State Department To Downplay Religious Oppression

Posted 07/17/2012 06:38 PM ET

Investors Business Daily:

Rights: The U.S. government no longer includes religious freedom in its annual Human Rights Report. We won't embarrass anyone by pointing to burnt out churches abroad while suppressing religious liberty at home.

The declared reason for dropping the coverage is to avoid duplicating another document, the annual Report on International Religious Freedom. We suspect the reason is that an administration that's been apologetic about our leadership role in world affairs no longer wants to offend those nations who tolerate or even foster assaults on religious liberty, even as the administration suppresses it at home.

The Pew Research Center has produced two studies showing that 70% of the world's population lives in countries where religious freedom is severely restricted, either by governments or by hostile groups allowed to run amok by indifferent or hostile leaders.

Religious liberty was considered so important by our Founders that it was written into the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in a country populated by those fleeing the religious oppression of governments.

We considered religious liberty a bedrock of freedom and democracy and, as stated in our Declaration of Independence, we believed we were endowed with Unalienable rights by our Creator, not by men or governments.

The U.S. in recent years has grown increasingly indifferent to the lack of religious tolerance around the world as it has taken an increasingly violent turn.

Christians in places like Nigeria and Iraq, along with Coptic Christians in Egypt, have been subject to ruthless persecution by those for whom religious tolerance and freedom are a threat.

As 2011 began with a New Year's attack on an Egyptian Coptic Christian church that killed 21 worshippers, it ended with attacks on two Nigerian churches that killed 35 and injured at least 57.

While such attacks are officially condemned, they are part of a campaign of violence and suicide bombings for which 34% of Nigerian respondents in a Pew Global Attitudes Project poll expressed support.

Such violent attacks on Christian churches in Nigeria mirror the Oct. 31 attack on Our Lady of Salvation in Baghdad in which 68 people were murdered.

The Islamic State of Iraq, another al-Qaida-linked group, took credit for that attack and vowed a campaign of violence against Christians wherever they are.

We have other issues with Iran, including one that involves Youcef Nadarkhani, a Christian pastor sentenced to death in Iran recently for leaving Islam and converting to Christianity. The State Department has called for his release, and he may just be a pawn in other negotiations. Yet the fact remains such a conversion is not permitted or tolerated in a large part of the world.

Here at home we find a different kind of war on religious liberty, not violent but insidious, conducted by a government intent on imposing its beliefs regarding access to contraceptives and mandating that religious institutions violate their beliefs and consciences in the name of government health care edicts.

Here we see an unprecedented attempt by the Obama administration through ObamaCare to define what a church and religious institution is — the notion that you're a church if the government, in Soviet-style fashion, says you're a church.

Religious institutions see the universities, hospitals, charities and other social services they perform as part and extensions of their faith.

The government believes they are impediments to its growing power over every facet of our lives. As a result, these religious institutions and the freedom on which they are founded, are in serious jeopardy.

We need to keep the focus on religious persecution — both abroad and here at home.