Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Toby Harnden leads off our picks on Obama’s war on religion.
At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington yesterday, President Barack Obama suggested that his desire to raise taxes on higher-income Americans was rooted in the Bible. ‘For me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto to whom much is given, much shall be required’,’ he said.
Which prompted Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah (and a Mormon) to comment acidly: ‘Someone needs to remind the President that there was only one person who walked on water and he did not occupy the Oval Office. I think most Americans would agree that the Gospels are concerned with weightier matters than effective tax rates.’
It was just the latest example of Obama’s tin ear on matters religious. Remember, this is the man who was a member of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago, where sermons about ‘God Damn America’ and the US being responsible for 9/11 were preached but which remained, in Obama’s eyes, a place that was not ‘actually particularly controversial’.
Far more serious, however, than Obama’s crude attempt to state that the rich should pay higher taxes because Jesus wanted them to (in addition to this being, in VP Joe Biden’s view, a patriotic obligation) are his recent actions which amount to a declaration of war on the Roman Catholic church.
On January 20th, as much of the American political class was preoccupied with the impending GOP South Carolina primary, Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services announced that it was a requirement for contraceptive services to be offered by insurance policies supported under the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.
While there were exceptions for places of worship, there was no conscience protections for church-run schools, hospitals and social service agencies. These organisations will be required by law to provide free contraception to employees, even thought that is in violation of church teachings.
The move has been condemned by figures on both the Left and Right. The liberal Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne lit into Obama. So too did his colleague Michael Gerson, formerly President George W. Bush’s chief speechwriter. …
Peggy Noonan says the president may have just lost the election.
… But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.
But President Obama just may have lost the election.
The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says that under ObamaCare, Catholic institutions—including charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.
In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.
I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church’s charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.
There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.
The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.
Now the church is fighting back. …
One of the congresspersons who voted for ObamaCare recants. Weekly Standard Blog has the story.
Former Democratic congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper, a Catholic from Erie, Pennsylvania, cast a crucial vote in favor of Obamacare in 2010. She lost her seat that November in part because of her controversial support of Obamacare. But Dahlkemper said recently that she would have never voted for the health care bill had she known that the Department of Health and Human Services would require all private insurers, including Catholic charities and hospitals, to provide free coverage of contraception, sterilization procedures, and the “week-after” pill “ella” that can induce early abortions.
“I would have never voted for the final version of the bill if I expected the Obama Administration to force Catholic hospitals and Catholic Colleges and Universities to pay for contraception,” Dahlkemper said in a press release …
Daniel Henninger says the church is complicit because of the acceptance of federal funds. Fans of Hillsdale College, please note.
… So here we are, with the government demanding that the church hold up its end of a Faustian bargain that was supposed to permit it to perform limitless acts of virtue. Instead, what the government believes the deal is about, more than anything else, is compliance.
Politically bloodless liberals would respond that, net-net, government forcings do much social good despite breaking a few eggs, such as the Catholic Church’s First Amendment sensibilities. That is one view. But the depth of anger among Catholics over this suggests they recognize more is at stake here than political results. They are right. The question raised by the Catholic Church’s battle with ObamaCare is whether anyone can remain free of a U.S. government determined to do what it wants to do, at whatever cost.
Older Americans have sought for years to drop out of Medicare and contract for their own health insurance. They cannot without forfeiting their Social Security payments. They effectively are locked in. Nor can the poor escape Medicaid, even as the care it gives them degrades. Farmers, ranchers and loggers struggled for years to protect their livelihoods beneath uncompromising interpretations of federal environmental laws. They, too, had to comply. University athletic programs were ground up by the U.S. Education Department’s rote, forced gender balancing of every sport offered.
With the transformers, it never stops. In September, the Obama Labor Department proposed rules to govern what work children can do on farms. After an outcry from rural communities over the realities of farm traditions, the department is now reconsidering a “parental exemption.” Good luck to the farmers. …
Michael Barone thinks the president’s isolation leads to bad decisions.
… As in Chicago, Obama seems to live in a cocoon in which Republicans are largely absent, offscreen actors that no one pays any attention to.
His personal interactions are limited to his liberal Democratic staff — and to the rich liberals he meets at his frequent fundraising events. He has held more of these than George W. Bush, who in turn held more than Bill Clinton.
Two decisions in particular seem tilted toward rich liberals. One was the disapproval of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, even after it survived two environmental impact statements.
Obama says he wants more jobs and to reduce American dependence on oil from unfriendly foreign sources. The pipeline would do both, and is endorsed by labor unions. But Robert Redford doesn’t like Canadian tar sands oil. Case closed.
The other astonishing decision was the decree requiring Catholic hospitals and charities’ health insurance policies to include coverage for abortion and birth control. Here Obama was spitting in the eyes of millions of Americans and threatening the existence of charitable programs that help millions of people of all faiths.
Catholic bishops responded predictably by requiring priests to read letters opposing the policy. Who’s on the other side? The designer-clad ladies Obama encounters at every fundraiser. They want to impose their views on abortion on everyone else.
Obama fundraising seems to be lagging behind its $1 billion goal, and Democrats fear Republicans are closing the fundraising gap. So Obama seems to be concentrating on meeting the demands of rich liberals he spends so much time with.
David Brooks, comments on what he called an “underreported story.”
… Brooks made the traditional conservative argument against the administration, suggesting it was a form of “bureaucratic greed”.
“When you have the government saying one size fits all … you are going to do it our way, or not, well, then that insults a lot of people,” he continued. “And so I think this is having resonance across the country. It was — statements were issued in a lot of masses, a lot of pulpits this past Sunday. And, you know, I think it’s going to have a significant lingering effect for a long time.”
This controversary comes concurrent with Obama’s speech at the national prayer breakfast where a critic delivered a devasting prequel. Corner post fills us in.
If the organizers of the national prayer breakfast ever want a sitting president to attend their event again, they need to expect that any leader in his right mind is going to ask — no, demand — that he be allowed to see a copy of the keynote address that is traditionally given immediately before the president’s.
That’s how devastating was the speech given by a little known historical biographer named Eric Metaxas, whose clever wit and punchy humor barely disguised a series of heat-seeking missiles that were sent, intentionally or not, in the commander-in-chief’s direction.
Although Obama began his address directly after Metaxas by saying, “I’m not going to be as funny as Eric but I’m grateful that he shared his message with us,” both his tone and speech itself were flat, and he looked as though he wished he could either crawl into a hole or have a different speech in front of him.
In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that somehow Metaxas had been given an advance copy of Obama’s talk, then tailored his own to rebut the president’s.
Metaxas, a Yale grad and humor writer who once wrote for the children’s series Veggie Tales, began his speech with several jokes and stole the show early on when he noted that George W. Bush, often accused by his critics of being incurious, had read Metaxas’s weighty tome on the German theologian Bonhoeffer; he then proceeded to hand a copy to the president while intoning: “No pressure.”
Obama has been under pressure for some time now to somehow prove his Christian bonafides, for it’s no secret that millions of Americans doubt his Christian faith. A Pew Poll taken in 2010 found that only one third of Americans identified him as a Christian, and even among African-Americans, 46 percent said they were unsure of what religion he practiced.
Obama came to the prayer breakfast with a tidy speech that was clearly designed to lay those doubts to rest. He spoke of his daily habit of prayer and Bible reading, his regular conversations with preachers like T. D. Jakes and Joel Hunter, and even told a story of the time he prayed over Billy Graham.
But before the president could utter a word, it was Metaxas who delivered a devastating, albeit apparently unintentional critique of such God-talk, recounting his own religious upbringing which he described as culturally Christian yet simultaneously full of “phony religiosity.”
“I thought I was a Christian. I guess I was lost,” he matter-of-factly stated.
Standing no more than five feet from Obama whose binder had a speech chock full of quotes from the Good Book, Metaxas said of Jesus:
“When he was tempted in the desert, who was the one throwing Bible verses at him? Satan. That is a perfect picture of dead religion. Using the words of God to do the opposite of what God does. It’s grotesque when you think about it. It’s demonic.”
“Keep in mind that when someone says ‘I am a Christian’ it may mean absolutely nothing,” Metaxas added for good measure, in case anybody missed his point.
The eerie feeling that Metaxas was answering Obama on a speech he had yet to give continued …