This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Forgetting to have a baby?

Having children at any time does require a certain level of “doing without.” Our grandparents knew how to do without, but with the boomer generation and those following it, folks are much less acquainted with material sacrifice. Now things are coming full circle – doing without is becoming the new normal, and not by choice. Often this means doing without children.

In today’s fast-paced produce-and-consume treadmill of making ends meet, priorities are pathologically skewed to obsessive consumerism and toxic materialism. While thus preoccupied, perhaps it is easy for young females (and young males) to forget that the time frame within which a female can bear children is indeed limited. Read more

Egyptian rights advocates welcome fatwa forbidding short-term marriages.

Dar Al Iftaa has issued a fatwa forbidding so-called tahleel marriages, or short-term, intermediate marriages in which a man marries a divorced woman for the sole purpose of making it religiously permissible for her to remarry her first husband. Read more

Democrats Are Trying to Sneak Gender Dogma Into Bill on Family Violence.

As its name suggests, the Family Violence and Prevention Services Improvement Act is meant to update a 1984 law designed to help victims of domestic violence and their dependents.

Many of these updates are uncontroversial. But if you read closely, gender activists are trying to legally redefine sex, making it harder to maintain public facilities specifically for female victims of violence. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

A school horror story that didn’t fit the narrative.

60 members of Congress demanded an explanation from Attorney General Merrick Garland for how it could possibly be legal to treat concerned parents as criminals for exercising their constitutional rights.

“While some of these meetings may get heated, most of the parents who have been attending these meetings have simply voiced their passions and concerns for their children and their futures,” they wrote. “While we agree with you that any threat of violence against these government officials should be condemned and investigated, no government official has the right to claim that a citizen may not speak out against government policies.”

And yet, the NSBA in a letter to Garland, claims to oppose the president’s wildly dangerous transgender agenda is tantamount to a public “hate crime.” Read more

Keeping kids off porn.

“Young people [today] are dealing with the challenges of pornography and a hyper-sexualized culture like no other generation in the history of the world,” Clay Olsen, co-founder of Fight the New Drug, wrote in an email to IFS. “Not only is pornography more prevalent and accessible than any other time in history, but the very nature of the content has also evolved to be more aggressive and extreme.”

So how can we protect our children in an online world where pornography is pushed at them at every turn? And how do we help them grow into young men and women who are able to recognize and reject the dangerous messages porn teaches about sex and relationships? Read more

The Importance of Foster Care.

“Plenty of problems likely will not be solved in our lifetimes: poverty, racism, international conflict. But in the wealthiest, most enterprising, and most generous country on Earth, finding safe, loving, and permanent homes for our most at-risk children should not be among them.” Read more

Sanctity of Life

Senate Foreign Operations Bill Attacks Pro-Life Policies, Could Fund Chinese Population Control.

A legislative repeal of the Mexico City Policy, as the one proposed in the 2022 State and Foreign Operations Bill, would prevent future Republican presidents from instituting the policy without a Congressional mandate.

The Senate bill doubles the funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) to $55M and removes reporting requirements for the agency’s programs in China. UNFPA would no longer be required to forfeit U.S. funding equal to the amount it spends on family planning programs in China. Read more

New Jersey to allow midwives, nurses perform abortions under new regulation.

In a recent op-ed, Tasy warned that “because the Act is noticeably silent on any gestational limits, the Act will permit these abortions to be performed during all stages of pregnancy, even if these babies are viable and at full-term.”

Tasy also expressed concern that the bill would “invalidate the long-standing Conscience Clause law for health care workers, forcing them to now perform and assist in abortions even if it goes against their religious, moral or philosophical beliefs.” Read more

US Justice Department asks Supreme Court to block Texas heartbeat abortion law.

The Justice Department argued that allowing the law to remain in place would “perpetuate the ongoing irreparable injury to the thousands of Texas women who are being denied their constitutional rights.”

Pro-life leaders have pointed out that the Texas state legislature recently increased public benefits for low-income mothers, expanding Medicaid coverage for new mothers and $100 million in annual funding for the Alternatives to Abortion program. Read more

Religion

Jewish Students Under Attack.

As yet more evidence that Jewish students have continued to be targets of bias on university campuses, a Spring 2021 poll by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, together with the Cohen Research Group, revealed that 65% of students in the leading Jewish fraternity and sorority have “felt unsafe” on campus, while 50% of students surveyed have felt “the need to hide their identity.” Read more

Asia falls short on religious freedom, say Christian legal experts.

Asian nations are failing to effectively interpret and implement freedom of religion and belief for their citizens despite having constitutional provisions and guarantees, Christian legal experts said during a regional consultation. Read more

When Conscience Is Attacked, the Ground Beneath Us Shakes.

If there is one form of freedom on which a liberal democracy stands or falls, it is the freedom to live in alignment with our core convictions, whether ethical, religious, or political. Yet the once-settled principle that we should not force others to betray their conscience—unless there is a compelling reason to do so—is being diluted across our society. This trend is troubling, and not only because of the harm to persons who violate their core convictions. Stifling conscience rights makes it harder to achieve the kind of society we say we want: one that is inclusive, free, diverse, and democratic. Read more

Sexuality

Christian Employers Sue Biden Administration over Gender Transition Payment Mandates.

The Christian Employers Alliance filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration on Monday over two mandates that force religious nonprofit and for-profit employers to fund “gender transition surgeries, procedures, counseling, and treatments.” Read more

Spanish PM vows to outlaw prostitution.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pledged on Sunday to criminalise prostitution in the country, saying that the practice “enslaves” women.

Prostitution was decriminalised in Spain in 1995 and in 2016 the UN estimated the country’s sex industry was worth €3.7bn (£3.1bn, $4.2bn). A 2009 survey found that up to one in three Spanish men had paid for sex. Read more

Corporate Media, Democrats Praise Rachel Levine, A Man, For ‘Historic’ Female Admiral Title.

Rachel Levine, who lead one of the worst pandemic responses in the U.S., was sworn in as a four-star admiral to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps on Tuesday.

Levine, a man who claims he is a woman, first gained attention from the corporate media when he was confirmed by the Senate to help head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Now, the assistant secretary has caught the attention of leftist agenda-setters who are praising Levine for receiving a new and “historic” title. Read more