Secretary of State Antony Blinken honored “international religious freedom day” last week. “The United States joins the international community in marking the 24th occasion of International Religious Freedom Day,” he said. “Freedom of religion or belief is a founding principle of our nation, enshrined in our Constitution. Americans cherish the right to worship, or not worship, as they see fit.”
But Blinken’s words rang hollow. Far from respecting religious freedom, President Joe Biden’s administration undermines it both at home and abroad. Biden favors the suppression of religious freedom wherever it conflicts with his wokeness. He is harassing Christian institutions across the country that refuse to conform to his agenda on abortion and all things LGBTQ. His Department of Education is investigating Christian colleges that uphold traditional morality. His Health and Human Services seeks to force religious hospitals to perform abortions and mutilations. He has instructed federal agencies to withhold contracts from religious organizations that oppose gay marriage and adoption.
Meanwhile, Blinken is meddling in the affairs of Christian countries. It came out recently that the State Department is funding “drag shows” in Ecuador.
“President Biden has ‘wokified’ the State Department and is misusing taxpayer money to implement a radical and unpopular agenda abroad,” Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona has written to Blinken. “This initiative does not enhance national security, advance national interests or support U.S. foreign policy.”
According to Fox News, “The State Department has defended its decision to issue the nearly $21,000 appropriation, saying the program is strategic to ensure ‘diversity, inclusion and representation to equity and accessibility’ in Ecuador.” A State Department spokesman claims that recent “data suggest an alarming and deadly rise in violence against LGBTQI+ persons in Ecuador.”
Here we see Biden’s State Department blatantly imposing transgenderism on a Christian country in defiance of its religious character. Blinken cares so little about Ecuador’s religious freedom that he is willing to fund grotesque transgender propaganda there.
Since the days of Hillary Clinton, the State Department has arrogated to itself the “mission” of spreading the LGBTQ revolution across the world. Hillary Clinton authorized State Department diplomats to act as LGBTQ activists in foreign countries. She declared this a “priority of our foreign policy.”
“In our embassies, our diplomats are raising concerns about specific cases and laws, and working with a range of partners to strengthen human rights protections for all,” she said. “In Washington, we have created a task force at the State Department to support and coordinate this work. And in the coming months, we will provide every embassy with a toolkit to help improve their efforts. And we have created a program that offers emergency support to defenders of human rights for LGBT people.”
Blinken reiterated this sham State Department mission at the expense of religious freedom in foreign countries at the beginning of his tenure. “Transgender people are often denied access to legal identity documents that reflect their names and gender markers,” he recently complained. “Intersex people, including minors, continue to be subjected to unnecessary surgeries without their consent.”
He said, “Defending these rights is central to the health of our democracies. Any system where some groups are treated as ‘less than’ simply because of who they are is fundamentally flawed. Standing up for LGBTQI+ people is a top priority for our administration.”
Never mind that all of his activism means subverting the religious freedom of foreign countries. Where exactly does America get the right to finance drag shows in Latin America or demand Africans embrace gay marriage? This is an outrageous infringement of their sovereignty and reveals that the Biden administration is as contemptuous of Christianity abroad as it is hostile to it at home.
Blinken is not defending religious freedom across the world but undercutting it — a betrayal of American values that he signaled the moment he criticized the Trump administration for supposedly overemphasizing religious freedom. The American people have multiple reasons to vote the Democrats out of office in the fall, but one the more compelling reasons is the obnoxious secularism of Blinken and company. Do the American people really want their tax dollars spent on drag shows in Ecuador? Do they want the State Department to be an annex of Planned Parenthood and a jobs program for LGBTQ activists?
Underpinning the wokeness of the Biden administration is an implacable opposition to the Judeo-Christian values that gave birth to America. That wokeness seeks to secularize everything, including religion itself. The only religion Blinken and Biden won’t pressure into adopting wokeness is Islam. They will call Christians “bigoted,” but they wouldn’t dare describe Muslims in those terms. Hillary Clinton famously lectured the world that the LGBTQ movement is not a “Western phenomenon,” even as the administration to which she belonged held Ramadan dinners and touted the Muslim Brotherhood. Clinton made sure not to finance any drag shows in Saudi Arabia.
But Blinken knows that he can pull such stunts in Christian countries like Ecuador. He cynically calculates that they won’t hit back or point out to him the naked contradiction that such activism poses to his insincere blather about “international religious freedom day.”
