Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land: ‘How dumb does [Obama] think we are?

By Caroline May

US President Barack Obama announces that religious employers will not be mandated to offer free contraceptive coverage for workers at the White House in Washington, DC, February 10, 2012. AFP PHOTO/Jim WATSON (Photo credit should read JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON, DC - President Barack Obama makes a statement in the briefing room at the White House on February 10, 2012 in Washington, DC. President Obama announced a reversal of his administration's health care rule requiring religious employers to provide women free access to contraception.

According to Land, the adjustment in the mandate requiring all employers — including religious organizations — to provide birth control is “a distinction without a difference.”

“My initial reaction is: How dumb does he think we are?” Land wondered in an interview with The Daily Caller. “Does he think when he puts lip stick on a pig, that we don’t understand that it is still a pig?”

“Let’s just take Southern Baptists, there are 16 million of us, almost all of us are covered by a self-funded insurance program called GuideStone,” he said noting that all kinds of people are insured through the program. “So when he says ‘well you don’t have to pay for it, your insurance company will,’ our insurance company is a Southern Baptist insurance company, it is self-funded through the domination, so it is totally unconscionable for them to provide abortifacients. We don’t have the same problems with contraception that the Catholics do, but we respect those concerns.”

Indeed, on Friday GuideStone issued a statement to that effect, saying in part that the changes to do not take into account self-funded church insurance programs like theirs.

“This self-funded approach to health care coverage, which is common among many historic and large church plans, was completely ignored by the President in his comments,” the group said in a statement.

Land added that there are numerous religious groups that have self-funded programs such as GuideStone