Could someone please explain to me how it is that taxpayers in the U.S. are funding NASA not for scientific space exploration but rather for international Muslim outreach? The last time I checked, NASA and the U.S. Department of State were different federal agencies. When did that change?

On Wednesday of last week, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden was interviewed on an episode of Talk to al-Jazeera. During that interview he described three of the top priorities President Obama had tasked him with for his new job (in response to the question about NASA finding itself at a crossroads):

When I became the NASA Administrator—well, before I became the NASA Administrator—he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations, to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

He was asked if this is “a sort of diplomatic role to win hearts and minds of Muslims.” Bolden quickly denied that, and claimed President Obama simply wants to draw in “the contributions that are possible from the Muslim nations.” Yet in a speech two weeks earlier at the American University in Cairo, Bolden said that NASA used to work “mostly with countries that are capable of space exploration,” but that has changed in light of Obama’s Cairo initiative:

[Obama] asked NASA to change [...] by reaching out to ‘non-traditional’ partners and strengthening our cooperation in the Middle East, North Africa, Southeast Asia, and in particular in Muslim-majority nations.

“NASA has embraced this charge,” Bolden said, adding that NASA “is not only a space exploration agency but also an earth improvement agency.”

Is the American public aware that their tax dollars are funding the U.S. space agency to patronize Muslims to “feel good” about themselves with soft-diplomacy outreach? As noted by former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, NASA’s purpose is not to inspire Muslims or any other cultural entity. No doubt. Its purpose is to expand our knowledge of space and its attendant technologies. “If by doing great things people are inspired, well, then that’s wonderful,” Griffin said, and then observed, “There is no technology they have that we need” for NASA to accomplish its missions.

But earlier this year Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealed in her speech at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Qatar that the Obama administration is embarking on a new era of engagement with Muslim nations “to expand educational opportunities, support entrepreneurs, and promote advances in science and technology.”

“NASA, our space program,” she said, “has partnered with the Arab Youth Venture Foundation in Dubai to give Arab and American engineering students the chance to work together on NASA missions.”

Highly advanced rocket technology. Prime Directive, anyone?

Update: 27 July 2010

NASA: National Arabic Sensitivity Administration

(HT: Mike Church)

When it comes to the freedom of religion, as a blessing of liberty secured by the US Constitution, Americans cannot afford to overlook the subtle changes being suggested by the Obama administration in their shifting focus toward international laws, particularly when it is at the expense of the Constitution they were sworn to uphold and defend. In a speech given on 14 December 2009 by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at Georgetown University’s Gaston Hall, she spoke of the meaning and importance of democracy as it pertains to people enjoying consistent protection of the rights that are naturally theirs, whether they were born in Tallahassee or Tehran. Supporting democracy is one of the cornerstones of their 21st century human rights agenda, she said, because democracy “has proven the best political system for making human rights a human reality over the long term” and the Obama administration will not relinquish the idea of democracy “to those who have used it too narrowly.”

That sounds wonderful. However, buried deep inside this speech by Clinton is a curious phrase, one that threatens the freedom of religion as enshrined in and protected by the Constitution the administration is sworn to preserve, protect and defend:

To fulfill their potential, people must be free to choose laws and leaders; to share and access information, to speak, criticize, and debate. They must be free to worship, associate, and to love in the way that they choose. And they must be free to pursue the dignity that comes with self-improvement and self-reliance, to build their minds and their skills, to bring their goods to the marketplace, and participate in the process of innovation.

If I may beg your pardon, Mrs. Clinton: the freedom to worship might be a protection that international law concerns itself with, but the rule of law that democracy in the United States is predicated upon answers to the Constitution. And what is enshrined and protected in that document is something much broader than freedom to worship. Freedom of religion and freedom to worship are not the same thing, and it’s the former that the Constitution guarantees. As pointed out by George Weigal, Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, in an article about the erosion of religious freedom in America, the freedom of religion cannot be reduced to freedom of worship because real freedom of religion includes the right

to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square, and to conduct the affairs of one’s religious community without undue interference from the state.

“If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship,” he notes, well then “there is ‘religious freedom’ in Saudi Arabia”—where non-Muslim evangelism is illegal and the public practice of non-Muslim religions is prohibited, where the right to possess and use non-Muslim religious materials is not provided in law so the government is free to confiscate such materials, where significant restrictions exist for the building of places of worship, where a Muslim who converts to another religion places himself in mortal peril of the death penalty, and where Muslims who do not adhere to the state’s official and strict interpretation of the Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam face significant political, economic, legal, social, and religious discrimination, etc. According to the 2009 Report on International Religious Freedom, Saudi Arabia is a government who, as a matter of policy, “guarantees and protects the right to private worship for all.”

Freedom of religion and freedom to worship are not the same thing. While the former is guaranteed by the Constitution, it is the latter which the Obama administration seems to be leaning towards in its shifting focus toward international human rights laws and a restrictive policy of laïcité (Gk. laikos, Eng. laity) via European influence. However, as observed by Jacques Maritain, philosopher and a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there is a valuable distinction between models found in France and that of mid-twentieth century America, with the latter being considered more amicable because it had both “sharp distinction and actual cooperation” between church and state and “an historical treasure,” admonishing the United States to keep it carefully and “not let your concept of separation veer round to the European one” (as quoted in D.A. Carson’s Christ and Culture Revisited). As a Canadian I realize that our fight is separate from that of Americans, but I strongly and passionately encourage my brethren to the south who desire to “secure the blessings of liberty” for themselves and their posterity to observe very closely and, by power of elections, hold accountable the officials of government who are leaning away from the very Constitution they were sworn to preserve, protect, and defend. It is because of that document that America is comparatively exceptional in its religious freedoms, the slow erosion of which is less anomalous than symptomatic of European-influenced laïcité.

Do not stand for it. Please. In the upcoming election cycles, show your elected officials, like Hillary Clinton and her talk of freedom to worship, that Americans value their Constitution and hard-fought independence above international laws. In a twist that ought to be more ironic, the Obama administration is one of the best arguments for the principle values of America’s founding fathers. As you commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Independence this Fourth of July weekend, resolve to fight hard by the power of your vote for the values and freedoms that made your country great.