God has no rights in a culture dominated by fashionable bigots.

WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By George Neumayr, American Spectator) February 7, 2012  — The secularists of the French Revolution regarded the Roman Catholic Church as the last obstacle to atheism's final triumph. Blurting this out, the French dilettante Denis Diderot proposed to his fellow revolutionaries that they strangle the last priest with the "guts of the last king."

Under this spirit, the forces of secularism picked up speed in the 18th and 19th century, went into overdrive in the 20th, and now floor it in the 21st. Barack Obama is the one these revolutionaries have been "waiting for." He is the stealth radical, soft in temperament but hard in thought, who seeks to use religiosity without religion to purge all traces of God from public life.

Not wanting to repeat John Kerry's electoral debacle -- which even Nancy Pelosi attributed to the leaden senator's undisguised secularism -- Obama worked hard to con the religious into voting for him in 2008. He "valued" religion, particularly the votes of the religious. On his campaign web page, "people of faith" enjoyed their own special slot, a mere two tabs down from the "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community."

Obama cast himself as a "post-partisan" politician on matters of the spirit. He found fawning dupes in the religious community to provide him with pulpits and platforms for faux-pensive addresses on his newly conceived "connection between politics and religion." This pretentious throat clearing amounted to nothing more than Alinskyite advice to his fellow Democrats that they exploit religion for secularist and socialist purposes.

Vulgar and violent French Revolutionaries paid the Catholic Church the small courtesy of candor. Obama prefers deception and sweet sophistries. But the announcement of his attempt to strangle Catholic schools and hospitals through an HHS contraceptive/abortifacient mandate will make his con job a little more tricky in 2012. Not that he can't pull it off. Democratic strategists have informed the press that they are confident his anti-Catholic bigotry won't threaten his reelection.

Obama's Fifth Column within the Church also stands ready to help. The National Catholic Reporter, to take one example, has run a sympathetic editorial about his HHS mandate. And even ostensible opponents of it on the Catholic left and center already reveal the white flag near at hand. In the last few days, they have been blubbering weakly that the issue is not "contraception" -- a subject on which they agree with the president -- but the etiquette of partisan coordination and team play. In other words, the heretical priests and nuns who shilled for Obamacare feel that the president has made them look like old fools by exposing its secularist underbelly for all to see.

Obama prides himself on his Aloha-style "tolerance," but it is more like the tolerance of Paris circa 1789. The ideological offspring of Diderot and Alinsky -- the latter called Lucifer the first radical -- Obama seeks to banish orthodox Catholicism from his refashioned America. While he can't throw faithful priests and nuns into prison yet -- not that fellow secularists haven't tried; Richard Dawkins and his pals routinely call for the jailing of Pope Benedict XVI -- Obama seeks to accomplish the same end by different means. By turning her schools and hospitals into conduits for contraceptives and abortifacients, he can neutralize and corrupt the Catholic faith, choking off her last breaths.

He once said to coal industry workers: sure, you can keep going but we will "bankrupt" you under a system of global warming regulations. His message to Catholics isn't much different. Sure, practice your faith in public, he tells them in effect through his HHS mandate. But if you do, we will fine and prosecute you.

Obama's secularism is like an acid that burns through everything it touches. His poisonous ideology authorizes him not just to "separate church and state" but to dominate church and state. The goal of this control is to secularize everything, including religion itself.

Contained within his secularism is a totalitarian seed, which will grow and grow until nothing is a "private" matter. As the hapless executives at the Komen Foundation recently learned--after committing the thought crime of withholding private donations from abortionists--no one is free to leave Obama's Animal Farm.

Some pigs on it are more equal than others, and, remember, the secularist Napoleons can never be wrong.

Listen carefully enough to Kathleen Sebelius's defense of Obama's raping of religious freedom and one can hear the thuggish voice of totalitarianism. Did you see what she cited as proof of Obamacare's respect for conscience? That the government will refrain from injecting Catholic women with birth control! Wow, what a thoughtful regime. Even one of Stalin's party hacks might have grinned at the crude logic of that one.