It’s always uncomfortable when this supremely arrogant, narcissistic, dishonest President speaks at a prayer breakfast. He just can’t resist the opportunity to lecture the people he relentlessly, remorselessly lied to about gay marriage for years.
He’s demonstrated his utter contempt for people of faith through his politics – there is no other word for willfully deceiving people in order to gain the political power necessary to crush them. Obama has never acknowledged or apologized for his deceit, which would have been a very minimal gesture of respect for those he hoodwinked.
He can’t help letting that contempt seep into his words every time he takes the opportunity to talk about Christianity. He has a passing interest in bending Scripture to serve his true faith, the Church of the State, which he mostly does by equating “love” with obedience to the State, and “charity” with government spending. The book he’s reading from when he addresses Christian groups is Rules For Radicals, especially the part about defeating political enemies by holding them rigidly to tendentious interpretations of their own standards, while treating your own standards as hazy guidelines.
At an Easter-themed event this week, while supposedly “pulling it back” from his previous outrageous and ignorant harangue about the Crusades, Obama managed to top himself by hectoring Christians about their supposedly “less-than-loving expressions”… even as scores of Christians are laid to rest after an Islamist massacre in Kenya. Did Obama not read about that in the paper yet?
The willful ignorance Obama displays toward those who hate and attack Christians here in the United States is also stunning, if unsurprising. The relevant passage comes near the end of the President’s remarks, as we’re treated to yet another attempt by the anti-religious Left to co-opt Pope Francis:
Through God’s mercy, Peter the Apostle said, we are given “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” It’s an inheritance that calls on us to be better, to love more deeply, to serve “the least of these” as an expression of Christ’s love here on Earth.
That’s the spirit we feel in the example of His Holiness, Pope Francis, who encourages us to seek peace, to serve the marginalized, and be good stewards of God’s creation. Like millions of Americans, I’m honored that we will be welcoming him to our country later this year.
I want to quote him. He says that we should strive “to see the Lord in every excluded person who is thirsty, hungry, naked; to see the Lord present even in those who have lost their faith… imprisoned, sick, unemployed, persecuted; to see the Lord in the leper — whether in body or soul — who encounters discrimination.”
Isn’t that how Jesus lived? Isn’t that how He loved? Embracing those who were different; serving the marginalized; humbling Himself to the last. This is the example that we are called to follow — to love Him with all our hearts and mind and soul, and to love our neighbors — all of our neighbors — as ourselves. As it says in the first letter of John, “Let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.”
On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned. But that’s a topic for another day.
Where there is injustice — I was about to veer off. I’m pulling it back. Where there is injustice we defend the oppressed. Where there is disagreement, we treat each other with compassion and respect. Where there are differences, we find strength in our common humanity, knowing that we are all children of God.
The audience was gracious enough to treat all this as a joke and laugh after the “loving expressions by Christians” bit, but it’s not funny, and religious leaders aren’t doing a very good job of leading by applauding this garbage.
What a cowardly drive-by insult!
Obama doesn’t even have the guts to specify what he’s referring to. Remember, this is the same guy who blew a fuse because Ben Carson had the nerve to say a few words against tax-and-spend socialism while sharing a stage with him, taking Carson’s thoughts about the proper moral limits of government power as a personal insult. The thin-skinned Obama would never receive vague insults like this with good humor and gracious applause.
This is the same man who resolutely insists the Islamic State and Islamist violence have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. He just announced a “historic” agreement to give nuclear weapons to an Islamic fascist state that throws Christian pastors in dungeons, and kills gay people. But his big concern is “less-than-loving expressions” by Christians? He sticks his fingers in his ears and pretends he can’t hear the Iranian leadership shouting “Death to America, Death to Israel,” but he’s all over the insufficiently loving rhetoric of American churchgoers.
To those who might try to defend Obama by saying he’s nominally Christian, so it’s okay for him to be critical of his own religion: give me a break. Never mind how “Christian” someone who sits in a church and lies through his teeth to the pastor could possibly be. Obama endlessly delivers lectures on what Islam is really all about. He’s done it every time the Islamic State dropped a terror video featuring the murder of an American. It’s just that his lectures on the True Meaning of Islam are the complete opposite of his perpetual carping about the current and historical deficiencies of Christianity. He seems only the best in the former faith, and only the worst in the latter.
Another event Obama might have missed in the news, when he was busy not preparing any remarks about the oppression and slaughter of Christians around the world, was the sheer foaming-at-the-mouth hatred directed at Christians who didn’t toe the line on gay marriage. The President has a sworn duty to defend the Constitutional rights of the citizens he works for – yes, even the ones he loathes – but he didn’t have a damn word to say about freedom, dignity, and “loving” when his voters were bombarding Memories Pizza in Indiana with vile hate speech, pornographic images, and threats of violence to intimidate them out of business, based on a media hit that deliberately misquoted the owner of the store. You’re disappointed by “less-than-loving expressions” from Christians, Mr. President? That’s nice. How about the less-than-loving expressions of people who threaten to burn down their pizzerias?
Obama’s remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast weren’t constructive, or even amusing. They’re grotesque. The balance of hatred, from Islamists abroad to leftist crusaders at home, is turned very heavily against Christians. Domestically, they’re hated for things they haven’t even said, and treated like criminals for hypothetical future actions conjured in the feverish imaginations of those who despise them.
Their expressions of love and humility are ignored, while darker words are fabricated and stuffed in their mouths. The actual text of religious-freedom law is ignored, because it’s more fun to vent spleens against imaginary intolerance acts.
Try to imagine Obama chiding Islam this way, right after some hypothetical atrocity in which a couple hundred Muslims were targeted and butchered on the basis of their religion. Imagine him speaking to a same-sex marriage group and joshing about the “less than tolerant expressions” of gay-rights advocates who have claimed tolerance as their highest value for generations.
This little “joke” about “less than loving expressions by Christians” is coming from a man comfortable with using the power of the State to crush expressions he disagrees with. The “concern” of a lawbreaking, dictatorial executive is not a laughing matter, or a purely rhetorical flourish. The end of religious liberty means the State controls expressions of faith now. The disapproval of the Grand High Regulator is not a thing to be taken lightly.
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