Fox News Rips Obama Over Bible Quotes In Immigration Speech, Says It’s Improper Use

During Obama’s address on immigration policy, he called on Americans to open their hearts to people facing deportation, even using the Bible as a reference. Unsurprisingly, Fox News took the opportunity to say using the Bible is simply unfair. Still, the claim might seem a little insincere coming just days after encouraging the president to espouse more “traditional values.”

Obama referenced this quote from the Bible, Exodus 23:9, “Scripture tells us that we shall not oppress a stranger, for we know the heart of a stranger – we were strangers once, too.”

Fox News claimed that the bible quote is crossing a line by guilt tripping Christian conservatives into supporting his plan.

According to Raw Story, Elisabeth Hasselbeck said, “He’s using it [the bible] to guilt someone into” supporting his policy. “That’s not what the scholars behind the bible would interpret as proper use.”

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said it was “repugnant” for the president to use the bible.

“It’s repugnant, for this guy specifically, the president who spent his career defending late-term abortion, among other things, lecturing us on Christian faith? That’s too much. That is too much. This is the Christian left at work, and it’s repugnant.”

Of course, President Obama’s defense of late-term abortion is mostly considered an exaggeration by Factcheck.org.

Former presidential contender and ordained Southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee also got in on the criticism.

“[It] is interesting that Obama cites Scripture as the justification for him taking unilateral action on illegal immigrants. It’s similar to the way that his Biblical beliefs led him to oppose same-sex marriage as a candidate for election. Then when he needed big campaign donations from gay liberals for his reelection, the Bible suddenly got rewritten.”

It seemed that folks were united in their criticism of Obama’s Bible use, but it didn’t take long before their criticism was being criticized.

As MSNBC reported, just 48 hours earlier, the group on Fox and Friends were promoting an op-ed from Chuck Norris, that called on the president to talk about “traditional values” like Ronald Reagan did in a 1981 speech.

Although, Reagan did not directly quote the Bible like Obama did, he made plenty of allusions to it while discussing Christmas.

Obama’s speech is drawing criticism on more than just it’s Bible quotations. As previously reported by the Inquisitr, it only took a few moments after the Obama concluded his speech before a woman with a gun was caught participating in anti-immigration demonstrations.

It will still take time to see whether Obama’s Bible quotes helped him reach a more conservative audience, but for the time being they appear to be more of a target than anything else.

[Image Credit: Marco Schulze/Wikimedia Commons]