This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

The Mouse that Whored.

Disney has sold-out its family-oriented principles for the sake of more money and more influence. At first, this seems counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t Disney lose lots of money once its family base discovered that it is actually anti-family?

Not necessarily. As Daniel Greenfield points out in a recent piece, half of Disney’s movie business is targeted at “adults with no children.” Even more surprising, 60 % of Disneyland visitors were adults with no children, and only 37% of visitors to Disney World had children under 18. “The largest demographic for the theme parks like the movies,” says Greenfield, “are millennials.” Read more

On the New York Times’ Terribly Simplistic View of the Family.

Curiously, one of the scholars who the Times cites to make their weak case is Vern Bengtson from the University of Southern California. But Dr. Bengtson is actually a big proponent of the importance of married mothers and fathers, which is the glue that holds the actual nuclear family together.

One of professor Bengtson’s most notable books is Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations, by Oxford University Press. We are great fans of his work here at Focus on the Family as he explains that parents and grandparents are THE most effective influencers of childhood faith, with no close second or third. Read more

Subsidizing Single Moms Is Not A Substitute For Fathers.

A new study for the RAND Corporation claims to have found that problems our children and society face are not because of the lack of dads, and in fact fathers are not needed at all. According to Kathryn Edwards, the researcher behind the study, the problem is that the government is not spending enough money on subsidizing single parenthood.

This is sheer folly. Doing so would not only perpetuate the problem, but exacerbate it. All one needs to do is look at the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s, which threw billions and billions of dollars to supposedly solve the issues of fatherlessness and poverty, and failed. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

United Nations calls for more regulations to be placed on homeschooling.

According to the UN report, the presence of “non-state actors” in education, which refers primarily to educators in the private schooling sector but also mentions parents involved in homeschooling, promotes “inequity” and “privilege,” and therefore the solution is for governments to consolidate “all” education into a “single system.” Read more

So you have a teenager now? My 5 tips.

Having raised eight teenagers hasn’t made me an expert. What it has done is make me realize how inadequate I am — and how God can be counted on to work with whatever a parent gives him.

It does mean that I have a checklist of best practices, though. Here it is. Read more

New Poll Finds What Most Americans Think About Teaching K-3 Children About Sexual Orientation, Transgender Issues.

The majority of Americans support a ban on teaching young children about sexual orientation and transgender issues in public schools, a new poll has found. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Attempt to use war in Ukraine to broaden access to abortion.

The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine has brought governments and organizations together to save lives, relocate refugees and provide the necessities of life, especially food, to those who remain in Ukraine.

Pro-abortion organizations, however, view the growing emergency as an opportunity to change sovereign laws restricting abortion, provide abortion-inducing drugs in humanitarian kits, establish free abortion, fund pro-abortion NGOs and block funding to groups working to help Ukrainian refugees if the organizations oppose abortion. Read more

Canadian church hosts controversial assisted suicide ceremony for member with ALS.

In 2016, Canada passed a law legalizing physician-assisted suicide, with the law limiting access to citizens or permanent residents who were at least 18 years old and had “a serious and incurable disease, illness or disability” that included “enduring and intolerable suffering.”

Last year, the Canadian Parliament expanded the law to include those with non-life-threatening disabilities, though it would still prohibit the procedure for those suffering from mental illness.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler Jr. denounced the revision last year, seeing it as proof of how physician-assisted suicide was a slippery slope. Read more

The Golden State has become the ‘Gangrene State’.

Under this proposed new legislation, mothers would not be held criminally responsible for actively or neglectfully killing their hours-old to weeks-old infants. And depending on how a court defines the word “perinatal,” that timeframe could be expanded up to a year or more. This bill would also protect anyone who aids or assists the mother in exercising her “right” to kill and, furthermore, allows her to sue any law enforcement department which arrests or charges her for hurting or killing the baby.

The thinking behind the bill is that if a woman tries to have an abortion, but the abortion gets botched and the child survives, the woman should have the ability to carry through with ending the child’s life without repercussions. The wording of the bill, however, essentially opens up a floodgate for murdering babies for any reason and under any circumstances. Read more

Religion

COERCION AND CONVERSION THERAPY.

Efforts at supporting individuals who wish to order their sexual identities within the heterosexual norms of traditional human society strike me as reasonable, if pursued with respect and love. For young people in particular who struggle with a sense of their own biological identity as male or female, such efforts seem to me morally compelling. The letter in question offers little in terms of rationale for the signatories’ support of the “ban.” But a few key words offer a window onto the core of their concern: “pressure,” “manipulation,” and “coercion.” It seems that, according to the signatories, encouraging people to live the sexual lives ordered by their biological sex is a form of oppression. This strikes me as completely misconceived. Read more

Spain: Atheism and agnosticism on the rise in pandemic times.

According to the latest report by the Ferrer i Guàrdia Foundation, called Feminism, religions and freedom of conscience, the pandemic has accelerated the loss of religiosity among the population in Spain.

One fact highlighted by the Foundation is that for the first time, among young adults under the age of 34, the number of people who consider themselves non-religious is now a majority. Read more

Biden to roll back Trump conscience protections for healthcare workers.

The Biden administration will soon propose an end to the Trump administration’s religious conscience rule that allowed healthcare workers to object to performing services that contradicted their religious or moral beliefs, such as abortions or gender transitions. Read more

Sexuality

Florida Follows the Science With New Guidelines on Transgender Treatment for Kids.

The Florida Department of Health released new guidelines Wednesday about treating gender dysphoria in children. Unlike the recent guidance from the Biden administration, Florida’s guidance doesn’t promote aggressive medical interventions for minors who are struggling with gender dysphoria. Read more

Be careful not to allow ‘transgender’ news stories to accustom you to their lunacy.

Prior to the year 2000, not a single country on Earth accepted that marriage could be defined as a relationship between two men or two women. Twenty-two years later, most international bodies have enshrined these brand-new definitions as fundamental rights, and label those who still hold to the traditional view held by most of Earth’s population as bigots. That’s how fast change can happen—overnight, historically speaking. People may have condemned or mocked the idea that a millennia-old institution could be redefined by a handful of activists and revolutionaries, but here we are. The younger generation of voters don’t even remember what society was like before. Read more

Democratic congresswoman celebrates Drag Queen Story Hour for providing ‘well rounded’ LGBT education.

Drag Story Hour NYC, a citywide branch of its global parent organization, involves local drag performers reading picture books, singing songs, and teaching drag “as a form of dress up and play” to children as young as three, according to the group’s website. One of its self-proclaimed goals is to teach children to “learn to see beyond the pink and blue gender binary and celebrate difference in themselves and others.”

In 2018, drag queen Dylan Pontiff admitted to a committee that drag queen story hour events are deliberately for “grooming” the next generation to accept LGBT ideology. Read more