Commentary

BIDEN’S CATHOLICISM – “Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century,” wrote Elizabeth Dias in the New York Times, “regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.”  Note that she wrote, “his Catholic faith.” 

Crisis Magazine, a voice for the faithful Catholic laity, has a different view noted in a piece written by Declan Leary, “Yes, Biden Is Catholic. That’s the Problem.”

“The crisis of the Catholic Church in America is not that it has produced Joe Biden, but that it produced ten million Joe Bidens,” wrote Leary. “They sit on our parish councils.  They teach in Catholic schools.   They populate the pews on the weeks that it’s convenient.

“Joe Biden is the perfect representative of the mainstream current of American Catholicism,” notes Leary.  “He’s a squish who prioritizes temporal and sentimental over the eternal and the sacred.  (He’s) just as Catholic as the rest of us.  What a terrifying thought.”

During his campaign, there were stories of how his Catholic roots shaped his public life, but with little attention to his views on same sex marriage and abortion.

Although he supported the ban on foreign aid abortions as outlined in President Reagan’s Mexico City Policy in 1984, it became a political football with Bill Clinton rescinding it, George W. Bush reinstating, Barack Obama rescinding and Donald Trump reinstating.

Biden Approves Funding of Abortions

Although public opinion polls show that most Americans don’t want the U.S. to fund abortions in other countries, on the day after his inauguration, Biden signed an executive order again permitting the U.S. to fund global abortions.

Montana’s Republican Sen. Steve Daines, who founded and chairs the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, said that Biden’s action shows a “complete lack of respect for the sanctity of human life.”

NOT EXACTLY WHAT I EXPECTED – When candidate Joe Biden said his cabinet would “look like America,” I expected to see a diverse group that included more women and more people of color, but I must admit that a transgender individual didn’t cross my mind.  If confirmed as assistant Health Secretary, Dr. Rachel Levine (born Richard) will be the first transgender person to serve on a presidential cabinet.

NO FRIEND OF THE FARMER – Have you heard that President Biden has latched onto $30 billion Trump left behind in the Agriculture Department for aid to farmers affected by trade wars to be used to … wait for it … tackle climate change.

You may recall how businessman President Trump, working with his Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, utilized an obscure Depression-era financial institution – the Commodity Credit Corp – to help farm producers financially hurt by retaliatory tariffs. 

Farmers were the biggest casualties of the trade war.  In July of 2018, Trump announced a $12 billion farm aid package that included nearly $5 billion in direct payments to farmers to shield them from the effects of global trade negotiations gone sour. An estimated $43 billion in payments accounted for 40 percent of farm income in 2020.

However, now that Biden’s USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has learned of the funding measure, he’s going to convince Congress he needs authority to use the CCC funds to create a “carbon bank” to pay producers for using sustainable farming practices to capture carbon in the soil.

Vilsack claims that farmers and cattle ranchers are potential leaders in the new administrations battle against climate change.  “Farmers are prepared for it and anxious to do it,” Vilsack told a Senate virtual confirmation hearing.

It’s part of Biden’s fantasy to make climate change a “whole of government” endeavor.

AND DID YOU HEAR that climate change is also a racial justice issue, according to Gina McCarthy, Biden’s National Climate Advisor, because the issue “exacerbates the challenges in the communities that have been left behind? The poorest and most vulnerable communities tend to feel the effects of the climate crisis than affluent areas.”

MONTANA’S DEMOCRAT SENATOR Jon Testor, in real life a farmer, came out in opposition to President Biden’s executive order halting the Keystone XL pipeline. “I believe in climate change, but I also believe this one pipeline isn’t going to turn it around, isn’t going to turn our climate around.  It’s going to make it markedly worse.

He explained that he supports the pipeline because significant research and development is needed for alternatives to fossil fuels, and the market isn’t there yet.

ANOTHER WHOLE OF GOVERNMENT issue is now “racial equity” in an executive order signed by President Biden.  Incredibly, in signing one of the executive orders dealing with equity, he asked us to “imagine” if the government gave young people access to start-up capital, and enabled everybody to buy a home.  Did you know that “housing is a right in America?”  Biden proclaimed so.

PONDER THIS – The State Department, where there’s a passel of some 14,000 career foreign service diplomats among the 80,000 bureaucrats here and abroad, hosted President Biden on his first visit there since becoming president. 

I couldn’t help but wonder how many of them recall Robert Gates’ opinion that Biden has been “wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

“America is back, diplomacy is back,” Biden told those at State, without recognizing the Middle East Abraham Accords, the calming of North Korea’s nuclear threat, and the strengthening of NATO to name a few achievements of the Trump administration.  Obama-Biden failed to follow through on the moving the Jewish capital to Jerusalem

I WONDER, TOO, how a comment by Desiree Cormier Smith, Biden’s appointee as a senior advisor in the Bureau of International Organizations, is going over in the State Department.

In a podcast interview, Cormier Smith said that during her experience as a foreign service officer, she noted that white diplomats often treated visa applicants with hostility because of their “ownership” over the visas.

“They were so protective of the United States and they didn’t want anybody who could sully the image of the United States.  If you are a white foreign service officer, coming from a very wealthy background, a two-parent household, never knowing what it meant to struggle, you might automatically assume that there’s no way an applicant would use this visa properly.”

With Biden’s open borders position, it could be that Cormier Smith may be just the individual to change how the State Department looks at those seeking to come to the U.S.

THEN THERE’S KRISTEN CLARKE, Biden’s nomination as assistant attorney general  for civil rights, who once advocated theories of black racial superiority and anti-Semitism while a student at Harvard.  She said blacks had “greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities.” 

May God continue to bless the United States of America.