Good Morning!
In yesterday’s unsigned Supreme Court ruling blocking the Biden administration’s vaccine/testing/masking mandate, the majority held the order was a “significant encroachment into the lives and health of a vast number of employees.”
All of this brings to mind the wry C.S. Lewis observation:
“It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
- Focus on the Family President Jim Daly Hails Supreme Court Decision Blocking Mandate for Large Employers
From Jim Daly:
“Today’s decision blocking the Biden administration’s sweeping mandate is a victory for freedom and a resounding defeat of egregious and intrusive government overreach. No administration or federal agency should be permitted to force employers and employees to violate their deeply held convictions or burden them with onerous and intrusive unconstitutional edicts. We applaud the Supreme Court’s principled ruling and all indications suggest this stay will be permanent. As we approach the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 scourge, we pray for an end to this awful global pandemic and ask God to have mercy on a world weary and eager for a return to normalcy.”
RELATED:
Supreme Court Blocks OSHA Vaccine Mandate; Allows Healthcare Worker Mandate to Go Forward
From The Daily Citizen:
The U.S. Supreme Court issued rulings in two important cases on January 13 involving vaccination mandates from two different government agencies. In one case, the court temporarily blocked an OSHA mandate affecting 84 million workers, and in the other, it allowed a Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services mandate to go into effect for 17 million healthcare workers while the case proceeds in the lower courts.
In the OSHA case, involving a vaccination or masking and testing requirement affecting 84 million American workers, the justices, in a 6-3 decision, issued a “stay” blocking a lower court ruling that would have allowed the mandate to go into effect.
“The Secretary has ordered 84 million Americans to either obtain a COVID–19 vaccine or undergo weekly medical testing at their own expense,” the court’s unsigned opinion reads. “This is no ‘everyday exercise of federal power.’ … It is instead a significant encroachment into the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees.”
The court’s ruling comes after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order on December 17 allowing the mandate to take effect. The case now goes back to the 6th Circuit for further proceedings.
- Father’s child visitation rights suspended because he is unvaccinated
From TheBlaze:
A Canadian father has been barred from seeing his 12-year-old child after a Quebec judge ruled his visits would not be in the child’s “best interest” because the father is unvaccinated against COVID-19.
Superior Judge Jean-Sébastien Vaillancourt handed down the ruling on Dec. 23, stating, “It would normally be in the best interests of the child to have contact with his father, but it is not in his best interest to have contact with him if he is unvaccinated and opposed to health measures in the present epidemiological context.”
According to the Montreal Gazette, the judge’s decision came after the father, who was not identified in court documents, requested an extra day of visitation around the holidays. The child’s mother opposed the request, informing the court that she had recently learned that the father was unvaccinated.
- Ronald McDonald House to Evict 4-Year-Old Leukemia Patient, Parents Over Vaccine Status
From The Daily Citizen:
As a kid, I always enjoyed visiting McDonald’s – both for its food and its fundraiser for the Ronald McDonald House. It was entertaining to donate the spare change in my (or my mom’s) pocket to the charity by placing my coins in the coin-spinning donation contraption.
The Ronald McDonald House currently has 685 programs spanning 62 regions and has provided 1.4 million overnight stays for families.
But now, one of the charity’s locations in Canada has allegedly implemented a mandatory vaccination requirement for residents.
Austin Furgason, as The Daily Caller reports, has claimed that his family and his son, a 4-year-old leukemia patient, will be evicted by the end of January if they do not get fully vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Because we don’t have the vaccine, you’re going to throw us out in the snow with a few weeks’ notice,” Furgason said to the manager in a video uploaded to his Facebook page. “Like this is some kind of crazy evil like I have never seen in my life.”
“Don’t think you guys are just going to get away with this because we’re going to fight this and expose this to people,” Furgason added.
4. Schools are facing dire staff shortages. Some are asking parents to step in.
From the Washington Post:
Some schools desperate for substitute teachers and other staff are turning to an unusual group of candidates: parents.
At Austin Jewish Academy, Principal Chris Aguero said he is relying exclusively on parents to fill in as teachers call out sick during the latest surge in coronavirus cases and as the pool of substitutes dries up.
“It’s people reprioritizing what they want to do with their time,” Aguero said. “So if they’re not afraid to be in a building full of children, then they have to decide, is this how they want to spend their time?”
The Texas school isn’t alone.
At Hays Consolidated Independent School District, just south of Austin, parents are now considered qualified to fill in for absent teachers without the 30 college hours usually required, district spokesman Tim Savoy said in a statement. A flier posted on the district’s Facebook page says its schools are hiring “certified and eligible noncertified” substitute teachers.
- Washington, D.C. Restaurant Cancels Pro-Life Breakfast at March for Life After Guests Complain
From The Daily Citizen:
Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) was planning to hold a breakfast event next week in conjunction with the annual March for Life event at a Washington, D.C., restaurant called Busboys and Poets. DFLA even had a signed contract for the breakfast event, but received an email recently canceling the reservation because, as the restaurant explained, “guests have reached out about the nature and tenor of the event.”
In case you missed it, that’s code for “we don’t like having pro-life people around… even if they are Democrats.” A zero-tolerance policy.
The March for Life is attended annually by tens of thousands of marchers who gather in the nation’s capital to attend events and make their voices heard on behalf of the dignity of human life. The yearly march is intended to coincide with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that created a constitutional “right” to abortion.
How sad is it that a restaurant in the heart of the most political city in the country would succumb to the political pressure of a small pro-abortion crowd about an event they won’t even be attending?
- Majority of voters support keeping filibuster; support has grown since June: Poll
From the Washington Examiner:
A majority of voters support keeping the Senate filibuster intact even as President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders push to do away with the Senate rule to pass election legislation, according to a poll commissioned by the conservative Senate Opportunity Fund 501(c)4 advocacy organization.
The poll conducted by OnMessage, Inc. from Jan. 7 to 9 found that 53% of likely voters support the filibuster and 27% oppose it, while another 20% were unsure or had no opinion.
That represents an increase of support for the filibuster since June 2021, when 47% said they support it, 30% said they oppose, and 23% did not know or had no opinion.
Results are based on responses in an online survey from 800 likely voters, including an oversample of 408 likely voters states with competitive Senate races this year. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5%.
7. Experts Disagree, and So Should You
From the Wall Street Journal:
The media have noticed that experts disagree. “A strange unity of confusion is emerging,” the Washington Post reports, “a common inability to decipher conflicting advice and clashing guidelines coming from government, science, health, media and other institutions. On seemingly every front in the battle against the coronavirus, the messages are muddled: Test or don’t test? Which test? When? Isolate or not? For five days? Ten? Go to school or not? See friends and resume normal life, or hunker down again?”
Deferring to the experts appears central to many people’s value systems and political identities and is emphasized relentlessly by the Biden administration and the media. For people who have staked their lives on doing whatever the experts tell them to do, the strange unity of confusion has induced an epistemic crisis.
It is bewildering to receive changing and conflicting information from experts. But it also shows some things about our fundamental situation as creatures that have to believe and act without omniscience. Nothing, not even the experts, can relieve you of the burden of deciding what to believe. Even if all you want to do is believe whatever the experts say, that is itself a decision. Then you’ve got to decide who is an expert and which experts to believe.
8. The latest dating deal breaker? Not going to therapy.
From USA Today:
After dating someone for about 10 months, Kelly Wolfe called it quits for one particular reason: He wasn’t into therapy.
She says early on she recognized his “disdain” for therapy and “people pursuing therapy.”
“(He) not only didn’t go to therapy or wasn’t interested, (he) didn’t believe in it (and) was critical of therapeutic things I was trying to implement in my own life after seeing my therapist,” the 34-year-old explained. This created difficulties with their communication.
“I’m so deeply convinced about the benefits and importance of therapy and so it was almost a language barrier.”
Wolfe isn’t alone. Hinge found 88% of singles on the dating app prefer dating someone who goes to therapy and 97% of Hinge users prefer to date someone who actively takes care of their mental health. The dating app predicts ignoring your mental health will be the biggest dating deal breaker of 2022.
- The Difficult Habit of Quiet
From Desiring God:
In the rhythms of our lives, do we make time to be quiet before God? Do we expect God to do more for us while we sit and pray than we can do by pushing through without him?
While we refuse to wait for him, God waits to be gracious to us. He’s not watching to see if he’ll be forced to show us mercy; he wants to show us mercy. The God of heaven, the one before time, above time, and beyond time, waits for us to ask for help. He loves to hear the sound of quiet trust.
Blessed — happy — are those who wait for him, who know their need for him, who ask him for help, who find their strength in his strength, who learn to be and stay quiet before him.
- Supreme Court Sets Dangerous Precedent Of Letting The American People Make Medical Decisions For Themselves
From the Babylon Bee (Satire):
The SCOTUS has struck down Biden’s vaccine mandates on the grounds that they are unconstitutional. Experts say this sets a dangerous precedent of letting individuals make their own medical decisions.
In response to the court’s decision, a large group of protestors has gathered outside of the Supreme Court building.
“You can’t give people choices! What if they make the wrong one? One that isn’t what I wanted them to do?” said Waddlebum. “Next thing you know, people will decide to send their kids back to school and return to work in person without masks.”
At publishing time, people were dangerously continuing on with their lives making the best medical decisions possible for themselves and their families. They were even able to make these decisions without fear of losing their livelihood.
