CHAPTER ONE
COERCED
Ominous shadows fall beneath Barack Obamaâs ârainbowâ of âhope and change.â This book will illuminate the darkest one: his sweeping abuse of the American peopleâs religious libertyâa 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 âtransformativeâ 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. âThe future casts its shadow backwards,â wrote the late British writer Malcolm Muggeridge. In January 2012, we saw a shadow of Obamaâs 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.
âToday 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 Medicineâs recommended preventive services, including all FDA-approved forms of contraception,â said Sebelius on January 20, 2012. âWomen will not have to forego these services because of expensive co-pays or deductibles, or because an insurance plan doesnât 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.â
Sebeliusâs phrase, âcertain religious organizations,â 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 âreligiousâ and which do not. Most religious schools, hospitals, and charitable groups donât meet his definition, as it turns on narrow and unconstitutional criteria. Under Obamaâs definition, a religious institution must have âthe inculcation of religious values as its purposeâ and must âprimarilyâ employ and serve âpersons who share its religious tenets.â 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. âAfter evaluating comments, we have decided to add an additional element to the final rule,â said Sebelius. âNonprofit 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.â
The secularist hubris of the Obama administration left religious leaders stunned.
âIn effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,â said a frustrated Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York City.
The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America drew attention to Obamaâs outrageous presumption in determining for more than 300 million Americans that only private sects who exclusively serve their own are âreligious organizationsâ worthy of conscience protection:
Most troubling, is the Administrationâs 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 âreligiousâ character and liberties. Many faiths firmly believe in being open to and engaged with broader society and fellow citizens of other faiths. The Administrationâs ruling makes the price of such an outward approach the violation of an organizationâs religious principles. This is deeply disappointing.
The announcement of Obamaâs fiat triggered a severe backlash of comments like these.
Obama had smugly assumed that birth control-using Catholics, Protestants, and Jews wouldnât 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 Daleyâs 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 Sebeliusâs announcement, and a stung Obama had to cobble together a hasty ârevisionâ to try to quell it in February 2012.
The ârevisionâ 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. âReligious liberty will be protected and a law that requires free preventative care will not discriminate against women,â 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 âfreeâ drugs to them in the form of higher premiums. Donât 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. âI frankly donât 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,â said Gingrich.
As we will detail in this book, Obamaâs HHS mandate marks just one of many battles in his unfolding war on religious libertyâa war that began with an opening shot in secularist San Francisco. Recall that in April 2008 candidate Obamaâunaware that a blogger was recording his remarks at a private fundraiser for moneyed Bay Area radicalsâdismissed religion as a consolation for the âbitterâ 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 âspread the wealth aroundâ 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 âopiate for the masses,â a drug that the spread of worldwide socialism would one day make undesirable. Obamaâs aside in San Francisco about âbitterâ Americans clinging to belief in God out of economic frustration was nothing more than a restatement of Marxâs view of religion. Like Marx, Obama views traditional religion as a temporary opiate for the poor, confused, and joblessâa 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.
âYou 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 nothingâs 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,â Obama said, warming to his theme in San Francisco. âSo itâs not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who arenât like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.â
Out of this Marxist mindset came the HHS mandate, his conveniently cramped definition of non-public âreligious institutions,â and his planned death of Judeo-Christianity by a thousand cuts.
But isnât Obamaâskeptical readers of this book might askâreligious? Why would a president, who describes himself as a professing Christian, wage war on religious liberty? Isnât this charge just the usual partisan alarmism? No, it isnât. 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, Obamaâs pastor of many years, now doubts that he is a believing Christian.)
We acknowledge Obamaâs 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 Americaâs future is overwhelming. His toxic admixture of socialism and secularismâan ideology that he learned from his family, radical professors, his chosen pastor, and Saul Alinsky, among othersâexplains his habitual violations of the American peopleâs God-given freedoms, and portends the even grimmer violations yet to come.
Obama calls himself a revolutionaryâthe âone we have been waiting for,â 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. âMen will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest,â 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. âThe audacity of hope,â 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 Godâs 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 âtolerantâ liberal. He prides himself on having grown up in the carefree, Aloha-style atmosphere of Hawaii, a place of âaborted treaties and crippling diseases brought by the missionariesâ (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 âmost beautiful sound in the world,â 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 cityâs downtrodden South Side. Throughout his life he has thought of himself as a âprogressive,â 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, Obamaâs 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 âMinister of Religion.â 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 âministerial exceptionâ to federal employment lawsâthe exception covering, among others, priests, rabbis, and Protestant ministers subject to religious authority.
Even Obamaâs former solicitor general and now a Supreme Court Justice, Elena Kagan, couldnât believe her ears when the EEOCâs lawyer, Leondra Kruger, claimed that the Evangelical Lutheran Churchâs 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 casesâ
JUSTICE KAGAN: So, this is to go back to Justice Scaliaâs question, because I too find that amazing, that you think that the Freeâneither the Free Exercise Clause nor the Establishment Clause has anything to say about a churchâs 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: âThatâs extraordinary! There, black on white in the text of the Constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?â
The Obama administrationâs 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...