How Obama Gets Our First Principles Wrong - Article - National Review Online

How Obama Gets Our First Principles Wrong - Article - National Review Online

What betrays American tradition is the federal government’s establishment of a state religion. What violates our principles is the federal government’s interference with the free exercise of one’s religious beliefs.

It was a good deal more un-American for our federal thought police to browbeat the pastor than for the pastor to threaten a Koran barbeque. Don’t think so? Ask yourself what the New York Times would say if the FBI had instead been dispatched to discourage a university professor from burning the American flag.

If you are worried about the principles of the Founding, you are right to be. The First Amendment is about thwarting an authoritarian government, not policing how we argue with each other. Where was this grave concern about what this country stands for when the State Department wrote new constitutions for Iraq and Afghanistan that establish Islam as the state religion and impose sharia — a creed that, in Muslim countries, stifles freedom of conscience and the freedom to exercise religions other than Islam?

There is a government that makes it official policy to “burn the sacred tests of someone else’s religion.” It is Saudi Arabia, which regularly torches Bibles and other non-Muslim religious texts. President Obama is not hectoring Saudi sheikhs; he is about to provide them with $60 billion worth of advanced military arms, the better to protect their sharia state.

Egypt is a repressive regime in good standing among the repressive regimes of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Last October, it jointly sponsored a resolution in the United Nations Human Rights Council, an international sharia redoubt. It would require all countries to “take effective measures” that prohibit “any advocacy of . . . religious hatred” that could incite “hostility” — which is to say, it demands that countries enact and enforce laws that bar criticism of Islam. Who was the Mubarak regime’s co-sponsor? The Obama administration.

Somehow, on that one, our smooth-talking president seems to have lost his voice on the matter of “what this country stands for.”

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy for President.