RED EYE - JUNE 8, 2013 FULL EPISODE

Greg welcomes guests Anthony Cumia, Bernie McGuirk and Patti Ann Browne.

Obama Ignoring Religious Liberty Abroad

The federal government has not made religious freedom a foreign policy priority in the 15 years since Congress passed the International Religious Freedom Act, congressional testimony Thursday morning revealed.

The witnesses described to a House Oversight subcommittee a State Department and broader administration that is indifferent to religious freedom and tentative to defend it.

While the act created tools to fight for religious liberty around the world, "I believe they have never been fully used," Katrina Lantos Swett, chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told the subcommittee.

The result has been an incoherent and shifting U.S. policy, said Tom Farr, director of the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University and the first director of the State Department’s Office of Religious Freedom.

"It would be difficult to name a single country in the world over the past fifteen years where American religious freedom policy has helped to reduce religious persecution or to increase religious freedom in any substantial or sustained way," Farr contended in his written testimony.

The State Department declined to participate in the hearing because of a "longstanding" policy not to participate in a panel with non-governmental organizations, said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), chairman of the Oversight Committee's National Security Subcommittee.

Farr seized on this point at the beginning of his remarks.

"It is very unfortunate that the administration has decided that this hearing is not important enough to send a representative," he said. "As you will see, I consider this unfortunately symptomatic of the administration's view of religious freedom."

Farr blamed the administration's lack of interest in religious liberty abroad on a declining emphasis on the role religion plays in American life.

"Clearly the Obama administration has in its domestic policy weighed religious freedom against other rights claims it believes important, such as the right to contraceptives and abortifacients, or to same-sex marriage, and religious freedom has been found to be an inferior right."