Former congressman Beto O’Rourke, who lost his run for U.S. Senate in 2018 and failed in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, announced Monday he is running for governor of Texas.
Many Democrats consider him an embarrassment, and that’s not merely because of his losing record amid the embarrassingly glowing media coverage, but because O’Rourke says what most Democrats believe but know they are not supposed to verbalize.
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For example, in the 2020 presidential election, he admitted gun confiscation was an essential part of gun control.
More important, though, is O’Rourke’s take on the limits of free exercise of religion:
But, when you are providing services in the public sphere say, higher education or healthcare or adoption services and you discriminate or deny equal treatment under the law based on someone’s skin color or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation, then we have a problem.
That is, a Muslim’s First Amendment right to the free exercise of Islam is limited to what he does inside the mosque. Once he leaves that mosque and, say, becomes a doctor, he is compelled by law to follow O’Rourke’s religious beliefs on sexuality and other issues. Similarly, if you run a Jewish organization that tries to unite Jewish orphans with Jewish mothers, Beto O’Rourke has a problem with you.
The idea that anti-discrimination laws should be wielded as a hatchet to whittle down religious liberty is obvious in much of the Democratic Party’s agenda. President Barack Obama would replace “free exercise of religion” with “freedom of worship.” Nancy Pelosi, arguing that Catholic nuns should be required to pay their staff in birth-control coverage, said, “I do my religion on Sundays.”
Of course, a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, or whoever else does not exercise his religion only behind closed doors or only on the Sabbath. O’Rourke might not understand that. Or then again, maybe he does.
