At CPAC, candidates decry President Obama’s ‘war on religion’

By David Horsey
Los Angeles Times

President Obama is trying to accommodate Catholic bishops on birth control, but at CPAC, Republican presidential candidates still ranted about his assault on religion.

At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Friday, Newt Gingrich warned that Obama would “declare war” on the Catholic Church if he were reelected.

Mitt Romney, who in recent days has been decrying Obama’s “war on religion,” pledged that he would “reverse every single Obama regulation that attacks our religious liberty and threatens innocent human life in this country.”

Rick Santorum said the proposed mandate requiring all employers, including religious organizations, to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives is the kind of coercion that threatens religious freedom. Santorum’s remarks were restrained compared to what he had to say at a gathering in Texas on Wednesday. There, he accused progressives of trying to “oppress people of faith.”

“They are taking faith and crushing it.,” he said. “Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights, then what’s left is the French Revolution. What’s left is the government that gives you rights, what’s left are no unalienable rights, what’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a long way from that, but if we follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Yikes.
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