WND EXCLUSIVE

HATCH SLAPS DOWN CIVIL-RIGHTS COMMISSIONERS

Charges they believe nondiscrimination policies 'trump' Constitution

Bob Unruh

A prominent member of the U.S. Senate is blasting the Obama administration’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for making the claim that “nondiscrimination” laws should trump the First Amendment’s protections for free exercise of religion.

And Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, tells the commission that he’s very troubled by what appears to be a complete lack of understanding about religious rights in America.

“A majority of the commission appears to believe that, in all but the narrowest of circumstances, the civil right to freedom from discrimination trumps the constitutional right to freely exercise religion,” he charged on Friday. “In embracing this position, however, the report adopts a stunted and distorted version of religious liberty, suggesting that claims of religious conscience are little more than a cloak for bigotry and hatred. I reject the false picture of religious liberty presented in the report.

“The report also fails properly to account for the primacy of religious liberty in our nation’s history, founding principles, and legal commitments. Remarkably, the report’s title does not even mention the term ‘religious liberty,’ but rather subsumes it as one of a number of ‘civil liberties’ that, one supposes, are of varying significance.”

He continued, “Indeed, I cannot find any discussion in the report of the central status that religious liberty has always had in American society and law. James Madison identified the free exercise of religion according to conviction and conscience as an inalienable right. 

He further explained that religious exercise ‘is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society.’ 

As Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote, to America’s founders, religious liberty was preeminent among fundamental rights. 

More recently, the Congress of the United States unanimously declared in the International Religious Freedom Act that religious liberty ‘undergirds the very origin and existence of the United States.’

“Finally, I am troubled by the anti-religious sentiments in several of the supplementary statements in the report. 

In one statement, you say that religious liberty has become a ‘code word’ for ‘discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy,’ and other forms of ‘intolerance.’ 

You then tie contemporary religious liberty claims to the shameful legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. 

This is false equivalence in the extreme. Today’s sincere believers are not seeking to subjugate vast swaths of fellow Americans beneath the rod of government oppression. 

Rather, they are seeking room to live out their faith in a society that is fast abandoning traditional views on marriage and sexuality.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/09/hatch-slaps-down-civil-rights-commissioners/#vRDZ07yH5c0bhWZW.99

My comments: Obama's so called, Civil rights Commission, is an Example of the Extreme Views of the godless, Socialist, Secular Humanists and their Antipathy toward Christianity and the Word of God. They are Persecutors of Christianity and of Chrsit Jesus Himself.