The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. has a special holiday treat for the kiddies this year: My Fair Lady. Austin Ruse, President of the Center for Family & Human Rights, and his wife Cathy Ruse, Senior Fellow for Legal Studies at the Family Research Council, took their 14- and 11-year-old daughters to see it, and here is an excerpt from his review  published in the Washington Examiner:

Act 2, Scene 4: Alfred P. Doolittle is about to get married. … And what do we see …? Men dressed as can-can dancers singing and dancing to Alfred P. Doolittle’s joyous swansong Get Me to the Church on Time. It appeared that Drag Queen Story Hour had come to the Kennedy Center. …

[W]e were not prepared for the act to devolve into a staged orgy with simulated sex acts performed by and on a man dressed as a garish bride, the focal point of the choreography.

At one point, the “bride,” whose low-cut wedding dress repeatedly falls down to expose “breasts,” jumps on the top of a piano and leans back while another man exaggeratedly fondles his “breasts.” Then the “bride” spreads his legs in the air while another man pumps his face into the “bride’s” crotch, quite obviously simulating oral sex. This in front of my daughters and every other child unlucky enough to be there.

But there is more. The “bride” jumps down, dances across the stage, and bends over while Alfred P. Doolittle lifts his dress and simulates sex “doggy-style” for the gentle audience.

At the end of his number, there was rousing applause.

Nothing like simulated oral sex between a cross-dressing man and another man to celebrate the holidays.

Before the perverse, anti-family creepers got their grimy mitts on it, My Fair Lady was a family-friendly affair, but every inch of the public square must be sullied before the deviant among us are sated.

The inclusion of scenes of sexuality in plays that historically might have only alluded to sexuality is not new. Ten years ago, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Macbeth included these scenes:

• Just after Lady Macbeth has read the letter from Macbeth in which he describes the witches’ prophecy, the actress playing Lady Macbeth removed her top and performed topless. When Macbeth arrived home, she mounted him and they simulated sex while the actor playing Macbeth fondled the actress’ bare breasts.
• After Macbeth becomes undone by the vision of Banquo’s bloody head, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth retreated to their bedchambers where she knelt down in front of Macbeth and simulated an act of oral sex.
• Three scenes were set in a strip club. There was no nudity, but one of the witches wore a buttocks-baring thong and gyrated like a professional stripper.

Despite what “progressives” claim, objections to vulgarity like this do not constitute provincial philistinism, and the performances of actresses who perform nude or topless are not “brave” performances. Except for exhibitionists, it takes nerve to exhibit publicly those parts of the human anatomy that are sexual or excretory in nature, but the nerve needed to entertain a theater audience through nudity is different from the bravery needed to risk suffering or death in the service of a noble cause.

The actress, Karen Aldridge, was degraded and objectified. Her exhibition of her body and her willingness to be publicly fondled was disgraceful and distracting. It added nothing of value to our understanding of Macbeth and pulled audience attention out of the story.

If it is brave and justifiable to publicly exhibit and exploit one’s body, then we should stop telling our children that the parts of their anatomy that are inherently sexual are “private parts.”

For an actress to be willing to bare her breasts in front of hundreds of strangers night after night and allow a man who is not her husband to fondle them suggests a heretical Gnostic view of the human person—a view that separates the physical body from the internal “spiritual” self. This is a troubling and false dualistic view of the human person, which denies the reality that our physical, material bodies are inseparable from our immaterial spiritual selves and are sacred.

Despite what many within our “artistic” communities may claim, “art,” or rather some contemporary misconception of art, is not an ultimate value. It does not transcend or supersede the objective truth that our naked bodies are not for public display or public consumption.

As with the Ruse family, no warning was provided to my family that the production was R-rated. Clearly, the artistic staff at Chicago Shakespeare was not concerned about offending audience members, including those who brought their middle or high school-age children to the play as my husband and I did. Nor did they seem to consider the possibility that there may be people who struggle with an all too common, family-destroying porn addiction and consciously avoid graphic sexual imagery.

After IFI posted a short warning about the play, we received this email from a woman who objected to my objections:

Your evaluation of Macbeth made me chuckle. I am going to see the production tonight. My daughter, who works at the theatre, has seen it and was quite impressed with the production. I will reserve my comments to you until after I have seen it. However, I must be upfront and tell you I have little, if any, respect for your organization, so, naturally, your opinion is of no importance. However, I did want to share with you this funny (sad?) anecdote. One parent that came into the theatre worried about the sexual overtones of the show was quite accepting of the violence. No problem there! We can maim people, carry guns, annihilate anyone with whom we disagree, but show people having sex???? Blasphemy!! What a mixed-up set of values …

I’m not sure she knew what an “overtone” is. An overtone is “a subtle or elusive quality or implication.” There was nothing remotely subtle in the sexuality depicted in the Macbeth production. If the sexuality had been subtle, elusive, or implied, I wouldn’t have objected.

Her comparison of depictions of violence to actual nudity is flawed. Even a comparison of depictions of violence to depictions of sex acts is flawed. Many people, perhaps most, believe that sexual acts (and excretory acts) though perfectly normal are intimate, private acts that are not for public consumption. Violence is quite different. While violent acts are always unpleasant and often abhorrent or repugnant—even when necessary and justifiable—they are not thought of as intrinsically private, intimate acts.

Violent acts may be moral or immoral depending on the context, just as sexual acts may be moral or immoral depending on the context. But sexual acts are always intended to be private acts. And for many, actual nudity is appropriate in only very limited contexts. Opposition to seeing such displays of nudity does not grow out of prudery. Rather, such opposition grows out of a profound respect for the human body and a recognition of its inextricable connection to our spiritual natures.

Nudity, actual erotic acts (e.g., fondling breasts), simulated erotic and sexual acts (e.g., oral “sex” and intercourse), and perversion (e.g., drag queens telling stories to and twerking with toddlers in public libraries) are not new in the “arts” and entertainment world. The perverse, pagan, and hedonistic elites who control our culturally essential storytelling mechanisms have slowly, incrementally pushed decency out to make space for indecency. What still shocks is the brazenness and glee with which elites now introduce perversion to children, calling such exposure “education” and “inclusivity.” They include indecent ideas and images—not to condemn them through art—but to celebrate them—as all pagan societies have done and do. Make no mistake: They want the hearts, minds, and bodies of your children. Storytelling is one of the most effective means by which to capture first hearts, then minds, and finally bodies.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W.B. Yeats

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Holiday-Depravity-and-Arrogance-from-Theater-Community_audio.mp3

Subscribe to the IFI YouTube channel
and never miss a video report or special program!

Within hours of Justice Kennedy announcing his imminent retirement, voices on the left began announcing the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

David Cole, national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said, “If Donald Trump, who has promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, picks someone who is anti-choice, the future of Roe v. Wade is very much in question.”

More emphatically, Slate magazine ran a story with the headline, “The End of Roe,” declaring, “Anthony Kennedy’s retirement ensures the Supreme Court will allow states to outlaw abortion.”

And CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin tweeted, “Anthony Kennedy is retiring. Abortion will be illegal in twenty states in 18 months. #SCOTUS.”

During his appearance on CNN, he added that there was “just no doubt” that Roe v. Wade would be overturned, stating, “Roe v. Wade is doomed. It is gone because Donald Trump won the election and because he’s going to have the chance to appoint two Supreme Court justices.”

As stated succinctly in a tweet from Planned Parenthood Action, “With Kennedy retiring, the right to access abortion in this country is on the line. #SaveSCOTUS.”

May all these fears and warnings prove true! May we see Roe v. Wade overturned speedily, in our time. And may the many women who struggle with their pregnancies find new hope and learn that there are better alternatives than abortion.

Of course, it is too early to proclaim the end of Roe v. Wade. And for more than 55 million babies who have already lost their lives, this is too little, too late.

But, based on his performance to date, it is highly likely, if not almost certain, that President Trump will nominate a solid, pro-life justice. And it is then very likely that Roe v. Wade would be overturned in the years ahead.

This would be beyond historic. It would be unprecedented. It would mark the first time that the court made a radical, anti-life turn only to reverse course decades later. And it would mark a major turning point in the cultural life of our nation, since the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed like an impossible dream for years.

Although I was almost entirely unaware of the battle for life in 1973 (I was 18 at the time and I don’t remember hearing a word about abortion in my church), older colleagues have told me how bleak things appeared at that time. They have even related that pro-lifers were more despised back than those who hold to traditional family values are today. That’s saying something!

Back in 1973, after the Roe v. Wade ruling, pro-life forces were in disarray. Yet, Nina Martin reported in the New Republic in 2014, they quickly mounted “a push for a constitutional amendment affirming that life begins at conception.”  But, she explains, “that first effort fizzled, and it’s only in recent years that a new wave of pro-life activists—many of them born after Roe and educated in fundamentalist Christian settings—have once again seized on personhood as a way not just of weakening Roe, but of overturning it. In state after state, they have been pushing to have their beliefs enshrined in policy.”

So, according to Martin, a lot of the recent success in opposing Roe v. Wade is due to the efforts of conservative Christians born after 1973. In other words, they were born after abortion on demand was considered a settled issue in America. After the battle for the unborn was apparently lost. After our side was told to throw in the towel.

But that was not the end of the story. As Austin Ruse noted, “Social conservatives point out that the number of young people opposed to abortion used to be equally bleak among the young but is now trending their way.”

What makes Ruse’s point especially poignant is that he made this comment in a short article documenting the rising acceptance of same-sex relationships among young Republicans. In light of that, he suggested that, “All this leaves open the possibility that Republican opposition to same-sex marriage may fade with time.”

That’s exactly what was expected with regard to the battle for life in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. The die has been cast. The verdict has been rendered. The older, conservative opposition will soon die out. As for the generations that follow, abortion on demand will be the law of the land, unopposed and largely, if not universally, embraced.

And this, of course, is what we are told unceasingly with regard to same-sex “marriage,” almost word for word. Why couldn’t we see a cultural reversal there as well?

Today, we stand on the precipice of undoing the monstrous injustice of Roe v. Wade. Who’s to say we won’t live to see the reversal of Obgergefell vs. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court’s overreaching decision to redefine marriage?

It is for good reason that CNN is already writing about, “What Anthony Kennedy’s retirement means for abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action and the future of the Supreme Court.”

And Vox opines that “a Court without Kennedy is substantially more likely to: Overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states (and maybe the federal government too) to ban most or all abortions. . . . Rule in favor of religious challenges to anti-discrimination law, and perhaps, in an extreme case, reverse some past Supreme Court rulings on gay rights.”

All this sounds totally within reach today. And it could hinge on the next appointee to the Court. Let’s pray for God’s mercy on our nation, for the continuing turning of hearts towards life, and for righteous justices to adjudicate in our courts.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com

Last week, the Family Research Council (FRC) issued a press release in which they publicly ask Illinois’s U.S. Senator Mark Kirk to apologize for his bigoted decision to cancel a U.S. Senate office building room reservation for our friends at the Rockford-based Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society,  a decision Kirk made at the behest of radical homosexual activists.

According to Kirk’s press secretary, Kirk cancelled the meeting because he “will not host groups that advance a hateful agenda.” The so-called “hateful agenda” was a discussion titled, “[W]hat might conservative Americans learn from Russia, Australia, and other nations about rebuilding a pro-family policy?”

Despite the out-pouring of calls and emails from his own constituents and the public appeal from FRC, Kirk has not responded.

In response to Kirk’s narrow-mindedness hostility toward pro-family conservatives, IFI’s Laurie Higgins wrote an article in which she points out:

Sen. Kirk thinks that it’s hateful to believe that marriage is inherently sexually complementary, but not hateful to kill the unborn. To Kirk, cross-dressing and perverse sexual acts are moral goods and fighting for the rights of children to survive the womb and be raised by a mother and father are moral evils. What kind of man thinks like this? C.S. Lewis calls men like this “men without chests,” and Isaiah warns, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”

FRC President Tony Perkins also had a strong statement in response to this foolishness:

Sen. Kirk’s decision is true discrimination, silencing anyone who doesn’t adhere to a politically correct view of sexuality.

We welcome open debate about policy differences on social issues. However, Sen. Kirk’s decision to cancel the event signals that he wants to silence those who disagree with him. We are encouraged by the many Illinois residents who have stood up in support of the Howard Center and its right to free speech and freedom of assembly.

Holding a different view of marriage and sexuality is not discriminatory – especially when all the social science research demonstrates the benefits of the natural family.

Sen. Kirk should respect our faith and our views, even if he doesn’t agree with them – instead of literally closing the door to any debate or discussion.

Take ACTION: Don’t let him off the hook! Please click HERE to contact Senator Kirk to express your opposition to his endorsement of homosexual “marriage,” his engagement in religious discrimination, and his subordination of the wishes of Illinois conservatives to the desires of homosexual activists.

You can also call his office in these locations:

(202) 224-2854  —  Washington D.C.
(312) 886-3506  —  Chicago
(217) 492-5089  —  Springfield

Click HERE to make a tax-deductible donation to support IFI.

Last week, U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) confirmed my reasons for vehemently opposing his election.  His obamaniacal act of hubris last week also reminded me of the emails I received chastising me for what some perceived as my wrongheaded, doctrinaire naïveté in opposing Kirk’s election.

Last Friday, Kirk, in league with homosexual activists, abruptly cancelled access to a U.S. Senate meeting room that had been reserved months ago by the Rockford-based Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society.  According to Sen. Kirk’s press secretary, Kirk cancelled the meeting because he “will not host groups that advance a hateful agenda.” And what is the “hateful agenda”?  The question posed on the meeting’s invitation was” [W]hat might conservative Americans learn from Russia, Australia, and other nations about rebuilding a pro-family policy?”  

The discussion panelists were Austin Ruse, President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute; Allan Carlson, former professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan and president of the Howard Center;  Stephen Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and an advocate for human rights in China; and Dr. Janice Shaw Crouse, Senior Fellow at The Beverly LaHaye Institute, the think tank of Concerned Women for America.

If Kirk considers these scholars hate-promoters, then logically he must call all orthodox Christian theologians hate-promoters for every contemporary orthodox theologian and every theologian in the history of Christendom has held the same views on the nature of marriage and the nature and morality of homosexuality as these panel participants.  

If Kirk’s Democratic opponent in the U.S. Senate race had won, the Republican Party would be working feverishly to find a candidate to challenge him. Of course, with the Illinois GOP polluted by the corruption and ignorance that plagues much of the Democratic Party, who knows what dubious character they may have trotted out and insisted Republicans support. The designation “Republican” is no guarantee of integrity, wisdom, or humility.

But with Kirk ensconced in the corridors of the U.S. Senate, (where he works tenaciously for every pro-homosexual bill including Illinois’ recent same-sex “marriage” bill), the Illinois GOP has little motivation to dethrone him. They couldn’t care less if he abuses his position to normalize sexual deviance while trampling the conscience rights of untold numbers of people. 

“Moderate” Republicans (hereafter referred to as immoderates) caterwaul that social conservatives are exclusive, narrow-minded, parochial voters who just don’t get the bigger picture. That bigger picture is centrally shaped, in the exclusive, narrow-minded, parochial view of immoderates, by “electability” and fiscal issues. Their big tent is really not so much big as it is blue-tinged. They don’t really want social conservatives to expand their scope of interests beyond the issues of prenatal rights, marriage, religious liberty, and the post-natal rights of children. They want social conservatives to abandon wholly those issues.

Conservatives, move to the back of the big immoderate purple circus tent and shut your flapping jaws about those irrelevant issues pertaining to sexuality, the First Amendment, and children’s rights—none of which (in the view of immoderates) have any substantive bearing on the public good.

In the meantime, the immoderates unctuously ooze that social conservatives should just let the big daddies who know best—people like Mark Kirk who solicited support from the baby-killing  industry when running for the U.S.  Senate—to run the country for them.

Sen. Kirk thinks that it’s hateful to believe that marriage is inherently sexually complementary, but not hateful to kill the unborn. To Kirk, cross-dressing and perverse sexual acts are moral goods and fighting for the rights of children to survive the womb and be raised by a mother and father are moral evils. What kind of man thinks like this? C.S. Lewis calls men like this “men without chests,” and Isaiah warns, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”

Don’t you fret, oh ye of little conservative minds, your time will come—the immoderates hiss.  Just wait until men without chests have solved our debt problem and then they’ll end the forfeit—I mean, truce—on the “social issues.” Yessiree, once we get out of this $17 trillion debt, our lawmakers will work to restore the proper marriage laws, religious liberty, and children’s rights that they’re allowing to be trampled or, in the case of Kirk, actively and jubilantly trampling.

But does anyone really believe that in the future conservatives will be able to restore marriage laws or repeal the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) so that business owners will have the right to refuse to hire cross-dressers if men like Senators Mark Kirk and Rob Portman (R-OH) have been in Washington D.C. for decades using their power and friendships to shape the votes and views of colleagues?

If right-thinking Americans would spend just a little less time thinking about clever political strategies and just a little more time thinking about truth and courage, we might have a shot at preserving America.

Take ACTION: Please click HERE to contact Senator Kirk to express your opposition to his endorsement of homosexual “marriage,” his engagement in religious discrimination, and his subordination of the wishes of Illinois conservatives to the desires of homosexual activists.  You can also call his Washington D.C. office at (202) 224-2854.

As you know, the Illinois Family Institute is completely dependent on the voluntary contributions of individuals just like you.  Without you, we would be unable to fight the radical agenda being pushed by the godless Left.  Please consider chipping in $5 or $10 to help us promote family-friendly laws and policies. 

Click HERE to make your tax-deductible donation.