Obama's Shameful Rejection of FDR's D-Day Prayer
President Barack Obama had bureaucrat Robert Abbey deliver an opinion to a U. S. House committee last week that adding Franklin Roosevelt's D-Day prayer to the nation's World War II Memorial would tarnish the elegance of the memorial and hamper visitors from being moved, educated, and inspired by the memorial, so reports Fox News.
Let's underscore that Abbey said this about FDR's D-Day prayer, which was delivered at the commencement of the invasion of Europe. D-Day was the pivotal event in the European theater in World War II. The invasion was fraught with terrific uncertainty. Roosevelt and Eisenhower, among the nation's leaders, feared for the awful death toll in American and allied lives that the invasion would incur.
Abbey, who serves as the director of the Bureau of Land Management, made his remarks in reaction to a measure sponsored by Congressman Bill Johnson (R-OH) that would add FDR's D-Day prayer to the World War II Memorial. Abbey sought refuge in the Commemorative Works Act, which Abbey claims prohibits a change.
The D-Day invasion offered great hope, in that if successful - and no one then was sure - it would be the beginning of the end of the European war. Americans knew upon hearing the news of the invasion that there would be an awful price paid in American and allied lives. FDR offered his prayer not to rally the nation - the nation was rallied - but to give succor through the call for Providence's blessings.
Roosevelt's prayer was no namby-pamby "bless everyone, even those poor, misguided, Jew-killing, hell-loosing Nazis." No, Roosevelt said this:
They [American and allied troops] will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. [Emphasis added]
No moral relativism in World War II. No moronic pleas for the Axis and the allies to - gosh darn it - just find some way to split differences and get along. Roosevelt's prayer was a prayer of steely resolve, a prayer for an undisputed allied victory.
The secularist left, which Mr. Obama belongs, finds any prayer repugnant, but Roosevelt's D-Day prayer must be particularly galling. A public prayer by the nation's chief executive that so clearly calls for a military victory over an enemy... that just doesn't fit with the left's indoctrination of today's Americans, who need to jettison primitive faith. And heaven knows - Opps! - no one can possibly label bad guys the enemy (look at the distortions that Mr. Obama and the left go through to avoid calling jihadists the nation's enemies). Why, that's just positively politically incorrect.
FDR's D-Day prayer can be read here. Better, one can hear FDR reading his prayer to the nation here.
What a sad time in the nation's history. How shameful when Roosevelt's prayer to God for the triumph of good over evil should be objected to by a bureaucrat representing Roosevelt's successor, Barack Obama.
Roosevelt's prayer should be added to the memorial, and the next president - a Republican, let's hope - should commemorate the event.