The Biden Administration Assault on Religious Freedom

By George Neumayr

It was in going through all the agencies of the Biden administration that it became clear they are gradually undermining religious freedom, particularly in the military where Christian chaplains and soldiers in the military were asked to leave the military unless they accepted the LGBTQ agenda.

I would say Obama really laid the groundwork for what we’re seeing now.  Biden is actually worse than Obama in that he’s gone beyond the contraceptive mandate and he’s now imposing a transgender mandate and an abortion mandate on the religious.  Two weeks ago Xavier Becerra, Biden’s HHS secretary, finalized a proposed regulation (which is a revision to Obamacare) that would allow patients to file complaints against any hospital including religious ones that do not provide transgender services or abortion services.  The proposed regulation if it’s enacted and isn’t stopped by the courts has the potential to bankrupt religious hospitals and healthcare providers according to lawyers for Catholic hospitals.  It constitutes an existential threat to Catholic hospitals.  There are 700 Catholic hospitals across the country and Biden couldn’t resist getting his hands on such a large provider of healthcare so the Catholic lawyers for Catholic hospitals are warning they are going to face a panoply under this regulation of class action lawsuits, onerous fines and potentially criminal prosecution for non-compliant executives.  So HHS is really the tip of the spear against religious freedom. [After George’s speech this proposed mandate was struck down by the court of appeals. However, Becerra is now working on a new proposed regulation that would be a redefinition of sexual discrimination, working with progressive groups  (Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, etc.) that want HHS to mandate that all healthcare entities must participate in the provision of abortions, sterilizations, contraception, gender-transition services and fertility treatments for infertile couples, including for those they call “socially infertile,” such as same-sex couples and some single persons.]

Becerra, another bad Catholic like Biden, is driving a lot of these horrible regulations.   HHS won’t do any business at all with adoption agencies or foster care agencies that don’t accept gay marriage.

In fact, across the Biden Administration we’re seeing a total attack on religious freedom:

• The Department of Education has opened up investigations on at least 10 or so Christian colleges because they won’t commit to gay dating. A lawsuit was filed to remove religious exemptions for Christian Universities under Title IX.
• The Department of Labor has issued a regulation saying that no federal contractor can maintain a contract unless he accepts the LGBTQ agenda.
• We are seeing the Department of Justice going after parents who object to sexual propaganda in public schools.
• In the military, Biden tried to appoint a lesbian activist to oversee military chaplains. He failed and her nomination has been withdrawn but she’s on record saying that all Christians in the military who don’t accept the LGBTQ agenda should leave the military. But of course, we are seeing soldiers and chaplains already leaving the military because of all the wokeness and anti-Christian atmosphere in the military; and of course, during Covid, none of them received religious exemptions.
  • The Biden administration did not want to give a single religious exemption to anybody, but the courts put a halt to that.

So, we’re seeing that religious freedom is dying the death of 1000 cuts and it’s all coming from a secularism that really has no relationship to the American founding.  The American founding was theistic.  Our rights derive from God.  The separationists like to say there is a separation of church and state but by which they made a separation of God from state and God from politics but our whole system is predicated on our rights deriving from God … so our founding was theistic.

So, this philosophy of secularism that Biden is applying really has its roots in the French Revolution.  This philosophy is not rooted in the principles of the American revolution but the principles of the French Revolution which were starkly anti-religious, and anti-God.  In fact, the French revolutionary Dennis Diderot, famously said: “men will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

That really is the goal of modern liberalism:  to drive Christianity completely out of the public square. They don’t want any meaningful presence of religion in public.  They know that liberalism cannot triumph if religion is in the public square; they have to remove religion from the public square in order for liberalism to be fulfilled.  In order for their conception of liberal rights to be fulfilled.

Remember that Orwell talked about totalitarianism.  It is akin to a collectivist animal farm and so we’re kind of living in a collectivist animal farm in which nobody is free to leave.  Biden’s view of religious freedom is basically that we should receive no exemptions whatsoever.  Biden says if we give exemptions to the religious well then people can discriminate.  Or these people can violate people’s civil rights.  So, discrimination has become Biden’s euphemism for the suppression of religious freedom.  Whenever he talks about discrimination he’s really talking about religious freedom and why it should be suppressed.

All of this is rooted in a godless, secularist tyranny. To the extent that we have any rights, they do not derive from God but from whoever happens to be in power.  So, this is what we’re going to see in the next few years unless the Republicans can stop this assault on religious freedom from accelerating.  Biden is stacking the courts with secularists who view the First Amendment through an atheistic prism, not through the originalist understanding of the First Amendment.  Just as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said that the First Amendment exists not for the benefit of the religious, but it exists for the benefit of the irreligious.  So, in her view, the First Amendment exists to prevent the irreligious from being exposed to religion.  Of course, that’s the antithesis of why the Founding Fathers established the First Amendment.  They established it as a protection for the religious not against the religious.  It was designed to keep religious activity within public life in the states.

In fact, the states would never have signed the Bill of Rights if it didn’t have a robust defense of religious freedom in it.  Ironically, the very federal orthodoxy that the Founding Fathers feared, we are actually seeing that federal orthodoxy coming to being not through theocrats, but they’re all these woke liberals who want to impose wokeness on all 50 states and prevent the states from practicing any kind of meaningful religion in public life.

So, Biden is just putting on the courts all these secularists who view the First Amendment the same as the ACLU does.  “They all have ACLU chromosomes.”   We’re going to see Biden in office until 2024 when he will appoint 300 secularist judges to serve on the court.  Obviously, he put Ketanji Brown Jackson on the court and she is an ACLU-style activist who does not believe in a robust First Amendment that protects the religious.

The Supreme Court thankfully protected the football coach’s right to pray after games in the Bremerton ruling.  It wasn’t a particularly robust defense of free speech.  But it was better than nothing.

It wasn’t even a close call.  The Founding Fathers would have said “you can pray before a game, during a game, after a game, you can pray in the classroom;” the constitutionality of school prayer wasn’t challenged for 200 years.   It wasn’t until the late 60s that school prayer was challenged and that ruling, the Engel ruling, resulted in the disintegration of public schools.  That ruling had no basis in the Constitution.  It was just an atheistic declaration. It turned the First Amendment on its head.  The First Amendment is supposed to protect the religious it’s not supposed to give atheists veto right over any expression of theism in the public square.

We obviously have God’s name on our money.  The Founding Fathers talked about one nation under God.

For the first few decades of the country, there were full days of prayer and thanksgiving.  Everybody from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln talked openly about God.  What we’re seeing right now is completely alien to the origins of the country and the Judeo-Christian origins of the country.  It’s really a reflection not of the American revolution but of the French revolution which was atheistic and nihilistic and sought to eliminate religion from public life.

I’ve been trying to chronicle this erosion of religious freedom at every agency in the government.

I’ve talked about the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, etc.  The Justice Department, of course, is still trying to get the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for the contraceptives and abortifacients for their employees.  Additionally, there is an interesting case involving a pro-life nurse who was forced to assist in an abortion at a federal hospital in Vermont.  The Trump administration defended the nurse and said she should not have been forced to participate in an abortion.  Then the Biden administration came in and they immediately dropped that lawsuit.  Now doctors and nurses at federally subsidized hospitals are expected to assist in abortions if compelled to do so.  It is crazy to even operate now as a hospital:  You have to sort of pledge allegiance but not to the Hippocratic oath but to the elimination of the Hippocratic oath.

All of these hospitals are now told they have to provide care, especially in light of this most recent proposed regulation by Beccera that they know is harmful to patients.  They are told they have to mutilate and confuse patients and they have to abort unborn children or be subject to horrible fines and potential bankruptcy and class action lawsuits and maybe even criminal prosecution.

Hopefully, the courts may stop some of those but they might not because so many secularists are getting on the courts and they accept this philosophy that wherever liberalism and “discrimination” collide which is really religious freedom, liberalism should prevail.  In fact, Chai Feldblum (an activist for LGBT rights) who is an advisor to Biden openly said that whenever liberalism and religious freedom conflict it should be seen as a zero-sum game in which the Christian should lose.  She said that openly in an article and she is one of his advisors.

We are kind of seeing a replay of the old tyrannies of the Roman empire in which the most virtuous citizens are considered the worst citizens and the most decadent citizens are considered the best citizens.  That is what we are seeing now.  The gay activists are virtuous, and the Christians are terrible and must be dragged out of public life.

There is the misnamed Respect for Marriage Act which passed in the House of representatives with 47 Republicans supporting it which is shocking and scandalous, and it may even pass the US Senate with 10 Republicans.  If that law is passed it will codify and strengthen the Oberfell ruling, and it’ll make it impossible for Christian groups to work with the government because Christians are now seen as enemies of the state.  The state is completely on the side of wokeness and so anybody who is not on the side of wokeness is seen as an enemy of the state.  It is put in the same moral category as racists and segregationists.

Christians cannot work with the government and the tax-exempt status of religious groups is in jeopardy now.  The IRS doubled its budget with the planned hiring of 90,000 new agents which means that all these religious groups are going to come under greater scrutiny, and some may lose their tax-exempt status because they are opposed to the LGBTQ agenda and abortion rights, etc.

After the Dobbs decision, Biden who once supported the Hyde amendment which prohibited taxpayers’ funding of abortion, is now in favor of taxpayers funding abortion and wants taxpayers to pay for out-of-state Medicaid abortions.  Biden is telling all federal hospitals that in emergencies they have to do abortions.  Becerra has issued this regulation.  So really, we’re just seeing across the board an attack on religious freedom.

It’s really kind of shocking that there isn’t a greater uproar over this.  Why aren’t people talking about this thing that happened two weeks ago which could bankrupt Catholic hospitals?  Few people are talking about this.  National Catholic Register did an article on this, but this could be the death of Catholic hospitals if this regulation is enacted.  I remember that Cardinal George once said that Catholic hospital directories may become a souvenir because Catholic healthcare is facing this existential threat.  I am kind of shocked that there isn’t more resistance to this — more uproar.

This obviously provides one of the most compelling reasons for the American people to vote the Democrats out in the fall and then vote Biden out in 2024.  The reason they hate Trump – that is the ruling class and the media – is that he kind of betrayed the Libertines in Manhattan and Washington and across the country.  They thought he was one of them and maybe at some level he is – I don’t know.  But the fact is that as president he was the strongest defender of religious freedom since Ronald Reagan.  He really was a Constantine for Christians.  He carved out a space for Christians.  His administration was a gateway for tons of religious and social conservatives to enter the government.  And importantly, Roe v. Wade fell because of Trump.  It didn’t fall because of his predecessors.  It fell because of him, and he said in a political debate with Hillary Clinton that Roe v. Wade will fall and that “I’m going to put judges on the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade.” And he did it.  One of the reasons they hate him so much is that he was and could continue to be in the future a Constantine for Christians.  Now we’re seeing the opposite of that.  Of course, in the end, every last one of his [Trump’s] religious freedom protections has been undone by Biden.  Unless Biden is stopped, the fundamental transformation of America that started under Obama and Biden wants to complete. The final destination point of that is a secularist, godless tyranny in which we have no real rights from God.

Questions posed to George post-talk

Can you share your views on assaults on religious freedom relating to the Covid tyrannical moves?

The government is forcing us to commit sins which is the highest form of tyranny when your relationship with God is corrupted by the state (forced covid vaccinations, forced abortion procedures, etc.) The state is trying to turn the clergy into propagandists and stooges for the state just as the Soviet Union did with orthodox clergy.  Everybody is now subject to that government-directed assault on religious freedom that corrupts our relationship with God and what happened with Covid is a prime example of that.

Who was behind getting Obama into power?

In the book we wrote, No Higher Power, we talk about how the Catholic Church actually helped created Obama.  Cardinal Bernardin in particular paid for Obama’s Alinsky-type training.

Where will this go in the future?

They are hoping that religion becomes the propaganda tool but if it cannot then the government will replace God and then religion will fade away.   They do not want any meaningful religion.  They want religion to be an extension of their wokeness.  They want anyone who is seriously Christian to live like the Amish and remain completely marginalized and stay within their group, and never serve the public.   Because if you serve the public in any way, these regulations state you are subject to their nondiscrimination laws and you cannot practice according to their beliefs.  Alito has shown a lot of leadership on this issue and Gorsuch is ok.  Thomas is good.  Hopefully, the Supreme Court gets to 5 votes so these outrageous assaults on religious freedom are struck down but one cannot count on that.  Like the Republicans, they bow down to the separationists, anyone who says you cannot have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse, all these Republicans back off despite this being constitutional for nearly 200 years.

LGBTQ Woke Ideology has become a religion.  How can they get away with pushing their “religion” on us yet we cannot reciprocate?

The “Religion of Wokeness” has become the federal orthodoxy by which we all have to live.