It’s an illustration of the double standard that often prevails when it comes to same-sex “marriage.”

Vidala was a deputy manager at a Brookstone store in Boston’s Logan Airport. Last August, a manager visiting from another store told Vidala she was planning to “marry” her female partner. Vidala said he “quickly changed the subject.” As a Christian, he considered homosexual behavior immoral, and same-sex “marriage” an “oxymoron.” The woman’s comments made him uncomfortable.

But the visiting manager didn’t get the message—or maybe she did. She talked about her wedding plans over and over. Vidala later told Fox new she was goading him into commenting on her relationship.

Vidala said, “By the fourth time she mentioned it, I felt God wanted me to express how I felt about the matter. So I did.” He told her, “Regarding your homosexuality, I think that’s bad stuff.” He also reported that he had intended to tell her he would prefer she not bring up the subject at work, but she just started laughing.

And then she told him, “Get over it…keep your opinions to yourself.” She then complained to human resources, and Vidala was fired. Why? Because by “imposing” his beliefs on her, it constituted “harassment.”

So pummeling a junior-level Christian employee with endless comments he finds offensive is OK. But making a single critical comment to a lesbian senior-level employee is a firing offense.

Even more disturbing is the reason Brookstone gave to back up its decision. In Massachusetts, same-sex “marriage” is legal. So a lesbian employee can prattle on about her wedding plans without harassing anyone. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

The implications of this are frightening. If same-sex “marriage” is foisted upon other states, then expressing disagreement with it—or even criticizing the homosexual lifestyle—could become a firing offense for everyone. If employers had taken this attitude 90 years ago, people could have lost their jobs for disagreeing with laws forbidding women from voting!

This is how far the gay agenda has come in this country. Any disagreement is portrayed as hatred and harassment. And the victim—as in this case—is often a Christian.

Peter Vidala’s firing will have one beneficial effect, at least. It will help the rest of us understand why same-sex “marriage” laws are like no other. Oppose them beforehand or speak out afterward, and you will be punished.

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Especially over the course of the last few years, we have seen repeated efforts—in the courts, in state legislatures, in Congress, and on Pennsylvania Avenue—to erode what has been called the first freedom: religious liberty.

It isn’t hard to cite numerous cases where Christian organizations and individuals have been singled out and punished for adhering to their faith.

In New Jersey, a Methodist camp lost its tax exempt status for refusing to hold a same-sex civil union ceremony. In California, Christian doctors were successfully sued for refusing to offer in-vitro fertilization procedures for a lesbian couple. Catholic Charities in Boston had to shut down its adoption services because it was being forced by the state to place children with same-sex couples.

The current health care bill has no protections for religious medical personnel or health care providers who, by reason of conscience, refuse to participate in abortions. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act is gathering momentum in Congress. The bill would require even Christian-owned enterprises with more than 15 employees to hire those who do not share their faith.

The list could go on and on.

So why is religious freedom such a concern to us as Christians? Freedom of religion is called the first freedom for a reason. Our founding fathers recognized that without freedom of conscience, no other freedom can be guaranteed.

Christians, in fact, are the greatest defenders of religious freedom and human liberty—not just for Christians, but for all people. Compare religious freedom in those countries with a Christian heritage to the state of religious freedom in Islamic nations, communist countries, and Buddhist and Hindu nations, and you will see my point.

The reason that Christians place such a high value on human freedom is that freedom itself is part of the creation account in the Bible. God made humans in His image. He gave us a free will to choose to love, follow, and obey Him, or to follow our own way. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;

That free will, given us before the Fall, is part of human nature itself.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was this understanding of individual freedom that turned me into the kind of patriot who would willingly give his life for his country. It was the words of the Declaration of Independence that inspired me to join the Marines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

So this question of human freedom goes to the very heart of who we are as Christians and as Americans.

So this Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, a statement signed by 125 evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic leaders will be released—an historic declaration on life, the family, and religious freedom.

And please, today, go to ColsonCenter.org to view my Two-Minute Warning video on religious freedom. We will have some great resources for you. Then Friday at noon, we will have for you the declaration itself—probably the most important document I’ve ever signed.

The Church needs to understand the urgency of the hour and do its duty.

No, the single most important vote on health care is being cast in, of all places, Beijing.

As the New York Times reported Sunday, Chinese officials are questioning American officials about health care reform in the U.S. As the Times wrote, “The Chinese were not particularly interested in the public option or universal health care….They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the [U.S.] deficit.”

Why would the Chinese be so interested in our deficit? Well, for all intents and purposes, China is the official banker of the United States government. China is the number one foreign holder of U.S. Treasury securities.

And, as the Times reports, “like any banker, they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.”

Somehow, I doubt the President had any such evidence to give them in Beijing this week.

The Chinese are nothing if not clever. One investment banker told me that they had converted all of their debt from 30-year maturity to one year. The hard questions they are asking right now are about how much the health care bill will raise the deficit. And make no mistake, if the Chinese decide not to continue financing our debt, the dollar could drop through the floor. America could have a huge financial crisis.

Isn’t it ironic that the communist Chinese are more concerned about the cost of socialized medicine than the President and the Congress? That the Chinese communists are more concerned about the U.S. government printing money like it’s going out of style than we are?

If that isn’t a wake-up call to the politicians, the media, and to the American public, I don’t know what it’s going to take.

Look at your own personal spending over the past year. Have you cut back on expenditures because of the recession? Have you put off purchases—even ones that a year ago you might have thought to be essential? I know I have.

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Sadly, the government doesn’t think that way. The politicians want their pet projects—health care reform or earmarks—and they want them now. No matter that the U.S. budget deficit is at an all-time high. If you or I behaved this way with our personal finances, we’d be broke.

Well, the Chinese are having none of it. And what they are proving is that you don’t need huge armies or navies to conquer America. All you need to do is loan the U.S. government all the money it wants for social reengineering, and then call in the debt.

It’s time we all asked the government to be responsible with our money. Deferred gratification and prudence are virtues worthy of Christian individuals and of governments as well.

I and other Christians have voiced numerous concerns over the health care reform bill being debated on Capitol Hill—freedom of conscience, the government being involved in end-of life decisions, publicly funded abortion to name a few.

But in the end, it may be that the health care bill being debated on Capitol Hill will turn out to be just too expensive. We cannot afford it.

Just ask the Chinese.

Given the Cayman’s reputation as an off-shore financial center, that last part might raise a few eyebrows. But what really bothers the British Foreign Office isn’t any possible inconsistency—it’s mentioning Christianity at all.

When St. Helena was debating its new constitution, the British Foreign Office told its leaders that they should consider removing references to Christianity because “the UK was now multi-faith.”

Territorial leaders, including Governor Andrew Gurr, responded that “while the UK may well be multi-faith, Christianity is the dominant religion on the island.” So, they kept it in.

Well, as you probably guessed, it didn’t end there. A committee in Parliament raised the issue, and now the Foreign Office is giving “careful consideration” to ordering the territories to remove references to Christianity.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess. A few months ago, a Foreign Office official called on the Red Cross to replace the red cross with an “alternate symbol,” such as a “red crystal.”

I’m not making this up. According to Foreign Office official Chris Bryant, the cross potentially “undermines” the work of the organization because of its “connection” to the Crusades. That the organization wasn’t founded until 600 years after the Crusades, or that it was derived from the flag of Switzerland doesn’t matter. Some non-Christian somewhere might take offense, so it has to go.

The fear of giving offense is probably why Bryant’s boss, Dave Miliband, failed to send out Christmas and Easter greetings, but remembered Ramadan. One staffer called the oversight “depressingly predictable.” function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

But this is more than a misguided desire to avoid offense. Foreign Office officials have been instructed to “push gay rights” and “to support civil society work for [gay] rights.” This includes translating into local languages a document called “UK Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People and Their Rights.”

These efforts prompted a protest from the Polish government after the British ambassador distributed a Polish-language version to gay activists in Warsaw.

Put it all together and it’s hard to disagree with the Anglican Archbishop of Winchester, who wrote that the Foreign Office is intent on “advancing a secularizing agenda.” Likewise, one conservative member of Parliament is justified in seeing the attempt to remove references to Christianity as “proof positive that [the British] Government is anti-Christian.”

At the very least, the Foreign Office is intent on air-brushing Britain’s Christian heritage from the official record. Not so much because it offends non-Christians, but because it offends the post-Christians in charge.

Like the man said, “depressingly predictable.”

And then, through pride, or carelessness, he “takes his eyes off the ball,” and everything he worked for crumbles around him.

He goes to prison. And when he is released, he seeks to redeem himself. He even writes a book about his downfall.

Sound familiar? Well, I’m not talking about my own story of Watergate and my time in prison. I’m talking about Tank Black, a man who was the agent for many top NFL stars—players like Sterling Sharpe, Andre Rison, Carl Banks, and Jevon Kearse.

Tank’s newly released book, Tanked: Behind the Scenes with the NFL’s Biggest Stars by the Games Most Infamous Super Agent, details his life as a high school football player, college coach, and as a groundbreaking African-American player agent.

I can’t recommend the book for young people because it’s a real-life, gritty picture of what can happen to young athletes who rise from poverty and obscurity and suddenly become superstars—loaded with cash, surrounded by plenty of drugs, women, and no-good hangers-on.

But here’s why I can recommend that you consider purchasing and reading the book. Tank visited our Prison Fellowship headquarters recently to tell our staff that he will donate part of the book’s proceeds to Angel Tree, our ministry to the children of prisoners.

He’s doing it because Angel Tree touched him and his family when he went to prison. Tank served eight years for laundering drug money and defrauding his players of millions of dollars. Tank insists he was innocent of the charges, but he admits to being involved with criminals in a business venture, to lying to investigators, and to violating NFL and NCAA rules.

Tank says that prison was “difficult beyond imagination.” “It is especially heart wrenching,” he says, “when you have young children who don’t understand your absence—and they want and need your love and your presence so badly.”

In September of 2000, Tank wondered how he would be able to get a Christmas gift for his son, Matthew. Then he learned about Angel Tree, and how Prison Fellowship volunteers would deliver Christmas gifts and the Gospel message to his son—all on his behalf.

Tank says, “This was one of the few bright moments of my prison experience. It warmed my heart that Angel Tree cared enough about prisoners and their families to provide such a special service.”

Well, Matthew received the gifts from his dad. And as Tank says, “Over the next seven years I would benefit from the Angel Tree program as a prisoner. And now that I am out of prison I will support the Angel Tree program for the rest of my life.”

So come to our website, Breakpoint.org, if you’d like to order a copy of Tank’s book, knowing that a portion of the proceeds will help prisoners’ kids through Angel Tree.

And I’d like to ask you also to pray for Tank, as he rededicates his life to the Lord and seeks to redeem the years lost in prison. As an ex-prisoner myself, I know that a skeptical world will be watching his every move—and that can be a heavy burden to bear.

Well, the Gipper was wrong. I have 12 even more terrifying words: “I’m the government’s health care choices commissioner. Let me see your insurance policy.”

You see, the health care choices commissioner will be the head of just one of the 111 new government agencies created by the mammoth health care reform bill, which passed the House last Saturday by the narrowest of margins.

Unless you’ve read all of the nearly 2,000 pages of the bill, you might not have heard of the health care choices commissioner. But there is a lot more in this bill you’ve never heard about as well.

For example, as Bill Pear writes in the New York Times, supporters of gay rights included an amendment that would lower taxes for gay couples, ensuring tax-free health care benefits for an employee’s same-sex partner. This was never debated on the floor, nor was it passed as a tax measure. It was just swept up into what has become the health care grab bag. So chalk one up for the gay lobby.

Then there’s a provision requiring vending machines to post calorie counts for the goodies they offer. And fast food chains will have to provide a “calorie count for each standard menu item.” Health care reform?

The bill also has new programs such as grants for home visitation programs, in which nurses and social workers can coach new mothers on parenting practices and teach them how to interact with their child “to enhance age-appropriate development.”

Like most of the congressmen, I haven’t read these provisions, so I’m not sure who gets to decide what “age-appropriate interaction with children” is. But I’m not sure I want the government making those kind of decisions—telling parents how to interact with their kids.

I’m all for health care reform. Adequate health care is too expensive for too many. If we could clean up Medicaid and Medicare and provide health care subsidies for the working poor, I and a lot of other people would be dancing in the streets. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

Now, the House members deserve some credit. They fought for, and won, pro-life provisions in the House bill.

But it’s all now up for grabs in the Senate. Hopefully, the Senate will come up with a more responsible bill, which does not add a trillion dollars to debt, and which does not put the government in absolute control of our health care. The biggest issue to me is whether the government ultimately makes life-and-death medical decisions.

We’ve seen glimpses of this already. Just look at Florida’s plan to combat a potential swine flu emergency. The state’s approach to treating patients will be “the greatest good for the greatest number.” But this utilitarian approach is a potential death sentence for the elderly and those with disabilities.

I urge you to go to the ColsonCenter.org and view this week’s installment of the Two-Minute Warning, where I talk about the dangers of utilitarianism—especially as it relates to health care. And you can download some very valuable free materials.

I wouldn’t be so concerned if this health care reform bill were just another example of bad legislation. But I fear much more is at stake. A government that decides who lives and who dies is no longer a government of the people and by the people. And it’s certainly not a government for the people.

That’s not to say that the swine flu’s potential impact isn’t devastating—it is, but not in the way cable news would have us think.

And now the Florida Department of Health has issued a set of guidelines that instructs hospitals on what to do “if the state is overwhelmed by [H1N1] cases.”

The guidelines recommend that hospitals bar “patients with incurable cancer, end-stage multiple sclerosis and other conditions from being admitted to hospitals.” Another “recommendation” is that doctors “remove patients with poor prognoses from ventilators to treat those who have better chances of surviving.”

To facilitate this culling of the herd, the guidelines “suggest” that “intensive care unit patients and those using ventilators to be reassessed after 48 to 72 hours.” Those who have gotten sicker “would be taken off the machines or discharged from critical care” and replaced by those “who may have a better chance of survival.”

Not surprisingly, the Department of Health has not “publicized the guidelines or solicited input from the general public.” Not a bad strategy, given that Florida is packed with elderly retirees who may be less than thrilled by the news that the state proposes to make it easier to deny them emergency medical care.

Superficially, the guidelines resemble what on the battlefield is called triage. But that resemblance is just that—superficial. On a battlefield or in an emergency, medical personnel make agonizing decisions about whom they can and cannot save. No one is excluded before the actual emergency.

Here, the distinction is between those they will and will not save. It’s designating, in advance, those groups whom are regarded as expendable. And, as ethicist Wesley J. Smith pointed out, removing people from ventilators goes beyond triage principles to “indiscriminate rationing.”

Actually, there’s nothing indiscriminate about it. In a drill for a similar set of guidelines in Utah, a physician told a mother that her daughter with cerebral palsy could not be admitted to the hospital. He told her that “our list is our list.” function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

That’s why Smith is rightly concerned that guidelines like Florida’s could easily degenerate into judgments about the quality of life, age discrimination, and disabilities.

The triage consistent with Christian moral principles acknowledges that you try to save everyone, even if you can’t. But what Florida is proposing is a utilitarian calculation that seeks to do, in their words, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” by excluding the most vulnerable members of society. That’s the utilitarian formulation which led to the horrors of eugenics.

Christianity teaches that all life is sacred from birth to natural death. Florida, however, has already decided that some lives aren’t worth saving even if natural death is years away.

Dr. Miriam Grossman was lecturing at a Philadelphia college about sexual health. The students had invited her to talk about something they’d never encountered in all their years of sex education—the dangers of non-marital sex.

Grossman will never forget the girl who told her that everything she’d said about sexually transmitted diseases was correct. “I always used condoms, but I got HPV anyway, and it’s one of the high-risk types,” the girl said. If the infection did not go away, she had a 40 percent chance of developing cervical cancer.

In her new book, You’re Teaching My Child What?, Grossman says she felt “a wave of sorrow” at the girl’s words—but she was hardly surprised. The girl was yet another victim of a destructive philosophy that has been forced on America’s youth under the guise of “sex education.”

The sex-ed lobby has always claimed it was all about health—teaching kids how to stay safe. But in reality, their goal was not preventing disease, pregnancy, and emotional distress. It’s about indoctrinating them into a radical ideology—sexual freedom. Kids are urged to consult websites that urge them to begin “exploring” their sexuality at a young age, insist that sex at any age is a right, and encourage them to engage in bizarre and dangerous activities.

The findings of science are not allowed to interfere with these radical teachings. If new research proves the dangers of the behaviors they advocate, the so-called “sexperts” simply ignore it.

For instance, sex educators urge kids to avoid pregnancy by engaging in oral sex. But two years ago, cancer specialists found that oral cancers were on the rise among young adults, who used to be at very low risk if they did not smoke or drink.

If kids interact with five or more partners, they increase their risk “a whopping 250 percent.” And yet sex educators, Grossman writes, portray this activity as safe and normal. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

What’s the result of this teaching? One in four American girls now has a sexually transmitted disease.

What do the sex educators say about this? They shrug it off, telling kids that “most” people contract an STD in their lifetime—as if such a thing were normal and unavoidable.

This ought to make us really angry. The “comprehensive” sex educators have done enormous harm to our kids. They keep right on teaching kids that life is a sexual-free-for-all with no consequences as long as they use so-called “protection.”

Read Dr. Miriam Grossman’s book, You’re Teaching My Child What? You can get a copy at BreakPoint.org. And then, share it with the teens in your life. They need to know the truth—that while STDs, cervical cancer, and heartbreak may be increasingly common, they are no more “normal” than swine flu.

Once again, science is backing up the truth of the Judeo-Christian worldview. That is, sex ought to occur exclusively within the context of marriage. And anybody who tells us otherwise is sacrificing truth, science, and the health of our children.

One policeman called the events of that night a “barbaric act” and “one of the most disturbing crimes in my 15 years as a police officer.”

What disturbed him wasn’t only the overt criminal acts but the response—or more precisely, the lack of a response—of those in a position to help.

According to the police, the victim had left a dance at Richmond High School and was in the school’s courtyard when she was gang-raped. As heinous as this crime was, what made it a national story was that approximately 20 kids witnessed the attack and did nothing. Nothing.

Actually, it was worse than that. As word spread about the attack, people came to check it out. There are reports that some of the bystanders took pictures of the assault with their cell phone cameras instead of calling for help. Others laughed and a few even joined in the attack.

No sooner had police found the victim, semi-conscious under a bench, than attention focused on the behavior of the crowd. Comparisons were made to the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York, in which her neighbors supposedly ignored her cries for help because they didn’t want to get involved.

While how many of Genovese’s neighbors actually heard her cries for help is in dispute, there are no such doubts in this case. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

So why didn’t anyone do something to help? An obvious factor is fear. Richmond, California, has been described as “one of the nation’s most dangerous cities,” and its murder rate is higher than Oakland’s or Los Angeles’. The school even recently approved the use of surveillance cameras following a series of violent crimes on campus.

In this setting, people have reason to believe that authorities cannot protect them and, thus, getting involved will put them at risk.

Even so, many people live in dangerous neighborhoods where “snitching” is dangerous, but they don’t gather to watch another person being brutalized, much less take photos or laugh. After all, the attack ended when people down the street from the school learned what was happening and called the police.

The response that shocked the nation speaks to an indifference to the well-being of others among some of our children. Instead of empathy, these young people showed apathy—and, as one observer said, “a total indifference to [behavior], customs, mores, and sensibilities,” the things we associate with being civilized.

What happened in Richmond, California, is an unsettling reminder that the standards that make a good society possible cannot be taken for granted. It doesn’t take much to set them aside. That’s why those standards and the beliefs that make them possible must be taught and renewed continuously.

As one Oakland pastor wrote, what happened on October 23rd “is reflective of a societal breakdown that is not limited to the Richmond city limits.”

And that’s what should disturb us the most.

Even the Washington Post was shocked; its editors said Clinton’s comments were “misguided.” But now it seems that Clinton was only stating what was to be official Obama administration policy.

We saw this same attitude last month when Barack Obama declined to meet with the Dali Lama. The snub was an apparent effort to curry favor with Chinese leaders—leaders who deny religious liberty and human rights, not only to their own citizens, but also to Tibetans.

Obama’s refusal to meet with the Tibetan spiritual leader reminded me of when President Ford wrongly refused to meet with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the heroic Russian dissident.

Obama and his aides have also reportedly refused to meet with a representative of Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi.

And now we learn that the President has been quietly cutting off aid to groups that monitor human rights abuses and fight on behalf of human freedom—especially in Iran.

In the Wall Street Journal, David Feith and Bar Weiss write that the administration has eliminated millions of dollars in funding for the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Freedom House, and the State Department’s Iran Democracy Fund.

These actions go against everything America stands for. Our worldview is largely informed by our Christian heritage—one that puts human dignity first. Has this administration forgotten that human rights have always been America’s greatest export?

We believe that all humans are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, as our Declaration of Independence says. We can’t just write off these rights for the sake of climate change or the economy; they’re central to who we are. function fbs_click() {u=location.href.substring(0,location.href.lastIndexOf(’/'));t=document.title;window.open(’http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=’+encodeURIComponent(u)+’&t=’+encodeURIComponent(t),’sharer’,'toolbar=0,status=0,width=626,height=436′);return false;}

I knew this before I became a Christian. In 1973 President Nixon sent me to Moscow to negotiate for the release of Soviet Jews. I told Vasily Kuznetsov, the hard-line Soviet negotiator, that if the Soviets did not loosen their restrictions, Congress would not pass the trade treaty, which the Soviets desperately needed. Release the Jews, I said—or kiss American grain goodbye.

Kuznetsov pounded the table and shouted, “You have no right to interfere in our internal affairs!”

“These aren’t your internal affairs,” I replied. “Human rights are not conferred by government; they cannot be denied by government. They are God-given. We call them ‘inalienable.’”

Kuznetsov finally agreed to release the Jews—and America shipped its grain.

I can’t take credit for that; it was the U.S. Congress and the American people who freed those captives. And it will take the same pressure from Congress and the American people to free captives in China, Iran, North Korea, and anywhere else people are denied their God-given rights.

I hope you’ll contact the White House, Hillary Clinton, and your representatives with a strong message—one loud enough to be heard by people languishing in prisons around the world: The principles that guided us throughout our history are not for sale.