By DEXTER DUGGAN
Some pro-life parishioners at a Delaware church often attended by Joe Biden published a prominent half-page open letter to the president in their area’s largest daily paper in mid-May, calling on him to reform his life to honor the fundamental Catholic teaching he rejects as he promotes grave violations against human dignity.
Meanwhile, at about the same time in 2021 but as an entirely separate development, speculation about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic took on a new aspect when the possibility the virus may have emerged from a Communist Chinese laboratory began to be seriously considered by powerbrokers.
A coincidental link between the two developments was Donald Trump. Some people had argued that his presidency had to be rejected in 2020 even if that meant putting pro-abortion Biden in the White House. Others said that whatever Trump stood for had to be dismissed, including his belief that the Wuhan lab might have been the source of the disease.
Concerned Parishioners for Life of St. Joseph on the Brandywine took out the Biden newspaper advertisement, which was published from May 14 to 16 in Wilmington’s News Journal and is reproduced at the pro-lifers’ web page, sjobparishioners4life.com.
It respectfully asks Biden to change his position and, in the upper right of the broadsheet-size half-page open letter, includes a prayer for him that begins: “Gracious and loving God, we come to you in humble prayer. Bless our President.”
A Delaware reader mailed the actual page of that newspaper to this writer, in Arizona. The advertisement doesn’t seem to have broken into national news.
The pro-lifers’ web page says, “We believe in the sanctity of life from conception through natural death. We are opposed to abortion and the death penalty.”
The ad is headlined, “Pray for the President to Advocate for Life” and begins by noting that while Biden “is someone only seen and heard on TV” by many Americans, to these concerned parishioners, “he is a member of our community of faith. It is this familiarity that compels us to share our concerns.
“We write this letter with the utmost concern for the direction this president is leading our country in regard to the unborn,” they write. “The president’s policies on abortion wholly contradict the Catholic Church’s core belief and scientific consensus that life begins at conception.
“President Biden explicitly endorses the tragic Roe v. Wade decision, which has resulted in the deaths of over 62 million babies,” the letter continues. “Shortly after the inauguration, and evidently a priority, President Biden quickly penned an executive order to rescind the Mexico City policy, which prevented U.S. taxpayer funding of abortions performed overseas. . . .
“The prevalence of abortion is a fatal symptom of a larger moral malaise and lack of respect for life,” the parishioners write. “As someone who publicly professes his Catholic faith, Mr. Biden should surely confront this malady.”
Pointing to ways Biden could change, they invite him to “open a dialogue with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. As Americans and Catholics, we are duty-bound to defend all lives, especially the most vulnerable, from conception to natural death.”
The open letter is signed by 11 people, including one female doctor and two male doctors, and one Ph.D.
Meanwhile, the implications were monstrous that the Communist Chinese state covered up a dangerous leak in one of its labs when a timely disclosure of origins and facts might have saved hundreds of thousands if not millions of human lives from the coronavirus.
Liberal writer Thomas Frank, posting at the left-wing Guardian on June 1, noted that the lab-leak hypothesis wasn’t yet proved, but “there is a moral earthquake on the way” if that’s verified.
Because, Frank explained, once again the smug assurances of elite experts would have been shown to be wrong, and their dismissal and censoring of unfashionable opinion would have awful ramifications.
“Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger,” Frank wrote.
He noted that scientists were allowed the authority to ban wide social, economic and other activity.
The most prominent figure for Americans, indeed for much of the world, was Anthony Fauci, MD, who was cast at the U.S.’s angel while Trump was the devil.
But Fauci had political and other interests in helping cover for China — indeed, U.S. tax money was going to the Wuhan lab — while the force of “polite opinion,” or whatever it was, even persuaded professional publications held to be leaders in supposed scientific objectivity to distort their approach.
In seeking to guide and inform one’s life, a person would hope that the resources he called upon were more than just the results of other fallible people being afraid to offend the “right” people or theories, or taking glee in offending the “wrong” ones.
At certain past, best-forgotten times, false notions about phrenology, phlogiston, and Jewish people being a dysgenic race all were accorded scientific respect.
Citing Frank’s article, commentator Sumantra Maitra at The Federalist site on June 8 wrote, in part: “It’s a searing mea culpa, but it only tells half the story, as almost daily new reports are coming out showing how much our current saints are culpable for our current predicament. Public American funding (via grants from the National Institutes of Health) was spent on research carried out by the Chinese military.”
Those who couldn’t conceive that a global power like Beijing would countenance such a scale of death — regardless of whether the lab leak was accidental or even an intentional piece of biowarfare — needed to be reminded of its Communist cruelty.
Veteran U.S. commentator Kenneth Grubbs posted at Facebook on June 7: “Why would the Chinese regime deliberately unleash a virus that would kill its own people, it is sometimes asked. Dr. Fauci has himself asked that question. Well, to know the current Communist government is (to) know it still follows Chairman Mao, whose obscene portrait still glares down on Tiananmen Square.
“Mao killed tens of millions of his countrymen who stood in the way of his rise to power,” Grubbs said. “Beijing’s thugocracy, with its one-child policy, brutally forced millions of abortions. To the Maoists, human life is secondary (not even that) to political power and realizing the fantasy of becoming the world’s Middle Kingdom.
“Whether COVID was a deliberately unleashed bioweapon or an accidental lab leak, I do not know. But that question alone betrays the profound naiveté or willing ignorance of the questioner. History answers it easily,” he said.
No Early Warning
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer told The Wanderer on June 7: “We have no way of knowing what Chinese officials were thinking, but we know what they did and we know how deadly it was.
“What they did was to make massive efforts to cover up the true situation with the virus, so that it spread widely before most of the world knew what was happening,” Hillyer said. “Because of that lack of early warning, hundreds of thousands or even millions of people died who probably could have been saved.
“Worse, China repeatedly has blocked investigations into how the virus developed and spread, which not only made it harder to handle this outbreak but also harder to guard against new pandemics involving other viruses or even variants of this one,” he said. “Through all of this, the Chinese Communist government has shown itself to be downright evil.”
Conservative Republican political consultant Constantin Querard told The Wanderer on June 7: “We are still waiting for the facts and may never know, but it continues to appear that China covered up and kept the world in the dark instead of opening up from the get-go, and it cost millions of lives around the world.
“This isn’t a surprise if you have watched authoritarian governments function because they work hard to project images of infallibility to their own people as part of staying in power,” Querard said. “If you can’t trust your government to keep you alive, you will be less inclined to want your government to have complete control over your life.
“Fauci was turned into a celebrity and then a political prop in the usual manner that people in the United States often do when they suddenly develop a high profile,” he said. “But he has always been one doctor/scientist with an informed opinion, and not much more. The moment grew too large for him and he seemed to forget that there was…much that no one knew, including himself, so he proceeded as an ‘expert’ would so he could keep his profile.
“Sadly, that meant setting aside that for most of the last 18 months, there were no experts on this virus, and his educated guesses were still just guesses,” Querard said.
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