According to a new report, President Donald Trump may be planning to fill one of the State Department’s most important jobs with another evangelical Christian.
Johnnie Moore Jr., arguably one of the world’s most outspoken advocates for religious liberty, is being considered for the role of U.S. Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom. The liberal Foreign Policy magazine identified the Christian communications company founder as one of three front-runners for the job.
The other two leading contenders are Hudson Institute Center for Religious Freedom Director Nina Shea and former Baylor University Chancellor Kenneth Starr.
Shea is a human rights attorney and has served on the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom since 1999. She is a Catholic.
Starr is most famous for investigating alleged criminal activity in the Clinton Administration during the 1990s. He is a former U.S. district judge and solicitor general and was once considered a front-runner for the Supreme Court. He is a former Jew who converted to Christianity.
According to the report:
Though best known for uncovering details of Clinton’s extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky, Starr took an interest in religious freedom issues in his role as president of Baylor University in Texas from 2010 to 2016. “He’s been very, very strong on the issue,” Frank Wolf, a former Republican congressman and religious freedom advocate, told FP. The university has been organizing conferences and sending letters on the issue, he added. Starr left Baylor in 2016 amid criticisms of the university’s handling of a series of sexual assault cases under his watch.
Other rumored candidates include Johnnie Moore Jr., the former “special faith adviser” to Ben Carson and Nina Shea, a human rights lawyer at the conservative Hudson Institute.
Shea denied any interest in the position in an interview with FP, but said from her discussions, the Trump administration would break sharply with the Obama administration on religious freedom issues.
She said the Trump administration is likely to crack down on Saudi textbooks that denigrate Christians and Jews, take a firmer opposition to discriminatory blasphemy laws in Pakistan and swear off “apologizing for private speech in the United States that offends” Muslims. She referred specifically to the 2012 U.S. video titled “Innocence of Muslims” that sparked protests throughout the Muslim world and prompted condemnation from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Click here to read the entire article, which leads with the upcoming appointment of Pam Pryor, a former spokeswoman of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin who led the president’s religious outreach efforts during the 2016 campaign, as a key member of the Office of International Religious Freedom’s staff. {eoa}
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