SALENA ZITO: The Left’s War On Religion.

God, guns and prayer have been intertwined as enemies of the political left ever since Barack Obama described Pennsylvania voters as being “bitter” over job losses and surmised that “they cling to guns or religion.”

Despite handily winning this state twice, his and the left’s hatred for the very people who voted for him has never waned. As with everything else he dislikes about traditional American culture, he has sought to “correct” the behavior of those people.

Last week, that corrective zeal reached an entirely new level when the left condemned the act of offering thoughts and prayers to the grieving, treating it as code for gun ownership.

The left wants religion confined to the four walls of a house of worship for a few hours on Sundays.

It tolerates the invocation of religion — mostly, the Gospel of Luke — only when necessary to coerce the devout to spend more money on government aid programs. The left uses religious metaphors as a way to reach the rabble; otherwise, it doesn’t respect it.

Religion, like families, represents a power center outside of the state. The left wants everything to be inside the state, with nothing outside or against the state. This is also why university administrators don’t like fraternities: They’re also independent power centers that mean administrators don’t control the totality of students’ lives, as they wish to.