Vote Shaming Pro-Life Biden Supporters is a Mistake
There's a lesson for pro-life and pro-family leaders to learn if they stop caricaturing Pro-Life Biden voters. Also Ted Cruz slams the door on Hong Kong Refugees
The main article was originally going to be submitted elsewhere but due to a death in the family of the site’s editor, I decided to make a special newsletter of it. IWe’ll begin by talking about the lesson pro-life leaders should learn from 2020.
Jim Daly, the President of Focus on the Family, is rightfully upset about President-elect Biden’s appointment of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. As I’ve written in our last newsletter, not only is Becerra someone with no respect for the first Amendment, it’s inappropriate to a point a divisive political hack with no medical experience as the country begins to roll out the largest vaccination program in American history.
Yet, Daly doesn’t reserve the full measure of blame for Biden. It’s Festivus season and he wants an to air a grievance against those who are ultimately responsible.
Pro-life Never Trumpers who voted for Biden.
There is some truth in what Daly says. Fundamentally, when you vote for someone, you do have some responsibility for what they do with their power. Appointments like Becerra are part of the reason I didn’t vote for Biden or Trump. On the other hand, Daly is playing a counterproductive blame game.
One could and should blame President Trump for his own loss, which Daly doesn’t do. The President chose to do many things which felt good to him and were red meat to his most rabid supporters but infuriated and offended many winnable voters. You could also blame Christian Conservatives and pro-life groups for not supporting impeachment, resignation, or backing a primary challenger when it became clear how toxic this President was to the majority of the nation. Instead, these groups rallied to him the more apparent his unfitness for office became. They wrapped their movements in support of a deeply polarizing and flawed figure whose approval rating has hovered in between 40-45% for most of his presidency.
If pro-life leaders want to avoid a repeat of 2020, they’d do well to understand the reason why they lost the support of people who never voted for a candidate who wasn’t pro-life before. This requires a good faith effort to understand where these voters are coming from.
Daly doesn’t even try, writing, “The president’s sharp elbows, i.e., his tweeting and overall aggressive posture, are regularly cited by those who pulled the lever for Mr. Biden as key reasons for voting against Mr. Trump.” According to Daly, it all comes down to mean tweets.
Elizabeth Neumann seems to be the very sort of person that Daly blames. She was introduced to the country in an ad by Republican Voters Against Trump. She described herself as “first and foremost a follower of Jesus Christ” and stated she backed Trump in 2016 because of the Pro-Life issue. She went to work for the Trump Administration as Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Threat Prevention and Security Policy. There she became convinced that the White Nationalist movement was a domestic terrorist threat and the President’s rhetoric was enabling it.
In the ad, she also blamed the President for stopping officials from doing their jobs to prepare and address the COVID-19 issue between January and March 11 of 2020 out of fear that it would hurt Trump’s re-election prospects.
She said of the President. “You were hired to handle America's worst day and you've absolutely failed.” That drove her conclusion that the country couldn’t afford four more years of Trump. In her evaluation of how he handled the crisis, she also keyed to a concern by many in the national security community that if confronted with an international crisis, he’d handle it in just as incompetently which could lead to more pointless deaths.
Similarly, many Never Trumpers believe that the President was undermining the foundations of our Republic through his lies, conspiracy theories, and disrespect for the Constitution. Many told me that there would be other elections where issues would matter but that 2020 was about the survival of our Republic.
This all seemed a bit overwrought. However, after watching the attempt of this President to overturn the election, including the Texas lawsuit, and contacting state legislative leaders to ask them to disenfranchise their own citizens, I can’t help but feel they may have been more right than I gave them credit for. While the Biden administration will bring many policies I’ll despise, I can’t say that I’ll regret that America didn’t experience four more years with Donald Trump as President, this time with no fear of being held accountable by the American people.
Now, Daly may think none of this should matter. Even if he‘e right, the problem is that it does matter to the voters he’s complaining about. Trump presented them with a choice. They could have a President who would appoint pro-life judges and enact pro-life executive policies. They just had to accept the potential tragedy if President Trump had to confront any major problem in his second term, corruption in government, the growth of the white nationalist movement, and whatever crazy violations of the Constitution Trump attempted. These voters gave this a hard pass.
What many people don’t seem to understand is that the pro-life cause is essentially a moral movement. Unlike gun rights or tax policy, there’s no personal payoff for those who support the movement. People act for the pro-life cause because it’s right. Asking them to turn a blind eye to other wrong things to vote for the pro-life candidate undermines the moral authority of the movement. Asking a voter to vote pro-life at the cost of enabling the white nationalist movement or accepting government corruption is insane.
Rather than caricaturing the #NeverTrump arguments and hoping to shame back a few voters who voted for Biden, pro-life leaders should learn a lesson and never again support Trump or anyone else who would undermine the moral credibility of the pro-life cause.
Cruz’s Shameful Demogoguery on Hong Kong
China has cracked on human rights in Hong Kong. English-speaking nations around the world have opened their doors wide to China’s citizens. A bill for the U.S. to do that passed through Congress without objection. No one from Reps. Louie Goehmert (R-TX) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on the far right to Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and the squad on the Far Left or anyone in between had a prolem with it.
The bill was going to make it through the Senate and would be a Christmas to the brave and noble advocates of democracy in Hong Kong.
Then along came the grinch, aka Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) with an objection:
Taking to the Senate floor to block its approval, Cruz, of Texas, called the legislation an attempt by Democrats “to advance their long-standing goals on changing [US] immigration laws”, and claimed that Beijing would exploit relaxed immigration standards to send spies to the US.\
This is utter nonsense. Cruz is trying to make a partisan football of legislation that passed the House without objection from anyone. His allegation that we can’t allow refugees from Hong Kong lest the Chi Comms smuggle in some spies smacks of the worst sort of xenophobia. Of course, we need to vet refugees and take reasonable precautious to weed out potential spies, but that shouldn’t mean abandoning people who are being persecuted for standing up for democracy.
Many advocates of restricting immigration such as Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) have argued for skills-based immigration. By that standard, opening the door to the Hong Kong refugees is a no-brainer. The refugees from Hong Kong tend to be well-educated, highly skilled, and speak English. Not only will they benefit but the receiving countries are going to reap benefits as well. In every way you can imagine, they’re the perfect immigrants.
That is, unless you want to keep people who aren’t White out of the country. I think this is the type of voter, Cruz is playing to.
This isn’t what’s about in the best interest of the United States, but what will help Ted Cruz in the 2024 presidential race. Senator Cotton is the biggest anti-immigrant hardliner likely to be in the race should President Trump not win Cruz outflanked him. I hope this is an accomplishment the Junior Senator from Texas can be proud of.
The worst part of Cruz’s stance is that had America enacted the Ted Cruz policy in 1960 (i.e. no refugees from Communist Countries lest they turn out to be spies), his own father would have been sent packing. However, the United States granted asylum to Rafael Cruz instead.
Here’s hoping the legislation prevails in the new Congress and that America will throw open its doors to so many amazing people from Hong Kong, who’s courage reminds us of the value of a free society and how precious the liberty we enjoy is. As Senator Cruz reminded us, there are mnay powerful people who could use such a lesson.