–Cutting-Edge Analytics–
- by Franklin Otorofani -
These are not the best of times for the US president, Barack Hussein Obama. Sure enough the US economy is slowing climbing its way out of the ditch just in time for the next presidential election. And that should be good news for the beleaguered Obama administration. But the biggest story in the US today is not the economy. It is not even the Republican presidential primaries that only few Americans pay attention to. Heck, it is not even Obama’s decision to suspend the construction of oil pipeline from Canada to the US that has riled Republicans and the American people who consider it as pandering to environmentalists at the expense of the nation’s energy needs and security.
What is it? It is the Obama administration’s order to the Catholic Church and other religious groups to provide contraceptive pills to women in Catholic hospitals and clinics after personally promising Catholic Bishops that the Catholic Church that they would be exempted in the implementation of the new Healthcare law. As has been revealed in the media and testified to by no other than the New York Diocesan Bishop, Obama had personally called him to assure him of the exemption of the Catholic Church due to its traditional stout opposition to abortion and contraception only for Obama to make 180% volte face and rammed the new regulation down the throat of the Catholic and other churches and religions similarly opposed to abortion and contraception.
This insensitive act on the part of the Obama administration to the religious teachings of the church in general has rallied and solidly united Christian, Islamic and Judaic clergies against the Obama administration that is struggling to dig itself out of the hole it has deliberately fallen into. That is an expensive political gamble. Perhaps the administration did not anticipate the kind of extremely negative reactions it is getting, not just from the clergy but from the American public as well. Polls show that forcing the church not only to give but to pay for contraceptives against its own teachings is immoral and uncalled for. Not that religions matters are matters for public polls, but the public position is nevertheless instructive.
The position of the Obama administration in fact amounts to telling the church to abandon its teachings, go secular, and embrace abortion and contraception. That is sacrilegious. The Obama administration has crossed the line between Church and state, that even his own VP, Joe Biden and other members of his cabinet are reported to have privately advised him against implementing the policy without exceptions to no avail after personally promising exceptions. Publicly, high ranking Democrats, including former presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, a Catholic, have spoken out publicly against the new Obama policy. Against his better judgment Obama has thus set himself in a collision course not just against the Catholic which has huge voting bloc, (one out of every four American is a catholic and then candidate Obama carried the Catholic vote against John McCain in 2008), but against all religious groups in the US.
Now the pertinent question to ask is why is Obama suddenly resorting to these extreme measures against religious groups? Rightly or wrongly, he is now being attacked as the anti-religion president. Many influential politicians have gone to the extent of accusing him of declaring war on religion. The reason Obama is doing this is to get female votes in the next elections. He is casting the measure as being in furtherance of a woman’s right to choose to have child or not, which abortion and contraction, is all about. And feminists and liberals are out and about defending the Obama policy albeit rather awkwardly due to its implication on freedom of religion guaranteed in the constitution. He has chosen to please feminists and displease the Church, Christians, Moslems and Judaists. It seems Obama is ready to sacrifice religious freedom on the altar of the so-called women liberation movement and its purported right to abortions.
However, the question that has been consistently asked is, why Catholic and other churches. Can’t women who desire contraception obtain their pills from other non sectarian sources where there are abortion clinics, and in particular, Planned Parenthood clinics everywhere? Why must religious groups be forced to embrace and provide what they fundamentally preach against? Is this not tyranny? The whole measure is woven around politics which is makes it extremely distasteful. To place politics above morality and religious teachings in order to curry women votes is, to say the least, pandering to feminists groups and deplorable. It is this kind of political expediency and pandering that has now predisposed erstwhile candidate Obama who repeatedly said he was opposed to same-sex marriage to now say his attitude is “evolving”, whatever that means, and trying his level best to intimidate Nigeria and other countries that proposed legislation against same sex marriage when some 39 or more states in the US have passed such laws to his face in their territories outlawing and criminalizing same sex marriage. And by the way, just seven (7) states have legalized same-sex marriage in the US with Washington State being the latest, last week, out of 50 states. That is not a whole lot of states by comparison to states that have criminalized it.
One wonders where Obama, a supposed Christian will draw the line in the sand. If he is incapable of drawing the line because he is only interested in getting his second term for which religion and morality must be sacrificed, there are those who are ready to draw the line the sand for him. And right now, religious America is doing just that. And I have no doubt in my mind that Obama will be the first to blink. In fact, he has already indicated that when the administration came out this morning to say that a compromise position is in the works and will be announced later in the day. But then the damage to his electoral chances has already been done. He is about to do another u-turn. By the time this piece is published he would have reversed himself again. That is certainly not good for the administration’s image. It portrays him as policy gambler who simply takes chances. Ooops! He has given ground! Obama gives ground on birth control. See story in the link.
But why go down that perilous path if he knew he couldn’t go all the way? It is, to use Obama’s own words a, “bone-headed decision.” I think it is downright dumb to take on the church in an election year in a bad economy with slim chances of his re-election to begin with no matter what he hoped to gain from feminists. The man Obama is coming off as one without deep rooted religious conviction. And that accounts for the policy flip flops. How could a Bible reading Christian talk about his views on same-sex marriage “evolving,” knowing what the Bible says about it? Who knows maybe his real conviction is embedded in the liberalism. Even so there is limit to liberalism as Obama will soon find out.
Franklin Otorofani is an attorney and public affairs analyst.
mudiagaone@yahoo.com
