s public schools to tell parents right away about crimes committed against their child is too much for the same people supporting an attempt to break the Seal of Confession.

Senators also killed an amendment brought by Republican Senator Phil Fortunato to require school districts to report sexual abuse allegations, and related actions taken, to the state.

“This is, simply, an effort to cause a chilling effect on people of faith,” the Catholic League told LifeSiteNews. “The rabid secularists in Washington State would love nothing more than to marginalize faithful voters who stand in the way of their revolution.”

The law is “impractical,” so the aim must be “to intimidate Catholics and other people of faith.”

“When they specifically take aim on one of the sacraments, they clearly are trying to cause a chilling effect on good Catholics and other people of faith who wish to see public policy that is ordered by traditional morals,” the Catholic League stated.

‘Blatantly unconstitutional,’ legal scholar says

A left-leaning legal expert called the bills in Washington and Montana “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“Putting aside the obvious violation of the sanctity of the confessional, it presents a novel problem for priests if they both encourage the faithful to unburden themselves while at the same time reminding them anything that they say can and will be used against them in a court of law,” Professor Jonathan Turley wrote on his commentary website.

“In my view, the Washington State law is a frontal attack on free exercise and would be struck down if enacted,” the George Washington University law professor wrote.

“The only question is why Democrats consider such legislation to be any more viable politically than it is constitutionally.”

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum held a joint appearance in south Louisiana Thursday to tout the restart of the growth of America’s liquefied natural gas(LNG) industry.

The event celebrated the kickoff of a planned $18 billion expansion of the existing Plaquemines Parrish LNG export facility operated by Venture Global. It also served to symbolize the end of what was frankly one of the dumbest policy actions ever invoked by executive order – then-President Joe Biden’s “pause” on permitting for new LNG export infrastructure.

Reversed by President Donald Trump on day 1 of his second term in office, Biden invoked the year-long pause in January 2024 on the flimsiest of pretenses, a preposterous claim by anti-natural gas activist researchers that US LNG emissions exceed those of coal-fired power plants. Worse, that claim was not made in findings of a peer-reviewed scientific study, but in an early “preview” of a study that fell apart on close inspection.

The unpleasant task of defending this dumb policy action fell largely on the shoulders of Biden’s hapless Energy secretary, Jennifer Granholm, who assured the attendees of the annual CERAWeek conference in Houston in March 2024 that the “pause” would be “in the rearview mirror” when they met again in 2025. That prediction turned out to be accurate, but not due to any action taken by her or Biden. Instead, Granholm did her best to hype the Department of Energy’s(DOE) own study when it was released in November, making claims about its findings in a letter leaked to The New York Times the day before that turned out to not be accurate.

Even more concerning, Democrat nominee Kamala Harris consistently supported the pause and concerns increased throughout the campaign that, if elected, she would most likely move to turn the pause into permanent policy, thus ending America’s dominant position in the global LNG export business. But voters had different ideas, choosing instead to elect Trump for a second time in November, bringing his plans for American Energy Dominance along with him.

Burgum, who chairs Trump’s newly-created American Energy Dominance Council in which Wright also participates, told workers and executives assembled for Thursday’s event that, “One of our pathways to energy dominance is just unleashing the incredible resources that we have in this country: getting the red tape, getting the federal government off the back of the worker, off the back of companies.”

In an interview from the Venture Global site with Will Cain on Fox News, Wright, pointing to an LNG tanker behind him, said, “In less than 24 hours it’ll be loaded and sailing back to Germany; 100,000 homes in Europe can be heated and supplied with gas for a full year just in that one tanker behind us. This is unleashing American energy to the benefit of Americans and to the benefit of our friends and allies abroad. This is the way to peace.”

And so, Biden’s absurd pause comes to a richly-deserved end. Again, this entire fake controversy had zero basis in fact or real science. That’s how close America came to losing what has been one of its major growth industries of the last decade.

It is almost unimaginable that this could have happened in the United States of America, with its supposed system of checks and balances. But, as Elon Musk’s DOGE operation is revealing on a daily basis, so much of Biden’s administration appears to have been built on a foundation of a complex web of scams and money laundering schemes, with his energy and climate policies playing a leading role. This LNG pause episode almost pales in comparison to some of the multi-billion-dollar grants handed out by both DOE and the EPA in the administration’s final months.

But it’s all in Granholm’s imagined rearview mirror now, as is Granholm herself. America’s LNG industry is back, poised for rapid expansion and ready to resume its place as the dominant player in the global market.

Elections do matter.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.