We learned this week that the love of money is the root of all evil. Well, we learned that in Scripture. This week purportedly conservative Christian governor of Arkansas Asa Hutchinson just reminded us of it when he sold out children to corporate interests.

For those still basking blithely in the afterglow of America’s once shining light or are socially distancing under a rock, the Arkansas legislature sent a bill to Hutchinson that would 1. prohibit doctors from the risky and experimental use of puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones—some of the effects of which are permanent—for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors, 2. prohibit surgeons from performing mutilating, irreversible cosmetic procedures on minors. and 3. prohibit the use of public funds, including Medicaid, for any of those barbaric, snake oil “treatments.”

The purportedly conservative, purportedly Christian Hutchinson vetoed this commonsense bill to protect children from procedures that are devastating young healthy bodies.

Hutchinson might reflect for a moment on who exactly is cheering his decision. Hint: It’s not conservatives. Oh, no, it’s the “trans”-cult; the “entertainment” industry; the medical industrial complex; the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party (i.e., CNN, NBC, MSNBC, NYTimes, and Washington Post); soulless corporate America; BLM; the ACLU; and the Human Rights Campaign.

Word to Hutchinson: If all the good guys are criticizing you and all the bad guys are cheering you, maybe you made a disastrous decision.

On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program, Hutchinson defended his decision by appealing to conservative small government commitments—the last refuge of conservative scoundrels who want to embrace “progressive” positions on “social issues.” He also said, the bill “goes too far” because it would stop minors who are already being experimented on from continuing with dangerous “treatments” to conceal their biological sex.

Of course, small or limited government doesn’t mean no government. Nor does it mean abandoning children to the “trans”-cult and the godless profiteers who line their pockets with the lucre gained by chemically sterilizing children and lopping off parts of their sexual anatomy.

Many people, stunned by Hutchinson’s decision and not duped by his small government rationalization, look to corporate pressure as the real reason for Hutchinson’s alignment with the dark side.

In March Hutchinson appeared on another Fox News show and was asked about corporate “pushback” against legislation that promotes sexual sanity. Hutchinson responded,

We’re the home of some major global corporations here in Arkansas, they’re certainly worried about the image of our state.

Immediately after Hutchinson’s veto, left-leaning Tom Walton, whose family owns Walmart, issued this public pat-on-the-back to Hutchinson:

We are alarmed by the string of policy targeting LGBTQ people in Arkansas. This trend is harmful and sends the wrong message to those willing to invest in or visit our state. We support Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s recent veto of discriminatory policy and implore government, business and community leaders to consider the impact of existing and future policy that limits basic freedoms and does not promote inclusiveness in our communities and economy.

Our Founding Fathers would be surprised to learn that our “basic freedoms” include the freedom of children to stop puberty, take cross-sex hormones, and have healthy body parts cut off.

According to the Institute of Southern Studies,

Steuart Walton has been a generous donor to the Arkansas Republican Party as well as to Hutchinson’s campaign.

And Tucker Carlson reported that he “spoke with a source” who said that when the term-limited Hutchinson leaves office in 2022, “he would very much like a board seat” at Walmart.

There are some curious omissions in Hutchinson’s public statements on Fox News about the bill he vetoed.

For example, Hutchinson pointed to the depression and high rates of suicide among gender dysphoric minors. He implied that depression arises from gender dysphoria and can be alleviated by cross-sex hormone-doping. He didn’t seem to know that both depression and gender dysphoria could be symptoms of some other underlying problem. And he didn’t address studies showing that cross-sex hormone-doping can increase suicidal ideation or that suicidal ideation increases after “gender confirmation” butchery.

Hutchinson didn’t address the shocking increase in the number of adolescent girls now identifying as boys. Before the “trans”-cult stopped its slow titration of their ideological poison into the body politic, gender dysphoria affected a minuscule portion of the population and affected mostly boys, beginning between the ages of 3-5. Upwards of 80 percent of those boys eventually desisted from identifying as girls.

Now with the secular world promoting opposite-sex impersonation, particularly via social media, there is an explosion in the number of adolescent girls and young women suddenly identifying as male. As psychologists and sociologists know, girls are much more vulnerable to social contagions, like anorexia, bulimia, cutting, and now cross-sex identification.

Hutchinson didn’t mention the politicization of the professional medical and mental health communities. For example, while “trans”-cultists and their ideological allies like to tout the American Academy of Pediatrics’ endorsement of the medical “transing” of children, they don’t like to mention that the pro-“transing” policy was created and voted on by fewer than 50 members of the now-67,000-member academy.

Hutchinson didn’t mention the increasing number of young women who “detransition” and deeply regret having taken testosterone and/or having had their healthy breasts cut off. These young women with permanently male voices and scarred chests that will never nurse a baby feel betrayed by the medical and mental health communities.

Hutchinson didn’t talk about the health risks from the experimental use of puberty blockers and hormones never tested for long-term cross-sex use, risks that include infertility; liver dysfunction; coronary artery disease; cancer; strokes; osteoporosis; and the development of gallstones, blood clots, hypertension, and pituitary gland tumors.

Hutchinson never talked about the ethics of turning healthy children into lifelong medical patients (You know who likes that? Endocrinologists and pharmaceutical companies, that’s who).

Someone should ask Hutchinson whether his limited government principles would lead him to oppose bans on limb amputations for those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder—a condition in which the sufferer experiences a mismatch between his bodily wholeness and his internal sense of himself as an amputee.

And what about Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), which was banned by the Stop FGM Act of 2020 and signed into law by former President Donald Trump? Would small government Hutchinson oppose a ban on the excision of female genitalia from a 14-year-old girl who, for religious or cultural reasons, wants her genitalia mutilated?

While leftists, practiced at the art of deception and the skill of Newspeak, describe the slicing off of female genitalia as “mutilation,” they describe the slicing off of breasts as “gender affirmation care.”

Since girls as young as 13 are having double mastectomies, a 2015 article by Derrick Diaz and published in the DePaul University Journal of Healthcare Law about cosmetic surgery for minors may offer some helpful insights:

Minors should not have access to cosmetic surgery unless found by a court to be medically necessary. … [I]f medical necessity has not been shown, then the service should be prohibited the same as any regulated service or product prohibited to minors.

…

[A] medical necessity determination can be made through a four-pronged analysis. First, does the impairment hinder a minor’s normal physical function; and, is the proposed surgery intended to treat a present or future clinically verifiable disease, deformity, or injury? Second, is the physical anomaly (1) objectively tangible, and (2) unusual or relatively common? Third, what is the state of the minor applicant’s psychological health? Fourth, would a reasonable minor in the applicant’s position be hindered from normal functioning by the condition (e.g., avoiding normal childhood/adolescent activities)?

…

[R]egardless of whether continued [legislative] noninterference is sound policy generally speaking, it is absolutely not so with regard to minors, as states have statutory mandates to protect their health and welfare. When it comes to cosmetic surgery on minors, states must have an intervening hand in preventing the potentially harmful effects of caveat emptor.

“Trans”-cultists and their allies try to get around this position by arguing that amputating the healthy, natural breasts of gender-dysphoric minor girls is “medically necessary.” But it’s not, and leftists have no conclusive, researched-based proof that it is.

On March 30, just days before his surprising veto, Hutchinson met with two “trans”-cultists—both men who pretend to be women, including “Evelyn” Rios Stafford, a justice of the peace in Arkansas, who pleaded with Hutchinson to veto the bill.

Did Hutchinson talk to any parents of teen daughters who suddenly started identifying as boys?

Did he talk to any young “detransitioned” women who grieve over their damaged bodies and the betrayal of adults who didn’t stop them?

Did he talk to any of the members of the American College of Pediatricians who oppose experimentation on the healthy bodies of children?

Did he consult with Abigail Shrier, the Wall Street Journal writer who wrote the book Irreversible Damage about the harm being done to adolescent girls?

Has he read any of the articles by historically leftist Jennifer Bilek who has been exposing the “money behind the rapidly growing juggernaut of transgenderism in American culture and beyond,” which she argues, “all leads back to the pharmaceutical and tech giants that now interface with LGBT NGOs which are driving the normalization of a biology-denying ideology.”

There is some good news emerging from Arkansas. The Arkansas legislature overrode Hutchinson’s unconscionable veto.

If Hutchinson’s relationship with God and truth are his first priorities—which they should be—then he should publicly confess his sinful decision and repent. Something tells me, however, that confession and repentance aren’t on his agenda.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to Gov. Hutchinson via his official webpage. You can also call the governor’s office during normal business hours to give him and his administration feedback: (501) 682-2345

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Asa-Hutchinson-Sells-Out-Gender-Dysphoric-Children.mp3

---

Please support the work and ministry of IFI.  

Your tax-deductible donation is greatly appreciated!

This September 19-25, 2021, the displays in public libraries for the American Library Association’s annual Banned Books Week are going to be overflowing with banned books. In addition to Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally, and Abigail Shrier’s book, Irreversible Damage, there will be not one, not two, not three, but SIX Dr. Seuss books.

Historically the American Library Association has deemed a book “banned” if a few parents asked for it to be removed from the children’s section to another section of the library. Such a “banning” throws them into a tizzy after which they fall onto their fainting couches. Just imagine how they must feel now that book-burners managed to get the publisher of Dr. Seuss’s books to stop publishing SIX of them. Get those guy, gal, and sexually ambiguous librarians some smelling salts STAT.

What, you may be wondering, did Dr. Seuss write or draw that led to today’s book-burners—also known in Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 as Firemen (Gotta burn that book next year. “Firemen” definitely hurts somebody’s feelings).

One of the allegedly offensive books is If I Ran the Zoo in which young Gerald McGrew imagines traveling the world to collect exotic never-before-seen animals from faraway places for his zoo. The drawings most intensely drawing leftist ire are one of Asian characters with yellow skin and slanted eyes wearing traditional Asian clothes and using chopsticks, and the other is a drawing of two Africans wearing loin cloths and nose rings as many members of African tribes have historically done.

There is also a drawing of Persian princes wearing Persian garb and one of a Russian soldier with a big bushy beard wearing a Russian military uniform and carrying a bird called the “Russian Palooski whose headski is redski.” But those stereotypes don’t seem to bother leftists all that much.

CNN editor-at-large Chris Cillizza said this about the decision by the publisher of Dr. Seuss’s books to cease publication of six books—a decision compelled by leftist Firemen:

While six of his books will no longer be published, the remaining three dozen or so will still be on the bookshelves. That isn’t a cancellation.

Well, the cancellation of the publication of the six books actually is a cancellation.

Should a society censor books? Is burning a book written in 1950 because of several questionable images the proper response? Who will decide which books should be burned? Who will decide which hurt feelings render book-burning necessary? Are the faux-hurt feelings of leftist adults in academia sufficient justification for book-burning?

Leftists whine endlessly about stereotyping, suggesting that stereotypes are intrinsically offensive and hurtful. In so whining, they fail to acknowledge that stereotypes emerge from and reflect real phenomena. Stereotypes do not precede and create phenomena. Humans notice differences and categorize phenomena. That’s how the human mind works.

We are expected to worship at the altar of multiculturalism, but multiculturalism is based on the reality that there are distinctives that characterize different people groups. From those differences emerge “stereotypes.” And storytelling often depends on depicting characters that represent the diverse types of groups we observe. That is to say, storytelling depends on stereotypes.

One could argue that the wildly popular television program Will and Grace and movie Black Panther are filled with stereotypes, and yet the presence of stereotypes—that is, characters that represent recognizable types—in those cases is not viewed as either insulting or degrading.

Crazy Rich Asians, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Moonstruck, Godfather, Goodfellas, Mean Girls, Boyz N the Hood, and Birdcage too are replete with stereotypes. The “types” came first.

If someone wanted to write a children’s book about a Chinese family, would it make sense to depict the family with big round blue eyes in order to avoid the “stereotype” that Chinese people have brown eyes with slanted monolids?

If we’re going to burn books based on claims that they include hurtful language directed at “authentic identities,” then we’re gonna need one colossal bonfire. Every book that describes theologically orthodox people as “homophobic” or “transphobic” for views on sexuality or marriage central to their identity as Christians needs to be burned.

Former president of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (ALA OIF), the much-revered Judith Krug, once said this in an interview:

We have gone through periods where our biggest threats have been from the left of center, where people have wanted to remove materials that did not portray, for instance, minority groups in the way that they thought minority groups should be portrayed. … If we [the ALA OIF] have an agenda, it is protection of the First Amendment.

In that same interview, Krug said something even more salient to the issue of banning the six of Dr. Seuss’s books:

[M]any years ago …  Meshach Taylor made a statement … during a panel discussion that I participated in before the opening of The Big River at the Goodman Theater. Now, The Big River is one of the stage versions of Huckleberry Finn. Meshach Taylor was playing Nigger Jim, and one of the questions that came up from the audience during this panel was, “Do you really feel that Huckleberry Finn is appropriate for young people to read? Given the name of Nigger Jim, isn’t it too embarrassing or too frightening, or doesn’t it raise specters for young people that they would be better off without?” And Meshach Taylor answered, “You don’t know how you got to where you’re at today unless you know where you came from yesterday. And if you don’t know where you came from yesterday to get to where you’re at today, you’ll never know how to go forward into tomorrow.”

Here’s an idea: Stop demanding the banning of Dr. Seuss books. Let them be published and purchased wherever books are sold. And leave all of them on library shelves right behind the drag queens reading stories to toddlers and right next to picture books about Heather’s two mommies and tutu-wearing boys. Then moms and dads can decide which books to purchase or check-out, and read to their children.

---

If you appreciate the work and ministry of IFI,
please consider a tax-deductible donation to sustain our endeavors.

It makes a difference!

Democrats have long pretended to be the party that fights to protect the little guy, all the while privately cozying up with Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Brother’s Press to oppress the little guys and gals.

Democrat policies decimated the black family and our big cities. Democrats wasted millions of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and countless work hours on Russian collusion disinformation and impeachment ruses. And then in de facto collusion with social media mega-millionaires and the corrupt leftist press, the “progressive” Hive threw the election to befuddled Biden and his henchwoman.

But the worker bees shaped by the “progressive” Hive mind are not done yet.

In their official congressional roles, Representatives Anna G. Eshoo and Jerry McNerney, two hubristic California Democrats, sent jaw-dropping letters on February 22, 2021 to the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Hulu, Roku, Charter Communications (Spectrum), Dish Network, Cox Communications, and Altice USA to pressure them to stop carrying Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN), and Fox News.

In other words, tolerant, diversity-loving, free speech-devoted leftists seek to ban every outlet and platform for the dissemination of ideas they hate.

Here are the jaw-dropping questions, Eshoo and McNerney are “asking” every company to answer:

1. What moral or ethical principles (including those related to journalistic integrity, violence, medical information, and public health) do you apply in deciding which channels to carry or when to take adverse actions against a channel?

2. Do you require, through contracts or otherwise, that the channels you carry abide by any content guidelines? If so, please provide a copy of the guidelines.

3. How many of your subscribers viewed Fox News on YouTube TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel.

4. What steps did you take prior to, on, and following the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks to monitor, respond to, and reduce the spread of disinformation, including encouragement or incitement of violence by channels your company disseminates to millions of Americans? Please describe each step that you took and when it was taken.

5. Have you taken any adverse actions against a channel, including Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, for using your platform to disseminate disinformation related directly or indirectly to the November 3, 2020 elections, the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection, or COVID-19 misinformation? If yes, please describe each action, when it was taken, and the parties involved.

6. Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation? If yes, please describe each action and when it was taken.

7. Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News on YouTube TV both now and beyond any contract renewal date? Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN … both now and beyond any contract renewal date? If so, why?

Without a hint of irony, Eshoo and McNerney, card-carrying members of the Ministry of Truthiness, call conservative news sites sources of “disinformation.” No word about the misinformation and disinformation promulgated by Democrats in Congress and their propagandist minions in the press.

In this brave new dystopia being created by leftists, they have arrogated to themselves the “right” to decide what constitutes “misinformation” and “disinformation.” They have arrogated to themselves the “right” to decide what information, ideas, and beliefs make people “safe.” They have arrogated to themselves the “right” to define “safety.”

And, amazingly, from the crowd that rebukes “judgmentalism” and the notion of objective truth, leftists have arrogated to themselves the right to judge beliefs and then declare for the entire country which ones are true.

Once having declared which moral, ontological, and epistemological beliefs are true for all of America, the bees with their collective Hive mind buzzing, busy themselves with their stinging banning-business. And boy, does it hurt. I mean, girl sexually indeterminate human, does it hurt.

On no issue are the worker bees busier with their banning than on the “trans” issue. And since the minds of Big Business have been melded into the Hive mind, genuine “trans”-truth-tellers–i.e., people who tell the truth about “trans”-cultism–are being censored.

The work of two well-known “trans”- truth-tellers sparked controversial decisions among woke corporate behemoths recently. Those corporate decisions illuminate the dark cultural period the “trans” cult has ushered in, aided and abetted by the cowardice of those who know truth and the ignorance of those who should.

A few months ago, Target stopped selling an important book by Wall Street Journal reporter Abigail Shrier titled Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.

The well-researched and positively reviewed book offers a damning critique of “trans”-cultic beliefs, specifically how the “offensive” and “insipid” redefinition of “female” by the “trans” cult is damaging adolescent girls.

Target’s de facto book-banning resulted in fierce blowback, which caused Target to reverse its decision within days.

Fast-forward to Feb. 2021 when the news broke that Amazon had quietly stopped selling another important book critical of “trans”-cultism, this one by Ryan T. Anderson and titled When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, which Amazon had been selling for three years.

Anderson, founding editor of Public Discourse and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a political philosopher with degrees from Princeton and Notre Dame. Like Schrier, he is also faultlessly civil and winsome. No forewarning to Anderson and no justification from Amazon representatives when queried about Amazon’s book ban.

Amazon has some peculiar and opaque standards for determining which books won’t be sold on its platform. Customers can buy Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf, all sorts of homosexual porn, and the book Let Harry Become Sally: Responding to the Anti-Transgender Moment.

Within days of Amazon’s de facto book-banning, Target decided the time was ripe to once again remove Schrier’s book from their rainbow-hued shelves. The sanctimonious, judgmental Target execs refuse to profit from a critique of the “trans” cult that is profiting so handsomely from the confusion, sterilization, and mutilation of children and teens. No siree, those Target execs have standards to uphold—standards that look like a canary-yellow stripe running down their spineless backs. After all, men in dresses can be very scary.

In a December 2020 article titled “Leftists See Orwell’s Novel 1984 As a Blueprint for Progress,” I wrote this:

One of the many remarkable aspects of this time in America is that all the forces of oppression about which George Orwell warned in his novel 1984 are present and growing, and many of the oppressors can’t see it. Ironically, many of the oppressors view themselves as paragons of virtue when, in reality, they’re paragons of virtue-signaling, which constitutes a performative cloak of invisibility that conceals their totalitarianism.

Apparently, leftists read both 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as blueprints for “progress.”

Some doctrinaire libertarians argue that private businesses should be absolutely free to make any business decision they choose, including choosing to ban tweets, posts, social media platforms, news programs, or books. But such thinking is flawed in an age when the public square is the Internet and gargantuan communication and sales monopolies are controlled by the Hive.

If conservatives cannot disseminate ideas and cannot earn a living if they express ideas the Hive hates, then our first freedoms to speak and exercise our religion freely do not, in reality, exist.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/audioLeftist-Hive-Mind-Banning-Ideas.mp3

---

If you appreciate the work and ministry of IFI, please consider a tax-deductible donation to sustain our endeavors.  It makes a difference!