Obama’s mama

Frances Kissling wants President Obama to follow his mother’s lead. No, not to get baptized posthumously by Mormons. Rather, Kissling, former head of Catholics for Free Choice, wants him to keep religion on the DL and out of the White House. (Obama has called his mother, Ruth Stanley Dunham, who died in 1995, a “a […]

Frances Kissling wants President Obama to follow his mother’s lead. No, not to get baptized posthumously by Mormons.

Rather, Kissling, former head of Catholics for Free Choice, wants him to keep religion on the DL and out of the White House. (Obama has called his mother, Ruth Stanley Dunham, who died in 1995, a “a lonely witness for secular humanism.”)

Kissling is particularly perplexed about allowing faith leaders to hash out a solution to reducing abortions in the U.S., one of the goals Obama laid out for his revamped faith-based office in February.


She says: “It is wrong to cede issues related to sexuality, gender and reproduction to religious leaders who have been afraid to utter the word “sex” from their pulpits and who continue to discriminate against women within their denominations. It is frankly bizarre to turn to religions that have been fighting each other for centuries over which is the true faith and ask these ancient foes to mediate large-scale issues of ethical conflict.”

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