This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

‘Generation 9/11’ Ditches The Gripping Story Of Fatherless Children To Focus On Vapid Political Posturing.

The heartbreak of those born fatherless should make “Generation 9/11” the most compelling documentary to emerge in the 20 years since the attacks. PBS somehow manages to strip away any enduring quality from its profiles. The resulting film is not a meditation on grief or growing up without a father or raising children alone. It is a documentary about current events as seen through the eyes 0f precocious children on all sides of the political spectrum.

Nearly everything that distinguishes these teenagers from their peers is erased, ignored, glossed over. We do not see how their upbringing is affected by the death of their fathers or the subsequent actions of their mothers. Read more

Over 70 women ‘marry’ trees to prevent them from being cut down.

Suzan Hackett, a campaigner and “bride,” told the BBC, “Getting married to a tree is an exquisite privilege.” “It’s not only a romantic gesture; it’s also meaningful and significant. Trees are perfect examples of unconditional love, which perfectly complements the concept of marriage. Marriage is for life, just as breathing is.” Read more UFI Note: Just when you thought things couldn’t get any more upside down…

Women Want to Work From Home.

Fifteen years ago, a nationally representative sample of mothers with children under age 18 were asked to identify their “ideal” work situation: full-time, part-time, no employment, or working for pay from home. At the time, almost one out of every three mothers identified “working for pay from home” as ideal. The problem was that only 1 percent of moms actually had that work situation. In fact, working for pay from home was largely unheard of at that time. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

Scots council reinstates single-sex toilets at school after campaign by parents.

Plans to provide gender neutral toilets at a Scottish secondary school have been abandoned.The change, forcing boys and girls to share the same facilities at Culloden Academy in Inverness, was reversed by Highland Council after local families objected. Read more

Illinois gov. signs bill to indoctrinate kids with pro-abortion, pro-LGBT ‘sexual education’.

“Modernizing our sex education standards will help keep our children safe,” claimed Governor Pritzker, adding that the radical new sex-ed curriculum will “deliver the bright future our kids deserve.”

The “bright future,” according to the new curriculum, titled the National Sex Education Standards, includes teaching kindergarteners about “gender identity,” telling third-grade children about “the role of hormone blockers on young people who identify as transgender,” and informing sixth-graders about “pregnancy options,” such as abortion. Read more

Foster Care Works.

This is what we know about families reported for maltreatment. They are not simply the targets of a racist system that wants to punish poor minority families. Maltreatment, particularly in young children, is dangerous. And neglect, far from being a byproduct of poverty, is often the result of substance abuse or mental illness. This doesn’t mean that none of these parents can be rehabilitated, but they will need lots of support, and their children will need careful monitoring. In some cases, their children should be removed, if only temporarily. Acknowledging this stubborn reality would go a long way toward improving outcomes for our most vulnerable population. Read more

Sanctity of Life

UN Human Rights Experts Mess with Texas Pro-Life Law.

Two UN human rights experts have inserted themselves into the debate around the recently-enacted law in Texas that prohibits abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected.

They claimed in the British newspaper The Guardian that Texas, and the U.S. Supreme Court which refused to block the law, have violated international human rights law, despite the fact that no international human right to abortion exists. Read more

Online conference to discuss alleged organ harvesting in China.

Critics of alleged organ harvesting are maintaining their relentless campaign against the Chinese government. A group called Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH) has organised an online conference from September 17 to 26.

Executive director Dr Torsten Trey, says: “Forced organ harvesting from living people is an unfathomable, unspeakable disgrace to humankind. Never before in history has an authoritarian regime persecuted living people by killing them with the goal to eradicate them through the installation of a self-propelling, profit-driven organ harvesting infrastructure, potentially turning organ recipients into accomplices as their demand for a transplant surgery might have fueled the transplant abuse. This should be of concern to all humankind.” Read more

Mexico High Court Declares Right to Abortion for Women and “Gestating Persons”.

Mexico’s Supreme Court unanimously struck down the criminal abortion laws of the State of Coahuila de Zaragoza based on what it termed “women’s and gestating persons’ right to choose.”

The effect of the decision could be that abortion may never be considered a criminal act when it is carried out with the woman’s consent, effectively granting a right to abortion-on-demand up to the point of birth. Read more

Religion

Harvard University’s New Chaplain President Rejects Religion, Embraces Leftism.

It is increasingly hard to believe that when Harvard University began its operations in 1636 (as Harvard College), it was essentially (though not officially) Puritan in character, in student body, and in instruction. We’ve indeed come a long way since then.

Recently, the chaplains of Harvard University, some 40 in number, elected Greg Epstein as their president. Epstein, the author of Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, is the humanist chaplain of Harvard, which means, as NPR politely puts it, he “represents the fast-growing number of Americans who do not associate themselves with a religious group, sometimes referred to as nones, as in no affiliation, a group that now rivals white evangelicals and Catholics in size.” Read more

Surge in Antisemitism Linked to Spread of Critical Race Theory.

As more businesses and governments adopt initiatives based on critical social justice ideology, antisemitic and other forms of bigotry are flourishing.

“When you hold an ideology that there are really only two kinds of people in the world, those that are oppressed and those that are oppressors, you’re going to end up empowering ideas of antisemitism,” says David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish advocate as well as the founder and CEO of the Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. Read more

What a fight between a Christian nonprofit and the IRS could say about the future.

Let’s talk about why the IRS denied the nonprofit’s initial application for tax-exempt status. Officials said Christians Engaged violated rules against political campaign intervention. In other words, they thought the group’s efforts to educate people about issues and elections were a thinly veiled effort to get people to support specific campaigns.

To be clear, the IRS did not accuse Christians Engaged of openly promoting individual candidates. But officials did say the group’s intense focus on issues like abortion and marriage made it obvious which party its members were supposed to support. Read more

Sexuality

The Trans Exception.

In the last few years, in response to pressure from transgender activists, and without any real society-wide debate whatsoever, almost everybody in the American mainstream media agreed to buy into the notion that a person belongs to whichever sex he or she professes to belong to at any given moment – no matter what that person’s genitals, gonads, and secondary sexual characteristics may indicate. This policy not only involves agreeing to give subjective feelings precedence over biological facts – which itself, until the day before yesterday, was a rather radical move. It also means crediting people with being honest about their subjective feelings – which is arguably an even more radical move. Read more

Gender Ideology Run Amok.

In 2007, America had one pediatric gender clinic; today there are hundreds. Testosterone is readily available to adolescents from places like Planned Parenthood and Kaiser, often on a first visit—without even a therapist’s note.

How did we get to this point? How is it that we are all supposed to pretend that the only way you can know I’m a woman is if I tell you my pronouns? How did we get to an America in which a 13-year-old in the State of Washington can begin “gender affirming” therapy without her parents’ consent? How did we get to an America in which a 15-year-old in Oregon can undergo “top surgery”—elective double mastectomy—without her parents’ permission? And what can we do about it? Read more

My ‘Sex Change’ Was a Myth. Why Trying to Change One’s Sex Will Always Fail.

Recently, during a radio show on which I appeared as a guest, a caller posed a question I frequently get asked: “Do the administration of cross-gender hormones and genital surgery change a boy into a girl or a girl into a boy?”

The answer is simple: biologically, not at all. Read more