Yesterday The American Thinker posted an article about a telephone call from the White House to the Department of Justice targeting religious objects to receiving the Covid vaccine.

The article reports:

That good Catholic, Joe Biden, is troubled by the fact that people are raising religious objections to taking the COVID vaccine. We know this because a leaked White House telephone call lets us listen in as a Department of Justice attorney works with the administration to brainstorm ways to force vaccines on religious people over their faith-based objections. The First Amendment is a dead letter in the Biden White House.

In 1558, when Elizabeth I ascended the English throne, England had seen Catholics and Protestants engaged in deadly fighting for 25 years. Elizabeth wanted none of it. “I would not open windows into men’s souls,” she said, voicing the world’s first expression of religious liberty. By the 18th century, though, Britain had passed a series of laws mandating religious tests barring non-Anglicans from roles in government or academia.

In response, the Founding Fathers ratified the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from requiring religious tests for people to participate in society. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof[.]” And thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, the First Amendment applies to all governments in America, whether federal or state.

Additionally, contrary to what many leftists assert, the First Amendment does not operate to bar people from having their religious beliefs inform their politics or their dealings with the state. It’s a limit on government, not on people. Or as Elizabeth would have said, the government cannot open windows into men’s souls.

Nevertheless, a leaked White House recording of Marty Lederman, a Department of Justice attorney, has him cynically talking about getting COVID vaccines into those Americans who object on religious grounds. He doubts their faith but reluctantly concedes that there’s little the government can do — except for using government force to override them by claiming a compelling government need:

The question of religion and medicine is not a new one. The Christian Science religion does not believe in taking drugs of any kind. The Catholic religion objects to the fact that fetal tissue may have been used in the development of the Covid vaccine. Up to this point, religious objections to vaccines or other medical procedures have been accepted.

There is something really strange going on here. First of all, anecdotal information from morticians and hospital workers indicates that the vaccine does not protect you from catching the disease, being hospitalized with the disease, or from dying from the disease. If the vaccine does not truly protect you, why is the government pushing it so hard? Why is the government putting corporations in a position where they are firing people for not receiving an ineffective vaccine? Why are the statistics on injuries caused by the vaccine not being made available to public on a regular basis?