Posted: May 6, 2014
Last week's National Day of Prayer event on Capitol Hill opened with a "messianic rabbi" saying that 9/11 was a warning sign of God's "impending judgement" of America. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, took the stage to denounce President Obama as "the abortion president."
The event featured so much right-wing extremism that Representative Janice Hahn walked out in protest, saying that "James Dobson hijacked the National Day of Prayer to promote his own distorted political agenda."
But apparently the day's agenda wasn't a problem for the House of Representatives' official chaplain, Father Patrick Conroy, who offered a prayer from the stage.
For decades, the first Thursday in May has been designated by Congress as a nonpartisan, nonsectarian National Day of Prayer. But the day has increasingly been hijacked by a self-appointed, religious-right committee with no official standing -- led by Dobson's wife -- that calls itself the "National Day of Prayer Task Force."
The House and Senate chaplains -- who are supposed to be nonpartisan -- have regularly appeared at the annual right-wing event, helping to legitimize it in the eyes of Congress and the media.
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