Trump and Barr Speak At National Catholic Prayer Breakfast

Yesterday both President Trump (in a pre-recorded address-- full text) and Attorney General William Barr spoke at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, held online this year (video of entire breakfast). In his remarks, President Trump said in part:

Today I am announcing that I will be signing the Born Alive Executive Order to ensure that all precious babies born alive, no matter their circumstances, receive the medical care that they deserve. This is our sacrosanct moral duty. We are also increasing federal funding for the neonatal research to ensure that every child has the very best chance to thrive and to grow.

Attorney General Barr was presented the Christifideles Laici Award. In his acceptance speech (full text), he said in part:

That crucial link between religion and liberty, so well understood at the Founding, is all too often forgotten today.  In American public discourse, perhaps no concept is more misunderstood than the notion of “separation of church and state.”  Militant secularists have long seized on that slogan as a facile justification for attempting to drive religion from the public square and to exclude religious people from bringing a religious perspective to bear on conversations about the common good.

Yet as events like this one remind us, separation of church and state does not mean, and never did mean, separation of religion and civics... 

Unfortunately, in the last half century, that foundation of our free society has increasingly been under siege.  Traditional morality has eroded, and secularists have often succeeded not only in eliminating religion from schools and the public square, but in replacing it with new orthodoxies that are actively hostile to religion.  The consequences of this hollowing out of religion have been predictably dire....

Wherever we are in life, it is never too late to work in the Lord’s vineyard.  Our spiritual renewal, and the renewal of our national character, depend on it.

DOJ Gives Its Lawyers A Training Week On Religious Liberty

The New York Times reports today:

The Justice Department this week hosted training for its lawyers on religious liberty laws as part of Attorney General William P. Barr’s push to prioritize religious freedom cases, but the workshops prompted concern among some career lawyers that they were being educated on ways to blunt civil rights protections for gay and transgender people....

The training week was part of an ongoing campaign at the department to bolster ​its work to​ protect religious freedom, which is regularly described by top leaders as the first right protected by the First Amendment​, a department official said in response to a request for comment. ...

 A department spokesman said that the trainings were in no way meant to marginalize gay, lesbian and transgender people or to promote discrimination in any way, and that nothing in the materials presented did so.

Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, accused Mr. Barr of using the Justice Department to promote his religious beliefs.

“In speeches and statements, he says that civil society is being undermined by a move away from religiosity,” she said. “He wants to use civil rights statutes and the D.O.J. to redeem what he views as the corrupted soul of America.”