George Washington said,
"It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."
Separation of church and state that tries to remove God from government is a lie.
Barack Obama's faith council came to no clear conclusion after an impassioned debate on whether religious
organizations receiving federal funds should be required to cover or remove religious symbols in service areas, reported
Washington Post religion writer William Wan Tuesday.
The council discussed the matter in a two-hour
teleconference Monday, as it finalizes a draft report this week.
The members on the teleconference
also chose Melissa Rogers, the director of Wake Forest University School of Divinity's Center for Religion and Public Affairs,
as the faith council's official chairwoman. Rogers is considered an expert in legal issues pertaining to the separation
of church and state.
Wan reports that Rogers offered three possible recommendations for the
council regarding religious images for federally-funded groups: the icons could be disallowed; allowed only if no other religious
neutral rooms are available and covering up such icons is impractical; or allowed with encouragement that organizations
be "sensitive about the issue."
Catholic League president Bill Donohue said
that the fact the council even had the debate "just tells us volumes."
"This
is consistent with the animus against religion that we've seen from the beginning with [Obama]," Donohue told LifeSiteNews.com
(LSN) Friday. The leading Catholic watchdog called to mind an incident in April when, per White House request, Georgetown
University covering up a plaque with a cross and a symbol for the name of Jesus that would have appeared over Obama's head
during a speech there.
Donohue called on the administration to close down the faith office whose
purpose, he said, has been radically altered from the original vision of the Bush administration.
"We're
talking about people who are charged with faith-based initiatives, to implement them - and their central concern is not how
they can facilitate service to the dispossessed stemming from faith groups, their concern is how can they shield the bigots
in our society from religious iconography?" he asked.
"This is worse than just simply
an insult, they're a fraud - because they're posing as though they are the friends of faith-based programs, when in fact
they're not."
Donohue said he wasn't sure of how much impact the directive might be expected
to have on institutions such as [Christian] universities, which usually receive federal funds - but said the debate betrayed
a consistent motive in the Obama administration "to neuter the public expression of religion."
"When they hear 'religion,' they think 'church and state,' they think 'the separation of,' - they
think how we can limit freedom as opposed to expanding freedom," he said. "The whole thing is so utterly
twisted."
