No Higher Power

Obama's War on Religious Freedom

Phyllis Schlafly, George Neumayr

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781621570158
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Conservatism & Liberalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Obama administration's overreaching and pervasive secularist policies represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history. So argue conservative movement leader Phyllis Schlafly and journalist George Neumayr in their new book, No Higher Power. In No Higher Power, Schlafly and Neumayr show how Obama is waging war on our religious liberties and actively working to create one nation under him rather than one nation under God. " Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and jobless—a drug that will dissipate as the federal government assumes more God-like powers, and his new secularist beliefs and policies gain adherents, " write Schlafly and Neumayr. From cutting funding for religious schools to Obama's deliberate omission of God and religion in public speeches to his assault on the Catholic church, No Higher Power is a shocking and comprehensive look at how Obama is violating one of our most fundamental rights—and remaking our country into a nation our Founding Fathers would hardly recognize.

CHAPTER ONE

COERCED

Ominous shadows fall beneath Barack Obama’s “rainbow” of “hope and change.” This book will illuminate the darkest one: his sweeping abuse of the American people’s religious liberty—a right of conscience and free worship of God enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The policies of the Obama administration represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history. In the 2008 campaign, candidate Obama promised a “transformative” presidency; as president, he has delivered one. Through stealth and sophistry, he is gradually transforming America into a secularist and socialist dystopia along modern Western European lines.

If you think his first term has been troubling, gird yourself for his second. “The future casts its shadow backwards,” wrote the late British writer Malcolm Muggeridge. In January 2012, we saw a shadow of Obama’s imagined future for America when he decreed, through his Department of Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius, that all employers, including most religious ones, pay for the contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortion-inducing pills of their employees.

“Today the department is announcing that the final rule on preventive health services will ensure that women with health insurance coverage will have access to the full range of the Institute of Medicine’s recommended preventive services, including all FDA-approved forms of contraception,” said Sebelius on January 20, 2012. “Women will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesn’t include contraceptive services. This rule is consistent with the laws in a majority of states which already require contraception coverage in health plans, and includes the exemption in the interim final rule allowing certain religious organizations not to provide contraception coverage. Beginning August 1, 2012, most new and renewed health plans will be required to cover these services without cost sharing for women across the country.”

Sebelius’s phrase, “certain religious organizations,” excluded the vast majority of religious schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions throughout the country. Obama had arrogated to himself the right to define which organizations qualify as “religious” and which do not. Most religious schools, hospitals, and charitable groups don’t meet his definition, as it turns on narrow and unconstitutional criteria. Under Obama’s definition, a religious institution must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose” and must “primarily” employ and serve “persons who share its religious tenets.” That would obviously exclude Catholic hospitals, as well as many Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish schools and charities.

Regarding herself as generous, Sebelius informed horrified members of these groups that she was granting them extra time with which to adjust their religious views to the regulatory decree. “After evaluating comments, we have decided to add an additional element to the final rule,” said Sebelius. “Nonprofit employers who, based on religious beliefs, do not currently provide contraceptive coverage in their insurance plan, will be provided an additional year, until August 1, 2013, to comply with the new law.”

The secularist hubris of the Obama administration left religious leaders stunned.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said a frustrated Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City.

The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America drew attention to Obama’s outrageous presumption in determining for more than 300 million Americans that only private sects who exclusively serve their own are “religious organizations” worthy of conscience protection:

Most troubling, is the Administration’s underlying rationale for its decision, which appears to be a view that if a religious entity is not insular, but engaged with broader society, it loses its “religious” character and liberties. Many faiths firmly believe in being open to and engaged with broader society and fellow citizens of other faiths. The Administration’s ruling makes the price of such an outward approach the violation of an organization’s religious principles. This is deeply disappointing.

The announcement of Obama’s fiat triggered a severe backlash of comments like these.

Obama had smugly assumed that birth control-using Catholics, Protestants, and Jews wouldn’t care about the mandate. Bill Daley, his then chief of staff, warned him that he was walking into a political firestorm, according to Edward Klein, a recent biographer of Obama, in his book The Amateur. But the president ignored Daley’s advice and instead listened to the likes of White House advisor Valerie Jarrett, a loud and influential feminist within the administration. Daley was proven right by the outcry that erupted after Sebelius’s announcement, and a stung Obama had to cobble together a hasty “revision” to try to quell it in February 2012.

The “revision” amounted to nothing more than an accounting trick. Under it, insurance companies, instead of employers, are required to pick up the tab for contraceptives and abortifacients. “Religious liberty will be protected and a law that requires free preventative care will not discriminate against women,” Obama implausibly asserted in the White House briefing room on February 10.

The heads of religious and conservative political groups, among others, scoffed at this statement. They denounced the change as an insulting distinction without a difference, noting that insurance companies would simply satisfy it by passing the costs of these “free” drugs to them in the form of higher premiums. Don’t fall for this deception, said then-presidential candidate Newt Gingrich to Catholics, the group that generated the most intense criticism of the original HHS mandate. “I frankly don’t care what deal he tries to cut; this is a man who is deeply committed. If he wins re-election, he will wage war on the Catholic Church the morning after he is re-elected,” said Gingrich.

As we will detail in this book, Obama’s HHS mandate marks just one of many battles in his unfolding war on religious liberty—a war that began with an opening shot in secularist San Francisco. Recall that in April 2008 candidate Obama—unaware that a blogger was recording his remarks at a private fundraiser for moneyed Bay Area radicals—dismissed religion as a consolation for the “bitter” in Middle America.

Contained within this one remark was the seed of secularist bigotry toward the religious that would come to full and odorous flower in his first term. Conservatives correctly noted that his “spread the wealth around” aside to Joe the Plumber on an Ohio campaign ropeline in 2008 foreshadowed his quasi-Marxist agenda of high taxation and confiscation of wealth. But less attention was paid by conservatives to his quasi-Marxist spin on religion.

Karl Marx famously belittled religion as an “opiate for the masses,” a drug that the spread of worldwide socialism would one day make undesirable. Obama’s aside in San Francisco about “bitter” Americans clinging to belief in God out of economic frustration was nothing more than a restatement of Marx’s view of religion. Like Marx, Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and jobless—a drug that will dissipate, he hopes, as the federal government assumes more God-like powers, and his new morality of abortion, subsidized contraception, and gay marriage gains adherents.

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not,” Obama said, warming to his theme in San Francisco. “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Out of this Marxist mindset came the HHS mandate, his conveniently cramped definition of non-public “religious institutions,” and his planned death of Judeo-Christianity by a thousand cuts.

But isn’t Obama—skeptical readers of this book might ask—religious? Why would a president, who describes himself as a professing Christian, wage war on religious liberty? Isn’t this charge just the usual partisan alarmism? No, it isn’t. In this book we will demonstrate that Obama is a secularist ideologue first and a Christian second, if at all. (Even the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor of many years, now doubts that he is a believing Christian.)

We acknowledge Obama’s political skills and his apparent domestic virtue. By most accounts, he is a loyal husband to his wife and an attentive father to his children. But the evidence of his totalitarian secularist design on America’s future is overwhelming. His toxic admixture of socialism and secularism—an ideology that he learned from his family, radical professors, his chosen pastor, and Saul Alinsky, among others—explains his habitual violations of the American people’s God-given freedoms, and portends the even grimmer violations yet to come.

Obama calls himself a revolutionary—the “one we have been waiting for,” as his starry-eyed supporters put it in 2008. But to what revolutionary tradition does he appeal? It is not the God-fearing American Revolution of our Founding Fathers. Rather, it is the starkly anti-religious tradition of the French Revolution. “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,” bellowed the Parisian intellectual Denis Diderot, whose thought contributed to the French Revolution. While Obama would never put his aims so crudely, his agenda points, albeit without violence, to the same end: purging the traditionally religious from public life.

In his beliefs if not his methods, Obama is a revolutionary of 1789 Paris, not of 1776 Philadelphia. “The audacity of hope,” a phrase and concept that he adopted from Jeremiah Wright, the racist and socialist Chicago pastor who baptized his daughters and presided at his wedding, signifies a radical form of liberal Christianity without Christ that seeks to secularize everything, including religion itself.

We will show in this book that Obama is working to build not a glorious America under God, but one nation under coercive secularism. By reducing religion to the status of a wholly private sect, by silencing God’s voice in public affairs, Obama seeks to monopolize civic life. In his imagined America, no higher power exists than godless government.

CHAPTER TWO

ONE NATION UNDER OBAMA

Barack Obama often casts himself as a “tolerant” liberal. He prides himself on having grown up in the carefree, Aloha-style atmosphere of Hawaii, a place of “aborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionaries” (as he put it in his first memoir, Dreams from My Father) that he grew to love. He has also highlighted his years spent in the ethnic diversity of largely Islamic Indonesia. The Islamic call to prayer is the “most beautiful sound in the world,” he once said while musing upon his childhood spell in Jakarta.

He has written about attending college in casual, diverse California and in the melting pot of New York City, attending law school with the best and brightest at Harvard, and then settling into Chicago, where he became a community organizer on the city’s downtrodden South Side. Throughout his life he has thought of himself as a “progressive,” pushing for more expansive rights, justice, and opportunity for the oppressed.

But his much-advertised tolerance contains a bald contradiction: it permits him to behave intolerantly towards conservative Americans, particularly religious ones. His record on the issue of religious freedom is one of blatant intolerance. It reveals a consistent prejudice in favor of a secularist federal government that has no qualms about bullying the religious, even to the point of dictating which ministers their churches can hire and fire.

Exhibit A of this secularist arrogance is the October 2011 Supreme Court case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. Before the high court, Obama’s lawyer for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made the astonishing argument that the federal government could force a Lutheran church to rehire a teacher/minister for its school, after religious officials there had decided to hire someone else and after the rejected teacher/minister had violated church procedures.

The school, affiliated with the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, had conferred on the teacher the title of “Minister of Religion.” The school fired her after she violated the rules of the church by threatening to sue it under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The teacher/minister then filed a complaint with the EEOC, which in turn successfully sued the school and demanded that it hire her back.

The case ended up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which ruled against the church school. In 2011, the Supreme Court took the case up and concluded that the EEOC had openly defied what federal courts have long recognized: a “ministerial exception” to federal employment laws—the exception covering, among others, priests, rabbis, and Protestant ministers subject to religious authority.

Even Obama’s former solicitor general and now a Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan, couldn’t believe her ears when the EEOC’s lawyer, Leondra Kruger, claimed that the Evangelical Lutheran Church’s ministerial hiring and firing decisions enjoyed no First Amendment protections:

JUSTICE KAGAN: Do you believe, Ms. Kruger, that a church has a right that is grounded in the Free Exercise Clause and/or the Establishment Clause to institutional autonomy with respect to its employees?

MS. KRUGER: We do not see that line of church autonomy principles in the Religion Clause jurisprudence as such. We see it as a question of freedom of association. We think that this case is perhaps one of the cases—

JUSTICE KAGAN: So, this is to go back to Justice Scalia’s question, because I too find that amazing, that you think that the Free—neither the Free Exercise Clause nor the Establishment Clause has anything to say about a church’s relationship with its own employees.

Kagan was referring to the colorful moment earlier in the hearing when Kruger had told Justice Antonin Scalia that religious organizations and secular businesses should be seen as exactly the same under the Constitution. Scalia had exploded at this remark: “That’s extraordinary! There, black on white in the text of the Constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?”

The Obama administration’s case was so flimsy and ludicrous that it ended up losing 9 to 0 in January 2012.

This unanimous rebuke from the Supreme Court would have given most presidents pause. Not Obama. In the...