Some ill-informed Foreign Service professionals imagine that U.S. policies that promote religious freedom violate the First Amendment. Still others fantasize that international religious freedom policy is an evangelical ploy to use American power to clear the way for Christian missionaries. Others are afraid of scaring Islamists into further violent reactions. These reasons are dumb, or unworthy, or both.
But the real issue here is a deeper and more disturbing one. In Farr’s direct, unambiguous language, “A significant proportion of our foreign policy officials no longer believe that religious freedom is the ‘first freedom’—of American history, of the U.S. Constitution, and of all people everywhere.”
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I know senior people in and out of government who share Farr’s conviction and mine that the defense and promotion of religious freedom, strategically conceived and intelligently executed, is both the right thing to do and the smart thing to do. But they are a minority. And they are a minority that rarely dares raise its head in the present administration, whose approach to these issues was defined by Hillary Rodham Clinton in December 2009, when the secretary of state declared that “to fulfill their potential, people . . . must be free to worship . . . and to love in the way that they choose.”
(Why U.S. International Religious Freedom Policy Fails)
You must pass it to discover just how monumentally screwed up it is.
Congress and staff chafe under impending Obamacare out-of-pocket cost increases. Oopsie!
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 