Shocking News for Those Who Haven’t Been Paying Attention

Published Monday, June 11, 2012 A.D. | By Donald R. McClarey

I am shocked, shocked to learn that the Obama administration cares as little about religious freedom abroad as it does religious freedom at home:

The U.S. State Department removed the sections covering religious freedom from the Country Reports on Human Rights that it released on May 24, three months past the statutory deadline Congress set for the release of these reports.

The new human rights reports–purged of the sections that discuss the status of religious freedom in each of the countries covered–are also the human rights reports that include the period that covered the Arab Spring and its aftermath.

Thus, the reports do not provide in-depth coverage of what has happened to Christians and other religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East that saw the rise of revolutionary movements in 2011 in which Islamist forces played an instrumental role.

For the first time ever, the State Department simply eliminated the section of religious freedom in its reports covering 2011 and instead referred the public to the 2010 International Religious Freedom Report – a full two years behind the times – or to the annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which was released last September and covers events in 2010 but not 2011.

Go here to CNS to read the rest. I will give points to Obama on this score: his contempt for religious believers has been consistent:

5 Responses to Shocking News for Those Who Haven’t Been Paying Attention

LoneThinker says:

Monday, June 11, 2012 A.D. at 7:31am

They have been slowly and sneakily trying to narrow it all down to freedom to worship. That is not freedom of religion. The HHS “accommodation” was an application, your employee members may be exempt, but you, as private employer, religious institution may not. China of course and Saudi Arabia for a bank for the USA and oil are off-limits for any kind of concern.
Art Deco says:

Monday, June 11, 2012 A.D. at 8:09am

If it were just the President, it could be borne. I will bet if you looked under this particular rock you would find the Foreign Service officers tasked with this work never wanted to do it in the first place and that the pool of people from whom discretionary appointees in Democratic administrations are derived is chock-a-block with people indifferent or hostile to these tasks. With a Democratic administration, you assume that the political appointees are in tune with the permanent government. With a Republican administration, you assume that they are battling the permanent government (and the contacts those of the permanent government have in the news media).
Alphatron Shinyskullus says:

Monday, June 11, 2012 A.D. at 10:08am

Say it ain’t so! We need to get CNN and MSNBC on this right away! Oh, wait…
Mary De Voe says:

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 A.D. at 6:44am

The human being does not need permission from the state to exist. The human being exists at the will of “their Creator”, from The Declaration of Independence. Human existence is the criterion for the objective ordering of human rights. Roe v. Wade imposes an artificial condition contrived by the state to expand the state’s unauthorized, unsovereign, therefore, illegal intrusion into the life of the common good, the life of the people.
Prayer ban too, is an artificial and contrived condition by the state to allow the human being to exist, an illegal expansion of the state’s sovereign authority, a violation of the mandate given for the existence of the state, and an unnatural authorization against the common good of the people. Prayer ban, the exclusion of the Person of God from the common good and the people, the persons brought into existence through the will of “their Creator” is an illegal and unauthorized violation of the separation of church and state that dictates that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights to Life , Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, the pursuit of Happiness which is hampered, proscribed and deleted from the common good, from the people and from FREEDOM.
Marriage is a privilege to obey the law of God: “increase and multiply”. If you choose not, you are free to not. Witness to marriage is a privilege engaged by the people for the common good and exercised by the state. Gay-marriage is a contorted and contrived artificial, invented objection to marriage, inimical and antithetical to marriage and invented to extend the sovereignty of the state over the sovereignty of the people.
Mary De Voe says:

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 A.D. at 5:44pm

The Catholic Church and clergy are servants of God, not subject to commerce, not subject to business law, not subject to the civil court. Jesus said: “My kingdom is not of this world.”