On Friday the White House issued two proclamations about Sunday, March 31, 2024, the day I and many fellow Christians worldwide observed as Easter. Each was accompanied by a lengthy official statement. One proclamation called Sunday César Chávez Day and was mostly ignored. The other set off a firestorm. It labeled the holiest of Christian holy days, Easter, a Transgender Day of Visibility.
Finally, on Easter itself, the White House issued a very brief statement by the President and First Lady with their “warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”
Some on the right speculated that no one at the White House was even aware of Easter until a chorus of angry voices pointed it out. This doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the White House publicized and hosted its annual Easter Egg Roll — and specifically forbade the use of religious imagery in decorating Easter eggs for the event.
Some on the left rushed to assure us (a) that the timing of this Transgender Day of Visibility was a coincidence, because it doesn’t move and Easter does, from year to year, and (b) that you have to be part of “the Trump cult” to be bothered by it anyway.
It’s reasonable for the right to be suspicious. When the Left’s project is to demolish a nation’s culture, so they can replace it with a different culture in which they rule with awful power over everyone else, they understandably attack their target’s most sacred institutions, including its holy days.
On the other hand, Easter does bounce around a bit. And the Americans who call themselves LGBTQI+ (to use the White House proclamation’s version of that variable acronym) have a lot of days to track. They’ve already staked claims to more than one-third of all the days in the year, from Aromantic (not aromatic) Spectrum Awareness Week in February to a Transgender Day of Remembrance in November, and including the entire months of June, October, and November (Pride Month, LGBT History Month, and Trans Awareness Month, respectively).
Offending Christians for Fun and Politics
As far as I can tell, the White House made no serious effort on Friday to finesse the coincidence of Easter and the two days celebrated in those proclamations. Did these image-obsessed inventors of narrative simply forget to spin this – in a presidential election year – or did they want to offend Christians and overshadow the holiest of Christian holy days? In suspecting the latter, I guess I’m saying the act speaks for itself.
I’ve written before about the natural hostility between Judeo-Christian culture and the Left, including the gender ideology the Left has enthusiastically embraced in recent years. That’s not my point today. Nor do I wish to spend words on the logical and factual howlers in President Biden’s official statement accompanying the transgender proclamation; we’ve come over the past four — or forty — years to expect those from him. Nor do I speak against the proposition that Americans who identify as transgender should have the same rights as Americans who don’t. They’re Americans. (If this were my blog on things non-political, I’d assert that they, too, are children of God.)
I wish to make two points. The first is about President Biden. The second is about presidential candidate Biden.
About the President
If you squinted hard enough, mostly plugged your ears, relied on a very narrow segment of the political spectrum for your news and analysis (the segment headed, I suppose, by the New York Times), and ignored the sacramental devotion to killing unborn babies, it was more or less possible in recent years to believe two common assertions: Joe Biden is a Christian, specifically a Catholic, and Joe Biden is running the White House and, by extension, the country.
I’m reluctant to declare that someone is not a Christian. Perhaps this is because, for two centuries, other Christians have falsely declared that my own faith is not Christian. But it’s no longer possible for attentive, reasonable humans to believe both of these assertions at the same time: that Joe Biden is, at heart, a Christian in any coherent or meaningful sense, and that he is running the White House. After Friday, if one of those is true, the other cannot be.
Whoever issued Friday’s proclamations as if Sunday weren’t Easter is not a Christian, or at least doesn’t think like one. As I said, the act speaks for itself. Either someone else did it in Joe Biden’s name, or Joe Biden did it and forfeited any lingering credibility as a Christian.
Granted, it could have been far worse. Our leftist leviathan could have ordered all Christian churches closed for Easter, as it closed churches for the pandemic. Or the White House could have proclaimed celebrating Easter to be a crime punishable by . . . well, any of the punishments they sometimes apply to crimes, when political opponents commit them. But the tyranny of our times is softer than that. Its aspirations and many of its tactics are roughly the same, but it doesn’t generally slip into the brutal, sometimes grisly atrocities of the now-defunct Soviet GULAG state, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the People’s Republic of China.
Even though it wasn’t as bad as it could have been, this Easter episode highlights a question of far greater national urgency than President Biden’s Christian credentials. The American people need and deserve to know: Who is running the White House, and by extension the country? Is it the elected official we call President?
About the Candidate
To my second point. All this is happening in a presidential election year. It appears that someone, either President Biden or whatever unelected leftists are in charge, doesn’t think the Biden ticket needs Christians’ votes in November.
He’s already jeopardized the smaller but significant Jewish vote by openly aiding Hamas and its sponsor, Iran, in their war against Israel, through rhetoric, policy, and massive funding of both Iran and Hamas. Then there’s the rampant, overt, systemic antisemitism of Biden’s supporters and enablers on campuses, in government agencies, and on the streets. (The ally of my enemy is my enemy.) Now he or his puppeteers have publicly, and likely with malice aforethought, offended virtually every observant Christian in the land — probably even the Orthodox Christians who celebrate Easter slightly later in the spring.
If Biden doesn’t need the votes of Christians and Jews in November, what is going on?
Here are two possibilities. Either the Left is confident that he’ll win a second term no matter how Christians and Jews actually vote, or they’re already planning for someone else to be on November’s ballot as the Democrats’ candidate for president. Let’s leave the former possibility merely noted in passing and explore the latter (as I did at greater length in January).
Now that he has locked up enough delegates to win his party’s nomination, President Biden could withdraw before the party convention this summer, which would make for an exciting convention. Or he could withdraw just after the convention, leaving the party leadership to choose a replacement. This being the modern Democratic Party, the latter, less democratic scenario seems more likely.
Either way, he could cite health issues incident to age, and it would be among the most honest moments of his political life. And either way, the replacement candidate could denounce Biden’s debacles from Afghanistan to Easter; would generally be spared the rigors and scrutiny of a full-length campaign; and need not begin so ominously upside down in the opinion polls.
For example, Michelle Obama might win if the campaign were short enough. She has personal attributes – gender and skin color – which appeal to her party in ways a white man, even Gavin Newsom, cannot. Conveniently, some believe the chief puppeteer is former President Obama himself; if so, this would keep power in the family.
It’s an interesting election year, isn’t it? And so far we’re still in Act One of this tragedy.
Parting Thoughts
I say this prayerfully, not sarcastically: God bless America. We cannot long be free without him. Oh, and this: Jesus Christ is risen, risen indeed! A belated happy Easter to all who so believe.
Photo credit: Suzy Brooks on Unsplash
Thanks for reading!
Comments are always welcome, within the bounds of common civility and relevance.
Subscribe below to receive alerts of new posts by e-email.
If you’re on Facebook and you liked what you read here, or you hated it and think you should keep an eye on me, please consider liking my page The Freedom Habit on Facebook.
And if you’re interested in my fiction, which mostly isn’t about politics, check out my two published collections at 60 East Press.
