“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”
~Isaiah 5:20

Informed people know that Christians are persecuted around the world, but too few acknowledge the growing persecution of Christians in Canada and the United States. This is not to suggest that the persecution faced by Christians in North America is equivalent to the severe persecution Christians face in countries like China, Afghanistan, and North Korea. Christians in North America, especially American Christians, are blessed to be living in country where we are yet able to exercise our religion relatively freely. However, there are red flags in America and other formerly Christian-friendly countries. While the United States was founded by those with a biblical worldview, recent events have shown that those in power wish to change that.

Some on the left and right dismiss the idea that Christians are persecuted in America as laughable, asserting that Christians are a privileged and protected class. While this may have been true throughout much of our history, it is not the case anymore.

Recently, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki commented on lawmakers in Alabama who have been valiantly working to protect kids from barbaric transgender surgeries and hormone therapies. In a press briefing, Psaki said, “Alabama’s lawmakers and other legislators who are contemplating these … discriminatory bills have been put on notice by the Department of Justice.”

This threat from a purportedly unbiased DOJ should be alarming.  Not only is Biden’s DOJ supporting the mutilation of young children’s bodies, but it is also actively attempting to make it a crime to protect children from these irreversible acts.  If anything, it should be a crime to chemically castrate children or mutilate their bodies.

The Canadian government has been enacting legislation that supports sexual deviance and oppresses Christians. Bill C-4 bans any form of conversion therapy throughout all of Canada. This law may sound good to some people because, when people hear the phrase “conversion therapy,” they think of aversion therapy, or non-existent lock-down camps where kids are allegedly sent to be converted. That’s not the purpose of Bill C-4, though.

Bill C-4 bans all counseling efforts that would help someone understand the cause/s of their same-sex attraction or help them align their sexual identity with their religious faith. Both Bill C-4 and Jen Psaki aim to quash any opposition to the LGBTQ agenda–an agenda antithetical to Christianity.

In addition, our government schools are Exhibit A in how the government opposes Christian values. Many public schools teach children that the “LGBTQ”  movement is noble, while Christians see it as sinful. For that, Christians are deemed hateful bigots. The government is clearly taking a stance on this sensitive topic, and that stance is firmly anti-Christian.

The United States is not as oppressive as Canada, but there are disturbing trends on the American horizon. Christians should become politically involved to preserve the blessings of the First Amendment and be good stewards of our right to govern ourselves.

The Biden administration is warning of impending shortages at Christmas due to supply chain issues. A massive backup of container ships at the Port of Los Angeles is a major contributing factor to this severe problem. Not only are ships waiting long periods to dock, but, when they offload, the containers remain stacked, waiting for truck drivers to arrive to take the shipments to their destinations. Currently, there are approximately 250,000 containers on the docks and 500,000 shipping containers off the coast. President Joe Biden recently announced that the ports would move to 24-hour operations; however, most experts believe that the intervention has come too late and warns that shelves may be empty at Christmas time.

Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Florida) invited shipping companies to bring their goods to Florida in response to the problem. The governor has proposed that companies waiting to dock in California come to one of the 15 seaports in Florida to ease the bottleneck. Florida has invested $250 million in improving their ports and they are now ready to receive ships. Although this may help elevate pressure on the California ports, it may not prevent the shortages. Ports are only one part of the supply chain problem. Another broken link is due to the lack of truck drivers to transport the goods. Even before COVID-19, the country lacked an estimated 60,000 drivers. That deficit has only grown during the pandemic and will make on-time delivery of products for Christmas extremely difficult.

While problems with the supply chain are complex, the Biden administration’s response is most infuriating. White House Chief of Staff, Ronald Klain, retweeted economist Jason Furman who called the problems with the supply chain and inflation a “high class problem.” Additionally, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended Klain’s tweet and even went as far as saying that “we’ve made progress in the economy.” It seems the Biden administration is totally out of touch with how both supply problems and inflation impact all Americans. Not only are they out of touch, but they also do not understand the meaning of Christmas.

It is a bit reminiscent of the Dr. Seuss classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In the children’s story, the petulant Grinch is irritated that the Who of Whoville joyfully celebrate Christmas and he decides to steal their Christmas. He sneaks into Whoville, taking all their gifts and the food for their table. Like the infamous Grinch, the Biden administration tells us that we too will have no gifts or dinner feast. And like the Grinch, this administration also has missed the point of Christmas.

Instead of bemoaning their loss, the Who of Whoville gathered in unity and joyfully celebrated anyway. Believers should react much in the same way, even if the supply problems and inflation are tremendous. Christmas is not about gifts or food, and we, as Christians, must demonstrate a joyful celebration of everything that Jesus Christ represents. If the gifts under your tree are fewer and the food on the table lighter, do not despair. Start new traditions with your family, make homemade gifts, or donate your time to those in need. Find ways to share the gift of Jesus with family and friends. Christmas isn’t about the things under the tree, but the gift of salvation that God willingly gave two thousand years ago. Let us, even in our time of need, remember the gift of Christ and remind the leftist Grinches that “It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes, or bags…Maybe Christmas…doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more.” (Dr. Seuss)

For those who have been enjoying the waning days of summer away from news and social media, basking maskless by a refreshing body of water or hiking in a cool forest with a face as naked as a newborn babe’s, here’s what set ablaze the perpetually burning neurons of leftists: Texas banned all abortions performed on small humans whose hearts are beating and made anyone who facilitates the illegal killing of humans with beating hearts open to litigation. Sounds reasonable to me, but then again, I’ve never been a fan of killing defenseless humans who have committed no crime.

Following Texas’ prohibition of human slaughter after the first six weeks of life, the left lost what’s left of their minds.

With their feticidal minds unhinged at the prospect of mothers not being free to hire hitmen who identify as “physicians” to off their offspring, leftists proved again why they’re not known for skill in the use of evidence, sound analogical thinking, respect for science, respect for human rights, coherence, consistency, or morality.

Let’s take a cursory look at the darn things cultural regressives are muttering, sputtering, and tweeting:

Joe Biden, the self-identifying Catholic who claims his “avocation” is theology, recently said,

I respect people who … don’t support Roe v. Wade. I respect their views. I respect … those who believe life begins at the moment of conception and all. I respect that. Don’t agree, but I respect that.

But wait, in 2015 Biden said,

I’m prepared to accept that at the moment of conception there’s human life and being, but I’m not prepared to say that to other God-fearing, non-God-fearing people that have a different view.

So, which is it? Does he believe that at the moment of conception a new human life comes into existence or does he not? If not, what new science convinced him between age 72 and 78 that the union of human egg and sperm no longer marks the beginning of the life of a new human being?

(As an aside, why can’t leftists who claim to believe that women can be born in men’s bodies and that men can menstruate and give birth be like Biden and respect the views of God-fearing and non-God-fearing people who disagree?)

Disgraceful CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, brother of disgraced former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, tried to suggest that 6-week-old human fetuses don’t have heartbeats because they don’t have hearts. The Mayo Clinic dares to dissent:

Growth is rapid this week [sixth week]. Just four weeks after conception, the neural tube along your baby’s back is closing. The baby’s brain and spinal cord will develop from the neural tube. The heart and other organs also are starting to form and the heart begins to beat.

Please note, the Mayo Clinic refers to the baby as a “baby.”

CNN’s Joy Reid fretted that the Texas law signals the Handmaid’s Tale is coming to America—you know, the story of fertile breeding women being forced to have sex with ruling elite men while their wives watch. Reid’s guest, failed presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, nodding in agreement, fretted about the law’s impact on the “most vulnerable among us”:

This law is about bearing down on the most vulnerable among us. It’s bearing down on the woman, or the transperson, or the nonbinary who’s workin’ three jobs.

Warren views pregnant “transpersons” who are workin’ three jobs as more vulnerable than the babies whom they seek to kill.

Bette Midler tweeted,

I suggest that all women refuse to have sex with men until they are guaranteed the right to choose by Congress.

Midler forgot to specify the direct object of the transitive verb “choose.” To be clear, she means the right to choose to have incipient human life killed.

I completely agree with Midler that if a woman plans to chemically starve her baby fetus or have her fetus dismembered as her back-up contraception plan, it’s best she not have sex.

Millionaire leftist co-founders of the ridesharing company Lyft, Logan Green and John Zimmer, have gone all out in support of killing tiny humans:

Lyft is donating $1 million to Planned Parenthood to help ensure that transportation is never a barrier to healthcare access.

Killing humans is not “healthcare” no matter how many times leftists use this Newspeakian euphemism. Anyone who cares about the health of womb-dwellers ought not use Lyft.

And any leftist who believes that practices that have a “disparate impact” on persons of color are racist practices should know that black babies are killed in utero at much higher rates than are white babies:

Black women have been experiencing induced abortions at a rate nearly 4 times that of White women for at least 3 decades, and likely much longer. … In the current unfolding environment, there may be no better metric for the value of Black lives.

The millions of dollars donated by racists Green and Zimmer are going to facilitate the racist practices of Planned Parenthood.

The ever-snippy White House spokesperson Jen Psaki scolded a reporter for asking about how Biden reconciles his Catholic faith with his support for human slaughter. Psaki’s retort was revelatory in that it demonstrated how un-woke she is.

Without even asking for the reporter’s pronouns, Psaki just assumed the reporter was a man, presumably because he looks like a man and sounds like a man. Psaki asserted presumptuously that the reporter has never been pregnant. How does she know? Doesn’t Psaki know that in the woke playbook, some women have men’s bodies, and some men have women’s bodies and can get pregnant? I guess Psaki is an intolerant, hateful, ignorant bigot.

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin claimed that the refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to block the Texas law constitutes “a real blow against the U.S. Supreme Court’s institutional reputation.”  It’s strange to hear Toobin, who pleasured himself on a work Zoom call, express concern over “reputation.” But then again, Toobin has a vested interest in keeping abortion legal: He pressured a former paramour with whom he had had an extramarital affair to abort their now 12-year-old son. Toobin may be planning for his future “needs.”

Toobin also described Roe v. Wade as the “second most famous opinion of the last 100 years.” He should have said “most infamous opinion of the last 150 years.” Here’s what liberal legal scholars and pundits have said about the infamous Roe v. Wade opinion:

• “One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” (Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law School professor)

• “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible.” (Edward Lazarus, former clerk to SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun)

• “Blackmun’s [U.S. Supreme Court] papers vindicate every indictment of Roe: invention, overreach, arbitrariness, textual indifference.” (William Saletan, Slate magazine writer)

• Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” (John Hart Ely, former law professor at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford universities)

• “[T]he very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision—the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution—strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous.” (Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist)

• “[T]he finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” (Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University Law School professor)

• “Although I am pro-choice, I was taught in law school, and still believe, that Roe v. Wade is a muddle of bad reasoning and an authentic example of judicial overreaching.” (Michael Kinsley, attorney, political journalist).

• As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent. The court pulled its fundamental right to choose more or less from the constitutional ether” (Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania Law School professor)

• “Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.” (Archibald Cox, JFK’s Solicitor General, former Harvard Law School professor)

One law professor who has no need of constitutional grounding for abortion is UC Irvine law professor and cheerleader for legalized human slaughter, Michele Goodwin. Goodwin is a long-time and influential advocate of the legal right to kill the preborn. She and co-author Erwin Chemerinsky set forth their goals in a 2017 paper titled, “Abortion: a Woman’s Private Choice”:

We begin by justifying the protection of rights not found in the text of the Constitution. … Foremost among these rights is control over one’s body and over one’s reproduction. … Finally in Part III we discuss what it would mean for abortion to be regarded as a private choice. In this Part, we identify three implications: a) restoring strict scrutiny to examining laws regulating abortions, which would mean that the government must be neutral between childbirth and abortion; b) preventing the government from denying funding for abortions when it pays for childbirth; and c) invalidating the countless types of restrictions on abortion. (emphasis added)

Goodwin rightly condemns the “notorious eugenics period in the United States,” in which allegedly defective preborn babies were forcibly killed by the government. Goodwin fails, however, to acknowledge the difference between the government mandating that a doctor perform a surgical procedure on the body of a woman without her consent and the government prohibiting a doctor from dismembering or in other ways destroying the body of a human fetus without his or her consent.

Goodwin also believes the Texas bill to preserve human life is analogous to the Fugitive Slave Act. She believes that the grotesque law that incentivized citizens to help send humans into bondage is analogous to a law that incentivizes citizens to help prevent the slaughter of humans. Some might counter that the Texas law is more akin to laws that offer rewards for the capture of killers than it is to the Fugitive Slave Act.

Now that leftists have lost control of the U.S. Supreme Court, they’re stomping their angry feet and demanding the Court be jampacked with leftists, something conservatives have not called for to repair the grievous harm done by seven Justices in 1973. Neither the Constitution nor the will of the people matters to “progressives.”

There is no constitutional or moral right to have humans killed because of their dependency status, location, absence of self-consciousness, lack of full development, disabilities, anticipated future, maternal inconvenience, insufficient maternal finances, or crimes of their fathers. A civilized, compassionate, moral, and just society does not find the final solution to poverty, disease, disability, or any other form of human suffering in the killing of others. And in the Constitution, there is no free-floating absolute right to privacy in which humans can do anything they feel like doing to other human beings. Leftist U.S. Supreme Court Justices invented such a “right” out of whole blood-stained cloth.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Progressives-Say-the-Darndest-Things-About-Killing-Tiny-Humans.mp3

Written by Michael Barone

Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters can’t seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring “politically incorrect” speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, “There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.”

Now, the Biden administration seems to be giving the colleges and universities some serious competition. Like many Democrats during the Trump presidency, they have come to see suppression of “fake news” as the ordinary course of business and indeed a prime responsibility of social media platforms.

For decades, print and broadcast media have been dominated by liberals, but Facebook, Google and Twitter have developed a stranglehold over the delivery of news which exceeds anything that the three major broadcast networks and a few national newspapers every enjoyed. If they suppress a story or a line of argument, it largely disappears from public view. And to the extent that it lingers, it can be stigmatized by these multibillion-dollar companies as “misinformation” or “fake news.”

Speech suppression was exactly what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had in mind last week when she called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were “producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.”

“Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”

And she wasn’t aiming her demand at just Facebook. “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others,” she added a day later. The message was surely not lost on these companies, whose fabulously successful business models are vulnerable to government disruption.

Like most speech suppressors, Psaki protested her good intentions. As did her boss, President Joe Biden, who, when asked about Facebook on Friday, said simply, “They’re killing people.” The implication is that any advice contrary to the current recommendations of public health officials — contrary to “the science” — is bound to increase the death toll.

This is more in line with Cardinal Bellarmine’s view of science than Galileo’s. As Galileo knew, science is not acceptance of holy writ but learning from observation and experiment. Today, in dealing with a novel and deadly virus, current science is a body of hypotheses only partly tested and subject to revision based on emerging evidence.

There’s a long list of things once believed to be “misinformation” about COVID that are now widely accepted. One prime example: the possibility that the coronavirus was accidentally released from the Wuhan lab. For more than a year, this was widely treated as a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory. Facebook slapped “warnings” on it and boasted that it reduced readership — i.e., suppressed speech.

Then, in May, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, in an article that Facebook let slip through, argued a lab leak was likelier than animal-to-human transmission, and a group of 18 bioscientists called for a deeper investigation. The Biden administration, to its credit, soon reversed itself and opened its own investigation and, reportedly, multiple officials now believe the lab leak theory is likely correct. Some “misinformation!”

That example provides powerful support for Galileo’s view that debate over scientific matters takes place best out in the open. But of course the urge to suppress speech is not limited to science. As conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote, “Removing information on vaccines will translate right over to anything they think is misinformation on gun violence, or climate, or healthcare or what defines a man or woman. Which is why they are doing this.”

If you think that’s extravagant, consider that, as Townhall’s Guy Benson argued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been stretching its ambit to studying gun violence and climate change even while letting its core mission of advancing public health atrophy, as shown by its inability to produce a COVID test.

It’s easy to imagine this administration pressuring Facebook and other social media to suppress information on other issues. For example, as the New York Post‘s Michael Goodwin noted, his paper’s negative stories about Hunter Biden‘s shady business dealings, which were largely blocked from public view in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Speech suppression is evidently habit-forming. Which is why a constitutional amendment was passed back in the 1790s guaranteeing “freedom of speech, and of the press.” Or is that obsolete in these modern times?

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

Here’s an excerpt from a July 7, 2020, blog post titled “The White Man Leading the White Man’s Party—and the White Church” written by Nathan Cartagena, associate professor of philosophy at evangelical flagship Wheaton College:

From his birtherism charges against President Obama, to his threats against “bad hombres,” to his bragging about getting away with sexual assault, candidate Trump signaled that he was going to be a white man’s president, dedicated to tapping into and drawing from the U.S.’s deep white nationalist roots and their accompanying sexism. Since ascending to office, he’s labored to establish Trumpism identity politics for white folks. And the Republican establishment has coddled his efforts, as Senator McConnell’s four-year defense of President Trump makes clear.

President Trump and establishment Republicans like Senator McConnell show no signs of ceasing their strategic gendered racism. Instead, they’re doubling down on it to keep their base. Yes, they’re cunning enough to place white women such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany before reporters. But they know these women will pull all necessary stops to promulgate the Party’s racist, patriarchal agenda. Sanders relentlessly lied. Kayleigh tirelessly defends Trump while claiming “I know who I’m ultimately working for, and it’s the big guy upstairs.”

…

[R]emember that a white man is leading a white party—and the white church is promoting both. What you’re witnessing is a byproduct of the seventies, the latest manifestation of the deplorable linking of Christianity and male-exulting whiteness. … And, to rift [sic] on St. Paul, beware: You may become someone’s enemy if you tell the truth about the Republican Party’s strategic gendered racism. Christian or not, President Trump’s followers prefer their white lies.

Cartagena seems not to remember that Senator McConnell was compelled by the corrupt antics of Democrats to defend former President Trump against a series of lies, including the whopper about Russian collusion paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Apparently Cartagena would have preferred Christians vote for the lying, race-exploiting, abortion cheerleader Hillary Clinton who supports compulsory taxpayer-funding of human slaughter throughout the entire nine months of pregnancy for any or no reason.

Does Cartagena have any problem with those Christians who voted for either the corrupt Hillary Clinton or the equally corrupt Joe Biden, both members of the party that, as black professor Carol Swain wrote for Prager U,

defended slavery, started the Civil War, opposed Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Klan, imposed segregation, perpetrated lynchings, and fought against the civil rights acts of the 1950s and 1960s.

In contrast, the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party. Its mission was to stop the spread of slavery into the new western territories with the aim of abolishing it entirely. This effort, however, was dealt a major blow by the Supreme Court. In the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sandford, the court ruled that slaves aren’t citizens; they’re property. The seven justices who voted in favor of slavery? All Democrats. The two justices who dissented? Both Republicans. …

[A]fter Reconstruction ended, when the federal troops went home, Democrats roared back into power in the South. They quickly reestablished white supremacy across the region with measures like black codes – laws that restricted the ability of blacks to own property and run businesses. And they imposed poll taxes and literacy tests, used to subvert the black citizen’s right to vote.

For decades, the Democrat party passed laws and endorsed policies to buy black votes even when those policies destroyed the black family, killed black babies, kept black children in lousy schools, and made urban black communities unlivable. Does Cartagena think those laws and policies are racist?

What about efforts by leftists to defund police which will inevitably result in more black deaths? Are those racist?

Cartagena calls Sarah Huckabee Sanders a liar and implies both Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany are female tokens. Well, is Jen Psaki a liar? Did she lie when she blamed the defunding of police on Republicans? Rhetorical questions, obviously.

Cartagena whines about the GOP’s alleged “patriarchal agenda” and “gendered racism” but says nothing about Biden’s gendered racism in deliberately choosing members of his administration based—not on merit, wisdom, knowledge, or experience—but on their skin color and sex. Biden makes no secret about his commitment to tokenism, aka “gendered racism.”

I’m not sure what a “patriarchal agenda” is or why Cartagena opposes it seeing as the Bible has a lot of good stuff to say about patriarchs and patriarchal structures. But coming from a leftist, this term would suggest Cartagena holds women in high esteem. For those who hold women in high esteem, it would seem that Trump would have been the preferred candidate over both Hillary and Biden, since both have made it clear they support the sexual integration of girls’ and women’s private spaces and sports.

Cartagena writes about critical race theory (CRT)—a lot and favorably. Much of his writing is academic in nature, picking apart arguments from scholars critical of CRT—you know, dancing on the heads of pins kind of stuff. He takes particular aim at Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Christopher F. Rufo, who has been influential in exposing the tenets and influence of CRT in academia, the corporate world, and the government—including the military. About Rufo, Cartagena says,

Culture-war agitators such as Rufo aren’t interested in offering a just, charitable understanding of CRT.

As evidence for this claim, Cartagena provides a decontextualized tweet—yes, a tweet. That doesn’t seem all that charitable now, does it?

But while he fusses about whether some critic gets a point wrong or misses a point, Cartagena doesn’t spend much time acknowledging that when scholarly theories wend their way down the sewage pipe from sullied Ivory Towers, academic theories morph. Big theories pass through filters that strain out the minutiae scholars love to debate. Large chunks of excrement remain to pollute culture. Right now, ideas derived from Marxism, critical theory, and CRT are stinkin’ up the joint.

In addition to CRT theorists Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Cartagena cites Paulo Freire—a lot and favorably—calling him a “Brazilian Christian.” Since “Christian” means many things to many people, a bit more information from Cartagena about Freire’s Christianity might be helpful to Cartagena’s readers, particularly students.

Freire was a Brazilian Marxist/Christian socialist, heavily influenced by liberation theology. Other  thinkers who influenced him include “Marx, Lenin, Mao, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro, as well as the radical intellectuals Frantz Fanon, Régis Debray, Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Georg Lukács.”

Freire wrote the well-known book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which former City-Journal writer Sol Stern critiqued in an article titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressor,” (subtitled, “Another reason U.S. ed schools are so awful: the ongoing influence of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire”). Stern describes Freire’s polemic as a “derivative, unscholarly book about oppression, class struggle, the depredations of capitalism, and the need for revolution.”

Cartagena wants the church and all of America to study CRT as intensely as leftist scholars study it, and unless they do, any criticism of CRT is, in Cartagena’s view, illegitimate:

Because marginalization and oppression in pigmentocracies operate along racialized lines, Christians should share the common interests of critical race theorists. And they should recognize that assessments of those scholar’s conclusions must be robust and nuanced. An endorsement or rejection of CRT requires examining a lot of U.S. history—especially U.S. legal history—political philosophy, sociology, and theology. … We must repent of our shoddy, unjust presentations of CRT. We must labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity. This is what neighborly love demands.

I’m not sure that “neighborly love” demands the kind of lucubration of an academic theory Cartagena demands.  Does neighborly love demand such laborious study of other academic theories? If so, which ones?

His assertion seems a clever way to use Scripture to force Christians either to spend inordinate amounts of time studying CRT or remain silent. His tricksy reasoning is based on the biblical truth that God commands us to love our neighbors. Then he asserts—with no biblical warrant—that “neighborly love demands” that Christians “labor to understand and evaluate CRT in light of history, political philosophy, sociology, and theology and the movement’s internal diversity.”

I haven’t read everything the Cartagena, prolific devotee of CRT,  has written on CRT (or “whiteness“) but so far I haven’t read anything suggesting he believes neighborly love demands the same kind of in depth study accompanied by “robust and nuanced” assessments of criticism of CRT.

No word about whether all teaching of CRT principles and tenets should be banned in public schools unless and until teachers prove they have studied CRT and its critics deeply.

And no word about whether public school teachers should advocate for CRT or present it without bias or favor.

I first wrote about Cartagena in May in an article about Wheaton’s RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY, which followed close on the heels of Wheaton’s controversial decision to cancel a plaque honoring slain missionaries, replacing it with one more palatable to Wheaton wokesters—one that removes references to the savagery of the killers who happened to be indigenous people.

With Wheaton awash in wokery, the following letter from Wheaton College president Philip Ryken to the Wheaton College community in the fall of 2020—just after the spring and summer destructive, violent BLM/Antifa insurrections—shouldn’t surprise anyone. Disappoint? Yes. Surprise? Not so much.

Dear Campus Community,

We all are witnesses to the egregious and senseless violence that recently claimed the lives of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd. Their deaths speak to the enduring presence of systemic and institutional racism within our society. As a community, we are deeply distressed by violent acts that have persisted in our country for more than four centuries.

As Christ followers, we denounce systemic racism and police brutality against any racial or ethnic group. Today especially our hearts are filled with pain for the inhumane treatment of our brothers and sisters in the African American community. We stand united with African American students, faculty, and staff who are all deeply affected by these ongoing acts of racial violence and other sinful injustices, often on a daily basis.

…

[W]e are also committed to identifying and addressing policies and systems in our own institution that hinder access and success of members who belong to marginalized and oppressed groups. In order to have the impact on the world that God is calling us to have, we are resolved to think and act in ways that create a more loving, equitable, and just community.

Wheaton College pursues a biblical commitment to respect and love all people as equal image-bearers of Jesus Christ. This is mandated by Scripture, promised in our Community Covenant, and detailed in our Christ-Centered Diversity Commitment.

…

To the members of our community belonging to the African diaspora, please know that you have our love, support, and concern.

Disabuse yourselves of any fanciful notion that Cartagena is the only wokester at Wheaton. He’s not. Parents considering paying boatloads of money to send their kids to Wheaton College might want to consider other, less woke Christian colleges. And Wheaton donors might want to reconsider how they steward their donations.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Wildly-Woke-Wheaton-College-Professor-Nathan-Cartagena.mp3