The ACLU is lending its full support to the reintroduction of the “Do No Harm Act” to make sure that religious freedom guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution and under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) doesn’t allow Christians and others of faith to deny services to homosexuals and transgenders. Passage of the Do No Harm Act, says the ACLU, will “prevent discrimination under the guise of religious liberty.”

But Matt Barber, founder of Barbwire.com and a constitutional attorney, says the ACLU is really fighting to create a license to discriminate against Christians.

“They presume with no real logic or history in law or any constitutional support that – as Chai Feldblum, President Obama’s appointment to the EEOC, once said – When religious liberty comes into conflict with so-called ‘gay rights’, gays win, Christians lose,” Barber says, paraphrasing Feldblum’s original remark.

He adds that nothing can be further from the truth. As he explains, the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the right to the free exercise of religion.

“The ACLU wants enumerated civil rights for these new-fangled gay rights, but these are not rights; they are gay wrongs,” Barber tells OneNewsNow. “These are behaviors and temptations that the Founding Fathers called a crime against nature.”

Barber concludes that imagining the Constitution supports “gay rights” is mind-boggling.

The Do No Harm Act to amend the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was reintroduced to Congress on July 13, 2017, by Democratic Congressmen Joe Kennedy (Massachusetts) and Bobby Scott (Virginia).

This article was originally posted at OneNewsNow.com

Last time we introduced transgenderism, the next letter on the LGB…T march into the new world. There is way too much to cover in just one more post but I’ll do my best. If you’re like me, you’re pretty tired of this topic after the past couple of years.

We left off with the first paragraph from the transgender Wikipedia page — here are the third and fourth paragraphs:

The degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their external appearance and accept their genuine identity has been called transgender congruence. Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and some seek medical treatments such as hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, or psychotherapy. Not all transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot undergo them for financial or medical reasons.

Most transgender people face discrimination at and in access to work, public accommodations, and healthcare. They are not legally protected from discrimination in many places.

Later on the page under the heading LGBT Community our Wikipedia friends provide some helpful information:

The concepts of gender identity and transgender identity differ from that of sexual orientation. Sexual orientation describes an individual’s enduring physical, romantic, emotional, or spiritual attraction to another person, while gender identity is one’s personal sense of being a man or a woman.

Got that? Here is Matt Barber:

[T]here remains a larger question still. If a person’s “actual sex” needn’t be rooted in biological reality, then why should anything be rooted in biological reality? […] As long as we’re tinkering with scientific and moral truth, why stop at a person’s biologically determined and fixed sex? Why stop at “gender identity”?

I’ll wager that next year Reuters scores a 150 percent on HRC’s “equality index” if it offers a category for “species identity.” If “a person’s innate, deeply felt psychological identification” is all that matters, then who is Reuters — who are any of us — to discriminate if an employee wants to get in touch with his inner horse and run the Kentucky Derby?

For that matter, what about “racial identity?” Again, why the intolerant and arbitrary “gender-identity” narrow-mindedness? Roseanne Barr is a short, obnoxious white woman today, but who’s to say that tomorrow she won’t develop an “innate, deeply felt psychological identification” as a seven-foot black man? Watch out, NBA.

Three years ago at American Thinker, Chad Felix Greene penned the article, “Transphobia: A Reasonable Response?” In it, he summed up some important recent history:

The DSM – 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 2013 changed the condition from Gender Identity Disorder to Gender Dysphoria. This was celebrated by the LGBT (the “T” is for Transgender) community as a victory for equality.

The goal was to “remove the ‘stigma’ associated with having a mental illness.” Greene quotes one supporter of the change: “A right-winger can’t go out and say all trans people are mentally ill…”

Green weighs in:

Regardless of the opinion if Transgenderism is a mental illness, a biological error, a personal choice or an emotional and psychological imperative we are free to embrace or dismiss the concept. By demanding that all people accept gender expression as relative to the presenter, we are stigmatizing natural impulses. It is wrong to demand that a person be labeled as a bigot for not viewing another person as that person demands to be viewed. In the end liberals do not create a more tolerant and open world, they merely create new and irrational categories of people to discriminate against. Appreciating the personal journey of an individual changing their gender is equally as tolerant as disapproving of the fluid manipulation of gender in the first place.

It might seem as if we are jumping back and forth between topics — but we’re not — they’re all “identities,” and thus all related.

Up next: Why the Term “Sexual Orientation” is Nonsense.

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If your daughter, sister, mother or friend “identified” as a fat person trapped in a perilously emaciated body – if she truly believed she was obese, but, in reality, suffered from anorexia – would you affirm her “fatness” and get her liposuction, or would you go to the ends of the earth to help her bring her subjective (and mistaken) identity into alignment with objective reality? When someone is engaged in demonstrably self-destructive behavior, it is not loving, but hateful, to encourage persistence.

It was, ironically, lesbian activist and writer Dorothy Allison who once wrote, “Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.” In validation of this truism, a series of new peer-reviewed studies have just been released that serve to utterly debunk and deconstruct key “progressive” homosexual-activist talking points.

‘Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences’

This study, conducted by world renowned Johns Hopkins University scientists Dr. Lawrence S. Mayer and Dr. Paul R. McHugh, is a meta-analysis of data from over 200 peer-reviewed (and left-leaning) studies regarding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” It was published in the fall 2016 edition of The New Atlantis journal and is, far and away, the most objective, exhaustive and comprehensive study on the topic to date.

The research established, among other things:

• “The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings – the idea that people are ‘born that way’ – is not supported by scientific evidence.”

• “Sexual orientation” in adolescents is “fluid over the life course for some people, with one study estimating that as many as 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions no longer do so as adults.”

• “Compared to heterosexuals, non-heterosexuals are about two to three times as likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse.”

• “Gay”-identified people are “at an elevated risk for a variety of adverse health and mental health outcomes.”

• “Gay”-identified people experience “nearly 2.5 times the risk of suicide.”

• “The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex – that a person might be ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ – is not supported by scientific evidence.”

• “Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals … do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.”

• “[S]ex-reassigned individuals [are] about five times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.”

• “[T]he rate of lifetime suicide attempts across all ages of transgender individuals is estimated at 41 percent, compared to under 5 percent in the overall U.S. population.”

• “Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.”

Lest you buy the liberal talking point that so-called “homophobia” leads to high rates of suicide and other devastating consequences of the “LGBT” lifestyle, a recent study from “gay”-affirming Sweden dispels this myth. The research, published in the May issue of the European Journal of Epidemiology, found that people entering into a “gay marriage” were, as mirrored above, nearly three times as likely to commit suicide than their heterosexual counterparts.

“Even in a country with a comparatively tolerant climate regarding homosexuality such as Sweden,” observed the researchers, “same-sex married individuals evidence a higher risk for suicide than other married individuals.”

To borrow from James Carville: It’s the lifestyle, stupid.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Meanwhile, the CDC, no bastion of conservatism, just released this month a report establishing and detailing the devastating effects of “LGBT” identity and behaviors on teens “grades 9-12.”

Writing at WND, child advocate Linda Harvey expressed frustration that, despite its irrefutable conclusions, the CDC yet insists upon using such propagandist terms as “sexual minorities” to describe same-sex-attracted teens. She notes that “these adolescents no more qualify as ‘minorities’ than kids who eat junk food,” and cuts through the smokescreen to summarize the report’s findings:

“Self-labeled homosexual and bisexual teens were twice as likely as heterosexual teens to have been victims of sexual or physical dating violence, to be regular cigarette smokers, to have tried marijuana before age 13, to ever have used cocaine, hallucinogenic drugs, ecstasy, taken prescription drugs without a doctor’s prescription, or to have felt sad or hopeless.

“They were more likely to be current marijuana users than heterosexual students, more likely to drink alcohol, and over four times as likely to have used methamphetamines or heroin.

“They were four times as likely to actually attempt suicide.

“Homosexual and bisexual students were about 25 percent more likely to have had sexual intercourse, and more likely to be currently sexually active and to have had four or more partners.

“They are more than twice as likely to have had sexual intercourse before age 13. Can we just have a heart and ask: with whom? Were these adult ‘partners’? (aka molesters).”

It’s notable here that, in past studies, researchers with the CDC have indeed discovered that “gay” men are “at least three times more likely to report CSA (childhood sexual abuse),” while the left-leaning Archives of Sexual Behavior similarly determined in a 2001 study that nearly half of all “gay”-identified men were, as children, molested by a homosexual predator: “46 percent of homosexual men and 22 percent of homosexual women reported having been molested by a person of the same gender. This contrasts to only 7 percent of heterosexual men and 1 percent of heterosexual women reporting having been molested by a person of the same gender.”

Considering the above non-biased, replicated, empirical and irrefutable scientific facts, its little wonder that an earlier study in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE), determined the “life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.”

Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences. “Gay” is not who they are. “Gay” is what they do.

You think me callous. You think I hate. I’m not and I don’t. Truth is hate to those who hate truth. I love self-identified “LGBT” individuals with a love beyond my own power to summon. I love them because Christ first loved me. I love them because, like them, I am a sinner in need of a Savior. They are under deception. The enemy of man is the father of lies, and he prowls like a lion seeking to both deceive and devour us all.

I know what it’s like to have someone close to me struggle with same-sex attraction and adopt an aberrant sexual identity. I have a dear family member wasting away with AIDS at this very moment. While I love him, I also understand that if I were to affirm his lifestyle and offer well-intentioned yet dangerously misguided “compassion,” I would be hurting him, not helping him.

I offer true compassion. I offer truth, in love.

If you truly love someone, you should never, ever encourage them in a demonstrably destructive and subjective “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual” or “transgender” identity. Love them unconditionally, but encourage them to find freedom from it.

Because, whether spiritual, physical, or both, it may be the difference between life and death.

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachmann!  She distinguished herself by not only forming and chairing the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 in the U.S. House but also through her courageous and outspoken pro-life leadership as attested to by her rating of zero from NARAL.

Please register today before the early bird special expires.

In the wake of England’s historic Brexit vote, and during America’s own Fourth of July celebrations, we’re reminded that man’s longing for individual freedom is a contagion, and that to declare independence from overreaching governmental control is a big part of the cure.

Still, while the UK’s recent “Declaration of Independence” from a decidedly socialist European Union was largely driven by socio-economic considerations, not to mention a desperate attempt to remedy Britain’s demographic suicide cocktail of political correctness, multiculturalism and deadly immigration jihad, America’s own freedom revolution was driven by a longing for both fiscal independence, and, to a larger extent, an effort to secure the unalienable right to individual and corporate religious liberty – particularly the free exercise of Christianity.

“The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity,” observed John Adams, our second U.S. President. “I will avow that I then believed, and now believe, that those general principles of Christianity are as eternal and immutable as the existence and attributes of God.”

At our founding America at once declared independence from tyranny and reaffirmed our dependence on the one true God of the Bible.

We must do so again.

Or perish.

The historical record is irrefutable. Consider this formal statement issued by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in 1854: “Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle… In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity… That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.”

Sadly, today’s secular left has indeed declared war against Christianity, the “religion of the founders of the republic,” which was “expected [to] remain the religion of their descendants.”

And the war has reached fever pitch. It’s high time this anti-Christian “revolution” was “strangled in its cradle.”

Indeed, contrast the above Judiciary Committee declaration with one recently made by Hillary Clinton: “Rights have to exist in practice – not just on paper,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recently said in the context of some phantom “right” to sacrifice undesirable infants on the altar of “choice.” “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed (emphasis mine).”

“Religious beliefs have to be changed.” And change them (or, more accurately, criminalize them) they intend.

As I detail at length in my latest book, “Hating Jesus: The American Left’s War on Christianity,” God’s natural created order, His immutable, scientific and transcendent moral precepts, as well as the very lives and livelihoods of Christian Americans, are under vicious attack today at a level unprecedented in American history.

This is, in every way conceivable, anathema to what the founders, and the U.S. Constitution, intended.

“Suppose a nation in some distant region should take the Bible for their only law book and every member should regulate his conduct by the precepts there exhibited. … What a Eutopia – what a Paradise would this region be!” pined John Adams. “Without [Christianity], this world would be something not fit to be mentioned in polite company: I mean hell,” he added.

Yet it bears repeating: Jesus continually warned that this anti-Christian war declared by the pagan left would occur: “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. …” (John 15:18-20)

So what should we do?

Jesus commands His followers to be His hands and feet – to be salt and light in a rotting world that loves darkness (Matthew 5:13-16).

While it is true that salt preserves; in an open wound, it also burns. Today’s anti-Christian, moral relativist culture is an open wound.

While it is true that light’s bright glare can be illuminating to those eager to see, it is likewise blinding to those whose eyes have become adjusted to darkness. When the light of Christ is shined, it sends lovers of evil scurrying for the shadows.

For this reason, Christ also warned, “You will be hated by everyone because of me, but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved” (Matthew 10:22).

For Christians, those times when the right people call us the wrong things are among those times we should “rejoice in our sufferings.” I received two emails this week alone that have given me great cause to rejoice. Because, as John Adams put it, I very publicly advocate the “general principles of Christianity,” I receive from those who hate Jesus, dozens of the following types of communications each month.

“Your fate is the same fate as ISIS. The only difference between you and them is the religious symbol on your armband and the fact that in their countries they can get away with murdering those who do not and will not bow down to their perversion of religion,” emailed someone identified as Mark Anderson (MA1779@gmail.com). “ISIS deserves to die and so do you,” he continued, “and when the United States government puts both of you rabid savages down the world will be a better place.”

Thank you, Mr. Anderson.

Someone calling himself Anthony Marks (AM999@aol.com) continued with the same theme: “You, Matt Barber, deserve to be riddled with the same bullets that took down the Orlando Terrorist. You deserve to hang at the neck just as Heinrich Himmler would have had the anti-LGBT savage not killed itself before it could be punished for its crimes against humanity. You deserve to be burning in Hell. … You are a non-human abomination worthy of death and you will get what you deserve…you disgusting barbarian filth.”

Thank you, Mr. Marks.

People ask me, “How do you take this kind of hatred day in and day out? Does it frighten you? Does it upset you?”

To which I reply, “No, I count it all joy.”

In fact, while I’m always buoyed by notes of encouragement, it’s the vile hate mail and death threats that lift my spirits more than anything else. They bless me. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me” (Matthew 5:11).

I pray for these people. They’re not my enemies. They’re lost. I hurt for them. I want those who hate Jesus to come to know Him as their Lord and Savior.

Their eternity depends on it.

And then I once again declare my dependence on God.

This article originally posted in Town Hall.

If you have school age children, contact your administration as soon as possible to ask this specific question: Will you be permitting students to refuse to speak in class on the Day of Silence? If the administration either answers “Yes” or dodges the question, please call your child or children out of school on the Day of Silence. Every absence costs districts money, and money talks.

Also, if your school will be permitting students to refuse to speak in class, politely insist that an email be sent to every family informing them of the following: 1. The Day of Silence will be taking place in classes on April 17, 2. Students will be permitted to refuse to speak during instructional time, 3.  The Day of Silence is organized and promoted by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

Parents have a right to know.

The Day of Silence is the queen of all the numerous homosexuality-affirming activities that take place in public schools. It started in one university and then like a cancer metastasized to thousands of high schools, and then into middle schools. Before long it will take place in elementary schools. Leftists know that it’s easier to indoctrinate 16-year-olds than 36-year-olds and easier still to indoctrinate 6-year-olds.

GLSEN promotes the Day of Silence as an “anti-bullying” effort. If it were solely about eradicating bullying, everyone—liberals and conservatives alike—would support it. But it’s not.

The Day of Silence exploits government schools, captive audiences, and anti-bullying sentiment to advance the Left’s social, moral, and political beliefs and goals. GLSEN seeks to advance the belief that all public expressions of moral disapproval of homosexual activity are bullying.

GLSEN urges students to refuse to speak all day, including during academic classes, which is disruptive to instructional time. Administrators permit students to refuse to speak in class, and teachers feel compelled to create lesson plans to accommodate student-refusal to speak. Teachers feel that if they don’t accommodate student-refusal to speak, they will be seen as supporting the bullying of self-identified homosexual students.

The little unspoken secret is that many teachers on both sides of the political aisle hate the Day of Silence because of the distraction and disruption it creates. Unfortunately, they’re afraid to say that to their administrations because GLSEN and its ideological acolytes proclaim that opposition to the Day of Silence necessarily means endorsement of bullying. The truth is one can both oppose bullying and oppose the Day of Silence.

The homosexuality-affirming legal organizations Lambda Legal and the ACLU have both stated that students have no legal right to refuse to speak in class, so school administrations have every right to require students to participate verbally in class. And teachers have every right to require students to answer questions, give oral presentations or speeches, or participate in debates or discussions.

A coalition of pro-family organizations is once again urging parents to keep their children home from school on the Day of Silence if their school administrations will be allowing students to politicize instructional time by refusing to speak. This is the only organized national effort to oppose any pro-homosexual activity or event in public schools.

Each year through the Day of Silence Walkout, parents of freshmen learn about the Day of Silence. And remarkably, there are parents of sophomores, juniors, and seniors who learn for the first time that the Day of Silence takes place in their children’s schools. This lack of awareness happens because school administrations do not notify parents about the Day of Silence.

The absence of conservative influence within the culture on issues related to homosexuality is to some extent the fault of conservatives. Ignorance, fear, and an astounding lack of perseverance on the parts of conservatives have turned our cultural institutions—including public education—into the playground of “progressives.” Our passivity has enabled homosexual activists and their ideological allies to become social, political, and pedagogical bullies. Evidence of that is everywhere, including in schools on the GLSEN’s annual April school event, the Day of Silence.

We must demonstrate the boldness and perseverance of the Left if we hope to stop the relentless appropriation of public education for the promotion of homosexuality.

Matt Barber, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, BarbWire

Dr. Michael Brown, Director, Coalition of Conscience

Brian Camenker, President, MassResistance

Linda Harvey, Founder and President, Mission America

Laurie Higgins, Cultural Analyst, Illinois Family Institute

Peter LaBarbera, President, Americans for Truth About Homosexuality

Diane Gramley, President, American Family Association of Pennsylvania

Matt Staver, President, Liberty Counsel

Debra Smith, Founder, Informing Christians

Tom Rasmussen, Executive Director, Montana Family Foundation

Pastor Scott Lively, President, Abiding Truth Ministries

Penny Nance, President, CWA

Debbie Leininger, State Director, CWA of Illinois

Beverly Uhlmer Roberts, State Director, CWA of Texas South

Linda Wall, VA Mass Resistance

Nolan Clayton, Faith and Freedom Family Ministries

Pastor Christopher Clegg, Operation Save America

Many people and organizations are concerned about so-called net neutrality and its possible effects on free speech, but OneNewsNow talked to one person who is concerned for another reason: the free market.

If this is a free speech issue, says the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Radia, “it’s not about speech being regulated by the government.”

“It’s about speech being regulated by private companies,” Radia suggests. “If you build a network, you own it, you operate it and you decide that your policy will be just to allow certain types of messages. You should be free to do that. Of course your subscribers are free to choose who their provider is.”

Conservative activist and attorney Matt Barber, meanwhile, says he’s concerned that President Barack Obama not only hates the free market and wants a socialistic United States, but he can control the Internet through net neutrality via the FCC. “We know that any speech that the progressive left disagrees with they want to classify as ‘hate speech,'” Barber says. “I’m concerned about the free speech aspects of this on the Internet as well.”

Radia, who is associate director of Technology Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says he opposes net neutrality for free market reasons.

“We’re not going to see Comcast blocking Fox. We won’t see AT&T blocking a union website,” he says, because subscribers would “revolt” and business partners would be unhappy if that happened.

This article was originally posted at the OneNewsNow.com website.

A veteran-related story by The Associated Press focuses on 92-year-old Rupert Starr, a World War II veteran who was captured by the Germans and earned a Bronze Star. The angle of the story, however, is that the veteran is a homosexual who opposed the U.S. military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – a policy that was lifted in 2011, allowing homosexuals to openly serve in the military.

Barbwire.com founder Matt Barber says the article is a slap in the face to veterans – on a day celebrating their heroism.  He tells OneNewsNow:

“To make this about sexual identity politics, and to focus on this individual’s abhorrent sexual proclivities and his lifestyle choices, and to somehow elevate those disordered behaviors as something to be proud of, is really offensive.”

According to Barber, the AP story – which mentions Starr’s homosexual lifestyle or homosexual activism 10 times in the 16-paragraph story – omits an important result of the military’s policy change: the “explosion” of male-on-male assaults in the U.S. military.

“I mean, immediately upon the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ these homosexual assaults spiked and are even – according to the Pentagon’s own statistics – are utterly out of control right now,” Barber tells OneNewsNow.

A 1,400-page Pentagon report conducted in 2013 reported 26,000 service members had been sexually assaulted; approximately 12,000 were female – 14,000 were male. Seventy-three percent of male-on-male assaults occurred on base, the report found.

The Washington Times reported on the findings earlier this year, quoting a homosexual in the story who claimed the male-on-males assaults weren’t done by homosexuals – that they were more like prison rapes.

Rather than truly honoring veterans in the story, Barber says AP is “acting as activists, in fact cheerleaders, for a radical agenda that has hurt the armed services.”

This article was originally posted at the OneNewsNow.com website.

Google’s recent “doodle” announces to the world that Google is gaga over homosexuality-affirming propaganda for minors. Google’s doodle pokes a virtual rainbow-colored flag in the eye of Russian president Vladimir Putin for signing into law a bill that protects minors from homosexuality-affirming propaganda. A financial blockbuster of a company with roots in the country founded to “promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” pro-actively endorses the propagandizing of children while a corrupt totalitarian cockalorum opposes it. Curiouser and curiouser.

The fanciful notion that having “two mommies” is ontologically and morally indistinguishable from having a mother and a father is not a fact. Presenting that non-fact to, for example, five-year-olds in government schools is propaganda. And presenting this non-fact to children is not a loving act even if it “feels” good to “educators” who don’t think about or discuss the issue deeply.

The motive of the imperious Putin for signing into law Russia’s anti-propagandizing-to-minors bill may be to exploit moral beliefs he actually disdains in order to divide various and sundry constituencies around the world for his pernicious purposes, but a law that prohibits propagandizing to minors is not in itself pernicious.

Two people or two groups of people may have very different motives for pursuing the same goal. The fact that one person or group is motivated by hate and/or error doesn’t render the goal inherently evil or wrong. Some politicians may oppose the legalization of same-sex “marriage” because of their sincere (and true) belief that marriage has a nature fundamental to which is sexual complementarity. Other politicians may be motivated to oppose same-sex “marriage” by self-serving political ambition. The selfish motives of the politician who cares only about getting elected have no bearing on the soundness of the goal of opposing same-sex “marriage.” Only chuckleheads and Machiavellian political tacticians confuse motives and goals.

A defense of a law that seeks to prevent the exposure of minors to homosexuality-affirming dogma is not a defense of Putin, the cagey and cunning political animal.

Physical assaults on homosexuals, like physical assaults on any human being, are reprehensible and should be punished in accordance with laws prohibiting assault. But there is no evidence—to my knowledge, at least—that the legal prohibition of propagandizing to minors causes violence.

And here in the United States, there is no evidence to substantiate the related “progressive” claim that orthodox Christian doctrine and those who love Christ cause violence. The fact that hateful people may quote and misapply Scripture in defense of violent physical assaults or ugly verbal assaults on homosexuals no more means they’re Christians than the fact that someone quotes and misapplies Scripture in defense of same-sex “marriage” means they’re Christians. Humans have for hundreds of years abused Scripture for their own sinful ends.

Exposing minors to homosexuality-affirming propaganda is nowhere more troubling than in our public schools where neither children nor teachers are encouraged to study in depth all sides of issues related to homosexuality. Quite the contrary. Curricula and supplementary resources and activities are controlled by “progressive” dogma, the kind of dogma promulgated by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). (Privately, “progressive” teachers actually scoff at the suggestion that there are sides other than theirs worthy of study.)

The propaganda begins in professional development opportunities for teachers in which teachers are never exposed to resources that dissent from the ideology of the “LGBTQ” community. GLSEN assumptions are treated as settled fact:

• There are no discussions of whether or in what ways homosexuality per se is analogous to race.
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether government employees (i.e., teachers) have the ethical right to introduce homosexuality in early elementary school when many children have never heard of homosexuality, their parents object to both the age-inappropriateness and bias of the presentations, and when they’re too young to understand the nature of objections to homosexual acts.
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether it is the right of educators to promote approval of homosexuality, which necessarily entails prior ontological and moral conclusions—conclusions that are shaped by subjects teachers were not hired to teach and for which they have no training.
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether homosexual acts are objectively moral, and if not, what right do government employees have to promote the approval of immoral or possibly immoral acts.
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether it’s the proper role of government employees to expose minors to every sexual phenomenon that can be found in the human community. For example, would it be proper for elementary school teachers to promote approval of polyamory since it exists and is on the rise? If not, why not?
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether disapproval of homosexual acts actually constitutes hatred of persons or causes violent acts.
  
  
• There are no discussions of whether disapproval of racism, promiscuity, over-eating, plagiarism, and drug use constitutes hatred of racists, promiscuous students, obese students, plagiarists, and “druggies,” or of whether such disapproval may lead to physical or verbal assaults against them.
  
  
• There are no discussions of resources written by conservative scholars that affirm the idea that marriage is at its immutable core sexually complementary, even as teachers expose students to pro-same-sex “marriage” resources.
  
  
• There are no discussions of how schools define “safety” (i.e., as “emotional comfort”) and whether safety has any inherent connection to objective reality. 

Ask any conservative public school teachers if their colleagues or administrators ever present resources that challenge “progressive” ideas about homosexuality in professional development meetings. And ask them if they feel as free to express their moral and political beliefs in faculty meetings (or in the classroom) as their “progressive” colleagues do.

“Agents of change,” secure in their tenured positions in public schools, share a certain esprit de corps with totalitarian regimes. They all hatch plans sub rosa to control the beliefs of others. Unfortunately, those victims—I mean, students—happen to be other people’s minor children.

Until our publicly subsidized educators relinquish their white-knuckled grip on curricula with their de facto enforcement of censorship, perhaps we need an anti-propagandizing-to-minors law.

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