If you’ve never heard of Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known by the moniker Mr. Beast, ask your child who he is. He (or she) likely knows. Mr. Beast is a highly popular YouTuber with multiple channels dedicated to various things, such as friendly competitions, gaming, and philanthropy. He has 146 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel and anywhere between 12.8 million to 32 million on each of his spin-off channels.

Mr. Beast’s videos, which are designed to look like a group of friends hanging out and filming as they go along, generally revolve around giving away large sums of money. For example, a few of his videos are titled, “Survive 100 Days In Circle, Win 500,000,” “I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!” or “Last To Take Hand Off Jet, Keeps It!”

Mr. Beast is incredibly popular among youth, especially teenage boys. His videos have over 100 million views each.

The first time many adults heard of Mr. Beast was a couple of months ago when he received a lot of flak (mainly from the Left) for a video detailing how he paid for cataract surgery for 1,000 blind people. Now Mr. Beast is in the news again, but unfortunately, it’s for something a lot less philanthropic.

Chris Tyson is a member of Mr. Beast’s cast of friends. Over the past couple of months, viewers noticed that Tyson has started to look and act differently in videos. The reason why became clear when Tyson revealed on Twitter that he has been going through hormone treatments to try and ‘transition’ into a girl. What makes this even sadder is that Tyson has a wife and son, who now must deal with the inevitable fallout of Tyson’s decision.

Tyson’s transition can be directly linked to an apparent addiction to pedophilic anime pornography, illustrating just how powerful influences can be. Tyson went from a typical, regular man, to a confused-looking guy in girl’s clothing.

Parents will want to know that Mr. Beast has given his full support to Chris Tyson in the form of a tweet that uses foul language:

Unless something changes, Mr. Beast’s channel is now a wolf in sheep’s clothing; another place for the LGBTQ+ agenda to be normalized and funneled into your kids. The things you watch and read and listen to really do influence you. The catalyst for Chris Tyson’s change was the porn he is reportedly addicted to and watching.

This should serve as a warning for each of us individually, and especially for parents when it comes to what they let their children watch or have access to. Finding porn online is as easy as mistyping a web address, and even if what you watch is not as evil as porn, the things you fill yourself with – books, movies, TV shows, etc., – really do influence and change you.

Bad company ruins good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33), and if what you keep company with is sinful, you’ll find yourself warped by it. Mr. Beast is sending a message to millions of kids around the world through his acceptance of Tyson’s change. Even if he doesn’t make a big deal of it and simply keeps Tyson on the show, kids all around the world are going to see that someone they look up to, admire, and wish to be thinks this is okay and normal.

This news provides a great discussion opportunity for you and your kids. Sin is awful, especially sexual sin, and those who are caught in it become slaves to it. These are chains that are incredibly difficult to throw off.

Chris Tyson is bound by the chains of this sin. We need to pray for him, Mr. Beast, and the rest of the Mr. Beast crew to see the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

(Picture of Tyson’s transition)

In his November 1 op-ed for The Hill, Fox News Analyst Juan Williams claimed that the “parents’ rights’ mantra in the Virginia gubernatorial elections is simply “a code for white race politics.” To the contrary, this really is about parents’ rights and about what is best for all children. To inject charges of white supremacy and racism is to miss the whole point of why so many parents are so upset. In all candor and with due respect, I would have expected better from Mr. Williams.

The fact is that these parents are concerned with the injection of racism into every phase of their children’s education, not to mention the injection of an extreme LGBTQ agenda. Williams should be standing with these parents, not against them. With reference to campaigning strategies in the 2018 elections, he wrote,

“Virginia Republicans are back with a new and improved ‘Culture Wars’ campaign for 2021. The closing argument is once again full of racial division — but this time it is dressed up as a defense of little children.”

Specifically, he claimed that,

“It is a campaign to stop classroom discussion of Black Lives Matter protests or slavery because it could upset some children, especially white children who might feel guilt.”

To the contrary, every white Christian parent with whom I have interacted wants their children to know the truth about slavery, segregation, and the lasting effects of those sinful institutions. And they want to see equal opportunities for all.

But they do not want their children thinking they are evil because they are white (this is actually happening). And they do not want their children to feel guilty for having a nice home or good educational opportunities, as if all success of all white Americans was built on the shoulders of slaves. In the words of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,

“The way we’re talking about race is that it either seems so big that somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.”

Most of all, these parents do not want everything to be about race, to the point that math can be seen as racist. Or that famous European poets and historians are cancelled because of their whiteness.

Remarkably, to make his case, Williams repeats the “very fine people” lie, writing, “Recall, it was Trump who famously said there were ‘very fine people’ on both sides of the violence sparked by ‘Unite the Right,’ the 2017 rally of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va.”

Surely Williams must know that this has been debunked time and time again. But why let a good lie die? He also claims that,

“Critical race theory — broadly, a focus on racial disparities as a fact of American life — is not explicitly taught in Virginia’s public schools or anywhere in American public schools. But Republicans nationwide have made it a boogeyman to excite racial divisions and get their base to the polls.”

To be sure, there are different ways to define CRT. For some, it is healthy, positive, and objective. For others, it is unhealthy, negative, and biased. So, before we debate CRT, it’s important to ask, “What, exactly, do you mean by the term?”

And clearly, CRT in its full-blown, academic form, is not being taught to kids in Virginia (and elsewhere). But are classes taught through the lens of CRT? Without question.

As a Daily Wire headline announced on October 31, “Terry McAuliffe Claims CRT Has ‘Never Been’ In Virginia Schools. His Administration Pushed It, Documents Show.” The documentation is clear and undeniable.

Yet Williams approvingly cites McAuliffe, who said, “[Gubernatorial candidate Glenn] Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party — mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”

To the contrary, it is authors with extremist views that are under scrutiny, or, at the least, authors whose views are being exploited by educators with extremist agendas, while contrary views are rejected and banned. (As an aside, but for the record, Youngkin largely campaigned as himself and for himself, not as an extension of Trump, as other political commentators have noted.)

To be clear, I would not deny that white racism remains an issue for some (perhaps many?) families in Virginia. Nor would I deny that some of them would prefer that the full truth about slavery and its legacy not be taught in schools. May they have a change of heart, may they face the facts, and may they enlighten their children. There is no place for white supremacy anywhere and at any time.

Unfortunately, Williams is guilty of a reverse racism, one that projects all kind of nefarious motives on to parents who really do care and who really want their kids to get a solid education rather than cultural brainwashing. In that spirit, I recently tweeted,

“The solution to anti-black racism is not anti-white racism (or anti-Asian racism, etc.). Instead, it is cultivating mutual understanding, respect, and love, with a real desire to see others thrive and enjoy the best of what America has to offer.”

Mr. Williams, I invite you to step higher with me so that, together, we could advance that mutual understanding, respect, and love – based on truth – rather than engage in an endless game of biased and racially charged sniping.

Surely America in 2021 deserves better.

This article was originally posted at AskDrBrown.org.

Someone I know from California told me recently that he has decided to pull his child out of public school and enroll him instead into a private, Christian school.

Why? Because during some of the Zoom instruction during the coronavirus pandemic, this concerned parent discovered some of the lessons they were trying to foist on his child. In this case, it was the anti-American historical revisionism that disgusted this parent.

Multiply this story many times over, and we are seeing a very important development right now—many parents are finding better ways to educate their children, including home-school and home-school co-ops, than the failing public schools.

But the left is pushing back. Perhaps the most galling thing about this debate is the arrogance of the educrats who think they are the ones who should be responsible for the education of the children—not the parents.

Former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe let the cat out of the bag. The Democrat is currently running for governor again, and he said in a recent debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Unfortunately, McAuliffe is not alone in these sentiments.

Writing in wnd.com (10/3/21), Art Moore points out that parents are supposedly “not the ‘primary stakeholder’ in their children’s education”—even though they are “important stakeholders.” Who says this? Some left wing nut job on a TicTok video? No, Joe Biden’s education secretary Michael Cordona said this.

What’s more, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) asked the Biden administration to treat concerned parents at school board meetings as essentially domestic terrorists. They write, “Now, we ask that the federal government investigate, intercept, and prevent the current threats and acts of violence against our public school officials through existing statutes, executive authority…to preserve public school infrastructure and campuses.”

They add: “Further, this increasing violence is a clear and present danger to civic participation.”

Apparently, President Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland agrees. He is now claiming that concerned parents protesting at school board meetings are guilty of “domestic terrorism.”

In his End of Day Report (10/5/21), Gary Bauer of American Values responds, “So, let’s get this straight: The radical forces indoctrinating your children are trying to shut you up by utilizing the same agency, the FBI, that the left used to smear Donald Trump with the fake Russia collusion hoax.” He observes that the Biden administration is “turning the FBI loose on soccer moms.” Critics note that Garland has a conflict of interest here. Bauer says:

“His son-in-law is the president of a consulting firm that makes millions of dollars contracting with school boards to push the left’s radical agenda.”

If you look at the videos of the unruly school board meetings, what you see are parents visibly upset that their children are being taught a bunch of lies. They are not resorting to “violence.”

The most prominent areas of curriculum conflict include:

• Critical race theory (CRT), where by definition whites are oppressors and blacks are the oppressed. Little children who have done nothing wrong are being vilified for the color of their skin.

• Historical revisionism, which turns American history on its head. The settlers and founders of America were far from perfect. But they created a nation with unparalleled freedom and prosperity. Now political correctness has turned America’s founders into villains. One can only wonder why those would-be American immigrants trekking through Central America are currently risking their lives to come to this supposedly evil country.

• The dogmatic LGBTQ agenda. Many children (mostly girls) are questioning if they were born in the correct gender. Because of this fad that is sweeping through many of the schools and is being promoted by teachers and the school administrators, many young people are undergoing “irreversible damage” as puberty blockers and even surgery are administered to try and resolve a conflict that usually resolves itself in puberty. The fallout is horrible. Journalist Abigail Shrier wrote a book documenting this dangerous trend—Irreversible Damage.

The schools and teachers unions are acting as if they own the children. They do not. Children are on loan by God to the parents. Indeed, who is responsible for children’s education? Parents or educrats?

Who knows better than the parents what is in the children’s best interest? To whom have the children been given? Hasn’t God given the parents the responsibility of teaching their children, even if they delegate that teaching to others? Traditionally, teachers have been described as “in loco parentis”—acting on behalf of the parents, not against them.

Our current education crisis could actually prove to be a good thing—if we handle it correctly. This could be the time when many Americans seek to rescue their children from leftist and false indoctrination promoted by too many of our public schools.

This article was originally published by JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Evan O’Bryan

But if you cause one of these little ones who trusts in me to fall into sin,
it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck
and be drowned in the depths of the sea. Matthew 18:6 NLT

About two years ago, the popular animated kids show Arthur broke boundaries when the show’s writers decided the teacher, a regular character on the show, was homosexual. This garnered mixed reviews with some praising the decision, saying Arthur was breaking social norms and introducing children to an important topic, while other, more rational people said they did not want a show meant for four to eight-year-olds to discuss such a controversial topic.

Unsurprisingly, the decision to reveal Mr. Ratburn’s sexual identity was praised by members of mainstream media who soundly criticized all who opposed it. Supporters often spouted rebuttals such as, “Why are you so upset? It’s just one scene of two men holding hands. It only lasts about five seconds,” but conservatives were concerned about the slippery slope, which they have been told is not real.

It appears, however, that not only is the slope real, but it’s also worse than most conservatives feared. Two short years ago, it was scandalous that an animated children’s show would include two homosexual characters, and now we have the perversion of the Blue’s Clues pride parade scene  and drag queen story hour on PBS Kids, neither of which have received nearly as much backlash as the Arthur storyline did.

Exposing young children to highly sexualized content cultivates an inappropriate awareness of sexuality in toddlers and preschoolers. What the media and the government are trying to do to children is despicable, and the worst part is kids do not understand what is being done to them. They do not understand the brainwashing that is occurring, the normalization of ideas and behaviors that are abnormal, and the insidious agenda that encourages children to question their sexual identity. Children should not have to think about these things. No one should have to think about these things but especially not children, because they are impressionable and easily confused.

According to The Washington Post, one out of six Generation Z adults are part of the LGBTQIA+ juggernaut. When will we say enough is enough? We have tolerated and ignored this moral decay–this sin–for too long. It seems that many conservatives have become complacent; they are just watching the world crumble before them.

We must not stop being outraged at the evil we see around us, and we should not stop voicing our opposition for fear of being “cancelled.” As conservatives, we have to make it clear that we are not giving into this leftist propaganda. We must still be willing to fight for what is good, right and true.

Evan O’Bryan is a high school senior and aspiring political influencer who has been raised in the faith and Christian education since preschool. He is a staunch supporter of Christianity, the MAGA movement, and Conservative ideology. He enjoys challenging the mainstream liberal narrative with those who haven’t yet reached the truth.

While students and teachers every year hold a Day of Silence in solidarity with the LGBTQ agenda; that agenda is silencing licensed counselors as well as Christians who use social media, and it threatens pastors.

Before we briefly cover our next group of people who will soon be demanding acceptance, it is worth taking a minute to focus on Laurie Higgins’ excellent post on the Illinois Family Institute website. In her article Illinois Association of School Boards’ Disturbing Document, Higgins writes:

“Progressives” seem to believe they have a unilateral right to control language. They establish Orwellian language rules, changing grammar and redefining terms like “safety,” “hate,” and “tolerance.” And now they’re trying to circumscribe what respect and dignity entail. Don’t be bullied. No one has an obligation to defer to Leftist Newspeak. For many people of faith, treating others with respect and dignity includes respect for the truth and meaning of their physical embodiment as male or female. To deny the truth that they are created in the image of God—male or female—is to disrespect them. To facilitate, affirm, or appear to affirm a lie as true is an act of profound disrespect.

Later on in the article, she writes:

There are several reasons why the incoherent, deceitful, anti-science “trans” ideology is transforming the country at breakneck speed, two of which  are the ignorance and cowardice of conservatives. Conservatives need to learn about this ideology and resolutely resist the efforts of “trans” cultists to control language and sexually integrate private spaces.

“Trans” ideology is just the ideology of the moment. Many more are to follow. Eventually conservatives will have to overcome their ignorance and find their backbone as the LGBT list continues to grow longer.

Now to our paraphilias of the day: Frotteurism and Toucherism.

“Toucherism” might have given you the clue about the definition. And yes, Wikipedia has a page for “Groping” as well.

Frotteurism is a paraphilic interest in rubbing, usually one’s pelvic area or erect penis, against a non-consenting person for sexual pleasure. It may involve touching any part of the body, including the genital area. A person who practices frotteuristic acts is known as a frotteur.

Toucherism is sexual arousal based on grabbing or rubbing one’s hands against an unexpecting (and non-consenting) person. It usually involves touching breasts, buttocks or genital areas, often while quickly walking across the victim’s path. Some psychologists consider toucherism a manifestation of frotteurism, while others distinguish the two. In clinical medicine, treatment of frotteuristic disorder involves cognitive behavior therapy coupled with the administration of a SSRI.

School districts of the not too distant future might want to get ready for the letters F and T. Those demonstrating those tendencies are merely expressing who they are — and who are we to disrespect them by using the wrong words (perhaps “pervert”) when referring to them?

While “groping” is not listed among the paraphilias, here is Wikipedia’s current definition for your reading pleasure:

When used in a sexual context, groping is touching or fondling another person in an unwelcome sexual way using the hands. The term generally has a negative connotation in many societies, and may be considered sexual assault, and terms such as frotteurism (or toucherism) may describe the practice of a person rubbing up against another person, typically using their sexual parts. Touching a consenting person’s body during sexual activity, massage, or medical examination is not usually considered groping, though the term is sometimes used to include clumsy, selfish, or inappropriate sexual touching. Areas of the body most frequently groped include the buttocks, breasts, vulva and thighs on a woman, and the penis, testicles and buttocks on a man. Gropers might use their hands, but pressing any part of their body against another person can be considered groping.

I can see it: LGBTFT…and calls for anyone who objects or disagrees to stop being an intolerant bigot. Get on the right side of history you frotteurismphobes!

Also worth reading at the IFI website is Tami Jackson’s recent “The Law of the Harvest: America Sows Free Love and Reaps Heartbreak,” which lays out the cultural background for how we got to this Harvey Weinstein (et al) era.

Up next: Identity Politics in 2018 and Beyond: Are Conservatives Ready?

Read more:  Series: Identity Politics & Paraphilias

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We’ve stood firm for 25 years, work diligently to accomplish our mission to
“boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy” in Illinois.

Here is a recent headline from the Independent Journal Review: “Salon: Identity Politics Is ‘Dragging the Progressive Agenda Down.’” IJR’s Pardes Seleha explains that yes, indeed, a “far-left publication” [Salon] is “finally denouncing its long-embraced identity politics…”

Salon isn’t the only place on the political left to find critics of I.D. politics. Last November, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia wrote an op ed that ran in the New York Times titled, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” Here was his opening:

It is a truism that America has become a more diverse country. It is also a beautiful thing to watch. Visitors from other countries, particularly those having trouble incorporating different ethnic groups and faiths, are amazed that we manage to pull it off. Not perfectly, of course, but certainly better than any European or Asian nation today. It’s an extraordinary success story.

But how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences. Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age. In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

So, Lilla writes, “the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.”

The “fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he adds. Ouch. Trigger alert!

At the level of electoral politics, Lilla says, “identity liberalism has failed most spectacularly, as we have just seen. National politics in healthy periods is not about ‘difference,’ it is about commonality.”

Why is this series about identity politics running at the Illinois Family Institute’s website? Because those who have been running up the white flag of surrender in the “culture war” should pull down that flag immediately.

Another name for that culture war is identity politics. Aggrieved groups demand their rights. Women are to be treated to taxpayer funded abortion. The LGBT(etc.) crowd are to be treated as if their sex-centric identity is legitimate. College campus snowflakes are to be treated as if they were grown-ups.

Professor Lilla’s article attracted a good bit of attention on both the left and the right.

Here was Rich Lowry writing at the National Review:

A recent essay in the New York Times elegantly diagnosed the problem and inadvertently illustrated it. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and highly respected intellectual historian, wrote that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

His piece itself occasioned a moral panic, focused overwhelmingly on how Lilla is, in fact, himself a white male. His op-ed was denounced from the left as “the whitest thing I’ve ever read,” and part of an “unconscionable” assault on “the very people who just put the most energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension.”

Lilla was so undeterred by the criticism from his fellow Leftists that he decided to turn the topic into a 160 page book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.

Beverly Gage, writing at the New York Times, wasn’t completely happy with the effort.

Still gobsmacked by the 2016 election, many liberals may be yearning for a thoughtful, generous and well-informed book to put it all in perspective, a strategic account of where they’ve been, where they are now and where they ought to go. In “The Once and Future Liberal,” Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, says his aim is to unify today’s fractured liberals around an agenda “emphasizing what we all share and owe one another as citizens, not what differentiates us.” Unfortunately, he does this in a way guaranteed to alienate vast swaths of his audience, and to deepen left-of-center divisions. Rather than engage in good faith with movements like Black Lives Matter, Lilla chooses to mock them, reserving a particularly mean-spirited sneer for today’s campus left. “Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” he instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

You can see why I included that entire paragraph. It was too much fun not to.

So, it’s clear that not everyone on the political left wants to move past identity politics — and that is very good news for those of us on the political right. Again, here is Beverly Gage:

This is not, of course, a work of historical scholarship. It is a polemic about the dangers of “identity liberalism,” and a critique of the misguided professors and students who seem so enamored of it.

Beverly in not a fan, either:

Despite his lofty calls for solidarity, Lilla can’t seem to get out of his own way — or even to take his own advice. He urges fellow liberals to focus on “the hard and unglamorous task of persuading people very different from themselves to join a common effort,” then proceeds to insult his own audience…

“The Once and Future Liberal” is a missed opportunity of the highest order, trolling disguised as erudition.

One note of thanks to Ms. Gage: Since I’m not going to read Lilla’s book, I appreciate her including this quote in her review — again, too much fun:

“Elections are not prayer meetings, and no one is interested in your personal testimony,” [Lilla] instructs “identity” activists, urging them to shut up, stop marching and “get real.”

Let me close with Michael Brown, also writing last December partly in response to the Lilla op ed:

[Leftist] radical agendas can only go so far before the people begin to push back, and that it is partly what happened with the recent elections.

Enough with the divisive ways of identity politics. Enough with the attack on traditional American values. Enough with the assault on our religious freedoms. Enough.

So, in that sense, yes, we are witnessing a larger moral and cultural backlash, even if some of these issues were not front and center in the Trump campaign. And to the extent we can make the case for a biblically-based, moral conservatism, one that treats everyone fairly but that recognizes that certain boundaries are healthy and good, we can turn the hearts of the younger generation as well as recapture the hearts of the older generation.

As my close colleagues and I have said for the last 15-plus years, on with the revolution.

Also worth reading on this topic is Kay S. Hymowitz‘s article “Why Identity Politics Are Not All-American,” where she opens with a reference to Mark Lilla’s NYT article.

Read more:  Series: Identity Politics & Paraphilias

PLEASE consider a financial gift to IFI to sustain our work.
We have stood firm for 25 years, working to boldly bring a biblical perspective to public policy.

Picture this: You’re at the library with your three-and-a-half-year-old daughter whose attention is grabbed by a colorfully illustrated children’s book. She takes it off the shelf and asks you what the book is about.

You are happy to oblige until you see that this colorfully illustrated children’s book is about promoting many aspects of the LGBTQQAP (etc.) agenda.

This is what happened recently to Kurt and Michaela Jaros. Fortunately, Michaela was quick to utilize her mothering skills and answer her daughter’s question without providing a sex ed lesson on the spot.

The book the Jaros’ daughter pulled from the shelves of the West Chicago Public Library is titled This Day in June.  Here is the description from the book’s Amazon.com page:

In a wildly whimsical, validating, and exuberant reflection of the LGBT community, This Day in June welcomes readers to experience a pride celebration and share in a day when we are all united. Also included is a Reading Guide chock-full of facts about LGBT history and culture, as well as a Note to Parents and Caregivers with information on how to talk to children about sexual orientation and gender identity in age-appropriate ways. This Day in June is an excellent tool for teaching respect, acceptance, and understanding of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?

Not to Kurt Jaros, who has taken up the issue with the West Chicago Library Board.

Jaros explains that since libraries work together through inter-library loans, if one library has it, it will be available to regional libraries as well. Therefore, one need not live in the West Chicago Library district make a statement at the meeting.

Jaros further noted that libraries often do not receive enough public comment on controversial issues. He has set up a website to rally support for the effort to have the book either removed from the shelves or be placed where children do not have access to it, as many libraries do.

Some argue that having this and similar books removed from library shelves is “censorship” or “book burning.” As with everything else, Leftists can’t quite grasp the fact that taxpayer have a say in how their tax dollars are spent.

Jaros explained that from cover to cover, This Day in June is filled with pro-LGBTQQAP (etc.) propaganda presented through symbols and messages. He prepared a flyer to provide examples from the book. (This disturbing book is written by Gayle E. Pitman and illustrated by Kristyna Litten.)

Library board member David Reynolds also spoke with IFI about the offensive nature of the book and the inappropriateness of allowing children to have unsupervised access to it. Libraries remove books from shelves all the time for various reasons, he said, but the effort to have this book removed is creating the equivalent of a “constitutional crisis.”

Controversial books should not be placed where children can easily step on cultural land minds, Reynolds said. Books like This Day in June should, at a minimum, be moved to a separate parent/teacher collection as is the policy at many libraries.

Just two days ago, Illinois Family Institute’s Laurie Higgins wrote “In a Heartbeat”: Propaganda for Children. Here is her opening paragraph:

Anyone who doubts that “LGBTQQAP” activists and their “allies” are pursuing the hearts and minds of other people’s children should watch this sweet, well-crafted, animated short film about an adorable, red-headed, closeted middle school boy whose secret crush on another boy is exposed when his anthropomorphized heart leaps from his chest and pursues the boy with whom the main character is besotted.

This Day in June too seeks to capture the imaginations of young children:

Filled with saturated colors and vivid illustrations, this picture book uses rhyming couplets to convey the fun and exuberate feelings assocated [sic] with a pride parade for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and families. For example, “Rainbow arches/Joyful marches/Motors roaring/Spirits soaring.” The cartoon artwork is richly detailed and capture the “Banners swaying/Children playing.”

Here is a paragraph from that Laurie Higgins’ article reworked to apply to This Day in June:

The book’s creators are making the implicit argument that the biological sex of humans is irrelevant to the morality of sexual activity. Leftists use the adolescent slogan “love is love” to distract the public from the central issue—which pertains not to love but to sex. The central issue concerns sexual morality and sexual boundaries. The Left seeks to skirt that issue by dangling vivid illustrations and rhyming couplets in front of vulnerable and manipulable children.

None of the “profoundly important questions about sexual morality matter,” Higgins writes, “in a culture where cartoons shape feelings—nothing more than feelings.”

IFI also spoke with a veteran of the public library systems who noted the Leftist slant from the local level on up to the Illinois Library Association (ILA) and the American Library Association (ALA). “Libraries do not need to carry these kinds of books,” she said, but often do because so often they are lobbying for one side of a political argument.

Even the ILA and the ALA seem to be less about promoting libraries than pushing political agendas, she said: “They need to be neutral like librarians are taught in library school and how they are trained in collection development.” Librarians are given a lot of control over the latter, she said, so the more liberal the librarians are, the more liberal the book collections will be.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send an email or fax to the West Chicago Library Board of Trustees, urging them to reject policies that spend tax resources on politically controversial and deviant books targeted at young children.  You may want to point out that this is not an issue of free speech but rather of book selection policy.

More ACTION:  If you are a local resident, please try to attend this meeting, and try to arrive by 6:30 to sign in to make comments, which are limited to three minutes. You may want to type up your comment and read it so as to ensure you don’t exceed the three-minute limit.

Written by Dustin Siggins

Last week, the Obama administration enacted a rule that prohibits the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) from contracting with groups that engage in “discrimination” against people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. According to National Security Advisor Susan Rice in a speech on Wednesday:

This rule means that any organization that contracts with USAID must ensure that all people can benefit from its federally-funded programs, regardless of race, religion, disability — or sexual orientation and gender identity.  It’s a major step towards ensuring that American assistance is provided in a fair and equitable manner.

But “fair and equitable” have a specific meaning for the Obama administration. It doesn’t include the unborn. “Discrimination” is still permitted against the unborn — USAID has given tens of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups, and engaged in other anti-life policies.

It does include LGBT people. As Rice notes elsewhere in the talk, some countries punish homosexual acts with death, and a death penalty law was narrowly defeated in Uganda a few years ago. Her speech suggested that supporting the LGBT agenda is more important to the Obama administration than stopping the Syrian slaughter, preventing Russia’s advance internationally and protecting Christian refugees.

The Administration’s LBGT Pressure

Rice’s speech reflects how the administration has spent years blackmailing African nations over the LGBT agenda, demanding acquiescence in exchange for basic humanitarian aid. Many Christian leaders have refused to bow to the administration, but the pressure has continued. While some nations certainly have deplorable and inhuman policies, many times the administration has prioritized the LGBT agenda over fighting terrorism and stopping starvation.

She thanked the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and another group “who fight so admirably to promote equal rights and dignity for all.” Co-founded by Terrence Bean — who squirreled out of being found guilty in the alleged sexual abuse of a minor — HRC has targeted pro-marriage advocates to such a degree that a college professor told me he’s never sure if his family is safe.

HRC has also attempted to bully Johns Hopkins University into denouncing a much-cited study that debunks LGBT talking points about sexuality, and has led the dishonest-yet-successful effort to tar North Carolina’s HB2 “bathroom” law as bigoted and hateful. (The Obama administration has also contributed to this misleading state of affairs, with Attorney General Loretta Lynch comparing the very modest bathroom law to racist Jim Crow laws.)

Finally, after referencing the Pulse nightclub shooting this summer, Rice compared HB2 and state-based religious liberty laws to unfair and sometimes inhumane treatment of people who identify as LGBT in other nations. She briefly mentioned the cultural and legal LGBT fight in Indonesia, “governments in Central Asia and Eastern Europe” that are passing anti-homosexual laws and how that “in as many as ten countries, same-sex acts are punishable by death.” She then said:

And, in Syria and Iraq, ISIL has unleashed a unique brutality on LGBT people — dragging gay men behind trucks, stoning them, and burning them alive. ISIL works with chilling efficiency, often going through the cell phones and social media accounts of their victims to identify more LGBT individuals for slaughter. As we speak, the United States is supporting Iraqi and Kurdish forces as they push to liberate Mosul, where ISIL fighters were taped hurling gay men off of buildings.  As one Iraqi man testified before the UN: “In my society, being gay means death.”

Again, some of these laws are downright horrifying, and ISIS’ actions are the same. The Obama administration is right to condemn them, and put pressure on nations to change those practices and laws. But Rice’s speech shows that the Obama administration’s ideology on LGBT “rights” continues to go above and beyond what is right and just, instead giving state-sanctioned preference to the LGBT agenda over the rights of business owners, women and children.

This article was originally posted at the Stream.org

“The very term ‘language rule’ was itself a code name;
it meant what in ordinary language would be called a lie.”
~Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem

With Hollywood, academia at all levels, the mainstream media, the arts community, professional medical and mental health organizations, and increasing numbers of heretical faith leaders in the tank for sexual deviance, the hubris of homosexual and “trans” activists grows.

First they pleaded for tolerance, then approval, then celebration. But despite pervasive “progressive” efforts to indoctrinate, suppress dissent, or compel acquiescence, there remains a remnant of Americans (and immigrants) who believe, among other things, the following:

• Homoerotic activity is immoral.
• Marriage has a nature central to which is sexual differentiation and without which a union can never in reality be a marriage.
• Men and women who choose to be in intrinsically sterile homoerotic relationships have no right to acquire children.
• Children have a right to be raised by a mother and father, preferably their own biological parents.
• Biological sex per se has profound meaning and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy to which humans are entitled when engaged in private activities.
• Restrooms, locker rooms, showers, dressing rooms, shelters, and semi-private hospital rooms should correspond to objective, immutable biological sex—not to subjective feelings about one’s sex (known by Leftists as “gender identity”).
• Pronouns correspond to and denote objective, immutable biological sex—not subjective feelings about one’s sex.

Not one item on this list constitutes hatred unless hatred is redefined as being constituted by beliefs with which Leftists disagree.

The Left believes that to be compassionate, loving, and inclusive, one must affirm and celebrate every feeling, desire, attraction, belief, idea, and moral claim that another person experiences or holds. Well,  that’s not quite accurate. They believe society must affirm and celebrate all the feelings, beliefs, ideas, and moral claims of Leftists—not those of conservatives.

Not quite sated by what they have thus far gobbled up of the culture, sexual anarchists are belching out their dessert desires: speech.

It’s not that they seek with their slavering maw only to gobble up the First Amendment. No siree. They not only seek to silence speech they don’t like but also to compel speech they do like. And the speech they like serves the cause of deception, disorder, and deviance.

Sexuality rebels are working feverishly to impose language rules—otherwise known as lies—on all of society, rules that if broken will bring fines or worse. Already schools are requiring faculty and staff to use opposite-sex pronouns (or pronouns like ze and zir) when referring to gender-dysphoric students, and New York City has issued legally binding “guidance” mandating that businesses, their employees, and patrons use the preferred pronouns of their employees, tenants, and patrons or be liable for up to $250,000 fines.

Professor Eugene Volokh who “teaches free speech law, religious freedom law, church-state relations law, a First Amendment Amicus Brief Clinic, and tort law at UCLA School of Law” illuminates the dangerous nature of such a law:

We have to use the person’s “preferred … pronoun and title,” whatever those preferences might be. Some people could say they prefer “glugga” just as well as saying “ze”; the whole point is that people are supposed to be free to define their own gender, and their own pronouns and titles. Seems improbable that some people would come up with new terms like that? Well, 10 or 20 years ago it would have seemed pretty improbable that today New Yorkers would be required to call some people “ze.”…Why wouldn’t some creative folks decide they want to add still more?

Or what if some people insist that their title is “Milord,” or “Your Holiness”? They may look like non-gender-related titles, but who’s to say? What if someone decides that one of the 56 genders is indeed especially noble or holy and that those really are the preferred gender terms? Or even if “Your Holiness” is understood as purely religious (again, why would that be so, given that the point is that people are supposed to be free to define their own gender self-conception and the words that go with it), presumably the same logic that applies to gender-related self-chosen titles would apply to religion-related self-chosen titles. Both sex and religious discrimination are, after all, prohibited by the same laws; by the City’s logic, if you call a Catholic priest “Father,” you’d have to use whatever other self-chosen religious titles people insist on.

…

[Y]ou should feel uncomfortable about people being forced to use “ze,” which expresses a view about gender that they might not endorse. And, more broadly, I think we should all feel uncomfortable about government regulators forcing people to say things that convey and support the government’s ideology about gender.

Thankfully, some courageous souls are mounting a counter-rebellion against the despotic demands of sexuality rebels.

One such courageous hero of the anti-totalitarian, pro-truth movement is University of Toronto psychology professor Dr. Jordan B. Peterson who explained in a YouTube video that if a student or colleague were to insist that he refer to them by gender neutral pronouns like “ze” or “zir,” he will not do it, arguing that he will not be a “tool” of “radical Leftist political motivations.”

In an interview, he elaborated further:

I don’t recognize another person’s right to decide what words I’m going to use, especially when the words they want me to use…are non-standard elements of the English language, and they are constructs of a small coterie of ideologically motivated people….I’m not claiming that a person is free to use any words, in any context. But what I’m saying is that I’m not willing to mouth words that I think have been created for ideological purposes.

When asked about University of Toronto “nonbinary transgender” physics professor Dr. Amanda W. Peet’s request that she (she actually is female) be referred to by the plural pronoun “they,” Dr. Peterson explained that Peet’s request places no moral obligation on him:

The mere fact that professor Peet would like to be addressed by a particular pronoun does not mean that I am required to address him by that pronoun. That doesn’t mean that I deny his existence or the existence of people who don’t fit neatly in binary gender categories. I reserve the right to use my own language and I’m perfectly willing to take that to its conclusion. If it’s the case that I can’t use my language the way that I see fit, because I’m using my language to formulate and articulate the truth in the clearest manner I can possibly manage and if that lands me in legal trouble—well, so be it.  

It is not an act of love to participate in or facilitate a fiction. Moreover, Christians are prohibited from bearing false witness, which means Christians are prohibited from lying. Will the church stand for truth even when doing so is costly? We’ll find out.

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With Hollywood, academia at all levels, the mainstream media, the arts community, professional medical and mental health organizations, and increasing numbers of heretical faith leaders in the tank for sexual deviance, the hubris of homosexual and “trans” activists grows.

Read more here…