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The Left Has Effectively Banned Christian Kids from Public Pools, Libraries, And Summer Camps


POSTED BY: JOY PULLMANN | MAY 23, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/05/23/the-left-has-effectively-banned-christian-kids-from-public-pools-libraries-and-summer-camps/

girl scouts at camp

Forcing children to sleep and undress next to kids of the opposite sex effectively puts up a ‘Christian kids need not apply’ sign on public recreation activities.

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This spring I got an email from 4-H, a club I participated in as a child, effectively communicating that my Christian family need not apply to summer camps and other activities sponsored by the quasi-public organization. (County governments often sponsor 4-H activities.) This email was signed by a 4-H staffer who put pronouns in his signature and told me, “Youth are assigned cabins based on gender indicated on the 4-H camp application and registration,” suggesting children were roomed by gender identity rather than sex.

Naturally, I was concerned that my tween daughter and son might be roomed overnight with an emotionally disturbed camper or counselor if I enrolled them in this camp. Based on numerous reported stories, I know that if this did happen, the camp likely would not even tell me, so I’d only hear about it after the fact from my kids. When I emailed again to confirm I was understanding this correctly, the staffer refused to answer definitively whether campers could be placed in private facilities such as bedrooms and bathrooms with transgender individuals. That’s an unacceptable risk to children’s well-being, as well as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Given how socially contagious LGBT identification is, it’s not just about transgender issue but also exposing children to sexual information and pressures far earlier than they are ready. Hand in hand with grouping children by gender identity is forcing conversations about what that means, which pushes children earlier and earlier to declare and investigate sexual behaviors. This is destabilizing to their identity, not “affirming” it.

Given 4-H national’s commitment to the toxic “diversity, equity, inclusion” ideology, the fact that my Christian kids now cannot equally access lots of their programming due to 4-H’s choice to sexualize their activities was no surprise. But I still wanted to see in writing that my red county in my red state was indeed giving tax breaks and other government privileges to an organization that might room children overnight with troubled people of the opposite sex against their parents’ will. The answer is yes. (Thanks, Republicans!)

Everywhere We Go, Someone Wants to Talk Dirty to My Kids on the Public Dime

It’s not just places kids get naked. It’s everywhere. I cannot take my children to the public library anymore, either, because the shelves are so full of pornographic and hostile books that it’s not a safe place for them. There, too, self-righteous LGBT activism has resulted in effectively banning my children from yet another public place and weaponizing my own tax dollars against my children’s safety. The shelves and displays in our library are full of books telling my children lies such as that “men can become women” and “some boys have girl brains” and “gender is a social construct.” I’m happy to have these conversations with my children when they are ready, but I know my six-year-old, and he is not ready. My eight-year-old is not ready, and neither are my 10- and 11-year-old, frankly. It’s grotesque and evil to put books at their eye level that deliberately aim to confuse them about something so deep and important. To do this is to usurp not only my parental wisdom and authority over my own children but to usurp my children’s right to an innocent, emotionally secure childhood.

It Won’t Happen, And When It Does, You Bigots Will Deserve It

These all prove that rapidly rewriting American laws to ignore sexual differences has effectively banned Christian families from equal participation in public facilities and activities. It’s not just Christian families, it’s any family that thinks it imprudent to lodge their sometimes-undressed daughters with an emotionally traumatized male at summer camp or to obtain swimming lessons at a public pool. This all descends from the massive bait and switch inherent to the LGBT policy agenda. We were told it was only about extending government sanction to what consenting adults do behind closed doors. We were told it was about allowing people to visit loved ones in hospice and inherit without legal difficulties. It wasn’t going to affect our families, remember?

Anyone who raised concerns about how calling sexual activities that cannot create a family “marriage” would affect children, faith, and families was smeared as a know-nothing bigot. Anyone who wanted to logically think through how legally equating men to women in the social keystone of marriage would have a domino effect on many other laws and social arrangements was also smeared as a hateful bigot, all the way up to highly intelligent and reasoned Supreme Court dissents. It’s the same toxic play we’ve seen work ever since: Anyone with a contrary opinion or even unanswered questions is not engaged, but simply smeared.

Men and Women Are Different, And That Matters

The fact is that equating homosexual relationships to marriage very often requires explaining adult sexual behaviors to tiny children. Erasing the differences between the sexes in marriage also leads irrevocably to erasing the differences between the sexes everywhere else, from bathrooms to pools to summer camps. Breaking down all sexual differences also results in discrimination against religious expressions that acknowledge men and women are different, and these differences are divinely ordered.

Thus upending the natural sexual order has resulted, not in the falsely promised “equality,” but in simply flipping which social system will rule. For what we were prevented from discussing or even seeing was the fact that these two regimes — treating the sexes as different and complementary versus seeing them as neutered and interchangeable — are mutually exclusive.

You cannot have both transgender swimmers and single-sex sports competition. You cannot have both the sexual profligacy pushed by the dominant LGBT activist class and protect children from sexualized childhoods and predatory social situations. You must have one or the other.

In the absence of clarity about this reality combined with effective use of power on reality’s behalf, abrasive, antisocial activists have fully taken over every public space. Any further sorties are merely tinkering around the edges of their all-encompassing kingdom.

Children Are No Longer a Protected Class, They’re Targets for Groomers

So instead of achieving equality, what we have really achieved is the subversion of children’s developmental needs to adult desires. Instead of equality, we have replaced legal preferences for the only sexual arrangement that produces the most stable future citizens — lifelong married biological parents — with legal preferences for sexual arrangements that harm children and send religious folk to the back of the public bus.

Therefore, all who believe in protecting children from marinating in sexual imagery and ideas everywhere they go are the new underclass in our political regime, and in many cases no Republican officials will even recognize our legitimate concerns, let alone fight for our daughters. That’s certainly the case here in Indiana, where Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb won’t sign bare-minimum legislation protecting girls’ sports and nobody is even talking about making our libraries, camps, and pools safe for families (even though that’s one of the few value-added policies a state like Indiana can offer its citizens).

Many of our major public and private institutions are making the public square completely hostile to a happy childhood and faith. Their “solution” to alleged bigotry was institutionalizing actual bigotry. “Our kind” aren’t wanted in “their” territory, you see. Maybe we would be allowed to have separate pools and summer camps funded by our own money, as long as the ACLU doesn’t sue them out of existence like they do Christian hospitals and foster care agencies.

What we weren’t told was that letting homosexuals out of the closet would require stuffing all the children and Christians inside.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. In 2013-14 she won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship for in-depth reporting on Common Core national education mandates. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Law, Culture Wars, and the Christian


http://barbwire.com/2014/04/06/law-culture-wars-christian/#pgtW9pMsROJPdTmt.99
 
Bill Muehlenberg
on 6 April, 2014 at 06:50

biblicallaw-and-justiceLaw and legal issues are of course a vital component of life. And for good parts of human history the laws of God stood over, and greatly influenced, the laws of men. But in the secular West today this is becoming more and more rare, and increasingly we find the rise of ungodly, if not anti-God, law.

This comes in many forms, including so-called anti-discrimination, equal opportunity, and anti-vilification laws. These are being used to stifle Christians from sharing the gospel, forcing them to violate their own consciences, and keeping them from speaking out publicly about important social and moral issues. We see examples of this happening all the time.
Today law in the West is largely in the hands of those who adhere to the worldview of secular humanism. This is reflected on a daily basis in a whole host of areas: laws and legislation passed, court and judicial decisions, sentencing for crime, activist agendas promoted through law, and so on.

Judicial Activism

Let me focus on that last area I just mentioned: judicial activism. This is where judges who are pushing radical agendas effectively take the law into their own hands, and promote militant social engineering causes. The most recent example of this was when the High Court ruled on a NSW case, actually claiming that there are no longer two genders, but people can now have a “non-specific” third gender! I discuss that bizarre case in detail here: Aussie Court Rules Against Biology — and Redefines Reality.

The sad truth is, all over the Western world we are witnessing the rise of judicial activism. We find the active political involvement of judges in contentious social issues. The problem is, judges — often unelected and unaccountable — instead of legislators, are making and repealing laws, and internationalising law as well.

Judges have overstepped their bounds, and their agendas are often at odds with the majority of those they claim to serve. In fact, far too often the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of judges. This usurpation of the democratic process should be of concern to all of us.

The rule of law is of utmost importance, and judges are to be neutral in its application, and not seek to push their own political and social agendas. Judges are meant to serve the people and the laws the people helped to make, and not rewrite the law books and promote Political Correctness and social radicalism. But that sadly has been exactly the case for a number of decades now.

Judicial activism can take many forms: it may simply mean that judges are speaking out on controversial ethical and political issues when such pronouncements are not really proper to the role of a judge. Or worse, it can mean using one’s position as a judge to not just apply the law but to radically reinterpret and rewrite the law, to suit trendy political changes or to enforce a stifling Political Correctness.

This has certainly been the case in the US, where in the past half century a whole raft of radical judicial decisions have been made on such controversial issues as abortion, euthanasia and homosexual rights. As Robert Bork has commented, we are beginning to understand “what it means to be ruled by an oligarchy. The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control” and put into the hands of a few radical judges.

Phyllis Schlafly minces no words when she laments “the judicial supremacists who have been systematically dismantling the architecture of our unique, three-branch constitutional republic, and replacing it with an Imperial Judiciary.”

And with judicial decisions attacking the very nature of the moral order — as in its pro-death and anti-family decisions — one has to ask if the courts are still to be regarded as instruments of justice. As Robert George notes, the “worst abuses of human rights have come from the least democratic branch of government — the judiciary.”

And of course our radicalised law schools are fueling all this. Today we have feminist legal theory, queer legal theory, Marxist legal theory, deconstructionist legal theory, and so on. Every kind of radicalism around seems to gravitate towards our law schools. And with good reason. Activists know that if they can take over our legal faculties, our courts and our judiciaries, they can impose their radical agenda on the rest of society.

In addition to the law schools, there are a host of legal reform bodies, often government supported (and taxpayer funded). They too tend to have a radical and secular agenda they are promoting, be it drug decriminalisation, the legalisation of prostitution, the decriminalisation of abortion, or the promotion of homosexual rights.

Cultural Marxism

So how did all this arise? Antinomianism has always been with us, ever since the Garden of Eden of course. But the anti-God agenda of recent times — including judicial activism and the radicalisation of law — has come about, not by accident, but quite deliberately. The field of law, like so many other areas, has been strategically targeted by those who want to overthrow the West and its Judeo-Christian foundations.

Let me mention just one important component of this. In the 1930s Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci said that there is more than one way to take over a nation. There is the obvious method of external use of force — armed rebellion and revolution and the like. But a nation can also be subverted from within — without firing a shot.

He made the case that radicals should take over the institutions of power and influence: the media, politics, the universities, and the courts. He spoke of the “long march through the institutions.” He knew that by so doing an internal revolution could easily take place. Sadly, we have seen his strategy almost fully realised now.

Indeed, no one could have foreseen how quickly and easily the institutions did crumble before the radical activists. The moral, cultural and social blitzkrieg has been as thorough as it has been all-consuming. And the success of this revolution, as Roger Kimball reminds, “can be measured not in toppled governments but in shattered values.”

How do we turn things around?

As to the radical law activists, much can be done: Their activities need to be exposed, and their public funding needs to be curtailed. In addition, alternative legal bodies need to be set up to reflect mainstream values, and to challenge the judicial activists. All these strategies are long term goals, and require time, effort and commitment from those concerned about the way things are now headed.

Indeed, reversing the decline of the West and its ungodly direction is no small task. And redeeming law in the West is just one part of this process. Much would need to be done in many areas. But let me speak to just one facet of this. A large part of our problem is that we Christians have allowed secular humanists and others to take over the field of law while we have simply pulled out.

Thus we are no longer being salt and light in this vital area as we are meant to be. By abandoning law — and most other spheres of power and influence — we have basically lost so many of these battles by default. We have handed these important areas over to our enemies, and we wonder why we keep losing here.

We need Christians to reclaim every area of life. That is because Christ should be Lord over every area of life. After all, he is the one who created politics, and law, and the arts, etc. These are parts of his original cultural mandate (see Genesis 1:28).

But we have sat back and allowed God’s enemies to take over all these areas. It is time for us to wake from our slumber, and get back into all these realms. So we need Christian lawyers and judges and law professors. And of course they need to be guided soundly by the Christian worldview.

Simply being a Christian in law, but soaking up the secular mindset and worldview, will not be all that helpful. We need to think Christianly here, and seek to promote Biblical values and ideas in the legal realm. So Christian participation in all areas of society, strongly informed by a biblical worldview, is imperative if we want to see some of these areas turned around for the glory of God.

For too long Christians have pulled out of the surrounding culture, and allowed the other side to take control. It is time we once again take seriously the idea of the Lordship of Christ, and take on board our responsibilities to be salt and light in every part of life — law included.

God is the ultimate source and author of law. But law in the West today has been hijacked by the secular humanists in their war against God. Christians need to re-enter the battle.

Image credit: http://www.peacemakersinstitute.com

Read more at http://barbwire.com/2014/04/06/law-culture-wars-christian/#zzMiyHpiIp0c1Ogc.99

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