Right Wing Freaks Out Over Obama's Prayer Breakfast Remarks

Hate merchant Bill Donohue

Personally, I find it obscene and offensive that presidents and members of Congress continue to attend the so-called National Prayer Breakfast which is sponsored each year by Christofascist extremists.  The organizers' goal is to turn the U.S. Constitution upside down and make their perverted form of Christianity the de facto national religion.  That said, it has been fun to watch the flying sheets of spittle after Obama rightly remarked that it was necessary to overcome the horrors and perversions that religion has all too often been used to justify.  Anyone with an accurate knowledge of history knows that Christianity has much blood on its hands.  And for a compilation of some of the murders conducted in the name of Christianity done by burning victims, check out Bob Felton's post here.  It makes ISIS' burning of a Jordanian pilot look tame.  Crooks and Liars looks at the right wing melt down over Obama's simple statements of fact.  Here are highlights:

President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he discussed freedom of expression along with highlighting the many acts of barbarism that are happening now and have happened throughout the centuries which were justified under the guise of religion. He also explained in depth about how as Christians, we can overcome these perversions of religion. President Obama spoke for about thirty minutes and used almost three thousand words today, but the only part of the speech the right wing media is focusing on is when he brought up the Crusades.

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India -- an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.

How dare the president put into context the historical atrocities performed over centuries in the name of God! As usual the Catholic League's Bill Donohue took front and center stage on Fox News and was fuming because Obama dared to mention Christ and demanded that he apologize. Neil Cavuto actually defended Obama for the most part which kind of surprised me, but Donohue, the pedophile priest apologist didn't. 

What Donohue is actually demanding is to be the president's speech writer/approval monitor. Bill has no problem with the speech except when Obama mentions acts of brutality perpetrated by Christians and Catholics. He immediately tries to rewrite history and said that the atrocities happening name in the name of Islam far outweigh anything that happened in the history of the world.

More of Obama's speech, which appears to make Donohue's whining completely unfounded.

But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge -- or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism -- terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.

The real truth is that a world free of religion would likely be a kinder, less violent place where much suffering inflicted by the "godly" and "pious" would no longer occur.