Senator Tim Kaine has no problem allowing the FBI to interfere with freedom of religion and no problem allowing the Public Health Service to increase patient surveillance. To Kaine, the interests of the Deep State are more important than the constitutional rights of the American people.
On April 16, in an interview with WSET (ABC 12 News, Lynchburg, VA), Senator Kaine defended an FBI memo calling for undercover agents to surveil Catholic parishioners in the Latin Mass in Richmond. Without the slightest evidence of probable cause of a crime being committed, the FBI surveilled Catholics in violation of their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Kaine had no problem with that. Instead, he rose in knee-jerk defense of the FBI, condoning the violation of Catholics’ freedom of religion as necessary to further FBI’s presumed interest in ferreting out non-existent “white supremacist extremists” who were said to hold sway over Catholic traditionalists.
Kaine’s words on the subject revealed bigotry against traditional Catholics who observe the Latin Mass. He said “radical traditionalist Catholics” were being recruited by “violent extremists” (by which he appears to have meant “white supremacists”). With that bigoted slight and without a shred of evidence of any criminality, Kaine defended FBI surveillance. He stood up for the Deep State against the rights of his fellow Virginians and Catholics.
Kaine is now marshalling support for yet another assault on individual rights, this time one that deprives us of our right to privacy. Kaine is urging support for a bill he introduced entitled the “Improving DATA in Public Health Act.” According to Kaine, the bill is “critical” to ensure “local, state, and federal public health agencies can quickly aggregate data,” particularly in a “public health emergency” by, in the words of bill co-sponsor on the House side, Democrat Congresswoman Ami Bera, “better position[ing] ourselves to surveil against any public health threats.”
The bill increases government surveillance of patients and improves the rapidity with which private patient data is shared among local, state, and federal governments. The bill also funds centralized government planning to mandate “best practices” for use in emergency response. Kaine includes nothing in his bill to protect confidentiality of patient medical information from government bureaucrats. The bill greatly expands surveillance at all levels of government over private medical information. It also finances more centralized public health planning over emergency response, supplanting decentralized individual patient choice, independent professional judgment, and medical freedom in the process.
From the pandemic, we learned the dire consequences of centralized government planning, of vaccine mandates, of disallowance of early treatments, and of censorship of challenges to the Public Health orthodoxy. The combined effects of those deprivations of freedom likely contributed to many avoidable COVID deaths and disabilities. Public Health authorities demanded that we and our health care providers accept unquestioningly every falsehood communicated by the heads of CDC, FDA, NIAID, and the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, among others.
Those lies included official statements that the vaccine was safe and effective; that the vaccinated could not contract COVID-19; that the vaccinated could not carry and transmit COVID-19; that vaccinated immunity was superior to natural immunity; that vaccination would either prevent or dimmish the adverse effects of COVID-19; and that N-95 masks (one, two, or three!) reduced or prevented COVID transmission or infection. That government bureaucrats under political leadership would lie to us should come as no surprise. Unlike private health care practitioners who, when unleashed from bureaucratic contol, provide you their best independent professional judgment, public health authorities routinely impose a one size fits all approach pre-screened and approved by politicians, largely or entirely impervious to each person’s unique symptoms and patient history.
Despite the abysmal public health record on COVID-19 (the disastrous loss of more than 1 million Americans to COVID, the absurd lockdowns that killed more by keeping them in poorly ventilated spaces rather than outside or in well ventilated spaces, and the wholly unjustified and continuing demand that children be vaccinated), Kaine demands more of the same. He is a true believer in government, in authoritarianism, and a true enemy of individual liberty and constitutional limits on government power. He believes more government surveillance, more government data collection, and more centralized control over your health choices essential.
There is, of course, an alternative to this highly paternalistic approach, one Kaine rejected long ago in favor of the road to serfdom. That alternative is to trust individuals to make their own choices in matters of religion and health. That alternative is to liberate the American people to worship freely without entanglement of government and to respect our wishes (and that of our chosen health care providers) over how best to treat disease.