Sen. Thom Tillis warned that the increasingly radical positions of the Democratic Party pose a threat to religious liberty in the United States.
North Carolina’s junior senator quoted Pastor Andrew Brunson’s recent interview with the Washington Examiner in a Friday op-ed for Fox News. Reiterating what the pastor freed from Turkey has observed in American culture during his year home, Tillis said “Brunson is absolutely correct” to assert the Judeo-Christian basis for religious freedom is quickly eroding.
“We don’t have to look far to see how our religious freedoms are being threatened,” Tillis said, pinpointing the positions of 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke as the most telling example of where the party might be headed.
During last week’s LGBT town hall on CNN, O’Rourke called for religious institutions to be stripped of tax-exempt status if they refuse to support gay marriage. The proposal “was met by cheers and thunderous applause from the audience,” Tillis said.
Explaining how the Establishment Clause in the Bill of Rights intended to prevent “future demagogues in government from endorsing a state religion or providing favoritism to some religious sects over others,” Tillis warned that O’Rourke’s punitive tax would effectively undo such a protection.
According to him, such policies are “a chilling attempt to subvert the constitutional rights of Americans of faith in order to social-engineer our places of worship.”
Acknowledging that O’Rourke’s positions may seem extreme for now, Tillis said the former Texas congressman has managed to push such ideas further into the mainstream.
“We have seen the pattern of fringe, far-left proposals gaining traction over time. Many of these fringe proposals are now mainstream Democratic Party positions,” he said.
Warning that “Democrats may not be so bold as to push for legislation eliminating the religious freedoms of American citizens and religious institutions,” Tillis predicted that the Left will attempt to enforce their agenda through judges who legislate from the bench.
“We must take Pastor Brunson’s warning about the future of religious rights seriously,” he said. “The effort to undermine those rights is already well underway, representing an existential threat to the values that make America a great and tolerant nation.”
He urged Americans of faith to do what they can at the ballot box to protect their religious liberty.
Tillis, who was among those leading the effort to pressure Turkey into releasing Brunson, introduced him on the Senate floor on Tuesday, where the North Carolina minister offered the opening prayer.
