Via RCP, the balls on this guy to even pay lip service to this subject in front of the Pope. Give me one example of the Obama administration going to the mat to expand religious freedom here or abroad. He fought Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor in court to make them provide contraception as part of their health-care plans notwithstanding their religious objections. He sits by and says nothing when small business owners are sued into oblivion by state AGs when they politely refuse to provide services to gay weddings on grounds that their faith doesn’t allow it. (Actual quote from the clip you’re about to watch: “People everywhere must be able to live out their faith free from fear and free from intimidation.”) He just made a deal with a theocratic Shiite regime that’s persecuting Sunnis in Syria, clearing the way for them to become a nuclear power in 15 years. He’s running a halfhearted war of token airstrikes against ISIS, an even greater persecutor of religious minorities, despite domestic and international clamor for him to do more. What’s the big Obama legacy achievement on religious freedom that warrants him even mentioning this topic? Where’s the evidence that the overwhelmingly secular, statist national Democratic leadership views religious freedom as an important priority at all?

Here’s another dubious use of “we” from his comments this morning via Charles Cooke. Obama on climate change:

Your Holiness, in your words and deeds, you set a profound moral example. And in these gentle but firm reminders of our obligations to God and to one another, you are shaking us out of complacency. All of us may, at times, experience discomfort when we contemplate the distance between how we lead our daily lives and what we know to be true and right. But I believe such discomfort is a blessing, for it points to something better. You shake our conscience from slumber; you call on us to rejoice in Good News, and give us confidence that we can come together, in humility and service, and pursue a world that is more loving, more just, and more free. Here at home and around the world, may our generation heed your call to ‘never remain on the sidelines of this march of living hope!

He doesn’t really mean that Francis is shaking “us” from “our” complacency, notes Cooke, he means that the Pope’s opinion should shake his opponents from their complacency. Question: Will Francis’s opinions on abortion and gay marriage shake Obama from his “complacency” on those subjects or does the conscience-shaking here only run one way? How strange that the Pope’s “profound moral example” seems to be profound only to the extent that it coincides with the White House’s agenda.