America
Will Hillary Clinton exploit FDR on Saturday?
June 8, 2015
Bill Donohue of Catholic League comments on Hillary
Clinton's presidential launch on June 13from Roosevelt Island:
Hillary's official campaign begins in the Four Freedoms park on Roosevelt Island. Look for her to invoke FDR's "Four
Freedoms" speech in her address, referencing his support for "freedom
to worship." The term fits with her agenda: "freedom to worship"
implies a private exercise of religion; freedom of religion implies a public
and robust one.
On January 13, 2009, Hillary appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations; she had been nominated to be Secretary of State. That was the first
time she used the term "freedom to worship" in public. On December
13, 2009, when speaking at Georgetown,
Secretary Clinton used terms such as "free to worship" and
"worship freely." In a State Department briefing on January 21, 2010,
she mentioned FDR's "freedom to worship" remark, repeating the term
three more times. Her choice of words did not go unnoticed: The U.S. Commission
on International Religious Freedom cited her words in its 2010 annual report,
cautioning that it sent a signal to human rights defenders around the world.
Hillary's campaign will say she is only being faithful to FDR's own choice of
words, and that "freedom to worship" carries no political or cultural
significance. Not true. When FDR used those words in 1941, he was invoking them
in a different context. Here is what he said: "The second freedom is
freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the
world." It would have been a clumsy construction to speak of the
"freedom of every person to freedom of religion." Moreover, earlier
in that same speech, FDR spoke about the necessity of "freedom of
expression [and] freedom of religion."
The First Amendment does not protect "freedom to worship": it
explicitly protects freedom of religion. U.N. founding documents do the same.
If Hillary really believes in a full-throated public exercise of religious
liberty, she ought to adopt the language of religion's friends, not its
enemies. No matter, FDR's innocent use of the term gives her no cover.