This Week‘s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

After the ‘Respect for Marriage Act’, will the US follow Spain down the ‘disrespect for marriage’ rabbit hole?

Consider Spain, which legalised same-sex marriage in 2005, ten years before Obergefell v Hodges. After almost two decades of experience, it is moving on to bigger and better things.

Next week Ione Belarra (who belongs to Podemos, a party at the extreme left of the left-wing) will present a draft of a new law on families to the Spanish Parliament. This lists 16 kinds of families, according to an exclusive in the ABC newspaper.

The bill’s explanatory memorandum states: “The family no longer exists, only families, in the plural, exist”. Based on rulings by Spain’s Constitutional Court, it declares that “the concept of family is not limited to those of matrimonial origin”. Read more

The Burden of Being a Family.

As some of the financial benefits to marriage have eroded, it can be tempting to use policy to make family formation more attractive. The rising median age at first marriage and first birth, however, largely arise from a mix of technological progress and preference for career, which aren’t things policies can reverse. Better solutions come from civil society, where entrepreneurs work to find solutions to the everyday problems modern parents face and religious communities help young adults order their priorities. Read more

If Marriage Can Mean Anything, It Will Soon Mean Nothing.

If you’re paying attention, you can see that the Senate’s recent 62-37 vote for cloture on HR 8404 puts us one step closer to abolishing state recognition of marriage entirely. That’s where this train is headed.

This will happen the same way such things always happen — through a demonization campaign that frames skeptics as bigots who are guilty of discrimination. That’s how you get Democrat-pliable Republicans such as Mitt Romney and craven Supreme Court justices like Anthony Kennedy to sign on. That’s how you manufacture a public opinion cascade, warning average Americans that they’ll be pummeled with lawsuits and ostracism if they dare think out loud. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

American Girl wants to trans your daughter.

American Girl dolls are a rite of passage for countless little girls across the United States. American Girl is to girls what Lego is to boys. Unfortunately, American Girl has chosen to strip away all innocence and teach girls how they can leave their girlhood behind and become boys if they feel like it.

Recently, they published a book titled, A Smart Girl’s Guide: Body Image by Mel Hammond. While on the surface the book appears to present a perfectly upstanding and relevant topic for tween girls, the content of the book is deceptive and dangerous, promoting LGBTQ ideology to potentially millions of young girls. Read more

Senators Press HHS as Whistleblower Alleges Unaccompanied Children Being Transferred to Criminals.

A Veritas journalist found one illegal immigrant female minor who corroborated Rodas’s concerns at an address Rodas provided. The minor told the journalist that her sponsor, who claims to be her aunt, had forced her into situations of sexual abuse: “She was pimping me and I didn’t like that. She would pimp me to men.”

“The tax dollars of people who are listening are paying to put children in the hands of criminals,” Rodas said of what she has witnessed. “[Most people] have no idea that children are going to unrelated people. That children are definitely—we have proof, evidence—that they are being recruited and transported. They are then in debt bondage.” Read more

Biden health chief confirms admin’s support for ‘transitioning’ gender-confused children.

U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra has reiterated that the Biden administration believes in “gender-transition” procedures for minors at taxpayer expense, doubling down on one of the Democrat Party’s most contentious positions. Read more

Sanctity of Life

A referendum in France could soon ask whether abortion should become a constitutional right.

With a large majority of 337 votes for and 32 against, the lower house of the French parliament approved a daft law which would enshrine abortion rights in the Constitution.

The text says that “no one can infringe the right to voluntary termination of pregnancy and contraception”. The law will now be submitted to the Senate.

A referendum would be the last step to make abortion a constitutional right in France. Read more

Bill Gates Sends $7 Billion to Africa That Will Promote Abortion as Population Control.

“Constantly reducing maternal mortality, constantly reducing neonatal mortality, under-5 mortality, that’s really the metric that drives our foundation,” said Gates while announcing the four-year pledge on November 17 in Nairobi. While laudable in theory, it is imperative that we ask—what will this money actually do?

International development funding inevitably comes with strings attached, and more often than not, those strings are tied to ideological agendas. Case in point: the Gates Foundation’s aggressive track record of abortion promotion, which stands in sharp contrast to the robust pro-life culture of many African countries. Abortion is illegal or heavily restricted across most of the continent. But money has a way of maneuvering around the law, and ultimately, much of the reason for pushing tremendous sums on developing countries is to dismantle established laws that protect unborn life. In this context, $7 billion could go a long way to.ward undermining what people actually want for their countries. Read more

Northern Ireland formally authorizes legal abortion, will fund abortionist recruitment and training.

Northern Ireland has announced that a permanent abortion “service” will now be established, allowing for the recruitment and training of abortionists.

In 2019, the United Kingdom forced legalized abortion upon Northern Ireland, with the mandate taking effect in 2020. By 2021, the number of abortions had skyrocketed, but the British government wanted an even greater expansion of abortion. However, the BBC has reported that the Northern Ireland Department of Health never established a centrally commissioned rollout of abortion — until now. Read more

Religion

Ukraine considering ban on churches tied to Russia; authorities raid houses of worship.

Ukraine is planning to move against churches within its borders affiliated with Russia, which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy argues will help the war effort.

Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council recently told the government to make a law to ban any church that might be taking orders from Moscow, Reuters reported last Friday. Read more

Troubling trends: is the Christian era coming to a close?

Secularisation is decimating the world’s largest faith group. We live in precarious times. The world is changing in ways we could not fathom a short forty years ago. Believing Christians, pro-family advocates and patriotic folks are fast becoming today’s marginalised communities. Read more

Fact-Checking 7 Claims by Defenders of Democrats’ Same-Sex Marriage Bill.

As I and others have argued for years, marriage is the exclusive, lifelong, conjugal union between one man and one woman, and any departure from that design hurts the indispensable goal of having every child raised in a stable home by the mom and dad who conceived him.

I won’t speculate as to why some of the faith voices who were once staunchly opposed to recognizing same-sex marriage have flipped on the issue. But flipped they have. Read more

Sexuality

UN Agencies Say Self-Identification Sufficient for Sex Change in Prison.

Issues like sexual orientation and gender identity remain highly controversial in the UN General Assembly. Even so, UN agencies have moved rapidly toward promoting “self-ID” as an international human rights standard without seeking consensus. In a similar way, UN agencies have promoted abortion and comprehensive sexuality education as human rights issues even as they are repeatedly rejected in international negotiations. Read more

Why So Many Teen Girls Are Planning on Becoming OnlyFans Stars.

Many teen girls today plan on skipping high school graduation to join OnlyFans when they are 18. They believe they can start making loads of money immediately by creating explicit content for subscribers. How did we get here as a culture? Read more

Rachel Levine says medicine is being ‘politically PERVERTED,’ calls on doctors to ‘STAND UP’ for trans youth.

On “The News & Why It Matters,” BlazeTV hosts Sara Gonzales and Pat Gray, along with BlazeTV contributor Jaco Booyens and child advocate Chris Elston, discussed a video clip recently uncovered by parental rights advocate Megan Brock showing the Biden administration’s assistant secretary for health, Rachel Levine, calling on doctors to become activists for “LGBTQI+ youth” because “medicine and science are being politically perverted around this country.” Read more