Democrats Dismiss Hunter Biden’s Emails as ‘Russian Propaganda’

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Democrats Dismiss Hunter Biden’s Emails as ‘Russian Propaganda’

To undermine recent evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s shady overseas business dealings, top Democrats are arguing that reports about the Bidens’ corruption are “Russian propaganda.”

The New York Post published email evidence that Biden, during his tenure as vice president, met with an executive with Ukrainian gas company Burisma while his son Hunter was on Burisma’s board.

The emails, which were obtained by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, indicate that Joe Biden played at least some role in Hunter’s business dealings.

But Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., have dismissed this evidence as misinformation planted by the Russians.

Murphy went on, without evidence, to call Giuliani a “Russian asset,” and claimed that it is “almost certain that any anti-Biden info he has is fed to him by … Russian intel.”

Schiff — also without evidence — made similar claims during an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

“Well, we know that this whole smear on Joe Biden comes from the Kremlin. That’s been clear for well over a year now that they’ve been pushing this false narrative about the vice president and his son,” Schiff said. “But I guess at this point we can’t be shocked by anything this administration does, no matter how craven. But, clearly, the origins of this whole smear are from the Kremlin, and the president is only too happy to have Kremlin help and try to amplify it.”

Schiff even said that Trump is working with the Russians to hurt Biden and win the November election.

“Well, look, I think we know who the driving force behind this smear has been all along and it’s been the president and the Kremlin. The Kremlin has an obvious interest in denigrating Joe Biden. They want Donald Trump to win,” he said.

Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, however, shot down Schiff’s conspiracy theory and made it clear that the intelligence community has absolutely no reason to believe “that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” he told Fox News. “It is simply not true.”

“And this is exactly what I said I would stop when I became director of national intelligence, and that is people using the intelligence community to leverage some political narrative, and in this case, apparently Chairman Schiff wants anything against his preferred political candidate deemed as not real and is using or attempting to use the intelligence community to say there’s nothing to see here,” Ratcliffe continued. “Don’t drag the intelligence community into this. Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

Calif. Sends 440K Ballots to Dead, Out-Of-State, & Ineligible Voters

Joshua Paladino
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Calif. Sends 440K Ballots to Dead, Out-Of-State, & Ineligible Voters

Election Integrity Project California sent a letter to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla on Oct. 17 with information revealing that nearly 440,000 ballots may have already been mailed to ineligible voters.

EIPCa’s latest warning about voter fraud comes after a May report that preemptively alerted Padilla to the prospect of 458,000 dead people receiving mail-in ballots, The California Globe reported.

“Earlier this year, the Secretary repeatedly rejected similar findings, despite the risks of universal mail voting with a bloated voter list,” said EIPCa President Linda Paine.

The state moved forward with the scheme anyway.

California has sent mail-in ballots to all people with “active” voter registrations, often failing to account for people who have moved or died.

This has resulted in more than 20,000 voters receiving two-to-four ballots in the mail, according to EIPCa.

Another 416,633 registered California voters have neither voted nor updated their registration status since 4 Nov. 2008.

Of these inactive registrants, 9,349 have not voted in at least 20 years, while 162,788 have never voted.

EIPCa said this information indicates that these 416,633 voters have likely either moved or died.

“We now encourage all candidates and parties to contact the Secretary of State to obtain our report, and to work with local election officials to ensure that only lawful votes are counted in November,” Paine said.

Padilla’s changes at the Secretary of State open the door to fraud and abuse by allowing multiple votes in a single envelope and prevent election officials from verifying ballot signatures.

“Adding to the problems in this election, the state will now allow multiple votes, scrawled on notecards, to be stuffed into one mail ballot envelope,” Paine said.

The EIPCa has confirmed a few cases of election abuse or fraud.

One voter in Los Angeles County was born in 1896 and was confirmed dead in 1993, but California sent her a ballot.

A man in Fresno County who received a ballot was born in 1936, registered in 1952, and last voted in California in 1998.

A woman who lives in Alameda County registered three times this year, using the same name, birthdate, address, phone, and email, and she has received three mail-in ballots.

WNBA Player: People Don’t Watch Us Because We’re Not ‘Cute and White and Straight’

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WNBA Player: People Don’t Watch Us Because We’re Not ‘Cute and White and Straight’

WNBA player Sue Bird suggested people don’t tune in to watch women’s basketball games like they do for the national soccer team because most basketball players are “cute and white and straight.”

“It’s 70%-80% black women, a lot of gay women. We’re tall; we’re big. And I think there’s just maybe this intimidation factor with that. People are quick to talk about it, judge it, put it down. And soccer, you just don’t see that just based on how they look,” Bird, a point guard for Seattle Storm, said.

Bird’s comments were made in response to soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who claimed last week that the female soccer league draws more viewers because her teammates are the “white girls next door.”

“Where’s that same energy for the best women’s basketball players on the planet?? Where’s that energy for the women’s sports that — instead of scanning cute and white and straight — scan tall and black and queer?” Rapinoe argued in a column for The Players Tribune.

Bird agreed with Rapinoe’s characterization and told CNN that “soccer players generally are cute, little white girls. And I think basketball players, we’re all shapes and sizes.”

“The problem is not the marketing, per se,” Bird told CNN. “The problem is how society and how the outside world is willing to accept the cute girl next door, but not willing to accept, or embrace, or not judge these basketball players who are tall, black, gay.”

Bird and Rapinoe are both vocal liberals who endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this summer.

Both women praised failed quarterback Colin Kaepernick and blasted the professional sports industry for trying to “silence” him.

“Do black lives matter to you when they’re not throwing touchdowns, grabbing rebounds, serving aces? If that was uncomfortable to hear, good,” Bird said during her ESPY Awards speech. “I used to shy away from moments like this because it’s convenient to be quiet. To be thought of as safe and polite. Colin Kaepernick never shied away. He knew that discomfort was essential to liberation and that fighting the oppression against Black people is bigger than sports.”

Deceptive WashPost Article Gives Bidens Benefits of Its Doubts

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Deceptive WashPost Article Gives Bidens Benefits of Its Doubts

(J. Peder Zane, RealClearInvestigations) Skepticism is fundamental to good journalism.

So one might applaud the Washington Post for raising questions about Wednesday’s New York Post article, which reported that emails found on a computer allegedly owned by Hunter Biden suggest Joe Biden was lying when he said he knew nothing of the lucrative deals his son had cut with a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma, while he was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy.

The veracity of the emails has not been established.

On the other hand, they haven’t been debunked, either.

This Washington Post article, however, suggests they have.

Start with the lede, which aims to debunk through ad hominem attack things that might very well be true:

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and his former top adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who have attracted the scrutiny of U.S. authorities for their political dealings in recent months, helped make public private materials purported to belong to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son in an attempt to swing support to the struggling incumbent.

The fifth paragraph of the article – which, at that point, has still not said what’s in the emails – continues the line of attack:

The New York Post, which is owned by conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, said its report was based on materials it said it heard about from Bannon and were provided by Giuliani.

When we finally get to the news in the seventh paragraph, it is presented with caveats that tell readers even if it’s all true, it’s no big whoop:

The report Wednesday did not markedly advance what is already known about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, other than to suggest that at one point he gave Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian business colleague, “an opportunity” to meet his father. The Biden campaign said the vice president’s schedule indicated no such meeting.

It would be a very big deal if we had proof that Hunter Biden had tried to arrange a meeting with his father, who was then acting as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine policy, because Joe Biden has long claimed he has “never” discussed such matters with his son.

In addition, the short email the Washington Post references but never fully quotes in its 33-paragraph article suggests the Ukrainian might have met with the vice president.

Here’s the New York (not Washington) Post quoting the email: “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

Finally, the Washington Post quotes ambiguous statements from Biden spokespeople to undercut the email.

We have reviewed Joe Biden’s official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said.

The skeptic will note that Biden could have had a meeting that was not on his official schedule.

More important, the Bidens are not claiming hat the laptop did not belong to Hunter or that the email is a fabrication.

Perhaps Hunter Biden tried to arrange a meeting that never materialized.

That is one reading of this response:

Hunter Biden’s attorney, George Mesires, told The Washington Post that “this purported meeting never happened.” Pozharskyi, who works for Burisma, the Ukrainian gas firm that included Hunter Biden on its board from 2014 to 2019, could not be reached for comment.

While the veracity of the emails is not firmly established, this article shows how the Washington Post – along with other prestigious news outlets that credulously reported the allegations of often anonymous sources to advance the Russiagate conspiracy theory – have weaponized skepticism to attack unwelcome assertions and facts.

The most common strategy is to say that figures they do not support – especially President Trump – have made claims “without evidence.”

But, as this article shows, they also do it through news reports that use selective skepticism to push an agenda…Original Source…

Biden Campaign Manager: ‘We Are Not Ahead by Double Digits’

Joshua Paladino
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Biden Campaign Manager: ‘We Are Not Ahead by Double Digits’

In a since-deleted video, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign manager admitted that “we are not ahead by double digits,” The Epoch Times reported.

Some polls from October show Biden with an 11- or 12- point national lead ahead of President Donald Trump, and the average has him 8.9 points ahead.

“Those are inflated national public polling numbers,” Jen O’Malley Dillon reportedly said on Oct. 16 at a campaign event.

Shane Goldmacher, a New York Times national political reporter, tweeted her comments with a screenshot before the video was deleted.

The Biden campaign has not disputed Dillon’s comments.

Dillon made similar comments in a three-page campaign memo that she sent to supporters on Oct. 17, Fox News reported.

“The reality is that this race is far closer than some of the punditry we’re seeing on Twitter and on TV would suggest,” she wrote.

She even suggested that the Trump’s base may turn out in higher numbers than Biden, skewing results toward Trump.

“Even the best polling can be wrong and that variables like turnout mean that in a number of critical swing states we are fundamentally tied,” Dillon wrote.

Most polling companies factor a Democratic advantage into their polls, sometimes assuming as much as a Democrat turnout of +8 compared to Republicans.

Using this model, pollsters will interview 39-41 percent Democrats and only 23-25 percent Republicans.

But she said Biden’s supporters must work “like we are trailing.”

“If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we cannot underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to claw his way back into contention in the final days of a campaign, through whatever smears or underhanded tactics he has at his disposal,” Dillon wrote.

Facebook ‘Election Integrity’ Expert Advised Biden on Ukraine Policy

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Facebook ‘Election Integrity’ Expert Advised Biden on Ukraine Policy

Facebook’s election integrity expert reportedly advised Joe Biden on Ukraine policy while he served as Vice President, according to Breitbart.

Anna Makanju, who is currently a “legal expert working at Facebook, where she leads efforts to ensure election integrity on the platform,” formerly worked for Biden as the “special policy adviser for Europe and Eurasia.”

In her current role, Makanju helps Facebook decide which election-related content is acceptable, meaning, she helps the social media platform censor material that could “compromise” the integrity of the election, according to her Atlantic Council biography.

This revelation comes right after Facebook suppressed a New York Post story detailing corruption between Biden and Ukraine — a decision that could have been influenced by Makanju given her current and former roles.

She already has a history of defending Biden’s dealings with Ukraine.

In 2019, when transcripts of Biden’s phone calls with Ukrainian officials were released, Makanju reportedly said that the calls “would only strengthen Biden’s case that he acted properly,” according to the Washington Post.

Facebook claimed last week that it would not allow a New York Post report proving that Biden helped his son, Hunter Biden, with his foreign business dealings until a thorough fact-check had been completed.

“I will intentionally not link to the New York Post,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending fact-checker review.”

Shortly after Facebook decided to censor the story, Twitter followed suit.

When confronted about the blatant act of suppression, Twitter executives claimed that the New York Post report violated a 2018 policy prohibiting the sharing of “content obtained without authorization.”

Supreme Court to Hear Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy & Border Wall Funding Cases

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Supreme Court to Hear Trump’s ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy & Border Wall Funding Cases

(Headline USA) The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to review a Trump administration policy that makes asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for U.S. court hearings.

The Court also agreed to hear the Trump administration’s appeal of a lower court ruling that it improperly diverted money to build portions of the border wall with Mexico.

Because the court’s calendar is already full through the end of the year, the justices will not hear the asylum case until 2021. If Joe Biden were to win the presidential election and rescind the policy, the case would become largely moot.

President Donald Trump’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” policy, known informally as “Remain in Mexico,” was introduced in January 2019.

It became a key pillar of the administration’s response to an unprecedented surge of asylum-seeking families at the border, drawing criticism for having people wait in Mexican cities.

Lower courts found that the policy is probably illegal. But earlier this year the Supreme Court stepped in to allow the policy to remain in effect while a lawsuit challenging it plays out in the courts.

More than 60,000 asylum-seekers were returned to Mexico under the policy.

The Justice Department estimated in late February that there were 25,000 people still waiting in Mexico for hearings in U.S. court. Those hearings were suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the border wall case, the high court has previously allowed construction to continue, even after a federal appeals court ruled in June that the administration had illegally sidestepped Congress in transferring the Defense Department funds.

The case will not be argued before the winter and it’s unclear how the outcome of the presidential election would affect the case, if Biden wins the White House.

It’s also not clear whether the administration has spent all of the $2.5 billion it moved to the wall project. Dissenting from a July order that allowed construction to continue, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the court’s action “I fear, may operate, in effect, as a final judgment.”

The case has its origins in the 35-day partial government shutdown that started in December of 2018.

Trump ended the shutdown after Congress gave him approximately $1.4 billion in border wall funding, but that was far less than the $5.7 billion he sought.

Trump then declared a national emergency to take cash from other government accounts to use to construct sections of the wall, as caravans from Central America flooded through Mexico to the U.S. border.

At the time, the money Trump identified included $2.5 billion in Defense Department money, $3.6 billion from military construction funds and $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund.

The case before the Supreme Court involved just the $2.5 billion in Defense Department funds.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Trump administration on behalf of the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition.

California led a similar lawsuit on behalf of several states.

Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.

TRUMP: We’d Be in a ‘Massive Depression’ if I Listened to Biden’s ‘Scientists’

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TRUMP: We’d Be in a ‘Massive Depression’ if I Listened to Biden’s ‘Scientists’

(Headline USA) President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden went on offense over the weekend, as both campaigned in states they are trying to flip during the Nov. 3 election that is just over two weeks away.

Trump began his Sunday in Nevada, making a rare visit to church before a fundraiser and an evening rally in Carson City. Once considered a battleground, Nevada has not swung for a Republican presidential contender since 2004.

The rally drew thousands of supporters who sat elbow to elbow, cheering Trump and booing Biden and the press. The president, as he often does, warned that a Biden election would lead to further coronavirus lockdowns and at one point appeared to mock Biden for saying he would listen to scientists.

“He’ll listen to the scientists. If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression,” Trump said.

Biden, a Catholic, attended Mass in Delaware before campaigning in North Carolina, where a Democrat has not won in a presidential race since Barack Obama in 2008.

Both candidates are trying to make inroads in states that could help secure a path to victory.

Earlier in the day, Trump sat in the front row at the nondenominational International Church of Las Vegas.

Trump spoke briefly, saying “I love going to churches” and that it was “a great honor” to attend the service.

The message was far different in both style and substance later in the day, when Biden attended a virtual discussion with African American faith leaders from around the country.

Biden held up a rosary, which he said he carries in his pocket every day, and described it as “what the Irish call a prisoner’s rosary” since it was small enough to be smuggled into prisons.

“I happen to be a Roman Catholic,” Biden said. “I don’t pray for God to protect me. I pray to God to give me strength to see what other people are dealing with.”

Earlier, at a drive-in rally in Durham, North Carolina, Biden focused heavily on promoting criminal justice changes to combat “systemic racism” and promised to help build wealth in the black community.

He noted that Trump had said at one of his rallies that the country had turned the corner on the pandemic.

“As my grandfather would say, this guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner. Turning the corner? Things are getting worse,” Biden said.

In addition to public polling that indicates Biden has an edge, the former vice president enjoys another considerable advantage over Trump: money.

Trump raked in $12 million during a fundraiser Sunday afternoon at the Newport Beach home of top GOP donor and tech mogul Palmer Luckey, which also featured a performance by the Beach Boys.

But over the past four months, Biden has raised over $1 billion, a massive amount of money that has eclipsed Trump’s once-overwhelming cash advantage.

That’s become apparent in advertising, where Biden and his Democratic allies are on pace to spend twice as much as Trump and the Republicans in the closing days of the race, according to data from the ad tracking firm Kantar/CMAG.

Though Trump has pulled back from advertising in Midwestern states that secured his 2016 win, he’s invested heavily elsewhere, including North Carolina, where he is on pace to slightly outspend Biden in the days ahead.

In Nevada, which Trump came close to winning in 2016, Democrats are set to outspend Trump in the closing days by a more than 3-to-1 ratio.

Trump’s visit to the state is part of an aggressive schedule of campaign events.

Trump’s Carson City rally was held at an airport with a golden scrub brush-covered hill providing a dramatic backdrop. He relived fond moments from his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, revisited his long-running feud with NFL players and went on an extended rant about water management policy, which he blamed for people having to “flush their toilet 15 times.”

He also added to his litany of hyperbolic attacks against Biden, claiming that, if Biden were elected, he would mandate new lockdown measures that would make Carson City “a ghost town” and “the Christmas season will be cancelled.”

As he surveyed his crowd, Trump expressed disbelief that he could possibly be tied to Biden in the state.

“How the hell can we be tied?” he asked. “What’s going on? … We get these massive crowds. He gets nobody…. It doesn’t make sense!”

Biden has held very small and virtual events in recent months, blaming the pandemic from which more than 99 percent of people survive.

Adapted from reporting by Associated Press.

Judges Won’t Punish Public Unions for Illegally Forging Signatures & Deducting Dues

Joshua Paladino
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Judges Won’t Punish Public Unions for Illegally Forging Signatures & Deducting Dues

Union members up and down the west coast have accused government unions of forging signatures to keep them paying dues, the Freedom Foundation reported.

The Freedom Foundation filed five lawsuits in California, Oregon, and Washington this year, Center of the American Experiment reported.

Judges ruled against the Freedom Foundation and two clients in Oregon and another client in Washington, according to a press release.

The Freedom Foundation last week appealed these lawsuits based on the belief that the judges ruled against the workers “despite clear evidence they had forged the signatures of workers on membership documents in order to thwart their desire to opt out.”

“We’ve seen them be very aggressive — employing coercive tactics, employing deceptive tactics, and now even forging signatures on forms to try to continue that dues collection,” said Maxford Nelsen, the Director of Labor Policy at the Freedom Foundation.

The plaintiffs only seek a refund of their dues payments.

The active lawsuits do not reflect the entirety of the problem, however.

Rebekah Millard, an attorney with the Freedom Foundation, said she knows of “dozens of cases where a government employee never signed anything, but the union still confiscates dues from their paycheck based on a bogus dues-authorization form.”

“In what alternate universe,” she asked, “can an American citizen be forced to continue financially supporting an organization whose values and tactics they loathe based on a document they never signed? It boggles the mind.”

A woman that has worked in Seattle since 2014 as a full-time caregiver to her mother claims to have been repeatedly harassed to join the Service Employees International Union.

Even after she declined membership several times, the union took a total of $3,000 out of her paycheck over the course of several years as dues.

When she confronted SEIU, the union claimed she had signed an electronic document agreeing to be a member.

The woman denies this and asserts that the document’s electronic metadata does not match her location at the time.

This woman and other victims of the unions are merely seeking full refunds for what they lost.

“She’s been very specific about her interactions with the union. … All the evidence that we’ve been able to accumulate shows that she never signed anything,” Nelsen said.

“These home caregivers are doing incredible work … and having to worry about whether the union that’s supposed to be representing them is taking advantage of them is really just an unnecessary additional burden,” Nelsen said.

A public employee of the Oregon Health Authority had a similar experience.

She has been paying union dues since October 2017, even though she said she did not remember signing an authorization document. The union, SEIU 503, said she signed the document on an iPad.

SEIU 503 could not show any evidence in the lawsuit that the woman signed the authorization, but they continue to collect dues.

“In none of these cases does the lower court judge deny that forgery took place,” Millard said. “But in every case, they managed to find a reason why it didn’t matter.”

The judges said that the states did not know that the signatures were forged when it collected money from the union members, so they cannot be held accountable.

And the unions are not considered “state actors,” so they cannot be punished.

“According to judges, neither the state nor the union can be held responsible for violating these employees’ First Amendment rights,” Millard said. “And yet these workers have had thousands of dollars stolen from them. At what point is someone going to be held accountable?”

In the third lawsuit, Sharrie Yates appealed her case against the Washington Federation of State Employees.

She has worked at Washington state’s Healthcare Authority since 2004.

She tried to leave the WFSE in October 2018, but the union said she could not leave because of an online renewal form that she allegedly submitted that June.

Yates said she can prove that she did not sign an electronic document.

Despite reaching out to WFSE on many ocassions, the union still takes her money.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME affirmed that forced unionization is unconstitutional. It gave public employees freedom from mandatory membership and dues payments, arguing that forced unionization amounted to a violation of the First Amendment.

Unions avoid this ruling by providing only a few days during the year in which employees can choose to leave the union.

Pastor: Christians Who Support Joe Biden ‘Have Sold Their Soul to the Devil’

Associate Editor
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Pastor: Christians Who Support Joe Biden ‘Have Sold Their Soul to the Devil’

(Headline USA) James Altman is a Roman Catholic priest in Wisconsin, little known outside his parish until a few weeks ago.

Robert Jeffress is the high-profile pastor of a Baptist megachurch in Dallas.

They have a message in common for members of their faiths: Voting for Democrats who support abortion rights is an evil potentially deserving of eternal damnation.

Their fierce, Christian rhetoric is attention-grabbing, but it remains the exception in America’s progressive religious landscape.

Most members of the clergy, including foes of abortion, steer clear of overt endorsements or denunciations of political candidates. Numerous denominations try to frame their stance on abortion in ways that tolerate murder of the unborn.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example, has adhered for three decades to a nuanced policy aimed at pandering to churchgoers on all sides of the debate.

“We say that abortion should be seen as a path of last resort, but we defend a woman’s right to make decisions over her own body,” said Bishop Paul Egensteiner, who heads the ELCA’s Metropolitan New York Synod.

The National Association of Evangelicals, which represents about 45,000 churches, declares in a policy statement that it “actively, ardently and unwaveringly opposes abortion on demand,” but simultaneously appeals for civility.

“We do not dismiss those who advocate for legal access to abortion as unconcerned for human life or unworthy of our respect and attention,” it says.

Such stances and tones differ sharply from those offered recently by Altman and Jeffress.

“You cannot be Catholic and be a Democrat,” Altman said in a YouTube video, admonishing people to “repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell.”

His comments were criticized by many Catholics, while endorsed by some others, such as Bishop Joseph Strickland of the Tyler, Texas, diocese.

Jeffress, the pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas and a close ally of Donald Trump, employs similarly strong language in denouncing the president’s opponent.

“As long as Joe Biden and the Democratic Party continue to support unrestricted abortion for any reason and at any stage in a pregnancy, priests and pastors like myself will have no problem saying, ‘Only Christians who have sold their soul to the devil would vote for Joe Biden,'” Jeffress said via email.

Jeffress’ church is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. Its leadership adopted a stringent anti-abortion stance nearly 40 years ago that remains in place.

Daniel Patterson, a vice president of the Southern Baptists’ public policy arm, said most of the denomination’s pastors don’t engage in partisan politics from the pulpit, although they’re free to address abortion and other issues as they see fit.

The Rev. Kevin Smith, executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware and one of the SBC’s highest-ranking Black leaders, criticized Christians who stress their opposition to abortion while minimizing the problem of racism, and objected to the partisanship making inroads in some churches.

“While too many so-called pastors wait for the morning talking points from their chosen political party, too many are failing at an essential pastoral task,” he tweeted last month.

Earlier this month, the National Association of Evangelicals issued a statement repenting for shortcomings in combating poverty and racial inequality. It pledged to “resist being co-opted by political agendas” and to uphold a “comprehensive pro-life ethic that protects both the unborn and the vulnerable of all ages.”

The association’s president, the Rev. Walter Kim, said many NAE pastors preach about various policies but most avoid political endorsements.

One NAE board member, the Rev. Mitch Hescox, is CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network, which urges pastors to broaden the concept of “pro-life” so it encompasses efforts to protect the environment.

“It would behoove pastors to be caring about people, rather than taking up politics,” Hescox said. “We’re supposed to be a voice for our values and not choose sides.”

Some mainline Protestant denominations have official positions supporting reproductive rights.

Access to abortion, says a 2018 Episcopal Church resolution, “is an integral part of a woman’s struggle to assert her dignity and worth.”

The United Church of Christ has a similar policy. Its president, the Rev. John Dorhauer, said he’s angered by warnings from some pastors that churchgoers risk betraying their faith with their political choices.

“Telling a member with a conscience and moral agency that a vote for a particular party or candidate is a violation of one’s faith is, in my humble opinion, unethical and immoral,” he said.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known for its conservative social views, says abortions “for personal or social convenience” violate church teachings and can lead to excommunication.

However, the church says exceptional circumstances may justify some abortions, such as when pregnancy results from incest or rape or a woman’s health is at risk.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.

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