Government building a database of Christians who object to vaccines

Even as Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates are being thrown out by the courts, several departments within the government have been using them to collect the personal information of Christians who object to the taking the shot for religious reasons and build a database to keep tabs on them in the name of “safety.”

Beginning with a little-known department called the Pretrial Services Agency (PSA) for the District of Columbia, Joe Biden has 19 departments collecting the information so far (via The Daily Signal):

[The Daily Signal] revealed that the [Pretrial Services Agency] plans to keep lists of the “personal religious information” of employees who had religious objections to the federal employee vaccine mandate.

As it turns out, the little-known Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia isn’t the only federal agency involved. As we feared, a whole-of-government effort looks to be underway.

A little digging at the Federal Register revealed that there are at least 19 total federal agencies—including five cabinet level agencies—that have created or proposed to create these tracking lists for religious-exemption requests from their employees.

The list includes the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Transportation, and the Department of the Treasury, to name only a few. (emphasis mine)

The list of agencies is disconcerting, but who is the Pretrial Services Agency for the District of Columbia?

According to the PSA website, it is “the Federal agency responsible for gathering information about newly arrested defendants and preparing the recommendations considered by the Court in deciding release options.” 

Why does a government agency responsible for gathering information on people under arrest need a database of Christians who object to COVID vaccine mandates? Is the government about to classify religious-objectors as criminals? It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

In August 2021, Biden and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a “domestic terrorism” alert ahead of the 9/11 anniversary — identifying the “terrorists” on the list as pushers of “anti-government rhetoric,” including “opposition to COVID measures.”

Earlier this month, Biden’s Department of Justice announced the formation of a new unit dedicated to dealing specifically with domestic terrorists; DOJ labeled them as “[people] who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.”

Revelations about government’s database of Christians prompted Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt to send a public comment to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg opposing the creation of these lists:

“On November 18, at the direction of the Biden administration, four federal agencies simultaneously announced that those who exercise their legal right to seek a health or religious waiver from a vaccine mandate would be tracked in federal databases. Rather than give the public ample time to weigh in on the advisability or legality of collecting such personal information, the Department of Transportation’s database in particular became effective on the day it was published…

“The chilling effect on a citizens’ exercise of religion due to the creation of this Database is alarming… the federal government decrees that a citizen who seeks a medical exemption or a waiver based on a sincerely held religious belief has automatically consented to being entered in the Database.

“To put it plainly, invoking the legal right to exercise one’s religious faith risks simultaneously waiving that legal right.”

Meanwhile, I don’t think we should be looking to the courts to protect religious liberty and bring an end to this practice.

In November 2021, Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the far-left wing of the Supreme Court to deny a preliminary injunction to a group of medical professionals seeking a religious liberty exemption from Maine’s vaccine mandate.

The 6-3 ruling against religious liberty in that case meant that the group of Maine healthcare providers would face being mandatorily vaccinated for COVID against their religious beliefs or lose their jobs. “With Maine’s new rule coming into effect, one of the applicants has already lost her job for refusing to betray her faith; another risks the imminent loss of his medical practice,” Neil Gorsuch noted in his dissent at the time.

Last month, Barrett and Kavanaugh provided an encore performance of their anti-religious liberty/pro-vaccine mandate play when they rejected two emergency requests to block New York’s vaccine mandate for health care workers. Three nurses and a group called We the Patriots USA had challenged the mandate, arguing that it violated the First Amendment because it didn’t include a religious exemption.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented and would have granted the request.

Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial track record exposed her as a conservative fraud, not a strict constructionist of the Constitution as we were told by Trump and McConnell. Barrett’s past showed that she was a big government, police state advocate who would continue the assault against our constitutionally protected liberties.

Barrett concurred with the majority in Illinois Republican Party et al. v. J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois to keep an illegal lockdown in place, going so far as to base her concurring vote on the precedent established in 1905 in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in order to avoid taking defending her decision.

The Jacobson decision gave the green light to vaccine mandates, and it carved out the emergency exception to Constitutional protection in “public health” or “emergency” cases used to justify state-mandated vaccinations. It was also the legal basis used in Korematsu v United States where the court ruled in 1942 that the internment of Japanese Americans was acceptable.

Last summer, Barrett rejected a request to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandates for students without providing any reason for doing so. She made the decision without consulting other justices as she could have done and suggested that there was no legal justification for the request.

Several notices, published in the Federal Register, claim that these databases are being created to implement Biden’s COVID-19 executive order on federal government employees. However, the rest are using the Privacy Act of 1974 — a law that “establishes a code of information practices that govern the collection, maintenance use and dissemination of information about individuals stored by federal agencies” — as the justification for creating a list. (emphasis mine)

In other words, if information about you is kept by a federal government agency, it can be included in the database.

When government is allowed to imposed vaccine mandates and create a database of Christians who object to them, we no longer live in a land of liberty, but a land of tyranny.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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