The world’s richest man has it right. Last Friday Elon Musk tweeted, “[a]ny parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.”

Twenty years ago this would not have been a controversial statement. The general response would have been, “of course.” But today it is a position at the very edge of a massive chasm that exists between the left and the right. How did this happen, and why?

It is not as if Elon Musk is a distant observer, who emerges from his executive suite from time to time to issue statements just to weigh in on current controversies. For him it is also a personal matter. A month ago, Musk’s 18-year-old son by a previous marriage filed a a petition for a name change in the Santa Monica Superior Court. He also petitioned for a new birth certificate, changing his sex to female. The wide rift that exists in our culture, apparently is equally as wide within the billionaire’s own family.

So called “trans-affirming care” — puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery — have been restricted, banned or are under consideration in 15 states: Indiana, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas.

In the remaining states the care remains legal and several have passed or are attempting to pass laws that will make the states trans sanctuaries.

A bill is under consideration to do just that in Illinois, but it has remained in the Assignment Committee since February, with no other action taken so far. California, by law, already is a trans sanctuary and in Minnesota legislation has passed in the House to become a sanctuary state. By Executive Order, Governor Tim Walz already has required protection for “gender-affirming” care since March 8th.

In Colorado, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill on April 14^th making that state the third official sanctuary state. On April 12^th, the Washington State House passed an amended version of a Senate Bill that protects runaway trans children and allows them to get hormone therapy and surgery without parental consent, although the Department of Children, Youth and Families has to be involved.  That bill apparently needs Senate approval before being sent to the Governor. Many other states are taking up this issue as well.

The Biden Administration is fully behind “trans-affirming” care and has declared it “settled science.” Biden, himself, just released a statement opposing H.R. 734, a bill that would require children to play on teams that align with their biological sex. The President says if it reaches his desk, he will veto it.

It is simply incredible and nonsensical that this deep divide exists. Even Saturday Night Live, which was once a comedy show, took up the issue over this past weekend. In an unfunny skit with Molly Kearney, the show took shots at several red states for banning what she called “health care for trans kids.” The left refuses even to look at the possibility that chemicals that sterilize, and surgery that mutilates and sterilizes children could be viewed as destructive, not helpful.

Anyone who speaks out against medical intervention for children risks condemnation and even physical assaults. Those who favor medical intervention become completely unhinged by any challenge to their views, making it impossible to have a civil debate. There is no debate, according to the left, pointing to the endorsement of “gender-affirming” care by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Association, and others as confirmation for their position.

We cannot get a coherent answer to the question of why these organizations support such care, when in Europe, where trans hormone therapy and trans surgery started, the medical clinics are being shut down. The preferred therapy there is now talk therapy.

Why the difference?

Popular bloggers, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, recently hosted Jamie Reed on their podcast, Triggernometry. Reed is the whistleblower who exposed the destructive transgender care practices at Washington University Transgender Clinic in St. Louis, MO. The clinic currently is under criminal investigation by the Missouri Attorney General.

Reed is a gay woman who is married to a transgender man and worked in the clinic managing the care for the clinic’s patients for the last several years. Initially it was expected the clinic would care for 50 or so patients a year, but 50 turned into hundreds, then thousands.

Kisin asked Reed how she explained this explosion of trans-identifying children. While Reed’s observations cannot be generalized to other populations, she has come to a few conclusions based on the thousands she saw. Her view was interesting.

She observed that white children in the U.S. are indoctrinated to believe they are privileged, and because of that they are seen as “oppressors.” Many are desperate to escape that label. Because they are white, it is difficult for them to claim a different race or ethnic identity. They can’t claim poverty when their family is affluent, and they find it too difficult to identify as gay or lesbian. It is easier for them to claim to be non-binary or trans. Trans seems to be the path of least resistance to become a member of an oppressed group, freeing them from condemnation as an oppressor.

She didn’t explain what accounts for other racial or ethnic groups who identify as trans, other than to say that most of the upsurge, she believes, is fueled by social media. These children are encouraged to join the oppressed class. She said if you took most of these kids to a farm in Montana and took away their phones, it would be better for them than the treatment they receive in gender clinics. The idea they were trans would most likely vanish.

Doctors, too, are affected by social and professional pressures. More important, she said, is that each medical professional is merely a “cog in a spinning machine.” The machine involves multiple professionals, each one carrying out his or her specific task. If any one of them stops or does something different the entire machine breaks down. Each professional performs his assigned task to the best of his ability, without the necessity to evaluate the entire spinning machine. That is someone else’s responsibility. They don’t think about it.

It reminds me of an examination of the people who were involved in Hitler’s death camps. Both Hannah Arendt and Christopher Browning looked at the phenomena of seemingly normal people committing mass murders in places like Auschwitz and multiple other concentration camps.

Both authors pointed to the Nazis using a division of labor as a way that allowed each worker an out. They were just one cog in a very large wheel, disconnected from ultimate responsibility for the mass exterminations. Someone else was responsible for designing the machine and keeping it going, not them.

The church, too, has taken sides on transgender divide, many of them coming down on the side of genital mutilation in the name of love, as the church from Revelation’s Thyatira might have taken. Most won’t adopt a position, being too cowardly to pick a side, much like the church at Laodicea would have done.

Very few follow the model of the church at Philadelphia, which faithfully followed God’s will.

Today the church is not driving the culture. It is being driven by it, transformed by it. Nothing is going to change in Chicago, or Springfield, or Washington D.C. until the church stands up and becomes an instrument of both truth and grace. That looks like that’s a long way off, but it could happen overnight if enough Christians answer the call.

Can you hear it?

Read more:

Analysis: Illinois One of 29 States Allowing Boys to Play Girls’ High School Sports (Prairie State Wire)

The Trans Quagmire – How We Got Here (Thomas Hampson)

[VIDEO] Transgenderism is The Most Dangerous Extremist Movement in The U.S. (Tucker Carlson)

[VIDEO] Riley Gaines Speaks Out Against Trans-Insanity in Women’s Sports

[VIDEO] Transgender Agenda Run Amuck (Fox News Channel)

New CA Bill Requires Foster Parents to Swear Allegiance to LGBT Ideology (California Family Council)

Opposing Transgenderism Is Not Genocide (Oliver Perry)

30 Transgender Regretters Come Out Of The Closet (The Federalist)

[PODCAST] Generation Indoctrination: Inside the Transgender Battle (Christian Post)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Language-Rules-Article.mp3

Womaniacal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—another Democrat leader with compromised cognitive abilities and no moral principles—has womanaged to womangle her first day of the new congressional session.

She womandated that in order to make the U.S. House of Representatives Code of Official Conduct more inclusive, it will henceforth exclude references to the following: fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, husbands, wives, fathers-in-law, mothers-in-law, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, stepfathers, stepmothers, stepsons, stepdaughters, stepbrothers, stepsisters, half -brothers, half-sisters, grandsons, or granddaughters, as well as all pronouns that correspond to immutable biological sex, like he, she, his, hers, him, her, himself, and herself.

Pelosi calls these changes “visionary.” Methinks she is a visionary womanqué.

No matter if all the persons affected by the banning of these words identify as husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, or daughters. No matter if central to their authentic lives and happiness are their identities as constituted by and inseparable from their immutable biological sex. To Big Brother Sibling and his small-minded, power-ravenous Sister Sibling, Nancy Pelosi, using Big Government to eradicate public recognition of sexual dimorphism is all that matters.

Democrat science-deniers thrive on cancelling words, ideas, speech, and religious liberty (not to mention powerless humans in their mothers’ wombs). If satiating the lunatic “trans” cult, homosexual activists, and radical feminists gains science- and morality-denying Dems more power, who cares about language, ideas, liberty, or truth.

In my mind’s ear, I hear some Christians tsk-tsking my description of the “trans” cult as lunatic.  Those Christians have yet to explain how Christians can heed C.S. Lewis’ admonition to train up our children to feel hatred for ideas and actions that are worthy of hatred without using harsh language to describe evil. To use scriptural language, Nancy Pelosi and everyone else who accommodates the diktats of “trans” cultists, homosexual activists, and radical feminists are vipers.

I can hear some other conservatives—also known as living, marinating frogs—dismissing concerns and warnings about the scorched earth devastation of feminism, homonormativity, and “trans”-cultism, all of which conspire to undermine public recognition and respect for God’s created order.

These are the same conservatives who now use the word “gay” instead of homosexual.

These are the same conservatives who failed to object when pro-homosexual resources were introduced to their children in government schools through sex ed, health classes, theater classes, English classes, and social studies classes.

These are the same conservatives who attend same-sex faux weddings and call their actions “loving.”

These are the same conservatives who welcome homosexual activists into the Big Circus Tent of the Republican Party—homosexual activists who are committed to killing the party from within like a coronavirus.

These are the same conservatives who do nothing when their local public libraries invite drag queens—that is, perverted adult men—to read stories to toddlers.

These are the same conservatives who know and care little that there is a public health crisis among adolescent girls and young women whose hearts and minds are being poisoned by the social contagion of “trans”-cultism.

And these are the same conservatives who have little understanding of the enormity of the threat posed to our essential First Amendment rights by the Equality Act.

Just after Pelosi announced the exclusion of “gendered” language from the House Code of Official Conduct, U.S. womentally unhinged Representative Emmanuel Cleaver opened the 117^th Session of Congress with a prayer that ended with these words:

We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and ‘God’ known by many names by many different faiths. Amen and awoman.

Yes, a former pastor with a Master of Divinity degree actually said those embarrassing words.

Cleaver is apparently so steeped in intersectional identity politics and beholden to the culturally powerful groups that seek to blur the lines between sexes, he ignored that “amen” is not a gendered word. He’s willing to trade the Word of God–whom he claims to serve–for a mess of rancid political pottage.

If we’re going to invent neologisms in a futile attempt to recreate a world in the image of intersectionalist ideologues, I’ve got some:

• Womendicants: women who live off the government
• Womendacious: women who lie
• Womengelian: women who order the deaths of or experimentation on their children

Pastor and theologian Douglas Wilson tweeted a response to Cleaver’s peculiar prayer closing that aptly describes how many feel on the first week of the new congressional session:

The opening prayer for the 117^th Congress concluded with “amen” and “awomen,” and I regret to inform you that all my patience with the 117^th Congress, at the conclusion of their opening prayer, was exhausted.

I suspect many right-thinking Americans are also feeling something more intense than exhaustion.

There’s another possibility: Maybe Cleaver wasn’t saying “amen” as in “so be it.” Maybe he was using the prefix “a” attached to men and women, meaning “not men” and “not women.” Yeah, that makes more sense.

Unless there’s a revival, America is doomed by the rebellion, cowardice, and ignorance of leaders elected by rebellious, cowardly, and ignorant people.

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … 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. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.” George Orwell, 1984

“For whatever other reasons the language rules may have been devised, they proved of enormous help in the maintenance of order and sanity in the various widely diversified services whose cooperation was essential in this matter.” Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

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Written by Rod Dreher

Last year, I spoke to a Soviet-born scholar who teaches in an American public university. I’m using a quote from our discussion in my forthcoming (September) book, Live Not By Lies. This morning, she sent me this e-mail, which I reproduce here with her permission:

I know from your blog that the work on your new book is going well and I’m glad because, boy, it’s so needed. I’m observing some disturbing developments on my campus, and we are really not one of those wokester schools for spoiled brats one normally associates with this kind of thing.

This academic year I’ve had an opportunity to work with some early-career academics. These are newly-minted PhDs that are in their first year on the tenure-track. What’s really scary is that they sincerely believe all the woke dogma. Older people – those in their forties, fifties or sixties – might parrot the woke mantras because it’s what everybody in academia does and you have to survive. But the younger generation actually believes it all. Transwomen are women, black students fail calculus because there are no calc profs who “look like them,” ‘whiteness’ is the most oppressive thing in the world, the US is the most evil country in history, anybody who votes Republican is a racist, everybody who goes to church is a bigot but the hijab is deeply liberating. I gently mocked some of this stuff (like we normally do among older academics), and two of the younger academics in the group I supervise actually cried. Because they believe all this so deeply, and I’d even say fanatically, that they couldn’t comprehend why I wasn’t taking it seriously.

The fanatical glimmer in their eyes really scared me.

Back in the USSR in the 1970s and the 1980s nobody believed the dogma. People repeated the ideological mantras for cynical reasons, to get advanced in their careers or get food packages. Many did it to protect their kids. But nobody sincerely believed. That is what ultimately saved us. As soon as the regime weakened a bit, it was doomed because there were no sincere believers any more. Everybody who did take the dogma seriously belonged to the generation of my great-grandparents.

In the US, though, the generation of the fanatical believers is only now growing up and coming into its prime. We’ll have to wait until their grandkids grow up to see a generation that will be so fed up with the dogma that it will embrace freedom of thought and expression. But that’s a long way away in the future.

I’m mentoring a group of young scholars in the Humanities to help them do research, and I’m starting to hate this task. Young scholars almost without exception think that scholarship is entirely about repeating woke slogans completely uncritically. Again, this is different from the USSR where scholars peppered their writing with the slogans but always took great pride in trying to sneak in some real thinking and real analysis behind the required ideological drivel. Every Soviet scholar starting from the 1970s was a dissident at heart because everybody knew that the ideology was rotten.

All of this is sad and very scary. I never thought I’d experience anything worse, anything more intellectually stifling than the USSR of its last two decades of existence. But now I do see something worse.

The book you are writing is very important, and I hope that many people hear your message.

Correction: In an earlier version of this article, I used the terms “late-term” abortion and “partial-birth” abortion interchangeably. While a partial-birth abortion is a late-term abortion, not all late-term abortions are considered partial-birth abortions, which were banned in 2003. As long as a baby is murdered prior to delivery, it’s not considered a partial-birth abortion. I apologize for the error.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

In honor of Labor Day, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is showing the documentary After Tiller that follows America’s  four remaining late-term abortionists as they seek to “help” women by murdering their full-term or nearly full-term babies.

The film interviews Leroy Carhart, Warren Hern, Susan Robinson, and lesbian Shelley Sella (whose “wife” is ironically a certified midwife).

Here’s an excerpt from PBS’ description of the film with manipulative, non-neutral rhetoric highlighted:

After Tiller is a portrait of the four doctors in the United States still openly performing third-trimester abortions in the wake of the 2009 assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas — and in the face of intense protest from abortion opponents. It is also an examination of the reasons women seek late abortions. The film presents the complexities of these women’s difficult decisions and the compassion and ethical dilemmas of the doctors and staff who fear for their own lives as they treat their patients.

…

After Tiller…weaves together revealing, in-depth interviews with the physicians and intimate vérité scenes both from their lives outside their clinics and the time they spend in their clinics, counseling and caring for their anxious, vulnerable patients at profoundly important crossroads in their lives. For all these doctors, the memory of Dr. Tiller remains a constant presence, serving both as an inspiration to persevere and a warning of the risks they take by doing so.

[F]ilmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson…decided to go inside the lives of the last four doctors performing third-trimester abortions in America…. “We discovered that they recognized the moral and ethical complexity of doing this work better than anyone. In fact, they struggle with the issues at the heart of this debate every day.”

“The patients…were racked with guilt, sadness, anger and even ambivalence. The reason so many patients agreed to participate in the film is because they never thought they would end up in such a desperate situation and they saw that only if they shared their stories could anyone possibly understand it.

Under the film’s segment subtitled “A Profession Under Attack,” we hear a doctor saying, “I got five shots fired through the front windows of my office. Many, many times I felt so alone,” (while showing him helping his young adopted son with his homework), and “When I walk out the door, I expect to be assassinated,” and “They said I was an abomination that should be driven from the state.” Violence perpetrated by lawless vigilantes must be deplored, but the experience of threats and “feeling so alone” pale in significance when compared to the unjustifiable evil of their actions.

Another segment is subtitled “And the People Who Risk Everything.” There is no nobility and nothing admirable about risking everything in the service of incomprehensible savagery—not even legalized, sanitized, and rationalized savagery.

In the segment subtitled “No Matter What the Cost,” one of the doctors says, “If I just give up and stop doing anything after twenty weeks, some women may get desperate and do things on their own. This is something that needs to be done.” But women who choose to “do things on their own” would be choosing. The babies whose murders these doctors rationalize have no choice. And no woman will choose to have her skull punctured, her brain partially sucked out, and skull collapsed. Nor will they choose to be injected with medication that will induce a massive heart attack. True compassion does not entail the grotesque, inhumane slaughter of innocents.

One doctor asks, “What drives women to seek third-trimester abortions? Unless people understand what’s going on for the woman, it’s impossible to support it.” Yes, this late-term abortionist actually said it. She believes that  the ends justify the means—any means, including the barbaric killing of babies capable of feeling pain and surviving outside the treacherous waters of the womb.

After Tiller includes a tearful confession from a very pregnant mother who is going to have her late-term baby aborted. The licensed professional killer (aka Dr. Sella) is seen nodding sympathetically with furrowed brows. The woman says, “It’s guilt no matter which way you go. Guilt if you go ahead and do what we’re doing. Or go ahead and bring him into this world and then he doesn’t have any quality of life.” And one of the doctors complains that  “Sometimes it’s been hard for me to feel like I could continue.” I guess the message here is that a sufficient degree of guilt covers a multitude of evils.

In the 1930’s one of the Nazi attempts to efface, dilute or diminish the onus of moral offense which they bore was to twist grotesquely the concept of suffering. In order to mitigate or obfuscate their guilt, some former Nazis emphasized their profound suffering at having to perform their unpleasant duties.* Hannah Arendt explains, “The trick used by Himmler…was very simple and probably very effective: it consisted in turning these instincts around . . . in directing them toward the self…in saying…how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!”

Similarly, abortion advocates emphasize the profound suffering women experience prior to, during, and sometimes following their abortions. I do not mean to suggest that the suffering is manufactured, nor do I wish to diminish the intensity of the suffering. Rather, I’m suggesting that the focus on the suffering of women who choose abortion has strategic implications.

Suffering comes to serve an exculpatory function in regard to the moral implications of the act of abortion. Because the woman suffers, the moral offense is reduced. Although this emphasis on suffering is not an admission of guilt, it serves a similar function of cultivating a sympathetic response in one’s audience through an open acknowledgment of the moral gravity of one’s actions. It is difficult to explain, however, why a morally neutral “choice,” one so devoid of moral implications as to render it impervious to legal regulation, would cause such profound suffering.  One especially wonders at the gullibility of the American people.

We fallen, weak, and myopic humans have no business killing other humans based on our limited perspective and often wrong prognostications about the potential quality of their future lives.

A necessary word about guilt: Guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt properly ordered helps keep humans civilized. It is the head and heart mechanism that tells us when we are acting within the bounds of decency, civility, and moral uprightness. Without guilt, humans become hedonists and sociopaths.

When our friends and loved ones struggle with life’s inevitable challenges, we should help them through their dark days, so that they do not in their darkness commit evil acts.

The film quotes The Hollywood Reporter: “After Tiller provides insight into a heartwrenching and complex reality.” Does it really? Does it show an  actual late-term abortion procedure? Does it show the tiny arms, legs, and tummies of murdered babies just outside the birth canal? Does it show the doctors injecting poison into preborn, full-term babies or jabbing their torturous instruments into the heads of babies and crushing them, so they can slip more easily from the birth canal? Does it show the babies immediately after they have been delivered, with what’s left of their brains oozing out of flaccid bodies? Is this part of the heartwrenching complexity shown in After Tiller?

Here’s something that is really heartwrenching: partial-birth abortion VIDEO (**WARNING: EXTREMELY GRAPHIC**). No woman’s circumstances justify this—none. And is it really any more justifiable to poison a full-term baby or induce cardiac arrest one day before crushing its skull and delivering it?

Take ACTION:  This film is being shown on PBS, which is funded in part by taxpayer money. There are two things you can do:

1. Click HERE to contact our U.S. Senators and your U.S. Representatives and ask them to oppose government funding of PBS. Yes, there is programming of value on PBS, and PBS can continue to solicit donations from the public.

2. Click HERE to contact PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler to demand equal time to air a film that challenges the ideas cloaked in demagoguery in After Tiller and humanizes the tiny human victims of late-term abortions.  You can also call PBS at (703) 739-5000.

* What has come to be called Godwin’s law is often invoked to discredit comparisons to events of the Nazi era without having to address the substance of the comparison. What the source, attorney Michael Godwin, actually said, however, is that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches.” Godwin never intended to silence all comparisons to issues related to the Holocaust or to suggest that all such comparisons are unsound.

 Faith, Family and Freedom Banquet
With Eric Metaxas on Sept. 19th!