Last week, the Coalition Against Religious Discrimination (CARD) sent a letter to President Obama in which they requested that he intervene and force faith-based organizations contracting with the federal government to look outside their own religious convictions when hiring. At the center of this is the hope that President Obama will reverse an executive order signed “by President George W. Bush that allows faith-based organizations to contract with the federal government while maintaining religious hiring policies consistent with religious mission.”

What CARD wants is for Christian faith-based groups to be forced to hire atheists, should they apply, and Catholic or Orthodox Jewish groups to be forced to hire Muslims, Hindus, or Wicca Priestesses should they apply. CARD’s letter, and the request it makes of the President, is akin to the same God-hating logic we’ve seen groups like Americans United for Separation of Church and State leverage inasmuch as CARD’s contention is that once a faith-based organization accepts federal money, they have to cash in their religious freedom.

In an attempt to make their point, CARD uses President Obama’s own words (spoken on the campaign trail in 2008) against him: “If you get federal money, you can’t use that money to proselytize to the people you help” nor can you “discriminate against them – or against the people you hire – on the basis of their religion.”

Clearly, the overarching goal here is to use a politically correct but factually inaccurate plea – “no federally funded religion” – to knock down one more barrier that protects the citizen who’s not ashamed to practice his or her faith publicly, and especially those who dare to form organizations which perform good deeds for their fellow man in the name of God.

In the end, this all comes across as nothing less than a bald attempt to establish a religious test for participation in public life: for it is public life that faith-based groups impact via the community-based social services they provide in lieu of those that “a distant federal government is incapable of” providing.

For those who love their God and their country, a religious test to participate in public life is repugnant to freedom.