Top Southern Baptist Russell Moore has joined with other religious leaders in lobbying US President Barack Obama against a civil rights report that states that religious exemptions in law are used as a pretext for discrimination.
The report last month from the US Commission on Civil Rights includes a statement from Commission chairman Martin Castro, who says: "Our country was founded by those fleeing religious persecution. We must, therefore, always be vigilant to ensure that religion not be used as a pretext to persecute those whose civil rights and civil liberties should be protected."
He adds: "The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance."
Religious groups fear that legislation following on from the report could remove current protections for religious belief from organisations including Christian universities, churches and mosques.
The report has already been condemned by leading Baptists such as Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who described it as part of "a moral revolution that is taking place right before our eyes".
According to Baptist Press, Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, wants Obama "to renounce publicly the claim that 'religious freedom' and 'religious liberty' are 'code words' or a 'pretext' for various forms of discrimination".
The letter was sent to the speaker, Paul Ryan, Orrin Hatch, the most senior Republican in the Senate, and Obama.
It says the report "stigmatises tens of millions of religious Americans, their communities, and their faith-based institutions, and threatens the religious freedom of all our citizens".
The signatories, who include Catholic, African, Methodist, Episcopal, Jewish, Muslim, Mormon and Hare Krishna leaders, say: "People of good faith can disagree about the relationship between religious liberty and antidiscrimination laws."
They plead that "no American citizen or institution be labeled by their government as bigoted because of their religious views, and dismissed from the political life of our nation for holding those views".
They argue that this is precisely what the Civil Rights Commission report seeks to do.
The letter was released by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
