After writing my October 15 article, “Christian Conservatives, Be Assured That President Hillary Clinton Will Declare War on You,” I came across an August 8, 2016 article on Snopes.com, denying that, “Hillary Clinton said in a speech that Christians in America must deny their faith in Christianity.” (Snopes is a widely-used, fact-checking website.)
I began my article stating, “Make no mistake about it. If you are a conservative Christian and Hillary Clinton becomes our next president, she will declare war on certain aspects of your faith. Your religious liberties will be targeted, and your biblical beliefs will be branded disturbing, if not downright dangerous.”
Did I exaggerate or misstate the facts?
According to Snopes, I did, although, quite obviously, the Snopes article, posted two months before mine, was responding to earlier claims on some rightwing websites, not to my article.
Who got the facts right? Let me present the relevant information to you, and you can be the judge.
Note first, however, that in my article, I did not cite any of the websites critiqued by Snopes but rather an article from the liberal Washington Post. There, the author, Marc Theissen, cited the same 2015 Hillary speech Snopes was discussing, claiming that, “Hillary Clinton made a stunning declaration of war on religious Americans.”
He added, “This is perhaps the most radical statement against religious liberty ever uttered by someone seeking the presidency. It is also deeply revealing. Clinton believes that, as president, it is her job not to respect the views of religious conservatives but to force them to change their beliefs and bend to her radical agenda favoring taxpayer-funded abortion on demand.”
Are these concerns valid?
Note also that Snopes was not dealing with Hillary’s 2011 remarks supporting LGBT activism, remarks which offended leaders all over Africa by attacking their religious beliefs and cultural values, as mentioned in my article as well.
Snopes was focused only on Hillary’s 2015 speech, stating, “On 23 April 2015, Hillary Clinton delivered the keynote address at the annual Women in the World Summit in New York City. In a 20-minute speech that touched on the triumphs and challenges of improving the plight of women and girls worldwide, Clinton emphasized the work yet to be done.”
Snopes then cited several excerpts from the speech where Hillary spoke to these women about things like the gender gap in schools and domestic violence still protected by law. And, she said, “we've cut the mortality rate in half, but far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth.”
It was immediately after this that she stated, “All the laws we've passed don't count for much if they're not enforced. Rights have to exist in practice, not just on paper. Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
This was the line that so alarmed Marc Theissen (and many others), the line that I cited in my article as well.
Snopes, however, saw no connection between Hillary’s words and an attack on our religious faith, noting, “Interestingly, within a day of Clinton's address, an excerpt from the passage above was being passed around on the Internet, misrepresented as a demand for Christians to renounce their faith.”
Snopes was actually incredulous that anyone could make such a claim, writing, “Having read the pertinent paragraphs from Clinton's actual speech above, one might well wonder how her call for the enforcement of laws protecting the rights of women in countries with deep-seated cultural biases morphed into a demand for American Christians to deny their faith.”
Really? It’s that hard to connect the dots?
Let’s put the key parts of her speech together to remove all ambiguity. Hillary said that “far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth,” explaining that, “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
As we all know, in Hillary Clinton’s lexicon, the phrase “reproductive health care” includes a woman’s “right” to abortion, and so, when it comes to our resistance to abortion, “deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
That sounds pretty clear to me.
In keeping with this radical philosophy, Lifesite news notes that, “The Democratic Party’s 2016 platform pledges to ‘stand up’ for Planned Parenthood, fund abortion nationwide and around the world, vows to ‘overturn’ state and federal restrictions on abortion, proposes cracking down on pro-life sidewalk counselors, and affirms abortion as ‘core’ to people’s ‘health and well-being.’”
To repeat Hillary’s words again, “deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”
Accordingly, she would certainly support the new California law, just upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court (referenced in my article) which requires pro-life pregnancy centers to refer clients to local abortion clinics.
So, did Snopes get things right? It’s all quite clear to me, but you must be the judge, asking yourself, “Is Snopes really seeking truth and examining facts, or is Snopes revealing its liberal bias?”
A June, 2016 article in the Daily Caller titled “Fact-Checking Snopes” agrees with my conclusions, stating that the “Website’s Political ‘Fact-Checker’ Is Just A Failed Liberal Blogger.”
Let the Christians beware.
