I find it very odd that a president notably lacking in humility and frequently riding his own high horse would lecture American Christians about those subjects because they presumably condemn acts of barbarism by Islamists.
Talk about a string of disconnects. While we're at it, let's note one more. Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast, also exhorted us to "uphold the distinction between our faith and our governments -- between church and between state." Last time I checked, it was not Christians, unless you believe that Obama is a Christian, who were using government power to restrict religious liberties of others.
Obama, however, has conspicuously infringed on the conscience rights of Christians in supporting mandates that require religious organizations to pay for contraception and abortifacients.
Indeed, Obama was too busy lecturing Christians about "theocracies that restrict people's choice of faith" -- though there are no Christian theocracies in the world -- to note that many Muslim nations in the world are theocratic and under Shariah.
Is Obama's moral compass so skewed that he is utterly blind to the rampant theocratic oppression that routinely occurs in Muslim nations in the world? This takes moral equivalency to new levels.
But that wasn't even his worst moral distortion of the morning. On the heels of the Islamic State group's burning alive a captured Jordanian pilot, Obama's instinct was not to decry ISIS' depraved murder but to caution us not to judge the religion of Islam. Was anyone doing that, by the way?
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As usual, Obama's first impulse to another atrocity committed in the name of Islam was to defend Islam -- and attack Christianity and Christians, who Obama apparently believes are holding their noses in the air thinking they don't engage in such behavior in the name of their religion.
Foremost on his mind was to correct the record on Islam, kind of a pre-emptive defense of the religion he holds dear from his childhood, against any attempts to tar it based on thousands of "isolated" incidents. Here's where his moral equivalence reared its ugly head again.
He said, "We ... see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon." That was his predicate for chronicling the recent despicable actions of ISIS -- an acronym, by the way, that, in his moral bewilderment, he refuses to utter -- and then glibly transitioning into certain regrettable actions committed by or with the support of Christians in history.
Of course, he was compelled to invoke the Crusades, which in his view were unprovoked acts of aggression by Christians against Muslims but which in reality were far more complex than that. And of course, he had to mention the Inquisition, as if that is somehow relevant, even microscopically, to what's going on today.
But no blanket condemnation would be complete without Obama's obligatory and habitual denunciation of slavery and Jim Crow, only this time he cited them as examples not of America's evil past but of evils committed in the name of Christianity.
As long as we're talking about "wedges" and "weapons," it sure seems to me as if that's precisely how Obama continues to use slavery and Jim Crow. He just will not let these go. It obviously never occurs to him that Christianity was one of the main driving forces in eradicating slavery in this country. But we can hardly expect him to give us a fair reading of Christianity's role when he is on a mission to demonize it.
Obama is the one who needs to demonstrate a little humility and dismount his own elevated steed. He needs to put aside the pride that contributes to clouding his judgment about acts of terror committed by Islamists. He needs to recognize that it is nothing short of an act of moral cowardice to suggest that the multitudinous atrocities committed in the name of Islam today, whether or not they are representative of the true religion of Islam, bear any comparison to acts of Christians -- today or in the past.
He needs to reset his own bias-riddled perception and open his willfully closed eyes to the fact that we have real enemies today who are killing us in the name of their religion and that, regardless of how representative they are of the faith that fuels their war cry, they see themselves as faith-driven and they are not going to be deterred or pacified by craven denunciations of Christianity or fervent defenses of Islam proper.
This is not about the Islamists' grievances over poverty or injustice or any of the other pet causes with which Obama can identify but about conquering the world for a global caliphate and subjugating or killing everyone who will not submit. There is no appeasing this mindset.
Americans are in greater danger now than we have been in decades because we have a leader who simply will not recognize that our allies and we are under attack around the world by untold numbers of people acting under the banner of Islam. No matter how many peaceful Muslims there are in the world, it doesn't change the fact that we're threatened by many who aren't.
If Obama spent one-tenth of the time focusing on these radical enemies as he does apologizing for the religion they claim to represent, Americans would be much safer.
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