Thursday, March 8, 2012

US: Obama is America’s Lenin – by Jeffrey T. Kuhner

Why does President Obama despise Christianity? Recently, his administration ruled most religious organizations must provide health insurance to employees that covers free contraception and sterilization procedures — including the morning-after pill. The decision provoked a furor among Catholics and non-Catholics. They rightly understood that the contraceptive mandate violates religious freedom and the conscience rights of the Catholic Church.

 
Countless Catholic hospitals, schools and charities would be forced to betray their fundamental religious beliefs or else face millions of dollars in fines. Hence, the Obamacare mandate offered a stark choice: comply or go out of business. The church hierarchy fought back, threatening civil disobedience. The administration has now put forth an “accommodation” to religious groups. Instead of paying directly for free birth control, their health insurers must offer those services to all employees. Yet, it is a distinction without a difference. Birth control is not free; someone must pay for it. In this case, the religious institutions will have to pay the insurance companies higher premiums to provide universal birth control. Rather than subsidizing contraception directly, the church is simply being compelled to redirect the funds to a third party. The Obama accommodation is nothing more than an accounting gimmick.
Polls show most Catholics are not buying the administration’s spin. Nearly 60 percent of Catholic voters say they staunchly oppose the new mandate and intend to punish Mr. Obama in November. They are concentrated in key battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio. This begs the question: Why would Mr. Obama risk his re-election chances by alienating a pivotal voting bloc — one that he narrowly won in 2008? The answer is a simple one: Like many secular leftists, he seeks to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization.
From its inception, Marxism has been in a life-death struggle with Christianity. “Religion is the opiate of the masses,” Karl Marx said. For Marx, secular enlightenment and personal liberation could only be achieved if the “primitive superstitions” of Christian dogma were swept into the dustbin of history. Capitalism, private property, the nation-state and the traditional family — all rest upon the Judeo-Christian moral order. Marxists have understood one seminal truth: Destroy a religion and you destroy the culture and civilization it spawned. This is why modern liberals relentlessly advance the sexual revolution characterized by individual gratification, abortion on demand and birth control. Sexual permissiveness — the godless libertine society — and not the international proletariat is the true agent of radical change. In fact, the founder of the Bolshevik Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, deliberately promoted open marriage, abortion, birth control and militant secularism as a means of social engineering. For Lenin, religion was the enemy.
Mr. Obama is America’s Lenin — a socialist revolutionary bent on cultural transformation. His contraceptive mandate is unprecedented in U.S. history: For the first time, private companies — health insurers — are being forced to provide a product or service for free. Moreover, Mr. Obama is dictating to the Catholic Church how to run its internal affairs and administer its social services. It is state-sanctioned coercion, forcing the church to betray its most cherished beliefs. This undermines religious freedom. Under Mr. Obama, Washington, not the Vatican, is the final authority on what Catholic institutions must do — even if it violates their conscience rights. His mandate is a direct assault on the First Amendment. Mr. Obama is behaving like an anti-Christian, anti-religious zealot.
He is pushing universal birth control in the name of “women’s reproductive health.” Yet, the last thing America suffers from is lack of access to contraception. It is everywhere — grocery stores, pharmacies, high schools, university campuses, public bathrooms. Planned Parenthood gives it away. This is not about protecting women’s health. It is about smashing the Catholic Church, the last bulwark against the sexual revolution. Mr. Obama is trying to turn the church into a vassal of the liberal Leviathan.
Mr. Obama is a product of the academic left. He openly embraces what the late Pope John Paul II called “the culture of death.” He supports partial-birth abortion — infanticide. He has entrenched taxpayer funding of abortion at the heart of Obamacare, forcing people of faith to be complicit in the mass murder of unborn children. He has enabled homosexuals to openly serve in the military. He refuses to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act. And he has appointed the two most militant secularists to the Supreme Court, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Mr. Obama is in the pocket of the pro-abortion feminist lobby. And they desire the same goal: the end of Christian America.
Mr, Obama claims he is a “Christian.” This is a cheap cynical ploy to win over some votes in the heartland. He is anything but a Christian. It is not just his policies that prove it. He does not attend a regular church. Previously, for more than 20 years, Mr. Obama’s pastor was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright — the head of a radical cult. Mr. Wright champions black liberation theology. It is a fusion of black nationalism, anti-colonialism and Marxism. It has nothing to do with preaching the gospel of Christ. Rather, it replaces Jesus with Marx on the cross. In other words, Mr. Wright’s church has been explicitly political: promoting spiritual solidarity with the supposed victims of the capitalist, Christian and imperialist West. Mr. Obama is our first non-Christian president.
He has shown us who he truly is — a faithful disciple of Marx. Mr. Obama has declared an ideological war on Christianity. If he wins a second term, his persecution of Christians will only get worse.
* Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute.

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