IMBODY:
Obama ‘freedom to worship’ assaults First Amendment
Freedom of religion not
just for private expression
By Jonathan
Imbody
Monday, January 28, 2013
President Obama marked
Religious Freedom Day earlier this month by framing religious liberty as “the
freedom to worship as we choose.” If the president had not been restricting and
attacking religious freedom so egregiously, he might merit a pass for using
“freedom to worship” as poor shorthand for religious liberty.
The First Amendment of our
Constitution actually reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The
constitutionally guaranteed free exercise of religion in America extends well
beyond the freedom to worship. It includes the freedom to live out our conscientiously
held beliefs.
Worship at its core is
essentially a private and personal process, a communion between God and an
individual. No government could restrict such worship, any more than it could
monitor and censor every citizen’s thoughts and prayers. Even forbidding
individuals to worship together in public, which coercive communist governments
like China’s
have done, cannot actually prevent individuals from worshiping God in private.
So a law that merely protected the freedom to worship would hardly be worth
heralding in a presidential proclamation.
The free exercise of religion
under the American Constitution, by contrast, includes the freedom to openly
express, follow and live out our faith — not just in private but also in the
public square — without government coercion, censorship or any other form of
restriction.
The concept of religious
liberty held by the Constitution’s framers included not merely the freedom to
worship, but also the free exercise of conscience — carrying out one’s moral
beliefs with conviction and action.
As Thomas Jefferson asserted, “[O]ur rules can have
authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The
rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable
for them to our God.”
James Madison expressed this understanding in his
original amendment to the Constitution: “The civil rights of none, shall be
abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national
religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be
in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.”
To be fair, Mr. Obama’s
statement eventually included a more expansive acknowledgement of religious
freedom: “Because of the protections guaranteed by our Constitution, each of us
has the right to practice our faith openly and as we choose.”
Yet the record will show that
the president’s gilded rhetoric belies tarnished policies. The prioritization
of the president’s first statement — that religious freedom means simply
freedom to worship — in fact parallels his policies. Those policies often
violate not only the general principles of the First Amendment, but also the
more specific Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which provides that
“Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” and
must take “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling
governmental interest.”
The Obama administration has taken several actions to restrict
or outright violate religious liberty. They have gutted the only federal
conscience regulation protecting the conscience rights of American health care
professionals.
Officials issued a coercive
contraception and sterilization mandate that imposes the president’s abortion
ideology on all employers, exempting virtually only places of worship. The
thousands of faith-based charities that actually exercise their faith and
conscience beyond the four walls of their churches now face millions of dollars
in fines by the Obama administration.
The administration has argued before the Supreme Court in
Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC against a
religious institution in an attempt to restrict faith-based organizations’
hiring rights. In a unanimous decision, even Mr. Obama’s own appointees to the
court rejected the administration’s radical arguments to restrict
religious liberty.
The Obama administration failed for months to aggressively
advocate on behalf of Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American citizen imprisoned,
tortured and now on trial, facing possible execution by the Iranian government,
for simply living out and speaking about his Christian faith.
The first American Congress
enshrined religious liberty pre-eminently in the Bill of Rights. Many of those
leaders and their fellow patriots who ratified the First Amendment had risked
everything they owned and their very lives to win those freedoms. They also
recognized that threatening one group’s freedoms, by either restricting or
establishing a faith, threatens the freedoms of everyone.
Unless we act swiftly to
guard against current assaults on religious liberty — by reversing the administration’s coercive policies through the
courts, by passing conscience-protecting laws in Congress and by re-educating the culture on
religious liberty — our First Amendment freedoms will become an empty
proclamation.
