That's how Newt Gingrich described the administration's decision not to provide exemptions to religiously-affiliated groups from a new rule requiring employers to offer birth control to their female employees. "The Obama administration is engaged in a war against religion," he told a rally audience on Monday in Jacksonville. "Their decision last week that they would impose on every Catholic institution, every Jewish institution, every Protestant institution, the Obamacare standard of what you have to buy as insurance is a direct violation of freedom and religion — an example of the increasingly dictatorial attitude of this administration."
Even if you disagree with the law, which a great many people do, it's altogether stupid and laughable to attribute such a decision to some sort of 'war' on the religious in America. Republican rhetoric on this matter has turned sour of late, casting aspersions on the secularist movement by maintaining that it is one side of a 'war' between the forces of the pious, hardworking church-goers, and the evil hotshot Washington-dwellers who want to take away their beloved Jesus. In the correct doses and delivered with a little zeal, such talk can easily evoke the worst kinds of paranoia within the religious. I'm not even going to mention the family values of Newt Gingrich. It's just too easy.
