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My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

To readers who are vaccinated against COVID, thank you. You are the reason any hospital beds are still available in this state.

Last Thursday nearly 1,700 people were hospitalized in Minnesota with COVID. While breakthrough infections are becoming more common, vaccinated people are still much less likely to become severely ill. The vast majority of people needing ICU beds for COVID are unvaccinated.

The hard truth is this: Republican voters are dying of COVID in higher numbers than their Democratic counterparts.

According to a recent analysis by NPR, people from counties that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 are dying from COVID at much higher rates than people who live in counties that voted for Joe Biden.

Not coincidentally, counties that voted for Biden have higher COVID vaccination rates, and counties that voted for Trump have lower vaccination rates.

This lack of vaccination is a deadly failure of Republican leadership. Republicans seem to think that undermining faith in life-saving vaccines and other measures to reduce the spread of COVID is an effective way to herd their base, win elections and maintain power.

Put another way, many Republican politicians seem willing to sacrifice their own voters’ lives. Not for a greater good, but to a virus.

This is behavior we expect from cult figures, not from leaders of a major political party.

Here at home, neither state Sen. Gene Dornink nor state Rep. Peggy Bennett has urged their constituents to get vaccinated. They could have — and should have — done this once it became clear that vaccines are saving thousands of lives. Instead, Dornink is now blaming Gov. Tim Walz for a staffing shortage at a Hayfield nursing home brought on by the latest pandemic wave that Dornink himself has refused to do the first thing to stop.

We’re extremely fortunate to have Gov. Walz and his health commissioner Jan Malcolm steering us through these difficult times. Walz used his emergency powers through June to effectively save thousands of Minnesota lives. If more Republicans had joined former Gov. Tim Pawlenty in working with Democrats to encourage our entire state to get vaccinated, we could be in a much better place this Christmas.

But many Republican leaders have chosen to make vaccinations a political issue rather than a public health issue, and new COVID cases and deaths are adding up quickly. Minnesota’s COVID deaths will reach 10,000 this week.

Senseless Republican behavior reached another low with Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeting a Christmas greeting with his family holding military style weapons in front of their Christmas tree just days after a student opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun — a Black Friday Christmas gift from his parents — at a high school in Michigan, killing four other students and traumatizing survivors.

Massie’s family seems to be commemorating Herod’s massacre of the innocents rather than the lowly birth of a baby prophesied to bring love and hope to Earth. 

Forget love and hope, Massie just wants “ammo.”

Massie’s family, displaying tens of thousands of dollars worth of guns designed to mince human organs, reveals what Christmas means to them — ostentatious displays of wealth and worship of destructive capitalist overconsumption.

When Republicans show you that power has become their only principle, believe them.

Christians, please meditate on what Republican leaders truly mean when they tie “Christian” identity to their party brand.

While Democrats defend separation of church and state and welcome all religious identities, Democrats much better embody the Apostle Paul’s message of being an inclusive body (“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female…”). They also manifest Jesus’s teaching that those who are “great” should be the servants of all, not the wealthiest and most powerful.

The obligation Jesus gave his followers to lift up the poor is embedded in the Democratic platform, whereas Republicans’ MO is to give wealthy capitalists freedom to extract as much value from working class labor as possible and funnel unearned income to overseas tax havens.

Christianity should be more than a label stripped of its meaning to advance corrupt ends. And make no mistake, Christianity has been co-opted to advance tyranny many times. The Age of Absolutism, in which power was derived from the “divine right of kings,” was only a few hundred years ago. It was a bleak time for liberty, and it is why the U.S. has separation of church and state.

We put up festive lights to defy the oppressive darkness of mid-winter. Many of us will light candles for hope, love, joy and peace. We could also light them for health, democracy, civil society and the rule of law.

We all do our part to overcome the darkness.

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.