The Gospel According to Obama

The sub title to this column is "Barack Obama says faith drives much of his domestic agenda—and no one even blinks":

George W. Bush had one small office devoted to faith-based initiatives, and was savaged for it. Barack Obama, on the other hand, says faith drives much of his domestic agenda—and no one even blinks.

We are in “the fourth year of the ministry of George W. Bush,” cracked novelist Philip Roth in 2004. By then, several million gallons of ink already had been spilled warning that Bush’s “faith-based presidency” was “nudging the church-state line” (The New York Times) and was “turning the U.S. into a religious state” (Village Voice) and was “arrogant” and “troubling” (St. Petersburg Times) and was “pandering to Christian zealots” (Salon) and “imposing its values on the rest of us” (too many to name).

Obama has been just as overtly religious as Bush—“We worship an awesome God in the blue states,” he said in his 2004 keynoter at the Democratic National Convention—and even more aggressive about injecting faith into politics. In 2006, he praised a religious “Covenant for a New America.” In a 2008 speech in Ohio, he said religious faith could be “the foundation of a new project of American renewal” and insisted that “secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square.” He has kept Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives. In fact, “Obama's faith-based office has given religious figures a bigger role in influencing White House decisions,” reported USNews in 2009.

At the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday, the president began by noting that he prays every morning, and then devoted the rest of his speech to explaining the manifold ways in which his faith guides his policies. “I am my brother's keeper and I am my sister's keeper,” he said. That somnolent silence you hear is the guardians of church-state separation taking a nap.

I need not tell you an obvious conclusion. They give Obama a pass because the press are generally with Obama on other issues more spending, higher taxes, or even more regulation. If you're with them on those issues they believe in they will give your religiousness a pass.

Which leads to another quote from this article:

Or take the temper tantrum that erupted last week when the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure, a women’s-health organization, decided—briefly—to stop giving its own money to Planned Parenthood. Let’s suppose Komen’s 27.3 million critics were correct in thinking the move was motivated by anti-abortion sentiments, which are essentially religious sentiments. So? Isn’t Obama right to say secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door?

Some claimed the issue was women’s health. Not so. The Komen foundation would not have shoved the money formerly earmarked for Planned Parenthood under a mattress. It would have spent the money on women’s-health initiatives elsewhere. Leftists were not upset because Komen’s decision shrank the pool of funding for cancer screenings and so forth; it would not have. They were fuming because Komen no longer wanted to tithe one of liberalism’s most sacred institutions. So apoplexy ensued, and Komen climbed down.

The lesson from all of this? Liberals should be able to impose their faith-based values on the rest of us, but any heretics who deviate from liberal dogma may not even observe their faith-based values by themselves. It’s right there in the Apocrypha—you can look it up.

I can't say I really understand this. They have a right to hold back money if they wanted to. How is abortion a matter of women's health and who says that money must go to Planned Parenthood. That money could just as easily go towards more research into breast cancer for example. Simplistic thinking at play here!