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Director of Catholic Outreach for the Obama Campaign — Possibly the most difficult job in the world: trying to convince people that night is day, wrong is right, and that Obama represents Catholic values.
When a politician has to hire someone to outreach to a particular group, the politician is in big trouble with them.
“It is a “mistake,” Obama said “to try to tamp down the moral dimension to abortion,” for do to so understates that it is “a wrenching choice for anybody to think about.” On Meet the Press some time ago, he stressed the importance of involving the clergy in the counsel of a mother.”
In Other Words: I will say nothing and parse it in words that mean nothing and will take a stand on absolutely nothing because you media types won’t pin me down.
His “Catholic” outreach director won’t be saying anything either.
I know, some would think I have too much time on my hands, but those thoughts just pop up and I can't control them.
The most horrifying cartoon I ever saw was a woman trying to deal with a tamper-throwing child by saying, “Now, Billy, don't make Mommy sorry she didn't have an abortion.” I thought I'd heave.
Was Obama Ever a Muslim?
"I've always been a Christian," said Obama, focusing on his own personal lack of practice of Islam as a child to deny any connection to Islam. But Muslims do not see practice as key. For them, that he was born to a line of Muslim males makes him born a Muslim. Further, all children born with an Arabic name based on the H-S-N trilateral root (Hussein, Hassan, and others) can be assumed to be Muslim, so they will understand Obama's full name, Barack Hussein Obama, to proclaim him a born Muslim.
More: family and friends considered him as a child to be Muslim. In "Obama Debunks Claim About Islamic School," Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press wrote on January 24, 2007, that Obama's mother, divorced from Obama's father, married a man from Indonesia named Lolo Soetoro, and the family relocated to the country from 1967-71. At first, Obama attended the Catholic school, Fransiskus Assisis, where documents showed he enrolled as a Muslim, the religion of his stepfather. The document required that each student choose one of five state-sanctioned religions when registering – Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant.
Asked about this, Obama communications director Robert Gibbs responded by indicating to Pickler that he wasn't sure why the document had Obama listed as a Muslim. "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim."
Two months later, Paul Watson of the Los Angeles Times (available online in a Baltimore Sun reprint) reported that the Obama campaign had retreated from that absolute statement and instead issued a more nuanced one: "Obama has never been a practicing Muslim." The Times looked into the matter further and learned more about his Indonesian interlude:
His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama's grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both schools he attended. That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.
The childhood friends say Obama sometimes went to Friday prayers at the local mosque. "We prayed but not really seriously, just following actions done by older people in the mosque. But as kids, we loved to meet our friends and went to the mosque together and played," said Zulfin Adi. … Obama's younger sister, Maya Soetoro, said in a statement released by the campaign that the family attended the mosque only "for big communal events," not every Friday.
Recalling Obama's time in Indonesia, the Times account contains quotes that Obama "went to the mosque," and that he "was Muslim."
Summarized, available evidence suggests Obama was born a Muslim to a non-practicing Muslim father and for some years had a reasonably Muslim upbringing under the auspices of his Indonesian step-father. At some point, he converted to Christianity. It appears false to state, as Obama does, "I've always been a Christian" and "I've never practiced Islam." The campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that "Obama never prayed in a mosque."-Daniel Pipes
OBAMA WAS BORN MUSLIM AND PRAYED TO MECCA AS A BOY
OBAMA KNOWS THE MUSLIM CALL TO PRAYER
Obama recited, "with a first-class [Arabic] accent," the opening lines of this prayer:"
"Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
Allah is Supreme! Allah is Supreme!
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that there is no god but Allah
I witness that Muhammad is his prophet
