Religious right pretends that Obama has a ‘God-talk’ problem

So here’s a common urban legend on the religious right, stated here by Phyllis Schlafly:

Every time [President Obama] recites the Declaration of Independence, he omits the word “Creator.” Now we all know what’s in the Declaration and it’s very strange, you can’t blame it on a slip of the tongue or blame it on the teleprompter because he does it all the time.

It’s terrible that the president keeps misquoting the Declaration. And it’s especially terrible that the word he keeps leaving out — “Creator” — is a reference to God.

President Obama, apparently, has a God-talk problem.

Except that he doesn’t. Phyllis Schlafly is lying.

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Now, when those accusations start to pile up, some pundits will call on the president to start quoting this passage and saying “endowed by their Creator” even more. They urge him to just start saying it a ridiculous number of times until Schlafly and the religious right can no longer plausibly claim that he’s never said it.

It’s a charmingly optimistic response: “Come on, we’ll show ‘em the truth!”

The problem with that advice is twofold: 1) It presumes, inaccurately, that these people care about the truth — that their complaint is being made in good faith and is not an explicit lie told for explicitly political reasons; and 2) Schlafly et. al. will claim that Obama has only just now begun saying this due solely to their attacks, and only because they called him out on it. And thus they’ll spin it around and begin attacking him every time he says “endowed by their Creator.”

That’s frustrating, but that’s how it works when you’re dealing with bad-faith actors who half-justify their lying by reassuring themselves that lying for Jesus is a Good Thing if it helps to defeat the evil baby-killing liberals. So they’ll keep attacking Obama for never saying “Creator” until that lie becomes to obvious to continue, at which point they’ll start attacking him for only saying it because they forced him to and for not really believing it or some such. But they won’t stop attacking him, that’s just who they are and what they do.

And of course these folks don’t just spread lies about the president. They spread such lies about everyone they perceive to be evil liberals — including any Christians who fail any of their ever-multiplying culture-war litmus tests. They say that such people are not really Christians — that they hate Jesus and disrespect the Bible.