Recently, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints joined several other U.S. faith leaders to create a letter sent to President Barack Obama, Sen. Orrin Hatch, and House Speaker Paul Ryan in response to a report issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
In the letter, they address how the report stigmatizes religious Americans and speaks out against the terms religious liberty and religious freedom. The letter states:
We wish to express our deep concern that the Commission has issued a report, Peaceful Coexistence: Reconciling Non-Discrimination Principles with Civil Liberties, that stigmatizes tens of millions of religious Americans, their communities, and their faith-based institutions, and threatens the religious freedom of all our citizens.
The Commission asserts in its Findings that religious organizations “use the pretext of religious doctrines to discriminate.”
What we find even more disturbing is that, in a statement included in the report, Commission Chairman Martin Castro writes:
“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”
