Trump insists Biden is 'targeting' Christians, urges evangelicals to 'vote, vote, vote' – Spectrum News NY1

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Former President Donald Trump thanked six conservative Supreme Court justices “for the wisdom and the courage to end Roe v. Wade” on Saturday, as he insisted without evidence to a group of evangelicals that the Biden administration is persecuting Christians and Catholics on the basis of their faith.
“We will protect Christians in our schools and our military and our government, our workplaces, in our hospitals, and in our public square,” Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for the November presidential election, told his audience at the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Washington Saturday. “And my next term, I will once again appoint a rock solid conservative…you know, we put in almost 300 judges and three Supreme Court justices to interpret the law and the Constitution as written," he said, adding that Republicans "totally transformed the federal bench.”
The attendees of the Faith & Freedom Coalition are, by and large, rock-ribbed social conservatives in favor of a total national ban on abortion.
Though Trump espoused pro-life views, and celebrated completing “what the pro-life movement sought to get for 49 years,” he did not offer a personal stance on a nationwide abortion ban. Rather, he said that abortion rules are now “up to the will of the people in each state.” However, he insisted that “radical Democrat extremists” are seeking to codify the right to an abortion up to the moment of birth. (Fewer than 1% of all abortions recorded in 2021 — 3,720 of 470,157, according to the Centers for Disease Control — occurred after 21 weeks or more of gestation.)
His greatest appeal was to insist that Christians must come out and vote for him, and in large numbers. And to do so, beyond repeatedly insisting that attendees “vote, vote, go ahead, vote vote vote,” Trump continually asserted that his audience was constantly under attack — and that they would be protected on his watch.
“Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers,” Trump said, though how strict he expects to be with that promise — and if he plans to protect all religious groups, or just a favored few — remains to be seen. Last year, Trump publicly pledged to bring back his “Muslim ban,” an executive order that banned the entry of citizens from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq — and to bring it “even bigger than before and much stronger than before,” he told an audience at an Iowa rally.
The former president — who last month was convicted of 34 felony charges in his New York hush money trial — said that a second Biden term would result in a nation where “Christianity will not be safe, and a nation with no borders, no laws, no freedom, no future…your religion certainly will be, I think, in tatters.”
As an example, he cited the arrest and prosecution of a woman who he said was “singing” outside of an abortion clinic.
“Just last month, the Biden DOJ got Paula Harlow, a 75-year-old woman in poor health, sentenced to two years in prison for…singing beautifully outside of a clinic,” Trump said.
According to the Department of Justice, Harlow was arrested and charged, alongside nine others, in Oct. 2020 for “using force, threatening to use force and physically obstructing access to reproductive health care in the District of Columbia,” in violation of a 1994 federal law protecting reproductive health clinics. She was convicted last year and sentenced to 24 months in prison in May.
Harlow’s group made a fake patient appointment, used chains and locks to barricade the clinic and passively resisted arrest while live-streaming their work on Facebook. “The defendants’ forced entry into the clinic at the outset of the invasion resulted in injury to a clinic nurse. During the blockade, one patient had to climb through a receptionist window to access the clinic, while another laid in the hallway outside of the clinic in physical distress, unable to gain access to the clinic,” the DOJ said.
Trump planned to follow his speech Saturday with a rally in Philadelphia later that evening.

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