If the Democrats Win, Say Goodbye to Faith-Based Hospitals

[U]nder a Democratic administration allied to Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the Little Sisters of the Poor will be compelled to provide contraceptives, some of which are abortifacients, to their employees. That, and nothing other than that, is what the Democratic platform promises. That is also the policy the Democratic candidate for president has said he would support. Does anyone doubt that his running mate (who seems to think the Knights of Columbus are a hate group because they espouse the understanding of marriage espoused by Barack Obama in 2008) disagrees?
—George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washington, D.C.’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies—

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Key point: If the Democrats win, America loses — probably permanently.

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On June 28, 1991, Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice of the United States Supreme Court, announced his retirement. President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill Marshall’s seat on the court on July 1. Abortion supporters fervently “opposed his nomination. Nonetheless, Thomas was confirmed by the Senate with a vote of 52–48, which was at the time the narrowest confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee in history.”

At the time he was nominated, Thomas was serving as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Prior to that, he had been the Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [EEOC]. After the Senate confirmation hearings had been completed “and while the full Senate was debating whether to give final approval to Thomas’s nomination, an FBI interview with Anita Hill [who had worked with Thomas at the EEOC] was leaked to the press.”

According to the article on Thomas at conservapedia.com, the leakage occurred in “flagrant violation” of the rules of the Senate: “Staff members for a sitting Democrat member of the Judiciary Committee “leaked a routine confidential FBI background report to Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio (NPR).” Hill had said Thomas was guilty of sexual harassment directed toward her. The hearings were reopened and Hill testified, but Thomas remained resolute about his innocence. His statements still are pertinent today, almost 30 years later. Joe Biden, who was then a US Senator and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, presided over the hearings.

The United States Senate, which was made up of a majority of Democrats at the time, went on to confirm Justice Thomas to serve on the Supreme Court. A total of eleven Democrats voted to confirm Thomas while two Republicans voted against confirmation. The final vote was 52 in favor, 48 against.

Not Your Parents’ or Grandparents’ Democrat Party

Today this wouldn’t happen. Significantly,

[i]n 1986, the year before Biden was lifted to chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Antonin Scalia had been approved 98-0 by the Senate. There weren’t really any Supreme Court confirmation battles before then.

A year later, in 1987, Robert Bork—who, Warren Burger, the former chief justice, claimed was one of the most qualified jurists he’d seen in 50 years—would be grossly caricatured by real-life sexual harasser Ted Kennedy, who warned that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”

That’s not to say the caustic opposition Democrats throw at Republican presidents and their allies with regard to their Supreme Court nominees is all Joe Biden’s fault. It’s the fault of the entire Democrat Party, of whom Joe Biden is a part. With extremely rare exceptions, Democrats vote together in lockstep fashion, or close to it. They would not, and will not, “cross the aisle” to vote in support of a Republican president. Consider the Kavanaugh nomination and hearings, where only one Democrat voted for confirmation of Trump’s nominee.

Today, the left is employing a new tactic — violence. Shortly after the country learned of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, September 18, activists unleashed their threats, including this one from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “If Mitch McConnell isn’t going to honor RBG’s final wish, we will. We will. And we have to.” What was her “final wish”? Reportedly, it was to be replaced only after “a new president is installed.” Tucker Carlson of Fox News is among several who seriously doubt this wish actually was expressed. Said Carlson, “I don’t think that people on their deathbeds are thinking about who’s president.”

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I don’t think that people on their deathbeds are thinking about who’s president.
—Tucker Carlson—

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Whether Ginsburg expressed this “dying wish” or not, the threats kept coming. Beau Willimon, president of the Writers Guild of America, tweeted, “We’re shutting this country down if Trump and McConnell try to ram through an appointment before the election.” And writer Laura Bassett declared: “If McConnell jams someone through, which he will, there will be riots.”

The truth is that the Democrat Party has become what it was well on the way to becoming in 1991 — a rabid, anti-God, anti-life (go here and here) anti-American values movement that isn’t interested in civility or winning people over with the substance of reasonable arguments. Journalist and columnist David Harsanyi writes, “For contemporary Democrats, the court exists primarily to safeguard the only constitutional ‘right’ that really matters to them anymore: abortion.”

Writing in The American Thinker, Trevor Thomas observes,

No one should be surprised that politicians who support the “right” to kill children in the womb, who championed the legal redefinition of marriage, and who now pretend we can no longer rely on science, or common sense, or even simply our eyes to tell us who is a male and who is a female, would display open animus against people whose faith tells them such positions are immoral, and who live according to the notion that there is such a thing as absolute truth.

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The Democrat Party is the party of leftism, and leftism is a religion that hates and opposes everything Christian.

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We must face it. The Democrat Party is the party of leftism, and leftism is a religion that hates and opposes everything Christian. Leftists are unhappy people who, when they lead, are tyrants under whom citizens groan.

Mark it down. Leftists don’t just oppose Christianity and Christian values in their minds or in civil discourse — they oppose them with their actions. We see this clearly in the Supreme Court case Bostock vs. Clayton County, where on June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the word sex in the civil rights law of 1963 not only outlaws discrimination based biological sex, but also outlaws it based on gender identity, a concept that was virtually unknown when the law was enacted. Disappointingly, Justice Neal Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, wrote the opinion for the majority. We recognize this; but given the political landscape and the realities that prevail, this cannot be a rational reason to abandon Trump and support the Democrats.

Declaring War on Decency, Compassion, Conscience, and Faith-Based Hospitals

With the Bostock decision, the court opened a nasty can of worms that will spread poison and kill American liberties unless and until this decision is overturned. One month and one day after the Bostock decision was released — on Thursday, July 16, 2020 — the ACLU filed suit against the St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland. Born a woman, 33-year old Jesse Hammons now identifies as a man and no longer wants her uterus. This uterus, by the way, is not diseased or deformed, but perfectly healthy. The hospital is a Catholic hospital; here are its Mission Statement and its Vision Statement, respectively.

UM [University of Maryland] St. Joseph Medical Center will be guided by our Catholic health care tradition of loving service and compassionate care. As an integral member of University of Maryland Medical System, we provide access to a full spectrum of health care services that improves the health of the communities we serve.

UM St. Joseph Medical Center, guided by our Catholic health care values, will be known for our ability to deliver the highest quality, innovative and coordinated care for the communities we serve.

The hospital declined to perform the scheduled surgery because doing so conflicted with its Catholic beliefs. In an article dated July 20 and titled “Left Comes for Religious Hospitals with Surgical Precision,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins issued an urgent warning.

The last thing anyone should want right now is fewer hospitals. And yet, that may very well be the outcome of lawsuits like this one. If people are worried about the health care system being overwhelmed today — just wait until liberals force the religiously-affiliated groups entirely out of business. Because that’s what’ll happen if the Left insists on forcing religious facilities to embrace their radical views. Catholic nonprofits have told the country before — in adoption and abortion debates — that choosing between their faith and ministry is no choice at all. [Here is one example.] They’d rather shut their doors than bend an inch on biblical teachings.

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If people are worried about the health care system being overwhelmed today — just wait until liberals force the religiously-affiliated groups entirely out of business. Because that’s what’ll happen if the Left insists on forcing religious facilities to embrace their radical views. 
—Tony Perkins—

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One is reminded that earlier this year, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, some New Yorkers were so overwrought about the moral and ethical beliefs of Samaritan’s Purse [SP] that they opposed the presence of the ministry’s field hospital in Central Park in New York City. Their opposition was unyielding, even if it meant that without the SP hospital, more New Yorkers would die of COVID-19.

Allow No Good Deed to Go Unpunished

As of 2016, there were 726 faith-based hospitals in the United States; and in 2020, a total of 6146 hospitals. These are not precise, completely up-to-date figures, but let’s assume they are close. Faith-based hospitals represent a whopping 12 percent of the total number of such facilities in America. Initially, twelve percent may not sound like much, but it is more than significant, especially if these facilities were removed from the healthcare landscape. Moreover, many faith-based hospitals aren’t small operations, either!

Do leftist activists, including those who have taken over the Democrat party, care about the likelihood that actions like the lawsuit I’ve just described will mean fewer hospitals and less healthcare for all? Apparently not. Joe Biden has said “there is no room for compromise” on transgender rights. Worries about religious liberty under a possible Biden Administration are compounded when one looks at Kamala Harris’s record. An article in First Things, a Catholic publication, warns about “Kamala Harris’s Threat to Religious Believers“:

Since presidential candidate Joe Biden selected Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate, some Catholics have rightly raised concerns about Harris’s hostility toward Catholicism and her animus for Catholics whose moral lives are informed by Church teaching. Coupled with Biden’s own antagonism toward Catholic moral theology, Harris’s nomination clouds rather than clarifies how a conscientious Catholic should (or can) vote in the upcoming presidential election.

But even more troubling is Harris’s perverse definition of religious exercise and the limits of religious liberty. And Biden, despite being a “devout Catholic,” seems to share Harris’s extremely limited understanding of the role of religious faith and practice in public life. For Biden, one can profess one’s faith publicly, but should not allow that faith to inform one’s policy positions. For Harris, to do so disqualifies one from public life. This is demonstrated by her tendentious misrepresentation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

The Ominous Implications of a Democrat-Controlled Congress

We’re not just talking here, however, about Biden and Harris, but about House and Senate Democrats as well. They are are salivating over the possibility that they will be able to push their radical agenda on the American people, and they are determined not to let anything stand in their way, including, as we are seeing with the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Constitution.

Democrats also are preparing to dispose of the tradition of civil debate among lawmakers. A long-standing rule in the United States Senate is the rule regarding the filibuster. In most cases, in order for the Senate to actually vote on a bill, a vote has to be taken to end debate. When 60 or more Senators vote to cut off debate, then “cloture” has been invoked and the measure itself is put up for a vote. This process ensures that bills that actually are considered have “a greater consensus” in the upper house of Congress, and, as a result, in Congress as a whole.

The sad reality is that Democrats don’t care what you think! Eying the possibility of being the majority party in the Senate, Democrats are planning to do away with the filibuster. Tony Perkins recently explained what this would mean. His words constitute an urgent warning for all voters.

Since the Senate filibuster is the only thing standing in the way of passing a radical progressive agenda, Democrat leaders have apparently set up a “war-room” to eliminate this procedural hurdle if they retake control of the chamber. This coalition, working under the name Fix Our Senate, is made up of former Senate Democrat staff, liberal policy groups, and even Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who is working inside the Senate to convince his colleagues of the benefits of removing the filibuster. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who is facing increasing pressure to push a progressive agenda if his party takes back control of the Senate, said, “We have a moral imperative to the people of America to get a whole lot done if we get the majority, which God willing we will, and keep it in the House, and Biden becomes president, and nothing is off the table. We will do what it takes to get this done.” If the laws that have governed our country for centuries are so easily ignored by mayors and rioters destroying cities across America, then a longstanding Senate precedent will stand no match against the politicians that support them.

The cordial and deliberate nature of the Senate, with its rules protecting against dramatic policy changes, could all be gone as soon as next year. The ability for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Republicans to stop a potential Biden administration from passing the Equality Act or the Green New Deal would essentially be gone if Democrats take back the Senate and vote to remove the filibuster. This plan being devised by Democrat strategists to radically shape our country is unlike anything we have ever seen before. At stake in this election is not just the difference of a few executive actions or policy preferences but rather the difference between a country in which all human life is valued, families flourish, and religious liberty thrives or one that seeks to destroy innocent life, undermine families, and is hostile towards religion.

Thus, I can tell you with great assurance that if the Democrats win, the loss of faith-based hospitals will be only one of a countless number of ominous consequences. Another will be that Schumer, Pelosi, & Company will increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court so the leftist perspective consistently prevails. Don’t let these things happen!

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At stake in this election is not just the difference of a few executive actions or policy preferences but rather the difference between a country in which all human life is valued, families flourish, and religious liberty thrives or one that seeks to destroy innocent life, undermine families, and is hostile towards religion.
—Tony Perkins—

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Christians Need to Wake Up!

One observer who keeps a very sharp eye on trends in the culture and in the church is Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon, a Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University. On Sunday, September 20, Dr. Gagnon expressed his bewilderment over Christians who seem to be blithely OK with the narrative the Democrats are presenting. Dr. Gagnon wrote,

I wonder for the sanity of Christian brothers and sisters who would prefer to have a Party in power that

Don’t Be Fooled — The Republic Itself and the Freedoms We Take for Granted Really Are at Stake!

No! someone objects. What you’re saying isn’t possible! Surely the Democrats won’t do these things! Not only is it possible, it is reality! In the House of Representatives, where the Democrats are already the majority party, Florida Republican Greg Steube proposed a resolution that called “for justice for George Floyd” and condemned police brutality. Significantly, it also condemned “violence, riots, and looting in the United States.”

Here is the “Resolved” section of the resolution in its entirety.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—
(1) calls for justice for George Floyd;
(2) calls for justice for officers and others who have suffered from violence at the hands of extremists;
(3) strongly condemns the violence, riots, and looting in the United States;
(4) recognizes that violent opportunists use the cover of legitimate protests by their fellow citizens to sow chaos;
(5) recognizes that the actions of those com- mitted to violence does not diminish the rights of other Americans to peacefully protest;
(6) urges peace and order to be restored;
(7) expresses that those responsible for these violent acts be held criminally responsible for their actions;
(8) strongly opposes any effort to establish au- tonomous areas within the sovereign territory of the United States; and
(9) strongly opposes efforts to defund, dismantle, or disband police forces.

The House of Representatives voted on Representative Steube’s resolution on June 25. In a moment, I’ll share with what we learned from the vote. Fast forward twelve weeks. On Wednesday, September 16, 2020, Ben Shapiro posted a video of a brief speech given by Congressman Chip Roy (R-Texas). Here is what Congressman Roy had to say.