Just in time for LGBTQ Pride Month, the Illinois Senate passed House Bill 2590 requiring county clerks to issue new marriage certificates upon request to reflect legal name changes for transgender and non-binary individuals. It passed by a vote of 82 to 28 in the House on April 22, 2021 and by a vote of 49 to 5 in the Illinois Senate on May 28, 2021.

State Senator Sara Feigenholtz (D-Chicago), the sponsor of the bill, also sponsored Senate Bill 139 which passed in both the Illinois House and Illinois Senate a few weeks earlier and allows the removal of “gendered” language from marriage certificates. This proposal passed out of the Illinois Senate on April 21, 2021 by a vote of 44 to 13, and out of the Illinois House on May 19, 2021 by a vote of 78 to 30.

However, Feigenholtz didn’t believe SB 139 went far enough. “Non-binary and transgender individuals should be able to have a marriage license that lists their correct name,” she said.

Hence, the introduction of HB 2590, which bars any additional markings alluding to the individual’s former name from appearing on the new marriage certificates. The bill only allows county clerks can only change names on marriage certificates when the marriage occurred in Illinois and legal documentation of the name change is provided.

People in the nonbinary and transgender communities along with their allies’ say the use of their former names, called “deadnaming,” is offensive and causes them trauma. That is why Feigenholtz and others say they pushed for HB 2590s passage.

Another bill, HB 9, also supported by the LGBTQ community, narrowly missed passage in the spring legislative session. HB 9 would have required the State Registrar of Records to establish a new birth certificate when receiving a signed statement (called self-attestation) that an individual has undergone treatment for the purpose of gender transition. Under current law, a treating doctor must sign off on the change.

While the bill passed in the Illinois House by a vote of 66 to 45, it failed to pass by one vote in the Illinois Senate and was placed on postponed consideration. The bill can be brought back up for another vote at any time the Senate convenes during this session.

House Bill 9 was introduced by State Representative Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz (D-Glenview) who describes it as aligning “with the requirements for driver’s licenses in Illinois that do not require a doctor’s note.”

Proponents of the bill claim the change is needed to aid transgender and binary persons secure vital documents even if they have not transitioned medically. So, if the bill were to pass, an individual would only have to state that they are different gender to have their gender changed on their birth certificate. No medical proof of medical intervention would be necessary.

Capitol News Illinois (CNI) reported Myles Brady Davis, press secretary and director of communication at Equality Illinois, told a House Committee, “Access to a birth certificate is the first step in securing important identity documents needed for many aspects of daily life.”

Our Springfield snollygosters are working tenaciously to provide Christian parents with a plethora of reasons to abandon government schools in Illinois. On Thursday afternoon (May 20th), the Illinois Senate took up and debated another “comprehensive” sex education bill (SB 818) that so-called “progressives” and their evil allies–Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and Equality Illinois–are using to indoctrinate children starting in kindergarten.

This bill to corrupt children with leftist humanistic values is sponsored by Illinois State Senator Ram Villivalam (D-Chicago) and passed by a partisan vote of 37 to 18 with four members not voting. It is now up for consideration in the Illinois House, where State Representative Camille Lilly (D-Chicago) is the chief sponsor.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her to vote against SB 818. Impressionable students in public schools should not be exposed to body- and soul-destroying messages that promote leftist beliefs about sexuality.

Background

The Illinois Senate debated this controversial legislation for almost an hour on Thursday afternoon. You can watch/listen to the entire debate on the IFI YouTube channel or on our newer Rumble channel. You can also watch the embedded version at the end of this article.

It was encouraging to see five conservative senators rise to question the sponsor and/or criticize the bill. Kudos to Illinois State Senators Sue Rezin (R-Morris), Terri Bryant (R-Murphysboro), Darren Bailey (R-Louisville), Neil Anderson (R-Moline), and Jason Plummer (R-Vandalia) for boldly speaking against this terrible bill.

Regarding the hour-long debate, there are just too many fallacies, outright lies and corrupt intentions to address in one article. Here are just a few of the glaring problems.

State Senator Celina Villanueva (D-Summit), a former sex education teacher, rose to ask the sponsor, “What’s the main goal of this bill?” Senator Villivalam responded:

The main goal is to insure that our youth have the opportunity to be safe and healthy by obtaining and having access to age and developmentally appropriate, medically accurate information and making sure that no one, no one, feels excluded in their classroom. No one feels excluded in their community.

Well, the bill also demands that comprehensive sex education classes be “culturally” appropriate, which the bill defines as follows:

“Culturally appropriate” means affirming culturally diverse individuals, families, and communities in an inclusive, respectful, and effective manner, including materials and instruction that are inclusive of race, ethnicity, language, cultural background, immigration status, religion, disability, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, and sexual behavior.

Culturally diverse and culturally appropriate? This Planned Parenthood legislation is neither inclusive nor respectful of orthodox Jewish, Christian or Muslim families. What families from these faith traditions deem to be “developmentally appropriate” is wildly different from what Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Equality Illinois celebrate and promote. This point is further illuminated by the floor statement made by State Senator Patricia Van Pelt (D-Chicago):

In my history, before I came here, I was a preacher, and I preached on a regular basis. When I looked at bills like this it was really, really hard for me to get my hands around it, because it was so contrary to what we teach in church. But this is a law this is not a church. And we are representatives of the people in our district. We are not their preachers. We are not their pastors. We are not the ones that’s gonna make them keep the values right or their morals right. 

I learned by being here that many of the things that we held true in the church was actually hurting our community. And I think not having that knowledge not letting those children have the knowledge about what this is [is not good]

…

I’m standing in support of this bill as a new Patricia, not the Patricia that came in here. Because the Patricia that came in here would have had a hard time even voting for it, more less standing up and saying ‘yes, these children need to know what’s happening to them.’

State Senator Van Pelt has been in Springfield since 2013, and by her own testimony, it appears she has been thoroughly corrupted by the Springfield swamp. The “new Patricia,” must have a heart of stone because she has repeatedly ignored the Holy Spirit’s promptings to do what is right. The “new Patricia” no longer has a problem upholding sexually corrupt material being taught to children.

It was also disappointing  to hear State Senator Doris Turner (D-Carlinville) assert that “families come in very different sizes and boxes and no one has the right to define what a family is and what a family should consist of.” As with “marriage,” the God of creation ordained family. It is He who has the right to define what a family is and what it is not.

Senators Van Pelt, Turner and many of their colleagues think that “knowledge” will solve the problems caused by a sexualized culture. State Senator Linda Holmes (D-Aurora) even stated on the floor during debate:

I just don’t understand it, I think what we are doing when we are teaching–again, age-appropriate, medically accurate–sex education to our children, we are arming them with knowledge, and I don’t know when that has ever been a bad thing. 

Maybe Senator Holmes doesn’t remember, or maybe she was never taught the creation story. Genesis 2:15-17 tells us:

Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Knowledge of evil is not a good thing. It leads to death. Comprehensive sex education as proposed by Planned Parenthood, et al. is evil. Exposing young, innocent and impressionable students to Planned Parenthood’s  view of “age appropriate” material normalizes early and high-risk sexual experimentation.

Perhaps the clearest denunciation of this atrocious bill came from State Senator Darren Bailey who rightly said it will put “perversion into our schools.”

I sat here and I listen to this, and I participate in what I expect to be a prestigious body. And here we are dealing with absolute nonsense of putting perversion into our schools. Yeah, that’s what it is, it’s perversion.

Thank God we still have some state lawmakers in Springfield with the moral clarity and backbone to boldly tell the truth about this insidious agenda to undermine and subvert Judeo-Christian values.

You can watch/listen to the entire 57 minutes here:

More info:

The War on Children [VIDEO]

Stop CSE Tools & Resources

Sign the Online Petition

A Plea to Exit Public Schools ASAP

Please consider supporting the good work of Illinois Family Institute.

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

What nation or organization do you suppose is attempting to amass the most influence and power in the world? Could it be China, Russia, North Korea, or the United Nations? Or might it be Planned Parenthood and the International Planned Parenthood Federation who are orchestrating the biggest power grab of all with their push for worldwide Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE)?

If you think this sounds like the wildest conspiracy theory ever, or even just a bit far-fetched, watch this video.

No longer content with merely aborting millions of babies every year, Planned Parenthood and IPPF are vigorously promoting an agenda that sexualizes children and threatens their health, champions dangerous gender ideology, subverts the parent-child relationship, and violates parental rights.

Parents and grandparents, this is a crisis! In order to protect our children and grandchildren, we must stand firmly against this destructive evil agenda. It is imperative that we know exactly which government schools, and unfortunately some private schools, have adopted CSE and are brainwashing K-12^th grade students. Watching this video documentary by Family Watch International is a good first step.

**View Discretion Advised**

Secondly, legislation pending in Springfield (SB 818) which would  require every school-age child in Illinois public and private schools (including homeschools) to be introduced to homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation through mandatory “comprehensive sex ed.”

Yes, lawmakers doing Planned Parenthood’s bidding want to expand “comprehensive” sexuality indoctrination, which currently starts at sixth grade, to start in kindergarten. Laurie Higgins wrote about these bills back in February. If passed these proposals “will enable leftists to reach deeper into the hearts and minds of impressionable children to shape their feelings and beliefs about sexuality under the viperish guise of protecting children.” Read more HERE and please take action to speak out!

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state lawmakers to ask them to vote against SB 818. This radical CSE bill is heartily endorsed by Planned Parenthood of Illinois and by Illinois’ premiere “LBGT” activist organization, Equality Illinois, which should tell you everything you need to know.

Shame on the lawmakers and schools that are willingly promoting this perverse comprehensive sexuality education on other people’s children! Impressionable students in public schools should not be exposed to body- and soul-destroying messages that promote leftist beliefs about sexuality.

More info:

Stop CSE Tools & Resources

Sign the Online Petition

Please consider supporting the good work of Illinois Family Institute.

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.

Why Christians must engage the culture on sexual ethics or be responsible for our civilization’s demise

As a Christian pastor, I am seeing a dangerous trend among American Christians: There seems to be a philosophical and theological framework developing in reaction to a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to a Christian worldview. In many cultural spaces, the Christian worldview is considered laughable and openly despised. The response of a large segment of evangelicals is to privatize faith and talk publicly only about issues that don’t ruffle cultural feathers.

This is most profoundly seen in the cultural conversations on sexuality. Every evangelical is ready to talk about clean water in Africa, but you will find very few who want to talk about the necessity of Christian sexual ethics as a cultural standard. The reason is crystal clear. Christian sexual ethics are despised in secular society. They are viewed as hateful and repressive. Younger evangelicals see the writing on the wall and want nothing to do with this—as they view it—embarrassing part of their faith. They might very well be traditional in their sexual ethics, but they have talked themselves into believing that no one else needs to know these biblical truths. Sadly, they couldn’t say why Christian sexual ethics are good for the culture anyway.

A new trend among evangelicals is a posture of apology: “we are so sorry that the Bible says this is not a good idea.” Then, they have “listening conversations,” in which they listen to how damaging these cultural ethics have been. Then, they apologize again. Through silence or apology, a large segment of Christians have removed themselves from the public square on the conversations of sex, desire and gender. They want to be relevant. Staying quiet on sex and gender seems to keep us acceptable to the powerful cancel culture.

What happens when the Christian worldview on sexuality loses its defenders in the public square? What happens when a society removes its long-held prohibitions on sexual activity outside of the traditional marital covenant—one man, one woman for life? What happens when marginal sexual impulses of a society aren’t just tolerated but celebrated as a societal good? What happens when morality itself shifts so that gay marriage, gender fluidity and surgical “gender” interventions are held as high examples of society’s wisdom? What happens when what has been considered wrong in Western culture for millennia are now examples of a person’s ultimate expressions of courage and “authenticity”?

This is the world in which we find ourselves. The legal right to marry someone of the same sex is now viewed as a constitutional right. The era of “gender fluidity” is here. Children can now get medicine and surgery to repress and conceal their embodied sexual development and become what their fallen hearts desire, whatever that might be.

Catastrophically, this is not all that this new sexual freedom wants. The goal of the new sexual-freedom culture is not just freedom to do what an individual desires but also to force everyone to celebrate every sexual expression. With fascist-like devotion, they are taking aim at our children.

In Illinois, a new law has been passed that requires the inclusion of LGBT “contributions” to United States history. But this is not about historical contributions; it is about ideological indoctrination. In Joy Pullman’s Federalist article on the new law, Brian Johnson, an LGBTQ advocate, reveals that they are using this law to teach our children to accept the lifestyles of the LGBTQ community as a positive good:

“Imagine a generation of Illinois students having learned the positive contributions of LGBTQ people to U.S., Illinois, world history. … I think it’s only going to have a positive effect on our society’s view of LGBTQ people.”

The angels weep as we sacrifice our children through silence to the new god of tolerance.

Christian silence brings a great human cost. By remaining silent, we are handing our culture a death sentence. This sounds alarmist but if what follows is true, then the alarm must be rung.

Harvard sociologist J.D. Unwin’s seminal work Sex and Culture makes the danger to our country and culture clear. Unwin, a secularist, performed a sociological survey of 80 societies, looking at their sexual ethics and the state of the culture. His work shows a direct link to the flourishing of a society and the sexual ethics they embrace.

There are four stages of civilization that have repeated themselves throughout human history. The first stage is “zoistic.” Zoistic societies “have no … political organization; usually their ‘chiefs’ are social elders or magicians,” and they are “sexually free.” These are primitive societies that cannot provide care to their inhabitants.

The second stage is “manistic.” Manistic cultures embrace “ancestral worship.” The dead are worshipped, placated or served. Manistic societies “compelled an irregular or occasional [sexual abstinence].” Such societies do little to harness this power for the good of its members.

The third society is termed “deistic.” Deistic societies erect temples to respond to the powers of the universe. Successful deistic cultures are “energetic.” Unwin shows how sexual restraint and this social energy are tied together, writing that “members of all the deistic societies demanded the tokens of virginity as proof that a girl was virgo intacta when she was married.” Such a society prescribed “pre-nuptial chastity” to restrain sexual energy. To the degree that the sexual energies were restrained, the society was proportionally energetic:

[T]he accomplishments of extremely energetic societies are territorial expansion, conquest, colonization and the foundation of a widely flung commerce.” Sexual restraint, chastity, and marriage cause a society to flourish.

The fourth stage is termed “rationalistic.” Rationalistic cultures develop the arts and sciences and have intellectual advancements, and are also best positioned to care for all segments of society. In short, a rationalistic society is the kind of society where humans can truly flourish.

Western society is at the rationalistic stage, the apex of societal development. Yet according to Unwin, we are in a precarious place. Unwin’s demonstrates that when sexuality is properly constrained, the energies of that restrained sexuality is [sic] used for the good of society. But when a culture begins to expand “sexual freedom. … the society will begin to display less energy” and display “human entropy.” Such entropy is a decline into disorder. If left unchecked, the society will decline and be overtaken by others.

Surely, we have much to defend and protect. Arguably, Western civilization is the greatest society that has existed in human history. Built upon the foundation of the Hebrew tradition and the teachings of Jesus, the great fruit of Western civilization is representative democracy. No other modern government has done more good for human flourishing than the one we are a part of today. It is built upon the blood, sweat and tears of nameless citizens, saints and soldiers through the ages. The common good of our fellow humans around the world is dependent upon its survival and its ideas taking hold.

But it is time to sound the alarm. We are in danger of an extinction-level event, societally speaking. The house is on fire. We have expanded our sexual freedoms. We are losing all sexual restraint and the future is clear: a declining society that very well might be swallowed up by powers that can no longer be held at bay. If your neighbor’s house is on fire and they are asleep, you do not stop yelling to wake them up even if it annoys the whole block. Better to be annoyingly loud than watch your neighbors burn.

How might we be annoyingly loud on sexual ethics in a culture that is on fire? First, we need to remember what it means to be human. In Genesis 1:26-28, we see important ideas about humans that have been foundational to modern Western society. The first important idea that the Bible has given Western society is that every man and woman bears the image of God. Notice that biological sex is foundational to image-bearing and not an expression of personal choice. Our sex is what we are, not what we choose or how we feel. We can’t allow this pillar of civilization to be thrown out because a few post-modern intellectuals have decided biological sex doesn’t matter. It matters. and we must say so. Society’s future is at stake.

Second, the Genesis text teaches that each person is of immeasurable value. This value should be tended to, defended and cultivated. In Western culture, this means constraining sex to marriage because it is in a committed relationship that one man and one woman can honor and serve the image of God in one another. From this, the sexual ethics of Judaism and Christianity find their foundation. Sexual boundaries protect the beauty of God’s image in humanity. According to Unwin, this boundary enables society to flourish. Without it, there will be hell to pay.

The third biblical idea is this: “be fruitful and multiply.” In Christian theology, this is referred to as the creation mandate. If the image of God in humanity is where each person finds his or her identity and worth, then the creation mandate gives the purpose of human sexuality. In Western society, the family is the foundation. The human family is to be a womb of love, creation and protection. In the love of a father and a mother, a child matures in the stability of a life-long commitment. This purpose gives an aim for sex. Pleasure alone provides no restraint. Procreation and restrained pleasure in marriage enables society to flourish.

It is these ideas that have formed the basis of human advancement and human flourishing since the age of the enlightenment in Western society. It is the highest level of hubris to think we are above this pattern of sexual restraint and social energy. We ignore Unwin at our peril.

It is the task of those who believe this is true and care about the future of human good to articulate and speak out for the good of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. It’s time to be annoyingly loud. In every area of life—with family, friends, colleagues, church, and in the public square and politics—we must be apologists for the common good. Make no mistake: those who believe in the new sexual ethic and destructive “gender” theories are not going to stay quiet. They are loud. If left unchallenged, a Christian worldview will be relegated to the trash dump of history. And if Unwin is right—and the research is sadly compelling—this new age of sexual freedom will propel our culture into destruction.

I have heard so many Christians speak ill of Western civilization or claim it doesn’t matter that Christians defend it. This demonstrates that they have no idea what comes next if we remain silent. According to Unwin, a culture that moves into our stage of sexual permissiveness has one generation to restore essential sexual restraints before the culture begins to diminish.

There is still time, but Christians cannot stay quiet. We know what is good and right. The house is on fire, and the occupants are sound asleep. If we love our neighbors, then we must engage. Gentleness and meekness have their place, but this moment demands something more. It demands courage to be annoyingly loud. It demands that we not be silenced by the crowds. It demands a willingness to be persecuted. We should do this because human flourishing is at stake. So, wake up, dear Christians. There is a fire to extinguish.

IFI is hosting our annual Worldview Conference on March 7th at the Village Church of Barrington. This year’s conference is titled “Thinking Biblically About Our Corrosive Culture” and features Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Rob Gagnon. For more information, please click HERE for a flyer or click the button below to register for the conference.

“[F]or Precious Brady Davis,
getting her husband pregnant meant going off hormones.”

How’s that for a head-scratcher of a quote—a quote that actually appears on the no-longer reputable NBC 5 Chicago “news” website  in a story about two “trans”-cultists who are married and recently had a baby. The pretend-wife is “Precious” Brady Davis,” a biological man who pretends to be a woman. The pretend-husband is “Myles” Brady Davis, a biological woman who pretends to be a man. Myles-the-real-mother is the director of communications and press secretary for Illinois’ premier “LGBTQ” propaganda organization, Equality Illinois. This woman really knows how to spread propaganda.

The “trans power couple” are in the news again, and again they’re in the news for pernicious reasons. When Myles was 20 weeks pregnant, she learned that she would be listed as the baby’s mother on the birth certificate, because she is, well, the mother.

As “trans”-cultists and propagandists so often do, Myles contacted an attorney with Lambda Legal who contacted the Illinois Department of Public Health, which immediately cried uncle … or aunt … or something. Suffice to say, the state caved to the “trans”-cultists.

The birth certificate will now identify the mother—the biological woman who gestated and birthed the baby girl—as the “father” and will identify the father—the biological man whose sperm united with Myles’ egg and then implanted in Myles’ womb—as the “mother.”

According to the Chicago Tribune, Myles-the-real-mother “never even thought the birth certificate would have to misgender us.” Yeah, riiight. She never thought a legal document would include the objective fact that she is the mother.

The Tribune writer, Nara Schoenberg, evidently a propagandist for the “trans” cult who identifies as a news reporter, described the possible identification on the birth certificate of the biological father as the father as making “matters worse.”

Propagandist Schoenberg also wrote this nonsensical sentence:

To have biological children, they had to go off their gender-reinforcing hormones.

Schoenberg needs to take classes in both biology and leftist sexuality ideology. Does she know what hormones are? Does she know what “gender” is in the “trans” world she seeks to suck up to? Gender—according to “progressives”—is the aggregate of arbitrary, socially constructed conventions associated with maleness or femaleness. Hormones are chemical substances produced in the body that control and regulate the activity of certain cells or organs. Hormones can’t and don’t reinforce “gender.”

The website Mommyish—which claims to “take parenting seriously”—has an article about the self-glorifying, “trans”-cultist power couple titled “Trans Couple’s God-Like Pregnancy Photos Defy Stereotypes” which includes this photo from Myles-the-real-mother’s Instagram account:

A better title would be “Trans Couple’s Frankenstein-Like Photos Defy God.”

Word to Mommyish, while Myles’ cross-dressing and cross-sex hormone-doping is clearly an effort to conceal her sex (or as Mommyish calls it, “defy stereotype”), the photo of a mother heavy with child is the anti-thesis of a “stereotype.”

“Trans”-cultists use the fact that language changes over time to try to compel others to use their redefinitions of words and the neologisms they invent to advance their strange, science-denying, metaphysical ideology. Now they want to redefine the words “mother” and “father.” They no longer want those terms to be linked to biological sex. Instead, they want “mother” to denote humans who wish they were women and “father” to denote humans who wish they were men.

Well then, why not redefine the word “teenager”? Henceforth, it will no longer denote a human whose objective age is between 13-19 but, instead, denote humans who feel like, wish they were, or identify as teens?

What about “Latinx,” the neologism that refers to “people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States”? Why not redefine “Latinx” to denote anyone who wishes they were or self-identifies as a person of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity—including those whose Puritan ancestors came over on the Mayflower?

While we’re thinking about language, let’s remember what George Orwell said about the abuses of language for oppressive political ends (i.e., Newspeak), which points to the importance of resistance to such abuses:

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. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. 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….

[T]he special function of certain Newspeak words… was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them….

[W]ords which had once borne a heretical meaning were sometimes retained for the sake of convenience, but only with the undesirable meanings purged out of them. (emphasis added)

So, “trans”-cultists have struck another blow against science and reality. Illinois birth certificates will no longer “misgender” “trans”-cultists. They will now mis-sex them. (As an aside, the long-ridiculed flat-earthers must be so jealous.)

Some of us remember the good old days when teachers asked elementary school children to scour the newspaper for current events. If we want children to learn about reality, teachers better not ask them to do that anymore.

It’s remarkable that seemingly rational, sane people in academia, the professional medical and mental health communities, the arts, faith communities, and the press pretend to believe the emperor in a gown is an empress. We should no longer be baffled by the ignorant and destructive ideas people believed or, because of their cowardice, pretended to believe in days gone by.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Chicago-Trans-Power-Couple-Birth-New-Birth-Certificates.mp3

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Folks, if you hope to defeat “trans” activism in your public schools, public libraries, the Springfield Swamp, and halls of Congress, you must first find those old rubbery spines that have been gathering dust in your attics. Then muster some courage to speak truth to Leftists who have been winning gold medals in epithet-hurling. Their tongues are now the strongest part of their bodies, while apparently their brains are the weakest. Try getting them to answer a few foundational questions that emerge from their incoherent, science-denying “trans”-ideology and watch them bob and weave, evasively changing subjects in between screeching “hater” at you. Just keep repeating to yourself the old adage your parents taught you: Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names will never hurt you. More on those foundational questions shortly.

Before you go on your spine search, please pay close attention to what has been happening in District 211—the largest high school district in Illinois with 12,000 students and 5 high schools—where local control has secretly been wrested from the community by a group of Leftists “colluding” secretly with “LGBTQ” activists outside the community—way outside the community—to sexually integrate student locker rooms.

Last week, I wrote about the purchase of the District 211 school board seats in 2017 by Laurence (aka “Lana”) Wachowski, “trans” director of the Matrix movies who lives in Chicago; a “trans” architect from Pennsylvania;  the lesbian head honcho of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network from New York; a state senator from Chicago; a homosexual CEO from D.C.; a “trans” activist from Maryland; a homosexual activist from Chicago; and two “trans” activists from Chicago who secretly funded the defeat of three excellent school board candidates.

Since then, it’s been revealed that Illinois’ premier “LGBTQ” activist organization, the grossly misnamed Equality Illinois, sent a representative to the District 211 School Board meeting on September 19 at which the proposal to sexually integrate all locker rooms was discussed. Equality Illinois boasted on its website about sending its “civic engagement coordinator,” Anthony Charles Galloway, who is the former Project Coordinator at Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region & Southwest Missouri.

Last Monday, Vicki Wilson, president of D211 Parents for Privacy, and Tracey Salvatore, an epithet-hurling mother of two District 211 elementary school children, were invited to appear on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight to be interviewed by Carol Marin.

Salvatore is the activist I mentioned in last week’s article who, instead of explaining exactly why private spaces should correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex, hurled epithets at parents who believe girls and boys should not be allowed to access the private spaces of opposite-sex peers.

Before I get to what Tracey Salvatore said on Chicago Tonight, it bears mentioning that for some odd reason her coach—er, I mean, escort to the Chicago Tonight studio was Ed Yohnka, communications director for the ACLU in Chicago. I wonder why Salvatore invited him?

Salvatore managed to refrain from her customary hate speech when making her points on Chicago Tonight. Perhaps her escort helped her avoid that pitfall.

In response to Carol Marin’s question about the prior policy requiring “trans”-identifying students to change behind privacy curtains (still bad policy but marginally better than unrestricted access) if using opposite-sex locker rooms, Salvatore said,

I do feel that it fell short of full inclusion, full equity, full access just by singling out transgender students as requiring them to use the privacy curtains.

Well, it rightly did prohibit “full access” because the person seeking “full access” to the girls’ locker room was a biological boy. But “transgender” students are not being “singled” out. The boy to whom Salvatore was referring singled himself out by asking for special treatment. He asked to be allowed unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room—something other boys are not allowed.

“Trans”-identifying persons, like all other humans, have a sex, which is objective, immutable, and meaningful. Schools, like every other place of public accommodation, have sex-separated spaces in which humans engage in personal bodily acts like undressing and going to the bathroom. Treating a boy as a boy is the epitome of equity. Conversely, including a biological boy in girls’ private spaces is the antithesis of fairness, impartiality, and equity. Treating a boy as if he is a girl in girls’ private spaces means treating him specially and violates the privacy rights of girls.

If girls have a right to be free of the presence of objectively male peers in their private spaces, that right is not abrogated by the feelings of some boys about their biological sex. If women have no right to be free of the presence of objectively male peers in their private spaces, then why have any sex-separate private spaces, including for staff and faculty. If biological sex has no intrinsic meaning relative to undressing and engaging in bodily functions, why have any sex-separate spaces?

Commitments to “inclusion” and “equity” do not require that persons who wish they were the sex they aren’t have access to opposite-sex private spaces. Their feelings about their maleness or femaleness do not grant them the right to dictate that private spaces no longer correspond to biological sex.

Grotesquely exploiting the words of Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren in Brown v. Board of Education, Salvatore said, “separate but equal is not equal.” Warren said this:

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

Segregating blacks from whites in schools or other places of public accommodation was a pernicious practice based on the erroneous belief that whites and blacks are by nature different and based on white hatred of blacks. Separating boys from girls in private spaces is based on the true belief that boys and girls are sexually different and that those differences matter when undressing and engaged in personal bodily functions. The desire to be free of the presence of persons of the opposite sex when undressing has nothing to do with hatred. Salvatore’s claim is patently foolish.

Salvatore’s third claim is equally foolish:

Transgender individuals are not a threat…. Transgender people are not a safety concern to anyone, not in a locker room, not on the street, not anywhere else.

First, the primary issue is not concern about predation—though that is an issue, particularly outside of schools. But how can Salvatore know with absolute certainty that “transgender people are not a safety concern” to anyone anywhere ever? Of course, she can’t and doesn’t know any such thing. While it is unlikely that a “trans”-identifying boy will sexually assault a girl in the girls’ locker room, can prognosticator Salvatore say with absolute certainty that no such boy ever will? Can she say with absolute certainty that no such boy will look at girls who are undressing? Can she say with absolute certainty that no such boy will ever expose himself in the presence of girls?

And what about students who have been victims of sexual abuse. Estimates are that 1 in 4 girls (and 1 in 6 boys) will be sexually abused by the age of 18, which means in District 211, there are likely 1,500 girls (and 1,000 boys) who are victims of sexual abuse. In contrast, the Williams Institute estimates that .7 percent of teens identify as “trans,” which would mean that there are about 42 biological boys who identify as “trans”  in District 211. Many, perhaps most, sexually abused girls feel uncomfortable changing clothes in the presence of opposite-sex persons. They should not be compelled to leave their own locker rooms in order to feel safe.

Though the issue of protecting the feelings of children who were victims of sexual abuses is critical, it is not the primary issue either.

The primary, foundational issue is the meaning of sexual differentiation. Do our sexed bodies have meaning or not? Cultural regressives, like Salvatore and school board member/sexpert Kim Cavill, essentially say that physical embodiment as male or female has no intrinsic meaning relative to feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when engaged in personal acts like undressing and going to the bathroom, which is absurd and destructive nonsense. Three times Salvatore mentioned “respect,” and none of those times referred to the respect due to students who have a right to a locker rooms free from the presence of opposite sex peers.

Salvatore then made this baffling statement:

I think people have learned that transgender individuals are just like human beings.

Well, “transgender” individuals are not just “like” human beings. They actually are human beings, and I don’t know a single person who thinks otherwise. Recognizing “trans”-identifying persons as humans includes recognizing that they have a sex and that in private spaces their sexual identity is all that matters. Prohibiting students from using opposite-sex private facilities does not deny their existence or their humanness.

Salvatore assures the Chicago Tonight viewing audience that “the reality is that people are not getting naked in the locker room.” That may be true, but it’s hard to believe that students who are taking a swim class or are on swim teams, diving teams, or water polo teams are never naked as they change from clothes to swimsuits. That, however, is beside the point.

Unrestricted access means that if girls in girls’ locker rooms are permitted to be in their underwear or fully nude, so too is a biological boy who pretends to be a girl permitted to be in his underwear or fully nude in the girls’ locker room. And a biological boy who is permitted unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room is also permitted to be anywhere in the locker room when girls are changing into swimsuits. Whether any particular boy chooses to partially undress, fully undress, or be in the area where girls are changing into swimsuits is irrelevant. It’s the principle that matters.

Finally, here are the questions that every school board member, administrator, and supporter of the sexual integration of private spaces should be required to answer before any votes on policy proposals are taken:

• Why should locker rooms correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex?

• Who decided that in private spaces biological sex is subordinate to subjective feelings about maleness and femaleness and by what authority did they make such a radical decision?

• Do humans have an intrinsic right not to undress in the presence of persons of the opposite sex? If so, is that right abrogated by the feelings of “trans”-identifying persons or their aesthetic deception?

• If humans have no such right, then why retain any sex-segregated private spaces anywhere?

• Why is it reasonable for “trans”-identifying students to refuse to use restrooms/locker rooms with students who don’t share their “gender identity,” but it’s hateful for other students to refuse to use restrooms/locker rooms with peers who don’t share their sex?

• Why should girls in girls’ locker rooms who don’t want to undress in the presence of biological boys be forced to change behind a privacy curtain? Why can’t biological boys in the boys’ locker room who don’t want to undress in the presence of biological boys use a private changing area in the boys’ locker room or nurse’s office?

• If schools can’t discriminate based on either sex or “gender identity” in private spaces, wouldn’t prohibiting normal students (i.e., “cisgender” students) from using opposite-sex facilities constitute discrimination based on sex and/or discrimination based on “gender identity”?

• What should school restroom and locker room policy be for “gender fluid” students?

• In the “trans” community, girls who “identify” as boys are boys, so why should they be free to use girls’ private facilities? Should girls who “identify” as boys be required to use boys’ locker rooms?

• Are lesbians and homosexual men who oppose the sexual integration of private spaces—especially the private spaces of girls and women—demonizing, bullying, intimidating, hateful bigots as Salvatore characterized those who oppose the sexual integration of District 211 private spaces?

So many essential questions asked by no one even as we deny human nature and the fundamental rights of girls and boys.

Correction: This article has been corrected with regard to estimates of number of abuse victims and of teen boys who identify as “trans.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/What-Conservatives-Should-Know.mp3

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-and, please-

Illinoisans shouldn’t need a reminder of how committed Illinois politicians are to using tax dollars and government schools to indoctrinate other people’s children, but Governor J.B. Pritzker just gave them one last Friday when he signed the “LGBTQ” school indoctrination bill into law. This law, which takes effect in July 2020, requires that all children ages 5-18 in public schools be taught about the deviant sexual proclivities of men and women who have made some significant cultural contributions. Well, not all deviant sexual proclivities are included. Only the deviant sexual proclivities currently and publicly approved by homosexuals and cross-sex pretenders will be included—for now.

When the time is right, those who identify as polyamorous—er, I mean, “sexually non-monogamous”—or as hebephiles, ephebophiles, kinksters, zoophiles, or infantilists will claim their proclivities constitute a “sexual orientation” and will demand to have the “roles and contributions” of fellow deviants be included in curricula. They will one day rise up against the intolerant, ignorant, hateful bigotry that has resulted in their exclusion and oppression. And then those with other disordered identities—not necessarily sexual in nature—like “amputee-wannabes” (i.e., Body Integrity Identity Disorder) will plead for inclusion.

The reason all these groups will battle for the “roles and contributions” of people like themselves to be taught to our young, impressionable, and vulnerable children is that the central reason for teaching children about the disordered desires and deviant acts of cultural contributors is to normalize deviance. It happens in three ways:

1.) Exposing children repeatedly to a set of beliefs about, for example, homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation from age 5 on up desensitizes children to deviance.

2.) Positive portrayals of deviance from age 5 on up from teachers who are role models shape children’s moral views of deviance.

3.) When, for example, homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation are associated with admirable qualities like achievement, creativity, intelligence, or bravery, the good feelings children have for these admirable qualities are transferred to homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation. And that’s exactly what “progressives” seek.

Of course throughout human history there have been cultural contributors who experienced all manner of perverse and sinful desires and engaged in all manner of perverse and sinful acts, but historically teachers discussed only their contributions—not their perverse and sinful desires and acts. Now, however, a segment of the population has concluded that two forms of sexual activity are neither perverse nor sinful and are using government schools, tax money, and captive audiences to eradicate all dissenting beliefs.

Equality Illinois, Illinois’ foremost organization for promoting perversion, said this about Pritzker’s most recent offense against decency:

“We thank Gov. Pritzker for signing the Inclusive Curriculum Law and ensuring that LGBTQ youth will now see themselves in the history they are taught….” An inclusive curriculum can have positive, affirming benefits.

Since when is it the role of taxpayer-funded government schools to provide “affirming benefits” to children, and what specifically constitutes an “affirming benefit”? Before concluding that affirmation of homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation is a benefit, lawmakers and government-employed “educators” had to have concluded those phenomena are morally good, which is decidedly not their right to do in their professional roles when it comes to highly arguable moral issues.

Moreover, when teachers affirm the unproven, non-factual, subjective beliefs of the “LGBTQ” community, they are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) condemning the beliefs of many people of faith.

Another of Illinois’ sexual deviance cheerleaders, Mary F. Morten, board chair of the deceptively named Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, said this about the “LGBT” indoctrination law:

Gaining a greater knowledge and understanding of the contributions of various underrepresented communities benefits all of us. 

Does inclusion require affirmation of all beliefs, ideas, feelings, and volitional acts? Are those who identify as polyamorists, ephebophiles, zoophiles, and kinksters part of the “underrepresented communities”? Why should homosexuals and biological sex-rejectors be the only sexually deviant groups to “see themselves in the history they are taught”?

Equality Illinois claims it “builds a better Illinois…. where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.” Don’t believe them. They want to ride roughshod over people of faith and deride them as hatemongers.

Remember too that this brazen effort to use government schools to promote “progressive” sexuality assumptions and eradicate the beliefs of countless people of diverse faith traditions is bolstered by the efforts of not only Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance but also by the Human Rights Campaign; the Illinois Human Rights Commission; the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network, the National Education Association; and Pritzker’s recently appointed “trans” task force.

Conservatives, if you don’t have a plan to exit the state of Illinois, you’ve got 11 months to come up with a plan to exit Illinois public schools. The inept and corrupt miscreants who run the state want you to stay put for two reasons: 1. They want your money, and 2. If they weren’t able to kill your children in the womb, they want to corrupt their hearts and minds via government schools and your money.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Look-Whats-in-Store-for-Public-School-Students-in-Illinois_audio_01.mp3

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-and, please-

Former Illinois state senator Daniel Biss recently guest-hosted a culturally regressive radio program titled “Live, Local & Progressive” in which he sought to draw attention to yet another God-forsaken executive order (2019-11) from Illinois’ morally bankrupt governor, J.B. Pritzker, which was signed “shortly before the Pride parade.” The executive order establishes a 25-member “Affirming and Inclusive Task Force,” essentially to use government schools to advance the ideology and goals of the “trans” cult.

Lest anyone think the task force will be ideologically balanced between those who believe biological sex matters when it comes to, for example, private spaces and athletics and those who believe it doesn’t matter, here’s what Pritzker’s order dictates:

The Task Force shall consist of at least one representative from the Office of the Governor and no more than twenty-five (25) members, selected by the Governor, who have experience or expertise related to supporting transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students in schools including, but not limited to, students, parents or guardians, teachers, school administrators, lawyers, medical professionals, and representatives from community-based organizations.

Note that members must have “experience or expertise” related to “supporting” students who embrace “trans”-cultism. The word “supporting” has nothing to do with assisting students in ways that move them toward accepting their immutable biological sex. It means facilitating their reality-denying feelings, their invasion of the privacy of their peers, their tyrannical linguistic demands of others, and the hijacking of hard-won girls’ athletic opportunities by objectively male students.

Any guesses which community-based organizations Pritzker will include? Could it be the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance? Equality Illinois? The Center on Halsted?

The order took effect on July 1, 2019 and its recommendations are due on the governor’s desk by Jan. 1, 2020.

Biss’ guests were the following:

Nat Duran, a young woman who pretends to be a man and works for the  “LGBTQ”-indoctrinating organization the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance.

Nicki Bazer, an attorney “who represents school districts in her day job, and also does pro bono work on behalf of transgender youth.”

Juliet Berger-White, Deputy General Counsel in the Office of the Governor and another activist for all things “trans”—particularly school issues—who helped craft Pritzker’s executive order.

Nat Duran exposed the lie that “gender identity” is fixed and immutable—a lie that some “trans” ideologues have tried to pass off to a gullible public:

[W]hen folks often think of trans and gender expansive young folks in school systems, they immediately go to restroom and locker room usage, right? Anyone who’s been in a public space and used these facilities know that they are really gendered, and so how do we make sure that students who maybe are exploring different aspects of their identity are able to use these spaces in a way that feels safe and supportive to them…. [E]specially as you think of younger grades, I think especially around middle school, students who are really just figuring out a lot of things about their lives, like allowing room for fluidity as well. I think sometimes… even if a school in the best of intentions enforces a really supportive practice, is it so rigid that it doesn’t allow for a student who’s like, “Well, I think I might be trans, or maybe I’m non binary, but I’m still figuring it out, and so I don’t know what restroom feels best to me right now.

Point of correction: restrooms and locker rooms aren’t “gendered.” They’re “sexed.” They correspond to objective, immutable biological sex.

Duran didn’t explain exactly why private spaces should correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex. Nor did she explain why it’s hateful for normal students to refuse to use restrooms with opposite-sex peers, but it’s not hateful for cross-sex passers to refuse to use restrooms with opposite-“gendered” peers.

And if, as “trans”-cultists assert, it’s impossible to know the authentic “gender identity” of a person by their clothing, hairstyles, or anatomy, “trans”-identifying students can’t possibly know whether their same-sex peers are male or female. Therefore, they shouldn’t care where they change their clothes or shower. Imagine a boy who identifies as a girl filing an expensive lawsuit to access the girls’ locker room only to discover all the girls identify as boys.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive—particularly when we do it based on an incoherent ideology.

Duran’s discussion of identity exploration and fluidity points to the end goal of the “trans” revolution. The end goal is the eradication of public recognition of sex differences everywhere. Identity exploration, gender expansiveness, and gender fluidity preclude the existence of anything other than the wholesale sexual integration of every space, activity, and context. No more sex-segregated anything for anyone. Even school practices that are “really supportive” of opposite-sex-identifying students is insufficient. Duran and most other “trans” activists seek locker room and restroom free-for-alls—literally, restrooms and locker rooms Free. For. All.

It is critically important to understand that if society is legally prohibited from “discriminating” based on both sex and “gender identity,” there remains no legal way to prohibit what leftists call “cisgender” persons (i.e., persons who accept their sex) from using opposite sex private spaces. If a public school allows biological male Bob who pretends to be Mary to use the girls’ locker room, there would be no way to prevent biological male Tom who accepts his sex from using it. The school couldn’t prevent him from using it based on his sex because they’ve already allowed another male access to it. And they couldn’t prevent Tom from using it based on his “cisgender” identity, because they can’t discriminate based on “gender identity.” Abracadabra, all private spaces become co-ed.

Duran’s discussion also reveals how young the children are whom cultural regressives seek to inculcate with the “trans” ideology.

Duran also longs for government schools to be complicit in concealing information from parents about their own children:

[H]ow do we think through parental communications? If I’m calling home to talk to a parent, [is the student] out, or safe and supported, at home? Am I going to be using a different name or set of pronouns when I do that?”

In the view of “trans” dogmatists, those parents who reject the unproven, arguable, doctrinaire assumptions of the “trans” cult are unsafe and unsupportive and, therefore, deserve to lose parental rights.

Attorney/activist Nicki Bazer deceived Biss’ audience by omission. Here’s what she said:

[T]he rights of transgender, gender expansive, non-binary students are already protected in Illinois…. [U]nder the Illinois school code, all students have a right to equal opportunity to all educational programs and services. And under the regulations that the state board of education has issued, they have defined that, and made clear that you cannot discriminate or exclude or segregate students based on their gender identity. [T]hat applies to all schools within Illinois that are public schools. The Illinois human rights act also touches all non-sectarian K12 schools, or pre-K12 schools, and that also prohibits discrimination in all schools on the basis of sex and sexual orientation. And under the Illinois Human Rights Act, sexual orientation, sex, is defined as including gender identity.

Interestingly, Bazer did not share these relevant words from the Illinois Human Rights Act, which is state law:

The Act permits schools to maintain single-sex facilities that are distinctly private in nature, e.g., restrooms and locker rooms.

Nor did she share this from the 2016 Transgender Students in School  guidelines posted by the Illinois Association of School Boards:

[F]ederal courts in non-school cases have recognized a fundamental right to privacy or acknowledged the legitimacy of safety concerns in cases involving individuals undressing, using the restroom, or showering in an area to which a member of the opposite birth sex has access. Moreover, a federal district court recently asked the question whether a university engages in unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX or the Constitution when it prohibits a transgender male student from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for men on campus. The court concluded: “The simple answer is no.”

Juliet Berger-White inadvertently exposes the hypocrisy of cultural regressives who claim to value diversity:

The goal of the executive order is to ensure that we are bringing together a crucial group of stakeholders who have great experience on the ground…. These stakeholders have been doing this work on an ongoing basis, but the benefit of doing it from the perspective of a governor-appointed task force is that it can help these private stakeholders collaborate with the government, and the Illinois State Board of Education, to figure out what next steps should be, and what that looks like.”

In other words, outside “progressive” activists are going to collude with the government to advance their sexuality dogma. Who are these “crucial stakeholders”? Are any lesbians who object to the sexual integration of women’s private spaces included? Will the task force include members of the professional mental health and medical communities who in increasing numbers are concerned about “adolescent-onset gender dysphoria,” the effects of puberty blockers like Lupron, and how social “transitioning” at young ages may effect brain development? What about Muslims, Orthodox Jews, or theologically orthodox Christians who are taxpayers and have children in public schools? Are parents and students who object to the sexual integration of private spaces and athletics crucial stakeholders?

The name Berger-White may sound familiar to long-time IFI readers. Her husband, Jeff Berger-White, is a former colleague of mine from the years I worked full-time in Deerfield High School’s writing center on Chicago’s North Shore. He was at the center of a huge community controversy over his decision to teach the egregiously obscene play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

The play revolves around two couples: married Mormon couple Harper and Joe whose marriage is disintegrating in large measure due to Joe’s repressed homosexuality, which he eventually acts upon; and a homosexual couple, Louis and Prior. Louis leaves Prior when he finds out Prior has AIDS, and then has a month-long affair with Harper’s husband Joe.

There’s the black, homosexual, ex-drag queen nurse with the heart of gold, Belize; and the Angel with “eight vaginae” whose visits prompt sexual arousal and orgasm. The play is replete with references to orgasms, fellatio, semen, ejaculation, and f***ing. It includes the line “Suck my ****, Mother Theresa.”

In the heat of the controversy, Mr. Berger-White sent a letter to our local press asserting that it is the responsibility of English teachers to “challenge the emotions and morals” of their students—a belief clearly shared by his wife. His assertion raises some questions:

• Is it really the responsibility of high school English teachers (or government lawyers) to challenge the emotions and morals of students (or other people’s children)?

• Who decided that and when?

• How does the pedagogical goal of challenging the emotions and morals of students square with “progressive” commitments to ensuring students feel “safe”?

• If society agrees that challenging the emotions and morals of students is the responsibility of high school English teachers, why do we never hear about materials being presented that challenge the emotions and morals of “progressive”/”LBGTQQAP” students?

In the Biss interview, Juliet Berger-White asserted that “the law sets the floor,” but that when it comes to government schools affirming “trans” dogma, “there’s no ceiling.” Echoing her husband’s sentiments, she acknowledges the moral implications of promoting the “trans” ideology and policies in government schools, arguing that taxpayer-funded schools should abandon respect for biological sex “not just because we’re legally obligated to do so, but because we’re morally obligated to do so.”

The presumptuous Berger-Whites are using their taxpayer-funded jobs to indoctrinate other people’s children with their sexuality ideology. Their views are premised on arguable assumptions that are rarely addressed and never proved. Neither compassion nor “inclusivity” requires the affirmation of arguable assumptions that deny reality or that deem subjective feelings of greater importance than biological reality, especially if those assumptions result in the sexual integration of private spaces and speech mandates.

Teachers, leave those kids alone.

Conservatives, teach your children well, which can’t be done in places where foolish adults don’t respect physical embodiment as male or female or by cowardly adults who passively acquiesce because they care more about themselves than the children who have been entrusted to them.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/trans-schools_audio.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois!

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“Train up a child in the way he should go;
even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
(Proverbs 22:6)

“Progressives,” also known as cultural regressives, have long had their sights on the hearts, minds, and bodies of other people’s children. Now that they control Big Government schools, regressives can control the ideas to which children are exposed. And boy, oh, boy are regressive Illinois lawmakers going for broke—morally speaking. They’ve already achieved fiscal bankruptcy.

Regressives in the ethical swamp known as Springfield are stampeding forward to impose the “LGBT” indoctrination bill regardless of whether it makes Orthodox Jewish, Muslim, theologically orthodox Christian, or secular conservative kids feel “unsafe” or whether it deeply offends those children’s parents. To heck with inclusivity. It’s the leftist low way or the highway.

If passed, this bill (HB 246)—which was created by three homosexual activist organizations—will require all students in k-12 public schools to be taught about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and opposite-sex impersonators and that textbooks purchased include discussions of the roles and contributions of homosexuals and opposite-sex impersonators. A quick, thoughtless skim of the bill might lead someone to think it’s innocuous. Critical analysis and deeper reflection—not the strengths of Springfield swamp creatures—expose the noxiousness of the bill.

The notion that homosexuality is the ontological flipside of and morally equivalent to heterosexuality is an arguable, leftist assumption—not an inarguable, objective fact. Others believe homosexuality represents a disordering of the sex drive. Government schools—supported by the hard-earned money of all taxpayers—have no ethical or pedagogical obligation or right to base curricular decisions on arguable, controversial assumptions—not even assumptions leftists really, really, really believe are true.

In order to teach all children in grades k-12 about the roles and contributions of homosexuals and cross-dressers, lawmakers and school leaders must have first determined that there is nothing morally questionable about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation. To prove that’s the case, ask yourselves if Illinois lawmakers would pass a bill that requires schools to teach about the roles and contributions of polyamorists, polygamists, kin-lovers, or zoophiles.

We all know they wouldn’t. If there were a polyamorist, kin-lover, or zoophile who had contributed something monumentally significant—so significant that it must be discussed—educators would talk about the contribution, while remaining mum about the contributor’s sexual peccadillo. If the peccadillo were brought up, teachers  certainly wouldn’t describe it positively.

Why not? Surely, there are some kids who experience unchosen, powerful, and persistent sexual attraction for multiple people at the same time, or for a relative, or for animals. Why wouldn’t lawmakers require that the contributions of polyamorists, kin-lovers, and zoophiles be taught and that their sexual proclivities/identities be positively affirmed? Is the reason that they’re judgmental, puritanical, non-inclusive, intolerant, or hateful bigots?

Homosexual and “trans” activists reading this are likely to be at this very moment consumed by anger that derives from the kind of “judgmentalism,” “intolerance,” “hatred,” and “bigotry” of which they constantly accuse conservatives. Leftists become apoplectic when homosexuality and cross-sex identification are compared to the “sexual minorities” of polyamory, kin-loving, and zoophilia—”sexual minorities” that they view as morally offensive. Leftists are unwilling to grant to others the right to object to positive teaching about homosexuality and cross-sex identification on the same grounds that they—leftists—object to positive teaching about polyamory, polygamy, consensual incest, or zoophilia.

To be clear, I believe nonconsensual incest between adults and children and bestiality are more grievous moral errors than homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation, but I believe homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation are far more grievous moral errors than polyamory, which public schools would not present positively to students—at least not yet.

Schools have long taught about the contributions of important historical figures who experienced homoerotic attraction, people like Oscar Wilde, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and Sally Ride, so why do Springfield swampsters want this bill? The reason is that their central concern is not that contributions be taught but that the sexual predilections of cultural contributors be explicitly taught. And what would be the reason for that?

Leftists will say this bill is needed in order to provide role models for students who experience same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. Equality Illinois, one of the homosexual activist groups that created this odious bill, says that an “LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum can have a positive effect on students’ self-image and make their peers more accepting.”

First, is improving self-images and promoting acceptance of homosexuality and the “trans” ideology the task of government employees charged with educating other people’s children?

Second, why aren’t “progressives” pushing a bill that would require curricula to teach about the roles and contributions of polyamorists, polygamists, kin-lovers, and zoophiles? To be consistent , shouldn’t they want curricula to positively affect the self-images of students who so identify? Shouldn’t they want peers of those students to be more accepting?

Now we’re getting to the dark heart of the matter. Leftists aren’t concerned centrally or solely with acceptance of persons. They’re centrally concerned with fostering approval of particular sex-related behaviors—not all sex-related behaviors—just the ones they have concluded are moral.

They want to use cultural contributions as a means to transform the feelings and moral beliefs of students about homosexuality and cross-sex identification. Homosexual and “trans” activists know that if positive contributions are associated with homosexuality or cross-sex impersonation, the good feelings students have about contributions will transfer to homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation.

Since the goal of these propagandists is not to ensure that children learn about the most important contributions in literature, science, and math but, rather, that curricula be used to transform feelings and beliefs about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation, curricula will elevate lesser contributions of homosexuals and cross-dressers to the exclusion of more significant contributions by heterosexuals.

Leftists use public money and public schools to promote arguable assumptions as if they’re unassailable, objective truths, and they censor with shameless arrogance all assumptions they reject. They rationalize their censorship by declaring that if children were to study the ideas Leftists don’t like, some would feel “unsafe,” by which they mean uncomfortable. Oddly, they’re willing to expose other children to ideas that make them feel “unsafe.”

Christian parents need to think seriously about whether their children can be properly trained up in the way they should go by adults who believe homosexuality is morally equivalent to heterosexuality; who believe marriage has nothing to do with sexual differentiation; and who don’t believe that the differences between boys and girls are profound, meaningful, and must be respected.

Churches need to think seriously about how they can facilitate the exit of Christian children from government schools hell-bent on destroying their hearts, minds, and bodies.

Springfield swamp creatures want to infect all Illinois children with a diseased sexuality ideology via indoctrination centers identified as schools. Cunning, perhaps even demonic, wouldn’t you say, to get parents to pay for the blighted indoctrination of their own children?

“I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.” 3 John 1:4

Please, fight this bill, and while you’re doing that, plan an escape route for your children from government schools.

Take ACTION: Send a message to your state representative to ask him/her to reject this effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased beliefs about sexuality to children in government schools.

**UPDATE: This legislative mandate passed the Illinois House by a vote of 60-42 on March 13, 2019 and then in the Illinois Senate by a vote of 37-17 on May 23, 2019. It was sent to Governor Pritzker’s desk on June 21st. He is expected to sign it into law. Read more about the 2019 Spring Session HERE.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/HB246.mp3

IFI Worldview Conference

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman; and Doug Wilson, who is a Senior Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho .

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Click here for more information.

Here’s something many Illinoisans don’t know about the school sexuality-indoctrination bill created by Illinois’ premier homosexual and “trans” activist organizations: Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance (formerly part of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network).* This bill, which requires that the “teaching of history shall include a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the history of this country and this state,” also mandates the following:

 [N]o pupils shall be graduated from the eighth grade of any public school unless he has received such instruction in the history of the United States and gives evidence of having a comprehensive knowledge thereof.

Did you get that? Leftists in Springfield, controlled by outside organizations whose sole raison d’être is to transform the ontological, moral, and political beliefs of Americans, seek to require that children be inculcated with Leftist assumptions about deviant sexuality and be tested on them in order to move on to high school.

Exploiting taxpayer funds and captive audiences of children constitutes the most egregious form of propaganda imaginable. This outrageous effort to use children and public monies to advance a Leftist ideology must be opposed with the kind of fervor and tenacity usually demonstrated only by Leftists.

The bill also has a troubling section on the state’s textbook block grant program. This program, which historically provided textbooks to public and private schools—including Catholic schools—has not been funded for the past five years. If funding is restored and if the school sexuality-indoctrination bill passes, private religious schools would either have to forgo textbook-funding or use textbooks that include material that espouses positive views of disordered sexuality—views that violate both Catholic and Protestant doctrine.

If passed, the ideologically-driven school sexuality-indoctrination bill—also known deceptively as the “Inclusive Curriculum” bill (SB 3249  and HB 5596)—would require not only that k-12 teachers teach about the “roles and contributions” of homosexuals and those who reject their biological sex but also to tell students about the sexual predilections of those contributors. In other words, when teachers teach about the accomplishments of Sally Ride or the plays of Oscar Wilde, they would have to discuss their disordered sexual feelings and life choices as well. I wonder if Leftists will require that students be taught that Wilde’s first homosexual encounter was with a 17-year-old when Wilde was 32.

The goal of homosexual and “trans” activists is to use government school curricula to transfer the good feelings children and teens have about achievement to homosexuality and biological-sex rejection. That is decidedly not the role of public schools.

Teachers would also have to teach about the history of homosexual and “trans” activism. Because Leftists have been so effective at advancing their ideology by falsely claiming that homosexuality and biological-sex rejection are analogous to race, they are continuing with that false (and insulting to blacks) analogy by falsely claiming that “LGBTQQAP” activism is analogous to the Civil Rights Movement and must be taught as such to children.

The only other state in the nation that has passed such a radical and destructive law is California, which exposes how radical and destructive Springfield is.

IFI is pleading with Illinoisans—including families that homeschool and private-school their children—to contact their state representatives and senators to urge them to oppose this bill. Until such time as every theologically orthodox church creates a school to educate their children or provides financial assistance to their families who want to pull their children out of government schools but cannot homeschool and lack the means to send their children to private schools, we must continue to fight the usurpation of government schools by Leftists.

Due to death, divorce, desertion, or disability, there are many families in which there is only one wage-earner who cannot afford private school tuition. Compassion for their plight and a commitment to stewarding how our taxes are used should lead Christians to actively oppose this bill with all its devilish details.

*(Note the dishonesty of these organizations’ names: They are about neither equality nor safety. Equality demands that we treat like things alike. Homosexuality is not like heterosexuality, and it’s not like race. And “safety,” as virtually everyone knows by now, has been redefined by homosexuals and those who masquerade as the opposite sex to mean absence of the expression of beliefs with which they disagree.)

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to both your state representative and state senator, urging them to reject this effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased beliefs about sexuality to children in government schools. Contact them repeatedly.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Devilish-Details-in-School-Sexuality-Indoctrination-Bill.mp3

Worldview Conference May 5th

Worldview has never been so important than it is today!  The contemporary culture is shaping the next generation’s understanding of faith far more than their faith is shaping their understanding of culture. The annual IFI Worldview Conference is a phenomenal opportunity to reverse that trend. This year we are featuring well-know apologist John Stonestreet on 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.”

Click HERE to learn more or to register!

The noxious Leftist “Inclusive Curriculum” bill (SB 3249 and HB 5596) created by two Chicago-based homosexual/”trans” activist organizations (i.e., Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance) is moving through the Illinois Senate. The central goal of this costly and ideologically driven mandate that robs schools of local control is to use curricula in government schools to transform the way children think and feel about homosexuality and biological-sex rejection (aka as “transgenderism”).

If passed, this indoctrination bill will require that any “book or book substitute that will be used as a text or text substitute” in grades K-12 include the “role and contributions” of homosexuals and of men and women who adopt opposite-sex personas (also known deceptively as “transgender”).

In other words, all materials used in schools will be required to address the roles and contributions of people who define themselves by their disordered sexual desires and sexual behaviors.

In addition, this bill will require that “the teaching of history of the United States in public schools shall include a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the history of this country and this State.”

There’s more:

This instruction shall be designed to teach that LGBT individuals have a rich history and have made substantial and valuable contributions to society, including government, arts, sciences, mathematics, sports, education, and in the economic, cultural, and political development of society. The instruction shall teach about the rich advocacy among the LGBT community and the LGBT community’s allies…. Instruction shall reinforce that all people, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression [i.e., cross-dressing], have a right to be treated with civil, legal and human rights….

When possible, adults, including school district employees who openly identify as LGBT and other openly LGBT adults in the community that the school district may decide to consult with, should be involved in the development and delivery of this instruction at the discretion of the LGBT individuals.

There are no good reasons for teachers or textbooks to mention or discuss the sexual interests of contemporary or historical figures who have contributed something noteworthy to society. Their exceptional accomplishments should be noted, but their sexual proclivities—especially controversial sexual proclivities that many view as both immoral and destructive—have no place in public schools.

Homosexual and “trans” activists are not centrally concerned about ensuring that the accomplishments of Sally Ride, James Baldwin, and Oscar Wilde are included in curricula; they already are. Homosexual and “trans” activists from Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance are centrally concerned about ensuring that students know that Ride, Baldwin and Wilde were sexually and romantically attracted to persons of the same sex. Homosexual and “trans” activists seek to transfer the good feelings children and teens have about accomplishments to homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation. It’s a ploy to render disordered feelings and immoral actions innocent by association with accomplishment.

But the quasi-religious ontological and moral dogma of the homosexual and “trans” communities regarding biological sex, “gender,” and “gender identity” are not facts and are not neutral. They are articles of faith—arguable beliefs—that government schools have no right to propagate either explicitly or implicitly. Taxpayers should no more be forced to subsidize material based on the quasi-religious beliefs of homosexual and “trans” activists than they should be forced to subsidize material based on the beliefs of, for example, the polyamorous community.

Would any lawmaker vote in favor of mandating that schools teach about the “roles and contributions” of polyamorists and poly-activists, or the roles and contributions of other communities whose identities are constituted by what many view as disordered desires and immoral volitional activities, like “amputee-wannabes,” infantilists, zoophiles, sadomasochists, and sibling-lovers (i.e., “Genetic Sexual Attraction”)?

“LGBTQ” activists take umbrage at such comparisons, declaiming that their sexual predilections constitute an authentic identity somehow set apart from those who identify as polyamorists, amputees, or babies, to which others may respond, “Who are you to judge?”

What if children or their parents experience such desires, engage in behaviors impelled by such feelings, or identify as poly, “amputee wannabes” or “infantilists”? What if they experience unwanted “minor attraction,” “genetic sexual attraction” or zoophilia? If homosexuals and “trans”-identifying persons should be able to see their predilections represented in curricula, shouldn’t other identity groups be able to see themselves represented in curricula? Should the accomplishments of people throughout history who experienced such feelings be excluded simply because they don’t yet have a powerful lobbying group that invents language that cloaks their beliefs in the appearance of objective facts?

We all know that schools—at least for now—wouldn’t teach about the accomplishments of polyamorists, “amputee-wannabes,” sibling-lovers, zoophiles, infantilists, or sadomasochists. Even if school leaders believed the feelings of persons in these groups were powerful, persistent, and unchosen, and even if school leaders believed biochemistry influences the development of their feelings, school leaders would not allow k-12 students to be taught that an important historical figure was a polyamorist, “amputee-wannabe,” sibling-lover, zoophile, infantilist, or sadomasochist. Why is that?

The reason is not merely that no one has yet demanded that they do so. The reason is that school administrators and board members—at least for now—believe the behaviors integral to those conditions are unhealthy, disordered, and immoral and that teaching about the role and contributions of those who engage in them would serve to normalize the phenomena.

Well, here’s an inconvenient truth: many believe the same about homosexuality and the science-denying cult of biological sex-rejection. What right have arms of the government (i.e., public schools) to treat the beliefs of Leftists on those two issues—homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation—as if they were objectively true?

“LGBTQ” activists are so invested in exploiting taxpayer-funded schools to indoctrinate other people’s children that Equality Illinois is dedicating their annual “LGBTQ Advocacy Day” to pressuring lawmakers to pass the wildly inappropriate Inclusive Curriculum bill. This Wednesday, April 11, Equality Illinois is busing their supporters to Springfield for lobbying-training and lawmaker-goading.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to both your state representative and state senator to ask them to reject this effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased beliefs about sexuality to children in government schools.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Leftist-Public-School-Indoctrination-Bill-Moving-Forward-in-Springfield.mp3

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!

While conservatives squeak “uncle” about the “social issues” from the dark recesses of their homes and churches where they hide, the jackbooted Left marches boldly forward obsessed with making the “social issues” the central plank of everything. They’re especially obsessed with transforming the hearts and minds of other people’s children using taxpayer-funded government schools in which they have an audience of cultural captives.

The newest brazen effort to exploit public money in the service of propagandizing Illinois children is a creation of Equality Illinois and the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, two of Illinois’ dubious “LGBTQQAP” activist organizations, and their most reliable allies in Springfield, State Senator Heather Steans (D-Chicago) and State Representative Anna Moeller (D-Elgin) who have sponsored SB 3249 and HB 5596 respectively.

If passed, this “Inclusive Curriculum” bill will require that any “book or book substitute that will be used as a text or text substitute” include the “role and contributions” of homosexuals and of men and women who adopt opposite-sex personas (also known deceptively as “transgender”). In other words, all materials used in schools must address the roles and contributions of people who define themselves by their disordered sexual desires.

In addition, this bill will require that “the teaching of history of the United States in public schools shall include a study of the role and contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the history of this country and this State.”

But, wait, the activist sponsors aren’t done:

This instruction shall be designed to teach that LGBT individuals have a rich history and have made substantial and valuable contributions to society, including government, arts, sciences, mathematics, sports, education, and in the economic, cultural, and political development of society. The instruction shall teach about the rich advocacy among the LGBT community and the LGBT community’s allies to be treated equally. Instruction shall reinforce that all people, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression [i.e., cross-dressing], have a right to be treated with civil, legal and human rights, and as full human beings above all else.

When possible, adults, including school district employees who openly identify as LGBT and other openly LGBT adults in the community that the school district may decide to consult with, should be involved in the development and delivery of this instruction at the discretion of the LGBT individuals.

This bill applies to kindergarten through 12^th grade. You read that right. Leftists seek to mandate that five-year-olds be exposed to positive portrayals of perverse sexuality, and they want this exposure to be reinforced every year for the next 13 formative years.

Don’t be deceived by the language of “civil rights,” “legal rights,” or “human rights.” Neither homosexuals nor “trans”-identifiers are being denied any civil, legal, or human rights. To be clear, men and boys have no civil, legal, or human right to use women’s or girls’ private spaces, and women and girls have no civil, legal, or human right to use men’s or boys’ private spaces.

Equally deceptive is the reference to “full human beings.” “LGBT” activists relentlessly assert that disapproval of homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation constitutes treating those who identify as homosexual or “trans” as less than full human beings. This language and this bill are intended to use cultural accomplishments to transform children’s view of homosexuality and biological-sex rejection and to silence dissent.

This bill’s advocates seek to use cultural achievements to suggest without stating that homosexuality and biological sex-rejection are good because people who affirm homosexual or “trans” identities did great things. The strategy employs a kind of false syllogism that goes something like this:

Sally Ride was a physicist, astronaut, and the first American woman in space.

Sally Ride was a lesbian.

Therefore, homosexuality is good.

Rational people who have developed the ability to think properly about morality will not be duped by this propaganda technique. Mature people who have been trained to think rationally about morality recognize that people can be kind, creative, brilliant, funny, and/or generous and yet at the same time experience disordered feelings and engage in immoral acts.

The problem is that children, teens, and even many adults have a poorly developed moral compass. Children and teens are especially predisposed to thinking that those they love or admire are perfect in every way.

Can those who choose to place their unchosen same-sex attraction at the center of their identity do great things? Of course they can. And so too can people who experience other disordered desires and engage in other types of immoral acts. But subjective sexual feelings and the volitional acts impelled by those feelings have nothing to do with their great achievements. So, why mention them?

Leftists seek to associate homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation with achievement in order to transfer the positive feelings people have about achievements to homosexuality and gender confusion. Leftists want to inculcate young minds and hearts with arguable propositions without actually having to make an argument with evidence and without allowing dissenting arguments to be made. The Left treats their arguable assumptions about the morality of homosexuality and biological-sex rejection as if they were unassailable objective moral truths. And they’re counting on no one noticing or addressing what they’re sneakily doing.

An NPR reporter asked me how I would respond to a homosexual teen who complains that he’s not seeing himself represented in curricula. I responded that I would ask the teen what he thinks should be done about a polyamorous student who complains that he doesn’t see himself  represented in curricula, or the girl who’s in love with her brother (remember, love is love, and who are we to judge) and doesn’t see herself represented in curricula, or the girl who embraces promiscuity as central to her identity and complains that she doesn’t see herself represented in curricula.

Lawmakers, administrators, and school board members would never allow teachers to present to students resources that include the role and contributions of polyamorists, sibling-lovers, or promiscuous persons. Or rather, they wouldn’t allow teachers to identify the polyamorous predilections, incestuous identities, or promiscuous propensities of men and women whose achievements are shared with students. And why not?

Because—at least for now—lawmakers, administrators, and school board members believe polyamory, consensual incest, and promiscuity are immoral and unhealthy. And therein lies the problem: Many people—including Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox—believe that homosexual activity and opposite-sex impersonation are equally immoral. Public schools—which are funded by all taxpayers and serve a diverse population—have no business treating homosexuality or opposite-sex impersonation as if it were objectively and inarguably moral.

Furthermore, this bill puts homosexuals–both inside and outside schools–in charge of curricula, and it requires that “LGBT” activism be taught. Obviously, such activism is to be taught positively. Schools are expected to teach about “LGBT” activism as they would teach about the Civil Rights Movement. But it’s not like the Civil Rights Movement because homosexuality per se is not analogous to race per se.

If this indoctrination bill is passed, “agents of change” (formerly known as teachers) will base their text selections not on the quality of a text but, rather, on whether it was written by a homosexual or by someone who adopted an opposite-sex persona or on how it depicts homosexuality and the “trans” ideology. Curricula will become–even more than it is already–a political tool.

If this bill is passed by the Illinois Senate and House and lands on “No-Social-Agenda” Rauner’s desk, is there any doubt that he will sign the bill into law? Remember, he just attended a swanky fundraising soiree hosted by Equality Illinois (which, by the way, was honoring Planned Parenthood). “No-Social-Agenda” Rauner spoke at and donated $15,000 to Equality Illinois to help it in its effort to eradicate moral truth about sexuality from the public square.

Former intelligence analyst and senior contributor at The Federalist, Stella Morabito, warns about the harms done to children through the kind of politicized curricula that Equality Illinois, Steans, and Moeller are pushing:

Identity politics and leftist politicization in the schools is pervasive these days…. Radical education reform has gutted school curricula of meaningful content, replacing it with identity politics, fads, and political activism.

…

The highly politicized nature of today’s public schools serves to draw virtual targets on the backs of students whose beliefs don’t align with its own. A bully is free to target with the taunt “bigot” any child who comes from a traditional Christian home, and the curricula will back them up.  

While conservatives are badgered relentlessly to shut up about the “social issues,” Leftists rub their hands in glee. Unrestrained by anyone in their own party and with conservative obstacles largely removed, “LGBTQQAP” activists and their Leftist toadies advance their perverse positions on the “social issues.”

So, fight this bill, and while you’re doing that, plan an escape route for your children from government schools.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to both your state representative and state senator to ask them to reject this effort to politicize curricula in order to advance biased beliefs about sexuality to children in government schools.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Wait-Till-You-See-What-LGBTQQAP-Activists-Have-Planned-for-IL-Schools.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!

The Leftist effort to sever objective immutable sex differences from both meaning and cultural recognition and to promote the fiction that one’s sex can change marches on. Within hours of the filing of the Pupil Physical Privacy Act (HB 4474) in Springfield, which would prohibit students in public schools from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for the opposite sex, Equality Illinois, an organization dedicated to the normalization of sexual perversion and confusion, flew into a paroxysm of deceit:.

HB4474…would stigmatize transgender and gender non-conforming youth by requiring them to use separate restrooms and locker rooms.

This bill is an attack on the well-being and dignity of transgender and gender non-conforming students. It says to them that they are not respected and valued in the very spaces where they should be safe and affirmed.

The only fair option is to ensure transgender students have access to the facilities that correspond to their gender identity.

Despite the demagogic rhetoric of Equality Illinois, policies and practices that acknowledge and respect objective, immutable, and important sex differences do not “stigmatize” or “attack the well-being” or “dignity” of gender-dysphoric students. Respect and valuation of humans does not require affirmation of all their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. In fact, sometimes respect and valuation of humans includes not affirming some of their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. Many would argue that allowing a boy or girl to deny the meaning and import of their sex through cross-dressing, rendering themselves sterile through the use of cross-sex hormones, and mutilating their healthy bodies is profoundly disrespectful—an egregious denial of their dignity.

The Left believes—sort of—that all reality is determined by the subjective feelings and desires of each individual. So a person’s maleness or femaleness is determined by their feelings not by their, well, maleness or femaleness.

But, it’s a horse of a different color, when other people “feel” that maleness and femaleness is inextricably linked to objective, immutable sex, or when they believe that it’s wrong to pretend people are the sex they are not, or that treating others with dignity requires affirming their wholeness. In such cases Leftists, who with alacrity and regularity violate the law of non-contradiction, claim their subjective feelings (and assumptions) should be considered immutable, absolute, objective truth—you know, unlike each person’s sex.

Certainly boys whom parents and schools foolishly permit to cross-dress at school are at risk for bullying in (and out) of restrooms and locker rooms that correspond to their actual sex, which is why the Pupil Privacy Act specifically allows schools to accommodate the disordered desires and behavior of gender-dysphoric students. The bill allows schools to provide single-occupancy facilities to gender-dysphoric students.

What government schools must never be permitted to do is affirm or espouse to students that compassion or respect for gender-dysphoric students requires society to pretend that their desire to be the opposite sex is more important than their actual sex. Government schools must never be permitted to allow students who don’t like their bodies to use opposite-sex restrooms or locker rooms. And government schools must never mandate that faculty, staff, or students lie by using opposite-sex pronouns. When administrators, teachers, and school board members no longer recognize something as fundamental as the immutable reality and meaning of sex differences, schools have lost the ethical right to teach. And people of faith must stop excusing, tolerating, and accommodating such ignorance and immorality.

To my knowledge, Equality Illinois has not explained why restrooms and locker rooms should correspond to students’ feelings about their sex rather than their actual sex. Equality Illinois has not explained why students who are gender dysphoric should not be compelled to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose “gender identity” they don’t share while non-gender-dysphoric students (i.e., normal students) should be compelled to use restrooms and locker rooms with those whose sex they don’t share.

Conservatives need to be intellectually equipped to respond to the lies used to promote the utterly irrational and destructive effort of Leftists to redefine reality. Conservatives need to commit unwaveringly to speaking and acting in ways that comport with truth, including in even seemingly small things, because it is through acquiescence in seemingly small things that incrementalism changes culture. And they need to prepare to endure the persecution that is upon us.

Teachers in public schools: Tell your administrations that pronouns denote and correspond to objective biological sex, that you cannot lie, and that, therefore, you cannot refer to students by opposite-sex pronouns. Tell them too that you will not use newly coined pronouns (e.g., “zie,” “zim,” “zir”), because they embody false beliefs about sex.

Parents: Tell the teachers of your elementary and middle school-age children that under no circumstances are your children to be exposed to resources or activities that address gender dysphoria. Tell the teachers of your high school students that your children are not to be exposed to any resources or activities that address gender-dysphoria unless equal time is spent with resources that espouse dissenting views on the nature of gender dysphoria and the proper way to address it.

Parents: Teach your middle and high school students about gender dysphoria. Teach them about the immutability and goodness of objective, immutable sex differences. Teach them never to use opposite-sex pronouns when referring to gender-dysphoric persons.

People of faith: Ask your church, synagogue, or mosque leaders to teach on this issue.

Those who out of cowardice are predisposed to accommodation, know this, the Left does not seek merely the “right” of a few gender-dysphoric teens to use private stalls in restrooms and locker rooms. No siree, Leftists seek the “right” of any gender-dysphoric person of any age to have unrestricted access to any opposite-sex restroom, locker room, shower, or dressing room in any context. Leftists will not be satisfied until they have forced all society to treat gender-dysphoric persons as if they are in reality the sex they wish they were.

Leftists will oppose this common-sense bill to protect the privacy, dignity, and safety of students with the vigor, tenacity, demagoguery, and deceit with which they promote efforts to normalize deviance. Conservatives should support it with the same vigor and tenacity but without the demagoguery and deceit. Fortunately, we’ve got reality on our side.

Citizens of Illinois:  Take ACTION:  If your state representative is not yet a co-sponsor of HB 4474, click HERE to urge him or her to sign on.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem

We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today.  Seating is limited!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

On Saturday evening (Feb. 8, 2014), U.S. Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) was presented with the “Freedom” award by Equality Illinois, the state’s leading homosexual pressure group, at a swank fundraising banquet in Chicago. You can watch a video of the presentation below [or on YouTube HERE].

Senator Kirk has become one of the most liberal Republicans in Washington D.C. on homosexual-related issues with ever greater acts of pandering to the LGBTQ Lobby. (He came out for homosexual “marriage” and is pushing for passage of ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [see homosexual activists release on Kirk and ENDA HERE], 

Read more about ENDA in the Heritage Foundation’s report on the ENDA bill HERE.

You might recall how Senator Kirk – in a capitulation whose cowardice was eclipsed only by its pettiness – recently blocked the respected pro-family organization  World Congress of Families (WCF) from securing a meeting room on Capitol Hill. This towering act in defense of “freedom” (sarcasm) came after the Senator heard complaints against WCF from some homosexual activists. World Congress, affiliated with The Howard Center, is based in Rockford, Illinois.

Thus it appears that Senator Kirk’s conception of “freedom” matches that of his intolerant homosexual activist allies. In 2012, Equality Illinois launched a vicious and slanderous campaign to deny Chick-fil-A restaurants the “freedom” to operate in Illinois. As you can see below, EQ falsely accused C-f-A of “discriminatory policies” because the latter’s Chief Operating Officer, Dan Cathy, had spoken out publicly against homosexual “marriage” as tempting the judgment of God. The Chicago “gay” group launched this “Flick the Hate” petition campaign designed to boot the Christian-owned chicken fast food franchise out of several college towns:

As you can see, Equality Illinois’ malicious campaign smeared Chick-fil-A and its COO, Dan Cathy, as representing “hate”–merely because Cathy disagreed publicly with “gay marriage.” EQ sought to petition stakeholders into cancelling their rental leases to the 19 Chick-fil-A restaurants then operating in Illinois. (Thankfully, they failed; there are now 32 C-f-A franchises in Illinois, according to the company’s website.) The EQ page reads, in part (emphasis theirs):

Chick-fil-A has 19 restaurants across Illinois, mostly on university campuses and in shopping malls.This petition will be give to key stakeholders in Illinois who lease, rent or allow Chick-fil-A to continue to sell their hate-filled homophobic “Chiken,” asking them to cut ties….

That kind of hate has no place in a business, especially in Illinois. It is a shame to be associated with such extreme intolerance and hate.

[Petition:]

…We urge you, as business and institutional leaders in Illinois, to challenge the discriminatory policies of this fast food chain and end all relationships that enable the Chick-fil-A brand to operation on your premises.

This kind of hate has no place in a business, especially in Illinois. It is a shame to be associated with such extreme intolerance and hate. 

I urge you to sever your ties immediately and “Flick-the-Hate!”

Background on Chick-fil-A

It is important to remind the reader that Chick-fil-A as a corporation never “discriminated” against homosexual customers or employees. In fact, one homosexual C-f-A franchise owner defended the restaurant chain and a New Hampshire Chick-fil-A restaurant owner supported a  “gay pride” event. What ignited the LGBT-obsessed Left was that Dan Cathy actually spoke out publicly against counterfeit “gay marriage.” The pro-homosexual/liberal campaign against Chick-fil-A also involved political opposition to proposed restaurant openings in Chicago and Boston–with liberal politicians seeking to banish C-f-A in the name of “tolerance.”

The Left’s opposition to Chick-fil-A led to a massive Christian pro-family backlash in the form of “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” organized by Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and 2008 Republican presidential candidate. Americans by the hundreds of thousands nationwide went to their local Chick-fil-A to support the restaurant chain.

Thankfully, the homo-fascists at Equality Illinois–and their Democratic political allies who used their offices to attempt to deny Chick-fil-A the right and opportunity to expand and do business (e.g, in the economically-struggling State of Illinois) did not prevail. In fact, they succeeded only in generating more support for Chick-fil-A among many, many consumers.

As you can see below, Sen. Kirk is still recovering from the stroke he suffered in 2012. We wish him a continued and speedy recovery. Politically speaking, however, we at AFTAH are appalled at Kirk’s pandering to Hard Left activists of the sort usually associated with Democratic politics, and we plead with him to return to supporting the pro-family principles of the Republican Party Platform.

Take ACTION:  Call or write Senator Mark Kirk R-IL)  at his Washington D.C. office (202) 224-2854; or at his Chicago office (312) 886-3506; or through his online Comment Form HERE] and urge him to stop rewarding anti-Christian bigotry. Ask him to return this “Freedom Award” from the hateful anti-Christian homosexual group, Equality Illinois–which in 2012 launched a failed pressure campaign to kick Chick-fil-A restaurants out of Illinois.

More ACTION:  Call or write the Republican National Committee [Contact Form HERE] and its Chairman, Reince Priebus [202-863-8500; choose ext. “1”], and urge them to stand firm against the aggressive Homosexual Lobby, which is targeting Christian leaders and businesses like Chick-fil-A for demonization. Tell Priebus that when Republicans like Senator Mark Kirk embrace Democratic-type social liberalism, it only deflates the pro-family GOP grassroots. Lastly, urge Priebus to PUBLICLY oppose ENDA, the radical Employment Non-Discrimination Act. Thank Chairman Priebus for being publicly pro-life–but urge him also to make the case against “Big Gay Government” (e.g., ENDA)–and Obama’s push to nationalize “same-sex marriage”–as part of the RNC’s regular public Talking Points. 

You can watch the YouTube video of the Equality Illinois presentation of the “Freedom Award” to Sen. Kirk HERE

This article was originally published at the AFTAH.com blog.

On Friday afternoon, the Illinois State Senate Executive Committee heard testimony on Senator Heather Steans‘ “Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act” (HB 4963).  With nine Democrats and 6 Republicans on this committee, the bill easily passed out of the committee by a vote of 8 to 5.  

The hearing included emotionally manipulative testimonies from a self-identifying lesbian mom and a PFLAG parent, two liberal clergy members, and Laura E. Berk,  Professor of Psychology at Illinois State University.  Testifying in favor of natural marriage include Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Paprocki, Rev. Bob Vanden Bosch and Ralph Rivera on behalf of Illinois Family Institute.

Background

The homosexual lobby, which includes Equality Illinois and the Civil Rights Agenda, are working overtime in an attempt to secure support of 60 state representatives for their marriage redefinition bill. Other politicians and groups assisting in passing the measure include Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Governor Patrick Quinn, Lt. Governor Shelia Simon, Illinois GOP Chairman Pat Brady, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the AIDS Foundation of Chicago, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Stonewall Democrats, and Illinois Log Cabin Republicans.

For the past four General Assembly sessions (8 years), a constitutional amendment to define marriage as one man and one woman has been introduced. And each year, Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) has refused to move it to a committee to be debated and voted on. If this amendment were to come before the entire General Assembly, we are confident that it would receive the two-thirds vote needed to pass. And once passed by the General Assembly, it would be placed on a ballot referendum in the next state wide election forIllinois voters to decide.

We cannot afford to ignore this situation! Illinois citizens can send a strong message by calling, emailing and/or visiting your state lawmakers in support of natural marriage.

Take ACTION:  If you haven’t yet sent an email or a fax to your state lawmakers, please do it now!  Click HERE to let them know what you think.

Please forward this article to your family and friends in Illinois.