This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Why Don’t We Tell Women What’s Making Them Miserable?

Over the last five decades, feminism has made a long march through American culture, culminating in the first female vice president of the United States. But it isn’t clear that feminism’s fruits are helping everyone. Happiness metrics confirm that women are struggling: suicides, depression, substance abuse, and sexually transmitted infections have all increased dramatically over the last five decades. Women aren’t becoming happier, just more medicated. Read more

Latest Figures Show China’s Millennials Aren’t The Marrying Kind.

Young people in China are increasingly ruling marriage out of their plans for the future, putting further pressure on the government’s attempts to get them to have more children, according to recent official figures. Read more

Taliban Takeover Bodes Return to Dark Ages for Afghan Women.

The Taliban is trying to persuade the rest of the world that it will respect human rights, including women’s. But the women of Afghanistan aren’t buying this for a second, and neither should the rest of the world. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

UN Agency for Children to Promote Sexual Autonomy.

The UN agency for children, UNICEF, is revamping its strategic framework to promote sexual autonomy for children. Adding sexual health and information for children to the work of UNICEF would dramatically increase the availability of funds and human resources for UN agencies to promote its controversial reproductive health agenda. Read more

Should Public Schools be Allowed to Deceive Parents?

Abigail Shrier writes: Last week, I spoke with another mother who discovered her 12-year-old daughter’s middle school had changed the girl’s name and gender identity at school. The “Gender Support Plan” the district followed is an increasingly standard document which informs teachers of a child’s new chosen name and gender identity (“trans,” “agender,” “non-binary,” etc.) for all internal communications with the child. The school also provided the girl a year’s worth of counseling in support of her new identity, which in her case was “no gender.” Even the P.E. teachers were in on it. Left in the dark were her parents. Read more

Judge reverses decision removing child custody from mom who isn’t vaccinated.

During a Zoom meeting held on August 10, Judge Shapiro denied Rebecca Firlit custody of her son upon hearing that she had not received the vaccine. Firlit, who has been divorced from the boy’s father for 7 years, said that the question came from nowhere. The mother said that she has had adverse reactions to other vaccines and, because of that, she was advised by her doctor not to take the current injections. Shapiro then told her that she could not have custody of her son until she received the jab, something the boy’s father hadn’t sought. From that point Firlit could see her son only on video chat. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Supreme Court Denies Bid to Block Texas Abortion Law.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied a bid to stop Texas from banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, allowing one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the U.S. to remain in effect. Read more

A Graying Italy Looks to Euthanasia to Solve Its Demographic Problems.

Italy, which has the oldest population of any country in Europe and the second oldest population in the entire world, may soon legalize an escape chute for those wishing to unburden family members or the state. Even for those who do not wish it, the pressure to “do the right thing” will be substantial. Read more

San Francisco will pay people to not shoot others: ‘Cash for criminals’.

San Francisco is rolling out a pilot program that will pay high-risk individuals to not shoot anyone as gun crimes tick up in the city. The move comes as California also works to become the first state to pay drug addicts a few hundred dollars to stay sober. Read more

Religion

Afghan Christians left behind will be ‘targeted with deadly violence’: Human rights group warns.

Among the communities at risk are “an estimated ten thousand Christians, many of whom are ‘guilty’ of converting from Islam — a crime punishable by death under Sharia law,” Giorgio Mazzoli, a legal officer representing ADF International at the United Nations, said in a statement. Read more

3,000-Plus Pediatricians, Medical Professionals Sue Biden Admin Over Transgender Mandate.

Pediatricians and other health care workers are suing the Biden administration over a mandate tied to health care which would, according to the suit, require medical professionals to provide gender-related services and surgeries despite objections, medical or otherwise.

Objections, even to treating children, would be considered “discrimination,” pursuant to Biden’s reinterpretation of sex to include sexual orientation and “gender identity.” Read more

UK university refuses to recognize Catholic priest as chaplain over social media posts.

Palmer told CNA that he rejected the university’s explanation for its decision to deny him recognition.

“The university says they have ‘no issue with the expression of faith in robust terms,’ but this is precisely what they had an issue with,” he said.

He added: “The university claims to support ‘diversity and inclusion,’ but it appears that diversity only goes so far, certainly not as far as the Catholic chaplain being able to express ‘robustly’ mainstream Catholic beliefs.” Read more

Sexuality

Transgender puberty blockers are ‘reckless’, say medical and legal experts.

If informed consent is one of the pillars of clinical bioethics, puberty blockers fail the test, according to a leading psychiatrist and constitutional lawyer writing in the magazine Commentary. Paul McHugh, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, and Gerard V. Bradley, a law professor at Notre Dame, argue that neither young people nor their parents can possibly understand what they are missing by delaying puberty, one of the most mysterious aspects of human physiology. Read more

Biden Admin ‘Back-to-School’ Transgender Message: ‘We Intend to Enforce Our Ideology’.

The Biden administration released a “back-to-school” video that serves as a message it intends to “enforce” its transgender ideology and “use children as enforcers,” states the founder of an organization that helps victims of what she refers to as the “Sexual State.” Read more

Colonial Williamsburg Begins ‘Reenactments’ About ‘LGBT History In The Colonies’.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, which runs a monument to 1700s history in Virginia, has created a “Gender Diversity Committee” to create “programs and reenactments geared toward educating the public on LGBTQ history in the colonies.” Read more