Rogue Catholic picked for Holy See post

By Catholic League President Bill Donohue

Several Catholic news outlets, including Catholic News Service, have reported that Joseph Donnelly, President Biden’s nominee to be the new U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, is a “pro-life” Democrat. They are wrong. Worse, Donnelly is not only at odds with the Catholic Church on abortion, he is pro-gay marriage, against religious liberty, and against school choice.

When Donnelly served as a congressman from Indiana (2007-2013), he was pro-life, but when he became a U.S. Senator (2013-2019), he pivoted and joined the pro-abortion camp. Here’s the evidence.

While serving in the 111th Congress, 2009-2010, Donnelly agreed with the positions of National Right to Life 83% of the time. When he became a senator, his numbers dropped to 20% (2013-2014), 25% (2015-2016), and 28% (2017-2018).

NARAL, the pro-abortion giant, gave him a 0% score in 2016, but he jumped to 84% in 2017 and 80% in 2018.

Donnelly also voted for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in 2010, even though the bill required Catholic non-profits, such as the Little Sisters of the Poor, to pay for abortion-inducing drugs in their healthcare plans.

According to Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal, he was not initially in favor of the bill, but a phone call from the former president of Notre Dame University, Father Theodore Hesburgh—done at the behest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—convinced him to change his mind. It worked. Thereafter, Donnelly never voted to repeal Obamacare.

Donnelly’s support for Obamacare pitted him against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). In 2012, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the USCCB, wrote that the Obama administration “has refused to exempt religious institutions that serve the common good—including Catholic schools, charities and hospitals—from its sweeping new health-care mandate that requires employers to purchase contraception, including abortion-producing drugs, and sterilization coverage for their employees.”

In 2017, when President Trump signed a bill that would deny states the right to use Title X funds to enable abortion providers, Donnelly voted against it.

In August 2015, Donnelly voted against funding Planned Parenthood, but literally four months later he voted to fund it. In 2018, he once again voted to have the taxpayers fund this abortion-clinic behemoth.

On gay marriage, Donnelly went through a similar “evolution.” He was initially opposed to it, which is why the Human Rights Campaign, a prominent gay organization, gave him a score of only 30% when he was  in the House. But when he got to the Senate, this homosexual entity was so delighted with him that they gave him a score of 85%.

In 2013, the USCCB issued a statement opposing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The bill, which was promoted as a way to protect homosexuals from being discriminated against in the workplace, was much more than that. “The bill does not distinguish,” the bishops said, “between sexual inclination and sexual conduct.”  The bishops also criticized the bill for inadequate religious-liberty protections. Donnelly voted for it.

A year later, after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its “Hobby Lobby” ruling—it protected the religious rights of private business owners—the Democrats sought to undo it. Bishop Timothy L. Doherty of the Lafayette Diocese was none too happy with Donnelly. “Two weeks after they pleaded with Congress to maintain our religious freedom, a majority of the Senate—including our own Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana—voted to move forward with legislation to take that freedom away.”

In 2015, Donnelly fought against an Indiana bill that would safeguard religious liberty. The bill, which was modeled after the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act, had already been adopted by thirty states. More important, allegations that it would lead to discrimination against homosexuals were unfounded. The evidence showed that these laws did not engender a single act of discrimination against any American.

In Donnelly’s last term in the Senate, he voted against a school choice measure that would have allowed families to use 529 account funds to help pay for private and secondary education, including homeschooling. Thus did he stand fast against the bishops in their support for school choice initiatives that would assist Catholic schools.

Joe Donnelly started out as a Catholic official who was mostly in line with the policy prescriptions of the Catholic Church. But he ended his career in government as a foe of the Church’s moral teachings. Now he wants to represent the U.S. at the Vatican.

There is a reason why Donnelly was co-chair of Catholics for Biden. Like our “devout Catholic” president, he turned rogue.

 

This week’s Faith On Trial program

Tom Brejcha

Iowa Catholic Radio|10/14/2021

Guest: Tom Brejcha, president and chief counsel, 

Thomas More Society

Topic: The case of David Daleiden, the independent journalist who exposed the Planned Parenthood aborted baby parts scandal and has faced numerous lawsuits since; and the expanded conflicts of interest by the federal district judge who handled one of the civil cases.

https://www.iowacatholicradio.com/faith/episode/34d42d18/the-case-of-david-daleiden-101421

Faith On Trial is broadcast every Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Iowa Catholic Radio 1150 AM & 94.5 FM; 90.9 FM Creston; 88.5 Adel, and streaming on IowaCathlicRadio.com.

Happy Columbus Day and Italian Heritage Month!

 

Forced speech is "free" speech?

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – Okay, how can it be that forced speech is free speech, or even that suppressed speech is also free speech? Well, that’s the brainchild of Judge Mary Briscoe, a Clinton appointee to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now being airmailed to the United States Supreme Court.

The case comes from Colorado and arises out of the state’s public accommodation law, the same one that the state Civil Rights Commission used to try to punish Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding. This one has similar issues except it involves wedding promotional videos.
Lorie Smith is a web designer and graphic artist who works out of her own studio, 303 Creative. Smith, the sole owner of 303 Creative, sincerely believes that same-sex marriage conflicts with God’s law and as such violates her deeply held Christian beliefs. As a result she will not offer her services to create wedding websites to celebrate those weddings.

In addition, she plans to publish a statement on her website explaining her religious objections and her policy against “creating websites promoting and celebrating ideas or messages that violate my beliefs.”

Colorado’s law, however, prohibits discrimination in two areas of concern for Ms. Smith:
First is what is referred to as the Accommodation Clause: “It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person…to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services . . . or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.”

And a companion provision forbids any public notice “that indicates that the full and equal enjoyment of goods, services…or accommodations…will be refused, withheld or denied,” referred to as the Communication Clause.

Thus before she went public with her plans, she filed a pre-enforcement action against the state seeking to adjudicate her rights and to prevent the state from enforcing either clause of the public accommodation law against her.

She lost in the district court and on appeal the two Clinton appointed justices, Mary Briscoe and Michael Murphy, ruled against her while the Bush-appointed Timothy Tymkovich, serving as chief judge, penned a fiery dissent.

The court’s majority decision starts off well enough for Smith clearly rejecting the state’s arguments that she lacks standing or an injury; the court found that she has a reasonable basis for concluding that if she moves ahead with her plans she will be prosecuted.

It wrote that while Smith’s goal may be to only discriminate against same-sex marriage, it is actually discrimination against same-sex couples and would expose her to liability under the state law, noting that the law, while providing some exceptions, did not provide a religious exception.

Turning to the question of Smith’s free speech rights, the court did recognize her argument that the creation of wedding websites is pure speech and cited several cases where wedding videos and invitations have been held as speech. And it recognized that the First Amendment has protections against compelled speech and that those protections apply to unsophisticated expressions as well as those by professional publishers.

But then it turned to a key question. In order to show that such a restriction is legal and meets the constitutional test of strict scrutiny, the government must show a compelling interest for the statute to survive constitutionally. “Here, Colorado has a compelling interest in protecting both the dignity interest of members of marginalized groups and their material interests in accessing the commercial marketplace.”

“The Accommodation Clause is, however, narrowly tailored to Colorado’s interest in ensuring ‘equal access to publicly available goods and services.’ When regulating commercial entities, like Appellants, public accommodations laws help ensure a free and open economy. Thus, although the commercial nature of Appellants’ business does not diminish their speech interest, it does provide Colorado with a state interest absent when regulating noncommercial activity . . . recognizing the changing nature of the American economy and of the importance, both to the individual and to society, of removing the barriers to economic advancement and political and social integration that have historically plagued certain disadvantaged groups.”

The court then compared Smith’s services to a monopoly in upholding the Accommodation Clause restrictions in the Colorado law:

“Excepting Appellants from the Accommodation Clause would necessarily relegate LGBT consumers to an inferior market because Appellants’ unique services are, by definition, unavailable elsewhere…our analysis emphasizes the custom and unique nature of Appellants’ services….LGBT consumers may be able to obtain wedding-website design services from other businesses; yet, LGBT consumers will never be able to obtain wedding-related services of the same quality and nature as those that Appellants offer. Thus, there are no less intrusive means of providing equal access to those types of services.”

Then turning to the Communication Clause the court held that the First Amendment does not protect the statement Smith wants to place on her website explaining her belief in traditional marriage and the reasons why she would refuse work for same-sex weddings.

The court wrote, “Having concluded that the First Amendment does not protect Appellants’ proposed denial of services, we also conclude that the First Amendment does not protect the Proposed Statement. Yet, the Proposed Statement also expresses an intent to deny service based on sexual orientation — an activity that the Accommodation Clause forbids and that the First Amendment does not protect. Thus, the Proposed Statement itself is also not protected and Appellants’ challenge to the Communication Clause fails.”

The dissent pounced: “The majority takes the remarkable — and novel — stance that the government may force Ms. Smith to produce messages that violate her conscience. In doing so, the majority concludes not only that Colorado has a compelling interest in forcing Ms. Smith to speak a government-approved message against her religious beliefs, but also that its public-accommodation law is the least restrictive means of accomplishing this goal. No case has ever gone so far. . . .

“Indeed, this case represents another chapter in the growing disconnect between the Constitution’s endorsement of pluralism of belief on the one hand and anti-discrimination laws’ restrictions of religious-based speech in the marketplace.

“It seems we have moved from ‘live and let live’ to ‘you can’t say that.’ While everyone supports robust and vigorously enforced anti-discrimination laws, those laws need not and should not force a citizen to make a Hobson’s choice over matters of conscience. . . . But what Colorado cannot do is turn the tables on Ms. Smith and single out her speech and religious beliefs for discriminatory treatment under the aegis of anti-discrimination laws.

“The First Amendment prohibits states from ‘abridging the freedom of speech’ or the ‘free exercise’ of religion. And the freedom to speak necessarily guarantees the right to remain silent. So the majority ushers forth a brave new world when it acknowledges that [the state law] compels both speech and silence — yet finds this intrusion constitutionally permissible. [It] forces Ms. Smith to violate her faith on pain of sanction both by prohibiting religious-based business practices and by penalizing her if she does speak out on these matters in ways Colorado finds ‘unwelcome’ or ‘undesirable’.”

The appellate court made “a very disturbing decision that what Lorie does is custom art and is speech that should be given the highest protection under our Constitution and yet the Tenth Circuit held that Colorado can force her to create messages that violate her beliefs,” ADF senior counsel Kate Anderson told my radio audience.

“What they are trying to force her to do is to violate her religious beliefs by promoting a view of marriage that is not in accord with her beliefs then telling her she cannot promote her view of marriage on her own website,” she added.

Now, on to the Supreme Court.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)

 

Louisiana Hospital Fines Employees For Having Unvaccinated Spouses

Louisiana Hospital Fines Employees For Having Unvaccinated Spouses: After enforcing a job-threatening vaccine mandate on its employees, Oschner Health will now charge employees with unvaccinated spouses up to $2,400 a year.

And It Doesn’t Ever Let Up

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – There is an old saying, “If at first you do not succeed, try, try again.” That now seems to be the mantra for the crazy anti-religious zealots who populate blue state administrative agencies.

About a year ago a Federal District Court in New York granted a request for a preliminary injunction against the state commissioner for the Office of Children and Families (OCFS) in favor of a Christian adoption agency, New Hope Family Services.

New Hope’s lawsuit was provoked by a rule promulgated by OCFS which prohibited “discrimination and harassment against applicants for adoption services on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, religion, or disability.” Ultimately, OCFS sought to terminate New Hope’s authority to serve as an adoption agency because its religious beliefs would not allow it to place children in the homes of same-sex, unmarried, or transgendered couples.

OCFS appealed the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals which sided with New Hope, finding that “the adoption provider’s arguments demonstrate that the government’s regulation may not have been neutral and may instead have been ‘informed by hostility toward certain religious beliefs’.”

Good for them, you might say. But hold on, the unreligious bureaucrats who run the administrative agencies in New York have tried another bite at the apple. Now the state Division of Human Rights is threatening New Hope for the same thing, apparently believing that what might be unlawful for OCFS is perfectly fine if it comes from a different agency. On behalf of New Hope, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has filed a new legal challenge to the current threats, so New Hope is back rehashing the same legal ground as before, only with a different arm of the state than the last go-around.

Not unexpectedly, New Hope’s new lawsuit sound a lot like the pleadings that went to the Second Circuit before.

But there is something new this time. Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case eerily similar to New Hope’s, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, ruled unanimously that the city could not discriminate against a faith-based foster care and adoption agency.

You have to wonder if the New York power system is so anti-religion, or just so overly stupid, to try to bully New Hope again. It just goes to demonstrate how the new “progressive” administrative agencies can use their powers in an attempt to just inflict damage on those with whom they disagree.

But the anti-religion sentiment is not limited to New York. The state of Vermont is doing the same thing.

Under state law, if a child lives in an area which is not served by a high school, the school district is to pay tuition to a school of the parents’ choice — even if that school is out of state. One such school district decided it would not pay the tuition for students wishing to attend a religious school.

Well, maybe. As it turned out the schools under consideration were to be rated according to how religious they were. The more so, the less likely they would be approved; thus a school religious in name only would be approved but one that taught religious principles would not. Confusing? Sure was, but the one thing easy to understand was that the state was evaluating these schools by measuring their religiousness.

So there was another lawsuit and it also found its way to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals which, citing numerous Supreme Court cases, ruled against the school district. There is now a preliminary injunction preventing the state to consider the religiousness of the schools.

So, the good guys win again? Well, not so fast. The key to the state is that the injunction against it is “preliminary” and if only the state waits until it expires they can try it all over again. Or so they think. The ADF also represents the plaintiffs here and it has already filed another suit to protect what we thought had already been protected.

There’s a time when you should know enough to throw in the towel and give up, but religious bigots don’t use common sense, as a result everything from the first case will need to be replayed simply to get the same result.

Where do these guys come from?

Of course they’re all over the place. Remember Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Colorado. He was cited by the state for violating its public accommodations laws for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. He was dragged through the state courts, losing all the way. That is until the Supreme Court got ahold of the case and vindicated Phillips’ religious conscience rights by refusing to bake the cake.

He’s now going through the entire process again. This time the issue is not a wedding cake but a gender transition cake, a custom pink and blue cake to reflect the client’s transition from one sex to another. Now, knowing that Mr. Phillips will fight this to the bitter end again, and he’s got a very good chance of prevailing on the merits again, why would someone pick a fight with him again?

It’s simple, and ADF attorney Jake Warner summed it up best:

“In this case, an activist attorney demanded that Jack Phillips create custom cakes in order to test Jack and to ‘correct the errors’ of his thinking, and the attorney even threatened to sue Jack again if the case is dismissed for any reason. This case and others like it represent a disturbing trend: Activists are weaponizing the legal system to ruin those who simply disagree with them. Someone you disagree with might be the one targeted today, but when political winds shift, it could just as easily be you or anyone else tomorrow.”

A similar issue is at play in Alaska, which I pointed out before. In Anchorage, the Downtown Hope Center is a shelter for battered and abused women who need a safe place. In 2018 an inebriated and injured man appeared for shelter and the Hope Center referred him to a nearby hospital and even paid for his cab fare there. The man later filed a complaint with the city’s equal rights commission for not allowing him to sleep with homeless women, many of whom had been abused.

The city decided to pursue the matter and ADF again filed suit to protect the Hope Center. After a temporary order against the city, the city agreed to drop the suit and the parties agreed to make the temporary order permanent.

Later the city ordinance under question was amended in an attempt to find a new way to punish the Hope Center. Now they’re all back in court re-litigating the same issue: Should a man be able to take refuge in a battered woman’s shelter?

And remember the Little Sisters of the Poor? How many times were they dragged into court only to have the Supreme Court vindicate them against the bigots who tried to destroy them?

You can’t make this stuff up. Pray! It may be the only answer to such human hate and stupidity.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)

Madness In The Schools

By Bill Donohue, Catholic League president: 

The new school year is off to a wild start. Perversion, anti-Americanism, and racism are being taught in some schools, and it's happening at all levels, from K-graduate school. Those pushing this sick agenda are imbued with hate: their animus is clearly directed at Western civilization, the very home to liberty and equality they have targeted for assault. 

In one Minnesota school district, a sex education class asks heterosexual students to engage in role playing, pretending they are homosexual; they are also asked to consider whether they should have sex with each other. Other students in the Richfield School District are asked to pretend that they belong to the opposite sex, and to consider whether they should have sex with a woman. In a gesture toward inclusivity, they are taught about anal sex. This begins in kindergarten. 

In a more sane time, the educators would be arrested for child abuse. 

Fairfax High School in Virginia was the site of a recent school board blowup. One of the parents, Stacy Langton, complained that the school library housed porn books that discussed man-boy sex; they also featured illustrations of oral sex, masturbation and "violent nudity." 

She also read aloud obscene words from the books about the male sex organ and fellatio, only to be interrupted by a female school board member who was worried—now she was worried!—that children in the room might hear what was being said. Langton was not deterred and kept on talking. 

In a more sane time, the school would be sued for corrupting the morals of minors. 

Alexander Hamilton High School in Los Angeles started the year with a deranged teacher who took down the American flag from the classroom. Inserted in its place were a Palestinian flag, the transgender flag, a Black Lives Matter flag and "the modern PRIDE flag." Hanging from the wall were posters saying, "F*** THE POLICE" and "F*** AMERIKKKA. THIS IS NATIVE LAND." 

In a more sane time, the teacher would have been terminated. 

The public school system in Evanston, Illinois started the academic year with a pending lawsuit against it. The officials who run it are teaching children about the horrors of being a white person. That's just for starters. They are teaching third, fourth, and fifth graders that "it is important to disrupt the Western nuclear family dynamics as the best/proper way to have a family." They explicitly denounce as "normal" the family that consists of "mom, dad, son, daughter, and pet." 

So what family form should we emulate? Dysfunctional ones? Of course, in the racist mindset of these anti-Western civilization maniacs, there is no such things as "dysfunctional" families—they are simply "alternative families." 

In a more sane society, the school system would be branded as racist and the administrators would be quarantined. 

It's not just in the elementary and secondary schools where insanity reigns. Columbia University has a new program where students are implored to "critically engage with whiteness." They specifically target white students who claim to be "liberal, progressive, and a champion of social justice." Looks like conservative students are written off as hopeless, and are therefore exempt from these thought control exercises. 

American University and Western Washington University have decided to follow the lead of schools like Stanford University by introducing segregated housing for black students. "Black Affinity Housing" is what these dorms are being called. George Wallace must be smiling from his grave. And a professor from Virginia Tech recently told students that she was working "on a daily basis to be antiracist and confront the innate racism" within herself, which, she said, was the "reality and history of white people." 

In a more sane society, the segregationists and the confessed white racist would be arrested for violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

Pope Benedict XVI warned us many times about the attacks on our Judeo-Christian heritage. His only mistake was in underestimating the extent to which educational elites have literally gone off the deep end. 

In a more sane society, the elites would be straightjacketed and taken to the nearest asylum. If they were lucky, that is.

Faith On Trial, Thursday September 30, 2021

Deacon Mike and Gina Noll visit with Kate Anderson, senior counsel with the Alliance Defending

Freedom, on the case of 303 Creative LLC and Lorie Smith v. Elenis and how the case of Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop might impact it.

https://www.iowacatholicradio.com/faith/episode/43f2cebb/303-creative-llc-and-lorie-smith-v-elenis-93021

Faith On Trial airs every Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Iowa Catholic Radio which can be heard locally on 1150 AM & 94.5 FM Des Moines; 90.0 FM Creston, and 88.5 FM Adel, and streams live on IowaCatholicRadio.com. 

Wyoming MassResistance Activists Stop Public Library’s “Transgender Magic Show for Kids” Event Before It Starts | The Stream

Wyoming MassResistance Activists Stop Public Library’s “Transgender Magic Show for Kids” Event Before It Starts | The Stream: Even in conservative northeast Wyoming, LGBT activists are aggressive in their efforts to proselytize children — and vicious towards anyone who opposes them.

Judge Who Made David Daleiden Pay Millions for Exposing Planned Parenthood Caught Breaking the Law - LifeNews.com

Judge Who Made David Daleiden Pay Millions for Exposing Planned Parenthood Caught Breaking the Law - LifeNews.com: A federal judge who fined undercover journalist David Daleiden $16 million for exposing Planned Parenthood’s aborted baby body parts trade is facing accusations of illegal and unethical financial connections to a party in one of his cases. The Wall Street Journal identified U.S. District Judge William Orrick, of California, as one of 131 federal judges who broke the […]

Thursday (9-30) on Faith On Trial: How far can the government go to force or suppress speech?

Kate Anderson

This week’s guest: Kate Anderson senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where she is the director of the Center for Parental Rights. Since joining ADF in 2015, Anderson has focused on protecting the conscience rights of individuals being unjustly compelled to forfeit their beliefs under threat of government retaliation, heavy fines, or other punishment. We will discuss the case 303 Creative v. Elenis which has just been appealed to the Supreme Court to decide if the government can force a web designer to create messages that violate her core beliefs.

See post below: Friday September 24, 303 Creative v. Elenis 

Join Kate, Deacon Mike and Gina this Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Iowa Catholic Radio: Des Moines 1150 AM; 94.5 FM; FM 88.5 Adel or 90.9 Creston, or streaming on IowaCatholicRadio.com.

Mr. Biden’s Magic Elixir

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – If you are a Catholic student at the University of Massachusetts and expect a conscience exemption to the COVID vaccine mandate, think again. A university official has ruled that no Catholic student is eligible for the exemption.

It seems that the vice chancellor of student affairs, Shawn DeVeau, who has a long history in school administration, but no known background in theology, made the ruling after a study of the Church’s teachings. He explained his methodology thusly:

“When reviewing students’ appeals, I engage in a holistic process: I review the student’s request, research the faith tradition on which they are basing their request, and respond to the students based on my research. . . . My process for reviewing appeals is to engage in an interactive process to discuss the student’s specific circumstances and determine if the exemption is based on a sincerely held religious belief” (emphasis mine).

In denying the student appeals, he quoted two statements from the USCCB stating that the vaccines can be morally justified. Apparently he forgot to check the statement of Archbishop Joseph Naumann of Kansas City, Kans., and chairman of the USCCB Committee on Pro-Life Activities, whom we quoted recently as stating that while it is prudent for people to get vaccinated, some “could reasonably choose” to reject the abortion-tainted vaccination to give “prophetic witness” against abortion; and he condemned those who would require vaccination as a predicate for holding or keeping their jobs.

“A society that fails to respect the rights of conscience lacks a key element of the common good,” the archbishop wrote. “The most charitable and just posture is to seek to accommodate the consciences of all persons.”

Of course Mr. DeVeau might have been too busy with his duties to have seen that. He also missed the legal point: conscience objections are not limited to a specific religious belief but a sincerely held belief irrespective of the religious status — or even non-status — of the individual.

But have no fear if you are a mandate proponent. The administration will be monitoring whether those claiming to be exempt from Mr. Biden’s mandate are “not abusing” the system.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that the administration would be keeping tabs on those businesses and workers claiming exemptions. He told CNN’s State of the Union program that “we’ve got to be vigilant there and make sure that people are using them in the spirit that they’re intended and not abusing them or asking for exemptions when they don’t apply. That’s an area that we continue to monitor in the days and weeks ahead.”

But none of this allows for any discussion of the merits of the mandate that doesn’t seem to fit in with the “one-size-fits-all” policy of the administration’s White House medical regime which, to date, has not even recognized the concept of natural immunity to the virus, nor with the spade of unexpected problems with the vaccine. And that dynamic is playing out in places where it has worked to the disadvantage of far too many citizens.

For example, in Lowville, N.Y., the Lewis County Health System says that since some nurses are refusing to take the vaccine, the hospital will have to close its maternity ward. In New York all healthcare workers are required to get the vaccine. According to the hospital administrator, 165 of the 464 hospital employees have refused to get it and 30 have resigned over the mandate.

In Texas, the CEO of the Brownfield Regional Medical Center said that 20 to 25 percent of his staff will leave due to Mr. Biden’s mandate that stipulates that healthcare workers in facilities that receive Medicaid or Medicare funds will have to get the vaccine. Losing those workers, he said, would likely cause his hospital to shut down.

Researchers and others are reporting on many unexpected negative implications with the vaccine. One, among many, involves the negative impact on breastfeeding mothers and their children.

According to LifeSiteNews, the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reports that a six-week-old baby died from blood clots and “severe inflammation of [his] arteries” after the child’s breastfeeding mother received Pfizer’s vaccine.

“The mother had received her first dose on June 4, and her baby started experiencing a high fever shortly thereafter [and]…passed away on July 17.” According to the VAERS report, the mother wondered if “the spike protein could have gone through the breast milk and caused an inflammatory response in [her] child,” as the six-week-old was healthy prior to the injection.

But, worry not, your concerns over the vaccine can be ameliorated if you can do just one thing: Cross our southern border. True! Just look at this exchange between Fox News’ Peter Doocy and the White House’s chief propaganda minister, Jen Psaki:

Doocy: “Why is it that you’re trying to require anybody with a job or anybody who goes to school to get the COVID-19 vaccine, but you’re not requiring that of migrants that continue walking across the southern border into the country?”

Propaganda Minister Psaki: “Well, look, our objective is to get as many people vaccinated across the country as humanly possible. And so the [mandate is] an effort to empower businesses, to give businesses the tools to protect their workforces. That’s exactly what we did. But certainly we want everybody to get vaccinated.”

Doocy: “But it’s a requirement for people at a business with more than 100 people, but it’s not a requirement for migrants at the southern border.”

Propaganda Minister Psaki: “That’s correct.”

With that huge loophole in the system, why is it so important to risk side-effects and the loss of jobs and even risk the closing of hospitals and other businesses to try to vaccinate nearly everybody else? Yet the administration and its allies apparently will try to do everything to eliminate conscience and medical objections to the vaccine including attempts to ostracize the unvaxed.

Recently, former Obama Secretary for Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was part of the pile-on, suggesting that if you are unvaccinated you should not be able to work, roam freely, or have access to children. She, like several other prominent pro-mandate observers, hinted that the unvaccinated are responsible for COVID deaths.

And some courts are even jumping into the fray. In Illinois, a judge during a routine child support hearing stripped a mother of all parenting time when she said she had not been vaccinated. The judge later withdrew the order but the father’s attorney is asking that it be reimposed.

In an Ohio court, getting the jab was a requirement for probation. In Georgia some judges are making the jab a condition of reduced sentencing, in Louisiana it will reduce community service time.

In an adjacent matter, the Federation of State Medical Boards said that physicians who spread COVID vaccine misinformation risk disciplinary action by state medical boards, including loss of their medical licenses. The American Board of Emergency Medicine made a similar announcement. Neither organization defined “misinformation,” but you can be sure it means disagreeing with Mr. Biden.

And disagreeing with Mr. Biden’s ideas about his fix-all elixir is apparently the touchstone for all that may follow. He says it’s not about freedom but public health and safety. Always the argument, it’s about safety. But, of course, if it was, they’d close the southern border, study the effects of natural immunity and those of possible therapeutics. Since they’re not doing that this must be about something else.

Go figure!

As Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday at 10 a.m. CT on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)

303 Creative v. Elenis

Web designer asks US Supreme Court to reverse ‘Orwellian’ decision forcing her to express messages against her beliefs Dissenting judge called decision ‘unprecedented,’ ‘staggering’ in scope for giving officials more authority to regulate speech as it becomes more expressive.

 

Biden's Pro-Abortion Bill Is Off-The-Charts

By Bill Donohue, Catholic League president

"The Administration strongly supports House passage of H.R. 3755, the Women's Health Protection Act of 2021." That is the statement released by the White House on September 20. In actual fact, the proposed law has nothing to do with women's health—it is a pro-abortion bill.

This is true notwithstanding the bill's contention that "Abortion is essential health care and one of the safest medical procedures in the United States." Essential health care would be things like heart surgery and treatment for Covid, not elective abortion. And it is fatuous to say that it is safe. Safe for whom?

The bill maintains that abortion restrictions are "a tool of gender oppression." If this were true, why were America's first feminists staunch opponents of abortion? In 1858, Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke about "the murder of children, either before or after birth." She branded it "evil." Similarly, Susan B. Anthony called abortion "child murder" and "infanticide."

So if the first feminists were strongly opposed to abortion—they said it was analogous to treating women as property—when did abortion restrictions become "a tool of gender oppression"? In the 1960s.

That was when two men, Lawrence Lader and Dr. Bernard Nathanson (who later became a Catholic and a pro-life activist), convinced feminists such as Betty Friedan that abortion should be seen as an example of women's liberation. In other words, it took the boys to teach the girls about their own "emancipation."

As for this bill, it is anything but "women friendly." To be explicit, it would abolish the requirement that abortion can only be performed by a physician, thus allowing mid-wives, nurses and doctor's assistants to do the job. The bill also eliminates health and safety regulations that are specific to abortion facilities.

Now ask yourself this: If a bill were passed that would allow dental hygienists to pull your tooth, and that it could be done in a facility without customary health and safety regulations, would anyone in his right mind consider this to be progress?

Iterations of this bill have been introduced every year since 2013, but it wasn't until this year that dramatically new language was introduced. The neologisms are emblematic of the wild-eyed activists who work in the White House.

For example, the bill talks about "reproductive justice" and the necessity of opposing "restrictions on reproductive health, including abortion, that perpetuate systems of oppression, lack of bodily autonomy, white supremacy, and anti-Black racism."

This is the mindset of those who are positively obsessed with race, the kind of people who find discussions about chocolate and vanilla to have racial undertones. Just as some who were obsessed about communism in the 1950s found communism under every pillow, those who work in the Biden administration find racism under every blanket.

The bill insists that "Access to equitable reproductive health care, including abortion, has always been deficient" for blacks and other minorities. In actual fact, thanks to Planned Parenthood, this is a lie: access to abortion services have been fantastic for blacks.

Planned Parenthood erects 86 percent of its abortion facilities in or near minority neighborhoods in the 25 counties with the most abortions. Although these 25 counties make up just 1 percent of all U.S. counties, they accounted for 30 percent of all the abortions in the U.S. in 2014. 

Is it any surprise that although blacks comprise roughly 13 percent of the population, they account for at least a third of all the abortions? It is therefore dishonest to claim that they lack access to abortion mills.

Another novelty found in this bill is the linguistic game of pretending that males and females can change their sex. For example, it says that abortion services "are used primarily by women (my italic)." This is factually wrong. Only women can get pregnant and only women can abort their child. A man can identify as a woman (or as a gorilla for that matter), but he can never get pregnant.

Similarly, the geniuses who wrote this bill make more than two dozen references to "pregnant people"; this is roughly twice as often as they speak of "pregnant women." Now if a man can get pregnant, in what orifice does his baby exit? His ear?

If this isn't nutty enough, the bill's authors add that it is their intention "to protect all people with the capacity of becoming pregnant—cisgender women [meaning real women] transgender men [meaning delusional women who think they are a man], non-binary individuals [there is no such breed], those who identify with a different gender [the mentally challenged], and others." Who the "others" are remains a mystery.

Catholics need to take note. Though this "off-the-charts" bill is not likely to pass, it is the expressed desire of our "devout Catholic" president that it should. Biden can carry his rosary to the moon and back, but all that matters are his values and his policies, and in many instances they are anything but Catholic.

  

Oh, It’s Only Abortion!

By Deacon Mike Manno

(The Wanderer) – Yeah, you heard it right. Abortion, the wanton killing of a preborn child, is back big time in the news. But as controversial as the topic is, I’ve noticed that more and more folks, including leading Catholic laymen and prelates, trying to brush the issue aside as if it is as normal as taking your dog for a walk.

After all, it is health care.

Even our devout Catholic president — or whoever is pulling his strings — has become a champion of its expansion: abortion everywhere, anytime, and for any reason. And of course if you are trying to limit it, well, you might as well be considered a neo-Nazi, or a skinhead, or — even worse — a white Christian Taliban who needs to be investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for crimes against women.

And, of course, the DOJ has announced that it will do just that in Texas, in case any other uppity states might wish to save babies. Remember, it is healthcare. Healthcare for pregnant “persons.”

After all it’s only abortion, a right that should be respected for all. It is, they say, reproductive health care and women (except female fetuses) need it so they can live a life unencumbered by the cares of child-raising. You see, this is truly health care.

But not so fast. What kind of health care is it that starts with two patients, kills one and, regrettably, sometimes maims or even kills the other?

Consider a recent report by the Charlotte Lozier Institute which found that in 2019 that some 11 percent of the abortions in Wisconsin resulted in complications, including 621 cases where body parts of the aborted children remained in the woman’s body after the procedure, up over 750 percent from the year before.

Other complications included 54 cervical lacerations, five instances of hemorrhaging, four uterine perforations, and three infections, the report found.

Wow, that’s some healthcare Badger women, er, pregnant persons, received! Is that why we need more of it?

“These figures out of Wisconsin are devastating and an indictment of the lack of care for women, especially by the abortion industry and its advocates, who refuse to tell the truth about the risks of abortion,” according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute.

“Chemical abortion is rapidly becoming more common than surgical abortion around the world, despite being four times more likely to result in complications than surgical abortion.”

But abortion advocates are fighting back. Joe the Devout’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, is now going to bat for the baby-killers by suing the state of Texas over its most recent legislation restricting abortion after six weeks into the pregnancy by giving private citizens the right to sue on behalf of the unwanted baby.

And, coming to their aid, the Satanic Temple is now arguing that curbing abortion violates the religious freedom of Satanists. According to the Satanic abortion promoters, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act requires access to abortion-inducing drugs and the Texas law “imposes an undue burden on the ability of [their] members to undergo the Satanic Abortion Ritual” within the first 24 weeks of pregnancy.

“I am sure Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton — who famously spends a good deal of his time composing press releases about religious liberty issues in other states — will be proud to see that Texas’ robust religious liberty laws, which he so vociferously champions, will prevent future Abortion Rituals from being interrupted by superfluous government restrictions meant only to shame and harass those seeking an abortion,” Satanic Temple spokesperson Lucien Greaves said in a statement.

What a great group of compadres this makes. I am so proud of the company Mr. Biden keeps.

Oh, and by the way, the city of Portland — you remember Portland, a fine city before Mayor Ted Wheeler and the city council turned it into a dumpster fire. Well it has announced that it is supporting the right of pregnant persons in Texas by stopping the purchase of all goods and services from Texas and banning all city employee business travel to the state. That will show ’em!

Plus it will give the city time to clean up the approximately $22+ million in damages and lost business revenue from the 30 riots and 62 fires from last year’s attempt to provide a home for Antifa.

And if support from the Satanic Temple, Merrick Garland, Joe Biden’s merry abortionists, and the brilliant and enlightened city fathers of Portland isn’t enough to encourage more baby killing, the web hosting service, GoDaddy, has announced it is canceling a Texas pro-life website.

Maybe this is truly health care. All you potential pregnant persons rejoice, Joe’s got your back.

+++++

And as if things aren’t topsy-turvy enough, Alaska Airlines has reportedly fired two flight attendants for asking questions on the company’s internal communication website. It appears that Alaska Airlines announced its support for the Equality Act on its internal employee forum and solicited comments and questions.

In case you have forgotten, the Equality Act would force employers and workers to — among other things — conform to new sexual norms; force hospitals, insurers, and medical providers to provide therapies against their moral objections; normalizing hormonal and surgical interventions for gender dysphoria in children; open sex specific facilities to members of the opposite sex, and create havoc for faith-based institutions over its support for the transgender and homosexual relationships.

The employees posted questions about the morality of some of the Act’s provisions. One of the attendants asked: “Does Alaska support: endangering the Church, encouraging suppression of religious freedom, obliterating women rights and parental rights?”

They were both fired, the Airlines telling them, “Defining gender identity or sexual orientation as a moral issue…is…a discriminatory statement.”

On behalf of the employees, First Liberty Institute has filed separate charges of discrimination against the Airlines with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission.

 (You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com and listen to him every Thursday mornings at 10 a.m. CT on Faith On Trial on IowaCatholicRadio.com.)