Religious Freedom

Here’s a Friday treat: highlights from recent right-wing direct mail. In the past week or so, in addition to an invitation to this September’s Values Voter Summit:

Jerome Corsi, a rabidly Obama-hating birther and crazy-theory-promoter extraordinaire sent a VERY CONFIDENTIAL emergency request for money for his Freedom’s Defense Fund. Although Corsi told me that it’s “imperative that the media not know what Freedom’s Defense Fund has planned,” I’m going to let you in on the secret. Corsi says he’s going to “saturate the television with attacks aimed directly at Obama.” Corsi’s letter accuses Obama of “race-baiting” and “class warfare,” which isn’t surprising given that the president is, in Corsi’s words, “nothing more than a Socialist agitator in the mold of Sol Alinsky.” According to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website, Freedom’s Defense Fund raised and spent nearly $3 million in the 2010 election cycle. 

From the prolific folks at the American Family Association, a “declaration of spiritual emergency.” According to the AFA’s Tim Wildmon, the nation’s problems, including “the Obama administration’s blatant attempt to destroy religious freedom in this country” are evidence of what’s wrong with our nation: “As a people, we have divorced ourselves from God.”  Wildmon warns that “the ‘internal invader’ that threatens to destroy our nation is, in a word, secularism!” Wildmon’s letter is evidence of the increasingly close political alliance between the Religious Right and the Catholic Right in their joint effort to portray Obama as an enemy of religious liberty: it includes a quote from the pope himself complaining about new “cultural currents” in America “which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.”

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council contributes yet another screed warning that President Obama’s “war on religion” could “irreversibly transform America.” Perkins says of Obama: “His vision is to plant a dense forest of secularism (a non-Christian America) and socialism (a government-run America) that can never, ever be cut down or uprooted.”

Washington is aggressively moving to silence the influence and freedom of Christians in every sphere of society. Churches and ministries, charities, Christian bookstores, radio and television stations, Christian businesses will face coercion—censorship—silencing—denial of licenses—even being shut down.

 

Why? Because the Obama Left has made it clear they have a goal: marginalize Christianity, make it irrelevant and powerless to influence morality, the role of the family, and the course of our nation. And as the role of the Church is diminished—expand the federal bureaucracy.

 

They want to replace the effective work of churches and charities and essentially replace them with government programs—more constly, less effective programs.

 

They want to get religion out of the equation and make America utterly unrecognizable as a nation founded upon Christian principles. There is an unprecedented ideology of hostility toward the Christian religion in Washington today.

 

….

One prominent church leader has said, “what war and disease cannot do to the congregation, the government of the United States will. It will shut them down.”

Rep. Darrell Issa, who has followed through on his threat to turn his Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into an attack dog on the Obama administration, today held a one-sided hearing attacking as a threat to religious liberty the administration’s recent compromise on health care regulations requiring insurers to cover contraception.

Today on his radio bulletin Breakpoint, Manhattan Declaration co-author Chuck Colson claimed that the Obama administration has abandoned freedom of religion in order to advance LGBT rights. While attacking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech on LGBT rights abroad as “disastrous foreign policy,” Colson claimed that “in one fell swoop, she changed our God-given right to freedom of religion, a public act, to a much more restricted ‘freedom of worship,’ a private act, which any Chinese official could go along with,” while placing the “‘right to love in the way they choose’ as a fundamental human right.”

Of course, this argument that the mere use of the phrase “freedom of worship” has negated the freedom of religion ignores Secretary Clinton’s speeches on the freedom of religion, and as Kyle pointed out earlier, even former President George W. Bush frequently talked about the “freedom of worship.” Bush used the phrase four times in a 2008 proclamation, which if issued by Clinton or President Obama would surely have created uproar from the Religious Right.

But never mind all that, because for Colson, whipping-up anti-gay paranoia is far more important than the facts:

It started as a drip, drip, drip. Then the flow increased, and now it’s a gusher: The Obama administration has decided to promote and emphasize lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered rights—and it is doing so at the expense of everyone’s God-given freedom of religion. Those are tough words, but regrettably, true words.

In December 9, 2009 in a major address entitled, “Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century,” Secretary of State Clinton said people “must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose.” Did you catch that? In one sentence, little noticed at the time, Mrs. Clinton showed the Administration’s true priorities. In one fell swoop, she changed our God-given right to freedom of religion, a public act, to a much more restricted “freedom of worship,” a private act, which any Chinese official could go along with. And at the same time, Mrs. Clinton, speaking for the administration, elevated the quote “right to love in the way they choose” as a fundamental human right.

Lest you think I’m overreacting to an isolated statement, the intervening years have amply borne out my concerns. Freedom of worship has been substituted for freedom of religion in speech after speech by administration officials. Just last month, the Secretary told a gathering of diplomats that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” She also said the “most challenging issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens.” As I mentioned before on BreakPoint, this is a disastrous foreign policy. African nations are already up in arms, and it certainly isn’t going to help us with Muslim nations, who view U.S. advocacy for homosexuality as proof of Western decadence.

Not to be outdone, President Obama told a pro-gay-rights group, “Every single American—gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender—every single American deserves to be treated equally before the law.” Does that include marriage? Well, the President’s secretary for Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, has just said that he “absolutely” supports same-sex marriage. The Administration has already refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. And before the EEOC, officials have said in a contest “between religious liberty and sexual liberty,” sexual liberty triumphs.

Can you see where all this is headed?