We’ll work to strengthen families by removing the financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples and do more to encourage fatherhood – because what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child; it’s having the courage to raise one.

Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger America. It is this kind of prosperity – broad, shared, and built on a thriving middle class – that has always been the source of our progress at home.

Insofar as the president deserves praise, not only for what he said on Tuesday night but for what he has said about fatherhood over the past several years, it’s interesting to hear him speak candidly about strong families on the national stage. Quite simply because the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch on gay marriage and birth control in recent years necessarily results in fatherless households and abortion.

Indeed, while President Obama has been more than willing to express his support for responsible fatherhood, he has done more to undermine the institution of marriage than any other chief executive.

This is all rather confusing because in 2009 the president established a task force whose goal was to encourage stronger families and safer communities. He has also given a number of heart-stirring speeches regarding his own experience as a father, including this one, which kicked off the president’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative in June 2010.

As study after study shows, America’s greatest weapon against childhood poverty is a married mother and father. I think the president knows this, but he’s too politically cautious to turn it into a national issue. I pray he changes his mind, and his policies, over the next four years. Because as important as it is for the president to talk about being a responsible father, words alone won’t reduce the number of absentee dads and fatherless children by any significant amount. President Obama must do more to encourage responsible fatherhood.

They are strong words that he does not use lightly. Here is a list of ways Catholics feel backed into a corner by the Obama administration.

(Update: Archbishop Naumann asked us to start a Memorare Army for religious liberty. Click here for details.)

1. Abortion Extremism. Most Americans call themselves pro-life when it comes to abortion. In this regard, the Obama administration is not at all like most Americans. As I documented at the National Catholic Register, Obama’s administration made attacks on the right to life priority No. 1.

2. Forced Contraception Coverage. If the administration forced Jewish delicatessens to serve pork that would rightly be denounced as an attack on religious liberty, both by those who “keep kosher,” those who don’t, and those who aren’t Jewish at all. By forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception and sterilization, the White House is doing exactly the same thing.

3. Forced Funding of Abortifacients. By forcing Catholics to pay for birth control pills, Obama has inadvertently forced into the light a medical fact that contraception’s supporters would like to forget: Contraceptive pills work in several ways. The Mayo Clinic lists them here.  Among them: “Alter the lining of the uterus so a fertilized egg doesn’t attach to it.” A “fertilized egg,” in layman’s terms, is a newly conceived human being who is already male or female and with all the genetic information that will determine whether or not she is tall, short, good at singing or excellent at softball. And preventing implantation kills that new boy or girl.

4. Breaking Notre Dame Promise. When he spoke at Notre Dame, Obama assured Catholics that his still-new administration would “draft a sensible conscience clause” for Catholics. Forcing Jewish delicatessens to sell pork would not be a “sensible conscience clause.” Forcing Catholics to fund contraceptives is not a “sensible conscience clause.”

5. Anti-War Catholics Disappointed. Some Catholics who supported Obama said they did so because he was anti-war, compared to Bush. But Obama has not deviated from the Bush administration’s Iraq timetable, Afghanistan strategy or Guantanamo Bay policy. After he added a Libyan conflict to his record and spent a third of his 2012 State of the Union promoting his military record, the Nobel Peace Prize committee came under investigation for awarding him its prize.

6. Hushing Army Chaplains. At the same time, under the Obama administration, the Army has silenced chaplains who were instructed by their Archbishop to read a letter about the Obama administration’s forced contraception coverage. Kathryn Jean Lopez reports.

7. Government Regulating Ministers. If the Supreme Court had not stopped him, the Obama administration would have inserted the federal government in the hiring and firing of civilian ministers. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the unanimous January 2012 decision that the court was protecting “the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission.”

8. Catholics Officially Bigots. Obama campaigned claiming he was for protecting traditional marriage and against same-sex “marriage.” But as Bishop William Lori testified in the U.S. Senate, “The Federal Department of Justice has ratcheted up its attack on the Defense of Marriage Act by mischaracterizing it as an act of bigotry.” He cited several examples, including Catholics being driven out of adoption services because they will not assist homosexual couples in adoptions.

9. Federal “Catholics Need Not Apply” Policies. It was bad enough when local businesses barred Catholics from certain jobs in the early 20th century. Now the White House has put “Catholics Need Not Apply” signs up in key places, denying Catholics the ability to fulfill certain charitable grants. Bishop Lori provides several examples.

10. Anti-Immigrant Policies. President Obama’s unprecedentedly harsh deportation policy has drawn the ire of Latinos. Catholic bishops as recently as August had hoped for a change that would be more in line with Church teaching on welcoming immigrants.

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Tom Hoopes is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan., where he teaches in the Journalism and Mass Communications department and edits the college’s Catholic identity speech digest, The Gregorian.

Recent events have shown us that what sets us apart must not just be our power – it must be the purpose behind it.  In South Sudan – with our assistance – the people were finally able to vote for independence after years of war. Thousands lined up before dawn. People danced in the streets. One man who lost four of his brothers at war summed up the scene around him: “This was a battlefield for most of my life. Now we want to be free.”

We saw that same desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator. And tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.

We must never forget that the things we’ve struggled for, and fought for, live in the hearts of people everywhere.

What about Lebanon, Mister President?

Iranian-backed Hezbollah has been busy re-arming its military and thinning the ranks of its heavily Christian, democratically inclined opposition through murder and coercion. Now they have precipitated the collapse of the Lebanese government over the international investigation of the 2005 murder of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, an investigation which they believe (rightly, it seems) will implicate Hezbollah, and perhaps their Syrian and Iranian enablers.

Obama’s non-comment on the Lebanese situation comes after his failure to make any noise of support for the brave souls crushed in Tehran in 2009 after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

(You know Iran: that’s the country that just oulawed Valentine’s Day gift giving because the practice is too Western.)

Now Iran, through its Hezbollah minions, is poised to take control of a pro-Western nation, a largely Christian nation, a nation on Israel’s northern border, where in 2006 nearly 38 percent of the population converged on the capital to demonstrate peacefully for freedom from Syrian control of their country. But Obama did not see fit to include it in his discussion of places where the people are fighting for freedom.

Obama mentioned Sudan, Tunisia, and even Iraq as places where freedom from oppression and tyranny has made strides and “we stand with them.” But considering the threat Iran poses to significant allies in the region (and beyond, as they develop their nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities) a few words of rebuke to their puppet-state ambitions would have been significant.

Not sure if he fears provoking Iran or if there are other reasons [*cough* anti-Israel *cough*] but the failure to mention Lebanon and stand with them was an unfortunate lacuna.