Like so many events this spring, my little sisters’ dance recital was canceled, causing much disappointment after months of hard work. My youngest sister has found solace in leaping and twirling around the house in her recital costume, with the undeterred enthusiasm of a four-year-old who fully intends to be a princess-ballerina when she grows up. From my own days as a dancer and from my younger sisters’ current experience, I know dance’s potential to be a source of enjoyment that also builds confidence, coordination, and discipline. Because of this, Netflix’s recently released trailer and promotional imagefor a film called Cuties disappointed me, to say the least. The film artworkwhich sparked an outcry on social media, causing Netflix to issue an apology and replace the image (without changing the content of the film itself)featured 11-year-old girls in revealing costumes and provocative poses accompanying the film description, “Amy, 11, becomes fascinated with a twerking dance crew. Hoping to join them, she starts to explore her femininity, defying her family’s traditions.”
Cuties is not the first time that Netflix has featured a film that portrays children in a sexualized manner. As World magazine pointed out, “It might be easier to give Netflix the benefit of the doubt on its artistic intent, though, if the company didn’t have such a poor track record featuring hypersexual material involving young characters.” Cuties is a symptom of a much deeper problem. It is a symptom of culture that does not understand human value and dignity and that views the human body as a commodity. This same mindset fuels the widespread use and acceptance of pornography and the hypersexualized images that are so often on display in the entertainment industry and on social media.
Last night pro-life spokeswomanand former abortion worker Abby Johnson addressed the Republican National Convention, sharing part of her story of her journey from directing a Planned Parenthood facility to advocating for the unborn, explaining how, for her, the fight against abortion is not abstract but deeply personal. “See, for me, abortion is real,” she told the convention. “I know what it sounds like. I know what abortion smells like. Did you know that abortion even had a smell? I’ve been the perpetrator to these babies. To these women.
“I truly believed I was helping women,” she said of her time at Planned Parenthood. Shortly after she was recognized as Planned Parenthood Employee of the Year,Abby Johnson was assigned an abortion quota and was instructed to make sure that her facility sold twice as many abortions as they had the previous year. When she questioned this, pointing to the abortion giant’s public goal of making abortion less common, she told, “This is how we make our money.” She left the abortion industry a few months later after witnessing an ultrasound abortion. Her ministry, And Then There Were None (ATTWN) has helped nearly 600 abortion workers leave the abortion industry.
Marriage rates in the United States recently reached an all-time low.On top of that, it is currently estimated that only half of America’s children are raised by married parents. An increasing number of people are beginning to ask, “Are we seeing the death of the nuclear family?” What is particularly striking is that many of the people askingthis question do not see the death of the family as a bad thing. As lockdowns were put in place this springdue to COVID-19, severalvoices suggestedthat this ought to be the end of traditional family structures. Even well before COVID-19,the nuclear family was being challenged as sexist, oppressive, and even racist.
These critiques generally assume that the nuclear family is an invented concept. However, at the core of the nuclear family is marriage, which does not have a human inventor. Rather, it was created and ordained by God in the beginning. Because marriage is part of God’s good design, the benefits of stable, two-parent families are not a surprise, nor is it surprising that there are serious, tragic effects when God’s design is ignored. These effects do not come about because the nuclear family is an oppressive construct, but because the nuclear family is good.
Two more Minnesota cities have adopted counseling bans that intrude on counselor-client relationships by allowing the city council to dictate what kind of help young people struggling with gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex attraction may seek out. Winona and West Saint Paul’s bans, both of which passed on Monday night, bring the total number of Minnesota cities that have adoptedthese counseling bans up to six.
These bans make it punishable for a licensed counselor or therapist to discuss a full range of optionswith their clients. Counseling bans are especially concerning when it comes to teens struggling with gender dysphoria. Even though the vast majority of young people struggling with gender dysphoria and do not “transition” become comfortable with their biological sex as they get older, these bans would usher young people into social transition and medical “treatments” that carry life-long effects and do not improve mental health outcomes. City officials do not have the right to decide that a young person struggling with gender dysphoria cannot receive help in the form of watchful waiting and counselinginstead of being rushed into a “transition” that will affect them for the rest of their lives, nor do they have the right to limit the free speech of counselors in this way.
On Friday, a federal district court halted the enforcement of a Louisville, Kentucky ordinance that would have penalized Chelsey Nelson, a Christian wedding photographer and blogger, for running her business in accordance with her beliefs. Last year, the city of Louisville adopted an ordinance that prevented Nelson from refusing to participate in a same-sex wedding. The ordinance would have also prevented her from explaining her beliefs about marriageon her website or her social media accounts. In other words, the Louisville ordinance would have kept Nelson from publicly statingor acting on her beliefs.
In response to this law, Nelson filed a lawsuit, pointing out that she was being required to choose to “violate the law, forsake her faith, or close her business.” The judge’s decision on Friday allows Nelson to continue to operate her business in accordance with her beliefs as her case continues to move forward. In a statement, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Jonathan Scruggs said,
The court was right to halt enforcement of Louisville’s law against Chelsey while her case moves forward. She serves everyone. She simply cannot endorse or participate in ceremonies she objects to, and the city has no right to eliminate the editorial control she has over her own photographs and blogs.
Christians are often accused of engaging in politics because we love power and we want to control people. While these accusations are often spurious, it is important that we ask ourselves why engage in politics and what we communicate to the world around us. Our cultural engagement reflects what we believe about God. Because God is sovereign over all, we are free from the politics of fear, so as we engage, we should ask ourselves if our words and our actions reflect this. Do we engage in such a way that people know us by our love?Does the world around us know that we love and celebrate God’s design? Do we approach victories as well as defeats with the confidence that, whatever happens, God is in control, or do we allow ourselves to be consumed by fear and bitterness?
If we place our ultimate hope in anything that is not God, we ask that thing to be something that it is not, distorting its purpose and keeping it from what it was designed to be. As a result, something that was created to be good becomes something harmful.Political engagement is a good thing, but all good things must be kept in their place in order to remain good. If we find that our politics are marked by resentment, fear, and love of power, we should carefully examine our hearts and ask ourselves if we have allowed ourselves to bow to an idol by placing our hope in the political process, instead of God.
Yesterday presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, making for the “most pro-abortion ticket in history.” Senator Harris takes her support for abortion to appalling extremes. Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser pointed out that Harris supports taxpayer-funded abortions on demand up until birth, and has even opposed legislation that would prevent abortion survivors from being denied lifesaving care. She also allowed her support for abortion giant Planned Parenthood interfere with her work as California Attorney General prior to her election to the U.S. Senate in 2016. While she was serving as California Attorney General, Harris ordered a raid on a citizen journalist David Daleiden’s home after he expose Planned Parenthood’s role in the trafficking of body parts from aborted babies. The handling of Daleiden’s case has raised significant concerns regarding freedom of speech and the future of undercover journalism. In May, the Center for Medical Progress filed a lawsuit against Harris and others for “brazen, unprecedented, and ongoing conspiracy,” pointing out that Harris secretly met with Planned Parenthood executives to discuss the investigation shortly before the raid.
As the LGBT movement gains widespread popularity,dissenting voices, including those who have left the LGBT lifestyle, are increasingly being silenced. Facebook has recently joined this trend,enforcing a new “hate speech” policy to remove posts fromorganizations that offer counseling to people dealing with gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex attraction from Facebook and Instagram. After a targeted campaign from pro-LGBT groups, Facebook decided to remove posts from two non-profits, Core Issues Trust (CIT) and Restored Hope Network, and announced that it would be introducing a new policy classifying content that promotes “conversion therapy” as hate speech under their community guidelines, explaining that they would be doing so because they “don't allow attacks against people based on sexual orientation or gender identity.”
The counseling that Facebook is targeting under this new policy is not an “attack” on anyone, but voluntary talk therapy for people facing gender dysphoria or unwanted same-sex attraction. Ryan T. Anderson pointed out that under Facebook’s new approach, “Content about therapy to help a teen with a body-image struggle due to anorexia would be allowed, but content on the same therapeutic techniques to help a teen with a body-image struggle due to gender dysphoria would be removed.” Family Research Council noted that if Facebook was really interested in free expression, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told Congress, they would immediately reverse the decision to engage in this viewpoint discrimination.
Pro-lifers in New York are speaking out against an assembly bill intended to target pro-life pregnancy resource centers. Assembly bill A08212 would direct the commissioner of health to “conduct a study and issue a report examining the unmet health and resource needs facing pregnant women in New York and the impact of limited service pregnancy centers on the ability of women to obtain accurate, non-coercive health care information and timely access to a comprehensive range and reproductive and sexual health care services.” The bill authors reveal a bias against pro-life pregnancy centers by labeling them as “limited service.” Even before the bill has been signed into law, it has already identified what the results of the study ought to be—that pro-life pregnancy centers, because they offer “limited services” by not performing abortions, are leading to unmet needs and offering inaccurate and coercive information.
Abortion is not healthcare, and the fact that pro-life pregnancy centers do not perform abortions does not mean that they are not meeting health and resource needs. It is completely unreasonable to imply that pregnancy resource centers should be obligated to provide abortion, or that they are the cause of “healthcare” shortages because they don’t.
Schools in Madison, Wisconsin have decided to adopt a policy that allows children with gender dysphoria to secretly “transition” at school behind their parents’ backs. Under the policy, teachers are prohibited from informing parents if their student chooses to adopt a new name and pronouns and gain access to restrooms and locker rooms designated for members of the opposite sex. This policy was adopted in 2018 and was challenged by parents living in the Madison Metropolitan School District in December of last year when they sent a letter informing the district that they would sue if the policy was not changed. After the district refused to back down, the parents filed a lawsuit against the school district with the help of Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
The school district’s guidance and policies handbook explains to teachers that, unless if a student gives the school permission to inform their parents, the school should not do so. The handbook goes on to say that,
All staff correspondence and communication to families in regard to students shall reflect the name and gender documented in Infinite Campus unless the student has specifically given permission to do otherwise. (This might involve using the student’s affirmed name and pronouns in the school setting, and their legal name and pronouns with family).
You’ve no doubt seen the direction the city is going in. And you've seen our steadfast campaign opposing so-called "Drag Queen Story Hour," which is a threat to children.
Now, there's another threat on the horizon.
Currently, Minneapolis Park Board ordinance PB2-21 states no one 10 years or older is allowed to expose their genitals, pubic area, buttocks or female breast below the top of the areola in a park or parkway, whether or not children are present.
But members of the Minneapolis Park Board are holding a hearing tomorrow (agenda here) to make public female nudity legal in Minneapolis parks and parkways under any and all circumstances.
Parks are, of course, a great resource for families with children. But many families are justifiably opposed to displays of female nudity in front of their young sons and daughters. The park board is continuing the trick that we've seen for several decades, but which is now accelerating: erasing the real differences between men and women.
Earlier this week, 23 pro-life leaders sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn asking him to remove the abortion pill from the U.S. market. The letter points out that the abortion pill, also known as RU-486 is considered so dangerous that it has been placed under the FDA’s Risk Evaluation Mitigation Strategy (REMS) and that when it was approved in the U.S., the FDA accelerated the approval process, a move that is “usually reserved for high-risk drugs used to cure life-threatening illnesses, even though pregnancy is not an illness and the abortion does not cure or prevent any disease.”
The abortion pill ends the life of an unborn child and poses serious dangers to women, having been documented to result in severe complications and even death. A recent study found the abortion pill to be four times more dangerous to women than surgical abortion, and in the U.S. alone there have been over 4,000 adverse events from the abortion pill reported to the FDA, and 24 deaths since RU-486 was legalized. The letter notes that only the prescribing facility is required to report adverse events, and many women seek care at an emergency room instead of returning to the abortion facility. As such, we don’t know the true number of adverse events caused by the abortion pill in the past 20 years.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced a proposed rule that would protect the safety and privacy of women in homeless shelters. Under the Obama administration, a rule was put in place that would require shelters to accommodate people on the basis of their gender identity, rather than their biological sex. The current proposal rolls back that requirement and allows shelters to make admittance decisions on the basis of biological sex. Single-sex shelters offer women who have been abused, trafficked, or raped a safe place to stay, and this proposed rule would allow them to continue to care for the safety and well-being of women. HUD Secretary Ben Carson also pointed out that the rule change allows religious shelters in accordance with their beliefs.
In 2018,an Anchorage, Alaska women’s shelter was taken to court for choosing not to admit a man who identified as a woman. Saying that shelters must allow biological males to share intimate spaces with vulnerable women prevents shelters from carrying out their purpose of offering a safe place to women. Writing at The Daily Citizen, Jeff Johnston notes,
Of course, not all transgender-identified individuals threaten women. But activist groups like the ACLU and NCTE refuse to acknowledge that women have been harmed in sex-segregated facilities – by men who claim to be women. Liberty Counsel, a Christian legal aid group, compiled a list of 79 such incidents between 2006 and 2017.
In a Friday night decision, the Supreme Court denied a Nevada church’s petition to block enforcement of Governor Steve Sisolak’s restrictions limiting religious gatherings to 50 people, regardless of the size of the building. Under Governor Sisolak’s orders, casinos, restaurants, and movie theaters are allowed to open at 50% capacity, rather than being limited to a strict number limit the way that churches are. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court allowed Nevada to continue to discriminate against churches by holding them to stricter limits than secular gatherings, thus communicating that to both Nevada and the majority on the Supreme Court, entertainment is more essential than the free exercise of religion.
In response to the Court’s refusal to block enforcement of Governor Sisolak’s orders, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel David Cortman said,
The First Amendment requires the government to treat religious organizations, at a minimum, the same as comparable secular organizations. When the government treats churches worse than casinos, gyms, and indoor amusement parks in its COVID-19 response, it clearly violates the Constitution. As Justice Alito noted, ‘The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance.’
One month after the Supreme Court’s Bostock ruling,the ACLU has filed a lawsuit against a Catholic hospital that refused to perform a hysterectomy on a woman struggling with gender dysphoria.St. Joseph Medical Center was founded in 1864 by Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia and has continued to operate in accordance with their beliefs for over 150 years. Because of those beliefs, the hospital canceled Jesse Hammons’s hysterectomy as it would have removed a healthy organ and left her sterilized. The ACLU argues that, in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling, the hospital’s actions are discriminatory.
In an ACLU press release, Hammon said, “The hospital will perform hysterectomies for everyone else, but they did not think that my life, as a man who is transgender, is equally worthy of protection.” This claim is false. St. Joseph’s Medical Center does not perform hysterectomies for “anyone else,” but instead, only performs them when medically necessary. In a letter to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the general counsel for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in 2016,
A hospital does not engage in ‘discrimination’ when, for example, it performs a mastectomy or hysterectomy on a woman with breast or uterine cancer, respectively, but declines to perform such a procedure on a woman with perfectly healthy breasts or uterus who is seeking to have the appearance of a man.
After years of hailing her as a hero, Planned Parenthood has decided to attempt to distance themselves from their founder, Margaret Sanger. Throughout her life, Sanger made it no secret that she was a firm believer in eugenics, arguing for the forced sterilization of the “unfit” and called her work the “greatest step toward race betterment.” She included a white supremacist on her board of directors, spoke at an event for a women’s branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and used her work to target minority communities, opening her first birth control center in an immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn, and the second in Harlem. After decades of glossing over their racist and eugenics-based origins, Planned Parenthood announced on Tuesday that they would be removing Margaret Sanger’s name from their New York building and would be working with the city council to remove her name from Margaret Sanger Square. In an official statement, Karen Seltzer, the Board Chair at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York said,
The removal of Margaret Sanger’s name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood’s contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color. Margaret Sanger’s concerns and advocacy for reproductive health have been clearly documented, but so too has her racist legacy. There is overwhelming evidence for Sanger’s deep belief in eugenic ideology, which runs completely counter to our values at PPGNY. Removing her name is an important step toward representing who we are as an organization and who we serve.
Planned Parenthood’s attempt to distance themselves from Sanger’s racism and eugenicsis half-hearted and hypocritical at best. Following in the footsteps of their founder, the abortion giant continues to target minority communities and kills an estimated 247 black babies every day, and Live Action News has pointed out that 38% of reported abortions are committed on black women, while black Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population.
A recent study from Dr. Tricia Bruce at Notre Dame University revealed that American’s attitudes toward abortion are not always what they would seem to be based on polling data. She and her team conducted a study in which they interviewed people on their views regarding abortion, without letting them know ahead of time what they would be discussing. Rather than asking closed-ended polling questions, they spent over an hour talking to each interviewee and then analyzed the interviews for patterns and trends.
Most of the interviewees acknowledged that they had not given serious thought to the issue of abortion, and that it was a topic they had almost never discussed. “Nearly all Americans feel conflicted in some way about abortion,” observed Bruce. “Surveys underestimate the ambivalence that emerges when Americans talk through their own understandings of abortion.” Bruce also found that many interviewees would give one response regarding their views on abortion, and then follow up by explaining that their response doesn’t actually reflect their views, and that none of the individuals her team interviewed saw abortion as a desirable good. Near the conclusion of her report, Bruce writes,
Most Americans don’t know for themselves what they believe about abortion. No one has ever asked them, beyond a narrow dichotomy. Many are still figuring it out. Americans also find themselves bereft of scientific, legal, and moral lexicons to reason through difficult topics. Most work with a limited set of facts and tools in moral reasoning, leading them to positions without having contemplated the extent of implications.
“As or right now, his quality of life… he doesn’t have much of one.”
“What do you mean? Because he’s paralyzed with a brain injury he doesn’t have quality of life?”
“Correct.”
This was the conversation between a doctor at St. David’s Hospital in Austin, Texas and the wife of a quadriplegic man in early June. Michael Hickson, who was disabled due to an anoxic brain injury he had suffered in 2017, had been admitted to the hospital with a low-grade fever and pneumonia after testing positive for COVID-19 a few weeks earlier.Due to an ongoing custody dispute between Mrs. Hickson and her sister-in-law, a court had appointed Family Eldercare as Hickson’s temporary guardian and Mrs. Hickson no longer had the right to make medical decisions on behalf of her husband.In a recorded conversation between Mrs. Hickson and the hospital, one of the doctors treating Hickson explained that the decision had been made not to pursue further treatment and to instead put him on hospice care,and that this decision was made because of Hickson’s quality of life.When pressed on whether or not the quality of life assessment had been made because of Hickson’s disability, the doctor said that it was, and returned to that point more than once throughout the conversation, arguing that Hickson’s case was different from other patients, saying, “His quality of life is different from theirs. They were walking, talking people.” Six days later, Hickson died.
The New York Times recently proclaimed, “Churches were eager to reopen. Now they are a major source of coronavirus cases.”The since-modified headline is a gross overstatement and makes it sound as if churches have played a significant role in the spread of COVID-19. As Ed Setzer pointed out in Christianity Today, the New York Times reported that 650 cases had been linked to churches since the beginning of the pandemicwhen there have been over 3 million cases in the U.S. during that time. “650 nationally out of 3 million cases is a headline looking for a story,” writes Setzer. “The real story is this: churches are gathering and remarkably few infections are taking place.” Furthermore, out of over 300,000 churches in the U.S., only 40 have been linked to COVID outbreaks. Making the argument that the majority of churches are disregarding the safety of their parishionersand becoming a major source of the virus’s spread is ridiculous.
With religious gatherings being unfairlytargeted, this kind of reporting from the New York Times is dishonest and irresponsible. Churches are not compromising public safety, and they have not been a significant source of the spread of COVID-19. In the past week, there have been an average of 62,000 new cases reported per day. In other words, the number of cases per day is almost a hundred times as many as there have been linked to churches since March.
A federal judge on Monday waived a rule requiring an in-person visit before obtaining the abortion pill after the ACLUargued that the requirement poseda “substantial obstacle”during COVID-19. The abortion pill is subject to the FDA Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) protocol,and with good reason. In the 20 years that the abortion pill regimen has been legal in the U.S., thousands of women have experienced adverse effects and 24 have died. In May of this year, a woman who had taken the abortion pill was rushed from a Texas abortion facility to a nearby hospital as her oxygen levels dropped due to severe blood loss. Ignoring the dangers of the abortion pill, the ACLU filed a lawsuiton behalf of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic demanding thatthe FDA to waive the REMS requirement of an in-person visit.
Writing for Live Action, Nancy Flanders points out,
The purpose of undergoing a physical examination before taking the abortion pill is to ensure the gestational age of the child is not more than 10 weeks, that the woman is either Rh negative or positive, and that the pregnancy is not ectopic. In any of these cases, taking the abortion pill poses a potential health risk to the woman, including the possibility of future pregnancy loss, hysterectomy, and death.
Demanding the removal of in-person visits shows a serious disregard for the safety and well-being of women, and U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang was wrong to bow to the abortion lobby’s demands.
