More than 100 years ago, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that popular catchwords can stunt critical thinking for 50 years or more. In his latest book, Social Justice Fallacies, revered economist and scholar Thomas Sowell confirms Holmes’ observation by examining the buzzwords that self-described “social justice” proponents commonly use today. He shows that, despite many years — and in some cases even centuries or more — of evidence revealing these words to be nonsense, our media and cultural elites continue touting them in utter defiance of facts.
Social Justice’s False Premise
Consider, for example, the very term “social justice.” It is predicated on the assumption that institutional discrimination is the primary reason for differences among groups of people, whether among races, economic classes, or even between the sexes. It assumes that were it not for such discrimination, all races, groups, and classes would be equally represented in all human endeavors. In other words, human beings are equal not only in their nature and capacities but in theirability todevelop those capacities.
As Sowell documents, however, this assumption is rarely tested empirically. In fact, both the historical record and everyday experience regularly contradict it. For example, not only have homogenous societies had unequal representation among groups of people in various endeavors, but even twin siblings who are raised under the same roof and by the same set of parents show vast differences in aptitude, performance, and cognitive ability. This is because factors beyond both our knowledge and our control — including factors that begin long before birth — heavily influence the development of human capabilities, including intelligence.
Culture and Competence
Some cultural traditions, for example, go back centuries or even millennia and thus continue to orient the developmental capacities of the people living in these cultures today. For instance, Sowell notes that the Germans have been brewing beer for thousands of years, far longer than most other cultures. It is, therefore, no surprise that they tend to be superior at making beer nowadays. Likewise, for reasons that need not concern us here, Jewish people have historically been significantly involved in matters of finance, where they continue to excel to this day.
It is simply folly, however, to believe that government decree could circumvent these longstanding cultural traditions without major catastrophe. Moreover, these “reciprocal inequalities,” as Sowell calls them, rarely amount to one group dominating all fields of human achievement. “Even highly successful groups,” he writes, “have seldom been highly successful in all endeavors. Asian Americans and Jewish Americans are seldom found among the leading athletic stars or German Americans among charismatic politicians.”
Cultural Inequalities Aren’t Fair
Of course, Sowell quickly adds that this does not mean that life is fair for all groups of people, much less to all individuals, or that there is nothing that can be done about injustices in the world. It does mean, however, that we ought to be humble about the limits of both our knowledge and our power to improve things rather than make them worse. As he points out, “We might agree that ‘equal chances for all’ would be desirable. But that in no way guarantees that we have either the knowledge or the power required to make that goal attainable, without ruinous sacrifices of other desirable goals, ranging from freedom to survival.”
Sowell spends several chapters documenting the negative consequences that have followed from decades of government policymakers ignoring the limits of their knowledge. He describes the unintended consequences of minimum wage policies, tax legislation, rent control laws, and policies related to race and sex as well as to welfare, housing, and education.
Affirmative Action and Welfare Backfire
Take, for instance, the issue of affirmative action in education. Sowell exposes the harm these policies have done first and foremost to the recipients themselves. Minority students who gain acceptance to elite schools for which they are not academically prepared often struggle to keep up with the rigorous pace and demanding workload. As a result, they end up either failing or dropping out.
On the other hand, Sowell highlights the positive results that followed from the abolition of affirmative-action policies in California (as decided by voters). “The number of black and Hispanic students graduating from the University of California system as a whole rose by more than a thousand students over a four-year span,” he observes. “There was also an increase of 63 percent in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher.”
A similar trend followed the growth of the welfare state in the 1960s when both crime rates and out-of-wedlock birth rates exploded in minority communities. The two decades prior to the ’60s, however, saw declining crimes. Out-of-wedlock birth rates were lower among minority groups than among the majority white population. Nevertheless, laments Sowell, “intellectual elites, politicians, activists and ‘leaders’ — who took credit for the black progress that supposedly all began in the early 1960s — took no responsibility for the painful retrogressions that demonstrably did begin in the 1960s.”
Beware Man’s Ignorance
All this history and much more is packed into this short but critical book, whose single most important insight may be how little we know about the lives of others. We must, therefore, be careful when making policy decisions that have the potential to affect many people — and possibly even whole societies.
As Sowell warns, “Stupid people can create problems, but it often takes brilliant people to create a real catastrophe. They have already done that enough times — and in enough different ways — for us to reconsider, before joining their latest stampedes, led by self-congratulatory elites, deaf to argument and immune to evidence.”
David Weinberger is a freelance writer and book reviewer on topics related to philosophy, culture, history and economics. Follow him on Twitter @DWeinberger03. Email him at davidweinberger916@gmail.com.
The most uneducated but wildly popular critique of Christianity in America — especially on social media — is that Christianity has been a bastion of oppression and intolerance. So much so that the advancements made in liberty and equality over the centuries have come only when America and American leaders have rejected Christianity. In his new book Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, historian Mark David Hall offers a concise corrective to this inaccurate and often ignorant hot-take and popular narrative.
Hatred of Christianity is one of the pillars of the current anti-American ideology that permeates universities and the governing spirit of our ruling elite. Mockery of Christians, especially evangelicals, is also one of the core tenets of progressive culture. This hostility and mockery are unwarranted. Far from being agents of oppression and anti-intellectualism, Hall highlights how Christians have been the bedrock of social activism advancing liberty and equality, as well as promoting education reform, increasing literacy, and publishing newspapers and magazines.
We are all familiar with the asinine proclamations of America as a secular country, that progress, liberty, and equality are atheist ideals, and that committed Christians are the greatest threat to America’s future. Yet, as Hall forcefully rebuts, “it is simply false to claim that liberty and equality have been advanced primarily when America’s leaders embrace progressive manifestations of religion or reject faith altogether.”
Looking at the Puritans, the American Revolution, evangelical social reform prior to the Civil War, and contemporary debates over religious liberty, Hall reveals what used to be well-known: Christianity has been the heart of true social progress and explosive advancements in human liberty, equality, and democratic government.
Puritans and Foundations of Liberty
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, one of the most important senators the United States ever had, lauded the Pilgrims and Puritans as champions of the liberty that our “civil and religious liberty” grew from. Today, however, it is common to imagine Puritans as petty tyrants, intolerant theocrats, and bah humbug killjoys.
When I was a student at Yale taking classes on American Puritanism, our professor went to great lengths to de-indoctrinate us of the popular stereotypes of the Puritans. The Puritans were among the most educated people at the time, established our most venerable institutions of higher education, promoted the advancement and discoveries of Enlightenment science, vigorously advocated for public literacy, and enjoyed a good laugh, beer, and sex.
The real history of the Puritans that I learned at Yale is covered again by Hall in his opening chapter deconstructing the lies of secularists and anti-Christian writers and hacktivists portraying the Puritans in a dark and inaccurate light. The Puritans, our author reminds us, “valued natural rights, government by the consent of the governed, and limited government; they were convinced that citizens have a right, and perhaps even a duty, to resist tyrannical government.” When traveling through the lands the Puritans helped to build in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville remarked, “Puritanism was not merely a religious doctrine, but corresponded in many points with the most absolute democratic and republican theories.”
As historians and scholars of Puritanism have long asserted, the democratic ethos of congregationalist church politics helped develop the local customs of self-government in New England that would form the basis for “Democracy in America,” as Tocqueville famously put it. But what about the banishment of certain Baptist dissenters and the Salem witch trials, the critic asks? These events did happen, but they are drastically overblown by contemporary critics.
The banishment of a handful of religious dissenters in Massachusetts was only after these rabble-rousing individuals repeatedly, and deliberately, returned to cause trouble and disturb the peace. Also, Hall reminds us, when compared to Europe, where more than 100,000 men and women were prosecuted as witches and half sentenced to death, only 272 individuals in America were ever charged with witchcraft. The Salem witch trials, which happened in 1692, marked the last execution of a witch in North America. In Europe, witches were still executed as late as 1782.
Completing his overview of the Puritans, Hall writes that the Puritans “created political institutions that were more democratic than any the world had ever seen, and they strictly limited civil leaders by law.”
Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to God
Another one of the popular putdowns of Christianity by its critics (and even some Christians) is that Christianity doesn’t permit rebellion to tyrannical government but supports tyrannical government. In a gross and deeply literalist reading of the Apostle Paul in Romans (somewhat ironic all things considered), these critics assert that because a single passage in the New Testament supposedly teaches obedience to government, which is ordained by God, the American revolutionary patriots rejected Christian teachings and had to utilize secular and Enlightenment arguments to advance the cause of liberty during the American Revolution.
Again, this is patently false, as any decently educated person knows. Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer recently published a superb book, The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, addressing this myth in detail. Hall, too, quickly covers the problems of this critique. Highlighting Calvinist theological history (something that these critics have no knowledge of, despite their claims of educated intelligence), covering important names known to students of theology, such as John Ponet, John Knox, George Buchanan, Samuel Rutherford, and even John Cotton (grandfather of Cotton Mather), Hall shows that Christian theological history had come to see rebellion to tyrants as obedience to God and Scripture.
Moreover, most of the popular and patriotic arguments for revolution were not conversant with theorists such as John Locke but with Scripture. The Old Testament, especially, was appealed to by the patriotic clergy in favor of revolution. Christians, far from submitting to tyranny, offered complex theological arguments against tyranny and, therefore, helped formulate a political theology of liberty and equality in the process.
Evangelicals Against Oppression
Perhaps the most common trope that our contemporary anti-Christian elite culture pushes is the tyrannical and ignorant evangelical Christian. This, too, is a stereotype with little basis in history. In fact, many of our best institutions of higher learning were founded by evangelical Christians even if they have since departed from that faith that gave birth to them (Harvard, Yale, and Oberlin, to name a few). The first opponents of slavery and proponents of abolition were the heirs of the Puritans, such as the Rev. Samuel Sewall, who published the first anti-slavery writing in 1700.
Motivated by a vigorous religious faith, the Second Great Awakening was the fire that fueled anti-slavery and abolitionist politics in antebellum America. Men and women of Methodist, Baptist, and congregationalist (Puritan) backgrounds were oftentimes the leading champions of liberty and equality for African-Americans and indigenous Americans. As Hall writes, it was American evangelicals, and especially evangelical women, who most actively “oppos[ed] the evils of slavery and Indian removal.”
During the antebellum years, American evangelicals sought to “work together to help end social evils” and established “thousands of organizations aimed at alleviating suffering and reforming society.” Evangelicals were on the front lines of creating new educational institutions, promoting education reforms to advance public literacy, and establishing newspapers as a means of confronting social evils. Furthermore, Evangelicalism, originally a religious minority grouping, was deeply indebted to religious liberty as the means for its social growth and prominence.
This spirit of religious social reform for liberty led to the contemporary defense of religious liberty as the bedrock on which all liberty and equality before the law stands: “Christian legal organizations have been among the best advocates for religious liberty for all, including citizens who embrace non-Christian faiths,” Hall writes.
Why Christianity Matters to America
In Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land, Hall gives us yet another triumphant and important book to correct the polemical, inaccurate, and deeply misleading public presentation of the relationship between Christianity and American politics. Far from the evil bogeyman and religion of oppression that ungrateful critics claim, Christianity has been a positive force for good and the growth of liberty and equality. In fact, America has been best when it has reached into the heart of Christianity for its social reforms and advancement of liberty and equality rather than rejecting Christianity.
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of “Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics” (Academica Press, 2023), “The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books” (Wipf and Stock, 2021), and contributed to “The College Lecture Today” (Lexington, 2019) and “Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters” (Routledge, 2022).
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used.
The Associated Press Stylebook, a once-respected linguistic guide for journalists, conceded the definition of the word “woke” to conservatives on Thursday, in an update instructing writers to “use quotes around the slang term.”
“Woke” was originally popularized by left-wing proponents of identity politics to flatteringly refer to their own “enlightenment or awakening about issues of racial and other forms of social justice,” as the AP explains. Conservatives have used it to describe those same people and their ideas.
Those ideas more often than not, demand revolutionary social changes that prejudge people based on their secondary physical characteristics. If, like the vast majority of America until about five seconds ago, you think such identarian prejudices are a bad thing, you might use the word “woke” in a less than fawning manner. Apparently, the AP’s staff can’t handle that.
AP’s concession of the word is hilariously thin-skinned, but it’s also a rare win for conservatives in the war of words. Just by describing woke behavior as such, we’ve held a bit of ground against the unhinged language police who are mad that the right is using their terminology against them. Unintentionally, it seems we’ve ended up with command of the word altogether, if left-wing outlets like the AP are henceforth refusing to use it.
While there are times individual ideologies require a more specific description — queer theory, or socialism, for example — “woke” is a completely fair and often helpful term to use when speaking generally about the coalition of people on the left who want to see meritocracy replaced by identity politics. As my colleague Samuel Mangold-Lenett noted recently in these pages, “what other slogany-sounding word really works as a catch-all for what leftism has become?”
“They lost complete control of the English language,” he added, “and the word they used to indicate their radicalism to one another is being used to expose that radicalism to the rest of the world.”
The apparatus of left-wing media outlets, cultural celebrities, and tech platforms that drives our modern discourse has a majority share in defining the language we use. From headlines to search engines to literal dictionaries, activists manipulate the tools of debate. In any debate, the first step is defining your terms — if your definitions are off, you’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s incumbent upon conservatives to be intentional, honest, and straightforward with the words we use. That includes defending the legitimacy of disfavored-but-accurate terms (like “woke,” or “woman”) and refusing to use inaccurate language.
Take the nonsense phrase “gender-affirming care,” for example. The diction dictators have effectively standardized the term, to the point where even people who disapprove of such procedures will glibly repeat it. But nothing about the phrase is tethered to reality.
The whole idea that people have “genders” beyond their natural sex is pseudo-science crafted to further an ideology. Procedures that attempt to inhibit or reverse the physical realities of a person’s sex are not “affirming” that sex, but actively rejecting it. And deformative surgeries that involve amputating healthy body parts and creating Frankenstein-esque “penises” and “vaginas” with scraps of carved-up skin are certainly not “care.”
To use the phrase “gender-affirming care” is to give up the entire argument before it’s even begun. Or, as George Orwell put it, such nonsense terms “construct your thoughts for you,” and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
The same goes for using improper pronouns to describe sexually confused people: calling a man “she” or a woman “he.” Doing so indulges a delusion. Having physical reality on your side does little good if you concede it away by the very words you use.
Concurrent with the effort to mainstream invented euphemisms such as “gender-affirming care” is an effort to cannibalize established English vocabulary. Other victims of the AP Stylebook’s recent crusades include “riot,” “mistress,” “crazy,” and “pro-life.” Proper grammar is also a victim, with the redefinition of the plural pronoun “they” to refer to individuals who are in denial of their natural sex.
Tech monopolies such as Google instruct their employees to avoid terms like “man hours” and “blacklist.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has nixed “criminal” and “foreigner.” From journalism to medicine, terms such as “mother” and “woman” are replaced by dehumanizing lingo like “birthing parent” and “person who menstruates.” Merriam-Webster has redefined “anti-vaxxer,” “sexual preference,” and “assault rifle” to further the editors’ ideological ends.
By describing woke ideologies and their fruits at face value, conservatives felled the left’s self-conferred monopoly on how, when, and where the term could be used. But the same people policing the word “woke” are appointing themselves the arbiters of the rest of the English language, too.
For those of us who prefer our words to reflect reality, there is nothing to be gained by good-naturedly going along with linguistic charades. On the other hand, there is the entire discourse to be lost.
“The worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them,” George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Orwell protested not just sloppy use of language, but intentional misuse of language for political purposes.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,” he said. “Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
Politicians and dishonest media propagandists today use inaccurate language to frame narratives and foster a leftist perspective. Inadvertently, even well-meaning audiences sometimes internalize this language and end up propagating the very ideas and framing they fundamentally reject. Don’t let that be you.
In every debate, it’s vital to start by defining your terms. If conservatives want to counter the radical left’s agenda, we have to begin by using words that accurately reflect what we mean — not words that actively mean the opposite. Here are just 10.
1. ‘Mainstream Media’
The public communication cartel headed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, CBS, and MSNBC does not represent mainstream Americans. Earlier this year, Axios (another culprit of heavy-handed political spin) reported that 56 percent of Americans believe “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
Big Media has engaged in deception through false and misleading “reporting” on Georgia’s election laws, the trespass and unrest at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, and more. Embracing “Russiagate” and the allegations of the Steele dossier against President Trump was one indicator of crumbling credibility. The cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election was another.
Even more recently, CBS’s “60 Minutes” invented a scandal about Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, while giving minuscule coverage to New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths his policies caused.
Leftist propaganda outlets who are running cover for Democrats and spreading inaccurate opposition research on conservatives don’t deserve to be called mainstream. Instead, use “Big Media,” “corporate media,” or — as DeSantis says — “smear merchants.”
2. ‘Gender,’ When You Mean ‘Sex’
Words have gender; people are one sex or another. For Latin and in many of the languages that have grown out of it, gender is a linguistic term indicating which word endings a term should possess. Gender is either feminine, masculine, or neuter. The phrase “la boulangerie,” for example, is French for “the bakery,” and its gender is feminine.
Male and female, on the other hand, refer to sex. Sex is a biological category that reflects a person’s physical characteristics and reproductive systems, and also manifests in certain broad behavioral differences that distinguish men and women.
3. ‘Sex-Reassignment Surgery’
Further, sex is not assigned, at birth or ever. If it is not “assigned,” it cannot be reassigned. Surgical procedures that remove or conceal the outward appearance of a woman or man’s reproductive organs, are most accurately described as genital mutilation or amputation.
4. ‘Democracy,’ When You Mean ‘Republic’
A democracy is direct rule by the supreme will of the people: the highest law is that of the loudest mob. Derived from the Greek “demos” (people) and “kratia” (power), democracy involves no higher law than popular consensus, and subjects the majority will to no checks and balances but itself.
In Book VIII of “The Republic,” Plato lists democracy as the social structure directly followed by tyranny. Democracy, Plato theorized, “comes into being when the poor, winning the victory, put to death some of the other party, drive out others, and grant the rest of the citizens an equal share in both citizenship and offices.” He continued, “that is the constitution of democracy alike whether it is established by force of arms or by terrorism.”
The American system was established as a constitutional republic. The highest law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, to which all public servants are (or should be) accountable. Additional laws are made by elected representatives of the people. Further, the American system is a federal republic, meaning power is divided between federal, state, and local governments, all of whom serve as the guarantors of the people’s sovereignty and rights.
5. ‘Abortion Doctors’ and ‘Abortion Clinics’
Doctors protect life; they don’t willfully take it. The Hippocratic Oath, written by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates and long respected as a noble description of a doctor’s vocation, includes a commitment to “not give to a woman an abortive remedy.” Doctors are also obligated to, as far as it is in their power, “do no harm.” (This phrase is commonly attributed to the Hippocratic Oath, but actually comes from another work of Hippocrates, his book, “Of the Epidemics.”)
Similarly, clinics are medical facilities where people receive help and care. We do not call the room in which a prisoner on death row is executed a “clinic,” and neither should we use the term to describe the place where preborn babies are killed and dismembered. Call abortionists and abortion facilities what they are.
6. ‘Antidiscrimination’
Often, “antidiscrimination” policies actually refer to legal preferences based on sex, race, socioeconomic status, or some other category. The Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, for example, released an “Antiracist Agenda For Medicine” earlier this month that would provide “preferential care based on race” for black and Latino patients.
In another example of discrimination under the name of its opposite, Yale University unlawfully discriminated against white and Asian students, according to a two-year Department of Justice investigation. Instead of using the leftist buzzword “antidiscrimination” to describe these policies, call them legalized preferences, or simply the discrimination they are.
7. ‘Undocumented Immigrant’
“Undocumented” is the term used by people who don’t want to call breaking immigration laws “illegal.” However, most illegal immigrants have identification documents from their home governments. Further, 16 states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Washington — as well as Washington, D.C., issue drivers licenses to illegal aliens, giving them U.S. documents as well.
8. ‘Equity’ Or ‘Equality,’ When You Mean The Other
Equity and equality sound similar, but have widely different implications today. Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines “equality” as “The same degree of dignity or claims; as the equality of men in the scale of being … an equality of rights.” The Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal” recognizes this equal value and dignity in personhood of each human being.
Equity has traditionally been a common legal term, referring to civil remedies; it can also mean the “impartial distribution of justice.” But in the jargon of identity politics, equity describes a policy that “recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.” See the above entry for “antidiscrimination” for an example of how equity-driven policies usually work.
9. ‘Cisgender’
Cisgender is an unnecessary word and assumes that sex is a result of human choice. A cisgender man is a man; a cisgender woman is a woman. Only added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015, “cisgender” was invented to represent the opposite of “transgender” in the 1990s.
10. ‘Pro-Choice’
“Pro-choice” is a euphemism to get around having to call yourself pro-abortion. But just as we don’t use “pro-choice” to describe supporting a person’s decision to murder another, we shouldn’t use it here. Abortion denies giving the unborn baby the choice to live; in that sense, it is violently anti-choice.
“This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases,” Orwell continued, “can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them.” Sloppy, inaccurate phrases will “construct your thoughts for you,” he says, and “perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”
Don’t let corrupt media and politicians design your words and supplant your meaning. To win the culture debate, you better first define your terms.
Elle Purnell is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her work on Twitter @_etreynolds.
Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.
This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,”suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.
Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.
Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)
Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime
It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.
It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It
These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?
Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.
Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters
The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.
Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.
You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.
In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.
Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers
So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.
Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).
Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.
What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.
Well, this shoots a great, big gaping hole into the ‘white privilege’claim, doesn’t it? Proponents of so-called ‘white privilege’maintain that there is systemic oppression of non-white people, and that’s why they need ‘equity‘ rather than ‘equality‘. Equity, though it sounds like equality, isn’t the same thing. It’s not treating all as equal but instead giving a ‘leg-up’ to those that need that extra help to achieve the same results.
If you look up ‘Equity vs. Equality’ online, you’re bound to come across this set of images:
The social justice proponents would say that treating everyone as equals means that some will get things that they don’t need, some will get just enough, and others will still be left short. (Pun not intended.)
Government is not the one to distribute rights to individuals or groups, rather, according to the Founders, it is the role of government to protect man’s natural rights that were given to him ‘by nature and by nature’s God’.
But what happens when the progressive social justice people are proven wrong? What if it turns out that all of the Affirmative Action and these ‘leg up’ programs haven’t made us all able to get what we need as in the above illustration, but have actually given distinct advantages to particular groups and crippling disadvantages others?
Perhaps if we had some real journalists that report facts we could stop with all the race-based ‘privilege’ nonsense and deal with the real problems that our fellow Americans face.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Published by ClashDaily.com | on December 12, 2017
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