A new Romney campaign ad accuses President Obama of declaring a “war on religion” – a common critique of Democrats made by those on the right. Instead, it's Mitt Romney who shares the values of religious Americans, declares the ad.
The ad highlights the flap over a portion of the president’s health care law that required employers to cover contraceptives in their insurance plans. Churches were already exempt from the law, and, after protests from various groups, the Obama administration also added a workaround for religiously affiliated organizations, such as hospitals and universities.
From the Romney ad:
Who Shares Your Values?President Obama used his health care plan to declare war on religion, forcing religious institutions to go against their faith. Mitt Romney believes that’s wrong.When religious freedom is threatened, who do you want to stand with?
"War on religion" also calls to mind the Democrats' attack line on Republicans' anti-women policies this year, which was dubbed the "war on women."
President Obama again defended the health care law's inclusion of contraceptive coverage Wednesday in Denver at a campaign event.
“When it comes to a woman’s right to make her own health care choices, they want to take us back to the policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century…The decisions that affect a woman’s health, they’re not up to the politicians, they’re not up to the insurance companies – they’re up to you,” he said Aug. 8. “And you deserve a president who will fight to keep it that way.”
It’s not the first time another politician has tried to paint the president as anti-religion despite his longtime, well-documented Christian faith. (Can one have a controversial pastor in your background and ALSO be anti-religion?)
Remember then-candidate Sen. Barack Obama’s gun-religion gaffe about a certain swath of Pennsylvania and how the right (not to mention then-competitor Hillary Clinton) ran with it by painting Obama as an elitist, religion-hating, gun-hating liberal?
Obama’s full statement described how those who had been ignored and neglected by the government, particularly the unemployed, might be more likely to “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
As recently as April, Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania Republican senator was using that phrase for 2012 presidential politicking, declaring: ‘Damn right” we cling to our guns and Bibles.