Guest-hosting the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch last week, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said that he doubted President Obama’s Christian faith and American heritage. After making a bizarre argument about the incompatibility of marriage equality and evolution, Gohmert claimed that Obama is merely a “proclaimed Christian” and contended that the president has “gone to war with Christianity.”
“The gloves have come off, there really is a war by this administration against not just the Catholic Church but the Christian Church,” he said. Gohmert charged that under Obama “you can’t practice what you believe about birth control, about abortion, this administration will tell you what religious practices you can participate in and what you can’t.”
He also suggested the government may begin collecting personal information such as medical and phone records and emails of Christians to use against them:
Speaking with anti-immigrant activist Mark Krikorian later in the program, Gohmert said that Obama should follow in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson to “completely secure the border.” Of course, Wilson was president during the 1910s and exercised military intervention into Mexico.
Gohmert said Obama would have known about Wilson’s success if he wasn’t such a foreigner: “I understand that when you grow up in Indonesia a lot of times you don’t get the American history that the rest of us got growing up here but it was secure.”
The program ended with the congressman receiving a call from a listener who asked him to investigate the treatment of Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a birther who was discharged from the Army for refusing to obey orders from the president, and sign his petition canceling the last election based on the findings of Sheriff Arpaio’s “posse” that Obama’s birth certificate is fraudulent.
Gohmert said that he would “look into” Lakin’s prosecution but insisted that he was not a birther, claiming that legislation he cosponsored requiring candidates for president to submit their original birth certificates was inspired by a 2008 New York Times story about John McCain. The Times story examined whether McCain was eligible for the presidency since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. It had nothing to do with whether McCain had a valid birth certificate.
Gohmert swore that he is not a birther… just someone who wants “a president who is a lawful president.”
“They continue to call me a birther, which I’m not, but I do want a president who is a lawful president,” Gohmert lamented. “But I think at this point it’s time to take on these crushing issues.”
