This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Kodokushi: Japan’s problem with the old and isolated.

With its low birth rate, small families, and rapidly ageing population, Japan has a serious problem with social isolation of the elderly. Reliable statistics are scarce, but in 2003 in Tokyo, there were 1,451 cases of kodokushi; by 2018, that figure had nearly tripled to 3,882.

The new Japanese Prime minister even appointed a “minister for loneliness”, Tetsushi Sakamoto, in February. There are companies which specialise in the grisly business of cleaning up houses or flats where people died alone. Sometimes they are discovered months later. Read more

State gov’t. in Germany knowingly placed foster children with pedophiles.

The state government of Berlin in Germany for decades knowingly placed foster children with pedophiles. The New Yorker recently published a piece entitled “The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles.” Written as a human-interest piece, it follows the life of a German man named Marco who was a victim of the state-sponsored program. Marco was only one of the victims of a large-scale operation that has revealed the dark pedophile underbelly of governmental activities in Berlin’s recent history. Read more

Making Your Family a Safe Place in an Unsafe World.

In a time when people are literally obsessed with the concept of finding safe places for themselves and others, could we be overlooking the safest of all places, loving families? Why, in a time when there is more loneliness and confusion than ever before, are youth looking away from their families for safety instead of turning to the people who love them most? Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

Do Student Suspensions Really Cause a ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’?

Proponents of federal orders to reduce or eliminate suspensions are waving this study around as confirmation that federal intervention is necessary to stop the flow of suspended minority students into prisons later in their lives.

Before jumping on this bandwagon, people should more closely scrutinize what this study actually examines and how it claims that its results are causal.

Importantly, this research does not look at how changing school discipline policies affects students. Instead, it looks at how students are affected by being in a school with more suspensions versus one with fewer. Read more

The Senate Armed Services Committee just voted to force America’s daughters to register for the draft.

Selective Service currently requires young men between 18 and 25 to register for the draft or forfeit federal benefits like student loan eligibility. The new language for draft eligibility in the new $778 billion defense budget drops the term “men” in lieu of “all Americans.” Read more

New children’s book ‘Elephants Are Not Birds’ is ‘unapologetic rebuke’ of transgender agenda.

Woke children’s books such as pro-transgender “I Am Jazz,” race-baiting “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” and “The GayBCs” have been all the rage among leftist teachers, parents, and schools.

But there’s a new title in town that you can bet the woke set won’t want anywhere near their tykes — but it very well may be just what more conservative adults prefer their kids set their eyes upon. Read more

Sanctity of Life

America’s Policy of Abortions Up to Birth Puts it in Line With China and North Korea.

What do most European nations have in common with Mississippi? Commonsense limitations on elective abortion performed in the second and third trimesters.

Surprised? While American elites often look to Europe for social policy guidance, a new study by the Charlotte Lozier Institute shows 47 out of 50 European nations limit elective abortion at or before 15 weeks of gestation. In the United States, 0 out of 50 states have enforceable limits on abortion at 15 weeks. Read more

Protecting Life on College Campuses.

The physical and psychological traumas associated with the chemical abortion regimen evince the unique horrors of the procedure—even beyond what we are used to in the abortion context.

Tammi, one victim of the abortion industry’s embrace of this practice, reflected on her chemical abortion as “savage” and “horrific.” Read more

8 Facts You Should Know About the Abortion Pill, Which Kills Babies and Hurts Women.

The abortion industry really is getting aggressive about selling abortion drugs to women and girls.

Though abortion numbers have been dropping steadily across the U.S., abortion pills are being used to abort more and more unborn babies. Many expect the number will grow after President Joe Biden’s administration began allowing abortion drugs to be sold through the mail without the woman ever seeing a doctor in person – a huge gift to the abortion industry. Read more

Religion

TikTok’s Hottest Trend Is As Old As Demonic Possession.

People with disassociative identity disorder (DID) express multiple personalities, sometimes with great variation. The different personalities have different names, interests, ways of talking, and gender identities. DID used to be known as “multiple personality disorder.”

Often such people refer to themselves using plural pronouns, or as a mix of single and plural pronouns, just as demons did in the ancient world. Famously, when Jesus Christ asked a possessed man his name, he replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Many people afflicted with this disorder strenuously deny that it’s demonic, or even a problem, just like the man who called himself Legion before Christ delivered him. Some are seeking, not to reintegrate their personalities into one whole person through therapy, but to normalize and glamorize being possessed of up to hundreds of personalities. Others, dangerously bedazzled by all this, are playing at having the disorder to gain attention. Read more

Opinion: How can China avoid demographic disaster? Return to religion.

China is in a bad spot. The country’s one-child policy has profoundly downsized people’s expectations about family size. To make matters worse, the individualist ethos of the West, and the rising cost of living in Chinese cities, has made marriage much less attractive to ordinary Chinese men and women. The number of first marriages in China decreased from 23.86 million in 2013 to 13.99 million in 2019. Dramatic declines in marriage and childbearing mean that a growing number of Chinese women and especially men are “bare branches” — navigating their entire lives without kin.

Now authorities are casting about for options. They introduced a new fertility policy this month, largely paralleling Japan’s policy response. A more promising possibility for China is religion — understood as a set of values that endow ordinary life with transcendent value. Religion is strongly linked to fertility in countries across the globe. Read more

North Korean authorities complicit in torture, murder and slavery; report warns.

There is evidence of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea officials’ involvement in “murder and killings; torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment; sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and sexual violence, sex trafficking, forced abortions and infanticide; modern-day slavery; persecution based on religion or belief; and much more,” a report released last week states. Read more

Sexuality

Rescuing the Radicalized Discourse on Sex and Gender.

The public discussion about trans rights, in most cases, is no longer about being kind and respectful toward trans people—a principle that everyone of goodwill now generally agrees on. Rather, it’s a project aimed at manipulating language as a means toward mastery in areas of policymaking where the rights of transwomen (in particular) conflict with other rights, including those of women who seek to keep their intimate spaces free of male-bodied individuals; and parents who feel that their children are being pressured to use transition as a means to deal with unrelated traumas or psychological conditions. Read more

Policy shift in Finland for gender dysphoria treatment.

New guidelines warn about irreversible interventions even for people up to the age of 25, due to neurological immaturity. These guidelines from the Finnish Health Authority instead back psychotherapy, rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, as the first-line of treatment. Read more

Chicago Is Wrong on Condoms for 10-Year-Olds.

Earlier this month, Chicago Public Schools announced that it would be making free condoms available in schools, beginning with children in the fifth grade. In case you’re wondering (or too old to remember), fifth grade is still elementary school, and fifth graders are typically 10 or 11 years old. Read more