The Philadelphia EEOC regional attorney Debra Lawrence has filed suit against a Pennsylvania mining company on behalf of one worker who refused to submit to a biometric hand-scan because he believed that it was the “mark of the beast. “In appropriate cases we make reasonable accommodations to address any conflict with sincerely held religious beliefs.”
She must have missed the memo! According to the Obama administration, there are no “appropriate cases” for accommodations of any Christian belief.
Phyllis Schlafly rightly summed up Obama’s agenda when she wrote that his policies “represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history” and the President himself is “at war with Christianity, seeking to defeat it from without through regulatory decrees and from within through ecclesiastical traitors who do his bidding.” His administration “wants to transfer the American people’s faith in God to unquestioning faith in the state” and children in public schools “may already have been indoctrinated in the cult of Obama-worship” which is directed to a “cosmopolitan dilettante” deity who “see[s] himself not so much as a president, but as a supreme revolutionary leader or head of a church.” This is a church of secularism that acknowledges “no higher power exists than godless government.”
In 2011 Obama’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs decided to ban the mention of Christ at Houston National Cemetery funerals. Also in 2011, Army guidelines at Walter Reed Medical Center demanded, “No religious items (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or facts) would be allowed to be given away or used during a visit.” Christian chaplains are being forced to officiate at same-sex marriages and are in most cases not allowed to mention the name of Christ when administering to soldiers. Soldiers who admit to Christian beliefs and express their thoughts or even dare to keep a Bible on their desk are being disciplined and/or discharged.
Obama’s decision to abandon traditional marriage by declaring DOMA unconstitutional and his attempts to force a radical homosexual agenda down the throats of Christians apparently doesn’t meet his “reasonable accommodation” for religious beliefs.
Obama’s decision to require Christian hospitals, charities and universities to provide insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortions, sterilization, and abortifacients — in violation of their conscience and creed — is among the most offensive and troubling of the Obama era. And that is not an easy designation to achieve.
Sister Mary Ann Walsh of the USCCB observed after a long-time grant to the U. S. Catholic bishops for work helping the victims of sex trafficking was denied, that the Church’s refusal to violate their beliefs means that we have an “ABC Rule – Anybody But Catholics.”
It is somewhat astounding, and indeed revealing, that even though Obama has a tendency to refer to “freedom of worship” rather than the more robust “freedom of religion,” that such policies could pass through government channels unimpeded. Even the defense of “freedom of worship” seems to be a rather wispy conception, not something that can pass through any doors marked for government use.
Not that many years ago, Senator Obama gave a speech in which he said, “Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square.” Obama has done the secularists one better – he’s asking believers to leave their religion at the door before entering religious hospitals, charities, or universities, he’s asking Christian chaplains to forego the mention of God, and soldiers to sacrifice their lives in defense of a country that no longer tolerates their beliefs.
“There is a concerted effort to do away with all symbols of our Judeo-Christian culture, to deny our right of conscience in matters of faith and to attack Christians, Catholic and Protestant, who dare to speak openly of their faith. However, there is a silver lining in all of this. This may be an opportunity for a historic shift in the cultural and political direction of our country if Christians of all races will unite in rejecting the godless left agenda of the Democratic Party.” Bishop E.W. Jackson
