The comparisons between Barack Obama and Franklin D. Roosevelt began even before our 44^th president had taken the oath. In late 2008, TIME magazine portrayed president-elect Obama as FDR on its cover. The wish was father to the thought. Mr. Obama encouraged such dreams from his political father. He did not look to Bill Clinton as a model. And certainly no one would take Jimmy Carter as a mentor. No one, that is, who wanted to have a successful presidency.

Barack Obama might have wanted to offer Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson as a role model. At least, Johnson’s signing of historic Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation could be commended. But LBJ led us into the morass of Vietnam. After four bloody years in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Johnson could give no convincing reasons why the U.S. should prevail there. “Hey! Hey, LBJ! How many kids have you killed today,” chanted anti-war protesters then. The parents of today’s Occupy Wall Streeters drove Johnson from office in defeat and disgrace. Scratch Johnson.

That leaves John F. Kennedy as the Democratic hero to whom Barack Obama might look for inspiration. Well, maybe not. JFK said “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Oops! That’s not the kind of martial music Obama’s Peace Caucus-goers could march to. And JFK took us to the Moon. President Obama’s NASA chief thinks his Mission One is to make Muslims feel good about themselves. Also, Jack Kennedy cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans, arguing that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” That wouldn’t do for a socialist program of “spreading the wealth around.”

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Tags: Barack Obama, Civil Rights, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Government

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It’s safe to say our relations with the British have probably never been worse in our lifetimes. Recall that just before he went to London and bowed to beheaders, the newly inaugurated President Obama let it be known he had returned the bust of Winston Churchill to the British Embassy. He might as well have tossed it out of the Oval Office into the snow.

Then, he gifted Her Majesty with, what else, recordings of all his speeches. He followed that up with the amazingly thoughtful gesture of bestowing on Prime Minister Gordon Brown a $29.95 collection of DVDs of Hollywood’s greatest films. Mr. Brown is doubtless enjoying them now, in his retirement, if he can get an adapter.

The “Special Relationship” fostered so carefully by the World War II alliance of Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt is in tatters. The Obama State Department is happy to tell us that Britain is no more special to us than any of the other 192 countries in the UN. (Of course, President Obama is known to think the U.S. itself is no more exceptional than Britain, or even Greece.)

It was fairly easy to be the new broom sweeping clean – back in 2009. Now, however, as Rev. Wright might say, Obama’s chickens are coming home to roost. Along with his sagging approval numbers is coming increasing disrespect. Rep. Maxine Waters is asking permission from her constituents to take the president to the woodshed. Former backer Peggy Noonan briskly calls him a “loser” on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal and asks aloud if he might just be “snakebit.”

The worst example of dissing the commander-in-chief, doubtless came from leftist Bill Maher. He told a nationwide audience, in an obscenity-laced routine, that he had been hoping for a president who would shoot the BP executives after the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A short review of our Special Relationship might be in order. When Churchill crossed the U-boat infested North Atlantic seventy summers ago in the HMS Prince of Wales, he forged an alliance that lasted through World War II, the Cold War, all the way into the hills of Tora Bora, in Afghanistan and the oilfields of Basra in Iraq. Churchill, it was said in that 1941 First Summit, felt as if he was “going to meet God Almighty.” FDR’s son told the British Prime Minister his father thought him “the greatest man in the world.”

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Tags: Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, leadership, Winston Churchill

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President Obama’s decision this week not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court demonstrates both contempt for the law itself and a disturbing arrogance concerning his own authority.

This action is not unique.  As today’s Wall Street Journal notes, “The White House has apparently decided that it won’t enforce the unpopular parts of its health-care plan until after the 2012 election. The latest evidence is its decision not to slash Medicare Advantage, the program that Democrats hate because it lets seniors choose private insurance options.”

And this week’s decision regarding DOMA is not a new departure from allegiance to the law.  As George Will wrote in 2009, “The Obama administration is bold. It also is careless regarding constitutional values and is acquiring a tincture of lawlessness.”

The President of the United States takes an oath when he assumes office, assuring us that he will “defend the Constitution of the United States.”  That Constitution makes Congress the legislative body, not the Executive branch.  Thus, when Congress passes legislation that is signed into law by the President, it becomes incumbent upon the President — as the chief constitutional law enforcement office in the nation — to defend it.

When this or any President refuses to defend any given law, he is placing himself above it.  How, in principle, this distinguishes the United States from any tin-pot autocracy, where law is made by the fiat choices of an unaccountable dictator, escapes me.  For that matter, why bother with having legislative (Congress) or judicial (the Supreme and other federal courts) branches if the President can simply choose to ignore defending laws he dislikes?

Family Research Council’s Senior Fellow Chris Gacek (JD, Virginia) notes that DOMA “affirms the power of each state to make its own decision as to whether it will accept or reject same-sex marriages created in other jurisdictions … The Defense of Marriage Act preserves the right of the states to govern themselves with respect to family law and domestic relations. DOMA impedes judicial activism regarding marriage and provides needed uniformity in federal law. It is an essential part of preserving traditional marriage in America.”   In other words, as Quinn Hillyer writes in The American Spectator, “Without DOMA, state and local decision-making would be nil. In fact, the decisions of 49 states could be superseded by the decision of one state to allow such ‘marriages’.”

The rule of law is essential to the future of representative self-government in the United States.  The future of marriage hinges, in large measure, on DOMA.  President Obama has succeeded in undermining both this week.

Tags: Barack Obama, DOMA, Medicare Advantage

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During the presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama famously told Pastor Rick Warren that determining when human personhood began was “above my paygrade.”

A professing Christian, he could not bring himself to concur with the plain teaching of the Bible that from the moment of conception, human life in all its biological fullness begins at conception.

An educated man, he could not sufficiently evaluate the clear scientific evidence that with the entire DNA any person ever possesses present within the embryo from conception onward, personhood starts at conception.

A father, he could not affirm that his precious daughters deserved legal protection in their mother’s womb, from conception until birth.

Since then, his income must have dramatically changed, as he has initiated a nationwide health care mandate that funds and subsidizes abortion-on-demand, exported abortion overseas through American funding thereof, and even sought to have taxpayers subsidize abortion on our military bases.

As President of the United States, Barack Obama has been a deliberate, systematic evangelist of the culture of death.

Yet despite his professed theological mystification regarding the sanctity of unborn life, President Obama has no moral or intellectual difficulty in asserting that homosexuality is not a choice but the result of “people being born with ‘a certain make-up’.”

At a televised event targeting the nation’s youth,

… (when) asked directly if gay or transgender people have a choice or are born that way, Obama told a town-hall style event with students that he was no expert, then added: “I don’t think it’s a choice. I think people are born with a certain make-up.”

“We’re all children of God,” Obama said. “We don’t make determinations about who we love. That’s why I think discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is wrong.”

The President is wrong: Biology offers no sanction to the view that homosexuality is genetic, nor does Christian theology applaud or passively accept same-sex intimacy.  The God of love is also the God of truth Whose Word teaches that any kind of sexual intimacy other than that experienced by a man and a woman within marriage is offensive to Him.

No pay-level is needed to affirm these things: They are obvious from science and Scripture.

President Obama might be, as the Leftist religious commentator Jim Wallis asserts, “almost a public theologian.”  He is just not a very biblically faithful one.

The Bible tells Christians to pray for their political leaders.  This includes, of course, President Obama.  May we pray that this man who so obviously cherishes his own wonderful family sees that abortion and homosexuality are not morally neutral choices to be facilitated by a government founded on the principle that the “right to life” is a gift of the Creator.

Tags: Abortion, Barack Obama, Homosexuality, Theology

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President Obama was surrounded by doctors and nurses in white coats for the second time this week. Yesterday, he was on national television, pumping for his health care plan. But before that video performance, he was at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. He went there for his first physical as President.

I sure have to hand it to him: He’s practicing what he’s preaching. Bethesda is government health care. I should know: my life was saved there by a top-notch Navy doctor in 1985. I had been stricken with viral meningitis, an often fatal illness.

My heart went out to the President when the report on his physical exam came back. He is having a hard time quitting smoking. This is a hard addiction to shake. I quit in 1977. Cold turkey. Haven’t had a cigarette since. Or a cigar. Or a pipe. (I found through many attempts to quit that going to a cigar or pipe just whetted the appetite and sent me right back to cigarettes.)

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Tags: Barack Obama

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Here’s the full program of last night’s FRC Action webcast:

If you are reading this in an RSS Reader, you may need to click through to the post to view.

Participants:

• Tony Perkins, President, FRC Action
• Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.)
• House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio)
• Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.)
• Ken Blackwell, former Ohio Secretary of State
• Doug Johnson, National Right to Life Committee
• Bishop Harry Jackson, Senior Pastor, Hope Christian Church
• Wesley J. Smith, Senior Fellow in Human Rights & Bioethics, Discovery Institute
• Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel
• Mark Kellen, M.D., President, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
• Kathryn Serkes, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
• Dr. David Prentice, FRC Senior Fellow for Life Sciences, FRC
• David Christensen, Senior Director for Congressional Affairs, FRC
• Tom McClusky, Senior Vice President, FRC Action

Resources mentioned:

• The Capps Abortion Amendment To Affordable Health Choices Act
• Family Coverage: An alternative to the President’s Plan
• Q & A on Health Care
• Ten Reasons Rationing is Included in the Health Care Bill
• Personal Faith, Public Policy by Tony Perkins and Bishop Harry Jackson, Jr.
• Saving Freedom, by Senator Jim DeMint
• More Health Care Resources…

Tags: Barack Obama, Bishop Harry Jackson, Chris Smith, David Christensen, David Prentice, Doug Johnson, Health Care, Jim DeMint, John Boehner, Kathryn Serkes, Ken Blackwell, Mark Kellen, Mat Staver, Tom McClusky, Tony Perkins, Wesley J. Smith

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