Will the Real Joe Biden Please Stand Up?

PUBLISHED ON

June 15, 2020

“Catholic social doctrine talks about taking care of those who can’t take care of themselves, people who need help. With regard to abortion, I accept my church’s position that life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews and—I just refuse to impose that on others.” — former Vice President Joe Biden.

That baffling explanation of Biden’s views on abortion was delivered in July 2019 at a Democratic debate in Detroit.

He had espoused the same nonsense previously with the all-too-familiar “I oppose abortion personally, but …” Many other politicians before him had clung to this twisted logic, missing the fact that the beginning of life is not a Church judgment but a scientific one, binding on everyone, and that Church teaching on abortion is more about the duty to protect life in its earliest stages than it is about identifying precisely when it starts.

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

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So, no, he does not accept his church’s position on this matter.

And he has gotten worse. Along with imposing on everyone the acceptance of baby-killing, he now wants you and me to help pay for it.

He—as well as the Democratic Party platform—rejects the Hyde Amendment, which, with a few exceptions, protects our taxpayer dollars from paying for abortion.

The Hyde Amendment, which has saved a couple of million lives, is a “rider” to an appropriations bill in the Department of Health and Human Services and must be approved each year.

If the party of death were to gain control of the White House and Senate and retain control of the House, you can be sure that they would make the law require every person who is devoted to ending abortion to pay for it instead.

Before Hyde was put in place, an estimated 300,000 abortions were paid for by taxpayers every year.

It was just a year ago this month when Biden did an about-face on taxpayer funding for abortion. After spending most of his political career saying he supported the Hyde Amendment, he’s now all in for repealing it.

What he might feel in his conscience or say in public is immaterial; the Democratic Party demands his acquiescence to its radical abortion agenda. He would never have become the presumptive presidential nominee if he was still holding on to a shred of his integrity or any sliver of feeling for the unborn.

A man who can be swayed on something as important as how Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars are spent, and as foundational as the right to life, cannot be trusted to be elected to a school board, much less the presidency of the United States.

Once upon a time in the U.S. Senate, Biden was not quite pro-abortion enough for the ideologues most committed to legal child-killing. In 1981, he voted for a constitutional amendment that would have allowed states to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the following year—in another Biden flip—he voted against it.

In 2003, NARAL rated him only 36 percent for his votes on abortion. But you can almost trace the hardening of his heart by looking at his votes in the Senate after 2003. This is how OnTheIssues.com has reported Biden’s abortion votes:

In 2004, he voted against criminal penalties for those harming a baby in the womb during the commission of a crime.

In 2006, he voted against notifying parents when their underage daughters cross state lines to have an abortion.

In 2008, he voted against prohibiting minors from crossing state lines to obtain abortion.

His evolution brought him to accepting Roe v. Wade for being “as close to a consensus as we’re going to get” and now to supporting taxpayer-funded abortion.

Anyone who believes that Biden is in any way a moderate or a centrist needs look no further than his now full-throttle support for abortion to know he is as extreme as anyone in the Democratic Party is.

And this raises a question. If a politician can’t respect the life of a little baby, how is he supposed to respect yours?

Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images

Author

  • Father Pavone is the national director of Priests for Life and the co-chair of Pro-Life Voices for Trump.

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