Obama Shows Terror in Judgment

FRC Action: While our Secretary of State John Kerry is running around Europe insisting that refrigerators are as dangerous as ISIS, the real terrorists are having a field day. Yesterday's attack on a church in France by radical Muslims shows a new, more aggressive tactic of the jihadists: targeted violence against Western Christians. Police are already beefing up security around houses of worship like the small Rouen church, where 85-year-old priest, Father Jacques Hamel, was brutally beheaded during mass. As the Washington Times points out, his killing "marked the first time that the Iraq/Syria-based group targeted a church in the West, sending a shudder through religious communities that have highlighted the militants' persecution of Christians in the Middle East."

Of course, the war against men and women of faith is nothing new for ISIS. Unfortunately, the Obama administration's attention to the crisis is. It literally took years for the president to acknowledge the genocide taking place across the Middle East against Christians -- and so far, that acknowledgement hasn't resulted in the leadership on this crisis the world so desperately needs. If anything, the White House has only continued its religious favoritism -- granting asylum to thousands more Muslim refugees than Christians and casting the violence as rare deviations from a religion of peace.

After Tuesday morning's murder -- the latest in a string of small-town attacks -- the White House did manage to release a statement through a spokesman for the National Security Council that insisted: "France and the United States share a commitment to protecting religious liberty for those of all faiths, and today's violence will not shake that commitment." That sounds good, yet -- as the Apostle James said -- "Do you want to know, O foolish man, that faith without works is dead?" The NSC's words ring hollow when you look at the State Department's priorities in its foreign policies. Under a new brand of "diplomacy" that started under Secretary Hillary Clinton (and continues under John Kerry), State officials have repeatedly strong-armed countries on LGBT rights despite many nations' moral and religious objections. By 2011, the State Department had all but morphed into a satellite office for the radical Human Rights Campaign.

While the military was struggling to keep up with the threats, the Obama administration had launched another offensive: Operation International Tolerance. In a major U-turn from the Bush years, the Obama administration began initiating "anti-discrimination" resolutions to strong-arm the world into embracing pro-LGBT policies. Secretary Hillary Clinton was already knee-deep in her goodwill tour for abortion when she agreed to start lecturing other nations about the need to endorse homosexuality and transgenderism. By the end of her four years at the helm of the State Department, Clinton was most remembered -- not for improving the relations with key leaders, but her bullying approach to social extremism. "Gay rights," she argued on a global stage in 2011, are "human rights."

Meanwhile, her actions -- and the actions of the entire administration -- on behalf of persecuted Christians have been both reluctant and infrequent. Part of that blame lies with the president's constant coddling of Islam and frequent criticism of Christianity. When combined with their abject foreign policy failures, both have put religious liberty at risk here and abroad. After all, it was under Former Secretary of State Clinton's watch that the Ambassador at-Large for Religious Freedom position sat empty. And while the Secretary can't appoint that person, she can certainly advocate its importance -- something the Democratic nominee for president never did during her first two years of Obama's term.

Not surprisingly, the situation dramatically worsened under Clinton's watch -- since the elevation of sexual politics came almost exclusively at the expense of religious freedom. After eight years of chipping away at our First Freedom, we must demand that the next administration place a priority on both religious freedom and national security -- which, as we saw yesterday in France, is closely related indeed.

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