In His Battle Against The Family… Biden Launches Another Front

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Last week we saw how Joe Biden considers his support of abortion until birth to be his reelection campaign’s “silver bullet.”

But abortion isn’t the only round in his chamber. The Obama-era leftovers that populate the executive branch are skilled at utilizing their bureaucratic swagger to impose illegal and binding rules on the population at large in myriad ways, usually under the guise of “regulations.” A lot of them.

And while 2024 might be Joe’s last gasp, they are far from finished.

We have seen it with Biden’s “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) Executive Orders (nn. 13985 and 14035) that threaten any individual or institution that receives federal funding to conform to the Left’s ideological template. We have seen it in the administration’s defiance of immigration law that has allowed over ten million illegal aliens to swarm into unsuspecting communities nationwide.

And there we should note some intended but almost irreversible effects of illegal immigration. That massive crime is valuable to the Left for two reasons: strategically, it sows chaos — a lot of it. But its ideological goal advances more subtly and with a longer-lasting impact.

Consider: Most of the new illegals arrive from countries whose tyrants have told their subjects for generations that “Your poverty is America’s fault!” Buried in this message to those millions of “oppressed victims” is a silent but simple order: “These capitalist criminals have enjoyed their freedom and flourishing for years at your expense — Now it’s your turn! Steal all the free stuff you can; when you settle in, start demanding the reparations you deserve, and we’ll help!”

So, they’re killing babies and destroying communities. So far, so good. But every bureaucrat must have his (or hers, or “its”) day, and now the (unconstitutional) Department of Education enters the stage to aim at another Biden target: the family.

“The Biden administration released Friday [April 19] its long-awaited overhaul of Title IX, inserting “gender identity” into the watershed civil rights amendment aimed at eliminating discrimination against girls and women in education,” The Washington Times reports.

Of course, any amendments or additions to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 lie in the domain of Congress, not a gaggle of unelected bureaucrats. But hey, so what?? That’s old news.

“Title IX protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance,” wrote Biden’s Education Department on August 20, 2021. That means that the new rules published last week will apply to any educational institutions that receive federal funding — which means the vast majority of them nationwide.

And soon these rules will undoubtedly be applied to every other aspect of public, and even private life. No longer must one be a conspiracy theorist to imagine going to jail for “misgendering” a sexually perverted individual, or kicking a pervert out of the ladies’ room. It’s already happening in Canada and the UK.

The unborn, women, the family, the community: All are the enemy of the demonic hordes possessed by the libido dominandi, the lust for power that Augustine identified as the sin of Satan that has ruled the City of Man on earth since the Fall.

And “Catholic Joe” has waged war on them all.

A Requiem For Notre Dame

Joseph DeReuil graduates next month from “Our Lady’s University” next month. He has contributed several commentaries over the years to The Irish Rover, the faithful upstart that we have often celebrated as an alternative to the secular Observer that fell for the “spirit of the times” back around Vatican II and has never managed to get back up.

This week Mr. DeReuil’s final piece appeared, and it is stunning. “Yes, Notre Dame is dead,” he writes, “but only insofar as her image is herself. That is, she has been killed in the eyes of the large swaths of American Catholics who have populated her quads since her founding in 1842. This death is due in part to negative press brought upon herself — awarding Obama an honorary degree and giving Biden the ‘Laetare Medal’ come to mind immediately — but I know that we students who report on campus controversy from the inside have also played a role.”

And yet Mr. DeReuil has hopes for the soul of Notre Dame, as well as for his own: He will be joining the Norbertine Order in the fall.

We should pray for Mr. DeReuil, and for Notre Dame.

“Attorney generals for 17 Republican-led states have sued the Biden administration over its latest student loan debt forgiveness plan, arguing it does not have the authority to wipe out student loan debt for an estimated 30 million Americans,” the College Fix reports.

Note what’s going on here: For years, colleges have cashed in on Obama’s federal student loan program, coaxing students to stay long past the expiration of any chance of a real education.

Result? The college stays in business and the student stays in debt. Let’s face it: bribes are a critical ingredient of the student loan program. It pays off the faculty members, whose politics are as radical as those of the public school unions. And the students? Now Joe wants to buy the votes of thirty million dropout debtors with our money — with a grateful wink to all those leftie profs who apparently never taught their students how to earn a living and pay their bills.

Bishops + Politics = More Disasters

And let’s not forget the border. Catholic bishops have long branded critics of their secular border NGO’s as “bigots” and “racists,” but now one of their own officers confirms their critics.

Jose Antonio Fernandez, CEO of Catholic Charities San Antonio, confirmed to Catholic News Agency that the group did indeed help migrants with air travel from San Antonio to other locations in the United States, but he claimed that this was a licit use of funds under FEMA’s rules.

Cong. Henry Cuellar (D., Texas) disagrees. Federal funds from the FEMA Shelter and Services Program were never intended to pay for transportation or flights to other U.S. cities for migrants who cross the border into the United States. From the very beginning I said it would only be used for food and shelter, maybe transportation inside a city but not to be sending them [across the country],” Cuellar said. “The family or somebody should pay for that, not the taxpayer.”  

For months, bishops have denied reports that Catholic Charities affiliates are flying illegal aliens under cover of darkness to communities in virtually every state, without informing officials in those communities of their arrival.

Whitewater, Wis., is a typical destination: The town of 15,000 has been inundated with over 1,000 illegals, who crowd the schools and welfare offices. Reporter reports that one Whitewater resident, Steven Nasholm, has already been killed by Jorge Sanchez-Tzanhua, an illegal alien. Nasholm leaves behind a widow and three young children, Steve Cortes reports.

And our shepherds prove once more that they are really are bad at politics. On August 9, 2021, three USCCB committee chairs told Congress that, “we write in support of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, S.1486, which will make the workplace a safer environment for nursing mothers, pregnant women, and their unborn children.”

The USCCB “worked closely with and followed the lead of Democrat Congressional Members,” longtime pro-life legislator and lawyer Bob Marshall writes. We know how much USCCB staff enjoys that camaraderie, but now their bosses are in a bind: “Bishops are now opposing the Biden Administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) pro-abortion regulations as published on April 14, 2024. But these immoral regulations are a direct consequence of the PWFA. They were completely foreseeable, and the bishops ignored many pro-life warnings against supporting the Act,” Marshall continues.

The result? Pro-abortion EEOC regulations will now affect all employers in the United States with 15 or more employees. They’ll either have to provide abortions for their employees or pay their own lawyers like hundreds of Catholic groups did to defend themselves from Obamacare (also endorsed by the USCCB, by the way) and its notorious HHS Mandate.