by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2024
(Mar. 11, 2024) — Americans witnessed more than a State of the Union speech on March 7. We saw the scandal of President Joe Biden and the violation of his oath of office, each blatant and proudly performed on national TV.
The scandal is that the president, who claims to be a devout Catholic, defiantly supports abortion. He yelled (as he did most of the speech), “If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.”
His adamant denial of life to the unborn defies the teaching of the Catholic Church, which considers life sacred, regardless of its stage of development. It is this contradiction of the church’s teaching that conservative Catholic leaders consider scandalous and why many of them want the president banned from receiving Communion.
“Public figures who identify as “Catholic” give scandal to the faithful when receiving Communion by creating the impression that the moral laws of the Church are optional,” says Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia.1
The archbishop cites the church’s catechism: “Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. … Anyone who uses the power at his disposal in such a way that it leads others to do wrong becomes guilty of scandal and responsible for the evil that he has directly or indirectly encouraged.”2
Asked whether priests should withhold Communion from President Biden, The Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, archbishop of San Francisco, said, “I would want to be absolutely sure there’s no other recourse to repair the scandal and to help move the person down the path of conversion.”3
Apart from the president’s church scandal, Biden is also out of step with America’s Founding Fathers when he denies the unborn their lives and rights. The Constitution explicitly states in its preamble that justice, tranquility, general welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty were being established “to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Posterity, by definition, encompasses the unborn—the people who will exist in the future. Since the Founding Fathers included their descendants in these “blessings,” President Biden is violating his oath to uphold the Constitution by denying their posterity—and our own—their basic right to life.
Scandal and violating the oath of office are serious offenses, so we must ask: Why is President Biden so determined to make abortion the law of the land?
The president is bartering lives for votes.
Like the 2020 election, this year’s imminent rematch with Donald Trump will be hotly contested, and women are a key voting bloc. One poll finds that 76% of women of reproductive age support laws that guarantee a federal right to abortion.4
Biden’s own polls are dismal, and pandering to what’s popular seems his best path to keeping the presidency. The moral high ground does not interest him.
The president could quash these offenses in one simple act: align himself with the tenets of the church to which he claims to be devoted. Getting the fundamentals of life right would go a long way toward correcting his other misguided policies.
But this is unlikely. The chants of “Four more years” from his Democratic colleagues propelled him from the Capitol that night to the campaign trail the next day, where he is promulgating his platform.
The ones most affected by the president’s policies—the posterity foreseen and protected by the Constitution—are silenced before they can object.
They cannot vote for the future they will never have.
We can and must.
For references, see here.
“If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.” — (P)OTUS Biden, SOTU speech, March 7 2024.
In addition to defying the teachings of the Catholic Church and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, promising to restore Roe v Wade is promising to defy Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution which, as it does not specifically grant Congress power to regulate abortion/a woman’s right to choose, remands such power to the individual states.
(P)OTUS Biden’s promise is dictatorial/totalitarian in nature.
“We the people…” can and must prevent that.
James, you make a good point. The Supreme Court returned the regulation of abortion to the states when it overturned Roe v. Wade, so Biden is taking on the Supreme Court and state rule by vowing to make this federal law again. But then, a president who governs by executive orders wouldn’t think this is a big deal.