President Obama was praised by leaders of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) following their recent meeting at the White House. The NAE leaders thanked the chief executive for condemning the Iranian mullahs’ threat to kill Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani. Pastor Nadarkhani is facing a death sentence for the “crime” of converting from Islam to Christianity.
The Iranian pastor may not believe, as President Obama believes, that the muezzin’s call to prayer “is one of prettiest sounds on earth.” For wherever that call is heard, the dangers for Christian believers are very real. In Muslim lands, converts to Christianity regularly face death.
The meeting was hailed by the Religion News Service (RNS) as “an Evangelical Summit.” If so, then this thirty-minute conference was indeed historic. It would count as the shortest summit on record.
Three years into his troubled presidency, Barack Obama generously gave the NAE leaders his undivided attention. They were allowed to praise him for “doing a lot of listening.” They offered “respectful disagreement” with the president’s plans to abolish marriage, recruit gays by quota for the military and compel Christian colleges and most religious organizations to offer insurance coverage for contraceptives, including some that act like abortifacients. Of course, the NAE leaders would not frame their objections to presidential initiatives as baldly as I have just done. That wouldn’t be a pretty sound in his ear.
But those are nonetheless the effects of Obama policies. Christian colleges and religious organizations must either agree to offer coverage for drugs that can have abortifacient effects or drop health coverage for employees. Just consider the case of Franciscan University of Steubenville. This Catholic college is being harassed by the Obama administration for its failure to get in line with HHS policy.
Christianity Today’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey reported what NAE President Leith Anderson said: “Issues that relate to the poor we would address as pro-life issues, but it was not specifically a discussion on abortion. It was not intentionally omitted. We had a limited amount of time.”
So those 54 million unborn children in the United States who have been denied their inalienable right to life will have to wait. And the 47 million girl babies killed in China because they were girls did not get any face time with the president. Perhaps the NAE leaders could go down the hall and talk to Vice President Joe Biden. He’s the reigning expert on violence against women. He authored the Violence Against Women Act, his White House bio tells us.
Our first black president might have had something interesting to say about the six of every ten black babies who are aborted in New York City. Or about the fact that the abortion rate for black women is three times that of whites. Small wonder that Rev. Jesse Jackson called abortion “black genocide.” What has happened since 1977 to convince Rev. Jackson – or the president, for that matter – that abortion is not black genocide?
The NAE Summit apparently focused like a laser on foreign matters. Fine. Might it have been appropriate to point out that the Obama administration began by ordering full U.S. funding for the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), the two largest promoters of the slaughter of innocents worldwide?
Hillary and Bill Clinton used to say that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” The only place they made it rare was on the Moon and in Antarctica. Hillary is using her perch at the State Department to push abortion around the world. She is working as Obama’s loyal lieutenant in all of this.
The NAE leaders should be aware that President Obama is the most pro-abortion president in U.S. history. His health care takeover will constitute the largest expansion of liberal abortion since Roe v. Wade. He claimed that it would not fund abortion. However, he ignores the fact that his health care law directly spends money on new programs without any abortion funding restriction and funds the insurance coverage that pays for abortions. In short, it puts money in one pocket that those who seek abortions then take out of the other. Why should we object? Planned Parenthood has been doing this for forty years with Title X funds. Title X doesn’t fund the killing of the unborn; it just funds the killers.
President Obama would doubtless say he is not pro-abortion, but pro-choice. But Francheska Velez did not have a choice. She was a young mother, an Army sergeant, who wanted desperately to let her baby live. She was gunned down by Nidal Hasan as he yelled “Allahu Akbar.” Sergeant Velez and her unborn child were two of Hasan’s victims at Fort Hood. There is a law – the Unborn Victims of Violence Act (UVVA) – that specifically covers such killings. But President Obama is not charging Hasan with violation of UVVA. Why not?
Mr. Obama took an oath before God and the world to defend the Constitution. That Constitution says of the president: “He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” We who are faithful might have a special interest in such faithful execution of the laws. Let’s put that on the list of topics for the next “Evangelical Summit.”