Many Christians are feeling frustrated with the Biden administration. A recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal points to how Joe Biden’s flip-flop on refugees is frustrating evangelicals who foolishly voted for him last November. As the Journal contributor noted, they have a reason to feel betrayed.
Believers who care about values, life, and religious liberty continue to find that the new administration has let them down time and time again. While Biden may attend Mass regularly, many of his policy positions raise questions of how diligently he practices his Catholic faith outside the four walls of his church.
The Journal op-ed, written by Sheila Joiner of Fort Worth, Texas, said she voted for Biden in large part because of his promise to restore the refugee resettlement program. Last fall Biden pledged to raise the annual cap on refugees to 125,000, a move that in Joiner’s words “sold” her on his candidacy.
But in the space of a few hours last Friday, the Biden administration went through a very public flip-flop on the issue. First, the administration claimed it would not raise the current year’s refugee cap of 15,000, violating candidate Biden’s own promise. Then, after a public outcry from the left, the White House said it could lift the cap on admissions eventually, but believed that time would limit the number of refugees it could admit between now and the September 30 end of the fiscal year.
On top of the betrayal many pro-Biden evangelicals feel over the refugee fiasco, the White House’s egregious actions on human life and religious liberty add insult to injury for all those of Christian faith.
On Friday, the National Institutes of Health announced it would reverse the Trump administration’s ban on fetal tissue research. That development came mere days after documents from Judicial Watch highlighted the ways officials at the Food and Drug Administration trafficked in aborted baby parts — until the Trump administration’s ban on fetal tissue research ended the practice. Now the Biden administration wants to reinstate this grotesque trade in the name of “science.”
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) began the process of removing pro-life protections for the Title X program. HHS, now headed by pro-abortion Secretary Xavier Becerra, would allow Title X grantees receiving federal funding to refer patients for abortion, thus allowing Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider who endorsed Biden for president, to resume receiving federal taxpayer dollars.
But wait, there’s more. As part of last month’s purported “COVID relief” package, Congress greenlighted a massive expansion of taxpayer subsidies for plans that cover abortion. The $34.2 billion in increased subsidies for Obamacare plans that Democrats want to make permanent contain “restrictions” on funding of insurance plans covering abortion that the pro-life community has derided as a sham accounting gimmick. Also, the $35.1 billion in spending on subsidized COBRA coverage include no restrictions on insurance plans covering abortion.
To top it off, we are currently witnessing a record number of illegal crossings at the border, leading to an overflow of unaccompanied children packed on top of each other in detention facilities – a practice that was decried by evangelicals under the Trump administration. Despite vowing to shut down those exact detention facilities, Biden has instead reversed several Trump administration immigration policies that worked to curb human trafficking.
The damage to human life and religious liberty won’t just end there, of course. To win support from the far left during his campaign for the presidency, Biden had to reverse his decades-long support for the Hyde Amendment, meaning Democrats will now seek to repeal this pro-life protection to enable taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
Finally, Biden’s HHS, led by a man who supported shutting down churches during the coronavirus pandemic, will likely withdraw the conscience protections the Trump administration finalized in 2019, and which Becerra and other leftists challenged from the outset.
These moves, and unfortunately, many others yet to come, show the radical nature of the Biden presidency and its threat to individuals of faith, no matter their particular creed or denomination. Evangelicals like Joiner taken in by the avuncular Biden’s demeanor last year should not allow themselves to be fooled again.
Source: The Federalist
