Religious Liberty
BRIGADIER GENERAL E. JOHN Teichert commands the 412th Test Wing, Edwards Air Force Base, California. He is responsible for the second largest base in the Air Force—and he’s under attack because he maintains a website called “Prayer at Lunchtime for the United States.” On the site, he identifies himself only as “John.” He doesn’t speak for the Air Force—only himself. The website encourages Christians to “pray for our nation at lunchtime every day.” He suggests that people pray for the president and vice president, the Congress, and the military. He also asks prayer for “the unborn” and for “a return to our biblical foundation.”
Michael Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, claims the general’s prayer website is “unconstitutional.” Weinstein describes General Teichert as a “fundamentalist Christian tyrant and religious extremist predator” who promotes a “weaponized version of Christianity.”1
Weinstein’s Military Religious Freedom Foundation is not a religious liberty advocacy group, but an extreme anti-Christian hate group. Its deceptive mission statement focuses only on the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment and ignores the Free Exercise Clause which guarantees Americans like General Teichert the right to express their religious views freely. Using the banner of religious freedom to suppress religious freedom is perfectly Orwellian and is what totalitarians do.
A month after Obama’s inauguration, the New York Times reported that a meeting between Weinstein and Air Force General Norton A. Schwartz was “the first time the group has gotten an audience with a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”2 As a result of Weinstein’s subsequent influence with the Pentagon, during the Obama years, religious expression in the military became a criminal offense. Weinstein made the case to the Pentagon that Christians in the military—including chaplains—who shared their beliefs with others were committing “treason” and “spiritual rape.” He called service personnel who openly talked about their faith “enemies of the Constitution.”
Under President Obama and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, the Pentagon adopted Weinstein’s false view that the First Amendment was an antireligious stricture. In 2013, the Pentagon released a statement warning that soldiers would not be permitted to talk openly about their faith. “Religious proselytization is not permitted within the Department of Defense,” the statement said. The Pentagon statement also noted ominously, “Court martials and non-judicial punishments are decided on a case-by-case basis.”
This warning was issued after Breitbart News reported that Obama appointees in the Pentagon were meeting with Weinstein and the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to develop court-martial protocols to deal with Christians in uniform who shared their faith with others.3 The punishment meted out by a court-martial may include imprisonment and a dishonorable discharge.
An op-ed Weinstein wrote for the Huffington Post illustrates his ignorant extremism, which he has dedicated to the suppression of religious liberty in the military. “I founded the civil rights fighting organization the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to do one thing: fight those monsters who would tear down the Constitutionally-mandated wall separating church and state in the technologically most lethal entity ever created by humankind, the U.S. military.” Weinstein identified his opponents as “incredibly well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”
He went on: “Evil, fundamentalist Christian creatures and their spiritual heirs have taken refuge behind flimsy, well-worn, gauze-like euphemistic facades such as ‘family values’ and ‘religious liberty.’” Christians “coagulate their stenchful substances” in such organizations as the American Family Association, the “ultra-fundamentalist” Family Research Council, and Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty. Weinstein concluded with a warning that his readers need to speak out against the “fundamentalist Christian monsters of human degradation, marginalization, humiliation and tyranny” lest they one day find themselves living under a “rapacious reign of theocratic terror.”4
The fact that the Obama Pentagon would even consult with the unhinged author of such rabid sentiments, let alone institutionalize his antireligious attitudes, is an ominous indication of what the future may hold if radicals like Weinstein continue to have their day.
Fundamentally Transforming America
Religious liberty is America’s first freedom and the foundation of all American freedoms. It’s the reason America’s settlers and founders came to these shores and why they set up America’s system of unalienable rights. Freedom of conscience, derived from “the priesthood of all believers,” is the cornerstone of American pluralism, making possible the diversity of America’s communities, their equality under the law, and their ability to peacefully coexist.
The left’s attacks on religious freedom, and general hatred for those who don’t agree with them, are driven by “identity politics.” Identity politics is an anti-American ideology and a sanitized name for cultural Marxism. Marx viewed market societies as divided into capitalists and workers, to which he ascribed moral attributes: oppressors and oppressed. Society was the site of continual warfare between these classes. Cultural Marxists have extended this picture of class warfare to races, genders, and sexual orientations, attributing all inequality and injustice to the institutions and actions of the oppressor groups: whites, males, heterosexuals, and religious “reactionaries”—in particular Christians—whose views allegedly serve the interests of the oppressors.
Contrary to Marx and the identity politics left, which now includes the Democratic Party, the source of inequalities between individuals is not the work of oppressor groups, but is a combination of circumstance (often beyond one’s control), individual talents, and choice. As Christians, the American founders believed in free will—the responsibility of individuals for their actions and the results of those actions. Free will is what makes us equal, so long as government does not restrict our freedom. Recognizing that individuals make choices, which affect their destinies, puts the responsibility for overcoming the handicaps of circumstance squarely on the individual’s shoulders. This is a liberating idea. It is why America’s inspirational stories are always stories about the triumph of the underdog, the ability of individuals to overcome their circumstances, to rise above their allotted stations in life, to achieve something better. For over 200 years that vision has been the American dream.
Until now. Identity politics—which is currently the politics of the Democratic Party—rejects this inspirational idea and attributes inequality to the machinations of oppressor groups, who are defined by race, gender, and sexual orientation, characteristics that an individual cannot change. This is a prescription for true oppression, as the government steps in to create “social justice” by depriving those who have earned it, the fruits of their labor, and distributing them to those who have not. It is a prescription for irreconcilable conflict and division, not the compromise and coexistence that the American founders worked so hard to achieve. The success of the cultural Marxists in reshaping our institutions is why America now appears to be two nations instead of one.
If the source of inequality is not circumstance, individual talent, and choice, but is imposed by an oppressor group, it can only be overcome by suppressing that group. It is therefore morally wrong to extend sympathy to an oppressor group or to respect its American rights—rights once afforded to all. To respect oppressors’ rights is to support the injustices they commit. If social justice is to be achieved, one must suppress the perpetrators of injustice by depriving them of their rights. That is why progressives—cultural Marxists—are so intolerant and seek to suppress the free speech of those who oppose them.
In identity politics only collective rights matter—not individual rights. What matters is one’s membership in a “victim” group or an “oppressor” group. Membership is based on characteristics the individual cannot change. Identity politics is a politics of hate, and a prescription for war. The liberal but anti-left writer Andrew Sullivan has eloquently summed up the consequences of this view of the world:
What matters [to the left] is that nonwhites fight and defeat white supremacy, that women unite and defeat oppressive masculinity, and that the trans [gendered] supplant and redefine the cis [people whose sense of their own identity corresponds to their birth sex]. What matters is equality of outcome, and it cannot be delayed. All the ideas that might complicate this—meritocracy, for example, or a color-blind vision of justice, or equality of opportunity rather than outcome—are to be mocked until they are dismantled. And the political goal is not a post-racial fusion, a unity of the red and the blue, but the rallying of the victims against the victimizers, animated by the core belief that a non-“white” and non-male majority will at some point come, after which the new hierarchies can be imposed by fiat.5
In other words, by a totalitarian state.
Barack Obama’s effort to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” began with a major legislative initiative, misnamed the “Affordable Care Act,” better known as Obamacare. This massive government program was first of all an assault on individual freedom, taking away the right to choose one’s doctor and healthcare plan. In order to sell the plan to the public, Obama had to deliberately lie and say, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.” He spoke this lie again and again, using ironclad-sounding language like “promise,” “pledge,” and “guarantee” to socialize America’s healthcare system.
Because the plan was a frontal assault on the American system of individual accountability and freedom, the lies were central to getting Obamacare passed. They were even used to deceive the Congressional Budget Office and the Democrats in Congress who voted for it. In an unguarded videotaped moment during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Gruber, a chief architect of the plan, revealed the reasoning behind the lies:
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies, okay? . . . If you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically, that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.6
This is the way authoritarian governments think and act. It is the opposite of what was once the American way.
Big Government Versus the Little Sisters
Obamacare also provided its bureaucratic social engineers with the power to invent—without consent of Congress—additional mandates to impose on the public. One of these was an anti-conscience requirement that employers must provide insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives, and sterilization, even if such provisions violated the employer’s religious convictions.7
Because religious liberty is the foundation of all liberties, the ramifications of the Obama policy went far beyond an assault on religious institutions. It was a dagger aimed at the heart of the First Amendment—and the ability of the American people to form their own communities of belief.
“What is at stake here ultimately,” explained the Catholic scholar George Weigel, “is whether civil society will survive, and whether voluntary institutions or voluntary associations ranging from the traditional family to multimillion member organizations like the Catholic Church to small businesses will be allowed to function only if they imitate the government, only if they imitate the state.” In other words, what was at stake was whether America would remain a democracy or move in the direction of a totalitarian state.
“What is happening,” agreed the Heritage Foundation’s Matthew Spalding, “has little to do with health care or even public policy and everything to do with the role of government in the most immediate and intimate matters of our lives.” Under Obamacare, “all is subject to government control, regulatory dictate, and administrative whim. Nothing will be allowed outside of the new regulatory scheme: no independent state programs, no individuals or businesses permitted not to participate, no true private market alternatives.”8
The brutal, anti-American implications of the Obamacare mandates were made immediately clear in the government’s assault on a religious charity called the Little Sisters of the Poor.
Founded in France in 1839 by Saint Jeanne Jugan, Little Sisters of the Poor was originally a religious institute for women. Saint Jeanne would travel the streets of French towns with her begging baskets, seeking alms to care for the elderly poor. Today, members make vows of chastity, poverty, obedience, and hospitality. They serve the poor in thirty-one countries including the United States. “Our vision,” explains the official website, “is to contribute to the Culture of Life by nurturing communities where each person is valued, the solidarity of the human family and the wisdom of age are celebrated, and the compassionate love of Christ is shared with all.”
As a Catholic organization, the Little Sisters could not comply with the Obamacare mandate to provide abortion-inducing drugs and contraceptives to the elderly women they served. Failure to comply, however, meant millions of dollars in fines. This forced the Little Sisters to go to court to defend themselves.9
Because the Little Sisters were themselves celibate and served elderly women, the Obama administration’s position was obviously ludicrous. It was vindictive from the outset. But even when their motives were exposed, Obama’s agents refused to relent. Imposing their views on others was so important to the radicals, as the essence of the plan to fundamentally transform America, that they forced the Little Sisters to undergo years of costly legal battles to defend the religious freedom that is plainly guaranteed by the First Amendment.
A nun representing the sisters explained, “The government basically forced us into a corner. We have no desire to litigate against our government, but we had no choice because we cannot participate in the moral evil of providing or facilitating the provision of abortion and contraception.”10 She also explained why the Little Sisters felt conscience-bound to take a principled stand against the mandate, even though neither the sisters nor their elderly clients would ever need contraceptives or abortions: “As Little Sisters of the Poor we vow to devote our lives specifically to the service of the elderly poor, but the unborn are no less worthy of reverence and protection than the frail seniors we serve every day.”11
As the appeals progressed through the courts, the nuns’ belief in the “sanctity of life” was attacked by feminists as unconstitutional discrimination against women. The Little Sisters were putting an “undue burden” on women and were therefore part of the oppressor class.
In a case that should have been open-and-shut on First Amendment grounds (the free exercise of religion), the sisters were forced onto the legal treadmill in 2013. Their appeals were repeatedly rejected through 2015, when the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against them. It wasn’t until 2016, when the case reached the Supreme Court, that the Little Sisters finally won their First Amendment religious liberty. By a unanimous vote the justices struck down the Obama administration’s case, so weak were its legal foundations.
What was striking about this case, and typical of many similar ones, was its vindictive nature—the willingness of Obama bureaucrats to pursue the indefensible: to prosecute individuals who were clearly sincere in their religious convictions and seeking the protection of the most fundamental liberty that Americans enjoy.
The spectacle of a Big Government bureaucracy bullying the Little Sisters of the Poor seemed like a story scripted for a Hallmark Channel movie. Yet the Obama administration didn’t care how it looked—and was probably confident that the Hallmark Channel would not provide a platform for a story that exposed what the administration had done. Under the cloak of “social justice,” the government radicals were determined to prove that their mandates must be obeyed. Not even the First Amendment could be allowed to stand in the way of fundamentally transforming America.
A “Constitutional Right” Not Found in the Constitution
For eight years, the Obama administration was relentless in casting religious institutions and individuals as bigots and seeking to stifle religious voices. A faith-based website chronicled scores of incidents that exemplify the Obama administration’s war on Christian America. The website identified Barack Obama as “America’s Most Biblically Hostile U.S. President.”12 The list reads in part:
ACTS OF HOSTILITY TOWARD PEOPLE OF BIBLICAL FAITH
December 2009–Present—The annual White House Christmas cards, rather than focusing on Christmas or faith, instead highlight things such as the family dogs. And the White House Christmas tree ornaments which include figures such as Mao Tse-Tung and a drag queen.
March 2009—The Obama administration shut out pro-life groups from attending a White House-sponsored health care summit.
April 2009—In a deliberate act of disrespect, Obama nominated three pro-abortion ambassadors to the Vatican; of course, the pro-life Vatican rejected all three.
April 2009—When speaking at Georgetown University, Obama orders that a monogram symbolizing Jesus’ name be covered when he is making his speech.
September 16, 2009—The Obama administration appoints as EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum, who asserts that society should “not tolerate” any “private beliefs,” including religious beliefs, if they may negatively affect homosexual “equality.”
May 2009—The White House budget eliminates all funding for abstinence-only education and replaces it with “comprehensive” sexual education, repeatedly proven to increase teen pregnancies and abortions. He continues the deletion in subsequent budgets.
May 2009—Obama officials assemble a terrorism dictionary calling pro-life advocates violent and charging that they use racism in their “criminal” activities.
May 2009—Obama declines to host services for the National Day of Prayer (a day established by federal law) at the White House.
July 2009—The Obama administration illegally extends federal benefits to same-sex partners of Foreign Service and Executive Branch employees, in direction violation of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
October 19, 2010—Obama begins deliberately omitting the phrase about “the Creator” when quoting the Declaration of Independence—an omission he has made on no less than seven occasions.
August 2010—The Obama administration cuts funding for 176 abstinence education programs.
January 2011—After a federal law was passed to transfer a WWI Memorial in the Mojave Desert to private ownership, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that the cross in the memorial could continue to stand, but the Obama administration refused to allow the land to be transferred as required by law, and refused to allow the cross to be re-erected as ordered by the Court.
February 2011—Although he filled posts in the State Department, for more than two years Obama did not fill the post of religious freedom ambassador, an official that works against religious persecution across the world.
April 2011—For the first time in American history, Obama urges passage of a non-discrimination law that does not contain hiring protections for religious groups, forcing religious organizations to hire according to federal mandates without regard to the dictates of their own faith, thus eliminating conscience protection in hiring.
November 2011—Unlike previous presidents, Obama studiously avoids any religious references in his Thanksgiving speech.
November 2011—President Obama opposes inclusion of President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous D-Day Prayer in the WWII Memorial.
February 2012—The Obama administration forgives student loans in exchange for public service, but announces it will no longer forgive student loans if the public service is related to religion.
January 2013—Pastor Louie Giglio is pressured to remove himself from praying at the inauguration after it is discovered he once preached a sermon supporting the biblical definition of marriage.
March 2014—The Obama administration seeks funding for every type of sex-education—except that which reflects traditional moral values.
Ever the politician, Obama publicly opposed gay marriage well into his administration. But as the tide of public opinion began to change and made it safe for him to express his real views, he endorsed it and put his weight behind a series of cases that led to a June 2015 Supreme Court decision making same-sex marriage a constitutional right. There are many arguments for sanctioning gay unions, including the same religious considerations that regard families as indispensable foundations of decent societies. As the AIDS epidemic demonstrated, unattached males are dangerous to themselves and others. There are also different ways to legitimize same-sex couples and provide them with rights, such as civil unions.
In the normal democratic process, these questions would have been publicly debated and resolved with new legislation. The American people would, through their elected representatives, come to a consensus. In fact, by the time the Supreme Court reached its decision, 60 percent of Americans, polled by the Gallup organization, already thought gay marriage should be law.13
Was it necessary for the radical left to again go over the heads of the people? Was it necessary to keep the American people from voicing their own views on how this issue should be resolved? Was it necessary to appeal again to nine unelected lawyers to assert a “constitutional right” not found in the Constitution?
There Would Be No Compromise
Using the Court to take a shortcut past the legislative process is an attack on the very heart of the American system. It deprives the people of a voice in their own government. The founders designed our representative democracy as a way to force diverse communities and factions to debate, to negotiate, and to reach compromises if possible. As legal scholar Lino Graglia observed, the decision demonstrated the arbitrary nature of the Court’s power, the tyranny-in-the-making that its decision represented:
Even for Americans unfortunately grown used to having radical cultural changes decreed by the Court, it should be impressive that the Court could by a margin of one vote decree that “marriage” no longer means the union of one man and one woman and deprive fifty state legislatures and Congress of the power to have it retain that meaning. At the same time, it could hardly be clearer that the decision, as Chief Justice Roberts pointed out in dissent, has nothing to do with the Constitution. It is an egregious example of the Court’s usurpation of legislative authority. To accept it without protest is in effect to accept a change in our form of government, from the system of representative self-government in a federalism with separation of powers created by the Constitution to government, to a large extent, by the Supreme Court.14
In making same-sex marriage a constitutional right, the Court not only bypassed the legislative process; it laid the groundwork for attacks by gay rights groups on the religious liberty of those they opposed. These were manifested in suits brought by LGBTQ individuals against businesspeople such as bakers, florists, nonprofits, and higher educational institutions with traditional views of marriage. One celebrated case highlighted the aggressiveness of the gay campaign and its destructive impacts on individuals in its path.
In 2012, a gay couple walked into a well-known Christian bakery in Colorado, the Masterpiece Cakeshop, in a deliberate attempt to provoke a confrontation. The owner was a soft-spoken individual named Jack Phillips. The gay couple demanded he bake them a wedding cake. Phillips told them he would bake them any cake in the store but not a wedding cake, because it would send a message endorsing gay weddings, which went against his religious principles. He said he could not go against his religious conscience to make them that particular cake, any more than he would make them a Halloween cake or a cake carrying an anti-American message.15
Even though Phillips manifested no ill will toward them as gays, on hearing his response the couple began cursing him and attacking his store. They then walked out to file a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, claiming Phillips discriminated against gays, even though Phillips had been willing to serve them.
The commission ruled against Phillips, with one of the commissioners saying:
Freedom of religion and religion have been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be—I mean, we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use, to use their religion to hurt others.16
When the case against Phillips reached the Supreme Court six years later, this outburst was deemed discriminatory itself and resulted in a decision against the plaintiffs.
In the six-year interim, Phillips had been barred from baking wedding cakes, which were 40 percent of his business. He was forced to pay $175,000 in legal fees to defend himself, while he and his family were subjected to constant verbal attacks. “We’ve had death threats,” Phillips told ABC News. “We’ve had hundreds of phone calls and emails that were vile and vulgar and vicious.”
One death threat was called in to his store while his daughter, who also worked at the bakery, and his granddaughter were present. The anonymous caller said he was coming to the shop to make good on his threat. Phillips recalled, “I had to have [my daughter and granddaughter] go hide in the back. It was a crazy situation.”17
In each of these cases, the Obama administration was fully behind the gay vigilantes. As two writers for National Review observed, “The administration was content to depict any religious institution or person holding fast to traditional beliefs on marriage as engaging in invidious forms of discrimination.” Other commentators pointed out, “Each of the dissenting justices [in the Supreme Court case on gay marriage] specifically highlighted the ways in which the ruling represented an enormous threat to religious liberty. But in the months following the Court’s ruling, the administration made clear that there would be no compromise.”18
Switching from Jefferson to Marx
An even more ominous aspect of the Court’s ruling was the way the majority of justices embraced leftist identity politics and victimology. Meanwhile, the Court’s majority completely ignored the threat the decision posed to the pluralistic principle at the heart of America’s social contract.
Before making same-sex marriage a constitutional right, the Court had to void the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, passed by Congress during the Clinton administration. The act had defined marriage, for federal purposes, as “only the legal union of one man and one woman as husband and wife.”19 It was overturned in the 2013 United States v. Windsor case, in which the same Court majority declared the Defense of Marriage Act discriminatory and unconstitutional. In a scathing dissent, Justice Scalia wrote:
The majority says that the supporters of [the Defense of Marriage Act] acted with malice—with the “purpose to disparage and to injure” same-sex couples. It says that the motivation for DOMA was to “demean,” to “impose inequality,” to “impose . . . a stigma,” to deny people “equal dignity,” to brand gay people as “unworthy,” and to “humiliate” their children.
I am sure these accusations are quite untrue. To be sure (as the majority points out), the legislation is called the Defense of Marriage Act. But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.
In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence—indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis—enemies of the human race.20
Scalia had put the problem in a nutshell. There could hardly be a more precise description of the aggressions of a left that had switched its ideological allegiance from Jefferson to Marx, creating in the process the cavernous divisions in America’s political life.
In July 2016, alarmed by the assaults on religious liberty and the Obama administration’s disregard for freedom of conscience, congressional Republicans drew up a Conscience Protection Act. The act was designed to “protect health care providers that decline to be involved in abortions as a matter of conscience.” Speaker Paul Ryan explained that the act was “meant to guard against exactly what [had already] happened in California, where all employers—including churches—are now required to cover abortions.”21
On a straight party-line vote, the Conscience Protection Act was quickly passed in the Republican-dominated House. It was opposed by every Democrat on the grounds that it would “deny women full access to health care.” Justifying the opposition, Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette assumed the victim posture and declared: “Congress needs to stop interfering in women’s health decisions once and for all.” The Obama White House claimed the act would “limit women’s health care choices” and indicated that the president would probably issue a veto if it passed the Senate.22
At that moment, the Republican Party was holding its 2016 nominating convention in Cleveland, where its platform committee adopted a plank that read:
Right of conscience is the first freedom to be protected. Religious freedom in the Bill of Rights protects the right of the people to practice their faith in their everyday lives. As George Washington taught, “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to a free society. Similarly, Thomas Jefferson declared that “No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.”23
When the First Amendment was adopted in 1791, the principle that Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise of religion was plainly understood by every American, including lawmakers and judges. Today, the free exercise of religion has ceased to be a guaranteed right in America. Instead, it has become a battlefield.