Noted US theologian and religious commentator George Weigel has written a thoughtful piece on the challenges posed to religious freedom in America.

Arguing that notwithstanding historic prejudice against Catholics in that country, Weigel argues that Catholics have always thrived there, but he suggests that threats to religious liberty mean that this is “a unique moment, and just perhaps a critical moment, in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States”.

In particular, he suggests that comments by US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in December 2009 in a speech at Georgetown University, “emptied the concept of religious freedom of everything save the ‘freedom to worship’ while asserting, in a catalogue of what she claimed were fundamental international human rights, that people ‘must be free . . . to love in the way they choose’”.

Furthermore, he points out that Catholic health-care professionals have been “coming under increasing state pressure to yield the rights of conscience, formed by the principles of the natural moral law, to those for whom abortion on demand is the rights claim that trumps all other rights claims.

“And Catholic social-service agencies and institutions were coming under severe pressure to recognize as “marriage” relationships that the natural moral law teaches us are not, and cannot be, marriages.”

The whole article is an excellent summary of the dangers posed to religious freedom in a country which pioneered the concept. It is most definitely worth a read.