February 21, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Under the Health and Human Services mandate of Barack Obama, Americans face a corrupting dilemma: either support his secularist morality or suffer crippling fines. The mandate requires almost all employers to pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing drugs of their employees. Short of leaving public life or operating within narrow sectarian shadows, these employers can’t escape the mandate’s reach.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states that the federal government may not infringe the “free exercise” of religion. Obama’s mandate makes a mockery of that clause. It directly tramples upon the free exercise of religion by forcing employers to finance acts that violate their principles.
In the eyes of America’s founding fathers, a federal government that felt empowered to coerce citizens into sinning, thereby corrupting their relationship with God, would qualify as a rank tyranny. James Madison, who is considered the chief writer of the U.S. Constitution, called conscience rights “the most sacred of all property.” George Washington, America’s first president, said that the “establishment of civil and religious liberty was the motive that induced me to the field of battle.”
Nowhere is Obama’s promised “fundamental” transformation of America more evident than in his repudiation of this tradition of religious freedom. He has twisted the First Amendment into an instrument of secularism, driving people of faith to the margins of society.
Perhaps less well known is that his administration has also sought to undermine people of faith abroad. Obama is trying to export America’s secularized public square to the rest of the world. His State Department, under the direction of Hillary Clinton and now John Kerry, has made the promotion of secularist morality in foreign countries one of its chief goals.
In 2010, for example, the State Department lobbied Kenya to adopt a constitution enshrining a right to abortion. According to Congressman Chris Smith, the State Department devoted more than $23 million in U.S. taxpayer funds to the effort—a violation, Smith argued, of the Siljander Amendment, a federal law that prohibits the U.S. government from abortion lobbying in foreign countries.
Hillary Clinton has long considered it an American responsibility to spread “reproductive rights” abroad. In 1994, she supported a push at the UN’s Cairo conference for an international right to abortion, brushing off objections from Catholics and Muslims, among others, as irrelevant quibbles.
The State Department has become a de facto extension of Planned Parenthood, using international conferences to lecture developing countries on the need to embrace abortion and birth control. Obama’s State Department has also been active in the imposition of “gay rights” on foreign governments. In December 2011, Hillary Clinton gave a remarkable speech in which she announced that the universal promotion of “LGBT rights” formed a “priority of our foreign policy”—a statement America’s founding fathers would surely have found puzzling.
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In her remarks, Clinton noted that she had authorized State Department officials to operate like gay activists in foreign countries. She even detailed the ambitious meddling that she had in mind for them:
In our embassies, our diplomats are raising concerns about specific cases and laws, and working with a range of partners to strengthen human rights protections for all….In Washington, we have created a task force at the State Department to support and coordinate this work. And in the coming months, we will provide every embassy with a toolkit to help improve their efforts. And we have created a program that offers emergency support to defenders of human rights for LGBT people.
She also trumpeted a taxpayer-financed “Global Equity Fund,” which exists to advance “LGBT” propaganda globally, and rebuked those nations trailing America in sufficient awe for the gay agenda. Do not, she scolded them, see homosexuality as merely a “Western phenomenon”:
Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality. And protecting the human rights of all people, gay or straight, is not something that only Western governments do…
It is not enough for the Obama administration to corrupt America. It also has to corrupt the world. Foreigners who once looked to America for a defense of religious freedom now find their own religions under attack from its State Department.
For all of his talk about “tolerance,” for all of his tributes to the glories of “diversity,” Obama champions a secularist philosophy that is baldly intolerant and leveling—a form of coercion that treats religion as one of the few forbidden acts in public life.
George Neumayr is a contributing editor to The American Spectator and co-author of No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom.