This Week‘s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

‘Digital Babies’ and the Culture of Lifestyle Over a Culture of Life.

An article featured in British newspaper The Guardian forecasts a world in which it is commonplace for young adults and would-be parents to opt toward raising “digital babies” over having real children of their own. Powered by virtual reality and artificial intelligence, these “programmable and highly realistic children” would simulate play, emotional feedback, and the tactile feel of caring for offspring.

What it says about us is deeply unsettling: that we are a culture of lifestyle as opposed to a culture of life itself. Read more

Daily Headlines about Marriage.

Best known as the architect behind Senate Bill 8, the state law that deputizes everyday Texans as abortion bounty hunters, Mitchell has spent years arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court should reverse its decision in Roe v. Wade. His legal theories and court cases helped lay the groundwork onto which the ruling came toppling down.

But as the rest of the country was bracing for the fall of Roe, Mitchell was already moving on. Since opening up a one-man legal shop in Austin four years ago, he has jumped headlong into myriad other lawsuits over everything from the contraceptive mandate to affirmative action and same-sex marriage.

Mitchell says his goal is to systematically dismantle decades of rulings he believes depart from the language of the U.S. Constitution or that impose constitutional rights with no textual basis. Read more

A Novel Look at the Marriage Penalty.

Put simply, the system discourages marriage. For example, two lower-income Americans (the left-most bar) might gain access to Obamacare subsidies by marrying—and also come out better at tax time thanks to various credits—but these effects are swamped by others. Those ACA subsidies could come at the cost of losing Medicaid as an even cheaper health-care option, for example, and the couple may also lose numerous other benefits such as food stamps. At the higher end of the income spectrum, the consequences are less dire—a lower percentage is lost out of higher lifetime spending but marriage is still penalized, this time more via higher taxes. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

ADF launches roadmap for parents to understand, defend their rights.

Responding to the growing number of government officials who are imposing harmful ideologies that usurp the fundamental rights of parents, Alliance Defending Freedom, The Heritage Foundation, and the Family Policy Alliance formed a coalition to launch the PromiseToAmericasParents.org website on Thursday. The Promise provides a roadmap for parents, community leaders, and lawmakers to understand and defend the rights of parents through law and policy.

“Parents—not the government—have the right to direct the upbringing, education, and care of their children,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Advocacy Strategy Emilie Kao. “Yet we are seeing a wave of government policies that usurp parents’ fundamental rights by imposing destructive ideologies that politicize education and health care for children. The ‘Promise to America’s Parents’ equips parents, community leaders, and lawmakers with the tools needed to ensure that local, state, and federal government officials respect and protect parental rights.” Read more

Hope For Parents of Prodigal Children.

If you’re experiencing the loss of a prodigal son or daughter who isn’t currently in touch with you, you probably feel helpless. Here are some ways to understand a prodigal child and find hope if you have a prodigal child. Read more

Library Group Recommends ‘Pronoun Book’ for Infants.

According to Amazon, “The Pronoun Book” is “for children aged 5+” and “gently encourages children to learn pronoun etiquette and educates them on they/them pronouns, trans and non-binary identities, misgendering and neo-pronouns such as xe, zir and hir.”

According to the Association for Library Service to Children’s 2022 Summer Reading List, the book is for children aged “Birth-Preschool” as well. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Biden Admin’s Plan To Export Abortion Defies Our Laws And An International Treaty.

Exporting abortion isn’t just wrong from a diplomatic and moral perspective; it is illegal.

Yet, in the course of my work leading the Institute for Women’s Health (IWH), I’ve met with senior officials in governments all over the world who tell me America is directly attaching ideological conditions, like liberalized access to abortion, to their receipt of U.S. funding. The conversations I’ve had during my time at IWH and as U.S. special representative for Global Women’s Health confirm that certain U.S. administrations have been meddling in this way for quite some time, at least as far back as the Clinton administration. Read more

Here’s why we have to call suicide what it is, not ‘medical assistance in dying’.

This past weekend I was in the Netherlands, giving a series of lectures. One of the observations we made at the time is that during the debate on assisted suicide in Canada (as well as elsewhere), suicide activists and their media enablers constantly changed their preferred terminology as they sought to identify which terms played best with their audience and which framing would most effectively persuade people that assisted suicide and euthanasia were good things. Read more

Don’t Call It Abortion.

If a person remains pro-choice after they have been educated on what qualifies as human life and the procedures that occur with abortion, then they also must accept the reality that they support state-sanctioned, systemic violence against fellow members of their own species.

All this again highlights the problem of tossing around easy terms like abortion and reproductive rights that are something quite distinct from actually capturing and representing the reality behind the word. Instead, they hide and mask the reality of what occurs in actual fact.

Now that Roe v. Wade is overturned, the people have a choice to advocate for or against laws that support this chilling systemic violence. The morality and legality of abortion are not a question of one’s religious or political persuasion one. Read more

Religion

Another Public University Learns It Can’t Punish Christian Speech Because it ‘Offends’.

At the event, another student – a lesbian – asked one of the CLS members, Peter Perlot, why the club required its officers to affirm that marriage is between one man and one woman. After a polite response from Perlot about the biblical definition of marriage, and an offer to follow up with the questioner, several days passed. Then, at a campus panel with the American Bar Association (ABA) having to do with the law school’s accreditation, she publicly denounced CLS and its policies as bigoted.

The CLS members attending the ABA event defended the club’s policy and raised the larger issue of discrimination against CLS and its beliefs.

Three days later, and without an opportunity to be notified and be heard, Perlot and two other CLS members, Mark Miller and Ryan Alexander, were issued “no contact” orders requiring the three to stay away from and have no communications with the female student in question. The orders came after she filed a sexual harassment claim with the university, alleging the CLS members who answered her marriage question and spoke up at the ABA meeting left her feeling “targeted and unsafe.” Read more

Christian organisations join large religious freedom conference of the UK government.

“This conference is important because all around the world today, millions of people are being deprived of an education or a job or a home or access to justice or liberty, even to life itself, simply on account of what they believe”, said Bruce. Read more

PRIDE MONTH AND PUBLIC DECENCY.

During a recent appearance on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, career politician Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, “It’s my honor to be here, to say to all of you how proud we are of you…your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about.”

No pilgrim father or American founder would agree with this. We know this because we know what they said and wrote. In 1645, John Winthrop praised genuine liberty, which he called “moral,” “civil and lawful,” and “a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.” He contrasted it with “corrupt liberty,” the “liberty to evil as well as to good” that “makes men grow more evil and in time to be worse than brute beasts.” True liberty is celebrated by religion and reason, and works to support society. False liberty—“license” or “licentiousness”—is condemned by religion and reason, and works to undermine society. Read more

Sexuality

MASS OPPOSITION TO BIDEN TITLE IX POLICY.

Opposition to the new policy centers around six major issues: Due process, free speech, pronoun mandates, women’s sports, parental rights, and bathroom and locker room access.

Given these sweeping changes, it’s no surprise that so many have come out in opposition to the proposal. Read more

Gay couple reaffirm reality of biological sex by suing fertility clinic for giving them a girl instead of a boy.

The lawsuit claims that the clinic assured the Sanigers that they would be able to select the exact embryos used in each round of in vitro fertilization and that the biologically determined sex of each embryo had already been made known to them prior to the transfer procedures. The Sanigers say that they selected a male embryo, but that the clinic and Dr. Kolb “negligently, recklessly, and/or intentionally transferred a female embryo to the Sanigers’ gestational carrier.” Read more

UFI Comment: Note that the words “mother” and “pregnancy” are labeled “gestational carrier” by the fertility clinic and the gay couple. One of the goals of reproductive technology is to diminish the role of motherhood in pregnancy and beyond, since the baby will then be raised by two men and not his/her biological mother.

Don’t Count on Abortion Clinics to Help 10-Year-Old Sexual Abuse Victims.

Whatever your views on abortion, surely all Americans should agree that when a girl is pregnant due to sexual abuse, it’s imperative to report the crime and get help for the victim.

Yet Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, has often been silent in these instances, according to an explosive 2018 report from pro-life organization Live Action.

Planned Parenthood is “one of the biggest accomplices to child sexual abuse in the nation,” states the report, which adds that the organization is “a haven for sexual abusers and sex traffickers … a favorite place to take their victims to cover up their crimes.” Read more