The next four years will not be good ones for practicing Catholics or, for that matter, anyone who subscribes to Judeo-Christian beliefs. I’m certain that in a short time from now, Catholics will look upon the recent “fiscal cliff” scuffle as merely the prelude to the president’s plan to impose his ideological will on the nation.
Although Obama won with only 51 percent of the vote – and is the first president re-elected to a second term receiving fewer total votes than in his first election – he actually believes he received a huge mandate last November. He rejects the notion that the nation is in effect evenly divided and is still center-right.
This misconception has caused the Narcissist-in-Chief to reveal his true self. Compromise for Obama means “my way or the highway.”
This ego-centric attitude should come as no surprise. Obama watchers have been sounding alarms for years that, because he spent most of his pre-presidential years talking to like-minded people and sycophants in his radical-chic Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood, he believed he was an anointed one destined to lead a nation of dopes. This is the man who said: “Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost. It comes from me.”
One major-league Chicagoan who dealt with state senator and U.S. Senator Obama recently told me that, in a typical one-hour meeting, Obama would talk for fifty-five minutes, then conclude by saying, “I guess we both agree.” When he was informed this was not the case, Obama would take offence and abruptly end the meeting.
The man who called for “hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord” has consistently broken the rules he championed and has gotten away with it because the high-minded, main-line people in the press – with their contempt for ordinary people – have looked the other way. They view Obama as a fellow member of the enlightened class. And like all narcissists, they look upon those disagree as dumb.
Time magazine’s Joe Klein, a leading member of the pro-Obama cheering section, best expressed the attitude he and his confreres have for those who oppose the chosen one’s policies: “American’s are flagrantly ill-informed. . .and, for those watching FOX News, misinformed. It is very difficult to have a democracy without citizens. It is impossible to be a citizen if you don’t make an effort to understand the most basic activities of your government. It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”
The Obama Administration believes, Ross Douthat has written, “that issues like health care and climate change and immigration are best worked out through comprehensive bills drawn up by enlightened officials. . . . It regards sexual liberty as sacrosanct and other liberties – from the freedoms of churches to the rights of gun owners – as negotiable at best.”
So, expect Obama’s second term to be an all-out effort to undercut the Church. He will strive to promote not freedom of religion, but freedom from religion.
If Congress dares to get in his way, he will implement his agenda through executive orders and regulations concocted by his ever-growing bureaucracy of experts.
The Catholic Church will most likely be out of the health-care business in the next four years. Obama wants the secular state, not religious institutions, to control the billions of tax dollars allocated annually to hospitals. Regardless of what the courts decide on religious liberty, the 159 new bureaucracies Obamacare creates will, by way of onerous regulations and decrees, drive bishops to throw their hands up in disgust and surrender the keys to their medical institutions to Big Brother.
As for the same-sex marriage battle, it’s lost. The next move will be to deny the Church its authority to legally sanction marriages.
It is only a matter of time before a same-sex couple, waving their Catholic baptismal certificates, file a federal suit alleging their civil rights were violated because a pastor has refused to marry them in his parish church. And don’t be surprised when the Obama Justice Department files a brief supporting the plaintiffs.
Expect America to become like France – where every couple has to be legally married by a government magistrate and, only afterwards, if they choose, may participate in a church wedding ceremony.
Obama makes war on the Church because for him there are no absolute truths, no objective moral laws that supersede the state. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, he wrote “Implicit. . .in the very idea of ordered liberty is a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the Gulag, or the jihad.” John Paul II and Benedict XVI have, of course, pointed to and rebutted the fallacy of thinking that democracy can survive without a commitment to truth.
For Obama all is relative. The basis of democracy is the ever-changing push and pull of diverse opinions and tastes. Beliefs in transcendent order, metaphysics, common law must be replaced with concepts that are workable, efficient, and materialistic. For Obama, liberty means obedience to the uncertain will of the managerial elite. For Obama, rights and liberties are bestowed by the state, not God.
A scary picture? Yes it is. And that’s why all Catholics, especially the hierarchy, cannot let down their guard and must be ready to perform heroic deeds to defend the Faith in the public square. We’ll probably lose, but we must at least go down fighting.