“No one who had once fallen into the hands of the Thought Police ever escaped in the end.
They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.” ~ George Orwell, 1984

On Tuesday, there was a looong article in the Chicago Tribune’s business section on Starbucks “unconscious bias” training (which, unless Starbucks’ employees are unconscious, should probably be called “subconscious-bias training,” but—to borrow from millennials—whatever).

For those sub-rock dwellers among us, some background: Last month, one young white barista in Philadelphia told a black Starbucks visitor—who bought nothing—that he couldn’t use the restroom as per policies in some Starbucks’ stores. Subsequently, he and his friend—who also purchased nothing—were asked to leave and refused, after which the store manager called the police who arrested them. Calling the police seems an odd response since many people linger for hours doing work at Starbucks after buying one cup of overpriced coffee, but the response from the corporate office seems equally odd.

In addition to paying an undisclosed amount of money as a financial settlement to the two men who spent several hours in police custody and offering to pay for their college educations via an online program available to Starbucks employees, Starbucks management closed 8,000 stores at 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday in order to re-educate 175,000 employees on their “unconscious bias.” What this means is that re-educators will attempt to replace the bias of all 175,000 unconscious employees with a new set of biases.

The looong article recommends that bias “trainers… measure people’s understanding of the concepts before they start, so there is a baseline for measuring progress,” and that companies “bake parts of [the bias training] into performance reviews.”

One bias-training program sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, even includes a written test. Gotta make sure all unconscious employees regurgitate back the RIGHT biases.

To be perfectly clear, I’m opposed to social injustice. Any stores that limited restroom-usage to those who bought something should have applied such policy equally to humans of color as well as colorless humans—well, except for colorful and colorless young mothers in the midst of toilet-training toddlers. They should have access to every restroom in the known universe.

This costly effort in virtue-signaling from the perpetually virtue-signaling Starbucks got me to cogitating. Since, according to Erin Thomas, head of a “diversity and inclusion strategy consulting firm in Chicago,” “everyone harbors” bias, I’m wondering if people of color harbor any biases against whites or if “progressives” harbor any biases against theologically orthodox Christians that undermine social justice, tolerance, unity, peace, and comity.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Starbucks-and-Its-Unconscious-Employees.mp3

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Dahleen Glanton, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, recently penned a column about homosexuality that began with this ironic statement: “It is painful to acknowledge one’s own intolerance.” Glanton doesn’t say who’s experiencing this pain, but one thing’s for sure: It’s not her. Her entire column is an exercise in religious intolerance.

Glanton condemns as “intolerant” those who believe that “two men or two women joined in holy matrimony is somehow unnatural,” or who believe that “such an act makes a mockery of the institution of marriage.”

Glanton-the-Tolerant writes that theologically orthodox Christians who accept as true the clear teaching of Scripture on homosexuality and marriage “don’t even recognize their own bigotry,” suggesting they contribute to a “climate of hatred” and “are wallowing in self-righteous oblivion.”

Glanton then makes this comical claim:

It is easy to read between the lines of the Bible that God doesn’t favor homosexuals. At least that’s what many churchgoing folks choose to believe.

Yes, she actually said “between the lines.”

While pontificating on what the Bible says about homosexuality, she reveals the embarrassing extent of her biblical ignorance. Maybe her ignorance and intolerance are connected.

So, let’s look at those lines between which Glanton claims some churchgoing folks choose to read God’s disfavor:

• “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22).

• “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them” (Leviticus 20:13).

• “For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error” (Romans 1:26-27).

• “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10).

• “Understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Timothy 1:9-10).

• “Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 1:7).

Since the focus of Glanton’s column is same-sex faux-marriage, here’s another relevant passage from Scripture. This is Jesus speaking:

But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate. (Mark 10:6-9)

I’m choosing to read in these lines and the spaces between that Jesus says marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

Perhaps Glanton is unaware that until the latter half of the latter half of the 20^th Century, there was not a single biblical scholar in the history of the church that thought Scripture teaches anything other than that God condemns homosexual activity.

What set off Glanton’s intolerance radar was the disapproval of homosexuality on the parts of parents and school administrators. Parents in Elgin, Illinois objected to music teacher Nathan Etter sharing with first-grade students that he was “married” to a man. Parents in Arlington, Texas objected to art teacher Stacy Bailey showing fourth-graders photos of the woman she was going to “marry.” And the administration of a Miami, Florida Catholic school fired first-grade teacher Jocelyn Morffi after she “married” a woman—in defiance of Catholic doctrine.

Stacy Bailey is suing her district, “seeking… reinstatement at the school and possible damages.” Her lawsuit claims she was “born that way.” It will be interesting to see what hard evidence her attorney provides to prove that claim.

“Progressives” believe that if married heterosexual couples are permitted to share with students information about their spouses, homosexual couples should be permitted to do likewise. But sexually differentiated marriages are not controversial, whereas homosexual couplings have been controversial throughout history and in all corners of the world.

Moreover, equality demands that we treat like things alike, and the two types of unions are not merely unlike. They’re antithetical.

Someone should ask Glanton how she thinks homosexual teachers should demonstrate tolerance for parents who view homosexual acts and relationships as profoundly immoral and don’t want their little ones exposed to any ideas about homosexuality when they’re too young to understand critical ideas about morality, theology, epistemology (how we know what we know), ontology (the nature of things that exist), and teleology (the study of design and purpose of things that exist). These are the bases on which a moral assessment of homosexuality depend.

And how does Glanton think homosexuals—including  homosexual teachers—should  demonstrate tolerance for the Catholic Church, which teaches that homosexual attraction is disordered and homosexual acts sinful?

Glanton writes glowingly about the cultural shift in attitudes toward the legal recognition of intrinsically non-marital same-sex unions as marriages. She waxes jubilant that the number of people who “believe marriage should occur only between a man and a woman” is decreasing, including among people who identify as Christians. She cites a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute that shows increasing support for same-sex pseudo-marriage among diverse demographic groups. Apparently, what the Bible clearly says carries less weight for Glanton than does the number of people who abandon the Bible’s clear teaching.

The survey identifies particularly strong support among 18-29-year-0lds. Their support should surprise no one since this is the generation that has been exposed to the most pro-homosexuality propaganda and the most pervasive censorship of dissenting ideas. Coincidentally, this is the generation least likely to have been raised by theologically orthodox and committed Christians.

Glanton also prophesies:

They [i.e., “self-righteous” Christian bigots] are hoping that one day the law [i.e., laws permitting same-sex faux-marriage] will be reversed and the issue will go away for good. But that’s not going to happen, and it’s time those holdouts accepted it.

Not being a prophet myself, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this prophesy, but it may well be borne out. Scripture teaches that “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.”

But as for true Christ-followers accepting the absurd notion that two people of the same-sex can be in reality married? Never.

Glanton proclaims that “people don’t even recognize their own bigotry…. They just don’t think that people who happen to be gay deserve the right others have to choose with whom to make a lifetime commitment.”

Glanton is wrong. While people may just “happen” to experience same-sex attraction, they don’t just “happen ” to affirm it as a positive part of their identity. That is a choice they make.

Glanton is wrong again. Christians don’t say anything about the “right” of homosexuals to make a lifetime commitment to persons of the same sex. Rather, Christians say marriage is something. It has a nature central to which is sexual differentiation and without which a union is not marital. Christians and other conservatives say that homosexuals have no more “right” to unilaterally jettison the criterion of sexual differentiation from the definition of marriage than polyamorists have a right to jettison the criterion related to number of partners or sibling-lovers have a “right” to jettison the criterion of consanguinity (i.e., blood kinship).

Glanton describes the legalization of same-sex faux marriage as “civil rights for gay people.” First, there is no civil right for one special interest group to redefine marriage, and second, homosexuals have always had the right to participate in the institution of marriage. They were not seeking a right to marry. They were seeking to redefine marriage.

Without engaging the ideas of a single theologically orthodox biblical scholar, the biblically ignorant and sanctimonious Glanton refers to biblical orthodoxy as “baggage” from “religious teachings” and as “outdated beliefs… based on pure ignorance.”

While Glanton considers biblical prescriptions for marriage and proscriptions of homosexual acts “outdated,” here are the words of Jesus:

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.

Glanton said one thing with which I heartily agree:

It takes a conscious effort to acknowledge one’s own intolerance. But it takes an even greater effort to go through the process of learning and understanding what is necessary to reverse it.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Intolerant-Journalist-Demonstrates-Biblical-Ignorance.mp3

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**CAUTION: Not for younger readers**

Leave it to Chicago Tribune lifestyle expert Heidi Stevens to come up with another dumb idea. In an essay titled “Who do we become if we give teachers guns?,” in which she ruminates on the proposal to allow teachers to volunteer to be trained to use a gun in those rare instances when a mass killer starts killing school children, Stevens offers this deep thought:

Asking teachers to die for our children is very different from asking teachers to kill for them.

When did parents or anyone else ask teachers to die for our children? And to my knowledge, no one has proposed even asking teachers to carry and be trained to use guns—or as Stevens puts it, “to kill” for our children. She obviously phrases it like this to imply that defensively killing someone who is attempting to murder innocents is no different from murder. Killing is killing in the Upside Down in which Leftists live and move and have their being.

Here’s a more accurate description of what some have proposed: Knowing that there are many teachers who are already licensed and trained gun owners, some have proposed asking teachers if they would like to carry and be trained to use guns at school.

Stevens’ fatuous statement implies that asking teachers to die for our children is acceptable but asking if they are willing to kill a murderer to protect our defenseless children is beyond the pale.

Stevens quotes Al Vernacchio, a Pennsylvania teacher whose “writings” she follows:

I would rather throw my body in front of one of my students than raise a gun against an assailant. I may lose my life, but I will have preserved my humanity.

Vernacchio signals his virtue by claiming that “preserving” his “humanity” demands he use less effective ways of protecting his defenseless students from a murderer than more effective ways. Somehow in his twisted world—and it is twisted—his humanity is preserved by not killing a murderer, thereby making it more likely his students will be killed.

I wrote about the troubling Al Vernacchio in 2011. He’s a 54-year-old homosexual “sex scholar” and former Catholic who is “married” to a man and teaches English and human sexuality at a private Quaker school in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, where he promotes Leftist views of sexuality to teens. Of course, Leftist Stevens would follow Vernacchio.

A 2011 New York Times article on sex education features Vernacchio and shares the topics he covers in his class on sexuality for teens. Vernacchio encourages kids to share and discuss colloquial metaphors relating to sex and explains their meanings. He discusses penis sizes, giving and receiving oral sex, and shaving pubic hair. He shows a “research video… of a woman ejaculating… and a couple of dozen up-close photographs of vulvas and penises.” Vernacchio has handed out worksheets “with the five senses printed along the top and asked the students to try and list sexual activities that optimized each. (There were examples to prod their thinking: under hearing, for instance, was ‘listening to your partner read an erotic story.’)” Vernacchio, who says he doesn’t “necessarily see the decision to become sexually active when you’re 17 as an unhealthy one,” also “rarely misses a chance to ask his students to examine gender bias in their sexual attitudes or behavior.”

This is the kind of person who Stevens looks to for insight.

Stevens urges Americans to carefully consider “what we sacrifice when we fill our classrooms with guns. What we sacrifice when we fail to examine, thoroughly and honestly, why this country has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the developed world, why mass shootings have broken out in churches and movie theaters, college campuses and a nightclub, an outdoor concert and, again and again, schools.”

Stevens’ hyperbolic claim that allowing  gun-owning teachers to choose to carry at school constitutes “filling our classrooms with guns” is demagogic nonsense. Even having one armed teacher in every other classroom would not constitute “filling our classrooms with guns.”

Since this country has always had a significant number of armed citizens, Stevens is wise in asking why we are now seeing such high rates of firearm deaths and mass shootings at churches, theaters, college campuses, schools, and music venues. What’s changed over the past thirty or so years?

Could it be the breakdown or rejection of the nuclear family?

Could it be exposure to violence in our video games, television shows, and movies?

Could it be the loss of small community schools and the concomitant growth of large schools that breed social hierarchies and are inhospitable places for those who are different?

Could it be the rejection of transcendent meaning and objective truth by a post-modern culture that reveres subjectivism, relativism, nihilism, Gnosticism, and even solipsism?

Could it be the abandonment of faith in Jesus Christ?

Stevens characterizes the proposal to allow trained, gun-owning teachers as an admission of “defeat in the fight to keep guns away from our children and decide, instead, to forever link ‘school’ with ‘killing ground.’”:

Who do we become when we arm our teachers? We become a nation that no longer trusts our collective humanity to triumph over evil. We commit to being so enamored of guns, so inured to bloodshed, so unwilling to imagine a better way, that we’d weaponize our classrooms.

Nice platitudinous rhetoric that ignores reality. Because of doctrinaire Leftists, we can no longer collectively agree on something as obvious as it’s inhumane to force women to share private spaces with men.

Moreover, one way to triumph over evil is to stop it dead in its tracks, which guns do better than throwing one’s body over the body of one student and better than appealing to some vague notion of “collective humanity.”

How grotesque, dishonest, and—dare I say—inhumane of Stevens to suggest that arming willing, trained teachers against people with murderous intent against defenseless children constitutes being “enamored of guns” or “inured to bloodshed.”

Does the presence of armed security at parades, the Olympics, the Capitol, and the White House mean Americans are enamored of guns or are inured to bloodshed?

Acknowledging the reality in which we live is not the same as being inured to bloodshed. Wanting to provide willing teachers a better means than their own bodies for defending children against armed assailants is not equivalent to being enamored of guns.

Stevens closes by quoting a teen who made this statement at CNN’s anti-gun advocacy spectacle that was promoted as a townhall meeting: “If a kid throws a rock at another kid in a sandbox, you don’t give every other kid a rock.”

So much wrong with that analogy, so little time.

Let’s start with the obvious: rocks aren’t guns. Generally, rocks don’t kill.

Second, any adult present when a little child begins to throw rocks could physically stop the child because adults are more powerful than small children. In other words, the physical strength of adults provides a superior defense against the rock-throwing assault of a little child.

Third, let’s imagine a sandbox full of very young children who for some reason can’t escape. A young bully approaches and starts hurling rocks that have the potential to grievously harm or kill the young children. Also present is an adult, but she is confined to a wheel chair with no ability to physically stop the rock-thrower. The rock-thrower is pelting the little ones. They’re screaming and crying. Some are unconscious, some are bleeding. The adult now notices a pile of rocks beside her on the ground. Should she simply sit there, or should she use the rocks to try to stop the carnage? Which of these terrible choices poses a greater threat to her humanity: meeting force with commensurate force, or letting the little ones be mowed down?

Fourth, Nikolas Kruz is not a little child. He is a young adult.

Generally, it’s not wise to look to teenagers for wisdom. They have limited life experience. For the most part, they aren’t particularly well-read. If they’re in public schools, they’re likely not particularly well-taught. The impulse-control part of teenage brains is not fully developed. And they tend to be rebellious. It’s especially unwise to look to traumatized, grieving teens for wisdom or answers to complex social problems.

A commenter on IFI’s Facebook page asserted that arming teachers turns a non-violent place into a place of violence. No, it doesn’t. Killers turn non-violent places into places of violence. Arming teachers is one proposal for preserving schools as non-violent places.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Virtue-Signalling-from-Leftists-on-Arming-Teachers_01.mp3

RESCHEDULED: IFI Worldview Conference May 5th

We have rescheduled our annual Worldview Conference featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet for Saturday, May 5th at Medinah Baptist Church. Mr. Stonestreet is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “Making Sense of Your World” and his newest offer: “A Practical Guide to Culture.”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture.

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

Chicago Tribune columnist, lifestyle expert, and purveyor of deep thoughts, Heidi Stevens, is taking singer Kelly Clarkson to task  for Clarkson’s admission that she spanks her children. Stevens makes her argument by use of an analogy (“Progressives” really need to work on that skill). Stevens wrote the following:

“Here’s where we play swap-the-person-getting-hit. Let’s say you’re talking to a friend, relative, neighbor, acquaintance from church — any grown-up, really — and you get on the topic of marriage. Let’s say you’re exchanging anecdotes about the ups and downs, the frustrations, the disagreements that occur when you’re sharing a home and a life with a spouse. And let’s say the grown-up tells you, “I just slap my wife when she’s really upsetting me.” Or, “When I really want to teach my husband a lesson, I hit him.” I would find a lot wrong with that. I think most of us would. No amount of domestic violence is socially acceptable. We frown on all of it. Why on earth should we accept a lower bar for children?… I’m frankly astounded that it’s not outlawed in the United States.”

How about we now play swap-the-consequence-for-misbehavior.

Let’s say you’re talking to any grown-up and you get on the topic of marriage. And let’s say the grown-up tells you, “I just put my wife in time-out when she’s really upsetting me. She must sit on a stool facing the wall until I tell her time-out is over. If she gets up before time-out is over, I physically return her to the stool.” Or, “when I really want to teach my wife a lesson, I take away her television privileges or prohibit her from leaving the house for two weeks other than to go to the grocery store or take the kids to school.” Or, “if my wife says something rude, I require her to apologize and give me a hug.  Then I draw up a behavior contract that establishes that further disrespect will result in the loss of her cell phone.”

I would find a lot wrong with that. I think most of us would. No amount of domestic oppression is socially acceptable. Why on earth should we accept a lower bar for children? I’m frankly astounded that time-out, grounding, compulsory apologies, and behavioral contracts are not outlawed in the United States.

It should be obvious that it’s silly at best to compare methods of discipline of children to modes of conduct between husbands and wives.

With faith-filled fervor, Stevens cited glowingly a 2016 meta-analysis of spanking research and solicited quotes from lead author Elizabeth  T. Gershoff who says that the “evidence against spanking is one of the most consistent findings in the field of psychology.” Curiously, Stevens doesn’t cite any criticism of Gershoff’s meta-analysis, like one appearing in Scientific American in which Melinda Wenner Moyer wrote this:

[A]lthough the new analysis did attempt to separate the effects of spanking from those of physical tactics that are considered harsher, research has shown that many parents who spank also use other forms of punishment—so “you’re still not really isolating spanking from overall abusiveness,” explains Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist at Stetson University in Florida. In other words, the negative effects associated with spanking could still be driven in part by parents’ use of other tactics.

The new analysis also did not completely overcome the lumping problem: It considered slapping and hitting children anywhere on the body as synonymous with spanking but these actions might have distinct effects. Some research also suggests that the effects of spanking differ depending on the reasons parents spank, how frequently they do so and how old children are at the time—so the conclusion from the meta-analysis that spanking itself is dangerous may be overly simplistic. “I think it’s irresponsible to make exclusive statements one way or another,” Ferguson says.

Finally, the associations reported in the meta-analysis between spanking and negative outcomes did not control for the potential mediating effects of other variables, which raises the chicken-or-egg question: Are kids spanked because they act out or do they act out because they are spanked—or both? (Even longitudinal studies don’t completely resolve this problem, because behavioral problems may worsen over time regardless of spanking’s effects.) To rule out the possibility that spanking is only associated with bad outcomes because poorly behaved kids are the ones getting spanked, researchers can use statistical methods to control for the influence of temperament and preexisting behavioral characteristics—but these methods are difficult to employ in meta-analyses, and the new analysis did not attempt such a feat. Ferguson did try to control for the effects of preexisting child behavior in a 2013 meta-analysis he published of the longitudinal studies on this issue; when he did, “spanking’s effects became trivial,” he says. As a further demonstration of the importance of careful statistical controls, Robert Larzelere, a psychologist at Oklahoma State University, and his colleagues reported in a 2010 study that grounding and psychotherapy are linked just as strongly to bad behavior as spanking is but that all the associations disappear with the use of careful statistical controls. 

For those who have a tad more confidence in Scripture than in woefully unstable social science—which has become the ever-shifting bible of contemporary American culture—here are some words of wisdom from New Testament professor Walter Frederick Adeney who died at age 71 in 1920:

The primitive rigour of the Book of Proverbs is repudiated by modern manners…. people reject the old harsh methods, and endeavor to substitute milder means of correction. No doubt there was much that was more than rough, even brutal, in the discipline of our forefathers. The relation between father and child was too often lacking in sympathy through the undue exercise of parental authority, and society generally was hardened rather than purged by pitiless forms of punishment. But now the question is whether we are not erring towards the opposite extreme… and failing to let our children feel the need of some painful discipline. We idolize comfort, and we are in danger of thinking pain to be worse than sin. It may be well, therefore, to consider some of the disadvantages of neglecting the old-fashioned methods of chastisement. 

A properly administered spanking (e.g., a swat on the bum) is neither an act of violence nor a beating, and children are not adults.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Chicago-Tribune-Columnist-Wants-To-Outlaw-Spanking_01.mp3

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Traci O’Neal Ellis, the school board member in Illinois School District U-46, which was embroiled in a controversy last spring over the superintendent’s secret decision to sexually integrate restrooms and locker rooms, has joined the fracas over the Chicago Tribune’s biased reporting about State Representative Jeanne Ives. This is the twisted comment Ellis has offered on her school board member Facebook page, accompanied by a link to the dishonest Trib article…

Read more…

Isaiah the prophet warns in chapter 5, verse 20: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”

America was settled and founded by people of faith who revered God and his Word. They fled here to escape religious persecution and the tyranny of King George.

From the time of the first permanent colony, Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, the next settlement of the pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, America has been blessed and prospered, a haven for the persecuted, a hope for the industrious and downtrodden.

Indeed, Psalm 33:12 could, for the most part, apply to the United States of America:

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord; and the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance.

America’s history records periods of affluence, growth, and, at times, growing wickedness stopped by revival. As the Weeping Prophet’s warning to and diagnosis of the Hebrews applied universally, including Americans:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

But the remedy (2 Chronicles 7:14) always, always was available for healing and restoration:

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

On Friday, July 14, the Chicago Tribune published an article by Angie Leventis Lourgos titled, “‘My last resort’ — thousands come to Illinois to have abortions.” Never have I read a more stunning example of Isaiah 5:20. The stories told in the article, coupled with the story told in the accompanying video, are wholly, viscerally repugnant.

In the video a woman, Cyndi Portteus, a wife and mother of one, pregnant with their second child, recounts their heartbreak when they learn that their 22 week baby in the womb has a potentially fatal heart condition — hypoplastic left heart syndrome. The doctors and counsellors gave Cindy and her husband three options: a series of three surgeries to mitigate the malformed infant heart and give baby Portteus a chance to live; carry to term, have the baby, administer only palliative care (pain care) at home and allow him to die; or “terminate the pregnancy.”

Think on that. Now think some more and suppose that the infant in question, rather than being a second trimester baby in the womb, were a three year old child with a possibly fatal heart condition. What would people say of any doctor or genetic counsellor who offered up that third option? Such a practitioner would be deemed a Nazi-esque monster.

And what do you suppose is the point of the video, where one mother records for all of history how she and her husband would prefer to “terminate” a baby rather than give the tiny boy care? The video is an indictment on any and all states that would dare pass bans on abortions past twenty weeks. So much for the “safe but RARE” ruse.

Think of this. Dr. C. Everett Koop quashed the lie that abortion is sometimes necessary to save the life of the mother:

Protection of the life of the mother as an excuse for an abortion is a smoke screen. In my 36 years in pediatric surgery I have never known of one instance where the child had to be aborted to save the mother’s life. . .

If, toward the end of the pregnancy complications arise that threaten the mother’s health, he will take the child by inducing labor or performing a Caesarean section. His intention is still to save the life of both the mother and the baby. The baby will be premature and perhaps immature depending on the length of gestation. Because it has suddenly been taken out of the protective womb, it may encounter threats to its survival. The baby is never willfully destroyed because the mother’s life is in danger.

~ C. Everett Koop, M.D., as told to Dick Bohrer, in Moody Monthly, May, 1980.

And now 3D and 4D ultrasounds and medical heroes like Koop have revealed the humanhood of life in the womb and advancements in fetal development science reveal that the tiny humans in the womb can feel pain as early as eight weeks.

Therefore, abortion kills a human. Abortion is not necessary to save the life of the mother. The baby feels pain. All of those facts make a pretty solid case against abortion.

Yet, in this article Angie Leventis Lourgos writes as though the expectant mothers were the victims, hard pressed by states that have limited parameters allowing abortion.

Another story told within the article concerns a young woman from Missouri who is twelve weeks pregnant — right on the cusp of the second trimester. The narrative vilifies the expectant mother’s family:

Her conservative Christian family was against abortion. When her parents learned they had conceived a fetus with a severe and typically fatal birth defect, they chose to deliver rather than terminate.

And this young woman’s reasons for wanting an abortion?

“I’ve seen what unplanned pregnancies do to people,” said the woman, who requested anonymity to keep her recent abortion a secret from those closest to her. “I don’t want to be put through that. I don’t want to be forced into a marriage. I don’t want to raise a child alone.”

Oh. I see. Rather than marry or raise a child alone (as if those are the only two options), it’s preferable to kill the baby who is a separate human being with separate DNA and who is blameless in the condition of pregnancy.

When should the excuses for abortion stop? Perhaps a married couple don’t want to buy a larger home with more bathrooms and bedrooms? Perhaps another child would stretch the family budget and sacrifices might be required?

The impetus of the article is to show each of the pregnant women as desperate, seeing the state of Illinois as their beacon of hope. Lourgos notes:

Illinois health data show that each year around 3,000 women come from out of state to have an abortion in Illinois, which has some of the least restrictive laws in the Midwest.

. . .

While the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade has guaranteed the right to an abortion since 1973, lawmakers and courts across the country continue to tussle over the boundaries of that reproductive freedom. That has created pockets of access in places like Illinois amid what has been termed the U.S. abortion desert of the South and Midwest.

Whenever you hear terms such as “the boundaries of that reproductive freedom” be on guard: such language is radical feminist talk for abortion. Every woman has “reproductive” freedom. But according to geneticists, biologists, and yes, God, that image on the ultrasound is not tissue, but a tiny human on its way to becoming a larger human. The fetus is not part of the woman’s body, but living and developing in the womb, what should be a safe haven for the innocent baby.

Also included in the article is a video featuring “Leah Greenblum, founder and executive director of Midwest Access Coalition, a Chicago nonprofit that provides lodging, transportation and other support for women traveling to have an abortion.” Ms. Greenblum proudly speaks as though she’s a modern day Harriet Tubman, leading besieged women to the promised land of Illinois to realize freedom.

Sorry Leah. You have been deceived and are deceiving others. You also are culpable in the murder of these unborn.

Moses wrote God’s firm admonition concerning life in Deuteronomy:

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live. Deuteronomy 30:19

President Ronald Reagan called America a shining city on a hill, alluding to Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.”

That was the Founders intent. Unfortunately, America has lost her sheen as a war rages on between a culture of life and a culture of death. The Apostle Paul wrote, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

And never has there been more spiritual wickedness and darkness than in the Land of Lincoln, a safe haven for abortionists and abortion-seekers, and a killing zone for the unborn.

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A blaring, front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune about the women’s march for death and deviant sexuality marred the Sunday morning of many Illinoisans—once again justifying the subterranean position the mainstream press occupies in the view of many Americans.

The Trib reported that an estimated 500,000 mostly women “staged an enormous, raucous rally…to send a potent message of defiance to…President Trump.”

I wonder how the Trib reported the 2013 March for Life in Washington that drew an estimated 650,000. And does anyone believe the coverage would have been less feverish and sycophantic if the numbers for the death and deviance march had been 400,000 or 200,000?

The statements made by protesters yesterday affirming a non-existent moral right of women to have their offspring killed is more abhorrent than any of the abhorrent things Trump has said.

Extolling the legal right to have incipient human life exterminated in the womb is incalculably abhorrent. What we can calculate, however, is how many human lives have been killed in wombs in the U.S. since 1973: 59, 738, 680.

The Trib cited the “show of star power absent from inauguration festivities,” so let’s take a glimpse at what inaugural attendees missed.

Plasticized sexagenarian sex symbol Madonna offered this inspirational stem-winder:

Welcome to the revolution of love, to the rebellion, to our refusal as women to accept this new age of tyranny where not just women are endangered but all marginalized people….It took us this darkness to wake us the f*** up….And to our detractors that insist that this March will never add up to anything, f*** you. F*** you….Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House, but I know that this won’t change anything….I choose love.  

Let’s not forget these patriotic words from women’s role model Madonna at a public event just a month before the election:

If you vote for Hillary Clinton, I will give you a b***job. OK? I’m really good. I’m not a douche, and I’m not a tool. I take my time, I have a lot of eye contact, and I do swallow.

Pregnant Natalie Portman made this extraordinarily ironic statement:

We need to take inspiration from nature, and remember that we hold the mystery of life, and the seed of every possibility within our bodies….We need to demand freedom from fear over our bodies and control over our own bodies…. [F]rom the bottom of both hearts beating inside my miraculous female body, I want to thank our new president. You just started the revolution.

Cognizant of the beating heart of another human within her womb—the mystery of life, the miraculous body of another whose seed too contains within it possibility—Portman seeks to protect women’s legal right to kill it.

Then the always melodramatic Ashley Judd recited the words of 19-year-old Nina Donovan. Here’s just a taste of her distasteful spoken words:

I am a nasty woman. I’m as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheetos dust. A man whose words are a distract to America. Electoral college-sanctioned, hate-speech contaminating this national anthem….Blacks are still in shackles and graves, just for being black. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the prison system in front of people who see melanin as animal skin….I didn’t know devils could be resurrected but I feel Hitler in these streets. A mustache traded for a toupee. Nazis renamed the Cabinet Electoral Conversion Therapy, the new gas chambers shaming the gay out of America….I am not as nasty as homophobia, sexual assault, transphobia, white supremacy, misogyny, ignorance, white privilege….Yeah, I’m a nasty woman—a loud, vulgar, proud woman.

…

And our p***ies ain’t for grabbing. Our p***ies are for our pleasure. They are for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, you name it, for new generations of nasty women. So if you a nasty woman, or you love one who is, let me hear you say, hell yeah.

Someone needs to tell Ashley Judd that Bill Clinton did a whole lot worse than grabbing “p***ies,” and Hillary defended him while victimizing his victims.

Indulge me in a paraphrase of “nasty woman” Donovan’s words spoken by “nasty woman” Judd:

I’m a grieving woman. I’m grieving that “nasty women” speak in words that distract, delude, and degrade America and destroy American lives. Mainstream press-sanctioned, deplorable-speech and lies contaminating our national anthem….Blacks still in shackles and graves because their fathers abandoned them. Slavery has been reinterpreted as the welfare system by people who see melanin as victimskin….I didn’t know devils could be resurrected but I feel Hitler in our baby abattoirs. The final solution traded for “choice.” Mengele renamed “sex re-assigners,” castrating men out of manhood. I grieve for the victims of gender-obliterators, homofascists, and race-baiters whose lies deny that true identity is found in Christ alone—not in sexual deception or melanin.

I grieve for women who think empowerment is found in the illusions of Hollywood and delusions of actors. I grieve for women who learn about womanhood from “nasty women” like Madonna who made a living by objectifying herself. I grieve for women who are not birthing the life that grew within them and would have called them “mother.”

So, if you are one of these women or love one of these women—whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, you name it, know that there are thousands of other women and men who grieve and pray for you.

Amen.

Read more recent articles from Laurie:

New Trier High School Avoids Diversity Like the Plague

Highlights Magazine for Children Affirms Homoeroticism

Cub Scouts Reject Girl Who Wishes She Were a Boy

Join IFI at our Feb. 18th Worldview Conference

We are excited about our third annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Frank Turek on Sat., Feb. 18, 2017 in Barrington. Dr. Turek is s a dynamic speaker and the award-winning author of “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist”

Join us for a wonderful opportunity to take enhance your biblical worldview and equip you to more effectively engage the culture:

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

Read more:

North Carolina Policy Watch details how the most impoverished counties in North Carolina spend the most money on the state lottery: Read more HERE.

18 Signs That The Lottery Is Preying On America’s Poor  (Business Insider)

Lotteries: The Issue (Focus on the Family)

Lotteries — Robin Hood in Reverse (Boston Globe)

Illinois Lottery Has $200 Million in Bookkeeping Errors (Crain’s Chicago Business)

In addition to these IFI archive of articles, more articles on the topic can be found here.

The Illinois Family Institute is completely dependent on the voluntary contributions of individuals just like you.

Please consider supporting our work to stand boldly in the public square.

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I just read with interest a “news” story on Wheaton College that reported that Wheaton College has been listed as the “worst” college on the Princeton Review’s list of “LGBTQ-Unfriendly” schools and included on the “Shame List” by Campus Pride, an organization committed to normalizing homoeroticism. The unbiased news reporter Leonor Vivanco neutrally reports that the “Shame List” is composed of campuses that have “applied or received a Title IX exemption to allow institutions to discriminate against LGBTQ persons, or that have a demonstrated history of anti-LGBT actions [emphasis added].” These are reporter Vivanco’s “unbiased” words—not Campus Pride’s.

Read more here…

Lake Forest, Illinois resident Dianne Casuto in a letter in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday criticized a previous commentary in which Elizabeth Edens expressed concern over the safety to women posed by female-impersonators being allowed in women’s restrooms. Cassuto wrote, “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a transsexual or transgender individual is present there as well.”

Let’s clean up the euphemistic language, eliminating the Newspeak and rewriting her sentence more clearly: “It is inconceivable to me why Edens would feel ‘unsafe’ in a restroom simply because a man is present there as well.”

If Casuto is unable to conceive of why women might be concerned for their safety when forced to share restrooms with men, she suffers from a serious imagination deficit.

Why she would place quotation marks around “unsafe” is baffling. “Progressives” feel “unsafe” if they see presidential candidates’ names written in disappearing chalk. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of voluntarily attending a talk by scholar Christina Hoff Sommers. They feel “unsafe” at the thought of a debate on abortion. They feel “unsafe” if Chick-fil-A is on their college campus. So, why are safety concerns about the presence of men in women’s restrooms “inconceivable”?

Leftists, recognizing the importance of language in cultural battles, insist that everyone use their dogma-drenched diction. Those “transgender individuals” about whom Casuto writes who are seeking to use women’s restrooms and locker rooms are actually men.

George Orwell warned about the abuse of language by cultural dictators, a warning that should teach us to resist social pressure to surrender to their imperious commands—while we can:

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of IngSoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible….Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meaning and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever….

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A funny thing happened on the way to the following article getting published. After two pieces appeared in the Chicago Tribune mocking and maligning those who believe sex differences matter, I submitted an op-ed in which I express an opposing view. The associate editor of the Chicago Tribune’s Commentary section, Marcia Lythcott sent me this response:

I would love you to offer up an opposing viewpoint but you have submitted a rant. There is no way that this piece would make those on the fence say “Hmmm, that a really interesting viewpoint to consider.” I feel like you are jabbing the opposition in the eyes nonstop. Is it possible for you to do a rewrite, one that is less doctrinaire and reader-friendly? The point is to have as many readers as possible read a piece to the bitter end. I fear that many will stop reading your submission by the third paragraph. No one wants to be screamed at.

Readers can make their own judgments about the professionalism and accuracy of Lythcott’s eye-jabbing response, but before doing so, please take a few minutes to read the two pieces that prompted my op-ed, one by Rex Huppke and one by Mary Sanchez. See if their articles are less eye-jabbing, doctrinaire, ranting, and screaming than mine.

“The Left Seeks End of Sex-Segregation Everywhere”
Written by Laurie Higgins — First published on American Thinker

North Carolina’s attorney general recently announced that he would not fulfill his duty to defend a duly enacted law one of the purposes of which was to preserve the right of communities to require that restrooms correspond to biological sex rather than “gender identity.” Progressives are incensed by this type of legislation, which is proposed by conservatives in response to leftist actions in the service of their subversive beliefs about gender dysphoria. Progressives want any persons who wish they were the opposite sex to have unrestricted access to opposite-sex private areas, including restrooms, locker rooms, showers, dressing rooms and single-sex shelters. In the brave new progressive world, beliefs about the meaningfulness of objective, immutable physical embodiment as male or female must be subordinated to desires to be the opposite sex.

The left seeks to prohibit “discrimination” based on “gender identity” and “gender expression” in all contexts, including those areas that were created for the sole purpose of recognizing and accommodating objective, immutable sex differences. The prohibition of discrimination based on sex and the prohibition of discrimination based on “gender identity” and “gender expression” with regard to facilities in which private activities take place are wholly incompatible. The former permits society in some contexts to accommodate sex differences. The latter forbids society in any context from accommodating real, objective, immutable differences between men and women.

Some progressives dishonestly claim that conservatives are “obsessed” with so-called “bathroom bills,” when in reality it’s gender-dysphoric activists and their ideological allies who are obsessed with radically altering the cultural understanding of sex. They seek to mandate that sex-separated facilities, like restrooms, for private activities no longer correspond to the biological sex of humans but to the subjective feelings of humans about their sex.

Progressives ignore substantive conservative arguments. They recast arguments about the nature and meaning of sexual differentiation as bigotry; flippantly mock potential risks, particularly for girls and women; and wholly ignore the near universal understanding that separate facilities for men and women to engage in private activities exist because objective bodily differences exist and have meaning.

The concern of conservatives is not centrally about gender-dysphoric men assaulting women or girls — though that risk is not nil. The safety concern is, rather, that predators may exploit these policies, pretending to be gender-dysphoric in order to access women’s private facilities.

But even this is not the central concern. The central concern is with the meaning and value of physical embodiment from which feelings of modesty and desires for privacy derive.

In order to justify the injustice and irrationality of policies that force women and men to share private areas with persons of the opposite sex, the left resorts to unsound comparisons of gender dysphoria per se to race per se. Their error rests in the fact that while there are no intrinsic and meaningful differences between people of different races, there are intrinsic, substantive and meaningful differences between males and females, which both those who experience gender dysphoria and those who experience same-sex attraction implicitly acknowledge.

Here are some questions for progressives:

• Gender-dysphoric men claim that they want to use restrooms with only women, but what about actual women who want to use restrooms with only women? Why should gender-dysphoric men be permitted to use restrooms and locker rooms without men, but women should not be permitted to use restrooms without men? Why should gender-dysphoric persons not be forced to use restrooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share while non-gender-dysphoric persons should be compelled to use restrooms with those whose actual sex they don’t share?
• If separate stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from women in women’s restrooms, then why don’t separate stalls provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men from non-gender-dysphoric men in men’s restrooms?
• If separate stalls do, indeed, provide sufficient privacy to separate gender-dysphoric men (who are objectively male) from women in restrooms, then what would the justification be for maintaining sex-specific restrooms anywhere? Why not make all restrooms co-ed?
• If objectively male persons who are uncomfortable with their male bodies are permitted in women’s private areas, why shouldn’t all men be permitted in there? What difference does it make to women if the man in the stall next to them likes his anatomy or not?
• Once objectively male persons are allowed in women’s restrooms, on what basis would any man be prohibited from entering a women’s restroom? Wouldn’t prohibiting men from accessing women’s restrooms because they’re men constitute discrimination based on sex, and wouldn’t prohibiting them from accessing women’s restrooms because they’re not gender-dysphoric constitute discrimination based on “gender identity”?

While progressives are exalting subjective feelings, they should bear in mind that many men and women content with their respective maleness and femaleness have feelings too—feelings of modesty—which do not make them heartless, ignorant bigots no matter how many times those epithets are hurled at them.

Widespread embrace of leftist sexuality ideology, which is intrinsically self-contradictory, will ultimately result in the eradication of the public recognition of sex differences in all laws, policies and practices. It’s universal co-ed restrooms or else.

Concerned about Common Core Standards?

Join us this Friday (April 8th) in Orland Park for yet another IFI Forum, this time exploring The Case Against Common Core with Dr. Duke Pesta.  Click HERE for more information.

Click HERE for a flyer of the event.

If I had a nickel for every time a liberal said it’s a slippery slope fallacy to claim that the legalization of homoerotic marriage would necessarily result in the legal recognition of plural unions, I would be a very rich woman.

The juxtaposition of two recent Chicago Tribune editorials provides an almost-comical illustration of both “progressive” deceit and ignorance about marriage.

Eric Zorn inveighed against conservative claims about the inevitability of legalized polygamy, describing such claims as “desperate” and “sophomoric,” and then a few days later, Steve Chapman made the sophomoric claim that legalized polygamy is “not so scary.”

I guess this is how the Tribune demonstrates diversity. They’ve got far Left columnists and far, far, Left columnists.

Chapman writes that society should “reconsider” bans on plural marriage, arguing that “the case for legalizing polygamy builds on the case for legalizing same-sex marriage.”

He asks, “ If a man is living, procreating and raising children with two or three women, what do we gain by saying he can’t easily formalize his obligations to them?”

In an earlier attempt at deep-thinking about the moral imperative of redefining marriage to serve the desires of homosexuals, Chapman offered a journey through the history of marriage. He was attempting to show that marriage has never had a stable form, but ironically every form of marriage he presented had one constant feature: sexual complementarity.

Much of Eric Zorn’s “argument” consists of a thicket of epithets and generalizations. To him anyone who believes marriage has an ontology central to which is sexual differentiation necessarily regards same-sex couples with “contempt” and “disgust.”

Conservatives in Zorn’s evidently insulated world are “Bible-thumpers and hankie-twisters” who seek to “engage in poisonous debates.” That unseemly crowd includes, I guess, Princeton University law professor Robert George.  Surely, Zorn knows that no defenders of true marriage twist hankies with the kind of vigor that homosexual activists do.

Zorn’s real knee-slapper is his claim that “legalizing plural marriage” would be a “far bigger leap” than the legal recognition of homoerotic unions as “marriages.” He argues that there is a “vast difference between same-sex marriage and plural marriage when it comes to social and legal implications and…civic reverberations.”

That he believes this is astounding.

Jettisoning sexual differentiation from the legal definition of marriage is a leap of far greater enormity than eliminating the criterion regarding numbers of partners. It is, in fact, the most radical redefinition of marriage in history. Its civic reverberations have been already and will continue to be profound, shaking the very foundations of America. At no time in our history have First Amendment religious, speech, and assembly protections been threatened as they are now.

Zorn goes on to spew more foolishness:

[T]his is not one of those rare issues like abortion that will never resolve and fade away no matter what the Supreme Court says. It’s more like the issue of integration of public schools, an idea that was deeply polarizing at the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling but opposed today only by the most virulent racists.

There are, indeed, parallels to be found between Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell. Both Court majorities were wrong. The majority in Brown erred in affirming a false and destructive understanding of race. The majority in Obergefell erred in affirming a false and destructive understanding of marriage.

Zorn predicts that the marriage issue will “fade away.” Other “progressives” predict that the marriage issue will not fade away for the same reason that controversy over abortion has not faded away. Those liberals believe that because the democratic process was usurped and because the legal reasoning was deeply flawed, division over Obergefell will remain.

Both Zorn’s prediction and the other “progressive” prediction are wrong.

The marriage controversy will remain, and it will remain only in part because of the usurpation of the democratic process and lousy legal reasoning in Obergefell. It will also remain because eradicating First Amendment protections tends to provoke conflict.

But more fundamentally, cultural turmoil will remain because the philosophical assumptions that justify the legal recognition of non-marital unions as marriage are wrong. Just as preborn babies have a nature that sophistry can never fully conceal, so too does marriage. As with legalized feticide, opposition to same-sex faux-marriage will continue because the assumptions upon which it depends are false.

Homosexuality is not analogous to race. Zorn continually compares homoeroticism to race but doesn’t explain what constitutes either. Until recently, most people understood that race was a biologically heritable condition that carried no inherent implications regarding feelings or volitional acts. In contrast, homosexuality is constituted centrally–if not solely–by subjective feelings and volitional acts. Moreover, as conservatives learned over the past year, even homosexual scholars assert that “sexual orientation”–unlike race–is fluid.

The post-Dolezal understanding of race as a social construct opens up a can of intellectual worms for “progressives” because if homosexuality is analogous to race and, therefore, merely a social construct, one cannot appeal to biological immutability as a strategic way to condemn moral disapproval of homoeroticism. Clearly not all social constructs—which are self-evidently constructions of flawed humans—can be inherently good.

Oh those darn tangled webs.

So, why oh why do progressives get away with perpetually exploiting race as an analogue for homoeroticism? Why aren’t the Zorns of the world compelled to explain precisely the points of correspondence between race per se and homoeroticism per se? Do they even care if there are no ontological points of correspondence so long as they are winning in the public square?

I think we all know the answer to that. They don’t care any more about intellectual soundness than they do about the natural right of children to be raised by a mother and father.

The cool kids are wrong again.

If only liberals would listen to Pope Francis on marriage.

Plural marriage is a’comin’, folks. No doubt about it. Time to teach your children well.

Please support IFI as we fight for liberty & work to advance the truth
about the sanctity of life & importance of marriage in our culture!

Written by Anna Paprocki, AUL Staff Counsel

Sunday’s Chicago Tribune article, “State bill seeks to mandate disclosure,” is terribly misleading.  It implies SB 1564* merely requires a healthcare provider to disclose that she has a conscientious objection, that the bill is simply about not having patients be “blind-sided” that a Catholic hospital/provider doesn’t perform abortions, elective sterilizations, etc. The bill does not require mere transparency about objections, but creates new obligations for healthcare providers, including pregnancy resource centers that offer women alternatives to abortion, to promote and participate in conscience-violating activities. Sponsored by State Sen. Daniel Biss (D-Skokie), the bill promotes the coercive anti-conscience agenda of his abortion-industry backers, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU.

Pregnancy resource centers that offer “health care” such as ultrasounds, and perhaps even pregnancy testing, would be required under the bill to violate their core mission by discussing “benefits” of abortion and providing information on where to obtain abortions.

The article heavily quotes OSF ethicist Erica Laethem for irrelevant points. While Ms. Laethem explains that providers in her healthcare system do not have a moral objection to discussing any “topic” with patients, the bill is not about permitting doctors to talk about what they don’t object to, or providing information to what they don’t object to. It literally does the opposite. It creates duties on all healthcare providers regardless of his or her conscientious objection.

There is a fundamental difference between Ms. Laethem’s role in advising those in her healthcare practice about her view on complicity and a government-imposed mandate that all healthcare providers must, regardless of sincerely held moral convictions, promote and participate in conscience-violating services.

Notably, federal law does not share Ms. Laethem’s view that there is an appreciable “distinction” between a technical referral and effectively facilitating one that makes mandating the latter acceptable. Federal law prohibits discrimination against those who object to referral, in the technical sense, and also when she “refuses to make arrangements for” referral.

By violating federal law, SB 1564 could jeopardize Illinois’ federal financial assistance, including reimbursements through federal Medicaid, Medicare, and other federal health programs.

SB 1564 is detrimental to both healthcare providers and patients in Illinois.

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your Illinois state senator to ask him/her to please uphold religious freedom and conscience rights for medical personnel in Illinois.  Ask them to reject SB 1564.

*SB 1564 is co-sponsored by State Senators Julie A. Morrison (D-Deerfield), Toi W. Hutchinson (D-Chicago Heights), Linda Holmes (D-Chicago), Kimberly A. Lightford (D-Chicago), Michael Noland(D-Elgin), Heather A. Steans (D-Chicago), William Delgado (D-Chicago), Iris Y. Martinez (D-Chicago), Jacqueline Collins (D-Chicago), and Emil Jones III (D-Chicago).

How do we know that Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn is foolish? Well, let’s take a look at Sunday’s column and count the ways:

1.) He believes that the same-sex marriage debate will “fade into history.” 

2.) He believes that “ten years from now, when a betrothed or married couple is same-sex, it will be just as matter of fact as to a couple today being interfaith or interracial.” 

3.) He apparently thinks the elimination of sexual complementarity from the legal definition of marriage can change non-marriages into real marriages as opposed to merely unions recognized as marriages. 

4.) He has a fanciful notion that it is “progress” for the government to recognize same-sex unions as “marriages.”  

5.) Zorn’s belief that if six, or seven, or 40 judges overturn the will, knowledge, and collective wisdom of thousands of Americans—many of whom could likely run intellectual circles around these hubristic judges—means next to nothing in regard to the ontological reality of marriage. What judicial hubris tells us is that we’re fast becoming a nation untethered to either the Constitution or truth. And in the process, we the people are losing both our freedoms—chief among them the free exercise of religion—and our capacity to govern ourselves. 

6.) Those former supporters of true marriage who, in Zorn’s words, “have quietly folded up their tents” should be ashamed and are as culpable for the cultural damage done, including the impending persecution of dissidents and the suffering of children, as Zorn and his accomplices. While Zorn and his ideological ilk foolishly gloat, children, like the “banished babies of Ireland” are intentionally severed from their mothers or fathers. Christians have a responsibility to stand boldly for the rights of children no matter the personal cost. 

More important, any church leader or lay person who folds up his tent, either abandoning God’s design for marriage and sexuality or abandoning a persistent and courageous explication of them will eventually lose respect for the authority of Scripture in other areas of life. And the abandonment of faith in the authority of Scripture undermines the entire American project which, as Eric Metaxas and others explain, depends on virtue, which in turn depends on faith.

Here are some other truths of which Zorn (and scores of foolish Americans like him) seems profoundly ignorant:

• Homosexuality per se bears no points of correspondence to skin color. In other words, they are not analogous. 

• Legalized same-sex “marriage” per se bears no points of correspondence to interracial marriage. In other words, they are not analogous. 

• The belief that marriage is inherently sexually complementary is no more hateful than the belief that marriage is inherently binary. 

• The government’s legal recognition of only sexually complementary unions as marriages no more denies citizens the “right” to marry than does the government’s legal recognition of only unions between two people not closely related by blood denies citizens the right to marry. 

• Claiming that marriage is solely about who loves whom with no connection to reproductive potential  necessarily means legalizing plural marriages and incestuous marriages. Actually, if marriage is solely constituted by the presence of intense loving feelings with no connection to reproductive potential, then there is no reason for government involvement at all. The government has zero vested interest in recognizing, affirming, regulating, or promoting deeply loving inherently non-reproductive types of relationships. 
  
  There is no more government interest or public value in affirming and recognizing as marriages those sterile homoerotic unions than there is in affirming other deeply loving relationships like platonic friendships. Homosexual couples cannot suddenly justify their unions as “marriages” simply based on the presence of children, because they’ve already argued that marriage has no connection to children. There are many people in all sorts of relationship configurations that are raising children. If it’s the mere presence of children that makes a union deserving of being called a “marriage,” then any two or more people raising children together should be allowed to marry—or at least any two or more who really love each other.

No, the debate will never go away. Legally recognizing homoerotic unions as marriages is as profoundly wrong as were legal prohibitions of interracial marriage. While prohibitions of interracial marriage were based on the false belief that blacks and whites are inherently different, prohibitions of same-sex “marriage” are based on the true belief that men and women are different and that those differences have meaning for the public good.

No, the debate over the nature of marriage and the government’s recognition and regulation of marriage will never go away. If “progressives”—our current public censors—don’t ban dissent on issues related to homoerotic identity politics, this debate, like the one over legalized feticide, will persist.

Protecting true marriage is second only to protecting the lives of the least among us in terms of its importance to the health and welfare of this once great nation. The twin moral crimes of legalizing the slaughter of the unborn and legally recognizing homoerotic unions as “marriages” are dramatic manifestations of the enmity between unsaved man and God.  

This issue will remain until the end of this great nation or the end of redemptive history, whichever comes first. 

Stand with Illinois Family Institute! 

Truthiness:
the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true;
a quality characterizing a ‘truth’ that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively ‘from the gut’
or because it ‘feels right’ without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

A disgraceful column in the Chicago Tribune by the often disingenuous Eric Zorn serves as a reminder of how essential dishonesty is in the ultimately tragic effort to normalize homosexuality.

Zorn censoriously castigates Christians who seek to honor God in all that they do, including their work, describing them as “censorious photographers….sour and judgmental looking with revulsion” at homosexual “wedding” partners, and “saying bitterly to the guests ‘Smile, somehow.’” He further censoriously imagines a “reproachful caterer, slamming dishes down to express her contempt” and “an opprobrious deejay or sanctimonious florist grumbling darkly throughout the festivities.”

While glibly imagining these ugly and implausible scenarios, Zorn admits to a complete inability to “imagine that the fuss about gay weddings and their potential to impinge on religious freedom of service providers is a real-life problem.”

While providing not a single case in which a sour and judgmental Christian photographer looked with revulsion at homosexual “wedding” partners, or a reproachful caterer contemptuously slammed dishes, or a deejay or florist grumbled darkly during a reception, he did provide a case in which an actual Christian photographer was sued and fined for her demurral from photographing a lesbian commitment ceremony. And then there are the bakers and florist who are being sued. Oh, and let’s not forget about the fertility specialists who were sued for refusing to inseminate a lesbian, and the bed and breakfast owners who have been sued for not renting their facilities to homosexual couples.  

Zorn’s solution to the problem of the loss of religious liberty is to endorse yet another of obscene sex columnist Dan Savage’s harebrained schemes. Savage, the homosexual activist who describes orthodox Christians as “bat sh**, a**h***le, do***ebags,” has proposed establishing a database of “gay-hostile wedding service providers” whom Zorn describes as embodying a “we don’t serve your kind here” sentiment.

By now the lies of Zorn should be obvious: First, he posits hypothetical scenarios involving imaginary Christians for which he apparently has no evidence. Then he implies that actual Christians refuse to serve homosexuals when he likely knows—or should know—that the photographers, bakers, florists, and fertility specialists do provide their products and services to homosexuals, unless the particular service being requested violates their religious beliefs. In other words, Zorn lies when he suggests that Christians “don’t serve” homosexuals.

Contrast Zorn’s and other “progressives’” lies and ugly ad hominem attacks with Baronelle Stutzman’s response to this debate. She is the Washington florist who declined to provide floral arrangements for the same-sex “wedding” of a homosexual client whom she had served for nine years knowing full well that he was homosexual.

Please watch this moving video and send it to friends (click here).

Zorn rightly presumes that Christians who believe that both the Old and New Testaments condemn homosexual acts (while imploring all sinners to repent and “put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness”) will not sign on to such a dubious database. There are countless numbers of Christians who trust the scores of theologians trained in exegesis, including contemporary theologians, who teach that Scripture does indeed condemn homosexual acts. These Christians also believe that Scripture offers those who experience same-sex attraction the same freedom from bondage to sin (which is different from absence of sinful desires) that is offered to sinners who experience other sin predispositions. These Christians would not sign on to such a database.

And why not? (I’ll answer this question as if Savage and Zorn were serious and not merely snotty in their proposal.)

First, orthodox Christians wouldn’t sign on to such a database, because they’re not “gay-hostile.” They don’t hate those who experience homoerotic attraction and affirm a homosexual identity.

Second, they wouldn’t sign on, because those on the Left whose mission is to eradicate conservative moral beliefs will stoop to lies and slander to achieve their pernicious goal.

Without a shred of evidence, “progressives” continually assert the following non-facty, truthies:

• Homosexuality is biologically determined.
• Homosexuality is analogous to race or skin color.
• Homosexuality is in all cases immutable.
• All those who believe homosexual acts are immoral are stupid and ignorant (It is astonishing that “progressives” continue to assert this. I’d like to see Zorn or any other “progressive” debate N.T. Wright, Andrew Wilson, Doug Wilson, Elizabeth Scalia, Patrick Henry Reardon, John Piper, Nancy Pearcey, Robert George, Robert Gagnon, Anthony Esolen, William Lane Craig, D.A. Carson, J.Budziszewski, or Michael Brown on topics related to homosexuality).
• All those who believe that homosexual acts are immoral and that marriage is inherently sexually complementary are motivated by animus (I guess that includes Time Magazine’s Person of the Year: Pope Francis).
• Marriage has no inherent connection to sexual complementarity. (Then whence cometh the “twoness” of marriage?)
• Marriage has no inherent connection to reproductive potential.
• Marriage is constituted solely by love. (Then why not allow five people to marry? Why not allow two brothers to marry? And why should marriage be conceived of as a union between those who experience erotic/romantic love? Why not expand the definition of marriage to include platonic friends?)
• Children have no inherent right to know and be raised by their biological parents whenever possible (If biological heritage is so irrelevant as to render the creation of intentionally motherless or fatherless children justifiable, how do “progressives” account for the fervent public interest in genealogy?)

In a recent Public Discourse essay titled “The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare,” Carson Holloway questions Americans’ tolerance for deception:

Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation. How did American culture grow so dangerously accustomed to falsehood?

In order to know whether an idea embodies love, one must first know if it’s true. The idea that volitional homosexual acts are morally neutral or morally good is not true and, therefore, promoting it is not loving. Promoting such an idea to young children—as is happening in our publicly subsidized schools—is downright evil.

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