Divider-in-Chief (18 page)

This mindset helps to explain why Obama attacks religious liberty so vigorously. Last October, HHS ceased funding successful Catholic programs that help victims of human trafficking because the Catholic services don't refer them to abortion facilities if they are pregnant.
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For a time, Catholic Relief Services faced a similar threat to its international relief programs.

Here's a list of other Obama administration attacks on religion and religious freedom:
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These are only some of the more obvious instances of the anti-religious bias of the administration. In the now notorious Hosanna-Tabor case, the Obama administration's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission tried to bully a Lutheran church about its hiring practices, arguing that the church didn't have the right to control who it employs according to its religious beliefs. The case started in 1999, when Cheryl Perich began teaching at Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Michigan. In 2004, Perich left on disability after being diagnosed with narcolepsy.

When she tried to get her job back, the school told her that they had already hired a replacement. Perich threatened to take the school to court, prompting the school to fire her because using secular courts to solve an interchurch issue violated its teaching on resolving such disputes. With backing from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Obama administration, Perich filed a lawsuit against the school, arguing that the decision threatened equal protection under the law.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, where, in January 2012, it ruled unanimously in favor of the school. In
Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School
v.
EEOC
, the court ruled that “the Establishment Clause prevents the Government from appointing ministers, and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.”
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The case was seen by many legal analysts as an embarrassment to the Obama administration. Obama court appointee Justice Elena Kagan came
close to openly mocking the rationale of her successor as Obama's solicitor general during oral arguments.
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The ruling was a landmark victory for religious freedom. Richard W. Garnett, director of Notre Dame Law School's program in Church, State, and Society, told the
Washington Post
that the ruling was the court's most important decision on religious freedom in decades. “The government doesn't get to second-guess religious communities' decisions about who should be their teachers, leaders, and ministers,” he said .
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When I asked Matt Bowman, legal counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, to sum up the Obama administration's actions on religious freedom, he didn't pull any punches. He said, “President Obama is not only the most fervent opponent of religious freedom ever to reside in the White House. He has pursued his agenda by making villains of Americans who have traditional religious values, to divide them from other citizens so he can aggressively promote abortion, same-sex so-called ‘marriage,' and the marginalization of religion itself.”
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The Catholic Church is the largest religious denomination in the United States, and Barack Obama has always had a line-up of prominent Catholics willing to go to bat for him. For his inner circle, the president chose Catholics who dissent fully from their church on moral matters. Five of his original cabinet secretaries are Catholics who disown the church's teaching on human life. Two in particular stand out: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Vice President Joe Biden.

Sebelius is the flagrantly pro-abortion former governor of Kansas. In her current post as secretary of HHS, Sebelius is the Obama official most responsible for crafting the contraceptive mandate. As governor of Kansas from 2003 to 2009, Sebelius aggressively promoted abortion. She vetoed legislation that would have limited abortions in her state on at least four occasions.
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In 2008, she vetoed the Comprehensive Abortion Reform Act,
which would have strengthened late-term abortion laws and prevented coerced abortions.
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It's no wonder why Sebelius opposed limiting late-term abortions: their principle practitioner was a huge contributor to her campaigns.

George Tiller was notorious for being one of the only abortionists in the country who would regularly perform late-term abortions for almost any reason. Based in Wichita, “Tiller the baby killer,” as some of his opponents referred to him, was also a huge contributor to Sebelius and her allies in Kansas. He spent millions funding the Democratic Party through his ProKanDo political action committee. He spent $1.2 million in the 2006 election cycle alone .
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Sebelius and Tiller were so tight that Sebelius once held a party at the governor's mansion honoring Tiller. Only Tiller, his wife, and clinic staff were present at the event.
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Sebelius's promotion of abortion prompted her bishop, Kansas City Archbishop Joseph Naumann, to ask that she no longer receive Holy Communion.
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In 2009, Archbishop Raymond Burke, prefect for the Apostolic Signatura, the Holy See's highest court, proclaimed that Sebelius should not receive communion. “Whether Governor Sebelius is in the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas, or in any other diocese, she should not present herself for Holy Communion because, after pastoral admonition, she obstinately persists in serious sin,” Burke said.
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(All this negative attention is said to have knocked Sebelius out of the running to be Barack Obama's running mate in 2008.)

With Sebelius at the helm at HHS, nobody should be surprised at the Obama administration's attacks on religious liberty and conscience rights and promotion of controversial abortion laws—these have always been her forte.

In 2012, Sebelius accepted an invitation to deliver the commencement address at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute (GPPI). Georgetown is not Notre Dame. It often seems to downplay its Catholicism, preferring to stress its research and academic credentials rather than its Jesuit tradition. It routinely hires professors and invites speakers, Catholic and non-Catholic, who
publicly support abortion and other policies that contradict Catholic moral theology. Bill Clinton
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and Barack Obama
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have both spoken there. In 2008, the Georgetown faculty gave $179,000 to candidate Obama. The
Chronicle of Higher Education
ranked Georgetown among the top ten of Obama's academic donors.
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GPPI had always been full of liberal Catholics. Its faculty included E. J. Dionne, the liberal Catholic columnist, and Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator and the man Obama initially tapped to lead HHS before tax problems got in the way. Many of GPPI's previous commencement speakers were liberal Catholics who publicly endorsed abortion. But Sebelius provoked a special kind of negative response even at nominally Catholic Georgetown, and her appearance drew strong criticism.

More than 27,000 Catholics signed a letter opposing her appearance. The Archdiocese of Washington released a statement condemning it.
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Prominent Georgetown professor Patrick Deneen wrote a letter to University president John DeGioia signed by eight other GU faculty members asking him to rescind the invitation. According to the letter, Deneen believed that hosting Sebelius at a commencement ceremony signified Georgetown's endorsement of the HHS mandate.
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DeGioia responded that the invitation to speak had been made in January, before the mandate announcement, and that it in no way meant that the school endorsed the administration's policy.
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It was a measure of just how deeply the mandate decision had cut that Sebelius's speech drew any criticism at all.

Then there's Vice President Joe Biden. Unlike other dissenting Catholics, Biden likes to play up his Catholicism whenever he can. He enjoys meeting with the pope when he travels to Rome and glad-handing prominent Catholic officials at every opportunity here at home. But he has had a difficult relationship with the Catholic Church because of his positions on cultural issues, chiefly abortion. Biden once supported some limits on abortion, including limits on public funding of abortion. But as vice
president, Biden cannot dissent from Obama's radical abortion policies. Still, that hasn't stopped him from continuing to invoke his faith.

In January 2012, Biden told the
Delaware News Journal
he thinks Catholics may support abortion. “It's very difficult,” Biden said. “I was raised as a Catholic, I'm a practicing Catholic, and I'm totally at home with the Catholicism that I was raised in and this whole culture of social responsibility.”
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Biden then misrepresented Catholic teaching on abortion, saying, “Throughout the church's history, we've argued between whether or not it is wrong in every circumstance and the degree of wrong. Catholics have this notion, it's almost a gradation.”

In 2008, then-senator Biden invited the ire of the church by claiming that the beginning of human life is a “personal and private” matter of religious faith, and that one's view on the matter cannot be imposed on others. That statement earned swift rebukes from a number of Catholic bishops.
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Many alienated Catholics are abandoning Obama. During the Notre Dame commencement speech controversy in 2009, polls showed two in three Catholics approved of Obama's job performance.
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But even then the seeds of Obama's troubles with Catholics were being planted. In May 2009, political science professor John Green told
Politico
, “It's possible that [Obama] could alienate [pro-life Catholics who voted for him] if the abortion issue becomes salient.”
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And that's exactly what's happened. Obama will probably always have significant support among some groups of American Catholics—Hispanics, for instance, who make up more than a third of American Catholics.

But Obama lost white Catholics in 2008—the first candidate to do so and win the presidency since 1976.
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He lost them because they tend to be social conservatives (“Reagan Democrats”) or conservatives full stop.
An apparently “moderate” Democrat like Bill Clinton can win them over, but a radically liberal Democrat is unlikely to do so.

Just a few months into Obama's term, Notre Dame professor Scott Appleby said, “A lot of [Catholics] held their noses when they voted for Obama. His decision on life issues and the way he has communicated them have been deeply dissatisfying to Catholics who voted for him, including me.”
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