Effective July 2025, teacher licensing rules passed last year in Minnesota under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz will ban practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in public schools. Walz is now the presidential running mate of current U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. His resume includes a stint as a high school social studies teacher who sponsored a student queer sex club in 1999.
Starting next July, Minnesota agencies controlled by Walz appointees will require teacher license applicants to affirm transgenderism and race Marxism. Without a teaching license, individuals cannot work in Minnesota public schools, nor in the private schools that require such licenses. The latest version of the regulations requires teachers to “affirm” students’ “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” to receive a Minnesota teaching license:
The teacher fosters an environment that ensures student identities such as race/ethnicity, national origin, language, sex and gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, physical/developmental/emotional ability, socioeconomic class, and religious beliefs are historically and socially contextualized, affirmed, and incorporated into a learning environment where students are empowered to learn and contribute as their whole selves (emphasis added).
Last spring, administrative law judges finally approved these pending changes The Federalist reported one month before they were finalized. Universities are also affected: starting in 2025, they must either train their teaching students to fulfill these anti-Christian requirements or be banned from offering state licensing — and thus the ticket to the vast majority of teaching jobs — to their students.
Since 2020 in Minnesota, teachers renewing their licenses, which is usually required every five to seven years, must demonstrate “cultural competency” similar to the requirements imposed in 2025 on new teaching licensees. Teachers renewing their licensing must “Show[] evidence of self-reflection and discussion of” topics that include “Gender Identity, Including Transgender Students” and “Sexual Orientation.” They must also show they understand “bias” in themselves, and their students related to race, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other cultural Marxist categories.
Queer Totalitarianism Forces Religion into the Closet
Some Christian universities in the state will obey these regulations, said Doug Seaton, founder and president of the nonprofit Upper Midwest Law Center, located in Minneapolis. Some Christian universities will not, but so far, those UMLC has reached out to that plan to disobey these state commands to violate their faith will do so quietly and only sue when the state finds and punishes them, Seaton said.
“Some are not willing to do it [file a lawsuit] until they actually have their college programs tagged for noncompliance, or their graduates actually not licensed as a consequence of not adhering to these standards,” he said in a phone interview. This comes even though UMLC, as a public interest law firm, would undertake the litigation and pay the vast majority of its expenses thanks to their donors. Three Minnesota Christian Universities The Federalist reached out to did not return inquiries on whether they would enforce the new licensing rules.
Faithful members of the world’s largest and oldest religions cannot in good conscience “affirm” non-heterosexual sexual orientations and gender identities. Christians who do so publicly deny their faith, something Jesus Christ said endangers a person’s soul and eternal bliss after death: “Therefore whoever confesses Me before men, him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 10:32, 33).
Minnesota’s teacher requirements therefore force Christians, Muslims, Jews, and adherents to other religions to violate their faith and endanger their hopes of eternal life in order to work in government-run schools.
Forcing people to testify to beliefs they don’t hold, often called compelled speech, is clearly unconstitutional, he said: “They’re essentially requiring people to affirm these ideas that they don’t really believe, in many cases, as a condition of being a public-school teacher or being part of a program to be a licensed public-school teacher. You can’t force that kind of speech; you can’t require adherence to ideas that aren’t believed.”
The 13-member board that made these changes is appointed by the governor, whom for the last six years has been Walz. So, Walz is poised to make similar bigoted, totalitarian, and unconstitutional policies across the United States should he be elected vice president.
Marinating Kids in Anti-American Propaganda
As I reported last year, Minnesota’s new teacher requirements also “require teachers to agree that the taxpayers supplying their salaries and the people who created the school system that will employ them are racists and affirm other cultural Marxist beliefs.”
“For example, Standard 6C requires that ‘The teacher understands the historical foundations of education in Minnesota … that have and continue to create inequitable opportunities, experiences, and outcomes for learners … especially for … students historically denied access, underserved, or underrepresented on the basis of race … gender, sexual orientation.’” That “standard” remains in the latest version of the regulations, under the same number.
Recently in The Wall Street Journal, Katherine Kersten examined curricular changes Minnesota is making under Walz’s administration in “ethnic studies” that mirror these changes to teacher licensing requirements.
Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to‘identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power’ and ‘use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.’
Fourth graders must ‘identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.’ High-school students are told to ‘develop an analysis of racial capitalism’ and ‘anti-Blackness’ and are taught to view themselves as members of ‘racialized hierarchies’ based on ‘dominant European beauty standards.”
The new teacher requirements are also rife with demands to agree with race Marxism, as Child Protection League analyses detail. Below are just a few examples.
Walz’s first executive order as governor was to install a “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, council. Former Minnesota state legislator Allen Quist notes that “The radical Walz administration Department of Human Rights has also forced school districts to report student discipline by race and require equal outcomes (equity) in discipline. The results have been horrific chaos and violence.”
During Walz’s governorship, student achievement in Minnesota has gone from among the best in the nation to declining more sharply than anywhere else in the nation, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for the American Experiment. The most recent scores show Minnesota fourth graders dipping below the national average in reading for the first time ever recorded on the well-respected Nation’s Report Card.
Research has found for decades that there is no link between teacher certification and student achievement. People who enter teaching with a degree other than in education tend to have significantly higher personal and student academic performance.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her new book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
In 2023, the legislature amended the Minnesota Human Rights Act (MHRA) to add anti-discrimination protections for “gender identity” but failed to revise the corresponding religious exemption, effectively attempting to remove it.
This year, “gender identity” was added to a list of already protected categories of protections in the MHRA. “Sexual orientation” was already protected by the MHRA, but the term “gender identity” was added explicitly. A religious exemption that had already been in place since 1993 “prohibited the state from forcing religious organizations to comply with the anti-discrimination law provisions with respect to protected categories like sexual orientation when those provisions are inconsistent with a religious organization’s sincerely held beliefs,” said Renee Carlson, general counsel for True North Legal. However, the religious exemption was not updated to include the term “gender identity.”
“While we had hoped it was an oversight, the House Judiciary Chair stated on the record that the omission of those words was intentional,” Carlson said. “A discussion ensued during the committee where Democratic legislators not only refused to accept an amendment to protect religious organizations, but also called the amendment to protect religious organizations ‘disturbing’ and ‘disgusting’ after hearing a testimony from a diverse group of testifiers.”
By openly failing to include “gender identity” in the previously established religious exemption, the Minnesota legislation openly attacked religious freedom, but the attack does not stop there. Churches and religious institutions would be directly impacted by this exemption, but so would many unprotected groups served by religious organizations.
“A threat to religious organizations extends well beyond the churches and ministries that the statute protects. Religious organizations often serve marginalized and underserved communities, such as victims of sex trafficking, homeless families, and youth through programs that help kids graduate high school and even go to college. These religious entities in Minnesota meet individual needs and fill gaps that the government could never achieve on its own. To be sure, this was an unprecedented attack on religion and people of faith, but also on the communities that they serve,” said Carlson.
The MHRA could even threaten the existence of some religious organizations whose mission and religious beliefs are inseparable, Carlson added. “For religious organizations and its members, every decision is inextricably bound up in the tenets of its faith tradition. Removing statutory protections for religious organizations from the Minnesota Human Rights Act threatened the existence of all religious entities whose missions are inseparable from their employment practices, catechisms, and governance.”
According to Jason Adkins, general counsel at Minnesota Catholic Conference, the religious exemption was put in place in 1993 and had functioned without any problems until the bill introducing “gender identity” protections. The religious exemption was never meant to compromise anti-discrimination law but was intended to protect the freedom of religious institutions.
“The clear religious exemption provides predictability to religious organizations, potential litigants, and others about the scope of the MHRA and the pluralism of values that it protects, including the autonomy of religious institutions on matters of sexual identity. Anti-discrimination provisions related to sexual orientation and gender identity made it into law in 1993 in part because religious groups did not oppose them due to the inclusion of the exemption. This clarification of law restores the gender identity exemption and ensures that the MHRA is not used as a sword against faith communities,” said Adkins.
After public backlash, both the Minnesota House and Senate voted unanimously to restore religious protections.
While the restoration of the exemption somewhat protects religious organizations, there are many members of religions working in fields not controlled by religious institutions. Christian workers, including teachers, lawyers, and doctors, fear the need to compromise their religious beliefs in order to do their jobs in a way that respects the MHRA. “Our big concern is that doctors may be punished for declining to provide treatments they believe are unethical or harmful. This is not a tenet of a specific religion, but of natural law and universal human rights,” said a medical doctor from the Association of American Physicians.
Despite the religious exemption being restored, legal battles to defend religious freedom are constantly raging in Minnesota. Still in effect are the new standards requiring state-licensed teachers to affirm students’ gender identities. After the MHRA tried to effectively remove the religious exemption, new amendments to the Minnesota constitution intending to attack religious institutions have been proposed.
Doug Seaton, a lawyer at Upper Midwest Law, emphasized the constant need for vigilance in an environment where religious liberty is always under attack. “We have to be constantly fighting these assaults in the dark and bringing them to the light. This attempt ended in success, but it is a lesson in how eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) developed its 2021 framework on sex and “gender” around the concepts of fairness, inclusion, and non-discrimination. This framework leaves it to each sport’s governing body“to determine how an athlete may be at a disproportionate advantage against their peers.” However, they admonish sports organizations against “targeted testing … aimed at determining [athletes’] sex, gender identity and/or sex variations.” Instead, it’s up to each sport to “[provide] confidence that no athlete within a category has an unfair and disproportionate competitive advantage.”
The IOC’s sophistic gymnastics to deny sex-based categories in sport prompted 26 researchers from around the world to rebut the IOC’s framework. Their paper, published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, is the latest peer-reviewed study providing evidence of the obvious about sex in sports. The researchers reviewed studies from “evolutionary and developmental biology, zoology, physiology, endocrinology, medicine, sport and exercise science, [and] athletic performance results within male and female sport” to refute the IOC’s position that male athletes warrant “no presumption of advantage” over female athletes based on “biological or physiological characteristics.”
That statement “is ridiculous on its face,” says Kim Jones, co-founder of the Independent Council on Women’s Sports (ICONS). “This is the basic knowledge we all understand and see play out in front of our eyes every day. [This new] paper is brilliant at laying out how clear the differences are between men and women. There are thousands of differences between male and female development in humans across the entire maturity path that result in these huge performance gaps.”
John Armstrong, a mathematician at King’s College London who was not affiliated with this research, highlights this “central flaw” of the IOC’s framework. “To say we should not presume male advantage in a sport unless we have specific data for that sport is like saying that just because most of the apples in a tree have fallen to the ground, one shouldn’t presume the remaining apples are also subject to gravity,” he said.
“There is overwhelming evidence of male advantage from across different sports and there is little to be gained from demonstrating this again and again, sport by sport,” Armstrong noted.
The Illusion of Testosterone Suppression
But even sports that have copious research into sex differences in performance have permitted males to compete in the female category at all levels of competition and age. One path has been through misguided policies based on testosterone levels.
Over the last decade, various sports governing bodies — including the IOC and USA Boxing — have attempted to define females through testosterone levels. Those organizations relied heavily on a publication by Joanna Harper, a trans-identifying male medical physicist. The paper consisted of eight self-reports by trans-identifying male recreational runners who had suppressed their testosterone pharmacologically and recalled that they ran slower after doing so. Harper excluded the one respondent who said he ran faster and then concluded that males who were suppressing their testosterone could compete fairly in the female category.
Last week’s paper builds on research by lead authors Tommy Lundberg, Emma Hilton, and others who demonstrate the persistence of male advantage after testosterone suppression.
While testosterone suppression decreases various measures of anatomy, physiology, and physical performance, those changes are a small fraction of the differences between men and women on these metrics. A testosterone-suppressed male will have less muscle mass than his former self, but as a category, testosterone-suppressed men remain larger and stronger than women. Further, testosterone suppression does not change attributes like height, bone length, or hip and shoulder width.
Even before puberty, though, males outperform females in athletic competitions. Greg Brown is an exercise physiologist at the University of Nebraska at Kearney and was a co-author on the Lundberg paper. Brown recently published research based on national youth track and field championships. He found that by age 8, the boys ran faster in their final rounds than the girls did in theirs, at race distances from 100 meters to 1,500 meters.
When ‘Obvious’ Sex Differences Are Not Enough
Brown’s article came out a few months after John Armstrong (mentioned above), sociologist Alice Sullivan of University College London, and I published a paper on the role of sex versus gender expression in distance running. Having been on the receiving end of many tweets and articles saying, “Duh, obvious, did we need research to prove this?” I asked Brown if we really needed quantitative research to prove that boys run faster than girls.
“Some court cases regarding transgender athletes competing in girls’ sports said there’s no evidence of prepubescent sex-based differences. This kind of work does matter to inform policy. Moreover, it can be useful to evaluate the obvious because some of the things we take for granted as truth, maybe they’re not,” Brown said.
The obvious question in response to this accumulation of “obvious” data is: What will it take to restore and enforce sex-based categories in sports at all levels? Even if the International Olympic Committee aligned its policies with the Lundberg paper, the IOC is not binding on youth sports, grassroots sports, or even the NCAA.
Brown is optimistic about “the grassroots level, where girls and women’s sports will start being limited to female athletes. Some school districts and other local organizations are making female-only sports policies when state or higher-level organizations won’t.”
Brown noted the lawsuit against the NCAA by female athletes will “make those in charge of sports have second thoughts about their transgender inclusion policies. Before there was a fear of lawsuits from transgender activists, but now the shoe is on the other foot.”
He also called on “scholarly journals, sports science organizations, and sports scientists to speak out and keep the reality of sex-based differences in sports performance in the news to counteract the 20-year head start the transgender activists have.”
ICONS is funding the lawsuit that Brown mentioned. “We need people to realize there can be no fear and no shame in standing up for women. It’s a basic message that we all have the responsibility to communicate clearly,” said ICONS co-founder Kim Jones. “The stories of women and girls being robbed of fair sport, or even facing injury, are the path of change. It shouldn’t take women and girls being hurt, but everyone has the clear evidence.”
Jon Pike, a sports philosopher and a co-author of the Lundberg paper, advises sports organizations to look to the evidence and not to the IOC.
“They are training and developing athletes who aspire to international competition. They owe female athletes the same level playing field that they will get at the international level. Female athletes at all levels are entitled to fair sport,” he said.
Objective empirical data that accord with everyday experience and observation are the most powerful counters to the emotion, rhetoric, and threats that often accompany attempts to deny the validity of female-only spaces and categories.
The value of studies like those of Lundberg, Brown, Armstrong, and their respective colleagues will play out in board rooms and courtrooms, not to mention the living rooms where so many grassroots sports decisions are made. The more decision-makers can rely on research rather than earnest but shallow plaints of “But it’s obvious!” the more women and girls will flourish in fair and competitive sports.
George M. Perry is a sports performance coach, sports businessman, and writer. Before going into the sports industry, he was a submarine warfare officer in the United States Navy and briefly attended law school.
The mother of a Virginia teensex-trafficked twice after her school concealed her newly asserted gender identity has filed a groundbreaking lawsuit against school staff and a Maryland public defender who alleged parental “misgendering” and abuse. The complaint was filed Aug. 22 in the Western District of Virginia court on behalf of Michele Blair by the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC) with support from the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR).
It alleges that the defendants’ actions—first in withholding vital information about the girl’s gender identification and related assault in the boys’ bathroom, then later by falsely alleging abuse to deprive her mother of custody—resulted in the child’s ordeal at the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice. Blair v. Appomattoxet al. will set critical precedents in two areas of roiling national debate: parental notification of gender transition in schools and parental custody relating to gender identity.
Public Schools Hide Kids’ Dysphoria
More than 10 million children this fall returned to public schools that conceal kids’ transgender identities from parents. A California case recently settled for $100,000 is one of several lawsuits filed by parents whose children were secretly transitioned in school.
The Blair suit, however, is groundbreaking for displaying the liability schools risk when secret-keeping results in tragedy. Safely back in her loving home for more than a year now, Sage still suffers persistent nightmares and panic attacks. She is receiving intensive therapy for complexPTSD, her mother reports, a diagnosis related to prolonged helplessness amid extreme trauma.
The reason for the secrecy that prefaced her ordeal no longer exists: Sage has embraced her sex, reflecting in hindsight that she had “just wanted to make friends” at her new school by claiming to be a boy.
How gender identity relates to “abuse” is fiercely debated nationwide. In some states including California, pending legislation categorizes parental non-affirmation of gender dysphoria as abuse. The political cost of angering parents of all backgrounds has begun to affect 2024 campaigns, as demonstrated by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s unexpected veto of one of these bills.
In 2023, Virginia lawmakers debated “Sage’s Law,” requiring parental notification in schools and clarifying that raising a child according to his or her sex may not be considered abuse. Virginia Senate Democrats killed Sage’s Law, and it has become a campaignissue. In fact, the transgender delegate who vehemently opposed House Bill 2432 is now facing a veteran anti-traffickingleader championing the bill.
“Sage’s story is an absolute tragedy that no child should ever have to endure. But what is even worse is that it was entirely preventable,” said attorney Vernadette Broyles in announcing the lawsuit. “School administrators and public officials alike decided that their authority superseded that of her parents…This is about who has the best interests of the child at heart, who knows that child better than anyone else, and ultimately who must make important personal decisions for a child.”
An ‘Entirely Preventable’ Nightmare
Sage’s heartbreaking story was documented in The Federalist last winter, when Delegate Dave LaRock introduced Sage’s Law in the Virginia General Assembly. She was a 14-year-old freshman at Appomattox County High School in 2021 when her school allegedly reinforced her claim to be male and concealed it from her parents. She was severely bullied, then assaulted in the male bathroom school employees told her to use, according to the complaint.
Sage ran away, leaving a note expressing fear of further violence. She was caught by a predator who drugged and raped her, then drove her into Washington, DC, where other men sex-trafficked her into Maryland.
When the FBI rescued Sage in Baltimore eight days later, a public defender alleged “misgendering” and abuse at home, so a judge withheld custody from Sage’s loving parents for more than two months. Instead, the judge ordered Sage to a Maryland state home in male quarters, where she was assaulted again, the lawsuit says. Sage fled and was once again caught by a predator and raped, drugged, starved, and tortured, this time for months before law enforcement found her in Texas.
Seeking Justice for Sage
The 55-page complaint lays out nine causes of action, seeking “compensatory and punitive damages” plus court costs for “tortious interference with the parent-child relationship, conspiracy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, professional malpractice, and other rights” resulting in extreme harm to Sage and her mother. The first four causes of action target Appomattox County High School counselors Dena Olsen and Avery Via, Superintendent Annette Bennett, and the school board.
The remaining causes contain shocking charges against Maryland public defender Aneesa Khan and the school counselors of malpractice, perjury, and conspiracy “aimed at depriving Mrs. Blair of custody of her daughter and keeping [Sage] in Maryland to be affirmed in a male identity.”The complaint alleges the trio knowingly presented false testimony of abuse to Judge Robert Kershaw, and that their success in convincing him to keep Sage from her parents resulted in her subsequent abuse in a state home and in her second, months-long victimization.
Lawsuit: Hiding Info Led to Sex Trafficking
The Appomattox defendants, contends the lawsuit, concealed both the school’s unauthorized “mental health intervention” affirming Sage as male and the resultant student “bullying, verbal, physical and sexual assault.” It alleges they failed to take corrective action or to initiate a Title IX sexual harassment investigation, instead directing the girl into the male bathroom, where she was assaulted.
Among the most damning allegations is the counselors’ egregious disregard for Sage’s history of trauma and mental health concerns. Michele had provided these to the school expecting they would work closely with her like Sage’s previous school had, she described in testimony to Virginia’s legislature.
Sage lost her father as a baby and had been through six foster homes by age two when Michele, her biological grandmother, adopted her. Michele recalls Sage’s unusual silence as a child: she had learned not to cry because adults didn’t respond.
With years of love, she developed into a happy child. Then a wave of mental health issues emerged with puberty, compounded by Covid isolation. As a trained Virginia Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA), Michele sought professional help for Sage, including hospitalization the summer before she entered high school.
Despite this known vulnerability, contends the lawsuit, Appomattox kept Sage’s parents in the dark even once reports surfaced of assault in the boys’ bathroom. School personnel met repeatedly with Sage alone, culminating in an emotional session on August 25, 2021 where they threatened she could be sued if she made false allegations against the boys, the lawsuit says. Sage suffered a “psychotic break,” alleges the lawsuit, and ran away that night into the nightmare that followed.
Counselors, Public Defender ‘Conspired’
The night Sage was rescued in Baltimore, she spent hours alone at the hospital undergoing a difficult rape exam into the wee hours of the morning. As she was being driven to a detention center afterward, the complaint alleges, Sage asked that her mother be called to take her home. This request was denied and she was locked in solitary detention. Later that day, Khan was claiming in court that the Blairs were abusive and Sage did not want to go home.
Among the disturbing facts alleged are sudden, mysterious phone calls originating from self-described “mandated reporters” to the Appomattox County child abuse hotline hours after Sage was found on September 3, “before her rescue and location were known to anyone but law enforcement, Mrs. Blair and Ms. Khan.”
Other reports followed, claiming Michele had subjected Sage to “‘conversion therapy’ aimed at changing [Sage’s] gender identity.” This was “factually impossible,” as Michele allegedly only became aware of the gender identity shift the night Sage ran away. In fact, asserts the complaint, Khan conspired with Olsen and Via to “facilitat[e] the initiation of child protective services investigations in Virginia and Maryland.”
There are further allegations of grievous cruelty to a traumatized young rape victim: Sage was never informed her parents were waiting for her right outside the jail; Khan convinced Sage to lie to the court that her parents had abused her; Khan told the child her mother no longer wanted her, and withheld all the gifts and loving letters Michele sent to Sage at the Maryland children’s home.
These “extreme and outrageous actions intentionally aimed at harming…Mrs. Blair’s parental relationship with [Sage]” were allegedly “all because Ms. Khan believed that [Sage] must be affirmed as male,” the lawsuit says. According to a text from Sage to a friend, Khan had the stated ambition of taking her case to the Supreme Court.
Ideology Trumps Care for Trauma
Broylesstated to The Federalist Radio Hour that “ideology overwhelmed everything we know about trauma, about sex abuse victims, about children needing their parents and how they should be restored [to them] immediately…unless there’s actual proof of…abuse.” Instead, a 100-pound, deeply wounded girl with no criminal record was jailed for several days, then housed with troubled teenage boys, “where she was exposed to drugs, further sexual harassment and assault.”
Broyles reasoned Sage was treated “as if she’s a juvenile delinquent…in order to maintain control.” The legal maneuvering in Maryland lasted more than two months, with Judge Kershaw holding multiple hearings that delayed Sage’s return to Virginia required under the Interstate Compact for Juveniles (ICJ).
Khan’s alleged narrative of abandonment fell on receptive ground: Sage told Michele months later how much she’d missed her, but tried not to, because she “knew” Michele didn’t want her. The shame and unworthiness felt by victims of sexual exploitation is well-documented. “Trauma-related shame is an irrational and biological response…connected to the specific reactions of denial, hiding, and running away,” explains one study.
A Critical Precedent on School Secrecy
The school secrecy that allegedly facilitated Sage’s ordeal is an intense national debate. In Virginia, leftist school boards like FairfaxCounty’s are defying Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s new model policies requiring parental notification and use of privacy facilities by sex, not gender identity. California and New Jersey are suing their own constituents, at constituent expense, for the right to deceive them about their own children.
Significantly, records indicate Appomattox staff followed the same principle of instant, uncritical, and secret affirmation dictated by LGBT activist–craftedmodel policies that have infiltrated thousands of schools. The “Schools in Transition” model policy insists “affirming a child’s gender identity is in a child’s best interest,” and that school personnel have “unique insight into the student’s needs without the biases parents can or are perceived to have.”
An Essential Precedent on Children’s Rights
This raises the critical question: does refusal to affirm a child as the opposite sex constitute “abuse” and grounds for removal from parental custody, as Khan advocated in court? Activists are training legalofficials and law students that it does.
A bill California’s legislature passed would transfer children to state custody where, as Sage experienced, the risk of actual abuse skyrockets. Simultaneously, by dictating that foster parents “affirm” kids’ sexual identities, California is reducing the homes available to needy foster kids.
In some states, family custody is alreadydecided on this basis. While all 50 states are bound by the ICJ governing the return of runaway minors, some have passed “refuge” laws preventing the return of children who have run or been taken across state lines for “gender-affirming care.”
The fundamental question in Blair v. Appomattox et al. is whether fit parents or the state rightfully decide a child’s best interests. Sage’s story as described in the complaint shows the devastating potential harm to children when ideologically captured institutions wrest control of a child’s life from parents. While the case will set critical precedents in schools and courts, it also highlights the pressing need for laws reinforcing the right of parents to protect their children from state overreach.
Michele says she’s filing this lawsuit in the “hope…that no parent ever has to go through what [she] did to protect their child.”
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
The Rocklin Unified School District in California has adopted a policy requiring teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as a member of another sex. (Photo: damircudic/Getty Images)
Parental rights triumphed over the transgender agenda in the shadow of California’s capital overnight, as the state’s fifth school district adopted a policy requiring teachers to notify parents if their children begin to identify as a member of another sex. Parents burst into cheers as the Rocklin Unified School District board of trustees adopted the policy by a 4-1 vote Thursday morning around 12:40 a.m. local time. The regulation stipulates that schools must contact parents within three school days if their child requests to use a name, pronouns, or sex-segregated facilities “that do not align with the child’s biological sex.” Trustees also clarified that a student’s gender identity remains confidential to everyone “except the student and their parent(s).”
“We trust our parents to know what is best for their children,” said Rocklin school trustees shortly after the vote. “We believe that the best way to address these challenges is together, with open communication and clear expectations. The board’s action to strengthen parental notification and communication reinforces our commitment to include parents in school activities and decisions related to their child.”
The new measure is aimed at “strengthening the relationship between our staff, students, and family,” they stated.
The vote came after hundreds of people crowded into a grueling, six-and-a-half-hour meeting that included more than four hours of public comments that ranged from heartrending to hot-headed.
“This policy is violent,”asserted an LGBTQ activist wearing a rainbow cape, a cloth COVID-19 mask, and hoisting a handheld transgender flag. “You are waging war, and we will not take it quietly. … We’ll shame you in public! … Take our kids’ futures and we’ll take your livelihood!”
“We don’t take threats up here,” replied RUSD Board President Julie Hupp, who favored the policy. “Threatening the board members is not how we work up here.”
“It’s not a threat. It’s a promise!” said the speaker, who identified as Jay Smith, to the cheers of rainbow flag-waving audience members.
The X Below is a great example of these people whose mental illness they want shoved down our throats. This biological man, identifies as a woman, CLAIMING TO BE A LESBIAN. A LESBIAN! GET IT? HE’S SCREAMING HE WANTS SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH WOMEN AS A HETEROSEXUALL MALE, DRESSED IN A DRESS. Notice the bulge in the front of his/her dress.
This person identifies as a lesbian. How would you feel if he was in the bathroom with your daughter? pic.twitter.com/pYJdRT1OKZ
More than one speaker wore an LGBTQ cape in the manner of a superhero. Teachers in the school district reportedly passed out rainbow ribbons to oppose notifying parents. Mothers and fathers asked those teachers not to lock them out of knowing the most fundamental facts of their children’s lives.
“Please support parental rights. Basic safeguarding of children means not keeping secrets from parents,” pleaded concerned parent Beth Bourne.
One of the district’s concerned parents, California Assemblyman Joe Patterson, a Republican, thanked the trustees for their service, empathizing with those who received “really hateful comments.”
“What this whole issue is about is: Who gets to raise our kids? Who gets to raise the next generation of Californians? Is it the government, or is it their parents?” declared Assemblyman Bill Essayli, a Republican who has championed a similar policy at the state level (AB 1314).
“The central question is: What authority does a school have to withhold information from parents?” asked Essayli. He noted that courts have ruled “there is no right to privacy between children and their parents.”
Liberals promised swift political retaliation against RUSD and its four pro-parent trustees.
“Hit me up if you want to run for school board next year,” said Jonathan Cook, the executive director of the Sacramento Housing Alliance. (RUSD trustee Michelle Sutherland cast the lone dissenting vote on Wednesday night. Julie Hupp, Tiffany Saathoff, Rachelle Price, and Dereck Counter voted in favor.)
One political communications specialist urged LGBTQ activists to nullify or counter messages that parental notification policies validate parents’ love for their children. But messages of support also poured in from those unable to attend. “Parents have every right to know what’s happening with their kids. State politicians need to stay in their lane and stop meddling in parents’ efforts to raise their children,” said former state Sen. Melissa Melendez, a Republican.
Many of those who opposed the policy reportedly came from outside the district, while some who supported it cited their faith.
Hupp took a moment during the hearings to address a “controversy” over a social media post in which she invited “Christ-centered, family-focused individuals” to attend the proceedings, noting that she posted a second message inviting all families to take part.
The lopsided passage constitutes an act of defiance on the part of Rocklin, which is located in Placer County—a mere 22 miles outside Sacramento, where the administration of Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, has made a full-court press against parental notification policies.
California State Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, won a temporary restraining order Wednesday morning against the first district to approve a parental rights policy, Chino Valley Unified School District in San Bernardino County.
Sonja Shaw, Chino Valley Unified School District president, who has endured disturbing and specific death threatsfor her stand in favor of parental rights, objected that the policy “simply says that parents have a right to know what is going on at school and not be the last person informed.”
Judge Thomas Garza’s order, which applies only to Chino Valley, represents “a temporary setback in the ongoing struggle to affirm parents’ God-given and constitutionally protected right to direct the upbringing and education of their children,” said California Family Council President Jonathan Keller.
Bonta’s threats and legal intimidation amount to little more than “a political gimmick to intimidate school boards,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs at the California Policy Center.
“Gov. Newsom and other state officials are on a mission to strip parents of their rights and give control over their kids to the government,” he continued. “Bonta is using the power of his office to scare other school boards that are considering adopting parental rights policies. They should not be intimidated.”
“Despite the court’s decision, we stand undeterred by intimidation tactics from legislators, executives, and bureaucrats,” vowed Keller. “This is not just a legal battle; it’s a defining moment for our culture, drawing a line between government overreach and the sacred realm of family.”
Both see the lawsuits as an attempt to blunt the momentum in favor of parents’ rights and pro-family policy in deep-blue California.
ROCKVILLE, Md.—Here at the crossroads of Mannakee Street and College Drive in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Outside the headquarters of Montgomery County Public Schools, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox church stood in a white turban, gold-colored robe, and church insignia. Like Seyouman Getahun was in an interfaith crowd of about 1,000 parents, students, and community members. The crowd of largely “brown and black” people, as equity warriors so often colorize minorities, rallied for the right of parents to opt children out of age-inappropriate sex education in local public schools.
Meet Like Seyouman Getahun, a cleric at a local Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He told me why he was at the Montgomery County MD rally. I am putting 7 minutes of our chat here so you can hear from people in the trenches. Watch his reactions to Gay BCs and Gender Queer at the end! pic.twitter.com/SoCLuFlqrF
Co-organized by a new group called Coalition of Virtue, these parents are the “intersectional” answer to the Woke Army. The Woke Army are the leftist activists who exploit “black, indigenous, people of color” (BIPOC) to put children in the crosshairs of the “rainbow mafia” in K-12 schools. These parents who defy their stereotypes are the Woke Army’s worst nightmare.
Hundreds of Ethiopian Orthodox Christians from an estimated 40 local churches, including Getahun’s, rallied beside Muslim immigrant families from a dozen mosques and other area community members. Their ranks included a Filipino-Puerto Rican-American Christian dad and a Peruvian-American Catholic mother.
All were here to protest the refusal of the local school board, all affiliated at some point with Democratic Party politics, to allow parents to opt their kids out of sex ed that includes an introduction to homosexual behavior and gender identities that contradict one’s natural sex.
“This hill is where the democrats have chosen [to] die. Bizarre. Totally bizarre,” said a Twitter user.
Today, at the corner of Campus Drive and Mannakee Street, in Montgomery County, Maryland, woke intersectionalism came to die.
Today, June 27, about 1,000 Arab Muslims, Ethiopian Christians, Peruvian Catholics and so many other brown and black immigrant families outflanked the… pic.twitter.com/G623Q6Sw7x
From Rockville to Glendale, Calif., where Armenian American parents oppose school board indoctrination, a new “intersectional” rejection of wokeism includes voters up for grabs by Republican politicians and efforts like No Labels, which may advocate for a third-party presidential candidate in 2024.
“Vote them out!” the Rockville crowd chanted, packed shoulder to shoulder.
The protestors’ demands were simple enough: “Protect families’ rights!” “What do we want? Opt out! When do we want it? Now!” “We want freedom! We want rights!”
Across the parking lot, about a dozen all-white leftist activists stood, chatting with each other. They looked awkward and out of place, with rainbow umbrellas over their heads but no rain yet and soap bubbles from a party machine streaming by.
Later, inside for public comments at a school board meeting, local activist Laura Stewart complained about a video I had posted from a protest of Muslim parents early last month. She objected that it “was retweeted by Elon Musk,” the owner of Twitter.
In video testimony, Stewart omitted a critical detail from her resume: she has been an officer and leader in the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club. She has also been vice president of advocacy for the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations and just received the “National PTA Lifetime Achievement Award” from the local council.
The rallying parents are mostly new American citizens. Their lifetime achievement is immigration, acculturation, employment, and parenthood in a new nation where they enjoyed no legacy, no property, no bank account, and no “privilege,” except the inherited grit to navigate a new society with a new language and culture.
If you can believe it, the night before this rally filled with immigrants, the Montgomery County Women’s Democratic Club issued a statement with a newly formed group, “Coalition for Inclusive Schools” that Stewart now leads. It condemned “outside influences” seeking to opt-out children from age-inappropriate sex ed.
The #WokeArmy is dealt a lethal blow. The battlefront: Montgomery County, Maryland. TODAY. The hard-left came after the kids and Muslim parents aren’t having it. 🧵
Montgomery County Public Schools recently refused to allow parents to opt out of indoctrination that relates to… pic.twitter.com/KIMTI1fAIM
This multicultural crowd was anything but “outside influences.” It was filled with recent immigrants who live locally. These parents made an argument that parent groups are increasingly expressing around the country and in Canada, asserting religious freedom rights.
“Our beliefs! Our choice! Religious freedom, raise your voice,” they chanted.
Peruvian-American mother Norma Margulies carried a handmade sign that read: “Respetemos el derecho de las familias a compartir su cultura y religión con sus hijos e hijas!” “Respect the rights of families to share their culture and religion with their children, sons and daughters,” she translated, adding, “It’s a basic right.”
Margulies joined the protest from her home in nearby Fairfax County, Va., with a friend, Tony Sabio. He’s the son of parents from the Philippines and Puerto Rico and a military veteran who rescued a boy from Ukraine.
Sabio said he is running for school board in Fairfax County because of the disenfranchisement of parents. “I’m here for these parents,” Sabio said over the crowd’s chants as he carried the American flag over his shoulders.
In recent years, woke activists have exploited “intersectionality.” That’s a concept critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw invented in 1989 to look at injustices through the prism of an “intersectionality” of various allegedly oppressed social identities. While the idea had some merits, far-left activists and politicians have weaponized it.
In recent days, Maryland and Virginia parents have held sign-making events and parent educational seminars at local places of worship including mosques like the Islamic Center of Maryland and affiliates of the Medhanialem Orthodox Church. Holding signs that read “Respect Our Values” and “Parents Know Best,” they voiced concerns about the sex curriculum being taught to their children.
Across the street from the school system’s offices, a strip of locally owned storefronts showcased the diversity in this suburb community. On Hungerford Drive, an Ethiopian restaurant sits beside Island Pride Jamaican Restaurant, Yunnan Rice Noodle, Aria Halal Supermarket, and 5-10 Quick Mart.
In the crowd, Getahun, the Ethiopian Orthodox cleric, told me he was there to support parental rights as enshrined in the 14th Amendment and the U.S. Constitution. He flipped through copies of the books “The Gay BCs” and “Gender Queer” tucked in my “Mary Poppins” bag of inappropriate books in public schools and furrowed his brow at the images.
“T is for TRANS,” he read, not the usual “trains” in most books teaching the ABCs. “It’s a brave step to take,” he continued, “to take to live as the gender you know is innate.”
The book is meant for toddlers, as young as three.
While the rally primarily focused on the right to opt out of sex curriculum, the attendees also saw the school board’s refusal to address their concerns as an infringement on their religious freedom.
Nearby a rally organizer, Ismail Royer, a director of Islam and religious freedom at the Religious Freedom Institute based in Washington, D.C., said: “This is the intersection, this is the alliance that really matters. This is the moral consensus that is at the heart of the American moral tradition and virtue tradition.”
By about 5 p.m., the rally ended, with Getahun among the last leaving the rally off Mannakee Street and College Drive, as members of this new intersectional alliance chanted, “We will prevail!”
Asra Nomani is a senior contributor at The Federalist. A former Wall Street Journal reporter, she is also the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance Destroying America’s Freedom.” She is a senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.
After the 14-year-old was found being sexually assaulted in another state, a judge kept her from loving parents because they questioned her transgender identity. Then she was trafficked again.
In August 2021, by concealing a teen’s newly asserted transgender identity from her parents, Virginia’s Appomattox County High School participated in a chain of events that led to that girl falling into the hands of sexual predators not once, but twice.
When the FBI found Sage (last name of the family withheld for privacy) in Maryland, where she was victimized by a sexual predator, a judge refused to return her to her parents on the grounds they were abusing her in not affirming her as male. Housed in the boys’ quarters of a children’s home away from her parents, she told her mother, she was assaulted again. The girl soon fled, then was brutally sex-trafficked again until her rescue in Texas by law enforcement.
Sage’s Law, or the Child Protection Act, is being introduced this week in the Virginia House of Delegates by Delegate Dave LaRock in honor of this young teen from Appomattox County, Virginia. Sage hopes sharing her story will help protect others from the abuse she suffered at the hands of predators, precipitated in part by the very institutions that should have protected her.
School policies and state laws that encourage concealing information from parents’ purport to protect vulnerable minors. In practice, as tragically demonstrated by Sage’s case, such policies open the door to predators by removing children’s greatest protection from their lives.
Sage’s Law aims to shut that door in three ways. It would require schools to notify parents if their child asserts a gender different from his or her sex; it prevents school counselors from withholding or encouraging minors to withhold information about a child’s gender identity; and it clarifies that raising a child according to his or her biological sex, including decisions about a child’s mental and physical health, may not be construed as abuse.
Sage’s story, compiled from months of interviews, reports, and records, has been lived by countless other families torn apart in the name of gender ideology by activist schools, judges, anddoctors. This is a story of the unbearable cost of parent-exclusion policies, but also of a mother’s love and relentless determination to save her child.
Institutions that Should Protect Endanger Instead
Sage is a slight, pretty, 15-year-old girl with elfin features and an edgy style. Recently, reflecting back on her transgender identification, she told her mom: “I don’t know who I was. I’m a totally different person now. I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
That self-reflection is consistent with the research showing that upwards of 80 percent of gender dysphoric childrenembrace their sex as they emerge from puberty. Children who are “affirmed” as the opposite sex, however, particularly if puberty blockers are used, consistently go on to further medicalization. Sage’s comment also reflects the reality of social contagion, fueled by social media and increasingly recognized internationally as a factor in the exponential rise in the number of children identifying as transgender.
Yet states such as California allow children as young as 12 to make their own health-care decisions, without their parents but under the authority of the state. In January, Virginia delegates Candi Mundon King, Nadarius Clark, Michelle Maldonado, Sam Rasoul, and Marcus Simon filed a similar bill authorizing courts, social workers, and medical professionals to withhold information from parents and consent to medical procedures for “mature” minors.
The consequences for children and families in states such as California that construe not “affirming” as abuse are particularly dire. In October, progressive Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman announced she would reintroduce her 2020 bill to criminalize parents who do not affirm their child’s transgender identity as guilty of abuse, potentially resulting in the loss of custody.
School Policies Endangering Students
Michele adopted Sage, her biological granddaughter, after the death of her son. Like many gender-dysphoric children, Sage has a history of trauma from that early childhood loss. Related health problems became severe at times, requiring therapy and medical treatment. Her daughter’s previous schools notified Michele when concerns arose, she said, enabling her to have Sage’s treatment adjusted. But when her daughter entered Appomattox County High School in early August 2021, Michele says she was cut out of the loop.
Unbeknownst to Michele, her then-14-year-old’s taste at the time for boys’ clothing, which she described to her mother as simply “dressing emo,” was accompanied by her assertion at school that she was a transgender boy. School records, shared by the family, indicate school staff were calling Sage by her chosen male name and pronouns and at her request concealing this from her parents. Sage recalls her school counselor telling her during the first week of school that since she identified as male she could use the boys’ bathroom.
School records also indicate bullying, although they do not capture the severity of what Sage eventually told her mom: boys were following behind her in a group, touching her, threatening her with knife violence and rape, and even shoving her up against the hallway wall. On Aug. 23, according to school notes, reports were received from students and teachers that Sage had used a boys’ bathroom and encountered hostile boys there. The school counselor met with Sage the next day to direct her to use the nurses’ bathroom for safety reasons.
Sage’s statement that “all the boys at this school are rapists” prompted the school to review hallway footage outside the bathroom, showing that several boys had entered while she was inside. On Wednesday, Aug. 25, the counselor and school resource officer called Sage into a meeting, where she became so emotional that the counselor recorded concern Sage might be “a risk to herself due to being so upset when leaving school.”
Only at this point — after meeting alone with her daughter, after two days had passed and knowledge of the incident had reached all the way to the superintendent, according to the school records — did the school finally contact Michele, she said, still without revealing the male identity her daughter was asserting.
Michele recalls finding a school hall pass labeled with a new name that August evening and Sage telling her for the first time that she was identifying as a boy at school. As Michele sat with her on the floor, Sage tried to stop the tears as she told her mother a group of male students had “jacked” her up against the wall of the boys’ bathroom and threatened her with violence, and that she was terrified of what they would do. Michele tried to comfort her, assuring her she could stay home while they figured out how to handle the bullying.
That night, Sage disappeared. She was found nine days later in Maryland, a victim of sexual assault. That was just the beginning of her family’s ordeal.
Excluding Parents Invites Predators
As Michele’s case illustrates, school policies that exclude parents from critical knowledge of their child’s mental health remove a child’s greatest safeguard from his or her life. While this author could find no such policy posted on the Appomattox High School or school board websites, the school’s actions to “affirm” Sage’s stated gender, name, and pronouns and to permit access to bathrooms of the opposite sex are all consistent with the directives of former Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s 2021 model policies. So is the choice to deceive parents.
In fact, the Northam policies direct that an entire gender transition team and plan be set up for such a child, all in secret from the parents if the child so wishes. This guidance was revoked in 2022 by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, but Virginia Democrats and LGBT groups are fiercely contesting the transparency and parental consent required by the new proposed guidance.
Yet school counselors, unlike parents, have at best an extremely limited knowledge of a child’s mental, emotional, and physical needs. They also have neither the constitutional authority nor the expertise to determine a child’s best interests.
Children who identify as transgender have well-documented mental health co-morbidities and rates of adverse psychiatric events. Even Dr. Erica Anderson, former head of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), has raised alarm at the “pitched battle” engendered by professionals who “triangulate” or set children in opposition to their parents.
In Sage’s case, by withholding information about her daughter’s gender identity and related issues, including the severe bullying related to Sage’s transgender exploration, the school destroyed vital opportunities for Michele to discern warning signs in time to assess and respond before tragedy struck.
Predators know transgender kids are vulnerable prey. Sage told Michele months later that some of the transgender websites to which a school counselor referred her linked to “creepy” older men and pornography.
One mother told this author that as soon as her daughter identified online as “female to male,” multiple suspicious “sugar daddy” accounts reached out to her on social media. Roblox, the wildly popular children’s gaming site, has transgender chat rooms with a panic button to “hide your screen from your parents.” Sage, her mother says, was lured to meet sex traffickers by online predators posing as friends.
A Court-Enabled Tragedy
The first call from the FBI came late at night on Sept. 2, her mother recounts: Sage had been found. Michele says investigators told her Sage had been trafficked into Washington, D.C. and then Maryland for nine days of horrific, brutal sexual abuse.
Driving through the night, their backseat full of stuffed animals and cozy blankets, Michele and her husband Roger arrived early the next morning at the Baltimore Courthouse. They were stunned to hear that their child, who had just survived unspeakable trauma, was being held in a juvenile detention cell and that they were being summoned to a hearing late that afternoon before Judge Robert Kershaw. When they entered the courtroom, Sage appeared from the penitentiary remotely, on screen, with only court-appointed attorney Aneesa Khan, an assistant public defender, present in person. “I love you, baby!” Michele cried to her daughter, who responded “I love you too, Nana.” To their shock, Khan spoke up and alleged on Sage’s behalf that she did not wish to return home and had been “both emotionally and physically abused by his parents in connection with [his] expressed male gender identity and desire to live as a trans male.”
Michele had only found out about this claimed male identity the night her daughter disappeared. Yet Michele was willing to use any name or pronoun to bring her home. Sage later told her, Michele says, that Khan “told me to tell the judge my parents hit me, starved me.” Sage also told Michele that Khan “didn’t care how much [Sage] had to lie…but they were going to win this case” to remove Sage from her parents’ custody and place her in a Maryland foster home that would affirm her as male.
Michele is a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA) with years of experience supporting troubled teens, and she and Roger were quickly cleared of abuse charges. But the allegations were used to take custody of their daughter and bar them from seeing her.
The Cruelty of Ideology
Rather than treat Sage as a victim of horrific sex trafficking and return her to her family, the court dealt with her as a runaway, providing grounds for temporary custody in Maryland. Significantly, under the Interstate Juvenile Compact, even if allegations of abuse are made, juveniles are to be returned to their home state, which is presumed to better be able to assess the child’s needs. Judge Kershaw delayed this return for two months, which led to Sage’s next trafficking episode.
Instead of receiving treatment for her profound physical and emotional trauma, Sage was kept for days in solitary detention as a runaway, then transferred to the Catonsville Children’s Home. Per Judge Kershaw’s order, she was housed according to her “expressed male gender.” Michele says she eventually learned from Sage that she was the only girl in male quarters and that she had been repeatedly assaulted there.
Kershaw held multiple hearings focusing on Sage’s claimed male identity and Khan’s efforts to demonstrate gender identity abuse, including calling two Appomattox school counselors to testify against Sage’s parents. While his final ruling on Nov. 10, 2021, reluctantly conceded lawful custody to the parents, Kershaw opined at length that “more likely than not” Sage had “endured emotional abuse and neglect by his parents,” including “misgendering” and “misnaming.” Astonishingly, Kershaw cited as evidence of parental abuse “running away from Virginia to Maryland,” when in fact Sage was abducted, raped, and trafficked across state lines.
While Sage was in The Children’s Home, Michele says she sent letters and cards multiple times a week and tried countless times to reach her by phone, especially on Sage’s 15th birthday. Months later, Sage commented: “I missed you so much, but I tried not to because you didn’t want me back.” Horrified, her mother asked what she meant. She learned from Sage that Khan had told her that, because she was transgender, Michele didn’t want her anymore — and that not one of her cards or messages had ever reached her daughter.
Sage also eventually told her mother that, while living at the foster home, she skipped classes every day and would “smoke weed and do drugs” with kids she had met. Sage also relayed later that Khan had told her “I don’t give a sh-t if you do drugs, I just want to win this case.” Sage also said Khan had visited the home of one of Sage’s Maryland school friends to enlist her support in contacting Sage, claiming Khan had won the case and resulting in knowledge of Sage’s case spreading around the school.
In a text to a friend at the time, Sage referenced Khan’s intent: “going to the court of appeals, and the supreme court.” It is difficult to avoid Michele’s conclusion that “[t]he only best interest [Sage’s] attorney had was for herself. To put my traumatized child on center stage to push her political or gender agenda!”
Michele begged the court to provide treatment for the trauma Sage had endured and had found placement for her by mid-October, approved by Virginia social services, in Youth for Tomorrow’s program for young victims of sexual exploitation. The judge rejected it because they would treat Sage as a girl.
Not until Nov. 10 did Judge Kershaw approve placement in North Spring, a residential treatment facility that would affirm her claimed male identity. Frightened of being locked in the facility and believing her mother no longer wanted her, Sage texted a friend, “im gonna dip” (leave). On Nov. 12, 2021, Sage says, she cut off her court-required GPS monitor and ran away to meet an online “friend” in Texas she thought was 16.
Once more, the unspeakable happened. Sage fell into the hands of a predator who, police told Michele, raped, starved, drugged, and brutalized her. This time she disappeared for months. For the second time in less than four months, Michele had no way of knowing if her daughter was even alive. But Michele never stopped searching. Finally, a tip she discovered on social media led Texas marshals to her daughter’s rescue in Dallas on Jan. 24, 2022.
For the first time since that conversation on the floor of Sage’s bedroom on Aug. 25 the year before, mother and daughter were able to talk. On the plane ride home, Michele listened as Sage began to unburden her heart, grieving over what she learned but overcome with gratitude that her daughter was alive and restored to her.
Affirmation by Intimidation
Upon her return to Virginia, Sage entered North Spring, the lock-down facility negotiated by the court, with Michele driving four hours each way for her weekly allotted visit. Sage was heavily medicated, suffering from constant nightmares, and fearful of both residents and doctors. Sage told her mother that her counselor also pressured Sage to tell Michele she wanted a “gender-affirming” mastectomy.
Yet, during one of Michele’s visits, Sage asked if her mother could secretly take her to buy girls’ clothes, stating she didn’t want to be a boy anymore, but she was scared to tell the doctors. Pressured by North Spring to let them treat her daughter, Michele reached out to Josh Hetzler, an attorney with Richmond-based Founding Freedoms Law Center, who secured her daughter’s return. After nearly a year of horror, she was finally home safely.
The road ahead is a long one of healing both physically and emotionally. There are confusing lapses in concentration and persistent, terrifying nightmares. In a safe, loving home, surrounded by her pets and easing into at-home learning and therapy sessions, the painful recollections emerge unpredictably, as do the panic attacks. Michele doesn’t press, letting Sage open up at her pace, whether to her or to her beloved uncle Cory, who has moved home to support her.
As she begins to process her ordeal, Sage now desires to protect others from the horrors she experienced. Michele’s heroic, unrelenting determination to save her daughter has turned not only to helping her heal but to preserving other families from what hers endured. Advocates have rallied to help fund legal action through The Gavel Project, and to craft policies that will help protect others.
Sage’s Law
Many children never escape the clutches of sex traffickers. Had it not been for her mother’s relentless love and determination, Sage might never have been found. Michele calls it a miracle. In the starkest of contrasts, the actions of ideologues played a part — twice — in her daughter falling into the traffickers’ hands.
Sage’s public school could have been transparent to Michele about her daughter’s struggles. The court could have returned her to Virginia without furthering a quest to make legal history. The children’s home could have protected her from assault and access to drugs. And doctors could have treated trauma, not pressed living as the opposite sex and mutilative surgery on a victim of sexual abuse. All along, it was her mother who truly had Sage’s best interest at heart.
Sage was failed by adults who thought they were helping but were blinded to their own cruelty by their ideology. Michele tells of countless parents who have reached out to her with their own stories of families and bodies destroyed by school counselors, courts, and doctors who may spend minutes with a child, but assert they have the expertise and authority to usurp decisions from parents who have poured a lifetime into their care.
Sage has shown great courage in sharing her story, and it is time for lawmakers to take a stand for her and many other children by passing Sage’s Law. There is only one acceptable response to her story: never again.
Laura Bryant Hanford is a mother of five and is actively involved in school policy and religious freedom issues in Virginia, where she lives with her family. She served from 2015 to 2018 on Fairfax County Public Schools’ Family Life Education Curriculum Advisory Committee. She was the lead congressional staff drafter of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. She also served at the U.S. Embassy in Romania as the officer in charge of human rights, focusing on ethnic minorities, women, and refugees. She is a graduate of Princeton University.
Gay Pride Attendees Struggle To Define The Word ‘Queer’
K-12 school districts are implementing gender-affirming closets to provide students with products to help change their gender identity.
Items stocked in these gender-affirming closets include tucking tape, chest binders and stand-to-pee devices.
“An aspect of concern is that children see their peers getting special treatment and access to these closets, and that leads to developing resentment towards students with actual gender dysphoria, which could then lead to harassment and bullying, and even contribute to the social contagion we are seeing among our nation’s children,” No Left Turn In Education Chief Communications Director Yael Levin told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
In a push to create a “safer and more inclusive” environment, K-12 school districts are creating gender-affirming closets, giving students access to chest binders, stand-to-pee devices and makeup to help students change their gender identity.
The Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City, Oregon, held a “Gender-Affirming Closet Donation Kickoff” in August to receive donations from the community for the gender-affirming closet at the local high school. The library asked for donations of tucking tape and chest binders in addition to bras and boxers.
“No Left Turn in Education is concerned by the trend of public schools across the nation offering gender-affirming closets for students that include products such as chest binders for girls and tucking tape for boys,” No Left Turn In Education Chief Communications Director Yael Levin told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Not only does this usurp parents’ rights, but it is practicing mental health gender-affirming medical care without staff being licensed mental health professionals and without parental knowledge or consent.”
Tucking tape is used to push “breast tissue flat” in order to create “chest masculinization” over time, according to the website for TransTape, a company that sells tape for gender transitioning. Tutorials are found online for different patterns and ways students can use the tape to bind the chest and “give the appearance of pectoral muscles.”
The tape can also be used to tuck male genitals to reduce their appearance, the TransTape website stated. The tape is water and sweat proof, allowing it to stay on for a few days.
Chest binders are a tank top-like item with “double panel binders” that come in nude colors to flatten the breast area, gc2b, a trans-owned company that makes chest binders, stated on its website. The binder is meant to match the color of the skin and hide a female’s breasts to give them a male appearance.
Binder exchange programs are offered for kids who want to transition but cannot afford to purchase a chest binder, the DC Area Transmasculine Society, a trans-led nonprofit organization, showed on its website. In order to be eligible to receive a free chest binder, applicants must have gender dysphoria that is caused by their chest and be unable to afford a binder.
“Chest binders can cause restricted breathing, break the skin around the edges of the binder, cause overheating and even bruise or fracture the ribs,” Levin told the DCNF. “Tucking tape can cause chafing, urinary tract infections, problems with urine flow and twisting of the testicles. Further research is needed to determine if tucking tape might lead to hernias and to infertility in boys.”
People in Pride colors attend and march during the 2022 New York City Pride March on June 26, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
The Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago partnered with several schools in the city to provide LGBTQ resources such as websites for gender-affirming products. The website FtM Essentials, which sells gender-affirming items, has stand-to-pee devices, packers and packer holders.
Stand-to-pee devices are prosthetic penises “designed for standing urination” for females, according to the FtM Essentials website. Harnesses and tight boxer briefs are required to keep the devices in place and it is recommended that females try the device out in the shower first to learn how to use the device.
Females can also use packers, or a prosthetic penis, to give a “realistic bulge,” the FtM Essentials website showed. The packers come in different “colors, sizes and materials” for different ages of transitioning people.To keep packers or stand-to-pee devices in place, packing straps and underwear are available to keep the items “comfortable and discreet,” the FtM Essentials website stated. Some packing underwear come with a cup as an “enhancer” to help with packing.
“An aspect of concern is that children see their peers getting special treatment and access to these closets, and that leads to developing resentment towards students with actual gender dysphoria, which could then lead to harassment and bullying, and even contribute to the social contagion we are seeing among our nation’s children,” Levin told the DCNF.
Aside from items to give the appearance of having genitals of the opposite sex, gender-affirming closets contain makeup, fake eyelashes, jewelry and other clothing items like button-up shirts or leggings to allow students to dress like the opposite sex.
The “It Gets Better Project”gave out 50 grants of $10,000 each to schools across the country to create gender-affirming closets and start “Gender Sexuality Alliance” clubs in an effort to build “safer and more inclusive” environments in schools. Rock Bridge High School in Columbia, Missouri, is one of the schools that received a grant and put the money toward stocking the school with clothing, chest binders, bras, underwear and makeup for a gender-affirming closet.
“In many cases the advertised availability of such items in a school setting suggests a deliberate attempt to circumvent parental involvement,” Free To Learn Coalition President Alleigh Marre told the DCNF. “The distribution of these types of items without the express cooperation of the minor student’s family is completely inappropriate. Our schools should be focused on core competencies and academic achievement.”
The Driftwood Public Library, the “It Gets Better Project,” the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and the gender-affirming product companies did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
(Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
The New Jersey Department of Education will intervene in school districts that do not implement the state’s new sexual education standards that teach 10-year-olds the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity, according to statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
by the end of fifth grade, students should be able to explain the difference between gender identity and sexual orientation.
The 10-year-olds must be taught to “describe gender-role stereotypes” and how those stereotypes affect themselves and those around them.
The fifth grade students are also taught how to “promote dignity and respect” for those with different sexual orientation, gender identity, race and socio-economic status, the standards showed. By the end of fifth grade curriculum, the students should be able to explain all the ways “pregnancy can be achieved.”
In eighth grade, students are taught to define vaginal, oral and anal sex. The students are also asked to create a plan to foster an inclusive environment for all “gender identities, gender expressions and sexual orientations.”
Additional training principles in the standards include definitions on transgender men and women while noting that one’s “gender assigned at birth” doesn’t necessarily match their sex.
A students waits for First Lady Jill Biden to arrive to his classroom at the Samuel Smith Elementary School in Burlington, New Jersey on March 15, 2021. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ANNA MONEYMAKER/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Using the “New Jersey Quality Single Accountability Continuum (NJQSAC),” the state Department of Education monitors how school districts implement the sexual education standards, the department told the DCNF. The schools are tracked in five categories and if they score below an 80% in any category, they are subject to punishment and intervention by the state.
“Following the assessment, the district is placed on a performance continuum that will determine the level of oversight, and technical assistance and support it receives,” the state said in a statement. “Dependent upon the percentage of quality performance indicators a district satisfies upon review of the improvement plan, the Department may determine whether additional monitoring or intervention is warranted.”
School districts across the country are pushing to implement sexual education curriculums that implement sexual orientation and gender identity; the Wauwatosa School Board in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, implemented a curriculum that teaches sixth graders that the definition of a female was a “person with a vulva.”
A majority of nationwide voters, 70%, believe that elementary school students should not learn about sexual orientation and gender identity. About 53% still oppose instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity through eighth grade.
“For children to be excused from any part of instruction in health, family life or sex education, their parent or guardian must inform the school principal in writing that the instruction conflicts with their conscience or sincerely held moral or religious beliefs,” the New Jersey Department of Education told the DCNF.
At the beginning of the school year in 2019, Jennifer received an email from her daughter’s 5th-grade teacher. The teacher, a male, was using a different name for her then-10-year-old daughter. Jennifer thought it was a mistake. The teacher must have accidentally emailed the wrong parent. But then, Jennifer went to her daughter’s room and found a yellow Post-It note stuck to her dresser with that same name, along with the pronouns “they/them.”
“Do you have a new nickname?” Jennifer asked.
Her daughter responded yes.
Jennifer didn’t think much of it beyond harmless identity exploration. But a couple of months later, Jennifer received a more concerning call from a school counselor informing her that her daughter had used the words “suicide” and “cutting” with a friend. The counselor recommended her daughter start seeing a therapist who was contracted with the school. That therapist was free to use, accessible during school hours, and qualified to handle her daughter’s mental health problems, Jennifer was told. Worried about her daughter, Jennifer said yes. But because her daughter was only 10 at the time, Jennifer would have to go into the school and give written permission.
Jennifer lives in a suburb of Washington state, where children as young as 13 years old can access their own medical and mental health services without parental knowledge or consent. Parents in these cases are billed by insurance companies with no explanation of benefits, meaning they’re stuck with the tab but have no ability to know what services or treatments their child received.
When consenting for her daughter to see the school therapist, Jennifer made sure to tell the therapist that her daughter had been talking about her sexuality and gender identity. She shared that while she and her husband believed their daughter was too young to be exploring these ideas, they’d “love her no matter where she ends up.” The therapist made no mention of her own views on the subject or her affirmation-based treatment model where, if a child declares he or she is transgender or non-binary, the therapist would affirm the child’s stated identity.
So, for two and a half months, Jennifer’s daughter was meeting with a school therapist once a week who was treating her as a boy, using male pronouns and a made-up name. When Jennifer would ask how the sessions were going, the therapist acted as though nothing big had come up.
Then in February 2020, right before COVID-19 hit, Jennifer received a phone call from the school therapist with a two-fold purpose: to request that she and her husband come to the school in three days for a meeting where the therapist would assist their daughter in officially coming out to them as a boy, and to obtain parental permission to allow her daughter to stay overnight in the boy’s cabin for an upcoming school trip.
Sensing the meeting wouldn’t go well — and worse, would set them up in an adversarial position with the daughter they loved — Jennifer and her husband called it off.
“We were never going to let her do that, I don’t care who she thinks she is,” Jennifer said. “There are so many reasons not to put a girl in a cabin with a bunch of boys and a male adult teacher. So many safeguarding fails.”
At that point, Jennifer and her husband decided to take more drastic measures. They were skeptical that their 11-year-old daughter was transgender and believed the school and the therapist were actually leading her to identify as a boy. So, they revoked their consent for their daughter to see the school therapist, took away her access to online devices, and soon, unenrolled her from public school altogether.
“I already knew I couldn’t trust the school with my daughter when she was in fifth grade,” Jennifer said. “And going onto the middle school, she would be turning 13. And then I wouldn’t even know. They wouldn’t have to tell me what was going on.”
Identifying as a Boy
Jennifer’s daughter first identified as transgender when she was 10 years old and enrolled in an online drawing program. Prior to that, Jennifer and her husband had restricted their daughter’s access to online devices. But since their daughter was an artist, they agreed to what they thought was a harmless online art program.
Yet, a year and a half later, Jennifer learned it was through that group of online art friends that her daughter was introduced to ideas of sexuality and gender.
“She talked about being asexual at 10 years old,” Jennifer said. “Which of course she’s asexual at 10 years old. But that’s an identity.” She then talked about being demi sexual, gay, non-binary, and finally landed on transgender.
The transgender identity was heightened when her daughter began conversing with a group of girls at school who, at ages 10 and 11 years old, also identified as some form of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. The friends appeared to compete over who could have the edgiest, most unique identity.
“She was trying to fit in. She was trying to have friends,” Jennifer said.
Once her daughter was out of school and no longer communicating online with peers who valued queer identities, her transgender identity lost its importance. Slowly, Jennifer said, her daughter started to let it go.
‘Wasn’t Making Her Happy’
“Her mood changed drastically,” Jennifer said. Identifying as transgender “wasn’t making her happy.”
Since giving up on being transgender, Jennifer has talked with her daughter about everything that happened over the year and a half she spent exploring identifying as a boy. After repeated unanswered requests, Jennifer also obtained notes from the school therapist, which confirmed her suspicion that the therapist was encouraging her daughter’s transition behind her back.
“I was so upset because [the school therapist] was using male pronouns for my daughter from the first moment, from the first notes,” Jennifer said. “He, him. And it seemed like all that she was doing with my daughter was helping her advocate for herself whenever somebody ‘misgendered’ her.”
This included Jennifer’s older two sons, who didn’t even know their sister was identifying as a boy. It also included a boy at the school who Jennifer said got in trouble for “misgendering” her daughter.
“At the school, they’re not just affirming and encouraging my daughter in this delusion,” Jennifer said. “It’s deluding other kids too. They are teaching kids to deny their own sense perceptions.”
More recently, Jennifer felt enough time had passed that she could ask about the idea of staying in the boy’s overnight cabin for three nights without feeling embarrassed or self-conscious.
Jennifer’s daughter told her, “That wasn’t my idea. That was the school’s idea. My teacher asked me.”
“Kids want to please adults,” Jennifer said. “My daughter felt she had to answer yes.”
After that incident, Jennifer said her daughter, who is now 13, decided she didn’t want to go on the 5th-grade overnight trip. Though it wasn’t then, it’s now clear to her why.
‘Going to War Together’
Jennifer feels betrayed by educators, therapists, doctors, and liberal politicians whom she spent a lifetime supporting. That list includes President Joe Biden, who told parents in March that affirming their child’s transgender identity is “one of the most powerful things you can do to keep them safe and healthy.”
“A lot of people think that using the pronouns and affirming a child who says they’re the opposite sex, that that is about kindness,” she said, explaining:
Everybody’s very confused about this. Because the T has purposefully been attached to LGB, which is a completely separate issue. We know the LGB community was mistreated, and so people don’t want to do that again with trans-identified people, so everybody’s being super careful, and they want to be kind. But it’s a different situation. With LGB people, they’re saying, ‘Just let us be who we are.’ And there’s no medical consequences.
But with transgender-identified people or people who identify as the opposite sex, it’s very much a medical situation and it’s about the harm medicalization causes. Children are cutting off their healthy breasts and testicles and doing things to their bodies that they can’t undo. So that is completely different. Of course parents are concerned when their children identify this way because it carries a heavy medical burden which they will have for the rest of their life. They become sewn to the medical industrial complex. They will have to take drugs. They will probably have to have other surgeries. We don’t even know all the health consequences at this point. It’s an experiment happening right now on children.
In the past, most parents followed the watchful waiting approach. Children were not medically or socially transitioned, and the vast majority became comfortable with their sex when they went through puberty. Today, parents are being told that affirmation is the only acceptable response to a transgender declaration. Jennifer’s story is just one example of how there is another possible outcome if a child is not affirmed.
“They might desist,” she said. “Isn’t that preferable to a lifetime of harmful medical procedures?”
For more from IWF’s Identity Crisis series, click here.
Editor’s note: Last names have not been used to protect a minor’s privacy.
Kelsey Bolar is a contributor to The Federalist and a senior policy analyst at Independent Women’s Forum. She is also the Thursday editor of BRIGHT, a weekly newsletter for women, and the 2017 Tony Blankley Chair at The Steamboat Institute. She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband, daughter, and Australian Shepherd, Utah.
An individual walks through the aisles of a library. | Unsplash/Banter Snaps
State Farm has withdrawn its support for a program that distributes LGBT-themed books to schools and libraries after a whistleblower leaked an email showing the company encouraged staff to donate books about gender identity to children as young as 5. The insurance company’s Chief Diversity Officer and Vice President of Public Affairs, Victor Terry, announced the end of the collaboration with the organization behind the program, GenderCool Project, in a Monday email to staff obtained by the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. The GenderCool Project describes itself as a “youth-led movement” designed to highlight “transgender and non-binary youth who are thriving.”
“State Farm’s support of a philanthropic program, GenderCool Project, has been the subject of news and customer inquiries. This program that included books about gender identity was intended to promote inclusivity,” the email reads. “We will no longer support that program.”
Terry also wrote that State Farm does not support mandating school curriculum on gender identity, stating that “[c]onversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents.” The chief diversity officer said that the company supports organizations that provide “resources for parents to have these conversations.”
State Farm confirmed in a Wednesday statement to The Christian Post that it’s no longer affiliated with the organization, insisting again that the program was created to promote “inclusivity.”
“We will continue to explore how we can support our associates, as well as organizations that align with our commitment to diversity and inclusion, including the LGBTQ+ community,” the company told CP. “We recognize and value the diversity of all people and support a culture of respect and inclusion in the communities in which we live and work, as well as our workplace.”
State Farm’s announcement about the discontinuation of its partnership with The GenderCool Project followed the release of a Jan. 18 email leaked to the nonprofit organization Consumers’ Research by concerned employees at the insurance company. Consumers’ Research, an organization that educates people about policy issues and corporate activities, has launched the “Like a Creepy Neighbor” public awareness campaign in response to State Farm’s partnership with the GenderCool Project.
The title of the campaign is a play on the company’s catchphrase, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” The leaked email was sent by Jose Soto, a corporate responsibility analyst for State Farm in Florida. It reveals that State Farm was “partnering with The GenderCool Project to help diversify classroom, community center and library bookshelves with a collection of books to help bring clarity and understanding to the national conversation about being transgender, inclusive and non-binary.”
🚨 Emails leaked to @ConsumersFirst from concerned @StateFarm employees show the company engaged in the woke indoctrination of kids age 5+.
State Farm partnered with The GenderCool Project — which aims to have conversations with children about being Transgender and Non-Binary. pic.twitter.com/MYcZSW8Yp1
The collection of books created by The GenderCool Project that State Farm sought to distribute includes works titled, A Kids Book About Being Transgender, A Kids Book About Being Inclusive and A Kids Book About Being Non-Binary.The books are designed to help children 5 years old and older have “challenging, important, and empowering conversations about the toughest and most pressing topics we face today.”
“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children age 5+,” Soto’s email reads. “This is a fantastic way to give back and an easy project that will help support the LGBTQ+ community and to make the world around us better.”
The company reportedly intended to recruit six insurance agents to “[receive] these books in March, then [donate] them to their community by the end of April.” While the email only referenced recruiting agents in Florida, it indicated that the program is not just a regional initiative.
“Nationwide, approximately 550 State Farm agents and employees will have the opportunity to donate this three book bundle to their local teacher, community center, or library of their choice,” Soto wrote.
Hild told The Washington Examiner and other news organizations in a Zoom call that the program likely would not be allowed in Florida schools come July 1, when the Parental Rights in Education Bill takes effect.
Critics of the bill, signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in March, have derided it as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill that could stigmatize LGBT students. The legislation prohibits public schools and third parties from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with students in kindergarten through third grade.
“We would hope State Farm would … cooperate with the governor’s office or law enforcement in [Florida] and retrieve any of these books that may have been donated to public schools that by law now do not belong there,” Hild said, adding that such discussions with children are inappropriate according to “any reasonable understanding.”
The issue of gender identity in schools has appeared in several learning institutions throughout the country in recent months. Earlier this month, Fairfax County Public School Board, which oversees the largest school district in Virginia, reviewed a student handbook that includes suspension as a potential punishment for students who “maliciously” misgender their trans-identifying peers.
The proposed revisions to the district’s Students’ Rights and Responsibilities (SR&R) handbook indicates that students can face a five-day suspension for “malicious deadnaming,” which is defined as “[w]hen someone, intentionally or not, refers to a person who is transgender or gender-expansive by a name other than their own chosen name.”
In April, two sets of parents of the Ludlow Public School District in Massachusetts filed a lawsuit against school officials at Baird Middle School in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts Springfield Division. The complaint maintains that the school officials reportedly encouraged their children to secretly adopt new gender identities without informing their parents. The lawsuit accused the school of having a “protocol and practice of concealing from parents information related to their children’s gender identity.”
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.
The Department of Education is expected to roll out new Title IX rules that will expand the definition of sex to include gender identity.
“What we saw with Lia Thomas at the NCAA Championships will now be happening at schools and colleges across the country,” Heritage Foundation legal fellow Sarah Perry said.
Through the Title IX rule change, the Biden administration aims “to change culture, not just discriminatory treatment,” said Max Eden, a research fellow for the American Enterprise Institute.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) is expected to roll out new Title IX rules that will expand the definition of sex to include gender identity, which experts say will have legal and cultural implications for all aspects of American education.
The Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is planning to take an unprecedented step to expand the definition of sex to include gender identity under Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, a key civil righs law which ensures no person is discriminated against under any federal education program or activity “on the basis of sex.” The rule change will require every sex-separated space, program, building, bathroom and locker room to accommodate individuals “who may feel as though they are women, even though biologically, they are men,” Sarah Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
“What we saw with Lia Thomas at the NCAA Championships will now be happening at schools and colleges across the country if they receive so much as $1 of federal funding from the Department of Education,” Perry said.
Gender Is Not an Immutable Characteristic
The OCR has already indicated it will enforce Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in what it says is consistent with the 2020 Supreme Court case, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, which extended workplace sexual harassment and discrimination protections to LGBTQ employees. The Biden administration is using the Bostock ruling as its basis for all other modifications of civil rights law, Perry said. Although, the decision specifically noted that the Supreme Court did not “purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.” The high court has relied on the concept of immutability, which encompasses characteristics like race, national origin and sex, for decades, Perry explained. But now, the Biden administration is attempting to “shoehorn” an expansive definition of sex into Title IX, which she said was specifically drafted to protect biological women and girls, giving them all the rights that men already had.
“What this does is ultimately open up what has been long standing, successful application of federal civil rights law to individuals who happen to feel like a woman or feel like a man at any given time or at any given space,” she said. “We have never before in American civil rights law offered federal legal protections for an individual based on how they FEEL subjectively and internally.”
Once gender, which is not an immutable characteristic, becomes a protected class the same as race, “you’re running up against the freedom of individuals to say … ‘I don’t agree that you are a woman if you were born a biological male,’” Jonathan Butcher, an education fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told TheDCNF. “If you express that opinion, you would be violating federal law.”
Limits To Free Speech
Perry described the rule change as an unprecedented and illegal expansion of the law that would implicate free speech by forcing individuals and institutions to provide biological men who identity as female with access to women’s restrooms, sports teams and schools. By expanding civil rights law, the Biden administration is muzzling “individuals who believe sex is immutable and biological … it shuts those people up, utterly silencing dissent in the education context,” Perry said.
Max Eden, a research fellow for the American Enterprise Institute, said officials in the Biden administration aim “to change culture, not just discriminatory treatment.” Under the new rules, any student will now be able to level an accusation of gender discrimination against their school, forcing institutions to become gender affirming, he said.
Speaker Pelosi held an event to celebrate women athletes to honor the 50th Anniversary of the passage of Title IX. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Conflicts With State Law
States have enacted legislation that bars biologically male students from competing in women’s sports, restricts doctors’ abilities to provide transition services to minors and prohibits certain discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary classrooms. The conflicting legislation will set up a “battle royale” in the federal court system to test whether the regulation of a federal agency is more powerful than a democratically passed and enacted state law, Perry said. A coalition of 15 Republican-led states have already signaled that they will take legal action if the OCR’s rewritten rules conflict with existing state law.
If the Biden administration does formally achieve its Title IX goals, it “begs the question whether or not they will go beyond the issues of bathrooms and sports teams and get to the real crux of the issue of coercing public schools to teach and operate that this ideology is true,” Eden said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis once again led the way in protecting parental rights in education last week when he signed into law a bill that prohibits age-inappropriate “classroom instruction” on “sexual orientation and gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade. The legislation also requires parental consent for any health care services offered at school, and school districts “may not prohibit or discourage parental notification of or involvement in critical decisions affecting a student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.”
Contrary to the fear-mongering, there is nothing “controversial” about this law. Yet it certainly does throw a spanner in the works for the radicals, neurotics, and degenerates in control of corporate America, the establishmentmedia, and Hollywood, who are evidently on board with schools serving as platforms for perverts, predators, and groomers. The obscene obsession with hypersexualizing children that exploded about two years ago needs to be understood in the context of the left’s wider agenda to promote moral relativism and sexual deviance, a campaign they have been gaslighting Americans into accepting as “progressive.” Decades ago, Marxists ditched class warfare and economics in favor of sexual politics and culture as a vehicle for executing revolution. Ever since, they have been shrewdly redefining marriage, family, sexuality, and gender, to the point where “tolerance” and “diversity” now means foisting porn, perversion, and predators on our families. Those who won’t stand for it are cunningly condemned as bigots.
Although the tactics have changed, the underlying objective is no different from the philosophy of their ideological forebears in Communist hellholes like the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: the fundamental transformation of society by co-opting and perverting the nuclear family, the most influential societal unit, and the bedrock of Judeo-Christian values.
A Nationwide Trend
Brainwashing school-aged children as young as five into becoming transgender-affirming disruptors of the nuclear family is not just a thing happening out west in crazy California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington State. In Virginia, Michigan, and Texas, parents have expressed disgust and outrage over sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In Connecticut, eighth graders were given a foul school assignment asking them to share their sexual desires in the form of pizza toppings. A couple in Florida accused their 12-year-old daughter’s elementary school of covertly coaching her in gender confusion, which they believe led to her suicide attempt.
After last year’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe learned the hard way that parents don’t want this trash for their kids. It turns out white suburban women don’t take kindly to school boards covering up the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl by a “gender-fluid” student. Then there’s the Wisconsin teacher who apparently used a link in her email signature block to redirect students to an LGBT resource site and sex toy shop, and the Missouri teacher charged with sending dozens of nude photos and videos of himself to students, including a girl under 15.
Against this stunning backdrop, the U.S. Senate is poised to confirm the catastrophic Biden administration’s Supreme Court nominee, a radical judge with a 25-year career history of leniency toward individuals convicted of possessing or distributing child pornography. The left-wing media was quick to normalize and defend this disturbing trend, while endeavoring to humanize the depraved pedophiles in question.
A recent op-ed in The Hill spelled out the horrific reality behind the euphemistic phrase “child pornography.” It is the recording of violent acts of torture committed against terrified, defenseless pre-pubescent children and even infants by adult men, and distributed for the sadistic pleasure of the sickos who consume it, perpetuating a fiendish and expanding industry.
The Shift to Cultural Marxism
From the classroom floor to the Senate floor, none of this is a coincidence. Over the course of the 20th century, cultural Marxists realized that the class warfare narrative was never going to lure enough Americans to achieve a fundamental transformation of this nation. Despite the Soviet Union directing and subsidizing communist infiltration of U.S. government agencies, trade and teachers’ unions, and even churches and seminaries beginning in the 1930s, classical Marxism proved a flop. The left’s tactical response was two-fold:
Firstly, in reimagining Marxism in terms of sex and culture, they used maneuver warfare to simply attack the hill from a more advantageous position.
Secondly, pushing the falsehood that the Red Scare was just a conspiracy of the early 1950s deluded Americans into thinking the communist threat was a hoax when, in truth, it never went away.
Meanwhile, whether the battleground is economics or culture, the greatest threat to the twisted Marxist ideology has always been the Christian family. Christians know, as St. Paul writes, that every family in heaven and on earth receives its true name, not from the state, or a party, or society, or some fanciful “village,” but from God the Father. Hence the repression of religious families, the laicization of schools, and the prohibition of religious education that began with the Bolsheviks. In the 1950s, under the Khrushchev regime, Nikolai Ilyachev, the chief ideologist for a reinvigorated antireligious propaganda blitz, summed it up well when he stated that “in Soviet society, a family is a cell of Communist education or a refuge of backward conceptions.” The left’s contempt for those who remain faithful to God’s commandments and the truth revealed by Christ has never changed.
With Your Eyes Clear, Stand Up and Fight
Resisting the soul-destroying lies being force-fed to innocent children means supporting candidates who fear God more than some punk journalist, and who are bold enough, DeSantis style, to stand up to the Marxist schemers waging this cultural revolution. The politically suicidal Republicans and moderate Democratsflirting with the idea of supporting a historically unpopular Biden administration’s pedo-lenient Supreme Court pick might want to simultaneously start researching their post-political career options.
Most importantly, we must return to Christ. He is the only remedy for the sickness and squalor rotting this country from within. So read the Bible, pray, catechize your children, go to church, and yank your kids out of the rainbow-parading, gender expansive-promoting indoctrination camps posing as schools.
Every communist who has ever haunted the earth understands that to control society, you must control the family. They ironically possess a deeper, albeit disordered, appreciation of the mustard seed principle than do many Christians. The nuclear family, the smallest societal unit, has the potential for the most profound cultural influence. As Pope Leo XIII explained, family life is “the cornerstone of all society and government.” It’s time to reinvigorate our Judeo-Christian heritage and start using the Marxists’ tactics against them.
Carina Benton is a dual citizen of Australia and Italy and a permanent resident of the United States. A recent West Coast émigré, she is now helping to repopulate the country’s interior. She holds a master’s degree in education and has taught languages, literature, and writing for many years in Catholic and Christian, as well as secular institutions. She is a practicing Catholic and a mother of two young children.
President Joe Biden’s Department of Education is expected to finalize changes to Title IX rules in the coming weeks to expand the definition of discrimination beyond sex to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. The rule changes will have seismic implications, setting off not just state versus federal showdowns over state laws barring biological males from competing in women’s sports, but also how college campuses handle sexual harassment charges and due process.
While these changes have been anticipated since Biden took office, last week the Washington Post reported the first look at a draft copy of the proposed language, which includes this key sentence:
Discrimination on the basis of sex includes discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
The Post also reported that Biden’s DOE plans to rewrite rules established by President Donald Trump’s DOE, under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that required schools to recognize the presumption of innocence for those accused of sexual harassment or assault. Some of the DeVos era due process protections that may be targeted or revoked entirely include the right to cross-examination for both the accuser and the accused, as well as the right to full access to all evidence collected by schools in sexual harassment investigations and the opportunity to respond to that evidence.
Candice Jackson, who was Department of Education deputy general counsel during the Trump administration, told The Federalist that these two major changes, to both the definition of discrimination and the definition of what constitutes sexual harassment, will overlap in severely detrimental ways.
“It’s going to affect people’s ability on campus to talk about or debate about single-sex spaces on campus like women’s sports,” Jackson said. “All of a sudden, you’re in a position where even having a discussion or even trying to advocate for keeping women’s sports single-sex could get you called a harasser.”
Jackson said loosening the definition of sexual harassment moves beyond handling alleged rapes and into the realm of academic freedom.
“You’re now talking about the ability on campus to have important discussions on what gender identity discrimination means,” she said.
But as the rules are finalized, the return of campus kangaroo courts is likely to be overshadowed by the current culture war spotlight on women’s sports. With biological males winning national women’s titles, states that have recently passed laws protecting women from unfair male competition are likely to face the pressure of losing their Title IX funding. Jackson said she thinks this time will be different. She expects states to refuse to back down, as they have on other issues where the federal government wields its funding hammer.
“There is enough disagreement at a fundamental level about whether or not it is now ever OK to provide separate comparable services and activities for boys and girls and men and women that this is this is going to be a bit of a showdown, probably needing to be revisited by the Supreme Court,” she said.
Madeline Osburn is managing editor at The Federalist. Contact her at madeline@thefederalist.com or follow her on Twitter.
Madison, Wis. — Parents are “not entitled” to know their kids’ gender identity, according to a recent training session in Wisconsin’s Eau Claire Area School District.
Empower Wisconsin obtained a copy of a training slide from a late February staff development session. The 2021-22 Equity session on Safe Spaces reminds teachers that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ identities. That knowledge must be earned.”
“Teachers are often straddling this complex situation. In ECASD, our priority is supporting the student,” the professional development facilitator guide states. Teachers were encouraged to “Talk amongst yourselves!”
The lesson — that teachers know better than parents about what is best for their kids — is not sitting well with some community members.
“We are appalled that ECASD would display such blatant disregard for the parents and guardians of our community’s children. We are equally dismayed that current school district leadership would pressure teachers into breaking a social contract that we all know and understand—that parents and guardians hold primary responsibility and decision making for the welfare and care of their children,” said parents and school board candidates Nicole Everson, Corey Cronrath, and Melissa Winter in a joint statement.
The district’s training session is also legally suspect. A district court in 2020 issued a partial injunction against Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy allowing children of any age to transition to a different gender identity at school — without parental consent. The full case is now before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) and the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) filed the lawsuit on behalf of a group of parents challenging the gender identity policy “that violates the rights of parents to make important healthcare decisions on their children’s behalf.” The policy includes the following provisions:
Children of any age can transition to a different gender identity at school, by changing their name and pronouns, without parental notice or consent.
District employees are prohibited from notifying parents, without the child’s consent, that their child has or wants to change gender identity at school, or that their child may be dealing with gender dysphoria.
District employees are even instructed to deceive parents by using the child’s legal name and pronouns with family, while using the different name and pronouns adopted by the child in the school setting.
It’s not clear whether the Eau Claire Area School District has a similar policy.
The school board candidates are demanding district administrators issue an apology to teachers for “placing them at odds with families and also to parents and guardians for breaking the trust and partnership that is critical for thriving students and a stellar school district.”
An apology doesn’t appear to be forthcoming. ECASD Superintendent Michael Johnson issued a statement to Empower Wisconsin asserting the district is upholding its responsibility to maintain an educational environment that is “equitable, safe and inclusive for all students.”
“Our staff often find themselves in positions of trust with our students. The staff development presentation shared extensive data and information to assist our staff members in our ongoing efforts to create a safe and supportive learning environment for all students,” Johnson said in the statement. “The ECASD prides itself on being a school district that makes all students feel welcome and safe in our schools.”
The superintendent said the staff training focused on data showing students who identify as non-heterosexual have a higher incidence rate of mental health issues than heterosexual students. But critics say a school’s commitment to “equity and inclusiveness” does not give license to educators to hide important information from parents and guardians.
Cronrath, Everson, and Winter are among seven candidates, including two incumbents, running for three open seats on the school board next month. The three jumped into the race because they were concerned about the eroding of parental rights in the district. They say Eau Claire schools’ “blatant disregard for parental rights and responsibilities” has been creeping into the district’s classrooms. The latest training session sends three very dangerous messages to parents and the wider community, the candidates assert.
1. Schools are in control of children, not parents and families—When you entrust your child into the walls of ECASD, you no longer have the right as a parent to be informed of major developments in your child’s school life. In fact, you must ‘earn it.’
2. Current Leadership is willing to pit teachers against parents—Open communication between the classroom and home has always been critical to healthy school communities and student development. ECASD is putting teachers in a difficult and dishonest position by instructing them to actively withhold information from parents.
3. What goes on in the walls of ECASD is privileged information—By indicating that information about your child is ‘knowledge that must be earned,’ ECASD is setting a dangerous precedent. If identity questions for your child can be hidden from you, is diet, curriculum, healthcare, inappropriate relationships, mental health concerns, etc. also no longer the business of parents? Just what are parents and guardians allowed to know and when?
The Republican-led state legislature passed a Parental Bill of Rights that would prohibit school policies that infringe on a parent’s or guardian’s role as the primary caregiver of their child. Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat and the former state superintendent, is likely to veto the bill.
Eau Claire Area School District has a history of overreach. Last fall, school officials worked with the local health czar in removing a 14-year-old girl from school after someone in her class tested positive for Covid-19. The girl and her mom resisted, accusing authorities of abusing their powers. The county health director then sought a court order to have the girl forcibly removed from school.
Events happened this year that would have been believed impossible not long ago, with new lows and technological advances.
The world seemed to get closer to spinning out of its orbit in 2021. If you’d told me five years ago that men would be treated as women, criminals would not be prosecuted, and censorship would be widespread, I wouldn’t have believed you.
What were once considered the most basic, scientific truths (such as that you’re born with your sex and can’t change it) have broken down. Governments are no longer serving their primary function of providing security and protecting borders.
There are many more. As I reflected on the past year, here are just some of the many things that happened in 2021 that I never would have believed possible if someone had foretold them to me just five years ago.
1. Men As Women
The trend that most would have shocked my grandparents is transgenderism. Men are now competing with women in sports and being housed with women in prison. In 2021, President Biden appointed a man as a four-star admiral and proclaimed this was the “first” “female” “four-star officer.”
2. Blocking Puberty
A second shocker is that parents are enabling young children to try to change genders with dangerous surgeries and puberty blockers. Many public schools have a policy of not telling parents if their son or daughter has adopted a transgender identity at school.
3. Drafting Women
Third, the United States narrowly avoided a draft for women, which was supported by many elected officials in the “conservative” party.
Millions of immigrants have crossed illegally into the United States this year, in record numbers. The Biden administration also considered paying $450,000 in reparations to illegal immigrant families separated at the border.
6. Widespread Censorship
The former president of the United States is still banned from Facebook and Twitter. Big Tech censors debate on the most important topics of the day. Comedians can’t make jokes.
7. Parents Labeled Terrorists
Parents were labeled “domestic terrorists” by the Biden Justice Department for showing up at school board meetings with complaints. Schools aren’t telling parents what they teach and politicians are denying the obvious – young children are being taught, using public funds and institutions, that their country is racist.
8. President’s Mental Abilities Doubted
President Biden misspeaks regularly, to the point that many commentators doubt he’s really the one running the country.
9. Asking Athletes for Advice
People turn to athletes and actors more and more for their advice and opinions as many other societal leaders seem to have abdicated their duties to lead.
10. Record Debt and Inflation
With record U.S. national debt, the money supply increased by more than a third in 18 months. The United States is experiencing the worst inflation in 40 years. Energy prices are up, and one of the bigger events of the year was in May, when the main pipeline carrying gasoline to the East Coast was shut down due to a cyberattack.
11. Covid Restrictions Continue and Some Increase
Initially sold as “two weeks to slow the spread,” lockdowns, mask, and vaccine mandates continue two years since COVID-19 started. Some U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. are now segregating people from public places to penalize their independent assessment of their medical risks.
12. Major Scientific Advances Not Celebrated
Every year brings some surprises and new scientific advances, but this year, living in a time of such great division in society, these breakthroughs were not universally celebrated.
Surely the greatest impact of science this year was the widespread rollout of COVID-19 vaccines. Thankfully, the vaccines have saved countless lives. But many had hoped they would mean life could return to normal; instead, lockdowns and mask mandates continue and vaccines have become yet another point of division, with the vaccinated pitted against the unvaccinated.
A huge portion of the world’s population has been willing to get the jab and trust relatively new Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, but some have been doubtful and resisted coercion and mandates as they have made their own judgments about natural immunity and risk. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “mRNA vaccines are newly available to the public. However, researchers have been studying and working with mRNA vaccines for decades.”
Doubts have been sown because the vaccines don’t completely prevent infection or transmission, but also because the public has lost faith in science as it was politicized by scientists, the administration, bureaucrats, the media, and Big Tech – from discussion of the origins of COVID to its treatment and prevention.
Surely we could at least joyfully celebrate science when the long-time human dream of private space travel became more of a reality in 2021? Three billionaires made expeditions to this frontier. It was a massive milestone, but was criticized by some as a waste of money and an ego trip.
13. Losing Our Lead
While traveling to space sure sounds sci-fi, the United States is losing its lead in science. China continued its advances toward surpassing the United States in technology, surprising U.S. officials by launching a supersonic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead. The missile circled the earth once and barely missed its target.
It “approached its target traveling at least five times the speed of sound — a capability no country has previously demonstrated,” according to The Financial Times. The Pentagon is unsure how “China overcame the constraints of physics by firing countermeasures from a vehicle travelling at hypersonic speeds.”
China may also be behind some of the Unidentified Flying Objects seen by U.S. military pilots over the past two decades, according to a long-awaited Pentagon report this year, which could not explain the origin of the UFOs.
Even with all this bad news, our nation has so much to be grateful for. But looking at the societal chaos and dystopian scientific advances, it’s no wonder some think the end is nigh. For now, we can hope that Republican wins last November show that many Americans will vote for change in the next election.
And maybe we should celebrate those billionaires escaping Earth after all.
Eleanor Bartow is the features editor at The Federalist. She worked as an editor at The Daily Caller and an investigative reporter at the Daily Caller News Foundation. She was editor-in-chief of the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine, The American, and a reporter for Congressional Quarterly. Her articles have also been published with The New York Times, The Washington Post, Real Clear Investigations, National Geographic News, The International Herald Tribune, and The American Spectator. She has been interviewed on Fox News Radio, National Public Radio, and WABC. She received a Fulbright Professional Grant in Journalism and was a fellow with the Claremont Institute and National Review Institute.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is in crisis about the meanings of the words sex and gender. We are all victims of this crisis, but the primary victims are women and girls. Throughout U.S. law, the word sex is being completely redefined to mean “gender identity” or “transgender.” Congress is doing it. The Biden administration is doing it. The federal courts are doing it.
Most Americans have no comprehension of the implications of this, due to no fault of their own. Very few media outlets will permit us to talk about it. Yet feminists have been talking about it for a long time. The Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) has been talking about it since its founding in 2013 (I served on the board of WoLF from 2016-2020).
Jennifer Bilek talked about it in this publication in her 2018 essay, “Who Are the Rich, White Men Institutionalizing Transgender Ideology?” She continues to talk about it in her outstanding 11th Hour Blog. The Women’s Human Rights Campaign (WHRC) has been talking about it globally since 2019 and in the United States since 2020 by advancing the aims of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, which has been signed by more than 20,000 people and hundreds of organizations (I currently serve as the president of the U.S. chapter).
The mainstream media steadfastly ignores all of this and is engaged in a concerted effort to hide it from Americans. But Americans are waking up, due in large part to the steadfast work of radical feminists or, as some people might say, “TERFs.” The acronym “TERF,” said to mean “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist,” was created by misogynists to demean those of us who fight for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. Many feminists have chosen to reclaim the acronym, arguing that it stands for “Tired of Explaining Reality to Fools” or “Totally Excellent Radical Feminist.”
In October of this year, comedian Dave Chappelle made headlines when he proclaimed that he is “Team TERF” during his Netflix show “The Closer.” The hashtag #TeamTERF immediately started trending on Twitter. Chappelle did this in the context of defending British author J.K. Rowling, who has faced relentless abuse for her defense of women and girls and abuse survivors. If fighting for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls makes me a TERF, then so be it.
Many people will be angry with me for publishing in The Federalist because The Federalist is a conservative-leaning publication. I am not a conservative and never have been. I registered to vote as a Democrat in 1990. Since then, the only time I was not a registered Democrat was during a brief period in 2007 when I was registered Green (I re-registered as a Democrat so I could vote in the 2008 Democratic primary and have remained so ever since).
Still, I am grateful to The Federalist for publishing this because no one else will. That’s because U.S. media has been completely corrupted by an industry that is hell-bent on persuading ordinary Americans that there is such a thing as “gender identity” and that some people “are transgender.”
The truth is that “gender identity” does not exist in any real, material sense, and “transgender” is simply a made-up concept that is used to justify all kinds of atrocities, such as convicted male rapists and murderers being housed in women’s prisons with vulnerable women, men being permitted to parade around with erect penises in women’s sections of spas, and men participating in women’s sports. They are being permitted to do all of this on the basis that they have a so-called “female gender identity.”
All of “gender identity” and “transgender” politics is a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class. The entire edifice is a lie. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids.
Democratic Party leadership will not permit discussion about this, anywhere. But I assure readers that there are countless rank and file Democrats who are furious about it. I hear from them every day. Democrats are disgusted that party leadership is promoting the teaching of “gender identity” in schools down to the kindergarten level, celebrating the mutilation of healthy children’s bodies, and cheering on performances of “drag queen story hour” in public libraries.
The Democratic Party of today looks nothing like the Democratic Party that I was proud to be a part of just about all my life. Many Democrats share my despair. If the Republican Party manages to nominate just about anyone who is a decent human being for the presidency in 2024 (hint: “Grab ‘em by the p-ssy” guy is not included in this category), many Democrats will vote Republican.
Gender ideology is one of the reasons Democrats lost House seats in 2020 and one of the reasons Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in Virginia this month. I was proud to stand with parents in Loudoun County, and grateful to The Federalist for covering it (that coverage eventually got picked up in the U.K. via The Daily Mail). Gender will be one of the reasons that Democrats will lose more congressional seats in 2022 as well as the presidency in 2024.
I know people who have left the Democratic Party because of gender and become Independents. I know one woman who left the Democratic Party because of gender and registered Republican. I choose to remain a Democrat because I continue to hope the party will reverse course, as unlikely as that appears to be at this time, and have done my best to warn party leadership about what is coming here and here and here.
I am a second-wave feminist and a Democrat. I stand for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. These cannot be protected if sex is redefined incomprehensibly to include so-called “gender identity.”
Feminists have a saying: we cannot protect women and girls on the basis of sex if we cannot say what sex is. My hope is that lawmakers across the political aisle will get a grip and right the wrongs that have been perpetrated in the name of “gender identity.”
Every single human being is either female or male. No one “is transgender.” It’s long past time that lawmakers across the political aisle and members of corporate media said so.
Parents in Leon County, Florida, are suing the school district for holding a meeting with their teenage daughter about her chosen gender identity without their knowledge or consent. The parents have warned that the district’s LGBT policies create a “wedge” between students and their parents.
January and Jeffrey Littlejohn filed a lawsuit against the school board, Superintendent of Schools Rocky Hanna and Assistant Superintendent, Equity Officer and Title IX Compliance Coordinator Kathleen Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida on Oct. 18.
In the lawsuit, the Littlejohns accuse the defendants of violating their substantive due process right to direct the education and upbringing of their children under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and other rights guaranteed to them by state and federal law by excluding them from a meeting with school officials discussing their 13-year-old daughter’s gender identity.
Vernadette Broyles of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, a legal organization created two-and-a-half years ago “specifically to stand with and help parents who are in some way or the other … seeking to protect the well-being … of their child from gender identity ideology,” is one of the attorneys representing the Littlejohns in the litigation.
In an interview with The Christian Post, January Littlejohn and Broyles elaborated on the lawsuit and the events that led up to it.
Littlejohn explained that her daughter, who is now a high school student, began undergoing treatment for gender confusion in the summer before the start of the 2020-’21 school year. She attributed her daughter’s gender confusion to peer pressure from her “friend group because three other children in that same friend group had come out as nonbinary or transgender within the previous six months.”
While Littlejohn told one of her daughter’s teachers at Deer Lake Middle School that she was “seeking mental health counseling and she was experiencing distress that we weren’t affirming her at home because we didn’t feel like it was in her best interest,” she did not expect the school to begin referring to her daughter using they/them pronouns and give her the option to sleep in the same quarters as her male classmates on an overnight school field trip.
Littlejohn only found out that the school had taken such action because her daughter revealed to her that she’d had a meeting about her “nickname,” with the concerned parent telling CP that “that’s kind of what we refer to it as.”
She said her daughter then asked, ‘“isn’t it funny that they asked me what restroom I wanted to use?”’
“My daughter has ADHD … and so to her, this seemed like the silliest thing in the world that they asked her which restroom she preferred to use. That was my first indication that the school had met with her without … notifying my husband or myself,” she said.
“I immediately called her guidance counselor. The guidance counselor said she needed to call me back. She called me back with the assistant principal on the line. So right then and there, I knew something … felt different about the situation because I had spoken to the guidance counselor multiple times in the past because of my daughter’s 504 plan … for her ADHD.”
Littlejohn accused the school of “colluding with my daughter to deceive us so that we would never have known she was going by an alternate name.”
The concerned mother also insisted that she “absolutely should have been at that meeting” and expressed disbelief that the school that she volunteered at did not partner with them. “I was volunteer of the year at that school. It wasn’t like I was an unknown parent.”
Littlejohn recalled the detrimental impact of the school’s decision to hold meetings with her daughter about her gender identity confusion without her knowledge or consent, saying: “It created a huge wedge between our daughter and us, as her parents. We have worked very hard over the past year-and-a-half to stabilize the situation through counseling, and I do feel like she’s on a better path at this time.”
Broyles told CP that the purpose of the lawsuit was to get the school district to “rescind the guidance … that was in place that … basically instructed school officials not to inform parents when a child begins to indicate a transgender or LGBTQ+ identity.” The attorney expressed particular concern that the guidance implied that “outing a student to their parents could be dangerous to a student’s well-being.”
“Every time I think about this lawsuit, it really hits me: The district guidance had the message to parents that you don’t have the best interests of your child in mind. It sends the message that children need to … be protected from parents rather than by parents, and that is an earth-shattering message that cannot stand,” Broyles asserted.
Specifically, the guidance, part of the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide,” warned that “Outing a student, especially to parents, can be very dangerous to the [student’s] health and well-being” because “some students are not able to be out at home because their parents are unaccepting of LGBTQ+ people out.”
The guidance maintains that “as many as 40% of homeless youth are LGBTQ+, many of whom have been rejected by their families for being LGBTQ+,” suggesting that “outing students to their parents can literally make them homeless.”
“We are seeking that guidance to be permanently removed and replaced with new guidance that complies with the Parents’ Bill of Rights there in Florida as well as the Florida and United States Constitution that honors the parents’ right to make decisions for their children,” Broyles added. “It’s really important to recognize that affirming a child’s discordant gender identity … involves a significant mental health decision that affects the well-being of children … and with potentially lifelong consequences.”
The lawsuit, as summarized by Broyles, is asking the school district to implement new guidance requiring school officials to notify parents whenever their child “expresses gender discordance, gender confusion, a different identity other than their physical, biological sex” and “new policies that provide public notice and a public hearing regarding the new guidance through the school board.” Additionally, the Littlejohns are seeking “some sort of monetary damages for the … pain and suffering and … the impacts this has had on their family.”
Broyles stressed that the situation facing the Littlejohns is not unique: “This violation of parental rights is driving a wedge between parents and their children by school officials. … It affects parents … all throughout the political spectrum on both political parties or independents, whether it’s Christians, Jews, Muslims, atheists, agnostics. … We’ve spoken to almost virtually every stripe of parent.”
The attorney maintained that the Child and Parental Rights Campaign is working on several similar cases: “We hear almost weekly from parents who have … something similar happening to them and their children.”
“This same guidance I described to you is present on the websites of at least 11 other school districts throughout Florida,” Broyles said. She further noted that the “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Student Support Plan” included in the “LCS Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Gender Nonconforming and Questioning Support Guide” is also on the ACLU’s website.
“A lot of these documents are already out there and school boards, based on what I’ve been told, simply adopt those and put their name on them,” Broyles added.
“That’s why there seems to be the exact same guidance in multiple counties in the state of Florida and all over the country in all 50 states.”
Littlejohn told CP that she’s aware of other parents in Leon County that have found themselves in the same situation as herself.
“A lot of the parents are really scared to speak out or they don’t feel like they can speak out because it would jeopardize the very fragile relationship they have with their child who’s experiencing distress related to their gender.” She added that she speaks to other families “almost weekly to try to help them understand the situation at hand and help them get resources.”
She also pushed back on the claim that the school was conducting a “benign intervention”: “It’s the first step toward medical transitioning, which is why it is so imperative that parents be included [in] any discussion with their child that could impact the short-term and long-term mental and physical well-being of their child, whether it’s this issue or any issue. So fundamentally, this is about parental rights and what the schools can and cannot do … without their permission.”
Littlejohn emphasized that despite the harm this experience has caused to her and her family, “it’s made our faith grow” as Christians. She seconded Broyles’ assertion that “this issue affects all kinds of families” and “people of all faiths including atheists.”
In the time since officials at Deer Lake Middle School first met with Littlejohn’s daughter to discuss her gender identity, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed the Parents’ Bill of Rights into law. The measure mandates that “important information relating to a child should not be withheld, either inadvertently or purposely, from his or her parent, including information relating to the minor child’s health, well-being, and education, while the minor child is in the custody of the school district.”
Additionally, the law directs school districts to work with parents, teachers and administrators to “develop and adopt a policy to promote parental involvement in the public school system.”
Superintendent Hanna reacted to the Littlejohns’ lawsuit in a statement to news outlet WCTV: “We certainly want to include parents, and with the Parental Bill of Rights, I understand and respect that, but we also have to respect the rights of the individuals, safety of the children we care for each and every day” because “while the children are under our care we act in loco parentis, on behalf of a parent while they’re under our care.”
The lawsuit follows a year of unsuccessful efforts to convince the school district to change its policy. Littlejohn insisted that “We tried to do this without filing a lawsuit, which was never our intention.”
While the complaint mentions that the district removed the guide from the publicly accessible portion of its website, it alleges that the district did not comply with the Littlejohns’ request to “publish on the Website a written statement that parents would be notified when their child/children express a discordant gender identity and included in meetings or discussions with their child/children regarding their gender identity.”
The complaint contends that “there is no indication on the website or otherwise that the Guide has been rescinded, only a notation that it is being revised.” Additionally, it states that “no revised guidance regarding parental notification has been published or provided to Plaintiffs.” The website of the Leon County Schools’ Equity and Diversity Department has a section devoted to the LCS LGBTQ+ Support Guide, which informs visitors that “[the] Guide is currently being reviewed and is under revision.”
The lawsuit against Leon County Schools comes at a time when parents have expressed an increasing amount of unease with some of the material their children are exposed to in school. In recent weeks, outraged parents and community members in several states have descended on school board meetings to condemn the inclusion of sexually explicit material in books available to students in school libraries and writing prompts in a textbook used in a college-level English class.
It’s a phone call every parent dreads receiving. Earlier this year, Virginia father Scott Smith was notified his 15-year-old daughter had been sexually assaulted. While that news was horrific, little did Smith know this would just be the start of a nightmarish series of events in which he would end up being cast as the villain. He can thank Democrats for enabling the whole outrageous affair.
The saga began back on May 28 at Loudoun County’s Stone Bridge High School, the sheriff’s office confirmed, where Smith was summoned by school officials. Smith told The Daily Wire he learned his daughter had allegedly been assaulted in a girls’ restroom by a boy wearing a skirt. (According to some reports, the boy identifies as “gender-fluid.”) Smith said school officials told him they intended to handle the incident in-house, instead of through the police and courts. After Smith became understandably upset at this callous and wholly improper decision not to involve law enforcement, he says school officials calls the police on him.
Fortunately, Smith was not arrested that day, but the story did not end there. A month later, he attended a Loudoun County School Board meeting to protest a proposed policy that would, among other things, allow students to access whatever restroom or locker room corresponds with their self-identified sex.
Concerned parents argued the policy would take privacy and safety from girls. LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler responded, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms.” Smith couldn’t believe his ears. Later, a conversation between a left-leaning parent and Smith grew heated when the other parent implied Smith was lying about his daughter. This time, police did arrest him and video of the incident went viral. Overnight, Smith became the poster boy of supposedly dangerous parents. The National School Boards Association even specifically pointed to him in the now-infamous letter to the Biden administration, arguing that distraught parents ought to be seen as “domestic terrorists.”
The full truth about what had happened to Smith’s daughter did not become public until this past week: The sexual assault committed against her was no anomaly. Not only that, it was the direct result of policies promoted and advanced by Democrats who are willing to sacrifice the bodies, minds, and souls of innocent children to protect leftist gender ideology from criticism.
The prime culprits of the Smith family’s tragedy are dictates like Virginia’s “Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools.” Such dictates — disarmingly labeled “policies” — elevate subjective “gender identity” over sex, allowing male students to participate in girls’ sports, lodge with girls on overnight school trips, and, yes, access girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.
This is far from a new project. Democrats have been attempting to impose their gender insanity on the rest of the country since at least the Obama administration, when the U.S. Department of Education threatened schools with a loss of federal funding if they did not implement such policies. Unfortunately, weak Republican governors like South Dakota’s Kristi Noem have also been complicit through their refusal to meaningfully resist this agenda.
Concerned parents and others have fought this effort, arguing these changes would put girls in particular at risk to potential predators. Sespite Democrats’ best attempts at gaslighting, this is exactly what’s happened, and not just in Virginia. In November 2017, a five-year-old girl in Georgia was allegedly sexually assaulted in her school bathroom after the school introduced a new transgender policy. Her case, Thomas v. City Schools of Decatur et al, is still making its way through the state’s courts.
Still, Democrats and their left-wing allies refuse to even acknowledge this outcome of their transgender policies. After claiming there had been no assault in a school restroom, the Loudoun County School Board passed its new transgender policy in August. The alleged perpetrator was reportedly transferred to a different high school where, earlier this month, he was reportedly charged with sexually assaulting yet another girl. Still, the corporate media blackout of the story persists, while the Biden administration and Democrat politicians — and their henchmen in Big Tech and the press — continue to vilify ordinary parents like Smith.
Democrats’ true priorities are clear. Despite past “believe all women” rhetoric, their party’s ideology about sex has driven them to summarily toss aside the safety of girls in their campaign to normalize crazed gender ideology. As for the fundamental right of parents to choose how their children are raised, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe last month spelled out where he and his Democrat comrades stand: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
To stop the left’s nefarious agenda, parents and pro-family Americans must become politically engaged and toss out bad elected officials. If this doesn’t happen soon, Scott Smith’s nightmare could be endured by many others around the country.
Terry Schilling is the executive director at American Principles Project.
The National Sex Education Standards’ updated 2020 guidance is featuring what many parents may consider to be disturbing, indoctrinating sex-related information that public school districts are teaching children from very young ages. The new standards, according to the report, were conceived by the Future of Sex Education Initiative, a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer, and SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change that seeks to “create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of quality sex education in public school.”
According to a Tuesday report from the Federalist‘s Nick Bell, the sex education “blueprint” is steeped in “extremist sexual ethics” that are “designed to destroy children’s innocence”as well as undermine their Christian faith.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in a 2016 report noted that approximately 40% of school districts across the country adopted the National Sex Education Standards’ 2011 edition — a less extreme version of its 2020 successor.
“The 2020 standards unequivocally endorse abortion at any time, teach the topic starting in sixth grade, and even force teachers to provide information on local abortion clinics to students in ninth grade,” Bell wrote. “The standards also insist that children must be allowed to choose their own gender and false pronouns must ‘be respected by the adults in their lives.'”
According to the new standards, children as young as kindergarten age should learn about gender identity, while third-grade students should learn about the role of hormone blockers for transgender youth. Teachers should also be equipped to explain masturbation to students as young as just eight years old.
It gets worse from there: Bell noted that sixth-graders — who are often 11 and 12 years old — “must define oral, anal, and vaginal sex as well as the benefits of withdrawing one’s penis before ejaculation during intercourse.”
Sixth-graders, the groups said, should also learn that people ought not “assume that people with a penis are boys and people with a vagina are girls,” and that they should never assume another person’s sexual orientation. Students of this age group, according to the guidance, should also attend LGBTQ rallies and challenge themselves and others on ways to combat homophobia. Sixth-graders would also engage in a card game in which cards ask whether various sex acts — “oral sex (mouth on genitals),” “anal sex (penis to anus)” — are considered abstinence.
For seventh-graders, anything but “sperm in vagina” would constitute abstinence, the guidance added, and teachers would demonstrate how to put on a condom.
A lesson for eighth-graders, the guidance added, would encourage anal and oral sex over vaginal sex in order to avoid pregnancy.
The new standards, according to the organization, were “written with a trauma-informed lens; have been infused with principles of reproductive justice, racial justice, social justice, and equity; address social determinants of health and how these can lead to inequitable health outcomes; and take an intersectional approach. This edition uses less cis and heteronormative language that reflects a broader range of relationships and identities.”
The updated standards also appear to place parental consent on the back burner and encourage children to demand respect from the adults in their lives when it comes to sexual choice.
“No one else is qualified to label or judge another person’s sexual identity, including their sexual orientation or gender identity, and it is important that the language and terms young people use to identify themselves is respected by the adults in their lives,” a portion of the report added.
A state court has ordered the Christian-owned craft store chain Hobby Lobby to pay over $200,000 in fines for refusing to allow one of its trans-identified employees to use the women’s bathroom. A three-judge Illinois appellate court panel unanimously ruled Friday that Hobby Lobby violated the Illinois Human Rights Act by declining to allow one of its employees to use the bathroom that corresponds with the person’s gender identity instead of biological sex.
Friday’s ruling reinforces an earlier conclusion of the Illinois Human Rights Commission. The company was ordered to pay its longtime employee $220,000 in attorneys’ fees for “emotional distress.” The company argued the fine was excessive. However, the court did not find Hobby Lobby’s arguments persuasive.
The retail chain, owned by the Green family, has become known for its adherence to Christian principles. As explained in the decision, the employee, a biological male who now identifies as Meggan Sommerville, began working for Hobby Lobby in 1998. In 2007, while working as an employee of the Hobby Lobby in East Aurora, Sommerville began to transition from male to female.
The transition became official in 2010 when Sommerville “formally informed Hobby Lobby of her transition and her intent to begin using the women’s bathroom at the store.” Sommerville presented the store with an updated driver’s license, Social Security card and name change court order. Although Hobby Lobby changed Sommerville’s personnel records and benefits information to reflect a “female identity,” the store never allowed the employee to use the women’s restroom over the past decade. Sommerville has faced disciplinary action for using the women’s bathroom.
The East Aurora store did install a unisex restroom in 2013, enabling store employees and customers to “use either the bathroom corresponding to their [biological sex] or the unisex bathroom.” Sommerville contended, however, that being forced to use the unisex bathroom made it seem as if “they were segregating me,”adding, “I felt as though there were the guys, the gals, and then me.”
“Hobby Lobby’s provision of a unisex bathroom available to all employees and customers cannot cure its unequal treatment of Sommerville with respect to the women’s bathroom,”the court maintained. “If every employee and customer except Sommerville may use either the unisex bathroom or the bathroom corresponding to their sex, but Sommerville’s choices are limited to the unisex bathroom or a bathroom that does not correspond to her sex, Hobby Lobby is still discriminating unlawfully.”
Sommerville alleged that the inability to use the women’s restroom led to severe mental anguish, and the court agreed. It ruled that Hobby Lobby’s actions violated a law barring “discrimination against any individual because of his or her … [sex], or sexual orientation … in connection with employment … and the ability of public accommodations.”
Additionally, the law makes it illegal for “any employer to … segregate, or act with respect to … discipline … or terms, privileges or conditions of employment on the basis of unlawful discrimination” and for places of public accommodation to “deny or refuse to another the full and equal enjoyment of the facilities.”
The court emphasized that “discrimination against a person because of his or her actual perceived … sex … [or] sexual orientation” constitutes “unlawful discrimination.”
“Hobby Lobby’s conduct thus falls squarely within the definition of unlawful discrimination under the Act, as it treats Sommerville differently from all other women who work or shop at its store, solely on the basis that her gender identity is not ‘traditionally associated with’ her ‘designated sex at birth,’” the court argued. “The Commission did not err in finding that Hobby Lobby’s conduct of denying Sommerville access to its women’s bathroom violated her civil rights under articles 2 and 5 of the Act.”
While the court’s opinion never discussed Hobby Lobby’s Christian faith or religious beliefs, it did mention that the arts-and-crafts chain sees “an individual’s ‘sex’ — the status of being male or female” as “an immutable condition.”
Hobby Lobby gained national recognition for citing its religious beliefs when objecting to the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. The mandate forced employers to cover their employees’ birth control in employer-sponsored healthcare packages.
Hobby Lobby asserted that providing its employees with contraception coverage, including abortion-inducing drugs, would violate the company’s sincerely held religious beliefs.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell that companies could refuse to provide contraception for their employees if doing so violated their religious beliefs.
The Illinois appellate court’s ruling against Hobby Lobby comes as congressional Democrats are pushing for the passage of the Equality Act, which would enshrine nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community into federal law. The language of the Equality Act is similar to that of the Illinois Human Rights Act. Many conservatives have expressed concern about its implications for religious liberty.
As the battle rages on in our society about gender identity and the treatment of same-sex relationships under the law, the church is not immune from addressing these issues head-on – even at the dinner table. If you are like me, these questions are a constant source of debate with teenage children who are bombarded with social media and classroom discussions on the topic that challenge our Biblical views on sexuality, marriage, and gender.
Alarming statistics from a recent Gallup poll show that the onslaught of LGBTQ messaging directed at our youth is working. The report states, “younger generations are far more likely to consider themselves to be something other than heterosexual. This includes about one in six adult members of Generation Z (those aged 18 to 23 in 2020)…and more than half of those claim they are bisexual.” The fact that the rise is most pronounced in young people and the majority is not experiencing same-sex attraction, indicates that the deliberate indoctrination of our children not to accept traditional gender roles is increasingly successful.
When it comes to gender identity, the drastic rise in young people that identify as “gender fluid” has generated fierce debate. Prominent academics and health professionals advocate for a gender affirmative model, claiming that gender is determined by an “interweaving of biology, development and socialization; and, culture and context, with all three bearing on an individual’s gender self.” Therefore, parents should accept the “gender” as stated by the child, regardless of their anatomy. Juxtapose that to the stance of child advocates, researchers, and Christians who firmly believe the rapid onset of gender confusion in our youth results from underlying emotional disorders and manipulation from schools and other institutions that are engaged in some form of conversion therapy on our children. If you are not familiar with this debate, I encourage you to read these resources and understand the extent of the battle for our youth’s identity and emotional well-being.
Surprisingly, the church as a whole is not of one opinion on the issue of sexual preference and God’s condemnation of same-sex relations. The acceptance of openly gay members and clergy are on the rise. Some denominations that ordain homosexual pastors and worship leaders defend their stance by claiming Jesus loves everyone, and research shows that a significant number of Christians find no conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality. Thankfully, many evangelical Pastors do not legitimize same-sex couples and instead encourage the individual to rebuke the sin and lean on the power of the Holy Spirit to fight the urges of same-sex attraction just as one would other sins like fornication or adultery.In His Image, the movie does a beautiful job describing just how a Bible-honoring Christian can convey the message of the love of Christ to someone struggling with same-sex attraction. Organizations like Changed Movement help people find community with others struggling with similar issues but who left the LGBTQ lifestyle for freedom in Christ.
Even as a new believer, I knew the Lord did not intend to condone same-sex relationships based on Scripture (1 Corinthians 6:9, 1 Timothy 1:10) , but I struggled with how I could convey these principles to my daughter in a spirit of love and compassion. Last month, I was fortunate to attend an event for Living Stone Ministries at my church to hear from other parents of children struggling with gender identity and same-sex attraction. It was a wonderful time of support and worship with other parents, but the most amazing part of the evening was listening to former gay believers talk about their journey and the impact their parents had on their road to freedom in Christ.
Two of these young men and women empathically said their parent’s unwavering commitment to the Gospel stuck with them the most when deciding to leave the homosexual lifestyle. As one young man put it, “no matter how I tried to manipulate my mom or convince her that she was wrong and just didn’t want to support me, she never wavered on the truth that Jesus wanted a better life for me and I would never find true happiness in a same-sex relationship.” It was the truth of his mother’s words that rung in his ears when he survived an attempted suicide and finally gave his life to Christ for healing and restoration. Another young woman said her Christian mother took the opposite approach and went to gay bars with her to make her feel accepted. It ultimately backfired and made her resent her mother for not helping her leave the lifestyle. Hearing these stories brought me so much peace because it was a truth I knew in my heart but hearing it from someone with lived it affirmed my conviction.
So despite the arguments and accusations that my stance is homophobic, outdated, or just “my truth,” I continue to tell my young daughter that Jesus loves all sinners but despises the sin. It is no different than if she came to me wanting to do drugs or engage in premarital sex. I would warn her that a life of sin will never bring happiness or the freedom that comes from a life in obedience to God.
In light of all that is coming against our children to draw them into a life of death and depression, it is unfortunate that any church would condone same-sex couples and even allow openly gay pastors to lead a congregation. How can we teach our young people to follow any of the Bible’s commandments if we compromise the one that destroys the sanctity of creation and monogamy between a man and a woman in marriage? It is just one more example of how liberalism is unraveling the fundamental principles of the Gospel. Ultimately, it is a massive disservice to people who want to break the strongholds of addiction and be restored through the love and redemption of Christ.
ABOUT THE COMMENTATOR:
Hedieh Mirahmadi was a devout Muslim for two decades working in the field of national security before she experienced the redemptive power of Jesus Christ and has a new passion for sharing the Gospel. She dedicates herself full-time to Resurrect Ministry, an online resource that harnesses the power of the Internet to make salvation through Christ available to people of all nations, and her daily podcast LivingFearlessDevotional.com
A man waves a rainbow flag while observing a gay pride parade in San Francisco, California June 28, 2015. REUTERS/Elijah Nouvelage
Individuals living in New York City can choose from a minimum of 31 different gender identities, many of which allow them to fluctuate between some version or combination of male or female identities. Businesses that don’t respect and accommodate an individual’s chosen gender identity risk incurring six-figure fines under rules implemented by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.
The list of protected gender identities is available online and includes options such as “gender bender,” “two spirit,” “third sex,” “androgynous,” “gender gifted,” and “pangender.”A city official speaking on background confirmed to The Daily Caller that all of the listed identities are protected by the city’s anti-discrimination laws, but said that the list was not exhaustive.
Someone who identifies as “genderqueer,”for example, is a “person whose gender identity is neither man nor woman, is between or beyond genders, or is some combination of genders.”
A “gender bender”is someone “who bends, changes, mixes, or combines society’s gender conventions by expressing elements of masculinity and femininity together.”
Similarly, someone who is “gender fluid”is a person “whose gender identification and presentation shifts, whether within or outside of societal, gender-based expectations.”
If someone self-identifies as “androgynous,”it means they are “appearing and/or identifying as neither man nor woman, presenting a gender either mixed or neutral.”
“Two spirit”individuals are Native Americans “who have attributes of both men and women, have distinct gender and social roles in their tribes, and are often involved with mystical rituals (shamans).”
If someone is “pangender,” their “gender identity is comprised of all or many gender expressions.”
The full list of gender identitiescan be viewed onlinein a document provided by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.
The city’s gender identityguidancewas issued in December but has been the subject of ongoing media attention in the past week. As noted by law professorEugene Volokh, businesses can be fined up to six figures for knowingly using the “wrong” pronouns to refer to a customer or employee.
Seth Hoy, the Human Rights Commission’s press secretary, told TheDC that the guidance was issued to “ensure that every transgender individual in New York City is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve”but assured that that “accidentally” using the wrong pronouns “will not result in a fine.”His full statement is below:
The Commission’s legal guidance on gender identity protections under the NYC Human Rights Law addresses situations in which individuals intentionally and repeatedly target transgender and gender non-conforming people. Accidentally misusing a transgender person’s preferred pronoun is not a violation of the law and will not result in a fine. The Commission issued this guidance last year so that employers and individuals understand what the law says and to ensure that every transgender individual in New York City is treated with the respect and dignity they deserve.
BELOW IS THE LIST OF GENDER IDENTITIES NEW YOURK CITY HAS REGESTERED:
Regarding recent state laws that deal with transgender facilities or gender-neutral restroom policies, critics have claimed that the laws are based on purely hypothetical scare scenarios that would never actually happen in real life.
Maybe you’ve already guessed by now as to why this particular university had to rethink their gender-neutral restroom policy. I’ll give you a hint. It has something to do with shower stalls and cellphone cameras.
This is what we always said would happen when people were allowed to “define” their own genders so they could use their bathroom of choice. Now, it’s common for public places to offer gender-neutral bathrooms and/or locker rooms for those who don’t identify with either gender.
Or, perhaps you’re a man trapped in a woman’s body, so you’re going to want to use the men’s restroom. But you know you’re going to be looked at strangely if you do, so you use the gender-neutral restroom/locker room, if there’s one available.
The University is temporarily changing its policy on gender-neutral bathrooms after two separate incidents of “voyeurism” were reported on campus September 15 and 19. Male students within the University’s Whitney Hall student residence were caught holding their cellphones over female students’ shower stalls and filming them as they showered.
Melinda Scott, dean of students at the University of Toronto, told The Daily Wire that campus police had been contacted immediately and worked with residence staff to “support impacted students and ensure the safety of the Residences.”
“Given the serious nature of these incidents and the impact on directly affected students, we made the decision to specifically designate some washrooms in Whitney Hall for those who identify as men and those who identify as women,” Scott said.
If a female goes in to the gender-neutral locker room to shower, a male who “identifies” as a woman could go in right after her, and no one is supposed to say anything about it. Questioning that man’s motives would constitute “transphobia” and discrimination. This isn’t just a “what if” scenario. It happens. Probably a lot. Let’s not forget what happened in Seattle just a couple months ago:
Of course, pretending that this sort of thing didn’t happen before the whole gender identity crisis started would be silly. The difference, however, is that now, it’s permissible for a man to use the women’s restroom. All he has to do is claim that he identifies as a woman. And then once he’s in the restroom, everything he does is his own business.
The American College of Pediatricians recently released a statement on gender ideology, in which it outlines eight reasons that teaching it to young kids is destructive and harmful to their health.
The public statement urges educators and legislators to reject any calls from groups to incorporate gender ideology into school curricula. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality,” the statement reads.Here are the eight reasons they givethat teaching gender ideology to kids should be rejected:
Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health – not genetic markers of a disorder.
No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.
A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.
Puberty is not a disease and puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous.
According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.
Children who use puberty blockers to impersonate the opposite sex will require cross-sex hormones in late adolescence. Cross-sex hormones are associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke and cancer.
Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBQT–affirming countries.
Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.
The statement acknowledged the existence of disorders of sexual differentiation (DSDs), where the sex of the child is ambiguous at birth because of anomalies such as testicular feminization or adrenal hyperplasia, but pointed out that those cases are extremely rare and do not present a “third sex.” They are “disorders of the human design.” The “self-evident” purpose of male and female, according to the statement, is “reproduction and the flourishing of our species.”
In addition, those who “identify” as either a member of the opposite sex or “somewhere in the middle” – or a little of both – are not actually a “third sex.” The report contends that they are all either “biological men or biological women,” plain and simple.
This is it. I’m coming out. I want the world to know. I’m a black, lesbian platypus trapped in a white, straight guy’s body. This is my truth. It’s my experience. It’s how I identify. It’s my reality (actual reality notwithstanding). Transracial, transgender and transpecies lives matter (#TransLivesMatter), and I’m declaring myself an out and proud member of the LGBTTT community.
Crazy, you say? Don’t judge me, hater. This is my race-species-gender identity and expression, whether real or perceived, and if you refuse to play along, then you’re violating my civil rights. This is my struggle. I demand admission to the wrong bathrooms and showers, the right to play for the other sports teams and unfettered access to your children so I can indoctrinate them till they can’t see straight, or I’ll ruin you. Identify me by whichever stupid pronoun I invent, you cisgender, cisracial, cisspecies bigot, or I’ll glitter bomb you so bad that you’ll be slightly inconvenienced.
Move over, Caitlyn Jenner.
You’re yesterday’s news, Rachel Dolezal.
I’m here! I’m, er, whatever! Get used to it!
It’s my turn. I want my reality show. I want my heavily-Photoshopped, little duckbilled mug on the cover of National Geographic posthaste.
Call me Mrs. Wiggles.
Oh, and transwealthy. I’m that, too. I really need to get my mortgage transpaidoff, so, yeah, I’m transwealthy.
Well? Don’t just sit there. Get busy. Suspend disbelief. Bend the space-time continuum and otherwise adjust your life to accommodate my moonbat pathologies, you microagressive transphobe, or I’ll have your job.
Black, lesbian platypi of the world, unite!
Merriam Webster defines “reductio ad absurdum” as “disproof of a proposition by showing an absurdity to which it leads when carried to its logical conclusion.” You’ve just experienced reductio ad absurdum. “Species identity,” “racial identity” and, to no lesser extent, “gender identity” each represent comically absurd contrivances.
Yet here we are.
Seriously, thank you Bruce and Rachel for making this rant possible. Thank you, secular “progressives” and mainstream media for overplaying your hand on the whole “transwhatever” twaddle to the extent that Americans at large are beginning to sit up and, with a bold, unified voice, declare, “Um, say what?”
These past three weeks have served to set your extremist agenda back years, and that’s fantastic. People get it. Putting the “trans” prefix ahead of some objective truth that you oh-so-very-much-wish weren’t so, does not reverse that truth and make your personal fantasy become everyone’s reality. Ever heard of a “transabled” person? “Transgender” activists have long distanced themselves from the “transabled” community because the two clinical psychoses are effectively different manifestations of the same disorder. The “transabled” person has a sincere, deep-seated belief that he or she is a disabled person trapped in a perfectly healthy and able body. In an effort to align their false identity with objective reality, “transabled” people have amputated healthy limbs, intentionally blinded themselves, had their legs crushed and worse. Ironically, the transabled person who saws off a perfectly healthy arm, pokes out an eye or deliberately cripples healthy legs can actually achieve success. If he does one or more of these things, he will, in fact, become disabled.
The “transgender” person, on the other hand, can never enjoy this same success. If one who tragically believes that he or she is trapped in the wrong-sexed body goes through with cosmetic “gender reassignment” surgery and maims his or her body by mutilating perfectly healthy reproductive organs (or by having healthy breasts cut off if female), then that person remains as that person began – male or female. “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female (Mark 10:6).”
The pitiful paradox here is that, rather than being transformed to the opposite sex (or “gender” as “progressives” prefer) the “transgendered” will, like his or her similarly situated “transabled” counterpart, simply become physically disabled (and sterilized).
Or consider the anorexic. This is the emaciated person who, misperceiving herself to be grossly overweight, will starve herself to death. You don’t help the anorexic by affirming her delusion, calling her “transfat” and giving her liposuction. You feed her. And then you get her therapy.
Leftists love to say that race and “gender” are social constructs. Clever little buggers, aren’t they? This is a classic example of George Orwell’s doublethink. It’s a deliberate tactic by which relativists are able, with a straight face, to call up down, white black and male female. They muddy fixed, objective truths by labeling them “social constructs,” while, at the same time, socially constructing the rhetorical tools needed for fascism. Pretendoids like “gender identity,” “transphobia,” “sexual orientation” and “homophobia” are just a few examples of such social constructs (yes, I made up “pretendoids.” If they can do it, then so can I).
For relativism to work – and that’s what we’re talking about here; relativism;
reality must be undone,
adherents to objective truth pilloried
and all dissent stifled.
This is classic cultural Marxism. It’s a bizarre and despotic world in which the left’s upside-down version of “inclusivity” trumps authenticity – a society wherein any recognition of objective truths that “progressives” cannot (more properly, will not) abide, are labeled offensive “microagressions” that, when uttered even offhandedly, demand swift punitive measures.
While penning the infamous majority decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a decision that upheld the phantom “constitutional right” for a mother to have her own child dismembered alive, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” This, of course, is abject nonsense. Still, it is illuminating. It’s the rationale that undergirds, to the extent that anything devoid of substance can undergird anything else, the moral relativist worldview responsible for the postmodern “trans” phenomenon.
But it’s much more than all that.
Justice Kennedy is widely expected to be the swing vote in the Supreme Court’s imminent “gay marriage” decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, which will come down within the next couple of weeks. He will presume to dictate whether black is white, up is down, and whether we must all pretend, under penalty of law, that a man can somehow “marry” another man. Kennedy thinks people have the “right” to redefine the universe.
In the beginning, the homosexual agenda was about the right to be an “out” homosexual without government interference.
Now it’s about using the government to prohibit efforts to get out of homosexuality.
And the latest attack on this front is the ominously named “Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act” (TFPA), which would ban same-sex-attraction and “gender identity” reparative therapy. This is psychological counseling whose goal is to help people mitigate or eliminate unwanted same-sex attractions or the phenomenon whereby a person’s perceived sex doesn’t match his actual one.
The TFPA was introduced in Congress today by Representative Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), who authored his state’s 2012 ban on reparative therapy. After the Golden State’s action, D.C. and New Jersey (with Governor Chris Christie’s signature) followed suit in prohibiting the therapy, and a similar ban is in front of openly bisexual governor Kate Brown of Oregon.
Yet while the above bills prohibit only reparative therapy for minors, according to Philly’s Josh Middleton, the TFPA would apply to all ages. Moreover, while the wisdom of such bans should be questioned, there’s no question that states have the constitutional power to enact them. Yet nowhere in the Constitution is the federal government empowered to involve itself in such matters.
As to what this involvement would be, Middleton provides some details, writing, “The ‘Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act,’ explains the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), ‘would amend the Federal Trade Commission Act to clarify that providing conversion [reparative] therapy to any person in exchange for monetary compensation or advertising such services is an unfair or deceptive act or practice. This legislation would give the Federal Trade Commission the duty to enforce this provision in accordance with existing law.’”
Of course, labeling the therapy “deceptive,” critics would say, is deception itself; it’s predicated on the unproven notions that same-sex attraction and “gender identity” are always inborn and unchangeable, and that trying to alter them has negative psychological effects.
Adding to the deception, Lieu states at his website that reparative therapy “is a dangerous but often overlooked form of discrimination against LGBT Americans.” Yet this turns truth on its head. No one is forcing anyone else to participate in therapy. It is Lieu’s bill that discriminates by, as Regina Griggs, executive director of Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, put it, taking “away the rights of parents and children to receive help.”
Junk Science?
Lieu calls reparative therapy “crappery” while Griggs position is that his “legislation was not based on science,” writes the Washington Times. So where does the junk science truly lie?
One fashionable idea underpinning Lieu’s argument is that homosexuality, and this could apply to “gender identity” as well, is inborn. Yet despite media obfuscation, no “gay gene” (pertaining to happiness or homosexuality) has been discovered. In fact, a 2001 Columbia University study found that among identical twins (who share identical genetics), the same-sex attraction experienced by one was shared by the other only 10 percent of the time. And while there are theories regarding how intrauterine hormonal anomalies might lead to a lack of masculinization of a boy’s brain — creating a lad who supposedly has a “female brain” — brain scans aren’t used in particular cases to prove the innateness of homosexuality or “gender identity” (note: this usage of “gender” is agenda-driven. The term should be applied only to words). So, put simply, the science is inconclusive.
But history may not be. For example, homosexuality was institutionalized in ancient Spartan military camps, and it wasn’t uncommon for Athenian men to chase after adolescent boys. Does this mean that most all ancient Greeks had a “gay gene”?
Let’s accept for argument’s sake, however, the supposition that homosexuality can be inborn. Given the historical point above, and common sense’s dictates, would anyone say that same-sex attraction could not be a purely psychological phenomenon in even 1 out of 10,000 cases? That would be a truly radical assertion. But if it is possible, then it could be so in 2 out of 10,000 as well, no? Or it could be 10, 20, or 50.
Or 200.
The point is that science can’t say — and Ted Lieu certainly doesn’t know. Yet he would deny psychological help to those in whom same-sex attraction is a purely psychological phenomenon.
But what if it is inborn, at least in certain cases? Isn’t trying to change it then a trespass? Well, this philosophy isn’t applied to most anything else. There are many inborn abnormalities, such as cleft lip, Spina bifida, Down syndrome, club foot, and Tay-Sachs disease. We happily remedy them whenever possible, unimpeded by people saying, as activists do when justifying homosexual behavior, “God doesn’t make mistakes.”
Speaking of which, one also might ask: If “God doesn’t make mistakes” (and, presumably, everything is ordained), why do the same activists advocate so-called “gender-reassignment surgery”? Shouldn’t we conclude that if God wanted you to be a member of the opposite sex, He would have created you that way? And consider further the contradiction: Lieu and his fellow travelers would forbid doctors from trying to change people’s minds — which could be a purely psychological process — but happily allow doctors to change their bodies, which certainly are innately determined.
The reality is that inborn status tells us nothing about correctness. Factors between the ears are no exception, either, and it’s particularly dangerous to assume otherwise in their case. As I wrote in February:
The same social scientists telling us homosexuality is innate also claim that psychopaths are born and not made. Does this make psychopathy a legitimate state of being? And what if it’s found that some people are born with homicidal instincts? Would it be okay for them to commit murder?
… Then there’s this study indicating that racial bias is innate. Will the Left now move to rescind anti-discrimination law?
Some may now say murder and racial discrimination are different because they hurt another person. (Of course, others assert that engaging in deviant sexual behavior with another also hurts the person.) But if what “hurts” others is to be our yardstick for determining rightness, then the inborn argument becomes irrelevant. As I continued:
After all, whether or not an action reflects inborn urges tells us nothing about whether or not it hurts another.
Stating the obvious, the inborn argument could be applied to anything inborn. Logically translated it says: If a feeling is innate, the actions associated with it are okay. This eliminates morality completely and replaces it with biological determinism (BD). This is why accepting the BD argument means accepting everything that can be proven to be inborn — even if it’s pedophilia, bestiality, or murder. It’s just a slightly more sophisticated way of saying “If it feels good, do it.” But biology does not determine morality.
Unfortunately, morality doesn’t generally determine politicians’ actions. The good news is that as with sexual feelings but with far less difficulty, politicians can be changed.
Huckabee: Gays ‘Won’t Stop Until There Are No More Churches’ No More People ‘Spreading the Gospel’
Commenting on the attacks against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act by gay activists and liberals, former Gov. Mike Huckabee said it was a “phony crisis” manufactured by the left, but it revealed how intolerant they are of Bible-believeing Christians and showed that they “won’t stop until there are no more churches” and “no more people who are spreading the gospel.”
The attacks on Christianity “won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel, and I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth,” said the former Arkansas governor and ordained Southern Baptist minister during an interview on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.”
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) is a law that says no business or enterprise can be forced to provide a service if the business owners believe it would “substantially burden” their religious beliefs. Nineteen other states, in addition ot Indiana, have RFRA laws and Congress passed a federal RFRA that was signed into law by liberal President Bill Clinton in 1993. However, when Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, a Republican, signed his state’s RFRA into law in March, homosexual activists protested, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, and liberals such as Hillary Clinton, claiming the legislation was discriminatory.
Within a few days, the Indiana legislature made revisions to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to pacify the left-wing critics.
Speaking about this to radio host Tony Perkins, who also is the president of the Family Research Council, Huckabee said, “Tony, this is bizarre and I think it’s a phony crisis. It’s been manufactured by the left, just as was the war on women. There was no war on women. The left has gotten very good at creating a crisis, something to divide the country, something to create the sense in which ‘we have to go after these conservatives because they’re trying to trample over our rights.’”
“It is a classic example of, really, a page out of 1984 when what things mean are the opposite of what they really are, and that’s what I’m seeing here,” said Huckabee. “In the name of tolerance, there’s intolerance. In the name of diversity, there’s uniformity. In the name of acceptance, there’s true discrimination. It’s just bizarre. And the sad thing is a lot of these major companies and CEOs are just capitulating.”
“Here’s what’s even sadder to me,” he said. “A lot of the people in the political realm are just deciding that it’s easier to fold and quit than it is to fight. The result of that is we invite more of this. Nobody likes to have a fight, nobody likes to be hated. Sometimes you just have to stand up and say, you’re wrong on the issue and I’m not backing down because your facts are not facts. They’re fiction, and we’re not going to stop.’”
In response, Tony Perkins said, “The core principle of a civil society is that we all are different and we have different beliefs and different ideas, and we tolerate one another. The idea that you would go into a place of business that engages in – we’re talking about wedding vendors here – and force someone to do something that’s against their will instead of just saying, all right, I don’t agree with you and I don’t like that you don’t like what I’m doing but, you know what, I’m going to go next door to the other florist. Instead of doing that, what they’re doing is using the government to force somebody to engage in something. Now, some people will say it’s just this thing with same-sex weddings. No, actually, if as you pointed out earlier, where does this stop? Where will it stop?”
Huckabee said, “It won’t stop until there are no more churches, until there are no more people who are spreading the Gospel, and I’m talking now about the unabridged, unapologetic Gospel that is really God’s truth.”
Michael Dale “Mike” Huckabee, 59, is married and has four children. In addition to his political career and work as a Christian minister, Huckabee has written several books, including the 2008 New York Times best seller Do The Right Thing: Inside The Movement That’s Bringing Common Sense Back to America. His latest book is God, Guns, Grits and Gravy.
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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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Speaker Pelosi held an event to celebrate women athletes to honor the 50th Anniversary of the passage of Title IX. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Reported by Peter Hasson 05/24/2016
The University is 
homosexual without government interference.
gay activists and liberals, former Gov. Mike Huckabee said it was a “phony crisis” manufactured by the left, but it revealed how intolerant they are of Bible-believeing Christians and showed that they “won’t stop until there are no more churches” and “no more people who are spreading the gospel.”
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