President Obama has reached out via a conference call to thousands of religious leaders of many faiths to enlist their support for health care reform. The phone call apparently unearthed a secret, 11th Commandment that had been mysteriously missing from The Torah: Thou Shalt Support Socialized Medicine.
Obama accused those who are protesting health care reform with “bearing false witness” and that we have a “core ethical and moral obligation…that we look out for one another.”
Most of the people on the call were already on Obama’s side and all too willing to abnegate the role of their churches and synagogues and replace them with government bureaucracies. Father Bob Amundsen, a Catholic priest, said: “For us as Catholic Christians, we see this as a moral issue in which we carry on the healing ministry of Jesus.” Father, I am a Catholic Christian and would like to remind you that your statement is a political one, not a theological one. In that way, the fact that you have a white collar is interesting, but not of any theological (or moral) importance.
White House policy chief Melody Barnes claimed that health care reform was “at the crux of being a faithful steward of our resources.” I’m not even sure what that means, but I know it’s stupid. Is she telling the assembled religious leaders that health care reform is “a cross” that is necessary for being a steward (“shepherd”) of resources (parishioners or other congregants)? That’s the only meaning I can pull from this: you need to support this in order to be good leaders for your people.
We do have a moral obligation to look after those who need our help. “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do unto me,” said Jesus. So go: volunteer at your church or hospital, donate money to charities, open a shelter for battered women, buy a sandwich for that homeless man on the street. Do what you want to do as dictated by your own conscience. Do what you can do as dictated by your own means. Take the responsibility of being a good Catholic or Christian or Jew or Muslim.
What we most emphatically do not have is a moral obligation to support a massive government program that will certainly make health care more expensive, ration care, drive up deficits, take money from taxpayers, and put faceless bureaucrats into the middle of decision-making processes. To suggest that it is somehow immoral to oppose Obamacare is another shining example of the megalomania that lives in our President like a tapeworm, hungry for ever increasing amounts of power and glory. Supporting a government takeover of health care is not being moral, it is abdicating personal responsibility. The idea that good Christians, Jews and Muslims must support Obamacare on moral grounds is extremely repulsive. It assumes that a man who spent 20 years attending a church led by a radical racist who Obama called “the best of what the black church has to offer,” a man who is right now looking for a new church to attend in Washington D.C. with the same dogged intensity with which O.J. searched for the real killers, a man who voted to allow infant survivors of abortion to be starved to death post-utero, and a man who counts terrorists and communists among his friends is in any kind of position to tell the rest of the nation the difference between moral and immoral.
While he’s adding new Commandments, Barack Obama should refresh himself with the ones already in place. “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me” would be a good one to remember the next time he decides that his Big Government proposals are the moral thing to do.
UPDATED to include a link to Hot Air’s video of Barack Obama extolling the virtues of Jeremiah Wright and lamenting the fact that people look for scapegoats in tough economic times. You know, like evil insurance companies or organized mobs of right-wing false witness bearers.
The Clampdown 