This Week‘s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Identity Politics Stems From Young People’s Quest To Answer The Question, ‘Who Am I?’

Children and teens need the structure of family, home, friends, community, and faith if they are to develop properly. Within that structure, they can also learn to appreciate four particular conditions that allow for healthy development: virtue, cultural memory, privacy, and imagination. All of these are foundations necessary to forge strong relationships. Yet increasingly, over the past several decades, they have had such solid foundations pulled out from under them. Read more

The “Respect for Marriage Act” will harm children.

Honesty regarding the impacts of adoption has greatly improved over the years. Yet with respect to marriage and alternative family structures, the dishonest messaging continues: separating children from their parents does not matter.

The “Respect for Marriage Act” (RFMA) will further enshrine legal affirmation of nontraditional family and “marital” structures via federal codification of same-sex marriage and other partnership arrangements. The RFMA has already passed in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Senate will vote on it after the midterms. Read more

No, Manufacturing Children In A Petri Dish Isn’t A Reproductive Right.

Illinois state Rep. Margaret Croke recently introduced House Bill 5779, a bill to legally secure a right “to make autonomous decisions about one’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.” This bill seeks to codify an individual right to rent wombs and manufacture children in artificial conditions, as well as to discard or hold in freezers an unlimited number of embryos. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

The Parents’ Revolt.

The fierceness of the recent backlash to CRT and gender ideology in schools took the public education bureaucracy by surprise. The parental uprisings were the bill coming due for the activist agenda that had swept through public education in recent years. As the Black Lives Matter movement marched through American life in 2020, school boards—already dominated by progressives—redoubled their commitments to the most extreme pedagogical concepts involving race and gender, without pausing to consult parents.

In response, parents across the country began emerging as a formidable political force. Moms and dads suddenly were signing petitions, holding protests, and demanding answers from a school system grown accustomed to operating without parental scrutiny. In lieu of bake sales and library drives, parents were pulling together to lobby for curricular change. Read more

Screen Zombies: Is There One Living in Your House?

As cited by Pullmann, the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute conducted a survey of 1,600 teens ages 11 to 18 in May 2022. Participants reported “using digital media an average of 10 hours and four minutes per day, on such entertainment activities as social media, video chat, texting, shopping, and gaming.” Researchers found that teens living with both their biological married parents spent an average of nine hours per day on their devices, while those in all other household situations were plinking away on their devices for nearly 11 hours daily. Read more

Free Speech Doesn’t Mean Porn In Schools.

The most common books that school districts have restricted student access to include “Gender Queer,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” and “Out of Darkness.” These books have been criticized as pornographic and promoting LGBT content. For example, “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” a book aimed at adolescents, contains graphic descriptions of male homosexual sex.

PEN America argues that the removal of such books from school libraries “impede[s] free expression rights” and that such efforts do not “uphold free speech rights.” For PEN America, free expression rights “must be the bedrock of public schools in an open, inclusive, and democratic society.”

Such an understanding of free speech and free expression is wrong. Any sort of “free speech absolutism” that recognizes no limits is not the ideal for those concerned about ordered liberty. Men and women who care about their communities and their nation ought not to desire a public square that is laissez faire in its approach to speech. Just as true liberty is not license but liberty to do what is good, free speech is not freedom to degrade public morals. Speech expresses morals, and some morals — some ways of life — are beyond the pale for societies that are oriented to what is good and right and true. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Canadian doctors encouraged to bring up medically assisted death before their patients do.

In Canada, in contrast to just about all other jurisdictions, MAID is no longer seen as an exceptional procedure, Lemmens said.

“The fact that this has been presented as, ‘This has to be on the table because it’s part of informed consent,’ reflects, overall, an attitude that has developed in the Canadian context,” he said. “It’s being sold as a normal medical practice.”

“’Do you want to move to a nursing home? Do you want to be resuscitated? Do you want CPR? Do you want to be in the intensive care unit?’ And within that, ‘Is assistance to die something that is ethically abhorrent to you or acceptable to you? Is that something you want to explore more, or not?’”

Not providing information about MAID in a “timely manner” to someone who might be eligible for MAID can create harm, Trouton’s group said. Read more

Nebraska Physicians Are Playing ‘Fast And Loose’ With ‘Dead Donor’ Organ Harvesting Laws.

The University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha may be skirting laws governing the procurement of human organs for transplant by harvesting organs from individuals who may not yet be dead.

Failing to detail the particulars of the procedure to prospective donors and their families puts the lie to harvester claims of “informed consent.”

Once again, the public is forced to remind science – just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Read more

Why Montana Voters Rejected the ‘Born Alive Infant Protection Act’.

What’s the lesson for pro-lifers? Your proposals will be shamelessly misdescribed, distorted, and lied about by opponents and in the media. But also, that fact of political life requires careful and defensive drafting of ballot measures. For example, the first clause quoted above would have been sufficient to fulfill the desired purpose of the measure because it would have covered all circumstances of a crisis birth. Emphasizing “preserving life and health” in the second clause was superfluous and opened the door to the kind of blatant media mendacity that I suspect caused a majority of Montanans to vote no. Read more

Religion

Xi’s reelection will have ‘catastrophic consequences,’ religious freedom advocates warn.

Hudayar said that while the Chinese government has “has always been persecuting the Uyghurs since they [first] occupied East Turkistan back in late October 1949,” the treatment they have received has worsened considerably under Xi: “It wasn’t until Xi Jinping came to power and came up with this achieving the Chinese dream and achieving Chinese National Rejuvenation that Uyghurs began to actually face the wholesale genocide.”

“Prior to that, it was about assimilating us, trying to assimilate us to become Chinese. But after 2014, it was either we become Chinese or we are sent into the camps. We are indoctrinated, we’re tortured, we’re sterilized, we’re raped and we either become Chinese or we die,” he asserted. Read more

Religious Liberty and Natural-Rights Constitutionalism.

The threats to religious liberty from left and right betray a common ambition – if inspired by diametrically opposed anxieties and aims – to employ government to regulate faith. Whether intended to circumscribe religion or expand its reach, however, assigning the state responsibility for overseeing the wellbeing of citizens’ souls flies in the face of the principles of individual liberty, human equality, and limited government that are inscribed in America’s founding documents and deeply rooted in the nation’s political traditions. Read more

The Radical Inclusive Church.

The Vatican has just released a new document for the Synod on Synodality which calls for “a Church capable of radical inclusion.”

The 44-page document is entitled “Enlarge the space of your tent,” but the tent doesn’t seem to have much space for traditional Catholic beliefs and practices. Rather it encourages dialogue with “those who, for various reasons, feel a tension between belonging to the Church and their own loving relationship, such as remarried divorcees, single parents, people living in a polygamous marriage, LGBTQ people, etc.”

But don’t assume that the plan is to help the “marginalized” (i.e., adulterers, LGBTQ etc.) to conform their lives to Church teaching. Rather, the plan is to conform the Church’s teachings to the “lived experience” of the marginalized. Read more

Sexuality

CIRCLING THE WAGONS.

Last year, Old Dominion University professor Allyn Walker was forced to resign after an uproar about his campaign to destigmatize pedophilia, which included the suggestion to rebrand the word “pedophile” as “minor-attracted person” and to provide child pornography to offenders to appease their illicit desires.

Many considered the case open and shut. But this month, the American Society of Criminology, a professional association housed at Ohio State University, published an unequivocal defense of the embattled professor. They suggest that Walker should never have been forced to resign and lay blame on what they call a “hate and trolling attack” motivated by “misinformation” targeting Walker’s “non-binary, transgender and Jewish” status. Read more

Reason and Compassion on Gender Medicine.

Florida seems poised to adopt the Scandinavian—and, it appears, the British—model of caring for gender-dysphoric minors. Rather than imposing legislative actions that put politicians between the doctor and the patient, Florida decided to invoke the existing mechanism for the regulation of health practices, putting the decision in front of state medical boards. The Florida Medical Board’s five-hour televised discussion made it obvious that its practicing physicians are first and foremost professionals who understand the uncertainties of clinical care. Florida medical authorities’ nuanced decision is evidence of how reason and compassion can work in tandem. Read more

Game’s up, amigo. Your mis-pronouning days are over!

In the fiscal year 2022, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 2.2 million illegal migrants. Things are getting hot for the border patrol agents. They have to process, on average, 6000 people a day.

In the fiscal year 2022, US Customs and Border Protection apprehended 2.2 million illegal migrants. Things are getting hot for the border patrol agents. They have to process, on average, 6000 people a day. Read more