Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
If you missed this year’s Religious Freedom Day, it was Saturday. But don’t worry, the only thing you missed was a reminder of how much our right to the free exercise of religion has eroded in recent years.
“Our commitment to religious freedom has fostered unprecedented religious diversity and freedom of religious practice,” the official proclamation reads. “ . . . [M]y Administration is working to preserve religious liberty and enforce civil rights laws that protect religious freedom — including laws that protect employees from religious discrimination and require reasonable accommodation of religious practices on the job.”
Except if you’re a baker in Oregon or a county clerk in Tennessee who refuse to participate in same-sex weddings because of religious beliefs. In these cases, there is no “reasonable accommodations” for the free exercise of religion.
“ . . . We will also continue to protect students from discrimination and harassment that is based on their faith, and we will continue to enforce hate crimes laws, including those perpetrated based on a person’s actual or perceived religion.”
Tell that to this long list of Christian students who are being routinely censored in the nation’s public schools where they are forbidden to read the bible, write about God in homework assignments, or pray before sporting events? If our government was so interested in protecting the religious freedom of students, why don’t they threaten to withhold funding for violators the way they do for schools that won’t establish same-sex bathroom facilities for transgendered children?
“ . . . May we remember those who have been persecuted, tortured, or murdered for their faith . . . “ the proclamation continues.
Well, it’s about time the Administration makes mention of the thousands of Christians who are being slaughtered for their faith around the world. Religious leaders in the Middle East are calling the wholesale elimination of Christians from countries such as Iraq and Syria by ISIS forces a genocide – and yet the United States has not only failed to do anything to stop it, we barely even mention it for fear of offending Muslims!
The proclamation goes on to say that we must “reject any politics that targets people because of their religion, including any suggestion that our laws, policies, or practices should single out certain faiths for disfavored treatment.”
Why don’t we let the Little Sisters of the Poor and the dozens of other Christian organizations counter that assertion. These are organizations who are being forced to spend millions to avoid being fined for refusing to offer insurance coverage for services that violate their religious beliefs. If that’s not religious profiling, what is?
“The Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate is a classic case of religious profiling,” counters Catholic League president Bill Donohue. “Not only does it cherry pick Catholic non-profits by forcing them to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, it redefines what constitutes a Catholic entity: Catholic social service agencies that hire and serve large numbers of non-Catholics—that is what truly Catholic institutions do—are deemed to be no longer Catholic. This explains why the Little Sisters of the Poor were declared to be non-Catholic by the administration; it also explains why the nuns sued them.”
And what about what happened when the U.S. bishops complained about the birth control mandate and had a letter of protest read from the pulpits at every Mass? They were retaliated against by a gag order issued by the government against all military chaplains that forbad them to read a letter from Archbishop Timothy Broglio protesting the edict?
Let’s not forget the blowback received by the bishop’s Migration and Refugee Services which received federal grant money for years to help fund their work combating human trafficking. Because the program opposes abortion as a way to “help” women, the Obama Administration denied their funds.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Whole books have been written listing the many ways our religious rights have been eroded in recent years.
Suffice to say, if America is going to reclaim its heralded First Amendment rights, we’re going to need a lot more than “feel good” stump-speeches and a proclamation so poorly publicized most Christians didn’t even know it was in effect.
We need action, and until we get it, the only impact Religious Freedom Day will have on the Christian public is to remind them of the oppression they’re experiencing on a daily basis in what’s supposed to be “the land of the free.”
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