As Christians across America and around the world celebrated the birth of Jesus, religious police in the Sultanate of Brunei ordered business owners to remove Christmas decorations or face arrest.
This is the latest outrage by a country that adopted Shariah law earlier this year. Brunei, a tiny oil-rich fiefdom that shares the island of Borneo with Malaysia and Indonesia, imposes severe restrictions on religious freedom. It bans non-Muslims from teaching, publicly displaying and even speaking freely to Muslims about their religious beliefs. Violators face heavy fines and imprisonment.
All religious groups are required to register with the government, a one-party feudal theocracy ruled by the hereditary Islamic Sultan of Brunei. Muslims who convert to another faith face the death penalty. Non-Muslims who consort with Muslims face death by stoning. Christians who bring the Holy Bible into the country are imprisoned. The Sultan of Brunei has proven himself to be the wild man of Borneo.
Despite this outrageous record of religious persecution and violation of basic human rights, President Obama wants to reward the Sultanate of Brunei with special privileges under the proposed TransPacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. And John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are ready to help him do it.
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During the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans stood united in refusing to trade with countries that denied their citizens basic freedoms. We understood that the United States must use access to the largest consumer market in the world to promote American values and reward countries that respect them.
The threat today is not atheistic Communism, but religious totalitarianism. Shariah law is clearly an affront to everything we believe in, yet now the leaders of our two major political parties want to embrace a Shariah regime as a privileged trading partner.
Brunei is the worst but not the only offender in the TransPacific Partnership. In neighboring Malaysia, Christians are sent to concentration camps for forced conversion to Islam. Vietnam requires churches to register with the Communist government and monitors all prayer services. House churches are attacked and priests murdered.
God told the children of Israel to place no other gods before Him. Today, America's political leaders in both parties sacrifice our Judeo-Christian values and heritage to the false gods of globalism.
Islamist extremists are on the march in Indonesia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Syria and elsewhere, pushing governments to adopt Shariah law. A most-favored-nation trade agreement with a regime that tramples on religious freedom tells the rest of the world that the U.S. government believes the freedom to worship a God of one's choosing is irrelevant. What Brunei has done is unacceptable to all people of conscience.
The TransPacific Partnership, negotiated in secret by the Obama administration and supported by John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, institutionalizes religious intolerance and Taliban-like Shariah law. Yet these same leaders want to put it on a fast track for approval.
Call Congress and tell them we should not be giving special privileges to those who deny the religious freedom so many have given so much to defend.