Obama crosses America’s one bright line *UPDATED*
One of the brightest lines in America, a line that goes back to our Founders and the Constititution, is the imperative rule that the American government stay out of religion. That does not mean that people in politics cannot be religious or that their values cannot be informed by religion. It does mean, though, that the government may not dictate doctrine or sermon. Bruce Kesler takes Obama to task for doing just that. Oy! First the 10th Amendment and now this. We are dubiously blessed with a president who doesn’t even bother to explain away his Constitutional violations. He just tramples through those rights, supremely confident that he’s above the petty rules that have guided our nation for so long.
I’m sighing a lot lately. Sigh….
UPDATE: Peter Wehner makes an equally astute point:
Where Obama is getting into dangerous territory is when he takes a biblical injunction—we have a moral obligation to care for one another—and strongly implies that his health-care plan has God’s imprimatur. It is one thing to think theologically about public matters; it is quite another to describe what the right “Christian position” is. The temptation for people of faith who are in politics is to enunciate a principle—justice, compassion, peace, the rights and dignity of the individual, stewardship of the earth—and simplistically connect the dots, as if the principle itself easily translates into an obvious policy. It rarely does. And those who play this game create all sorts of confusion.
The purpose of Obama’s call to religious leaders was to create an implicit syllogism: if you love God and your neighbor, you will support ObamaCare. If Obama does not believe this, he has a responsibility to say so. Because as it now stands, based on the context of his comments (which was to urge those leaders to work on behalf of his health-care plan), this is a reasonable inference.
Some of us have criticized the Religious Right for making precisely this error—for portraying complex policy questions as ones for which there is only one obvious and “godly” answer; for denying that people of goodwill can disagree on which policies advance the common good; and for portraying those who hold differing views as cartoon figures driven by questionable or corrupt motives. This mindset is what Senator Obama warned against—but something that President Obama seems eager to embrace.
Engaged in a fierce public debate, with support for his health-care plans plummeting, Obama is jettisoning the subtlety and careful parameters about which he once spoke. He denies to others the presumption of good faith he once sought. One can only hope he feels a pang of shame at what he is doing—and that he pulls back before he creates a divisive and ugly conflict among people of faith.
I’ll add only that Obama represents the first time that a President has “portray[ed] complex policy question as ones for which there is only one obvious and ‘godly’ answer.” In the past (at least in the modern era), this line of argument has always been confined to special interest groups. And coming from special interest groups, the argument may fail because it doesn’t have broad appeal to those who don’t share your “godly” views, but at least it doesn’t implicate the Constitutional prohibition against the federal government interfering in matters of religion.
