Back when he was just another Republican running for his party’s presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry condemned the Obama administration’s “war on religion.” The man had a point: The left is markedly hostile toward religion that does not conform to liberal views.
And liberalism has become, in some respects, sexual libertinism. For liberals, it’s no longer just saying ‘anything goes,’ but that we have a fundamental right to an ‘anything goes’ lifestyle and the taxpayer-funded tools needed to sustain it.
Perry had one of his best debates during a tumultuous night in New Hampshire, during which moderators insisted on repeatedly asking questions about contraception and homosexuality, seemingly hoping to force a candidate to crack and admit harboring secret plans to issue a federal directive that would confiscate birth control. A conversation about the power of the government to override religious organizations on conscience issues — such as gay couples adopting children and publicly funded abortion — ensued, taking in numerous candidates from a variety of religious backgrounds.
Perry didn’t mince words about what he felt was a bias toward Christian values on the part of the Obama administration. “When we see an administration that will not defend the Defense of Marriage Act ... When we see this administration not giving money to Catholic Charities ... because they don’t agree with the Catholic Church on abortion, that is a war against religion. And it’s going to stop under a Perry administration.”
He was talking about senior officials in the Department of Health and Human Services killing a deal to help international victims of sex trafficking, merely because the church’s views on contraception and abortion clash with the government’s.
A certain man in Rome would likely be appreciative of Perry, even though the Texan is a Protestant. “It is imperative that the entire Catholic community in the United States come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres,” Pope Benedict XVI said during a routine visit of American bishops to the Vatican. The pontiff went on to warn of “certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms, the freedom of religion.”
“At the heart of every culture,” he said, “is a consensus about the nature of reality and the moral good, and thus about the conditions for human flourishing.”
Paying tribute to our nation’s origins, he praised America’s grounding “in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God.”
Now, according to the pope, that consensus has been “eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents” that are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.”
The pope wasn’t endorsing the Republican field, needless to say, but around the world, people are noticing our culture coming undone. It’s rare that a prime-time broadcast takes note, as well. But that Saturday night on ABC, there the candidates were, discussing just such an unraveling.
Perry’s late entrance into the presidential primary field was marked with controversy over his involvement in a prayer rally in Texas. The rally was an affront to those who insist that religion and politics can never mix.
Perry knows that belief in a creator is part of the American narrative as we’ve known it. And while you’re free to not pray, as I am to do so, we’d better be careful about manipulating faith for the sake of politics and ostracizing faith because of our politics, trampling on conscience rights in service to a phony tolerance.
When history remembers Rick Perry’s time on the campaign trail, it ought to remember this. He saw some of these things clearly and helped advance a conversation, keeping religious freedom out in the open and protected.
Kathryn Lopez is the editor-at-large of National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com). She can be contacted at klopez@nationalreview.com.