By Wayne Allensworth
In an earlier article, I wrote that resistance to Biden’s “vaccine mandate” was growing, not just out of fear, but as a matter of principle:
“Millions of ordinary Americans wish to make their own decisions about whether they will be vaccinated, weighing the claimed benefits vs. potential hazards, and considering moral concerns about the development and testing of the vaccines. And some of us still do not like arrogant public officials bossing us around. Joe Biden is not an absolute monarch, no matter what he believes in his muddled head.”
But beware, two writers warn, about how you resist.
Jeff Childers, writing at “Coffee and COVID,” has warned that those seeking a religious exemption should beware–the forms used by many companies are nothing more than “a kind of a trap.” Childers wrote that what the employers are actually doing is “gathering evidence.” The plan is to for HR departments to bring in individual employees one at a time and “interrogate” them about what they wrote on the form, questioning whether their religious beliefs are really “sincere.”
Quite a number of Americans, for instance, are seeking a religious exemption because of the use of fetal “stem cell lines” developed from aborted fetal cells. It’s important to know this: The vaccines do not contain fetal stem cells, so do not be tripped up if the interrogators play word games in an effort to distort your position–See, no fetal stem cells, how can you object?. The corporate interrogators are likely recording the “conversation,” so be careful what you say. If you are denied a religious accommodation, the recording could be used to undermine a lawsuit.
Another game is for the HR interrogators to claim that common medications–aspirin, Tylenol, even Tums–were developed and tested in the same way that the COVID vaccines were; i.e., using fetal stem cells. The HR munchkins may even try to force the employee who has reservations about taking “the jab” to sign a pledge that they will not use a long list of common over-the-counter medications. If the employee balks–Wham!–he just offered more “evidence” that his religious convictions are not sincere.
Susan Sammons, writing in Crisis, tells us to be skeptical of those claims, and notes the holes in such arguments. For starters, aspirin, for instance, was developed in the late 19th century. “Needless, to say,” writes Sammons, “no tests on aborted babies’ cells” were performed at the time. Sammons also demonstrates that efforts to create the impression that such medications are morally equivalent to the COVID vaccine are misleading, at least. I would add that no one is trying to force us to use Maalox.
Sammons goes to write that “participation in the jab program is participation in the COVID regime, a ‘sanitary dictatorship‘ that has us locking elderly patients away from their families; covering the faces of children and keeping them from seeing the image of God in their classmates and teachers; replacing real relations between persons with ‘virtual connection’—the feeling of a hug, a whisper in the ear, a firm handshake having become mere vectors of infection in the COVID culture.
Failure to acknowledge these evils, speaking of the COVID injection as if it can somehow be seen as just another shot, is the worst kind of spiritual and moral make-believe.”
Both Sammons and, especially, Childers provide some sound practical advice on how to deal with this issue in support of the position of Christians who do not wish to be implicated in the industrialization of the abhorrent practice of abortion. If we still believe ourselves to be a free people, resisting such dubious “mandates” is a moral imperative.
Wayne Allensworth is a Corresponding Editor of Chronicles magazine. He is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
