Lightning Bugs and Lightning: How Obama May Be Redefining the 1st Amendment

The folks at Catholic.org have detected a very troubling trend in the course of the past weeks and months. Obama and his minions no longer refer to "Religious Freedom" or "Freedom of Religion" arising from the First Amendment.

Instead they use the phrase "Freedom of Worship."

This is bad.

[L]anguage matters when it comes to defining freedoms and limits. A shift from freedom of religion to freedom of worship moves the dialog from the world stage into the physical confines of a church, temple, synagogue or mosque. Such limitations can unleash an unbridled initiative that we have only experienced in a mild way through actions determined to remove of roadside crosses, wearing of religious t-shirts and pro-life pins as well as any initiatives of evangelization. It also could exclude our right to raise our children in our faith, the right to religious education, literature or media, the right to raise funds or organize charitable activities and the right to express religious beliefs in the normal discourse of life.

...Georgetown professor Thomas Farr stated, "Those of us in the business of sniffing out rats know that this is a rhetorical shift to watch." Farr was the former head of the State Department's International Religious Freedom Office.

Read the whole thing here. This is bad stuff. En gardez!