The Paranoid Huckster Style

Mike Huckabee really does need to check his water because there's something in it.

Fox News host Mike Huckabee, who is an ordained Southern Baptist Minister, recently warned that President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could force his religion to begin using less water to baptize believers.

During a Tuesday evening interview with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, Huckabee worried that if president could mandate that Catholic institutions’ health insurance cover birth control for women then what would be next?

“It’s becoming increasingly clear to a lot of believers that this administration is not just indifferent to people of faith, it’s hostile,” the Fox News host explained. “And that’s not something I say lightly. I say that with a great burden in my heart to even have uttered the words. But how else can you look at it?”

“If the government can tell the Catholic Church what it must do, how it must practice, what it must do to accommodate the government mandate then the next time the government may say that Baptists can’t — maybe the Baptist won’t be able to immerse because the EPA will determine that’s using too much water,” he added.

How long before the House GOP passes legislation exempting all religious institutions from EPA regulations?  I mean at this point we already have the Conference of Catholic Bishops directing parishioners to go after Democrats.

On Thursday (June 21), Catholics across the country will amplify what is an already loud outcry from the hierarchy over the federal government’s so-called contraception mandate.

With rallies, marches, lectures and special publications, the U.S. Catholic Bishop’s Fortnight for Freedom campaign will seek to galvanize Catholic opposition to President Obama’s proposed mandate to require employers — including religious institutions — to provide free contraception insurance coverage to employees.

But while Catholic leaders frame the events as a fight for religious liberty, critics see signs of political partisanship and electioneering. Questions over the financing of the bishops’ campaign have caused those suspicions to multiply.

“The activities around the Fortnight for Freedom cost money,” said Steve Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington. “What groups are paying for this, and what’s the accountability for that money?”

Those kinds of questions were asked of key Catholic leaders like Baltimore Archbishop William Lori last week as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Atlanta.

Lori, who heads the bishops’ committee on religious liberty, told reporters that gifts “from Catholic groups and foundations” would help sustain the campaign. “The generosity we’ve experienced has been heartening,” he said.

The campaign, Lori said, “is not in any way partisan, either in its spirit or in its funding.”

Sure it's not.  They're just dedicated to the defeat of a sitting President through cynical manipulation of their congregations and taking in millions in order to do it, in direct violation of their tax exempt status because making contraception available to their employees for religiously affiliated institutions that aren't actual churches is intolerable violation of religious freedom.

Technically other religions besides Catholicism being allowed by the US government to exist in the country is violating the religious freedom rights of Catholics under this inane logic.

So glad I'm agnostic these days.  These people are crazy.