Back in September, administrators at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center updated the hospital’s visitation policy and, in an effort to “respect patients’ religious practices and preserve their privacy,” included a provision that stipulated that “no religious items, (i.e. Bibles, reading materials and/or artifacts) are allowed to be given away or used during a visit.”
The new language went unnoticed for several several weeks until the document was forwarded to the Family Research Council, which immediately alerted members of Congress like Rep. Steve King, who then denounced the policy on the House floor, claiming that it prevented priests from offering communion to wounded soldiers and family members from bringing a Bible to a loved one.
Officials at Walter Reed quickly rescinded the policy, saying it had been incorrectly worded and should have been more thoroughly reviewed before it was released.
Rep. King was on AFA’s “Today’s Issues” program today with Tim Wildmon and Bryan Fischer to discuss the issue and explained that, in the end, this policy change was really all President Obama’s fault:
How does this happen? How does the President of the United States have the time to have all of these things changed all the way down to these levels and levels well below this level? And I’ve watched it happen in the transition of the Chief Executive officer a couple of times in the past and it happens this way: when you put somebody in place as Commander in Chief, Barack Obama, then he fires everybody that he can and puts in political appointments. Those political appointments then lord it over everybody beneath them and that philosophy of the Commander in Chief just flows down across the entire Executive Branch of government and it cascades through there in a matter of a couple of months. And then the people who like their jobs and will slide into their desk in the morning and they’ll be thinking “what would Barack Obama do if he were sitting at my desk, doing my job today?” I want to please him so I’m likely to , I’m going to write something that is compatible with our Commander in Chief’s attitude.”
That kind of thing does change the culture; that’s why we need a new president so badly. You cannot fix these one at a time – you can fight them off and you can sometimes take a little back, but there’s another hundred or two or three hundred of those out there going on simultaneously that we didn’t catch, that we weren’t able to reverse. You just simply can’t play Whack-a-Mole endlessly and save our American religious liberty, you’ve got to replace the Commander in Chief who will then appoint new people and have the right principles cascade down from the White House throughout the entire Executive Branch and that affects the culture of the whole United States of America.
