Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly told a group of reporters at the Heritage Foundation Tuesday that President Barack Obama believes that loyalty to government trumps even loyalty to God.
She cited the mandates set forth by the Affordable Care Act and the repeal of the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy as two examples of where she said the president has put government ahead of the institution of religion.
“He seems to want to get rid of religion in any public place — a public school, or a public institution — and to keep it behind the four walls of your own church,” Schlafly said.
Schlafly has teamed up with George Neumayr to author a new book, “No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom,” which uses the president’s words and actions to illustrate an attempt to make the United States a secular society.
Under Obamacare, the Department of Health and Human Services initially ruled that religious institutions would be — through their health insurance plans — required to provide contraceptives, including the “morning after pill,” to employees, even if doing so would violate the institution’s religious teachings.
The administration then finessed the ruling to force the insurance companies to provide the contraception directly, rather than going through the religious institution, a revision that U.S. Roman Catholic bishops rejected. Violators of the mandate would be fined.
“It puts, before the religious, a choice,” Neumayr said. “You either bow to Obama’s secularism or you go out of business. Those are the two choices.”
“True happiness lies not with God, but with government,” Neumayr said of Obama’s beliefs. “The idea being that as government grows larger and more God-like and provides us with all these wonderful things like free health care, at that point, people wouldn’t need the drug of religion anymore.
“No Higher Power” also notes a policy at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Maryland where visitors were prohibited from bring a Bible into hospital rooms. The restriction, though, was reversed after loud opposition from members of Congress and the public.
“Obama doesn’t want to recognize any power higher than the federal government, particularly the executive branch,” Schlafly said.
The two authors also wrote of Obama continuously omitting the word “Creator” when reciting the Declaration of Independence, asserting that it is further proof of an anti-religion stance.
“Religion is a form of consolation for the bitter in small towns of America,” Neumayr recalled Obama saying when he thought he wasn’t being recorded at a 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco.
During the 2008 campaign, then-Sen. Obama told he crowd, “And it’s not surprising then they [small town people in Pennsylvania and the Midwest] 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.”
The comment, Neumayr said, is not dissimilar from the opinion of the communist philosophy’s founder, Karl Marx, who said that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people”.
“As the state grows larger and more God-like, people won’t need to cling to religion,” Neumayr hypothesized on Obama’s thought process. “They won’t be bitter anymore, they’ll be happy and they won’t need religion anymore.”