A.F. Branco Cartoon – In a hilarious show of cluelessness, Democratic Virginia Senator Tim Kaine denied the existence of God-given rights, the primary principle in the Declaration of Independence
What? Dem Senator Tim Kaine Says Founding Principle of the United States and Declaration of Independence is “Extremely Troubling” – “That’s What the Iranian Government Believes” – Ted Cruz SCHOOLS Him (VIDEO)
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 4, 2025
In a hilarious show of cluelessness, Democratic Virginia Senator Tim Kaine denied the existence of God-given rights, the primary principle in the Declaration of Independence, during a Senate Foreign Relations nomination hearing on Wednesday. “The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator, that’s what the Iranian government believes,” Kaine said while attacking Trump’s nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Riley Barnes. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence, however, state that the separation of America from Britain is justified by the notion that we as humans have God-given, unalienable rights and that a new government founded on these principles is necessary. From the Declaration of Independence: READ MORE
WATCH: “I Would do That 100%” – Trump says He Would Designate ANTIFA and Other “Radical Groups” as Domestic Terror Organizations, Wants RICO Charges Brought “Because They Should be Put in Jail”
By Jordan Conradson – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 15, 2025
President Trump on Monday told reporters that he is “100%” willing to designate violent radical leftwing groups as domestic terrorist organizations in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week. “I think it would start with Pam [Bondi],” Trump said. Charlie Kirk, 31, was assassinated by a leftwing terrorist, later identified as 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, during a speaking event at Utah Valley University last Wednesday. The shooter was revealed by law enforcement to have engraved his ammunition casings with Antifa and transgender slogans. After a 33-hour manhunt, Robinson was turned over to the authorities. It was later revealed that Robinson lived with his romantic partner, Lance Twiggs, a male who was transitioning to a female. Some in pro-trans online circles appeared to have… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, Elon Musk, and President Trump.
While so much of American culture gears up to celebrate LGBTQ “Pride” during June, The Ruth Institute is dedicating the first Sunday in June to those who rejected a homosexual lifestyle. “Ex-Gay Visibility Day” is unlikely to receive President Joe Biden’s endorsement, but arguably it’s more necessary than the Transgender Day of Visibility, which the White House commemorated on Easter. (Photo illustration: Getty Images)
Next month, companies will add rainbow flags to their icons and logos, the White House will hold events celebrating LGBTQ individuals, and Target and other stores will likely promote rainbow-themed merchandise. Amid all this “Pride,” the men and women who rejected a homosexual lifestyle will be forgotten.
Why should “Pride” have the entire month of June? That’s a question Jennifer Roback Morse, president of the Ruth Institute, asked herself. She came to the conclusion that if so, much of America’s culture is going to celebrate people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, she might as well highlight the Americans who rejected those identities.
Morse has christened the first Sunday in June (which is June 2 this year) “Ex-Gay Visibility Day,” in a fitting response to the White House’s commemoration of “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
“It’s not politically correct to talk about ex-LGBT people,” Morse says in a press release provided early to The Daily Signal. “To the gay lobby, they don’t exist, or they’re just lying to themselves or were never really gay in the first place. But I have met many people who have journeyed away from an LGBT identity and are living happy, fulfilled lives with opposite-sex partners.”
Morse mentions research from Father Paul Sullins, a Roman Catholic priest, senior research associate at The Ruth Institute, and former sociology professor at Catholic University, who found that sexual orientation is more malleable than LGBTQ activists claim. The “born this way” narrative doesn’t match up with the results of Sullins’ research.
Sullins previously told The Daily Signal that he doesn’t encourage lesbians, gays, or bisexuals to try to change their sexual orientation unless they feel uncomfortable about it. He emphasized that efforts to change sexual orientation don’t always work, but—contrary to the LGBTQ narrative—they do occasionally succeed.
“When people attempt to change sexual orientation, it is fully successful in my studies about 17 to 20% of the time,” Sullins said. “Most persons who undergo it, meaning about 60 to 65%, report that they are less caught up in homosexual attractions and behaviors and activity.”
Sullins noted that about 30% of the 1,500 lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in a 2020 study on sexual orientation said that they have tried to change their sexual orientation and about 10% said they agreed with this statement: “If I could be completely heterosexual, I would want to do that.”
“So there is a minority of the gay population who wants to change, is not happy with living the way that they’re living,” Sullins said.
As Roman Catholics, both Morse and Sullins consider homosexual activity to be a sin, but they’re not supporting Ex-Gay Visibility Day to shame those who identify as LGBTQ. They say they merely intend to highlight the fact that there are options for people who experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria (the painful and persistent feeling of identifying with the gender opposite one’s biological sex), even if they are uncomfortable with their feelings.
The White House is so dedicated to the LGBTQ movement that it chose Good Friday (the day Western Christians commemorate Jesus’ Crucifixion) as the day to release a statement commemorating Transgender Day of Visibility, which coincided this year with Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Western Christian calendar. The White House played off this timing as a coincidence, but it shocked many Americans, especially Roman Catholics. (The Catechism of the Catholic Church condemns the ideology behind the transgender movement.)
— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) May 24, 2024
President Joe Biden is unlikely to celebrate Ex-Gay Visibility Day, however, even though it doesn’t coincide with a more popular holiday. Biden touted “transgender leaders” whom he appointed to serve in the federal government, but he is unlikely to mention any ex-gays or detransitioners.
These heretics give the lie to the LGBTQ movement’s claim that it offers the only solution for those who experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. They are living proof that it is possible to reject the movement and they’re often dismissed as irrelevant, so a day of visibility arguably makes far more sense for them than it does for transgender individuals, who enjoy a chorus of support from companies, stores, and government bodies.
The Ruth Institute will release videos about ex-gays and detransitioners over the coming month, but especially June 2, to present hope for anyone who wants another answer. Sadly, it seems Biden, Target, and their allies would prefer that these people remain invisible.
In a growing environment of left-wing activism in schools, especially related to LGBT ideology, parents who have not been able to influence curriculum have had the option of opting their kids out of classes. Not any longer, at least according to a federal appeals court in a Maryland case of three families suing for the right to religious freedom for their elementary school-aged children in public schools.
In August of 2023, three families — one Muslim, one Christian, and one Jewish — brought a case against the Montgomery County Board of Education for a recent policy change removing the opt-out option for curriculum. Previously, parents received advanced notice of materials that would be read to their children and could opt out. The school board announced that parents would no longer receive advanced notice of materials, and they could no longer opt out of readings or lessons.
A year prior, according to the case, “In the spring of 2022, the School Board had determined that the books in its English language arts curriculum were not sufficiently representative because they did not include LGBTQ characters.” Maryland law requires schools to give parents the opportunity “to view instructional materials to be used in the teaching of family life and human sexuality objectives.” The school board also has an opt-out policy for religious exemptions in place.
However, there is a clause that states that “if such requests become too frequent or too burdensome, the school may refuse to accommodate the requests. Schools are not required to alter fundamentally the educational program or create a separate educational program or a separate course to accommodate a student’s religious practice or belief.” Deciding that LGBT inclusion in the curriculum was fundamental to the educational program and the requests were too burdensome, the school board simply declared parents could not opt out of LGBT content any longer.
Judge’s Ruling
Last week, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman dismissed the parents’ concerns and noted that every court that has reviewed similar mandatory public-school curricula has found that “mere exposure in public school to ideas that contradict religious beliefs does not burden the religious exercise of students or parents.”
She insisted, “The parents still may instruct their children on their religious beliefs regarding sexuality, marriage, and gender, and each family may place contrary views in its religious context.”
“No government action prevents the parents from freely discussing the topics raised in the storybooks with their children or teaching their children as they wish,” Boardman wrote in Thursday’s order.
The decision was upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Their reasoning was that the parents could not demonstrate how the LGBT-themed books would be used in the classroom and therefore could not determine if they would infringe on their beliefs.
Contrary to the First Amendment
Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, argued, “That runs contrary to the First Amendment, Maryland law, the School Board’s own policies, and basic human decency.”
“Parents should have the right to receive notice and opt their children out of classroom material that violates their faith,” he added.
In contrast to the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning, reviewing the Montgomery County Public Schools website makes it clear why these books are in the classroom. The website has a dedicated LGBT section stating, “We have welcoming, affirming schools, classrooms, teams, and clubs. We value all of our children, youth, teachers, staff, and parents.” The section provides an extensive list of LGBT content, resources, and “How to” guides for students, staff, and parents.
Students are provided a Coming Out as YOU! guide that instructs them on how to come out, including a “safety plan,” which tells the students to make sure they have a safe place outside their home to stay; someone, seemingly besides their parents, that they can trust; and to “Consider letting a friend know that you’re planning on coming out and if you don’t text them by a certain time you might need help because your safety might be in danger.” The guide tells students they should decide what they identify as daily, which can change day by day.
The school’s Culturally Responsive Supplemental Elementary ELA Collection is the biggest concern point for parents, as it details the content students will be provided. Students grades kindergarten to second grade are provided more than eight separate LGBT titles, half of which are trans-focused. One book, titled Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope, states in its description, “Penelope knows that he’s a boy. (And a ninja.) The problem is getting everyone else to realize it.”
Three books focus on a character named Max, a transgender-identifying elementary school-aged student who dedicates time to educating friends, teachers, and parents about what being transgender means. Several books are focused on same-sex relationships: one about a prince and a knight who fall in love, one about a child’s gay uncle getting married, and a book for 4- to 8-year-olds titled Love, Violet, about an elementary-aged girl who falls in love with another girl.
Not being subtle, another title for this age group is IntersectionAllies: We Make Room for All, a book on intersectional feminism that teaches kids how to be activists, and a book titled Let’s Eat Bugs! for fifth graders provides recipes on eating insects. The school also offers an LGBT club for elementary school students.
The Obvious Purpose
The school system’s agenda is pretty obvious.
Is it any wonder that religious parents would be concerned about their children — again, kindergarten to fifth grade — being exposed to extreme LGBT ideology? Critics pretend kids are just being told stories that include LGBT characters and that only bigots would oppose kids learning about different types of people. The first judge dismissed the parents saying they “failed to show that the lack of an opt-out policy would result in the ‘indoctrination of their children’ or ‘coerce their children to violate or change their religious beliefs.’”
However, these are books designed to teach kids about being LGBT themselves, not simply about LGBT experiences, history, or health education. This is an environment where kids are heavily encouraged to explore sexuality and gender ideology, with expansive resources, instruction guides, and clubs. Of course, religious parents would consider this to be an invasive level of activism and indoctrination.
It should be obvious to anyone that forcing parents to accept this instruction for their children violates their religious freedom, and the obnoxious dismissal from a judge that parents can simply undo whatever their kids learn in school further mocks these sacred rights. Left-wing, LGBT activists simply want full control over children’s education and have constructed a system that not only excludes parents but intentionally isolates their children from them in school.
LGBT activists believe they know best for all students, and that all students need to learn about LGBT ideology in an open, proactive, and affirming way, and if parents oppose this instruction, they don’t need to know about it, or worse, have no power to stop it. Unfortunately, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals just strengthened this abuse of power by school systems, degrading parental rights and religious freedom even further.
Chad Felix Greene is a senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of “Surviving Gender: My Journey Through Gender Dysphoria,” and is a social writer focusing on truth in media, conservative ideas and goals, and true equality under the law. You can follow him on Twitter @chadfelixg.
Francine Champagne was elected to her local school board in Canada in November 2022. By November 2023, she had been fired from her university teaching job and suspended from Winnipeg’s Louis Riel School Division (LRSD) board so many times — without pay — and with endless suspensions in sight, that she was forced to resign as a trustee of the board.
Champagne’s “crime”? A few posts she made on her personal Facebook page. One said, “Make men masculine again, make women feminine again, make children innocent again.” Another read, “To identify is to live a lie.” The third post was a link to the Stop the World Control website, which, Champagne explained, “included information on the sexualization and grooming of children, the United Nations’ agenda and the WHO’s ‘educational’ material.”
It’s important to remember that Champagne was elected to her position. She beat out an incumbent candidate who’d been on the board for decades and received votes from 2,817 people who determined she was the best voice to represent them and oversee the education of their children. What’s more, freedom of speech is enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
According to Champagne, her first six months on the LRSD board were positive. She visited numerous schools, attended district events, and built “an excellent rapport” with administrators, teachers, and the community. But then she ventured to ask that the board discuss a statement the board chairwoman, Sandy Nemeth, had posted on LRSD’s social media platforms declaring that LRSD fully supports LGBT resources in their schools.
“I simply asked during one of our meetings if we could talk about the stance of each trustee, because we never had addressed the issue,” said Champagne. “[Nemeth] immediately shut me down and told me harshly that she made the decision to emit a statement on behalf of the trustees, and that the diversity policy was not up for discussion. That was the end of that.”
It was, indeed, the beginning of the end for Champagne. Shortly after the dust-up with the board chair, Nemeth herself informed Champagne — during “Pride Month,” of course — that she had breached the LRSD code of conduct for her “hateful” posts that didn’t align with LRSD’s diversity policy.
Phony pretext in hand, the witch hunters set to work destroying Champagne’s life, starting, predictably, by attacking her in the press. Just five days after Nemeth’s confrontation, screenshots of the “hateful” posts appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press alongside an article about Champagne being “anti-trans” and “anti-LGBTQ.”
The next day, the LRSD board suspended Champagne for three months, and that same week, she lost her job.
The nightmare had just begun. Nemeth told the CBC that the decision to suspend Champagne “came after the realization of some incredibly unfortunate — and I will define unfortunate to mean disrespectful, hateful — comments on her Facebook page specifically indicating transphobia, homophobia, and just a general complete lack of [respect] for the LGBTQ community.”
“Because Champagne was democratically elected by the community, there is no provision within the Public Schools Act for the board to remove her,” Nemeth added. “However, the board can and will continue to suspend Champagne if she fails to sign and uphold the code of conduct.”
The board continued to issue suspension after suspension and went so far as to ban friends and supporters who showed up to board meetings to defend Champagne permanently from LRSD property. One community member noted in a letter to the LRSD board, “You are doing to her what you accuse her of doing to you, and that is bullying and discrimination.”
Champagne is a devout Catholic who expressed having “no fear” during her ordeal. “People are constantly calling me, emailing me, praying for me,” she said. “And I feel very peaceful inside just knowing that I’m standing on God’s truth.”
After determining that the LRSD work environment had “become unbearable” and that “it would be unsafe and unhealthy to work in an environment where intolerance reigns,” Champagne issued a statement of resignation and told her side of the story the media had largely ignored.
“I was no longer able to afford the legal fees towards the appeal process and other matters,” she said. “I surely did not become a school trustee with the intention of entering a legal battle. My objective was to focus on education (the 3Rs) and the molding of healthy minds, but political activism seems to take precedence. For all the reasons listed above, I will be forced to leave the board, and not of my own volition.”
Responding to Champagne’s letter of resignation, the LRSD board danced on her grave with nauseating sanctimony.
“Since June 6, 2023, the school board has endeavoured to hold a colleague accountable for words and deeds that caused great harm to students, staff, and members of our community while also working to reassure our community of our commitment to safe and caring working and learning environments,” they wrote. “The board extends appreciation to everyone in LRSD and beyond for their messages and demonstrations of support. We want to reassure you that actions and language that cause harm will never be tolerated, and decisive action will always be taken against anyone who attempts to spread baseless, malicious, deceitful and vengeful lies about our students, staff, and families.”
“The board accuses me of being harmful for trying to protect the children from all of this,” Champagne said. “In psychology, this is called gaslighting or projection. Unreal! The board has made its intentions clear: traditional views will not be tolerated.”
As Champagne’s martyrdom testifies to the power of the woke mob, Monique LaGrange continues to fight. Like Champagne, LaGrange was democratically elected and expelled as a trustee for refusing to apologize for posting a meme to her Facebook page or to undergo sensitivity training.
According to The Democracy Fund which is representing LaGrange in a lawsuit against the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools, the meme “depicted two side-by-side photographs, one of children holding swastika flags and the other of children holding pride progress flags. The meme … included a caption stating, ‘brainwashing is brainwashing.’”
“I was elected to stand up and protect our children, and that is what I am doing,” LaGrange said.
“Our society is messed up, but God will fix this,” concluded Champagne, “all in His perfect timing.”
Teresa Mull is an assistant editor of the Spectator World, a policy adviser for education at the Heartland Institute, and author of “Woke-Proof Your Life.”
The mob’s stranglehold of speech on college campuses may be beginning to loosen thanks to legal challenges aimed at strengthening the free-speech rights of college professors and students. Just look at Western Michigan University. In 2021, WMU fired adjunct music professor Daniel Mattson solely for writing about his religious views off-campus on his own time. After a remarkably short seven months of litigation, Mattson was vindicated this year on Oct. 31.
Mattson, a professional symphony trombonist, had worked for WMU’s School of Music since 1999. He performed in the university’s Western Brass Quintet, comprised of School of Music faculty members. As part of his duties, Mattson also performed with the Western Winds, a student-faculty ensemble.
In 2009, Mattson returned to Catholicism and left behind his prior homosexual lifestyle. For several years, he wrote articles and spoke at public events explaining how the church should engage with people who experience same-sex attraction. All the while, Mattson strictly compartmentalized his religious activity from his work at WMU. He never initiated a discussion about his religious beliefs or views concerning sexuality with students.
Punished for Christian Ideas
In 2017, Mattson’s writing culminated in Why I Don’t Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace — an autobiographical account of his experience with same-sex attraction. He advocated that the church should sympathetically engage people who experience same-sex attraction while offering Catholicism as a better way.
In October 2021, Mattson agreed to perform as a guest artist at the School of Music. A recently appointed faculty member and LGBT activist discovered Mattson’s writings on his experiences with homosexuality and his recommitment to the Catholic faith. She launched a campaign to cancel Mattson’s planned events. As she posted to Twitter: “I won’t be going to any recitals by ex-gay activists, thanks.” She engaged students, faculty members, and DEI administrators in this effort. In the weeks leading up to the recital, there was extensive discussion over email and on social media among faculty and students, many of whom expressed support for the idea that Mattson’s presence on campus was “harmful” to students who identify as LGBT.
The administration’s response to the outcry over Mattson’s religious speech was swift and harsh. Matson was first stripped of his core duties, hindered in important school activities, and finally, WMU refused to renew his teaching contract.
Mattson refused to allow activists to cancel him without a fight. He challenged WMU’s forcing him to choose between earning a livelihood as a world-class artist and mentor for aspiring musicians on campus and his life as a religious believer and witness for conflicted Catholics off-campus.
Violations of Free Speech and Religion
In March 2023, Mattson, represented by the Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit public interest law firm, filed a federal lawsuit on Mattson’s behalf challenging his firing as a violation of his rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech under the First and 14th Amendments.
WMU’s efforts to cancel Mattson ran afoul of both recent and longstanding Supreme Court precedent guaranteeing the right to religious free speech. Just last year, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a longstanding rule that government action that burdens a sincere religious practice in a manner that is not “neutral” must be justified by a compelling government interest and must be narrowly tailored to that interest.
In the 2018 decision Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court found that a plaintiff may also prove a free exercise violation by showing evidence of government hostility to religion. Here, the school administration had made its views clear in an email sent to the entire school community. “Mr. Mattson is also a high-visibility advocate for the position that homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle that is to be avoided. He has stated his position strongly and widely. While he is free to express his beliefs, we cannot ignore the fact that they are harmful to members of our LGBTQ community, particularly our students.”
Another body of law going back to the 1960s prohibits retaliation by a public employer against an employee on the basis of protected speech by the employee, where that speech was directed to an issue of public concern and was not made as part of the employee’s official duties.
Confronted with the controlling legal authority in Mattson’s suit and his refusal to let WMU cancel him so cavalierly, WMU was again swift to respond. Rather than attempting to defend its sectarian or viewpoint-based punishment in a court of law, less than seven months after Mattson filed suit, WMU settled the case and agreed to pay Mattson substantial damages and attorney’s fees.
These are the workings of the leftist cancel mob. Instead of a wholly government-controlled censorship regime, militant activist mobs have informally coordinated with DEI bureaucrats. Together, they have cowed administrators to censor, punish, expel, and fire students and professors who contradicted leftist orthodoxies about skin color and sex. These radicals have met the slightest deviations from DEI orthodoxy with draconian punishments, and sincere religious believers have suddenly been at risk of losing their livelihoods.
Even more rewarding than the financial compensation for Mattson is the vindication in standing up for the rights of all individuals to religious expression regardless of what others think. As more victories like this pile up, we may hope that we’re reaching a turning point in the battle against cancel culture.
J. Robert Renner is the Deputy General Counsel of the Center for Individual Rights and counsel of record for Mr. Mattson.
The U.S. Department of the Interior sent an internal bulletin to employees in September on “Supporting Gender Transition in the Federal Workplace.”
According to documents published on X by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, the department sent out guidelines establishing “gender identity” as a protected class under its federal policy. “Gender identity,”according to the Interior Department, is defined as “an individual’s internal sense of being male, female, another gender, no gender, of multiple genders, or fluid in gender.”
“The document states ‘it is not DOI’s intent to be overly protective,’” the Oversight Project reported, “but then goes on to establish policies governing confidentiality and privacy, dress and appearance, names and pronouns, inclusive language, restrooms and related facilities, workplace assignments and duties, recordkeeping, sick and medical leave, and hiring process.”
“An employee’s transition should be treated with as much sensitivity and confidentiality as any other private or highly personal life experiences,” the department memo reads. “Transitioning employees often want as little publicity about their transition as possible.”
The bulletin also outlines codes for “dress and appearance,” encouraging employees to “evaluate, and consider eliminating, where appropriate, gender-specific dress and appearance rules.”
“Once an employee has informed management that they are transitioning, consistent with the employee’s wishes, DOI dress codes should be applied to employees transitioning to a different gender in the same way that they are applied to other employees of that gender, as appropriate,” the policy reads.
Employees with the National Park Service (NPS) apparently violated the agency dress code during an LGBT “pride” celebration this summer when staff held a parade at Yosemite National Park featuring celebrity environmentalist drag queen Pattie Gonia. While the NPS uniform code expressly prohibits employee participation in demonstrations or public events “wherein the wearing of the uniform could be construed as agency support for a particular issue, position, or political party,” staff draped their uniforms in activist apparel anyway.
In October, the drag queen was featured by the department again with a bizarre clip promoting the false narrative that “queer rights are more under attack than ever” alongside Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
The transgender policy deployed by Interior leadership in September urges employees to “use gender-neutral language in broad communications to avoid assumptions about gender identity.” Examples of “pronouns,” according to the policy, are “they, them, theirs, ze/hir/hirs, ze/zir/zirs, xe/xem/xyrs.” Bathroom use is up to personal discretion, it says, and those who refuse to abide by departmental policies are warned of retribution for “unlawful discrimination.”
“Repeated, intentional refusal to use the employee’s affirming name/gender/pronouns, and/or repeated reference to the employee’s dead name/gender/pronouns by supervisors/managers, or coworkers is contrary to the goal of treating all employees with dignity and respect,” the policy states. “Such intentional conduct could constitute unlawful discrimination.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
A Cartoon that hits Minnesota Teachers who are supporting Hamas terrorism in schools and other evil social topics when they should be teaching things like math, English, and real history in class. This is what happens when students of higher learning graduate and enter our society. They create more woke monsters turning our world upside down.
So many left-wing groups are supporting Hamas terrorists, like Gay and Lesbian groups, LGBTQ+, Transgenders, Liberal Democrat Jews, etc., but don’t seem to understand that if any of them ventured to Gaza, they would be thrown off the top of a building to their death for the lifestyle or politics they have. DEI groupthink and American universities have warped and brainwashed our kids minds to the point they can’t see who is actually on their side—the side of freedom and democracy.
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Children’s books are one of the most powerful tools parents have to help teach their kids how to be good humans. From picture books being read at bedtime to novels being read by flashlight under blankets, kids flourish in the safety of stories as they develop their belief systems. Resilience, empathy, respect, and many other noble traits are portrayed and experienced vicariously through books. What a powerful tool!
Having been a part of the children’s book publishing industry for several decades, and as a passionate participant, I have watched in growing dismay as the children’s literature, or “kidlit,” world has shifted and changed, and most recently taken a drastic plummet. Parents need to understand the destructive path this industry has taken, or they will discover too late as the damage hits home.
Seeing the Shift
This shift in kidlit has been happening for a long time. About 25 years ago, novels that portrayed kids as environmental activists began to win awards. About 15 years ago, the award-winning books showed shocking, disturbing scenarios. Ten years ago, books that depicted sexualization and abuse at younger ages began to win awards. Then, five years ago, it shifted a bit more to where books focused on systemic racism and sexual identity won awards. Today, if books don’t include any of the above depictions, they are rarely published by medium and large publishing houses.
And it’s the medium and large publishing houses that supply schools, libraries, and bookstores.
Eight years ago, I organized a statewide writer’s conference for children’s book authors. We brought in several high-powered industry members from major publishing houses. One editor’s words threw open the window to this shifting world. She asked a writer at our conference, who was a leftist himself, about his story. He explained that in his manuscript, his main character learns that his hero is gay. The protagonist is troubled by this and works through his feelings to come to acceptance later in the book.
The respected editor stopped the writer mid-explanation and said, “No.” She explained that in kids’ books, we must present the ideal as if it already exists. There can be no “being troubled by” gayness. There can be no “coming to terms with” sexual identity. The characters in our stories must immediately accept with positive responses any representation of modern social constructs. This immediately laudatory reaction to woke ideology is now required in kidlit. If an author doesn’t portray it as such, his book will not be published.
This pronouncement by the editor shocked me and many other writers there. The line had now been drawn. As writers, our hope of publication rested on our willingness to positively portray woke ideology.
Shortly after this conference, as a part of several online writers’ groups, I started to see comments like this: “We have a duty to save children from conservative, Christian thought,” and “It’s our responsibility as writers to right the wrongs of past traditional thinking.” In their minds, they were in a strategic position as writers of kids’ books to influence young minds in the direction they wanted. These groups soon canceled me.
“We have a duty to save children from conservative, Christian thought,” and “It’s our responsibility as writers to right the wrongs of past traditional thinking.”
A Normalization Campaign
In the past three years, there has been another dangerous shift. In 2020, the Publisher’s Weekly list of Best Middle Grade Books of the year featured 14 titles. These are books for kids ages 9 to 13. Out of the 14 books, nine on that year’s list openly spoke about racism and sexual identity. Each book’s description clearly identified these themes. Of the 14 books on the 2021 Best Books list, nine of the 14 again included topics of racism and sexual identity, but this time, some were clearly identified and others subtly presented. On the Publisher’s Weekly list of Best Middle Grade Books for 2022, nine of the 14 books discussed racism and sexual identity, but only one clearly stated so in the book description. Publishers no longer openly tell readers about the portrayal of radical social agendas in their books. They are subtly inserting the concepts that they want to teach young kids without letting parents know they are there.
Any more questions about why reading and math score are so awful?
This shift frightens me more. We have moved from the inclusion of liberal social agendas in kids’ books — and flaunting it — to sneaking them in under the radar of parents. This is called normalization. The goal is to include these ideologies in exciting, adventurous stories so they become commonplace. Woke ideology has shifted from being the make-up of a book’s plot lines to the fabric of the setting — the normal backdrop of the story as if it exists that way in real life. This normalization leads to acceptance, which leads to embracing. By weaving these social agendas into the “normal” background of a story, a child who feels shocked at a scene or description immediately shifts to feeling shame for being shocked in the first place. Kids will seek to replace their shame with acceptance. This is the power of normalization.
When I know what a book is about, I can make sure my child doesn’t read it. When I’m being kept in the dark, these ideologies may slip past me and fall directly into my child’s hands and mind. Strong storytelling mixed with normalized social agendas creates a book that will influence my child in ways I don’t want. This is the power the industry holds.
We can no longer walk into a library or bookstore, grab a children’s novel off the shelf, and expect it to be clean, based on traditional values, or to contain age-appropriate material. It won’t.
The Library Lurch
And not only books and publishers pose a problem. After the seismic cultural shift that happened in 2016, libraries across the nation purged their shelves of anything “old.” This weeding out pulled many classics, which got some attention, but the deepest cuts were made in the children’s departments. Traditional values were ejected to make room for new, modern left-wing values — from board books for babies to young adult novels.
Many homeschool families use literature extensively in their programs because of the versatility of the media. But these families have increasingly become dismayed at what they are finding at the local libraries they have depended on for so long. I have heard from many parents that they no longer go to the library at all. What a shame! Even when well-meaning people donate clean books with traditional values to their local libraries, in the hopes of spreading light, many new library acquisition policies dictate that the donations be thrown away.
Of 12,000 librarian donors to the 2020 presidential campaign, 93 percent went to President Joe Biden. The vast majority of public and school librarians across the nation are leftist in their personal beliefs and are more than happy to join the publishing industry in promoting their ideals. We see this in children’s book promotional displays, in the way librarians arrange books on shelves, and in the books they order. In your library, you may find more than a dozen different children’s biographies on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but not even one on Amy Coney Barrett. This has become typical.
On Feb. 25, 2023, conservative children’s book publisher Brave Books, hosted a story hour at the Hendersonville, Tennessee Public Library. Kirk Cameron, Missy Robertson, and Riley Gaines went to read their traditional-value books to kids. When the librarian learned who they were, he tried to stop the story hour, saying he “didn’t want their movement” in his library. This librarian had previously hosted drag queen story hours. But Brave Books had arranged the story hour according to the library’s policies, so it couldn’t be stopped. So instead, the head librarian, along with his two assistants, did everything they could to disrupt the event. They blasted music, banged tables, and tried shouting them down.
Fortunately, Hendersonville is a very conservative community. Almost a thousand families came to the library for the story hour and appreciated the opportunity to stand up for traditional values in kids’ books. Due to public outcry, within a few weeks, the librarian had been fired.
This is what we’re up against. The entire children’s book publishing industry — from authors to publishers to librarians — believes it should have the power to control your children’s minds. And it has systematically and progressively gained that access.
Kiri Jorgensen is the Publisher and Senior Editor at Chicken Scratch Books.
The financial toll of the Pride backlash by conservatives against Anheuser-Busch, Kohl’s, and Target has resulted in a collective $28.7 billion loss in market value since the beginning of April, according to Axios. Reactions to “woke” policies and sales pitches mean companies could find themselves targeted at any time with the fallout being unpredictable, the news outlet said.
Anheuser-Busch, fighting to recover from the backlash over a social media Bud Light promotion with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, told its customers, “We hear you.” In a statement posted on the company website, Brendan Whitworth, Anheuser-Busch’s CEO, offered no apology for the controversy. According to Axios, the controversy resulted in a loss of billions of dollars off its market capitalization and shaved a 20% loss in its stock, which has since recovered, but is below its 52-week high.
Axios said Target has faced its own controversy for selling LGBTQ-themed clothing. Target opted to remove some of its Pride Month collection after the retailer’s promotion resulted in threats to the safety of its employees. It had also been revealed that the retailer had lost $10.15 billion in market capitalization due to the public backlash over its LGBTQ line of kids clothing, as well as one-piece swimsuits with “tuck-friendly construction” and “extra crotch coverage.”
The outcry over merchandising aimed at Pride Month and Bank of America downgrades, were responsible for a $15 billion loss from Target’s market cap, Axios noted. It has now recovered and stands at about $63 billion — down from about $74 billion in May.
“Many companies celebrate Pride by changing their logos, sponsoring celebrations, and offering themed products. While these corporate statements have been broadly accepted for years, the intensifying culture war may make companies more vulnerable to backlash,” Eurasia Group analysts Kylie Milliken and Noah Daponte-Smith wrote in a client note last month.
Axios said Kohl’s shares are underperforming. However, the stock, which had seen a drop of over 20% amid the controversy, has since rebounded. The retailer had experienced public backlash and calls for a boycott. This, after Kohl’s released its latest Pride Month merchandise, including a “Baby Sonoma Community Pride Bodysuit set” for 3-month, 6-month, and 9-month-old kids. The onesie, sports an illustration of what appears to be a lesbian couple with a dog and three children, including a young boy in a wheelchair. One adult in the illustration is carrying a multicolored flag. Other Kohl’s Pride merchandise under scrutiny included a “Love Is Love” banner, towels, bibs, candles, shorts, and pillows, as well as shirts that say “Be Proud” and “Ask Me My Pronouns.”
Is it just me, or is anyone else just tired of all this LGBTQHSGSYUASKJSUHP(YO{A(*^)+}AKKMN being shoved down our throats? I wish some polling outfit would run that poll. I think there are a lot of people who really don’t care about someone’s life choices. They aren’t mine, I love them just as they are, while not approving of those choices. Isn’t that being civil, and loving my neighbor?
President Joe Biden unveiled new initiatives Thursday to protect LGBTQ+ communities, though he had to hastily postpone a big Pride Month celebration on the White House lawn with thousands of guests from around the country because of poor air quality from the Canadian wildfires.
The event, which will now be held on Saturday, was intended to be a high-profile show of support at a time when members of the LGBT community say they’re under attack like never before.
The Biden administration’s new initiatives are said to be aimed at protecting LGBT communities from attack, helping young people with mental health issues and homelessness, and countering book bans, though the effects may be limited.
Biden was to discuss them at the event, which the White House had said would be the largest Pride Month celebration ever held there.
Thousands of guests had been invited from around the country for an evening filled with food, games and other activities on the South Lawn. Queen HD the DJ was handling the music, and singer Betty Who was on tap to perform.
But the nation’s capital by late morning Thursday was under a “code purple” air quality alert, the fifth-highest level on the six-level U.S. air quality index, with authorities recommending that everyone limit their exposure to the hazardous smoke wafting south from Canada. District of Columbia schools canceled all outdoor activities for a second day Thursday, and the National Zoo also closed.
The White House initially resisted altering its plans for the celebration, saying there were no changes, even as the air quality steadily worsened along the East Coast on Wednesday and into Thursday.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the first openly gay White House press secretary, said Wednesday that Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and their spouses are strong supporters of the LGBT community and think a celebration is an important way to “lift up” their accomplishments and contributions. She said the community needs to know Biden “has their back” and “will continue to fight for them. And that’s the message that we want to make sure that gets out there.”
The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest advocacy organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer individuals, earlier this week declared a state of emergency for LGBT individuals in the United States and released a guidebook outlining laws it deems discriminatory in each state.
Just a few days into June’s Pride Month, the campaign said it acted in response to a spike in discriminatory laws sweeping statehouses this year, with more than 525 anti-LGBT bills introduced and more than 70 signed into law so far — more than double last year’s number.
STOP!!! STOP!!! STOP!!! STOP!!! How blind can you be to not see that the majority of Americans are fed up with all this LGBTQLKVURFCUVIBUONBUVFO) being shoved down our throats, as well as our children and grandchildren? Do you think that’s where all these 525 laws originated from. Keep your lifestyle choices to yourself. Stop pushing them on to the rest of America.
Kelley Robinson, the campaign’s president, called for a “swift and powerful” response by people in power, including in government, business and education.
“This is a full-out crisis for our communities that demands a concerted response,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I think this is kind of a national call to action and a call to arms to stand up and fight back.”
Biden, a Democrat, announced that the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice and Health and Human Services departments, will partner with LGBT community organizations to provide safety resources and training to help thwart violent attacks.
Separately, HHS and the Department of Housing and Urban Development will provide resources to help LGBT young people with mental health needs, support in foster care and homelessness.
To confront a spike in book bans, the Department of Education’s civil rights office will appoint a new coordinator to work with schools to address that threat. The White House said banning books erodes democracy, deprives students of material needed for learning and can contribute to the stigma and isolation that LGBTQ+ youth feel because books about them are often the ones that are prohibited.
The White House points to Biden’s support for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals. He has appointed many to prominent positions in the White House, such as Jean-Pierre, and throughout the federal government. He signed legislation to protect marriage equality and continues to urge Congress to send him the Equality Act, which would add civil rights protections for LGBT individuals to federal law.
Polls show public support for the rights of people who are gay and lesbian has expanded dramatically over the last two decades.
But attitudes toward transgender people are complex: In polls conducted in 2022 by KFF and the Washington Post and by the Pew Research Center, majorities said they support laws prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in areas such as housing, jobs and schools.
At the same time, though, both polls found that a majority of Americans think that whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by sex assigned at birth, and many also support restrictive policies aimed at people who are transgender, for example preventing transgender women and girls from participating in sports teams matching their gender identity, along with restrictions on access to medical treatment like puberty blockers and hormone treatment for transgender teens and children.
Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Oh the irony. But real women need to “grow a pair”. Yes, BALLS.
I know this action flies in the crotch of what real women might find necessary. But I say to these ladies, at times real women must “man up”!
If that concept challenges your sensibilities, then real women in America should understand that the competition–the hairy underarm crowd–manned up. Literally.
Feminists have enlisted the help of “former men”. And the two factions have joined to wage war against real women. Which brings up an interesting point.
Can trans-men be real toxically masculine?
Imagine is real men chased a feminist into a bathroom and held her hostage for a couple of hours? I would consider that behavior toxically masculine.
That reality happened to Riley Gaines, a real woman. She was ambushed last week when a trans-activist, aka LGBT thug attacked her. She ran for her life and was forced to hide until authorities rescued her.
I don’t have a toxicity meter. But I’m betting this action by the so-called “trans-activist” would damn near peg that meter. As for masculinity? Well, I suspect both the trans-activist thug and that male swimmer who beat Gaines are both loaded with masculinity.
Yet, not a single outcry from the vagina-hat wearing #MeToo crowd over these obvious cases of toxic masculinity. Apparently, as long as you pretend to be a woman you can keep your balls and not be considered toxically masculine. Even when you behave toxically masculine.
To be clear, fake women target real women with no repercussions.
Gaines felt the wrath of the LGBTQIA simply because she fights to protect the rights of real women. While Gaines finished second to a fake-female swimmer, she fights for women in almost all sports. How does the feminist movement ignore the obvious? Fake-women will destroy real women in sports, if they allow this to continue.
So one must ask, what is the real agenda of feminists? Because if helping women is the goal, they suck at it.
Real men to the rescue.
While Leftists accuse real men of being toxically masculine, it is we who fight for the rights of women. Real men have always valued real women, even before having to use the adjective “real” to separate actual women from the brain-damaged body-dysphoric. Real men exalt women; always have and always will.
I suspect that fake women and feminists hate that they can’t be real women. Thus, subject to the adulation of real men. Further, I have always contended that feminists take girly men as their boyfriends, but they seek real men for physical pleasure. But I digress.
Real women to the rescue?
Olympic legend Sharron Davies is leading calls to boycott Nike over its campaign with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney — which she ripped as “literally a kick in the teeth” to women.
“We can protest,” the retired UK swimmer told GB News late Thursday of the divisive campaign she says reflects the “total disdain that women are being treated with.”
“It’s what’s left for us at the moment because nobody really seems to be listening to the general public,” she said.
This April marks 40 years since my therapist told me a “sex change” was the only answer to my persistent mental difficulties. Unfortunately, I followed his advice, obtained cross-sex hormones, and underwent surgery. As I learned through my painful experience, “gender-affirming treatment” (GAT), also known as “gender-affirming care,” is medical fraud and malpractice.
A person’s sex cannot be changed. I know. I lived and identified as a woman for eight years. Hormones and surgery didn’t change my sex. I was a man before surgery, and I remained a man after surgery, illustrating the truth of God’s perfect design — two separate and distinct sexes, male and female, innate and unchangeable.
Every step I took to identify as a female did not make me a female but devaluated me as a man, father, and husband. Each step dehumanized my male body and identity. So-called gender-affirming treatment destroyed my life and relationships, as well as those of my family.
The same thing is happening to people today, except at younger ages. I know. I get their emails.
In the decades following my surgery, instead of the “gender” industry dying out, it has run rampant — devaluing, dehumanizing, and destroying thousands of lives. When I fell for the scam, the patients were exclusively adult men. Today, the industry targets vulnerable adolescents of both sexes influenced by the emotional and physical throes of puberty, who can’t be expected to grasp the long-term consequences, such as infertility, bone density loss, and heart problems.
Parents are told their child will die by suicide if the child is denied medicalization, but it’s a myth. The Child and Parental Rights Campaign gathered the scientific evidence: “[T]here is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones or ‘transition’ surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that individuals who do go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate 19 times greater than the general population.”
A Path to Sterilization
GAT includes many destructive and devaluing procedures. With social transition, a person adopts a new name and pronouns that erase his original identity. Puberty blockers — drugs with severe, well-known side-effects that stop normal growth and maturation — are administered.
Those are followed by cross-sex hormones — powerful drugs with destructive, known medical side-effects that impose a cross-sex appearance. The final step is surgeries — invasive, destructive procedures to remove healthy breasts and wombs in girls and healthy genitalia in boys.
It’s a path to sterilization. Sperm and eggs don’t mature without going through puberty. When puberty blockers are followed by cross-sex hormones, the teen is permanently sterilized. Some refer to this as chemical castration. Furthermore, to state the obvious, surgically removing testicles or wombs ends any possibility of having biological children.
Affirming a child in the opposite sex is emotional and psychological child abuse. Experimenting on healthy children with powerful drugs and sterilizing surgery is the epitome of medical malpractice and horribly barbaric.
‘Regret Is Rare’
After living eight years identifying as a woman, I still experienced extreme emotional distress and made the decision to detransition, i.e., to go back to living and presenting as the man I am. When I told my gender therapist and sex change surgeon, they assured me I was the only one they had ever heard of who went back.
Curious how I could be the only case in which “sex change” failed to fix gender issues, I launched a website, SexChangeRegret.com, to reach out to others. It turns out my experience wasn’t rare. Over the last ten years, I have heard from hundreds, maybe thousands, of people like me who found that GAT wasn’t the answer.
Research tells a similar story. Regrettable outcomes made the headlines almost 20 years ago. In July 2004, The Guardian reported the results of a review of 100 medical studies in an article tellingly headlined “Sex Changes are Not Effective, Say Researchers.” The article summarized the findings: “There is no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation.”
A 2011 long-term follow-up study in Sweden concurs. People who underwent GAT were 19 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.
Undeterred by the lack of evidence of benefits, enthusiastic “gender experts” in Europe and the United States expanded the dangerous practice to children and adolescents. Pediatric gender clinics sprang up, ignoring evidence that showed most children, if not affirmed as the opposite sex, reconciled their sex with biological reality by the time they reached adulthood. Instead, clinics promoted and offered only GAT.
Finally, in 2022, pediatric gender clinics in Sweden, Finland, and the UK objectively reviewed the evidence. They found the risks outweighed the potential benefits and officially ended the practice of GAT for minors, replacing it with good psychosocial care. Recently, Norway did the same.
Why the U.S. Continues as Others Stop
But in the United States, it’s a different story. The legacy medical establishment pushes radical, risky medicalization, sterilization, and removal of healthy body parts as the only effective treatment for youth — no counseling, no diagnosis and treatment of co-existing disorders, little discussion of the risks and harms, no waiting, no alternatives.
Hospitals apparently salivate over the money to be made by gender clinics, as seen in the video from Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, in which a doctor describes the surgeries as a “huge money maker” for the hospital.
Recently, a selfless whistleblower from Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital blew the cover off the lack of established protocols and frequency of harm, saying, “what is happening to them [children] is morally and medically appalling.”
Children and their parents need protection from this medical quackery, and they need it now. That’s why lawmakers in several states are pursuing legislation to protect children from harmful medicalization. Arkansas, Arizona, Alabama, Florida, and Texas enacted protections, and several other states are in process: Missouri, Utah, Montana, South Carolina, South Dakota, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
The state of Florida commissioned a comprehensive evaluation of the benefits and harms of GAT for minors in 2022. The scientifically stringent review exposed a lack of quality evidence showing any benefit, and ample proof of harm. The analysis prompted the Florida medical boards to act and limit the widespread use of hormonal and surgical interventions for youth.
Encouraging Me to Cross-Dress Was Child Abuse
As a child, I was encouraged and affirmed by my grandmother to cross-dress in women’s clothing. She made me a purple chiffon evening dress when I was four years old. It was our secret, she said. Her repeated affirming and loving response to me in the dress proved devastating. It implanted the damaging idea that something must be wrong with me as a boy.
Think of the parallels to today. The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.
“The public-school environment fosters the same perverse practice on children by teaching students (beginning in kindergarten) a disturbing curriculum that confuses children about their innate identity. Public schools have become indoctrination centers for “gender change” and de facto satellite gender clinics that practice medicine without training, a license, or, in many cases, parental permission.”
Teachers groom children as early as kindergarten or first grade to think that “there are many genders” and they can choose one. When children seem upset or perplexed about whether they are a girl or a boy, school counselors and teachers stand ready to inappropriately diagnose them as trans and encourage them to take the next step: “Choose a new name and wardrobe for use at school. We’ll keep it a secret from your parents.” Unbeknownst to parents, many school districts prohibit staff from informing parents.
Protect your children from being corrupted and “transitioned.” Take them out of the public school system.
Trans Kids and Parents
As I discovered in my own life, and in the lives of parents and the detransitioners I have had the pleasure to work with, gender distress is a symptom, not a diagnosis. There are many factors driving youth to identify as trans, such as indoctrination and enabling in public schools, local peer group influence and social contagion, and autism or mental disorders.
Other factors are social media apps such as TikTok, sexually charged transgender gaming, and anime. Lastly, there are adverse childhood experiences, such as sexual abuse, emotional abuse, divorce of parents, exposure to pornography, bullying, and other perceived trauma.
Kids don’t need a “gender” therapist or hormones or to cut off healthy body parts. They need parents to shelter them from school indoctrination and peer group and social media influences. They may need a trauma therapist who can help them unearth and address underlying adverse childhood experiences or mental disorders.
My Adverse Childhood Experiences
I can only speculate as to why I wanted to cross-dress and pretend I was a girl. Certainly, my grandma’s obvious delight in me as a girl in the purple dress, not as the scruffy boy in blue jeans, damaged my male identity. Another leading contender was my relationship with my mother.
I never felt my mom, a young 20-year-old at my birth, ever wanted me, loved me, or accepted me. The feeling was confirmed years later, after I detransitioned, when she shared an alarming story with a friend of mine.
Without any shame or remorse, she revealed how she would grab my wrists and yank me up off the floor with one arm and hit my dangling body with a frying pan with the other. I have no memory of this. I must have been very young to be suspended with one hand.
I never hated my mom. I was always trying to win her approval and get her to love me. The sad truth is, at no time in my mom’s lifetime did she ever talk about how much she loved me. Shortly before she died, she revealed to me and my wife that when I was a toddler, she almost killed me by shaking me very hard.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to guess that a four-year-old boy would prefer being loved and appreciated at grandma’s wearing the purple dress than being yanked up by one arm and hit with a frying pan by an angry mom. My grandma’s affirming me as a girl started my overwhelming desire to change into a female, a longing reinforced by subsequent physical and sexual mistreatment.
The psychological and emotional abuse perpetrated on me as a child was so devaluing and so dehumanizing, I was convinced as an adult by doctors that the only way to heal was to load up on female hormones and let surgeons slice up my body and declare I was now a female. That was 40 years ago. Today, “gender-affirming care” for children is lucrative medical abuse that devalues, destroys, and dehumanizes boys and girls.
Sweden and other countries examined the evidence and ended it. Florida reviewed the high-quality evidence and as a result, Florida medical associations stopped it. The U.K. court reviewed evidence provided by the Tavistock clinic and called it experimental and not suitable for children.
Children need love, real care, and good psychosocial counseling, not a change of identity.
Walt Heyer is an accomplished author and public speaker with a passion for mentoring individuals whose lives have been torn apart by unnecessary gender-change surgery.
Regular viewers know that I am sicken by what is happening to America’s children. I have been asking for a long time, “Why is the political Left so hyper about transgenderism, and mutilating children?” I think I might have some (certainly not all) answers.
Could it be motivated by the “Over-Population” cabal?
The Democrat Party, and the rest of the whacky Left, have always embraced Margaret Sanger and her beliefs that the world is overpopulated. She fought for euthanizing certain people groups, especially black people. She wrote how she was a student of how Hitler killed the Jews.
The Left certainly knows that children that have these cross-sex hormones, surgeries, et., al., CANNOT REPRODUCE. (They also know the alarming amount of people, especially young people, are dying from Fentanyl poisoning, yet won’t close the southern border).
History is full of their manipulative means to control Americans. Could this be one more manipulation?
The project creates video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The National Institutes of Health is funding a study to create 3D avatars for transgender-identifying people to envision the body they imagine they should have and then medically alter their figure accordingly. Another NIH-funded project aims to allow trans folks to adopt a voice congruent with their sex-denying identity. Multiple taxpayer-funded studies on transgender issues focus on “intersectionality,” disparity, and HIV.
The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 75 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually.
The NIH is wasting taxpayer dollars on a project titled “Personalized 3D avatar tool development for measurement of body perception across gender identities,” which purports to help people with gender dysphoria by mapping the difference between their actual physical embodiment and what they believe their body to be. But instead, it indulges their illness by defying science and denying the immutability of sex.
The tool (a prototype is pictured here) would scan individuals to create personalized 3D visualizations with which they can interact on mobile and desktop devices. Those behind the project say they are trying to create technology that “can potentially improve clinical outcomes by identifying specific sets of body parts as targets for treatments to improve body congruence.” In other words, the research project will create video game-like avatars with which people can envision specific body parts they want to target with surgery — which includes removing healthy organs, shaving facial bones, and more — to make themselves look more masculine or feminine.
The study is at the University of Toronto, Canada, and has received $288,000 so far. It began in 2021 and is scheduled to run through 2024.
Other Taxpayer-Funded Research on Ideal Voice, Acne, and Sex Ed
Another taxpayer-funded study addresses how transgender-identifying people experience challenges in adopting a voice characteristic of their so-called identity. Trans individuals “report that producing a voice congruent with their gender identity is crucial to affirming their gender identity. There are a variety of gender affirming services available, but medical interventions, such as surgery or hormones do not … ensure satisfaction with vocal gender.”
A third NIH-funded study looks at acne in the trans-identifying population. “Little is known about the interplay of endogenous and exogenous hormones on acne incidence, severity, impact, treatment, and experience,” the summary says.
NIH is also funding “A fully functional online interactive sexual education tool” for “transgender and gender expansive (TGE) youth.” Such children “are at high risk of several sexual health outcomes that have life-long impacts including sexually transmitted infections, early, unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted sexual contact/intimate partner violence. … [C]urrent educational and clinical structures largely ignore their experiences,” according to the project summary. The tool will clarify “that gender-affirming medical interventions do not prevent unintended pregnancies.” It will also address what it calls “difficulties navigating partner consent because it is often described in heteronormative, binary terms in sexual education classes.”
The bluehead wrasse, a small fish and sequential hermaphrodite, meaning it contains both types of reproductive organs, will be the subject of another taxpayer-funded transgender study: “Organisms that naturally undergo sex transformations in response to changes in their social environment provide excellent systems in which to investigate mechanisms of behavioral sex specification.” Adult female bluehead wrasses can rapidly switch sex in response to changes in social structure, according to the project.
Four ongoing NIH-funded studies related to transgenderism mention “disparities” in their project titles and three mention “stigma.” NIH even issued a Notice of Special Interest in understanding how so-called “intersectional stigmas” harm health. About half of all NIH-funded transgender research, including that which has been completed, relates to higher rates of HIV among the transgender population, totaling approximately $80 million since 1985.
Despite all the possible health risks, President Joe Biden has issued executiveorders charging “HHS to work with states to promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” The administration has issued directives that federal health insurance benefits must “provide comprehensive gender-affirming care.”
Taxpayers are already paying for transgender procedures, as they are covered by some insurers and Medicaid in some states.
Woke Waste
House Budget Committee Republicans have announced “woke waste” is among the spending cuts they want in a debt limit deal. According to the House Budget Committee:
The recent omnibus included millions of dollars in funding for woke policies that American taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for, including $1.2 million for “LGBTQIA+ Pride Centers,” $1 million for a space for “gender-expansive people of color” … and $750,000 for “Transgender and Gender nonconforming and Intersex (TGI) immigrant women in Los Angeles.”
Under the Republican plan, billions of dollars in savings would also come from ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s “environmental justice” programs, enacting new work requirements for welfare, halting Biden’s student loan forgiveness, and getting back unspent Covid-19 pandemic funds.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
Last week, a whistleblower came forward in The Free Press to expose how the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital engages in experimental interventions (aka “gender-affirming care”) on children that are “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in [their] care.”
The stories Jamie Reed outlines are horrific. Young girls were given testosterone, with gruesome side effects. Mentally ill individuals were chemically castrated with virtually no attempt to find another alternative. Parents were kept out of the loop, and people permanently altered their bodies as children, only to regret the decision shortly after. For the majority of these individuals, it is already too late.
Let’s get this straight. They are taking children who are sexually “confused” and feed them more information that ADDS to their confusion, then support that confusion by talking them into having life altering surgeries, WITHOUT PARENTAL KNOWLEDGE (in some cases), and then leave them alone to fend for themselves as a mutilated creature. We need to apologize to Dr. Frankenstein.
Many of us have heard these stories before and have been desperately trying to get people to pay attention. Calling out the transgender agenda for what it truly is, an experiment on our nation’s children, of course, comes with backlash from trigger-happy leftists who deem this language “hateful,” “transphobic,” or “anti-LGBT.” For conservatives, that reality is something we have learned to live with.
The risk for the whistleblower was far greater. Reed describes herself as “a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” and is “married to a transman.” Her social and political circles are undoubtedly populated by people of similar viewpoints who are likely very supportive of so-called “gender-affirming care.”
This background is important — to come out as she did and to expose the horrors she witnessed at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital will almost certainly earn her a scarlet letter from her social and professional circle. She will likely face the realities of unemployment and social humiliation for standing up for the truth. She already knows the risks yet also knew that standing up on this issue was far more important.
Not only is this incredibly courageous, but it should be a message to others on the left who listen to the antics of glory seekers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ilk, who have blamed the pushback for these practices on the “radical right.”
The whistleblower’s story is gut-wrenching in and of itself, but it reveals the endgame of drugs and surgery to chemically castrate and irreversibly damage children physically and mentally. That endgame does not happen in isolation.
It begins at school.
Schools Indoctrinate Early
In the early years of children’s K-12 education, they get to read books like “It Feels So Good to Be Yourself,” an illustrated book for ages 4-8 that encourages kids to question their sex at any age. One example in the book is Ruthie, a biological boy who tells his parents that the doctors got it wrong, and he is now a girl. Ruthie is 5 years old.
As children get older and enter puberty, the books encouraging this only grow more plentiful. Students will often see titles such as “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” prominently displayed in their school libraries.
Meanwhile, school policies are changed to allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the sex with which they “identify,” to compete in sex-segregated athletic events pursuant to the sex with which they “identify,” and to be referred to by the “pronouns” they desire, regardless of whether other students and teachers have religious or moral objections.
Students who “identify” as a different sex are effectively given rights above and beyond everyone else. It’s no wonder young adolescents would deal with their growing pains in a way that gives them a feeling of acceptance, validation, and being part of a new “civil right.” In other words, a social contagion takes root.
Children are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. When this was highlighted in Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage,” the transgender lobby went on the attack, and her book was pulled from the shelves of Target. Those who dare suggest a social contagion is at play will be met with articles from corporate media citing so-called “experts” denying its existence. But now even a far-left whistleblower tells us of “clusters of girls” arriving at the clinic “from the same high school,” and says that “the doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.”
As this is all going on, schools work overtime to keep parents in the dark. Don’t like books encouraging transgenderism? Too bad, the book stays on the shelf and you had better hope you like being branded a “book banner.”
Even worse, schools require that staff not share with a student’s parents that their child is identifying as a different sex while at school. The reason? They consider transgender interventions to be health care, as articulated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. Therefore, if you are not providing such health care to your child, you are a child abuser. They often won’t say this out loud or call Child Protective Services on you, but make no mistake — it’s coming.
Resisting the Profit Seekers
None of this is to say there aren’t actual cases of gender dysphoria that occur when a person feels a persistent incongruence or disconnect between their biological sex and the one with which they identify. These cases are extremely rare (in .06 percent of the population), and approximately 75 percent of children with gender dysphoria will age out of this condition.
Further, and as noted first by Shrier and then by the whistleblower herself, prior to the 2010s the vast majority of cases involved boys, but beginning in 2015, “teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.”
Dealing with the rare cases of gender dysphoria is not what is happening, however. Rather, the powers that be have set up academia to become a pipeline for a dangerous ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents. That ideology denies biology to provide customers for a rapidly expanding market that has experienced exponential monetary growth and is on pace to grow 11.23 percent over the next 10 years to become a $5 billion industry.
If you speak out, you will face repercussions. The activists in the space do not play by the rules, and they will seek to cancel and destroy you for daring to question the mutilation of children. But if we have learned anything from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital whistleblower, it is that people must stand up to stop this unethical, dangerous, and anti-science war of physical destruction being waged on children, regardless of politics.
Ian Prior is a senior advisor to America First Legal and author of upcoming book “Parents of the World Unite!”
Last Thursday afternoon, time expired for parents to provide comments on proposed changes to sex education in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), one of the largest school districts in the country, with a population of about 180,000 students. As The Federalist reported last week, the proposal includes labeling boys and girls, respectively, as “assigned” males and females “at birth.” It also includes curricula on “sexual orientation and gender identity” that involves watching a pro-transgender PBS video telling kids they can have “intermediate” private parts.
If you think FCPS officials will carefully consider comments and complaints from parents worried about exposing their prepubescent children to transgender ideology, and perhaps even rethink their plans, I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to sell you. As we have seen from earlier examples of Fairfax County “welcoming comments” on proposed changes to road names, this public survey is nothing more than an empty, perfunctory bureaucratic procedure aimed at pretending that parents have a say regarding what happens during the school day.
Yet even more saliently, FCPS’s willingness to embrace this radical gender ideology and foist it upon thousands of Northern Virginia youth provokes a more important question: If our public schools can’t differentiate boys from girls, what wisdom and knowledge can they impart?
Ignoring Basic Biology in Favor of Gender Studies
I confess a certain embarrassment to be the one writing on this. When I worked in FCPS, I taught high-school history, not science. Years before that, I earned a respectable but certainly not impressive “B” in my ninth-grade FCPS honors biology class. But I’d like to think the lessons my teacher offered on the rudimentary realities of male and female biology — which of course apply not only to humans but the entirety of the natural order — are still in effect, even if it’s been 24 years since the last time I took a test on stamens, pistils, and gametes. I can still remember us boys immaturely chuckling when our teacher discussed ova and sperm.
But this is no laughing matter. School administrators and educators across the country have dispensed with these basic truths of biology in favor of the latest “findings” from politicized university sociology and “gender studies” departments. Schools take their directives not from biology — or, God forbid, classical philosophy and its articulation of the teleological nature of the human body, oriented, as ova and sperm are, toward the creation of new life — but from politically motivated journalists who attack the few teacherscourageous enough to take a stand.
The new FCPS directive — which other school districts will undoubtedly follow — rejects stable and universal distinctions between large and small gametes and the fact that sexes can now also be determined at conception through the SRY gene (resulting in male gametes), or its absence (female gametes). They expound endlessly on “intersex” persons who supposedly undermine “binary norms,” neglecting to note that such persons are incredibly rare: Sex is readily recognizable at birth for 99.98 percent of humans. Of the 3.6 million babies born in America in 2021, there was some manner of sex-related deformity or irregularity in about 750 of them, according to Abigail Favale’s book “The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory.” But to the ideologues, a trait found in .02 percent of people isn’t a biological deformity, but a new “gender.”
The Casualties of the Curriculum
The FCPS directive can only further intensify the casualties from confused gender ideology, well documented in Abigail Shrier’s recent popular book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.” Little girls have been exhorted to go on puberty blockers, causing all kinds of permanent harm, from sterility to arrested brain and bone development. As I noted in a Federalist article earlier this year, a recent Heritage study observed that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.” And a 2016 report found that “a large percentage of adolescents referred for gender dysphoria have a substantial co-occurring history of psychosocial and psychological vulnerability.” A growing body of research indicates that promoting transgenderism in youth increasesmental illness.
Professor John S. Grabowski’s in his recent book “Unraveling Gender: The Battle Over Sexual Difference,” notes that “significant evidence reveals that aggressive hormonal and surgical transitioning procedures do not improve mental health outcomes for people who undergo them — even in ostensibly LGBTQ+ friendly cultures.” Moreover, postoperative transsexuals experience higher rates for psychiatric hospitalization, criminal conviction, and suicide, not to mention higher risk of mortality. In other words, confusing prepubescent fourth-graders or hormonal eighth-graders about their gender and sexuality may very well have lifelong detrimental effects on their emotional, psychological, and physical well-being.
It’s Not Just Biology, but English, Social Studies, Libraries…
If only it were in science classes that children are catechized in errant ideologies. An FCPS English teacher earlier this year read 10th-grade students a poem about masturbation (my 10th-grade FCPS English class, by comparison, read “Brave New World,” “1984,” “Lord of the Flies,” and “Antigone”). School libraries promote trans content for elementary schoolers, including in picture books. FCPS prides itself on its libraries’ queer book selection.
And, of course, we cannot forget social studies, whose curricula have become beholden to racial ideologies pushed by the 1619 Project and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Many Virginia schools have embraced the SPLC’s “Teaching Hard History” curriculum, while school districts across the country are using the 1619 Project’s social studies curriculum. That New York Times-originating project believes that America was “founded … on an ideal and a lie” as a “slavocracy,” and that “anti-blackness” is “at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.”
It depresses me to see what has happened in FCPS, and so many other school districts across the country. I am a product of FCPS, as are many of my extended family members. My mother and I worked in FCPS. It was once an impressive school system, one my parents trusted to offer me a solid, if secular, education. Now its leadership can’t even tell boys from girls. On what grounds should we trust them regarding anything else?
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Lands.
About a year and a half ago, I noticed that my son — let’s call him Andy — was putting rainbow stickers on his phone. And a friend alerted me that Andy rebuked her daughter in a group chat for being “so cisgender.” I did some delicate digging, and it became clear: My child, then 13, was flirting with going “trans.”
He’s not alone. The number of transgender-identifying kids is up 20 to 40 times since a decade ago, to 1.5 percent of all teens. And the gender facilities that say they are the experts have been unmasked. Videos and statements have revealed that doctors in these so-called clinics are willing to give 15-year-old girls double mastectomies and call it treatment.
I wasn’t about to send my son off for experimental medical interventions that didn’t treat any underlying psychological issues. In this, I think I’m representative of the silent (and bullied) majority. Still, what could I do?
The first thing I had to do was to realize that the gender cult is powerful, and I can’t control the choices and feelings of my kid. I had to accept my limits, but that didn’t mean I was helpless. Parents are still the most important influence on their kids.
Finding a New School
I was lucky: My son was at a private school that did not push kids, behind their parents’ backs, into exploring alternate sexualities and getting “treated” by lifetime medicalization. If my son had been at a trans-affirming school — which means just about any public school — I would have been undermined at every turn.
At this school, however, he did have a cohort of “rebel” friends who all seemed to identify themselves as gender-questioning. And the school itself was not academically challenging enough for Andy. So I focused on academics, and we looked for a new school that would be a better fit on that score — and still supportive of my values. Finding one gave him a fresh start and a new peer group.
Building Real Identity
Next, I decided I would not provoke Andy by debating gender and trans issues. Maria Keffler in her book “Desist, Detrans, and Detox” reminds parents that transgenderism in adolescents is less about sex and more about identity, identity, and identity. A few decades ago, Andy probably would have worked through his teenage crises by going goth or arguing with me about religion. These days, becoming one of the letters in LGTB is the shortcut to being interesting, not “basic.”
Well, I didn’t want to make gender-bending the way he was going to differentiate himself from his parents. If he had been openly claiming a different so-called gender identity, maybe I would have been more confrontational about it. But since he was just flirting with being trans, not yet eloping, I decided not to make the topic of the sexes even more important than it already was. Instead, I focused on helping him build an identity in a healthy way.
I made it a priority to compliment him, every day, praising him for all the good things he is. Every time I “caught him” being funny, smart, helpful, generous, thoughtful, or kind, I noted it out loud. Every day, multiple times a day. I tried to help him see that these things are more important to his identity than some exotic “gender.” I also tried to help him feel more at home in his skin. He was given lessons in a sport he enjoys, so he could experience his body being strong and agile. Whatever reduced his alienation from his body, I encouraged.
Open-Ended Questioning
Next, I focused on building our relationship. I asked a lot of open-ended questions, and I made goofy jokes. We laughed a lot. I learned about him and signaled that I was interested in learning more. De-escalating tension and increasing the joy between us was key.
If Andy wanted to wear a vintage shirt that looked like it belonged on a French aristocrat from a few centuries ago, I just shrugged and let it pass. As long as what he chose was somewhere within the boundaries of socially acceptable male clothing, I didn’t make a fuss. After all, being a man (or a woman) is large enough to encompass differences in style, personality, and interest. It’s the trans movement that stereotypes the sexes, telling us that a sensitive, artistic boy must actually be a girl. Nonsense! My son could be a man and wear pastels.
When opportunities arose in everyday life, I pointed out the differences between men and women. In talking about school athletics, I would casually observe, “Oh, in high school, the athletic teams are divided by sex, because by puberty, boys develop more muscles and have more lung capacity than girls.” I never made these into arguments, just objective remarks.
In fact, we didn’t talk about so-called gender much, although I was prepared to. I coached myself on how to respond with neutrality and interest. I was determined only to ask questions. “I’m not clear how, if gender is socially constructed, that it is also an infallible identity deep inside the person?” “Help me understand. If gender is fluid and changeable, why should people get surgeries to alter their bodies permanently?” Books and essays pointing out transgenderism’s inconsistencies helped me clarify my thoughts. Still, I vowed I would only provide my own answers when Andy asked me a question — only, that is, when he was truly curious about my thinking.
I did take Andy to one talk on gender by a speaker who was calm and sympathetic but still supportive of my values. When he asked why he had to go, I simply said, “It’s an important topic, and this point of view is not well-represented in the culture.” Afterward, when I asked him what he thought, he said, “It was fine,” in a tone of voice that indicated the opposite. I dropped it; the talk still gave him a lot to chew on, even if he didn’t want to admit it.
Limiting Technology
One other piece was key: technology. Much trans proselytizing happens online, with anonymous adults love-bombing vulnerable kids. These adults sell the idea that acceptance can be found only in their new trans family and not in their real home. Some parents need to take drastic steps regarding their kids’ online presence. Fortunately, the screen problem was one I had been addressing for a long time, so I could be more moderate.
Andy did not have a smartphone, although even flip phones these days have internet browsers. I gave him a new phone designed for kids, one that had some carefully curated apps but no internet browser. For computer time, he was limited to an hour a day, and I trusted the internet filters I managed on his computer to keep him off the porn sites and the sexually explicit forums that cater to trans-questioning kids. All that limited (but didn’t eliminate) his exposure to pro-trans pressure. As a bonus, I got a much more cheerful kid at home who wasn’t always in front of a screen.
The point of all of this was threefold: to be the good guy, to distract him from all gender talk all the time, and to provide other identity options than the trans one.
Upping My Parenting
Lastly, I played the long game. Even when I didn’t believe it, I kept repeating to myself that the universe wouldn’t give me a kid that I couldn’t care for. That I had his best interests at heart — and online trans gurus didn’t — and I could wait this out with patience. I prioritized him when we had downtime in the evenings, not my phone. And I did the things I needed to, like sleeping enough and getting my own support system, so I could be available to him. Should I have been doing all of this all along as a parent? Well, of course, and in fact, it’s not like I had to do a total 180 when this emergency happened. Some of these things I was already doing, sort of. But I still needed to level up my parenting.
This summer, when he decorated a new phone, there were no rainbow stickers on it.
I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods, but he seems uninterested in the whole gender question. His wardrobe choices are less outrageous, and he’s not anxious, angry, and approval-seeking. Instead, he’s engaged and happy at school and at home, and he doesn’t need to be “different” according to the trans script. He’s happier being different just as himself. That makes me one happy parent.
This byline marks several different individuals, granted anonymity in cases where publishing an article on The Federalist would credibly threaten close personal relationships, their safety, or their jobs. We verify the identities of those who publish anonymously with The Federalist.
(Photo credit JASON CONNOLLY/AFP via Getty Images)
A Colorado school board proposed a “gender expansive” toolkit that directs educators on how to address transgender and non-binary students, including keeping gender transitions a secret from parents, according to the Post Independent.
“We previously affirmed students’ rights without yet specifying supporting practices,” Roaring Fork School District Chief Of Student And Family Services Anna Cole wrote in a memo to the board. “We have since learned the importance of providing clear guidance and programmatic support and have heard requests from students and staff for more explicit procedures. The toolkit is our response to these requests.”
The toolkit suggests a “gender tree” to explain gender identity and calls the soil, “societal influence,” which is the way “social, cultural and institutional influence” shape “gendered individuals.” Included is “fluidity and history” as the “rings of the tree” to represent a person’s “deeply-felt sense of gender” that can expand beyond man and woman to “genderqueer and agender,” the toolkit showed.
Under the “toolkit,” educators are advised to allow students to use whichever restroom and locker room corresponds with their gender identity. On overnight trips, students should receive accommodations “on a case-by-case basis with the goals of maximizing the student’s social integration.”
“It’s one thing to identify as a gender, but quite another to compel others to use special pronouns, and to open bathrooms and locker rooms to transgender students or allow transgender students onto sports teams of the opposite sex,” a board meeting attendee said to the Post Independent. “The rights of those not identifying as transgendered are being trampled.”
A Civil Union license is signed at a midnight ceremony in the Denver Office of the Clerk and Recorder, at the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building on May 1, 2013 in Denver, Co. Colorado is the eighth state to have civil unions or similar laws implemented, permitting unmarried couples, both gay and heterosexual, the ability to form civil unions and get similar rights to those of married couples. (Photo by Marc Piscotty/Getty Images)
In Florida, a school board implemented a sexual education curriculum that links to Planned Parenthood documents and teaches 12-year-olds “all the ways pregnancy can occur.” An Ohio school is allowing educators to wear LGBTQ badges, despite parental pushback, in an effort to show students they are allies to the community.
The Roaring Fork School Board and Roaring Fork School District did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Peter Doocy Wrecks Karine Jean Pierre And The FBI Goes After … Barron?
Teachers from a Pennsylvania school district are refusing to follow the district’s transgender policy, saying it deadnames, or disrespects, students’ gender identity, according to the Courier Times.
At least four teachers from Lenape Middle School and Central Bucks High School West, both in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, said they would not be following the district policy which requires educators to call students by the name and pronouns on their official records, according to the Courier Times. The district implemented the policy in September, which allows students to change their official record on a case-by-case basis.
“We’re not doing it,” Central Bucks High School West David Klein told the outlet. “If we adopt what they’re suggesting we’re putting a very, very fragile small minority of kids at a risk.”
Central Bucks West teacher Rebecca Cartee-Haring said all of the coworkers she talked to will not be following the policy, the Courier Times reported. At least two Lenape Middle School teachers said they will not be following the policy and know other educators in their building who will be doing the same.
Grand Marshals wave from a float as they participate in the 2016 Gay Pride Parade march through downtown on June 12, 2016 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jessica Kourkounis/Getty Images)
In May, the school district required any political symbols to be removed from classrooms which included pride flags, according to the Courier Times. In July, a district policy was passed that gives the community the right to challenge any book held in the school library.
“If we’re going to, as a way of making it easier for some angry parents to control their kids, we’re going to by policy make it worse for the most marginalized in a school where we’ve already seen the negative consequences of this? No, we can’t,” Klein told the Courier Times.
In Virginia, students in nearly 95 schools walked out on Tuesday to protest Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s proposed transgender policy which requires educators to call students by the name on their official records, which can only be changed with parental consent. The policy also requires students to use bathrooms that correspond with their biological sex rather than their gender identity.
The Central Bucks School District, Klein and Cartee-Haring did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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.
Radical gender idealists recently announced they are unhappy with the “current standards in forensic human identification” because those policies “do a disservice to people who do not clearly fit the gender binary.” Instead of simply discovering and classifying the past using contextual clues in human remains, including sex as determined by biological features, there’s a new academic push to project the sexual climate of today on history and offer “a gender-expansive approach to human identification.”
We should have guessed that the same progressives who want to wipe the Founding Fathers’ legacy off the face of the planet would also want you to believe that skeletons from ancient times would be miffed about being “misgendered” by archaeologists and anthropologists. The left’s war on the past shows their ferocious desire to control the future. By normalizing sexual chaos in the now and using that to contextualize the past, transgenderism activists are chipping away at the foundations of humanity. To participate in their charade, you must reject biology on all counts and accept what false narrative is force-fed to you as tolerance and acceptance.
Unfortunately, Americans are buying it. They are adding “pronouns” to their email signatures and Instagram bios. They cheer when Big Tech nukes someone like Jordan Peterson from Twitter for “deadnaming” actress Ellen Page and pointing out that no amount of mutilation will change her sex into accord with her new name, Elliot Page. They collectively moan when they hear another Republican state passed legislation affirming women’s sports or launched an investigation into puberty-blocking drug manufacturers.
The left wants a monopoly on language, definitions, and history because once you control those, you have the power to set the narrative for everyone else — past, present, and future. That’s why institutions from schools to libraries to sports leagues and all the way up to the federal government are plagued with propaganda pretending it’s perfectly fine and normal for immature, underdeveloped children to make life-changing, physically altering, and often irreversible choices.
Biden Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine: We need to “empower” kids to go on puberty blockers and get sex reassignment surgery. pic.twitter.com/CRPRaFYtzK
Thanks to elevation by the corrupt press, pharmaceutical companies, and social media echo chambers, that propaganda is working. Not only has the number of self-proclaimed trans teens nearly doubled since 2017 to 300,000, but a “study found that people 13 to 25 accounted for a disproportionately large share of the transgender population” in the United States.
As The New York Times succinctly put it, “trans identification in recent years has become political dynamite, driven in part by the rise in minors seeking medical treatments.” These “medical treatments,” often touted as life-saving, include chemical castration, genital mutilation, and other irreversible procedures and prescriptions that lack approval from the Food and Drug Administration, but those dangerous risks are memory-holed by the White House and the corporate media. This spin is present throughout the whole trans movement.
Just like it is taboo to mention that there is often regret associated with sculpting bodies into something they are not, it is almost always forbidden to mention the name and life associated with a person before he or she “transitioned.”
Any mention of a “deadname” could evoke a deranged rage because, for the radical gender idealists, any mention of the past that doesn’t comport with their perception of the future must be rejected.
That’s why leftists demand we pretend Lia Thomas wasn’t just an average swimmer in the men’s division before deciding to switch over to the women’s category and destroying the competition there. That’s why Merriam-Webster has repeatedly caved to radical gender activists and updated its definitions to reflect ideology instead of science, truth, and fact.
The left doesn’t just want you to deny biological reality in the present. They want you to ignore that biology was ever valued in the past. Refuse to accept the terms and conditions of their wordplay and reject their attempts to replace fact and science with this radical new orthodoxy on sex. It’s wrong, it’s revisionist, and it’s already harming an entire generation of moldable children at a historic rate.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The National Science Teaching Association (NSTA) held a seminar called “Queer Your Classroom: Supporting LGBTQIA+ Students” on April 2 instructing teachers on “simple tricks and strategies to affirm and represent queer students” who are “marginalized in science,” according to an event announcement.
The seminar, led by Bronx High School of Science chemistry teacher Jamie Kubiak, who goes by “they/he” pronouns, instructed attendees on “how to affirm and represent queer identities” and make “impactful changes” to K-12 curriculum, according to the event announcement and slideshow.
Kubiak instructed teachers on the GLSEN“Gender Triangle Education Guide” which defines gender attribution, gender identity and gender expression, explaining that there is a common misconception that gender and sex are the same thing, according to the presentation slides. GLSEN, a national advocacy organization which aims to “transform” K-12 schools into a “safe and affirming environment” for LGBTQ students and other “marginalized identities” has been criticized by Parents Defending Education as a way to push political activism in American public schools.
No Left Turn in Education Founder and President Dr. Elana Fishbein told The Daily Caller New Foundation that the NSTA has “completely abandoned its educational mission to promote political ideology cloaked as ‘inclusivity,’”
“It is no wonder that America’s students score pitifully lower in science and math than many countries,” she added.
In the presentation, Kubiak provides “simple strategies” for queering classrooms, which includes a suggestion that teachers replace any terms or phrases that “reinforce the binary” like Prom King or Prom Queen.
A teacher walks among the masked students at Medora Elementary School in Louisville, Kentucky. (Photo by Jon Cherry/Getty Images)
Teachers are instructed to ask students for their gender pronouns rather than “assuming gender identity and misgendering with incorrect pronouns” and use terms like “everyone” or “you all” to avoid saying “guys.” A “sample student information survey” included in the slides, asks students their gender pronouns, if these pronouns can be used in front of the class, what pronouns the teacher should use when contacting a student’s family and what family members the student lives with. (RELATED: Here’s How Biden’s Radical Rewrite Of Key Civil Rights Law Will Fundamentally Change America)
Kubiak also suggests schools adopt a gender-neutral dress code, gender neutral bathrooms and other policies to “protect LGBTQIA+ students against discrimination,” which includes caution about the observation of holidays like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
The presentation suggests “queer” ideology can be implemented into every subject and provided examples for English, history, math and Spanish.
“In my chemistry class, I’ve infused talking about gender and sexuality even when it doesn’t seem like it would ‘fit’ or that there would be time,” Kubiak states in the slideshow notes. “When we talk about the electromagnetic spectrum, I connect the word ‘spectrum’ to how gender and sexuality can be a spectrum so that students can understand that there can be two ends but that values are possible in between.”
Kubiak also explained that when assigning the book, “The Disappearing Spoon” which does not discuss any LGBTQIA+ scientists, students are also instructed “to research an LGBTQIA+ scientist or other marginalized scientist and talk about how their identity played into their work or their discovery.”
Kubiak, NSTA, GLSEN and The Bronx High School of Science did not respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
Miller Middle School in San Marcos, Texas is hosting a “Queer Week” where students as young as sixth grade are urged to dress in “pride” colors, wear nametags with preferred names and pronouns, and “protest” LGBT discrimination.
“The goal of the week is to provide a school culture that values diversity, equity and inclusion,” MMS Principal Saumnya Hart told parents in an email forwarded to The Federalist by the school.
According to a “Miller Queer Week” schedule obtained by The Federalist, MMS set aside four school days in April “to provide support for students in the LGTBQIA+ community, their allies, and the greater student and staff body.”
Beginning on Tuesday, April 19, students were encouraged to “share their stories on the wall in the hallway in order to stand against mistreatment.” On Wednesday, students were told to “dress in colors of the rainbow to support the LGTBQ+ community.”
Nametags designated for “pronouns and preferred names” will be supplied for all students on Thursday, according to the “Queer Week” calendar. On Friday, the week is scheduled to close out with a “National Day of Silence” where “LGTBQ+ students and their allies protest the harmful effects of harassment and discrimination of LGTBQ people in schools.”
Hart told parents that she approved the event after approximately 15 students “who identify in the LGTBQIA+ community” asked the administration for “protection and a safe place to learn without being belittled.” She justified the school-sanctioned event by claiming that the activities “are completely voluntary and will not be included as part of any lesson or instruction being provided.”
San Marcos Consolidated Independent School District Chief of Communications Andrew Fernandez told The Federalist that the school has received complaints from concerned parents but believes the activities are appropriate because they are “not part of the instructional day.”
“We have calls every day about questions or concerns that families may have and we’re handling the situation as we do any other situation,” Fernandez said. “We speak with the parent. Hear their thoughts and concerns and then share the reasoning behind the activities taking place this week.”
Texas officials have made it very clear that school-sanctioned activities dealing with sexuality violate the state’s sex education opt-out requirements for parents.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton recently scolded Austin Independent School District for hosting its annual Pride Week which featured activities such as “watching Queer Eye” and “nail painting.”
“The Texas Legislature has made it clear that when it comes to sex education, parents — not school districts — are in charge,” Paxton wrote.“By hosting ‘Pride Week,’ your district has, at best, undertaken a week-long instructional effort in human sexuality without parental consent. Or, worse, your district is cynically pushing a week-long indoctrination of your students that not only fails to obtain parental consent, but subtly cuts parents out of the loop. Either way, you are breaking state law.”
It appears based on the email and the substance of the activities at Miller Middle School that this school is likewise in violation of Texas state law.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
The last several years can be viewed as a testament to the remarkable strategic power the woke left wields. The speed at which absurd ideas have been thrust into the limelight by vested media and a wide array of well-financed academics and non-profits is both startling and impressive. Not long ago, it would’ve been unimaginable that a seven-year-old boy’s innocent preference for Polly Pockets over Power Rangers would find its tragic end in puberty blockers, chemical castration, and 15 minutes of fame on Snapchat’s explore page. Calling this abuse doesn’t encapsulate the full extent of the damage. It is a culturally bolstered, politically incentivized mass grooming campaign with a disturbing history. Even worse, this all may be eclipsed by a much darker future should it continue unabated.
The push for childhood transgenderism is predicated on a perverse and extreme individualistic sentiment, specifically that children’s rights as individuals imply an autonomous ability to make irreversible decisions regarding their health, rather than require protection from parents and a culture that fend off all that endangers the most vulnerable. The dangerous claim that children can meaningfully consent to puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy, or genital mutilation is, besides itself being deeply harmful, also leading our society down a sinister path towards accepting pedophilia. Here’s how.
A Legacy Of Abuse
Unfortunately, this isn’t speculative fear-mongering. Pedophilic child abuse has deep roots in the transgender movement. John Money, a sex researcher who paved the way for acceptance of childhood transgenderism, sexually abused his young patients and defended pedophilia. Money is infamous for the series of experiments he ran on David Reimer, the first child who was born developmentally normal yet underwent a sex-change operation. After Reimer’s botched circumcision, Money saw an opportunity to test his leftwing gender theories. He convinced Reimer’s parents to raise their son as a daughter and subject him to a sex change operation. Reimer and his twin went on to be studied and abused by Money, who according to a peer-reviewed biology encyclopedia from Arizona State University forced them to “engage in behavior resembling sexual intercourse” while he watched and took pictures. Despite this, Money failed to get Reimer to adopt a feminine identity. Reimer, who didn’t know he had been born male until the age of 14, frequently behaved in a masculine manner and resisted Money’s attempts to feminize him.
According to Reason Magazine’s Books Editor Jesse Walker, Money “touted himself as a defender of sexual liberation: for the rights of gays and other sexual minorities, for legalized pornography, for breaking down social taboos.” When his abuse of the twins was exposed, he insulted his critics as “anti-feminist” bigots beholden to traditional gender roles.
Reimer’s life eventually ended in the same tragic way that still disproportionately claims the lives of so many transgender people when he committed suicide at the age of 38. As if it wasn’t sinister enough, Reimer’s case was used to justify thousands more sex reassignment surgeries on children born with genital abnormalities.
Transsexual Pioneer Also Supports Pedophilia
Money also used his stature as a prominent academic to defend pedophilia. The pedophilic organization North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) even references a quote from an interview with Money that explicitly endorses pedophilia in an attempt to normalize their pathology. None of these revelations have prevented academics from lauding this moral monster as a founding father of the transgender movement. Terry Goldie, the author of a biography on Money, explained that Money “didn’t search for biological evidence of transgender identity, but accepted a patient’s conviction as fact.”
Anke A. Ehrhardt, a research partner and disciple of Money, similarily noted his role in the transgender movement, calling him a “pioneer,” crediting him with the introduction of terms like “gender identity” and “sexual orientation,” and pointing out his role in our culture’s departure from a biological understanding of sex.
Erhrardt, who was directly involved in the Reimer case, still has a foothold in academia and is now the director of the Division of Gender, Sexuality, and Heath, and The Program for the Study of LGBT Health, a project of Columbia University. The abuser is also honored with the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, which specifically seeks out those “whose research interests concern the history, politics, and methodology of sexology and sexuality studies.” The institute is named after Alfred Kinsey, another leftwing sex researcher venerated by NAMBLA. Kinsey, who worked alongside transgender activists to normalize gender dsyphoria, also mainstreamed the concept of gender fluidity through experiments that featured the systematic sexual abuse of children and even babies as young as two months old, according to his own books. Kinsey heavily influenced both Money and Harry Benjamin, the latter of whom has been called the “father of transexualism.”
Make no mistake, the transgender movement is predicated on a psuedo-academic legacy that’s replete with the most egregious crimes against children.
The Threat Of A Legacy Fulfilled
It isn’t hard to identify the same trend in the modern incarnations of transgenderism and adjacent movements. Here I highlighted numerous attempts to normalize pedophilia by various entities, the most pertinent being a New York Times article that referred to the serial rape of a 13-year-old homeless victim of transgender groomers as selling sex.
As children are lured into the world of transgenderism, they become open to a number of abuses beyond cross-sexual treatments. One study found that children with a recent onset of gender dysphoria (62.5 percent of whom had previously been diagnosed with “at least one mental health disorder or neurodevelopmental disability”, began to isolate themselves from their families and distrust those who weren’t trans, both of which lead to further isolation.
To make matters worse, transgender figures have told children that “it’s okay to walk away from unsupportive … parents” and to exchange them for a “glitter family, your queer family,” before inviting these children to call or Skype him. And what do “supportive” families look like anyways? How many “supportive” families have encouraged their children to become trans in exchange for social media’s fleeting dopamine hits?
The grooming has been institutionalized in American schools, with campus organizations like the Gay-Straight Alliance that seek to “train youth leaders” finding financial favor from Soro’s Open Society Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Weingart Foundation, Vans, The California Endowment, and various other elite organizations. The Federalist broke news that America’s second-largest school district, which is associated with GSA, has been holding LGBT club meetings for 4-year-olds and hosted a nurse who discussed “medical transition.” The district refused to answer whether parents were required to accompany children to such meetings.
These moneyed efforts are capitalized on by teachers who’ve used the club to groom children to become transgender under the nose of unsuspecting parents who are subsequently lambasted for not being “supportive.”
These People Aren’t Kidding. You Shouldn’t, Either
Yes, they are coming for your children. It’s a feature, not a bug. The history of transgenderism proves this. You shouldn’t expect them to stop unless you make them through protecting your kids, coordinated activism, and community involvement. If you don’t, it likely won’t be long before it’s argued that children who can allegedly consent to sexual surgeries should also be able to consent to sexual relationships. If such a hellish future seems unimaginable, consider that any number of the outgrowths of sexual progressivism would’ve been beyond the pale only a decade ago.
Alternatively, turn your attention to a 1977 open letter in France from 69 people that defended three pedophiles and argued for the age of consent to be lowered below 15. It also contended that 13-year-old girls, by virtue of receiving birth control pills, should have the legal right to consent to sex. One of the signers was critical theorist Michel Foucault, who would later have a sizeable impact on the field of queer theory that now dominates American society.
Child grooming is already commonplace within the transgender movement as it has been since its inception and attempts to normalize pedophilia have already hit the mainstream.
We Can’t Accept Half Measures In The Defense Of Children
If there was ever an instance in which the right needed moral courage and a healthy dose of stubbornness, this is one of them. You can defeat this, but not alone.
This movement is backed by an array of NGOs, elite interests, and pallets of cash. It’s pivotal that you find like-minded people in your church and community and that you employ all legal and ethical means to collectively reject the dangerous insanity that’s being foisted on your children. For all the risks this comes with, you can be certain that cowardice bears a heavier cost, both on your children and on your psyche. But here’s cause for celebration: this moment is begging to be met by those who have the courage to do so.
Spencer Lindquist is an intern at The Federalist and a senior at Pepperdine University where he studies Political Science and Rhetoric and Leadership and serves as Pepperdine’s College Republicans President. You can follow him on Twitter @SpencerLndqst and reach him at LSpencerLindquist@gmail.com.
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
Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 25 books and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire. | Courtesy of Michael Brown
Just type the words IRS, Christian, and Bible in your search engine and you’ll get a flood of results, most of them starting with headlines like this: “IRS denies Christian nonprofit tax exemption, saying biblical values are Republican.” Or this, “IRS denies tax-exempt status to Christian nonprofit group because ‘Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the Republican Party’.”
Naturally, there has been outrage among Christian conservatives over this ruling, pointing to this yet another example of the IRS’s anti-Christian, anti-conservative bias. That’s also why most of the commentary has focused on the egregious ruling itself, which is being appealed.
Yet, in the midst of this very wrong ruling, the IRS made a very right observation: by and large, the Republican Party is more aligned with biblical teaching than is the Democratic Party.
Of course, neither major party is fully aligned with God and His Word. And, without a doubt, the world of politics cannot be confused with the purity of the spiritual realm and the kingdom of God. We can also debate which party’s policies are closest to biblical values when it comes to helping the poor or the immigrant.
That’s why, on principle, even though I have voted for Republican candidates for years while not voting for a single Democrat, I am registered as an Independent. It’s just my way of saying that I cannot align myself fully with any political party.
At the same time, when it comes to important biblical values, in the great majority of cases, the Republican platform is more aligned with Scripture than is the Democratic platform, to the point of getting the backhanded recognition of the IRS.
As for the organization involved in this ruling, it is called Christians Engaged, and its stated purpose is: “to awaken, motivate, educate, and empower ordinary believers in Jesus Christ to.”
Their threefold emphasis is: “Pray for our nation and elected officials regularly. Vote in every election to impact our culture. Engage our hearts in some form of political education or activism for the furtherance of our nation.”
Yet when they applied for tax exempt status, they were rejected.
In the words of the official IRS ruling (I’m quoting the most relevant section), “Specifically, you educate Christians on what the Bible says in areas where they can be instrumental including the areas of sanctity of life, the definition of marriage, biblical justice, freedom of speech, defense, and borders and immigration, U.S. and Israel relations. The Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the [Republican Party] and candidates. This disqualifies you from exemption under IRC Section 501(c)(3).”
Again, the mocking headlines were well deserved, including this one, from RedState: “The IRS says if you believe in God and the Bible, you are working for the GOP.”
That’s why, for good reason, the ruling is being appealed by First Liberty Institute, which has argued that the IRS ruling “errs in three ways: 1) [it] invents a nonexistent requirement that exempt organizations be neutral on public policy issues; 2) [it] incorrectly concludes that Christians Engaged primarily serves private, nonexempt purposes rather than public, exempt purposes because he thinks its beliefs overlap with the Republican Party’s policy positions; and 3) [it] violates the First Amendment’s Free Speech, and Free Exercise, and Establishment clauses by engaging in both viewpoint discrimination and religious discrimination.”
Yet in the midst of the pushback against the IRS, many have missed the biting irony of the words of the ruling where biblical teaching is associated with the Republican Party. In large measure, the IRS got this exactly right.
As noted in RedState, “The Bible, yes, IRS, the word is capitalized, is not neutral on the sanctity of life. It is not neutral on homosexuality. It is not neutral on marriage. It is not neutral on justice.”
Let’s remember that the Democrats positioned themselves as the party of the Religious “Nones” (meaning, people with no religious affiliation).
And it is the Democrats who have become increasingly radical in their pro-abortion zeal.
And the Democrats who are pushing the Equality Act, which guts religious liberties in favor of LGBT extremism.
As I noted in September 2019, “There is no question about it. There is not even a desire to hide it. The Democrat Party continues to grow spiritually darker to the point of actually proclaiming itself the party of the religiously non-affiliated. Is it any surprise?”
Or, as I pointed out in August 2020 (with regard to the Biden-Sanders “Unity Plan”), “God is never mentioned in the document. Not once.” In contrast, “the word gender occurs 22 times.
“More importantly, ‘transgender’ occurs twice, and in very specific contexts: ‘we will act expeditiously to reinstate Department of Education guidance protecting transgender students’ rights under Title IX and make clear that schools shall not discriminate based on LGBTQ status.’”
In sum, “LGBTQ” is “mentioned 17 times in the plan” while “‘religion’ is mentioned once, ‘Christian’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘God’ are not mentioned at all, but ‘LGBTQ’ is mentioned 17 times. Need I say more?”
And what of the rising, virtually unchecked tide of anti-Zionism and antisemitism within the Democratic Party?
For good reason the IRS pointed to what “the Bible says” with regard to “U.S. and Israel relations.” Here, too, the Republican Party stands much closer to Scripture than does the Democratic Party.
So, while the IRS ruled quite wrongly in denying Christians Engaged tax-exempt status, it ironically got one thing right: if you teach the Bible accurately, by and large, you’ll end up siding with the Republicans rather than the Democrats.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Michael Brown (www.askdrbrown.org) is the host of the nationally syndicated Line of Fire radio program. He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and has served as a professor at a number of seminaries. He is the author of 40 books. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Finnish Member of Parliament, Päivi Räsänen. | ADF International
Law professors and scholars are calling on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom to pressure the State Department to sanction Finland’s prosecutor general for prosecuting a Christian politician who shared her biblical beliefs on sexuality and marriage. In an open letter published by Real Clear Politics last Friday, professors from Ivy League institutions like Harvard University, Yale University and Princeton University spoke out in defense of Päivi Räsänen and Bishop Juhana Pohjola. They both face criminal charges related to Räsänen expressing her Christian views on marriage.
Räsänen, a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, could face up to six years in prison after being charged with three counts of ethnic agitation related to statements she made expressing her beliefs pertaining to human sexuality and marriage.
Räsänen is the former chair of the Christian Democrats and a former interior minister who has served in Parliament for seven terms. The mother of five, who is married to a pastor and Bible college principal, has been under police investigation since June 2019.
She publicly voiced her opinion on marriage in a 2004 booklet on sexual ethics, describing marriage as between one man and one woman. She also expressed her views on a 2019 radio show and tweeted church leadership on the matter. Prosecutors determined that her previous statements disparage and discriminate against LGBT individuals and foment intolerance and defamation. The mother of five is adamant that her expressions are “legal and should not be censored.”
In their open letter, the professors argue that the prosecution of the politician for her remarks could “compel Finland’s clergy and lay religious believers to choose between prison and abandoning teachings of their various faiths.”
“The charges against Dr. Räsänen stem from her authorship of a 2004 booklet entitled, Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relationships Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity, published by the Luther Foundation,” they wrote. “In the booklet, Dr. Räsänen argues that homosexual activity should be recognized by the church as sinful based on the teachings of the Hebrew Bible and Christian scripture.”
“Second, the Prosecutor General has charged the Bishop-Elect of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland, Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, with one count of ethnic agitation for publishing Dr. Räsänen’s booklet,” the letter continues.
“The Prosecutor General’s pursuit of these charges against a prominent legislator and bishop sends an unmistakable message to Finns of every rank and station: no one who holds to the traditional teachings of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and several other religions on questions of marriage and sexual morality will be safe from state harassment should they, like Bishop Pohjola and Dr. Räsänen, express their moral and religious convictions.”
The letter argues that the prosecutions“constitute serious human rights abuses”because they violate Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 10 of the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights. Those documents affirm the right of an individual “to manifest his religion or belief in teaching.”
The professors urged commissioners serving on the congressionally-mandated independent commission tasked with advising the U.S. government on international religious freedom matters to urge Secretary of State Antony Blinken to sanction Finland Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen because of “a gross violation of human rights.”
The letter’s signatories include Princeton University law professor Robert P. George, Harvard University’s Learned Hand Professor of Law Emerita Mary Ann Glendon and Harvard constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule.
Other signatories include: Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; Middlebury College political science professor Keegan Callanan; Yale University history and religious studies professor Carlos Eire; Princeton University math professor Sergiu Klainerman; Princeton University international studies professor John B. Londregan; Harvard University African American studies lecturer Jacqueline C. Rivers; and attorney David Rivkin of the law firm BakerHostetler.
The signatories argue that Räsänen’s prosecution isn’t merely “mundane applications of a European-style ‘hate speech’ law.”
“No reasonable balance of the goods of public order, civil equality, and religious liberty can ever support this suppression of the right to believe and express one’s beliefs. The prosecutions are straightforward acts of oppression,” they write.
“To uphold the internationally recognized rights of freedom of expression and religious liberty, the United States must now respond to the abuses in Finland as it has recently responded to other violations of religious liberty in non-western nations.”
The letter points to how the U.S. government designated a Chinese government official as a human rights abuser for “his involvement in the detention and interrogation of Falun Gong practitioners for practicing their beliefs.”
“Prosecutor General Toiviainen’s status as a European official must not shield her from sanctions for her abuse of traditionalist Christians in Finland,” the letter argues.
In addition, the letter urges USCIRF to pressure Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to designate Toiviainen for sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows for sanctions to be placed on foreign officials believed to be responsible or complicit in severe human rights abuse.
“Prosecutor General Toiviainen and any line prosecutors who choose to assist her plainly meet this description,” the professors argue. The letter contends that there is “no statue of limitations on human rights violations of this magnitude.”
“Should calls by USCIRF to designate and sanction Prosecutor General Toiviainen and her accomplices fall on deaf ears, we respectfully request that USCIRF not simply let the matter drop,” they conclude.
Räsänen is represented by ADF International, which argues that her case is about the freedom to express religious beliefs in the public square without the fear of government investigation.
In a March statement, Räsänen said that she did not threaten, slander or insult anyone and that her comments were all “based on the Bible’s teachings on marriage and sexuality.” She vowed to defend her right to “confess” her faith.
“The more Christians keep silent on controversial themes, the narrower the space for freedom of speech gets,” she said.
Earlier this month, the European Evangelical Alliance voiced its support for Räsänen, asking if the prosecutor is “attempting to redefine human rights law.”
“Freedom of expression gives the right for anyone to share their opinion,” EEA General Secretary Thomas Bucher wrote in a statement. “The right to freedom of expression exists to legally protect those that express views which may offend, shock or disturb others.”
President Joe Biden’s new policy redefining sex puts doctors at risk, American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday. The Biden administration announced Monday that it would reinterpret “sex” in the context of healthcare anti-discrimination laws to include “sexual orientation”and “gender identity,” reversing a Trump administration policy that defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth.
“Make no mistake,” Schilling said. “The policy announced by HHS today is not about ‘fix[ing] a broken bone’ or ‘screen[ing] for cancer risk.’ No American was being denied access to these treatments for identifying as ‘LGBTQ.’ Rather, this policy is really about forcing hospitals and medical professionals to adhere to leftist ideology regarding sexuality and gender—and in particular to provide sex-change procedures to all comers, including children.”
The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will interpret Section 1557 and Title IX prohibitions on discrimination based on sex to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and on the basis of gender identity, the Department of Health and Human Services announced in a memo released Monday.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that people have a right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex and receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation. That’s why today HHS announced it will act on related reports of discrimination,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a Monday statement.
“Fear of discrimination can lead individuals to forgo care, which can have serious negative health consequences,” Becerra said. “It is the position of the Department of Health and Human Services that everyone — including LGBTQ people — should be able to access health care, free from discrimination or interference, period.”
APP President: Policy May Force Doctors To Violate Consciences Or Get Sued
Assistant Secretary for Health Dr. Rachel Levine also said in a statement that HHS seeks to “enhance the health and well-being of all Americans.‘
“All people need access to healthcare services to fix a broken bone, protect their heart health, and screen for cancer risk,” Levine said. “No one should be discriminated against when seeking medical services because of who they are.”
APP President Schilling told the Daily Caller News Foundation Monday that though Levine and Becerra paint the HHS move as one “all about lifesaving care for transgender people,” the HHS announcement is merely “a way for the federal government to use its full weight and coercion to do the most controversial aspects of the gender identity stuff, which is gender transitions for minors.’
“There’s not some rash across the country where gay people are going in to get their broken arm fixed and the doctor is like ‘Oh sorry, you’re gay. I’m not helping you,’” Schilling said. “We would know about those cases immediately.”
CHARLOTTE, NC – SEPTEMBER 06: Democratic presidential candidate, U.S. President Barack Obama (R) and Democratic vice presidential candidate, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden wave after accepting the nomination during the final day of the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena on September 6, 2012 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Schilling presented the DCNF with a hypothetical scenario in which parents take a child diagnosed with gender dysphoria to a doctor that does mastectomies. The doctor finds out that the child doesn’t have breast cancer, that the child is a 15-year-old girl who is gender dysphoric, Schilling suggested. If that doctor doesn’t perform the surgery, the parents can sue the doctor on civil rights grounds, Schilling said. He also noted that this scenario could play out similarly for doctors who have an issue prescribing puberty blockers to kids who wish to begin transitioning.
“Those doctors are also at risk,” Schilling said. “It’s basically forcing doctors to do off-label treatment for gender dysphoria, and it’s a total nightmare.”
The new policy reverses a June 2020 Trump era rule that had defined “sex” as gender assigned at birth and clarified that sex discrimination does not include abortion when it comes to health care and coverage. Former President Barack Obama’s administration had redefined sex discrimination in 2016 to include abortion and gender identity — defined as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”
Under the Trump era policy, HHS returned to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination “according to the plain meaning of the word ‘sex’ as male or female and as determined by biology.”
“HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress,” Roger Severino, former director of OCR, said in June 2020. “We are unwavering in our commitment to enforcing civil rights in healthcare.”
The Biden administration’s new interpretation will guide OCR in conducting investigations and processing complaints, an HHS press release said, but will not “itself determine the outcome in any particular case or set of facts.” HHS also noted that “OCR will comply with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.
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Imagine for a moment you’re a female weightlifter.
For years, you’ve started every day with a run. You spend grueling hours in the gym and live with the sore muscles as a testament to that. Your diet is just as strict and regimented as your workout routine — every calorie and macronutrient is accounted for, and you force yourself to drink protein shakes between every meal.
Feeling prepared and at the top of your game, you enter a state powerlifting competition. All of your hard work is about to pay off. After watching the women competing, you’re sure that first place is yours.
But after the women’s division winners are announced, a 280-pound man walks up. The judges hand him a gold medal, and then he raises his hands in a victory pose.
You get a second-place ribbon. Better luck next year.
This could have been the story of any woman at January’s United States Powerlifting Association Minnesota State Championship. Despite the countless years of gym time between all of the women there, a man with a single year of training under his belt walked home with not onlytwo women’s gold medals but one of their state records as well.
The man is JayCee Cooper, a 31-year-old amateur weightlifter who describes himself as “queer-n-trans” on his Instagram profile.
His championship victory didn’t sit right with everyone. The conservative clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson even weighed in on Cooper’s “accomplishment,” in his own sarcastic way.
“Such an impressive accomplishment,” Peterson wrote in a Twitter post. “Defeating all those women. And so quickly. And by such a margin. Miracle? Or narcissism of an incomprehensible quality?”
After sweeping the competition at the state championship, Cooper’s powerlifting ambitions were halted by an email from USA Powerlifting — the big dog of American lifting federations. As Cooper revealed in an interview with Compete Network: “The USAPL will not allow me to compete because I am a transfeminine person. And, according to them, it confers some sort of anatomical advantage, even though I’m not sure where they’re getting that ‘science.’”
Despite Cooper’s apparent lack of understanding about the fundamentals of biology, science is pretty clear on the subject of sex differences and physical ability. A Duke University study found that even Olympian Tori Bowie’s lifetime best 100-meter time (less than 11 seconds — an impressive speed) was shattered by men and boys over 15,000 times in a single year. And this is just for a 100-meter dash. Strength competitions will obviously have just as large of a disparity, if not a bigger one.
In the Compete Network interview, Cooper acknowledged he’s only been seriously into weight training for about a year. It’s a good bet the women he defeated at the competition have been training much, much longer than that.
Unfortunately for female athletes, it appears as though Cooper’s victory is emblematic of the unfair advantage they may often face in the future.
And leftists, obsessed with “transgender causes,” are abandoning the very women they claim to be supporting.
Jared is a husband, dad, and aspiring farmer. He was an infantryman in the Arkansas and Georgia National Guard. He has been an assignment editor for Conservative Tribune since 2017.
Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) wants relevancy so bad. And he’s decided that the LGBTQ community can help him get there.
Moreover, judicial confirmations bring out “Spartacus” when Booker gets on the world stage.
Recall Booker made headlines last September in his “I am Spartacus” moment. In that theatrical display, Booker moved to release sensitive documents during now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing. The punchline? The documents were not sensitive at all. And the only thing sensitive is Booker’s fragile ego.
In his latest “Drama Queen” display, Leftist nutbag Booker attempted to grill Neomi Rao, the nominee who will replace now-SCOTUS Justice Kavanaugh on the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C.
Booker: “Have you ever had any LGBTQ law clerks?”
Rao: “Senator, I’ve yet to be a judge. I don’t have law clerks.”
Booker: “I meant someone working for you.”
Currently, Rao serves as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. So she has no clerks.
Regardless of Neomi Rao having no clerks, consider the nature of this question.
When interviewing people for a job, who inquires about a potential employees sexuality? Aside from that being illegal, it’s just bad business. When you’re looking to fill a job, you should be concerned about a person’s ability to perform in the role, not sexuality.
But the question runs deeper. If you happened to hire a gay person, should you be expected to know it and provide a count? In other words, what did Booker expect Rao to say?
“Yes, Senator Booker. By my count, I’ve hired 23 LGBTQ employees!”
This is akin to “Yes, I have a black friend”.
Yet, Booker’s question was part of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate’s bid to explore her views on LGBTQ rights, given her past writings. You can bet her writings kept the playing field level for all Americans, regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. Yet Booker tries his “gotcha” moment.
#MeToo…Is this thing on?!
And what of the attack on Rao…an Asian woman? Where’s the Left’s outcry over this? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time, either.
In another clip, Booker berates Secretary of Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for forgetting President Trump’s comments in which he is reported to have referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”. Booker declares her “silence and amnesia is complicit.”
How would Leftists treat a Republican who asked such a dumb question of a Leftist female nominee?
But Rao showed class. And you can tell she wasn’t contrived in her answer to Booker follow-up. Frankly, her answer truly showcases the difference between Conservatives and Leftists.
She said:
“To be honest I don’t know the sexual orientation of my staff. I take people as they come, irrespective of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation. I treat people as individuals.”
Game. Set. Match.
Understand that Spartacus wants to be president. I’m not sure he’s aware that we had our first closeted gay president from 2008 to 2016. Perhaps Booker wants to be the first openly gay president?
Regardless, his and the Democrats’ incessant need to check people’s pulses on sexuality and other impertinent issues will be their undoing.
The Left’s intersectional coalition is imploding… exactly as predicted. What do you EXPECT will happen among groups ‘united’ by their grievances?
There’s a really good reason the Left has to push their bogus ‘sexist,racist, homophobe’ line so hard that it’s beyond parody. If they ever stop hating ‘the evil Republicans’ long enough to take a good look at whose on ‘their’ team, they will realize they aren’t really fighting for the same things.
And now the LGBT ‘alliance’ is starting to crumble. How ‘bisexual’will maintain its place in the acronym in our Brave New Gender-Fluid World is ‘problematic’ enough, but now Lesbians are taking issue with the transgender crowd.
What got the lesbians upset with the trans activists? Here’s a headlne from last summer:
London Pride: Anti-trans activists disrupt parade by lying down in the street to protest ‘lesbian erasure’ LGBT groups condemn protesters who describe trans movement as ‘anti-lesbianism’
You see more of that sentiment here:
Kara Dansky, a feminist lawyer and spokeswoman for Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), spoke against the so-called “Equality Act” at the Heritage Foundation on Monday, denouncing the transgender and gender identity movement as anti-women and anti-lesbian in particular. Her remarks echoed the London Pride March sign declaring that “Transactivism Erases Lesbians.”
“This is a men’s Rights movement — this is really a men’s rights movement,”Dansky declared, calling for men to stand up for women and denounce the transgender movement.
“Overwhelmingly women have been resisting this,”Hacsi Horvath, a man who once identified as a woman and underwent surgery, said a few seconds before Dansky’s remark. “And it’s really shocking how many men on the internet are defending the whole trans thing. Straight men are all about the trans, and you have to wonder what the heck is going on.”
Horvath agreed with Dansky in condemning transgender activism as a “Men’s Rights movement,” and Julia Beck — a lesbian and former member of the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ Commission — nodded in agreement. Beck had been kicked off of the commission for opposing transgender identity.
“I got kicked off of the Baltimore mayor’s LGBTQ commission — as the only lesbian — simply for stating biological facts,”Beck said. “I was found guilty of ‘violence.’ My crime? Using male pronouns to talk about a convicted male rapist who identifies as transgender and prefers female pronouns.”
Read More: PJMedia
Lesbian thrown under the bus for using the wrong pronoun. And she’s wondering why straight men aren’t standing up for men’s rights. Where does it all end?
It ends when everyone realizes that the Conservative approach of general rights for all and special rights for none — with the government getting the hell out of our way for most aspects of our lives — is the best path to genuine personal freedom of every kind.
Many in the media truly believe they are serving children’s best interests by promoting the LGBTQ agenda. If only they would just inform people based on facts obtained through objective investigation.
Well, it’s official now: Jazz Jennings – born 18 years ago as Jared, with normally functioning male parts – now has female parts.
Despite a “complication” requiring a second procedure, Jazz is happy to tell her throngs of adoring fans that her surgery was a success and that now “I just get to be myself, be in the body that I’ve always wanted.”
In case you missed it somewhere along the way – as you worked those long, hard hours scraping up enough money to pay the rent and feed your family – in 2007, when Jared was just seven years old, he became the poster-child for childhood transgenderism. ABC’s Barbara Walters gave the young boy the platform he needed to become a wealthy celebrity – as a girl, Jazz. Many other media appearances soon followed. Jazz quickly became a star, with her own TV show.
Alluring attention
Imagine for a moment being seven years old and having adoring adult celebrities praise you – on TV, in front of millions of viewers – as a brave, pioneering role model. Imagine, while still transitioning out of baby teeth, having your own TV show – on the implied condition that you continue as the brave young transitioning pioneer. How would all that fame and adulation affect you? Who, whether child or adult, wouldn’t feed on such flattering attention?
Now imagine you are another seven- to twelve-year-old watching the Jazz interviews – or her own TV show. It must appear pretty captivating – pretty enticing. Is it possible that our media are feeding the surging childhood interest in transgenderism?
It is plausible that ROGD represents an ego-syntonic maladaptive coping mechanism for some AYAs and that peer group and online influences may contribute to its development. It is unknown whether the gender dysphoria of rapid-onset gender dysphoria is temporary or likely to be long-term. The elevated number of friends per friendship group who became transgender-identified, the pattern of cluster outbreaks of transgender-identification in these friendship groups, the substantial percentage of friendship groups where the majority of the members became transgender-identified, and the peer group dynamics observed all serve to support the plausibility of social and peer contagion for ROGD.
In other words, “Look at all the attention Jazz is getting. That’s so cool!”Okay, that’s clearly in considerably more vernacular phrasing than anything seen in the Brown study. But kids don’t read those kinds of studies; they’re the subjects of such studies. And if you read between the lines, that appears to be what’s happening.
Before I get deluged with angry replies telling me the above-cited Brown study has been debunked, let me elaborate. Lisa Littman, who led the Brown University study, is assistant professor of the Practice of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown. I won’t take up your time by listing all her credentials. Please go see them for yourself. Prior to this study no one questioned Dr. Littman’s credentials or her objectivity. But these days the preferred method of operation in refuting studies is censorship rather than open debate. After heated objections from LGBTQ groups, Dr. Littman’s published study, previously posted on the Brown University website, has been removed.
When my father came out as a woman back in the 1980s, the very thought of changing one’s gender was foreign to nearly everyone. Post Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner, transgenderism has become the progressive crusade du jour, and the numbers appear to be growing. The generally accepted percentage of adult transgenders in the U.S is about half of one percent. But a recent study of high schoolers has pegged the percentage at about three percent. While three percent might seem insignificant, it’s dramatically larger than half a percent. If the percentage has grown by a factor of six over the preceding generation, that is truly significant.
Reporters or promoters?
So … are the media merely reporting the trend or successfully promoting it? Thomas Sowell wisely wrote:
Media bias in editorials and columns is one thing. Media fraud in reporting ‘facts’ in news stories is something else …. The issue is not what various journalists or news organizations’ editorial views are. The issue is the transformation of news reporting into ideological spin, along with self-serving taboos and outright fraud.
Many in the media truly believe they are serving kids’ best interests by promoting the LGBTQ agenda. But the role of the media is simply to inform based on facts obtained through objective investigation. The role of the media’s consumers is to choose how to interpret and apply those facts.
American media, stick to your job, please.
Denise Shick is the founder and executive director of Help 4 Families, a Christian ministry that compassionately reaches out to family members and brings understanding of the emotional and spiritual issues that families face when a loved one is gender-confused. She is the author of several books, including “My Daddy’s Secret,” “When Hope Seems Lost,” and “Understanding Gender Confusion – A Faith Based Perspective.”
College Professor Attempts To Make The Bible More LGBTQ Friendly.
The Bible, the holy book that guides millions of people worldwide. Many take comfort in the scripture and weekly lessons that are doled out from it via sermons. The Bible has been translated numerous times throughout the ages making the word of god more accessible to all. But now a liberal teacher, Gwynn Kessler of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, has found a way to tarnish it. The teacher plans to hold a class called “Queering the Bible.”
Queering the Bible is a class that will supposedly “destabilize long-held assumptions about what the bible–and religion–says about gender and sexuality.” The class will be looking at the scripture that is aimed at LGBTQ oriented people as well as reinterpreting the Bible in new ways such as this controversial statement: “If we can point out places in traditional writings where God is nurturing, forgiving, and loving,” the course description asks, “does that mean that God is feminine, or female?”
“Queering the Bible” is scheduled for the fall of 2018. The class will cover controversial gender topics while picking apart the bible.
Dr. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and a spiritual advisor to President Trump, warned about the spiritual dangers of twisting God’s word. “In suggesting that God is ‘queer’ Swarthmore College is guilty of nothing short of modern day idolatry BLASPHAMY,” Jeffress said.
When you read the Bible you will discover that God reserved His harshest condemnation for individuals and nations that practiced idolatry – creating an imaginary god who conformed to a culture’s immorality,” Jeffress said.”
There is nothing wrong with discussion and classes focusing on the bible. It’s the dissecting, cherrypicking, and trying to revise the Bible to be more LGBTQ friendly that’s the issue. The bible is a holy book recognized by millions it should be treated with respect as such.
College course teaches students about ‘queering the Bible’
Class ‘destabilizes long held assumptions’ about what’s in the Bible; university refuses to comment
Swarthmore College is offering a course next year that will survey “queer and trans* readings of biblical texts” by using “queer and trans* theoretical approaches,” with faculty staying silent on the specifics of the course material.
“Queering the Bible” is set to launch next fall and will be instructed by Gwynn Kessler, an associate professor of religion, according to Swarthmore’s course catalog.
The course, which is being offered through Swarthmore’s Religion Department, promises to “[introduce] students to the complexity of constructions of sex, gender, and identity in one of the most influential literary works produced in ancient times.”
“By reading the Bible with the methods of queer and trans* theoretical approaches,” the catalog advertises, “this class destabilizes long held assumptions about what the bible–and religion–says about gender and sexuality.”
It appears that the Swarthmore Religion Department will offer no other Bible-centric courses next fall apart from this one. Out of around ten listed courses that explicitly involve Bible study at Swarthmore, “Queering the Bible” appears to be the only one taking place in fall of 2018. Only one other Bible-related course, a class teaching the grammar and vocabulary necessary to read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, is offered during that time.
Repeated attempts by The College Fix to learn more about the course, and whether or not any additional Bible courses would be offered at Swarthmore next year, were met with silence. Multiple emails to Gwynn Kessler and the Swarthmore Religion Department, as well as phone calls to both, were not returned.
According to her faculty profile, Kessler’s research focuses in part on “rabbinic constructions of gender and identity.” Her work is also “situated within, and suffused with, postmodern, feminist, and queer theoretical approaches.”
In addition to “Queering the Bible,” Swarthmore College’s religion department also offers “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology,” a course that “examines feminist and queer writings about God, explores the tensions between feminist and queer theology, and seeks to stretch the limits of gendering-and sexing-the divine.”
“If we can point out places in traditional writings where God is nurturing, forgiving, and loving,” the course description asks, “does that mean that God is feminine, or female?”
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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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American Family Association
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