Obama's New Audacity

When he stood before the world to deliver his first inaugural address four years ago, President Barack Obama proudly declared, "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers." Early in his presidency, he repeated various permutations of this phrase, always reserving the resonant final spot for the "non-believers."

During his first term, Obama also occasionally edited the Creator from the Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident," he said, for example, in a Sept. 15, 2010, speech, "that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights: life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Judging from his first-term rhetoric, Obama did not deem belief in God and deference to His authority essential elements in his own vision for America.

Yet, in the opening of his second inaugural address, Obama spoke the actual words of the Declaration, and then made them a recurring theme of his speech. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," he said, "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

"While freedom is a gift from God," he said, "it must be secured by His people here on Earth."

The president provided a strong clue later in his speech, when he returned to the theme of men being created equal.

"Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law," he said. "For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well."

This statement was simultaneously an appeal for the gay-rights agenda -- which, for Obama, now expressly includes same-sex marriage -- and an apparent claim that God is on the side of this agenda.

In the past, Obama has gone so far as to deride St. Paul's Letter to the Romans precisely because it condemns homosexual behavior.

"All too often I have sat in church and heard a pastor use gay bashing as a cheap parlor trick -- 'It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!' he will shout, usually when the sermon is not going so well," wrote Obama.

"I am not willing to have the state deny American citizens a civil union that confers equivalent rights on such basic matters as hospital visitation or health insurance coverage simply because the people they love are of the same sex -- nor am I willing to accept an obscure line in Romans to be more defining of Christianity than the Sermon on the Mount," he said.

In the passage Obama is no doubt referencing here, St. Paul said: "For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever.

"For this reason," said St. Paul, "God gave them over to degrading passions; for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error."

Jesus Christ, reaffirming Genesis, defined marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The truth is: A public policy vision that not only advances same-sex marriage, a "right" to abort an unborn child and now also a government commandment that forces Christians to act against their faith by compelling them to provide and pay for abortion-inducing drugs cannot be reconciled with the Bible or with the "Laws of Nature and Nature's God."

So, why did Obama concede in his second inaugural address that our rights come from our Creator? Perhaps it was for the same reason he invoked "our Constitution" and "fidelity to our founding principles." Perhaps he was not seeking to reaffirm an ancient truth, but redefine the very foundation of our society.

Thank you for posting both this and another article dealing with the President's "audacity" and "hope" messaging.

Hope you won't object to my reposting my response to your other thread:

A wise teacher once warned about houses built on sand.
"Hope," to be a reliable human exercise, must be based on substance and reality. That is a false "hope" which relies on a pretended right of a group of imperfect human beings in government to "grant" rights.
The American Republic was built on a solid foundation of enduring principles and ideas; thus, the "hope" of millions of oppressed people from all over the world found realization of opportunity and freedom on these shores.
Thomas Jefferson's "First Inaugural" outlined what he described as the "essential principles" and then proceeded to advise future citizens what to do if the nation ever "strayed from" those essential ideas of liberty. A portion of that address is included among the following quotations from others:

"Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court even can do much to help it." - Judge Learned Hand
"If I have learned anything from the reading of history, it is that the man who, in violation of great principles, toils for temporary fame, purchases for himself either total oblivion or eternal infamy, while he who temporarily goes down battling for right principles always deserves, and generally secures, the gratitude of succeeding ages, and will carry with him the sustaining solace of a clean conscience, more precious than all the offices and honors in the gift of man." - Sen. Zacharias Montgomery
After Thomas Jefferson, in his First Inaugural, had enumerated the principles which would guide his Administration in his First Inaugural, he added:
"These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and the blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty, and safety."
So-called "progressives" of the 20th and 21st Centuries, in their arrogance, have removed (censored) the Founders' ideas of liberty from America's textbooks, but technology has outstripped their efforts. Every American school child and adult now has potential access to almost every word the Founders spoke and wrote, and their ideas are being rediscovered and circulated in a manner unheard of even 10 years ago, as if by the hand of Divine Providence. How else can one account for the events of 2010?
Enduring principles, according to the Founders were just that--enduring and "self-evident."

The sacred Rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power - Alexander Hamilton

"Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness, as you confess those invaded by the Stamp Act to be. We claim them from a higher source - from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence, which establish the laws of our nature. They are born with us, exist with us, and cannot be taken from us by any human power, without taking our lives. In short, they are founded on the immutable maxims of reason and justice." - John Dickinson (Signer of the Constitution of the U. S., as quoted in "Our Ageless Constitution," p. 286)

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