Jeb Bush was addressing the Class of 2015, but most eyes were on 2016. While other presidential hopefuls were speaking to voters, the unofficial candidate was talking to graduates at Liberty University’s commencement ceremony. The weekend’s festivities drew plenty of attention — not just because Liberty is the largest Christian university in America, but because many realized that this was an important opportunity for Jeb to connect with evangelicals.

Like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who announced his candidacy at Liberty, the Florida Governor seized the moment to highlight core values like life, religious liberty, faith, and family. From sex trafficking to Israel, Jeb knew which notes to hit with the young, conservative base. And while the speech touched on plenty of issues, religious freedom was easily the most prominent.

Seeing a natural opening to defend Christianity from the hostile Left, Bush spent most of his time lashing out at the forces of political correctness. “Fashionable opinion — which these days can be a religion all by itself — has got a problem with Christians and their right of conscience. That makes it our problem, and the proper response is a forthright defense of the first freedom in our Constitution.”

Using the President’s ObamaCare mandate as exhibit A, Bush hammered the current administration for forcing Americans to fund pills and procedures they find morally wrong. Citing the nuns who sued HHS, Jeb said,

> “I’m betting that when it comes to doing the right and good thing, the Little Sisters of the Poor know better than the regulators at the Department of Health and Human Services. You might even say it’s a choice between the Little Sisters and Big Brother — and I’m going with the Little Sisters. How strange, in our own time, to hear Christianity spoken of as some sort of backward and oppressive force. It is not only untrue, but it’s also a little ungrateful, to dismiss the Christian faith as some obstacle to enlightened thought… And this confusion is all part of a false narrative that casts religious Americans as intolerant scolds, running around trying to impose their views on everyone … Our friends on the left like to view themselves as the agents of change and reform, and you and I are supposed to just get with the program.”

Like most Republicans, he came out swinging against the rash of decisions that “should be easy calls in favor of religious freedom” but “have instead become an aggressive stance against it.” “Somebody here is being intolerant, and it sure isn’t the nuns, ministers, and laymen and women who ask only to live and practice their faith.”

And while the governor comfortably pushed back on the Left’s discrimination-in-the-name-of-nondiscrimination, he missed an opportunity to expose the real agenda at work here. These days, it’s impossible to talk about religious liberty without mentioning its biggest threat in our nation: the redefinition of marriage. Without that context, Americans would be entering the battle blind.

Conservatives will be at a severe disadvantage if they don’t acknowledge what the Left already has: this is not about the marriage altar — this is about fundamentally altering society. And religious liberty is their biggest obstacle to achieving that goal. To be effective, any true defense of religious freedom must include support for natural marriage.

Prenatal Shouldn’t Equal Pre-Fatal

Usually, anniversaries are something to celebrate. In the case of the Kermit Gosnell’s murder conviction, the only thing worth celebrating is the string of pro-life legislation passed in response. From Texas and North Dakota to Ohio and Arkansas, leaders turned their horror into haste to tighten clinic regulations. A near record 70 pro-life policies have become law in the states, a severe rebuke of an industry that only gives birth to tragedy. This is the war on women: a greedy, profit-driven abortion industry, so focused on making a buck that they can’t be bothered to clean rusty equipment, wipe down bloody operating tables, appropriately sedate patients, or monitor mutilated women.

This week, Congress is next in line to take a stand — scheduling a long-awaited vote on the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a ban on five-month abortions that could have spared many of Gosnell’s born and unborn victims. Even the New York Times admits that very premature babies are surviving outside the womb — and it’s time that our laws caught up with what science has already told us about the personhood of these tiny humans.

The brutality of what Kermit Gosnell did exposed a horrifying truth: babies killed inside and outside the womb experience the same excruciating pain. This week, Congress will have an opportunity to stop the suffering — not just of children, but of women. The updated bill, H.R. 36, includes extra care and protection for women and girls who are victims of rape — without letting abortionists off the hook for late-term abortion. This will be a vote that FRC will be tracking so that voters know where their representatives stand on an inhumane practice that all but seven countries ban. You can help by contacting your members and urging them to honor Kermit Gosnell’s victims by preventing more.

Freedom: It’s Not Just for Liberals Anymore!

There are plenty of Americans out there who don’t understand why Louisiana is pushing the Marriage and Conscience Act. I have two words for them: Donald Verrilli. Late last month, the President’s Solicitor General should have had every state scrambling to do what my home state is attempting: preventing on a small scale what the Obama administration wants to do on a national one. During the oral arguments at the Supreme Court, Verrilli admitted that one of the side effects of redefining marriage may be to punish the entities that believe otherwise — even if they’re religious!

The easiest way for the government to put the squeeze on these institutions is by stripping their tax exempt status — which is just one of the things that Louisiana’s Marriage and Conscience Acts would outlaw. “The central thrust of the bill guarantees that the state of Louisiana will not make tax determinations based on a person or organization’s beliefs about marriage,” Austin Nimocks explains.

“In other words, if a church believes that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, the Marriage and Conscience Act simply ensures that the government cannot functionally defund and eliminate that church’s existence by withdrawing its nonprofit status.”

Governor Bobby Jindal (R-La.) has been a staunch defender of the measure — and the religious liberty it defends — and spoke over the weekend about the bill’s importance. Asked why he was focusing on this bill and not economic growth, Jindal fired back that the two issues aren’t “mutually exclusive.” “In Louisiana, we don’t believe in discrimination against anybody. In terms of economics, look, our economy has grown twice as fast as the national economy. Our job creation three times as fast as the national economy. We actually right now have more people working than ever before, our highest ever per capita income ranking… So I think that we can have religious liberty and economic growth…”

The bill, he explained, simply says “the state of Louisiana cannot discriminate against those families, individuals or businesses that have a traditional view of marriage. To me, this is common sense. A business owner shouldn’t have to choose between their sincerely held religious beliefs and being able to operate their businesses. They shouldn’t have to lose their licenses, pay thousands of dollars in fines. The religious freedom act had a strong, bipartisan majority. I’m hopeful this bill will as well. We can have religious liberty and tolerance.”

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.