How a Vague Provision of Human Trafficking Law Is Threatening Religious Communities | John Lauro
American Thought LeadersShow Notes
A 2008 update to the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) is increasingly being used to target religious communities, says attorney John Lauro, and raising red flags for experts in constitutional law.
The definition of the term “serious harm” in the statute was altered to include psychological and other non-physical harms. And in recent years, “that provision has been weaponized by plaintiffs’ lawyers,” Lauro says. This could affect the many religious communities that involve members voluntarily giving their time or money to religious causes; some of whom may later become disillusioned. “This statute … is like a dagger pointed at the soul of every voluntary religious community in the United States,” Lauro says. An advocate for religious freedom, Lauro has worked as a criminal and civil defense attorney for decades. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
More from American Thought Leaders
In 2022, New York fined three private Amish schoolhouses $118,000 in combined fines for allowing unvaccinated children to attend. This came after New York repealed its longstanding religious exemptions for school vaccination requirements in 2019.
From security dossiers and advanced aerospace stealth designs to the mundane technology in your living room, virtually no sector of the American economy has remained untouched by the Chinese Communist Party’s intellectual property theft campaign.
What does the U.S. government actually know about UFOs or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), and what aren’t they telling us? Have non-human intelligences visited Earth already? And what do we know about them?
In this episode, I sit down with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. He’s the longest-serving sitting governor, having spent 11 years in office, and is running for reelection this November.
Nate Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.”