Apparently, Atheists Caused the Disaster That Is ObamaCare June 30, 2012

Apparently, Atheists Caused the Disaster That Is ObamaCare

By Hemant Mehta
June 30, 2012

This is the headline at WorldNetDaily:

How on earth did atheists causes ObamaCare? What’s the connection? We don’t believe in god… so we don’t get healed after a sickness or accident… so we need more government-run healthcare? Nope. I was wrong.

But William Murray, the Christian son of the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, knows the connection. It has to do with the Supreme Court cases from the early 1960s (including his mother’s) that removed mandatory Bible readings from public schools…

“The 1963 case was one of the troika of cases that worked to destroy the basic family unit,” Murray explained. “One of the striking things about Obamacare is that it was pushed and promoted out of its necessity because of the breakup of the family. There is no one to take care of the family, because of this.

“Medical care since the time of Genesis was always a family responsibility,” Murray said. “But because government has interfered in the family, and because it has eliminated the three-generation household and eliminated the ability for families to take care of their own, the individual mandate becomes mandated.

Riiiiiight. I remember when President Obama barged into my childhood home and killed my grandparents. That was a sad day.

Murray has gone crazy. Getting mandatory prayer out of public school didn’t change anything for the people who wanted to pray. They could continue to pray in school all they wanted — and still can — privately. Because of those cases, those of us who don’t buy into the religion myth are no longer forced to recite a prayer to God. It was the right decision then and it’s been upheld for good reason. To blame the “breakup of the family” on a decision that protected religious freedom in public schools is just an ignorant conspiracy theory, a last ditch effort from a sad man.

If atheists are responsible for ObamaCare, though, we better get some credit for it a decade from now, when people wonder how we lived without it.

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  • Gordon Duffy

    When it turns out to be amazing all credit will go to Jesus 

  • cipher

    Murray has gone crazy.

    A WND writer is crazy.

    In related news, water is still wet.

  • It’s pretty disgusting when the people who claim to follow Jesus throw a hissy over a program designed to help provide affordable health care to everyone.   It really shows their true colors. 

  • Geit

    I just read “Medical care since the time of Genesis was always a family responsibility” and all I could think was yes, the family kill a sheep back then to ask the gods to make you better.

  • Those good old stone age days when mommy kissed your boo-boo and made it all better.  Then those damned doctors came along to interfere with family values and needed to be paid for their time.

  • Jasmyn

    He killed yours too?! What a bastard!

  • Joe

    What he means is, it used to be that women could be relied upon to provide slave… er… unpaid mommy care to family members. But with these modern-family-destroying feminists, however, who were raised without understanding their godgiven place as man’s little helper,  now secular government has no choice but to… you know… pay people to do that job.

  • Thorny264

    Well I’m not from america but if someone wants to blame me for providing better healthcare then I will gladly take that bullet.

  • Muxika

    The family dynamic is a patriarchal system handed down from the Middle Ages. The three-generation household still exists, but family dynamics do change because of social differences and economic stability…why am I putting any thought into this? He’s a loon.

  • mikespeir

    Well, that’s stupid.

  • Guest

     Yeah, I was confused at that part. I thought the three-generation households became rarer because general wealth and technology levels increased and people actually moved out of their parent’s house. I had no idea the government destroyed them!

  • BrentSTL

    To use a soundbite a friend of mine (an Internet talk-radio host) uses on one of the shows he hosts: 

    STUPID!! You are made of STUPID!!

  • BrentSTL

    To use a soundbite a friend of mine (an Internet talk-radio host) uses on one of the shows he hosts: 

    STUPID!! You are made of STUPID!!

  • Nankay

    “There is no one to take care of the family, because of this.”
    That is so insulting. My dad and I were there to take care of my mom as much as we could, but dang, there was no way we could have ‘taken care of’ the $16,000/month/round of chemo she was on.

  • Spherical Basterd

    As an atheist, I would like to take credit for the current heat wave. My heated discussion with my landlord over the existance of god last week brought this upon us.

    While I’m at it and in the mood for mea culpas: You may also attribute all the summer hurricanes, earthquakes, tornados, political gridlock, the gay agenda, feminism and anything else the Far Right and any religiotard would like to blame on me and my goddamned atheism.

  • Carolyn

    Tommy Douglas, the “father of medicare” in Canada, was a Baptist minister. 

  •  He killed his own grandparents too.  That’s what you DO when you have a time machine.  Besides planting fake newspaper stories about your own birth, of course.

  • Sware

    Wow, atheists did all that?  When did we become such a pushy majority and take over the supreme court?  How did I miss all of that?  Sheesh and I thought I kept up with things pretty well. *eye roll*

  • Murray’s views are peculiarly American and go against the evidence. The government-run health care services in Europe were mostly set up in the 1930s-1950s, at a time when we are led to believe that ‘Christian family values’ were much stronger.

    As Aneurin Bevan, the prime instigator of the National Health Service in the UK said in 1949:

    “Christianity and Conservatism stand in opposition”

  • Now that he mentions it, I remember the gospel story about how the leper’s mom “made it all better.”  Of course, Lazarus had to get a referral to grandma, his being a more serious case.

  • So let’s see… a plan that was conceived in significant part by the conservative, quasi-religious  Heritage Foundation in response to Clinton’s health plan, first implemented by a Mormon Governor at the state level, and then by a fairly devout Christian at the federal level, is somehow the product of atheists?

    Although it would be great if atheists could take credit for this health care reform effort, that would be dishonest, wouldn’t it?

  • cipher

    I just did something I never do; I went to WND and read the comments. The level of stupidity is, as usual, astounding. This has very little to do with lack of education or early childhood experience; these people are congenital imbeciles. They shouldn’t be reproducing. They certainly shouldn’t be voting.

  • advancedatheist

    Back in the 1980’s William Murray appeared as a guest on the exorcist Bob Larson’s radio talkshow. I was a twenty-something at the time, and I called in to argue with him about atheism. Murray hijacked the discussion in his favor by saying that atheism only “works” for young white males, and that I would have to tall back into religion around the time I turned 40. He added that he has seen this happen repeatedly to white male atheists.  I turned 40 back in 1999, so why haven’t I become a christian yet?
    I can see why Murray might have made such a bizarre claim about health care, however. He has organized his post-conversion life around his ability to exploit conservative christians based on his mother’s reputation as America’s most prominent atheist, yet I think he has started to realize that after his mother’s murder in 1995, atheism in the U.S. simply hasn’t depended on her reputation and accomplishments. In fact, many younger atheists may not even recognize her name. The organic growth and increasing visibility of atheists in the U.S. makes Madalyn O’Hair look more like an early adopter of a practical new lifestyle than a freak.  That leaves Murray as a superannuated and obsolete figure whose opinions about the horrors of atheism make no sense now. 

    So why not double down and make outrageous pronouncements about current events to try to get another 15 minutes of fame?

  • Ken

    Yes, why can’t we all be more self-reliant and use the family MRI, and do our own blood tests?  I’ll be doing spinal surgery in my dining room later today, and my sister is giving our whole family colonoscopies next Tuesday in the guest bathroom.

  • Kaydenpat

    “There is no one to take care of the family, because of this.”

    What does this have to do with access to healthcare?  Was there a time in the recent past when all families took care of their own medical needs?  Then why do we need hospitals/clinics? 

    Bizarre thinking.  Coming from Canada, I don’t understand the fuss that some Americans are making over the Affordable Care Act, which doesn’t go as far as the healthcare systems in most of Europe and Canada.

  • Miko

    Most of the stocks in the health care/insurance sectors have risen at least 5%-10% since the Supreme Court announced that they would force people to pay some of their taxes directly to insurance companies and buy their health care at monopoly prices.  Truly Obamacare is one of the most successful privatization efforts in the history of corrupt government.  So of course it’s atheists who inflicted that conservative monstrosity on us; who do you think was responsible–the health insurance lobbyists and the legislators and president that they own?

  • LesterBallard

    Christian asses must be cavernous. They pull everything out of them.

  • LesterBallard

  • I call dibbs on any volcanic erruptions. I love me some volcanoes.

  • Nicole Youngman

    This is an old meme of theirs that goes back several decades: “taking prayer out of the public schools is the source of all our problems.” So when rightwingers define X as a problem, they just update the meme to work in current events.

  • Rich Lane

    ” because government has interfered in the family, and because it has eliminated the three-generation household
    and eliminated the ability for families to take care of their own…”

    Yes, because my grandma could perform major surgery and alleviate cancer.

  • I always make an effort to keep the fire of my profound atheism under a bushel, as it were; but now I am obligated to wave my freak flag and be proud. If my fervent atheism caused the Affordable Healthcare Act, then next I will try to anti-pray away the DEA, war, and Rush Limbaugh.

  • I completely agree about the irrelevancy of the O’Hair family. This quick and steep decline happened since the Brits so adroitly took control of the Atheism discussion in the 1980’s. My actual college experience was for business degrees (’73 & ’75), but in recent years I grew an interest in mathematics and science. I have become a fan of Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson since reading their books and seeing them in action on PBS. The idea that the universe was created from nothing without a god’s intervention was a difficult idea around which to wrap my brain; but having previously been exposed to time with no start or finsh. and multiple universes, this was not too bad. My interest in science probably began when I watched the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan on PBS. I blame Obamacare on Carl Sagan!

  • They could continue to pray in school all they wanted — and still can — privately.

    It kinda irks me a bit when you say it like that. It gives the impression that it’s something they ought to do alone where nobody can see them, which makes it sound like they should be ashamed of it (Matthew 6:5-6 aside). That will only make them feel oppressed. I’d rather it be “they could – and still can – so long as they aren’t disrupting or pushing it on anyone.”

    Or maybe I’m just being unnecessarily picky.

  • Keulan

    Wait, so atheists taking mandatory prayers out of school resulted in better healthcare? That’s some insane troll logic there.

  • The Other Weirdo

    But that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. It’s not even Paul, it’s freaking Jesus commanding it, and comparing them to hypocrites if they don’t.

  • a minor deity

    Actually, the prevalence of three-generation households is HIGHER today in the US (thanks to the recession) than it ever was since WWII.

  • And Americans would consider his politics [Labour oriented] to be “commie pinko”.
    I so very much love living in Canada.