By Judie Brown
Several media outlets have reported that Joe Biden has flipped his position on abortion. But what does that mean, and why should Catholics care?
We can say without hesitation that Biden was never pro-life by any stretch of the imagination. While at one time he favored the Hyde Amendment, which prevented many taxpayer-funded abortions, he never recognized the preborn child as a human being.
More recently, even Biden’s once phony position took a hit. In typical political gobbledygook, reports say that Biden currently claims that the “nationwide ‘assault’ on a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy forced him to change his mind.”
That is code for “I had to look as rabidly pro-abortion as my advisors told me I needed to be.”
Editorialist Alexandra DeSanctis puts it this way:
For decades, he has billed himself as a pro-life Democrat, taking the line that, as a Catholic, he is “personally opposed” to abortion. Along with former New York governor Mario Cuomo and former Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, Biden pioneered the notion that prudent politicians don’t force their religious views on others, and thus that it would be wrong for him to insist on prohibiting abortion, even if his religion dictates that the procedure is morally wrong.
Enter, Satan!
Biden’s Catholicism is a sham. His position on abortion is a lie and always has been. While he and the other politicians mentioned by DeSanctis claimed to be Catholic, all of them defied Catholic teaching by never admitting the core truth about abortion—that every abortion kills an individual member of the human family.
Along with his fellow betrayers of Christ, Biden has heard corrective words here and there over the years from Catholic bishops, but of late there has been silence.
Isn’t that exactly how the devil works?
Biden has center stage and his alleged reversal on abortion has created the biggest stir. With attention from every media outlet from Fox to CNN, the explanations given by his campaign are the same, and they always involve two things: his Catholic identity and his convictions.
Biden’s deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, told CNN that
“he looked at the crisis that we’re facing on choice in this country, and he made that decision. That’s authentic to who he is. He’s somebody who says what he believes.”
And there you have it. If we are to believe what is being parroted in his defense, we understand that it’s all about “choice” now—never about the baby. And clearly what Biden believes is what is most convenient for the moment in which he is opining.
This is how the devil works—sowing confusion and falsehood that is propagated far and wide by his foot-soldiers.
Saint John Paul II reminded us of this when he wrote in the Gospel of Life about the wiles of the devil:
“Through his envy death entered the world (cf. Wis 2:24). He who is ‘a murderer from the beginning,’ is also ‘a liar and the father of lies’ (Jn 8:44). By deceiving man he leads him to projects of sin and death, making them appear as goals and fruits of life.”
Biden’s subjective change of opinion exposes his personal choice to set aside the differences between good and evil in order to achieve a worldly goal. In the process of doing this, he is sending a clear message that his Catholicism means nothing and is but a mere word in his biographical data.
As we ponder the media’s infatuation with all things false and deceptive, including Biden’s deceit, we remember these words of St. John Paul II as well:
The moral conscience, both individual and social, is today subjected, also as a result of the penetrating influence of the media, to an extremely serious and mortal danger: that of confusion between good and evil, precisely in relation to the fundamental right to life. . . . When conscience, this bright lamp of the soul (cf. Mt 6:22-23), calls “evil good and good evil” (Is 5:20), it is already on the path to the most alarming corruption and the darkest moral blindness.
This is why Biden is Satan’s secret weapon. With Biden’s surrender to dishonesty, he has certainly earned this dubious position.
image: Marc Nozell via Flickr | CC-2.0