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Pelosi Durbin and the Denial of Communion

A question that’s been roiling the Catholic Church for years is whether Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin and other Catholic politicians should be denied Communion since they support the legalized killing of children in the womb.

In 2004, then-Fr. Kevin Vann (now Bishop Vann of Orange, CA) publicly advised U.S. Senator Durbin not to present himself for Communion at his home church in Springfield due to his stance on abortion. But mostly the Church has wrestled with this question through the decades. Many wonder why there is any reluctance to deny Communion to Catholics who endorse views contrary to those of the Church.

Opponents of the denial of Communion argue that since we’re all sinners, if we deny Communion to some politicians on this issue, then we must deny Communion to others in the pews who are engaged in serious sin. That, in turn, would mean that few would be receiving Communion, which is at the heart of Mass for Catholics.

But now action has been taken by Nancy Pelosi’s archbishop, Salvatore Cordileone, in San Francisco to deny her Communion, and the floodgates of opinion have opened. The action was immediately praised by other bishops and panned by celebrities.

First, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Celebrity Whoopi Goldberg, who identifies as Catholic, proclaims on TV to the archbishop: “It’s not your job!” Except that it is Archbishop Cordileone’s job. In fact, it’s at the very heart of the “job description” for a bishop or priest. They are called to tend their flock and help people live righteously, part of which is administering or withholding the Eucharist.

Second, politicians and leaders have a special responsibility that most of us don’t have.[1] As leaders of civil government, they regularly determine life-and-death issues, chief among which is abortion—the direct killing of innocent unborn children.

Now on to the nitty-gritty of Catholic Church teaching.

The way it’s supposed to work is that the priest of the church that Nancy Pelosi attends is in charge of ministering to her. Just like any other parishioner, the local priest is her shepherd. He talks to her, hears her confessions, counsels her, and administers the sacraments to her. He gets to know the real Nancy, who is created in the image and likeness of Almighty God, all for the purpose of helping her grow in holiness.

For decades, her priest (and his boss, the archbishop) have undoubtedly held many private conversations with Pelosi. Many attempts to get her to renounce killing the unborn were surely made. Indeed, Nancy says so herself. But she says she “disagrees” with the Church on this and other key issues.

So, what is an archbishop to do? He is to do exactly what Archbishop Cordileone did. Privately counsel one of his flock on a major sin. Counsel her to confess and ask for forgiveness. And urge her not to sin again. If she refuses, the priest cannot in good conscience administer the sacrament of Communion.

Catholic leaders like Pelosi and Durbin will often say that Catholic teaching provides that one’s “right of conscience” is sacred. That is true. But using that as an excuse to support abortion or gay “marriage” or any other serious sin makes a mockery of the teaching. The teaching does not give carte blanche to reject Catholic doctrine.

Catholic teaching says that a “well-formed conscience is upright and truthful” and also that a well-formed conscience can never contradict the objective moral truth contained in Sacred Scripture or taught by the Magisterium of the Church.

Public discussions of the Catholic Church’s respect for conscience often include a grave misunderstanding of how the Catholic Church views conscience. Conscience is “the sense of right and wrong, but also the obligations that follow from our understanding of what is right and wrong.”

Further, conscience must be properly formed by Scripture and the historical teachings of the Catholic Church. Catholic apologist Tom Nash writes,

[A] Catholic is obligated to form his conscience particularly with the teachings of the Church (CCC 1785) and including these basic moral rules:

  • One may never do evil so that good may result from it
  • The Golden Rule: “Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them.”
  • Charity always proceeds by way of respect for one’s neighbor and his conscience: “Thus sinning against your brethren and wounding their conscience . . . you sin against Christ.” Therefore “it is right not to . . . do anything that makes your brother stumble”

Choosing abortion clearly violates all three rules. Thus, one can never have a truly certain conscience and choose abortion. … In addition, as Vatican II makes clear, conscience does not give individual Catholics arbitrary veto power over any and all Church teachings they don’t like. Rather, in evaluating decisions in their conscience, Catholics are faced with an objective, divinely given law (see Romans 2:14-16) they must obey, not one they can override or rewrite.

The archbishop obviously doesn’t believe Nancy is submitting to God. As Nancy Pelosi said, “They say to me, ‘Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the pope.’ Yes I do. Are you stupid?”

The Catholic Church believes that its priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals, are established on Earth for the purpose of guiding and helping people grow in holiness. Like most clergy, Archbishop Cordileone is keenly aware of his role in trying to get Nancy Pelosi, and others in his care, to accept God’s Word. Let us pray for them all.





Who Are America’s Domestic Terrorists?

While U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pretends to be quaking in her Jimmy Choo stilettos about alleged homegrown domestic terrorists, she doesn’t seem to know who they are. Pelosi faux-frets about tragic school shootings and an imagined insurrection, while ignoring the human slaughter she openly supports and the terrorist threats and actions she secretly supports. And she’s not alone on the left, which is why the legacy press and most leftist collaborators remain electively mute as Jane’s Revenge seeks vengeance against any organization that tries to protect the unborn.

Jane’s Revenge, an anonymous anarcho-feminist collective with apparently multiple terrorist cells around the country, has claimed responsibility for the bombing of several crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations and warns via blood-red graffiti that more violence is coming:

If abortions aren’t safe, neither are you.

Abortions were quite safe for women by the 1960s and remain wildly unsafe for tiny humans in the womb today. In fact, abortions are lethal for most—though not all—gestating humans.

In the first communiqué from Jane’s Revenge, titled “NIGHT OF RAGE: AN AUTONOMOUS CALL TO ACTION AGAINST THE PATRIARCHY,” the vengeful urge women to be ferocious in the service of a nonexistent constitutional right to slaughter the unborn:

Why is it that we are so afraid to unleash hell upon those who are destroying us? … Your anger has been stolen from you. To this we say: no more. We need to get angry. We need the state to feel our full wrath. We need to express this madness fully and with ferocity. We need to quit containing ourselves. We need them to be afraid of us.

Just what America needs right now: More wrathful leftist women with babies in their sights.

We already know the pro-human slaughter movement is intellectually and morally bankrupt, but this part of Jane’s Revenge’s manifesto makes clear they’re also lunatics:

Last week, an evil creature slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in their classroom in Texas. While some may call this horrific act “senseless” or “random,” we know that’s not the case. We know that this was an act of male domination and patriarchal violence, meant to make women, children and teachers live in fear. We know it is deeply connected to the reproductive violence about to be unleashed on this land by an illegitimate institution founded in white male supremacy.

Say what? The Uvalde shooting is connected to the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization? Allowing states to restrict human slaughter is “reproductive violence“? On what basis do the vengeful Janes make those claims?

(As an aside, I wonder if Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought the Supreme Court is an illegitimate institution.)

Leftists—including women—refuse to arm teachers, refuse to keep criminals in jail, refuse to support the police, refuse to safeguard our borders, and refuse to acknowledge the critical need of children for their fathers. And then the leftist Janes ironically allege the patriarchy (i.e., conservatives) cause harm to children.

Leftists—including women—celebrate the experimental chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of minor children in the service of an arguable, anti-science, metaphysical superstition and then claim to care about children.

A lone male killer mowed down 19 children, while an army of matriarchal murderesses march in our blood-soaked streets fighting for the legal right of women to mow down close to 900,000 humans in the womb annually.

Leftists shout their voluntary slaughter of their own children and call it “reproductive health care” and freedom.

Jane’s Revenge was named after the Jane Collective (or just Jane), a group of seven young women in Chicago who arranged and sometimes performed illegal abortions in the years 1969-1974, after which their wicked services were no longer needed.

In an HBO documentary titled The Janes, the now elderly Janes claim they were saving women’s lives. What is not mentioned is that, according to the pro-human slaughter Guttmacher Institute, by “1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200.” Compare that to the million deaths of human beings in the womb every year since 1973–half of whom are girls and all of whom were denied any choice about being aborted.

Jane’s Revenge has more plans for oppressed “people who can get pregnant” (Sane people call people who can get pregnant “women.”), the first step of which is for women to feel their “fury”:

The next step is carrying that anger out into the world and expressing it physically. … On the night the final ruling [i.e., Dobbs v. Jackson] is issued … we are asking for courageous hearts to come out after dark. Whoever you are and wherever you are, we are asking for you to do what you can to make your anger known. We have selected a time of 8pm for actions nationwide to begin.

Sounds to me like a call for domestic terrorism—er, I mean mostly peaceful protests.

The second communiqué from the terrorist organization Jane’s Revenge includes a threat directed to crisis pregnancy centers and pro-life organizations:

You’ve read the communiqués from the various cells, you’ve seen the proliferating messages in graffiti and elsewhere, and you know that we are serious.

We were unsurprised to see thirty days come and thirty days pass with no sign of consilience or even bare-minimum self-reflection from you who impersonate healthcare providers in order to harm the vulnerable. …

Your thirty days expired yesterday. We offered an honourable way out. You could have walked away. Now the leash is off. And we will make it as hard as possible for your campaign of oppression to continue. We have demonstrated in the past month how easy and fun it is to attack. We are versatile, we are mercurial, and we answer to no one but ourselves. We promised to take increasingly drastic measures against oppressive infrastructures. Rest assured that we will, and those measures may not come in the form of something so easily cleaned up as fire and graffiti. Sometimes you will see what we do, and you will know that it is us. Sometimes you will think you merely are unlucky, because you cannot see the ways which we interfere in your affairs. But your pointless attempts to control others, and make life more difficult, will not be met passively. Eventually your insurance companies, and your financial backers will realize you are a bad investment.

From here forward, any anti-choice group who closes their doors, and stops operating will no longer be a target. But until you do, it’s open season, and we know where your operations are. The infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. We will never stop, back down, slow down, or retreat.

What was the “honourable way out” that Jane’s Revenge offered pro-life activists? Complete submission to the vengeful Janes’s pernicious will.

Jane’s harpies seem ignorant of the irony in griping about alleged oppression while threatening retaliation if fellow women refuse to sanction the slaughter of the least among us.

Maybe Biden can squeeze in some time between creating Ministries of Truth and spying on wayward parents to investigate Jane’s Revenge who are actually threatening Americans.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Who-Are-Americas-Domestic-Terrorists-B.mp3





The Almighty and Abortion

As the debate over abortion rages, with the U.S. Supreme Court poised to possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 pro-abortion ruling, I find myself wondering: How can anybody claim that God is in favor of abortion? But some do. Or how can they claim that the issue is important, but not really that important?

‘It’s About Abortion’

Francis X. Rocca wrote for The Wall Street Journal (6/13/22) on the ongoing split between Catholic bishops on the issue of “Abortion Politics.” The issue is: Should Catholic politicians who are strongly pro-abortion, such as Nancy Pelosi, nonetheless receive Communion?

Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco thinks Pelosi should not receive it. As Bishop Michael Barber of Oakland puts it, “because it’s really not about Communion, it’s about abortion, the killing of a child in its mother’s womb.”

In contrast, Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego claims also to oppose abortion, but his view (as characterized by Barber) seems to be, that “it’s not wrong enough that you need say or do anything about it or interact with the politicians who are publicly promoting it.”

Christian Leaders Who Support Abortion

This debate is not among Catholics alone. A few weeks ago the Associated Press (5/20/22) wrote an article highlighting professing Christian leaders who claimed their faith demanded that they support abortion.

They quote Kendra Cotton of the Black Southern Women’s Collective: “We know that Christianity supports freedom, and inherent in freedom is bodily autonomy. Inherent in Christianity is free will. When people talk about the body being a temple of God, you have purview over your body, there is nothing more sacred.” Than what — being able to abort your own baby?

Obviously, what is ignored here is the sacred nature of the unborn child created in the image of God. In Psalm 139, David describes how we are “fearfully and wonderfully made,” even in utero: “You knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”

“Thou shalt do no murder” is the 6th Commandment. That directly applies to abortion, the deliberate taking of a human life, albeit in the womb (hidden from view).

Meanwhile, it would seem that the vast majority of Christian leaders in the conservative denominations are clearly opposed to abortion — thankfully.

And why shouldn’t they be? We know more today, scientifically, about the humanity of the unborn baby than the Supreme Court did in 1973, when they gave us Roe v. Wade.

From Planned Parenthood to Pro-Life

When women see a sonogram of the unborn, they often become pro-life.

Abby Johnson, author (with Cindy Lambert) of the book, Unplanned, was the Planned Parenthood Employee of the Year in the late 1990s. The very next year, at her own clinic for which she served as the manager, she quit shortly after witnessing the sonogram of a 15-week old preborn child being aborted. The poor kid didn’t have a chance.

Today pro-life Abby helps medical workers transition out of the abortion industry into other jobs through her outreach, And Then There Were None.

Other Excuses for Abortion

Another commandment is that we are not to tell lies. But we often forget that Roe v. Wade was built on a series of lies, e.g., that “Jane Roe” was raped. She was not. Well, if you favor killing unborn babies, why would you have a problem telling lies?

Another commandment forbids adultery. Sometimes abortions are committed to cover up the sin of adultery. Abortion could be viewed as violating at least three of the Ten Commandments.

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his Second Inaugural Address, he brought out the issue of God and slavery. Speaking about the two sides in the Civil War, he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged.”

He goes on to point out, “The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. ‘Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’”

An Act of Violence

And we would ask today: How can any true Christian accept the direct violence of dismembering an unborn child simply because the mother has been deceived to think this is her only choice in the matter?

Every abortion is an act of violence no matter how sterile it may be presented in the media. Lila Rose of Live Action has documented that violence.

Those who claim God is on the side of the abortionist are not only supporting a terrible evil; but they are likely violating the Third Commandment by taking the name of the Lord God in vain.


This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.




Oren Jacobson: Another Foolish Illinois Activist

Why has Illinois become a stinking bog of degradation, violence, and fiscal collapse? It’s because we have scores of “leaders,” and activists who are as unable to distinguish right from wrong as they are unable to distinguish men from women. One of those activists is Oren Jacobson, devoted advocate for the slaughter of preborn humans, founder of Men4Choice, board member of pro-human slaughter Personal PAC, self-identifying “thought leader,” and self-promoter extraordinaire who recently said,

Everything we’re doing is focused on getting what are really millions of men—who in theory are pro-choice but are completely passive when it comes to their voice and their energy and their time in the fight for abortion rights and abortion access—to get off the sidelines and step in the fight as allies.

And here I thought men were supposed to shut up about abortion.

In an interview on MSNBC with Zerlina Maxwell after the U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito was leaked, Jacobson emoted,

I want to say one thing to … all the women watching, everybody who can get pregnant, how deeply sorry I am that we’re in this moment. I’m feeling very emotional about that.

He had to add that last statement in case everybody who can get pregnant didn’t notice his phony voice-cracking indicating he was about to fake-cry. Jacobson wants everybody who can get pregnant to know he has Deep Feelings about the possibility that pregnant women—and men—may not be legally allowed to slaughter their offspring. Nuttin’ means nuttin’ without Deep Feelings.

And boy, oh, boy does the emotive Jacobson have Deep Feelings—deep feelings and a vivid imagination. The mere thought of women not being free to slaughter their unborn leads Jacobson to imagine a horrific dystopian handmaid’s tale where rapists roam free and women’s very humanity is denied:

If this is, in fact, the ruling that the Court will hand down, that in at least 13 states right away and most likely in 25 0r 26 states pretty quickly, a rapist will have more rights than a woman in those states. And it is beyond horrifying to imagine a future in which your humanity, your dignity, your ability to control your life is valued less than a rapist.

What precisely are the “rights” rapists will have that women will not in states that acknowledge the humanity of unborn humans? And how are the humanity and dignity of women diminished by recognizing the humanity and dignity of their offspring and protecting their right not to be exterminated?

I’m not exactly sure what the self-identifying “thought leader” Jacobson means when he says that restricting or banning human slaughter means women’s humanity, dignity, and ability to control their lives are “valued less than a rapist.” Rape is illegal, and if caught, rapists are arrested and punished.

Maybe he’s referring to opposition to abortion in cases of rape. Many people who believe in the sanctity, humanity, and dignity of all human life believe that humans created through criminal acts should not be punished for the crimes of their fathers. Such a belief does not constitute either a devaluation of women or an elevated valuation of rapists.

Rather than feeling horrified that 64 million humans have been slaughtered since 1973 because they were imperfect, inconvenient, or unwanted by their mothers, Jacobson is horrified that the killings may stop.

Jacobson sidestepped an awkward question from interviewer Maxwell who said the quiet part out loud, tacitly admitting that men and women use human slaughter as a means of contraception:

One of the things I think we need to talk about … is how men benefit from abortion. … There are men who would not be CEOs but for access to contraception. Tell us how men benefit.

Jacobson was politically canny and cunning enough to avoid responding to that question. Instead, he launched into an autonomy answer that—again—ignores the person with the most at stake and no voice whatsoever:

I want every pro-choice male to step into this out of an obligation to stand up for the freedoms to those most directly impacted. … You deserve the right, within the context of a healthy relationship, to make decisions with your partner that are in the best interest of your family. … In my own personal life, when we have had moments in planning our family … at no point did I give a rip what Ted Cruz, Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Mike Pence, or any other of these anti-abortion men with power across the country thought about what my wife and I should do. And that is why, to me … this isn’t just a woman’s issue.

When considering whether the “product” of conception between two humans is a human; whether that “product” has humanity, dignity, and value; whether the “product’s” body is her mother’s body; and whether a more developed human should be able to kill the “product,” I don’t give a rip what Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, J.B. Pritzker, Jared Polis, Jan Schakowsky, Gavin Newsom, Oren Jacobson, or any other pro-human slaughter men and women with power who refuse to recognize that abortion involves two human bodies thinks.

And that’s why this isn’t just a woman’s issue.

Jacobson continues with his dissembling and evasion:

The simple reality is that the men in America who oppose abortion, who are using their privilege and their power, are not shy, and they are not quiet. So, the question isn’t why shouldn’t men get loud. It’s why haven’t we been getting louder sooner.

Surely, Jacobson knows that men who support the legal right of women to off their offspring have been “using their privilege and power” to rob the unborn of their right to live. In fact, it was seven men, six of whom were white, who in a raw exercise of their power and privilege denied the humanity, dignity, and right to life of preborn humans in Roe v. Wade.

And surely, Jacobson knows why men haven’t “been getting louder sooner.” The reason is that feminist harpies have been shrieking for years that men have no right to speak on abortion—despite the fact that the babies killed have fathers too.

But I agree with Jacobson. Men should get involved. Men should donate to pro-life crisis pregnancy centers and advocacy organizations.

Men, who should be the protectors of and providers for women and children, should march shoulder-to-shoulder with women in pro-life marches. Men should listen to the voices of women who were pressured to have their sons and daughters killed, who live with bone-deep grief and regret, and who are angry that their country tolerates the slaughter of thousands of babies every year.

And to quote Jacobson,

Men, your job is to carry the voices of those women to your peers and buddies, to call them, text them, post on social media about this, to start lifting up those voices and owning this conversation amongst your friends.

The very lives of humans depend on the voices of men and women who know truth.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Jacobson-Another-Foolish-Illinois-Activist.mp3





Hatred Animates the Left

As we head into the next presidential campaign season, it would serve us well to remember how leftist hatred and the lies they created to serve their hatred have caused ordinary Americans to suffer.

Leftist hatred of former President Trump resulted in the election of the senile mob boss Joe “Bananas” Biden, who has destroyed virtually every good thing Trump did during his four years in the White House. (Ironically, leftists consumed by hatred hurl the epithet “hater” at anyone who holds different moral views than they do.)

With his ill-conceived COVID and economic policies, Bananas Biden destroyed a once- flourishing economy that helped communities of color. Democrats don’t really care about the welfare of those communities. Rather, they exploit those communities for votes. If they did care, they wouldn’t incentivize fatherlessness, celebrate single-sex family structures, and deny families school choice. If Democrats did care about families of color, they wouldn’t defund the police and release criminals who plunder communities already ravaged by crime and poverty.

While Trump presided over the historic Abraham Accords and foreign policies that kept bad actors in check, the feckless Biden emboldened tyrannical regimes.

Biden’s fear of the hysterical AOC and other climate Chicken Littles rendered the energy-rich United States oil-dependent again, thereby contributing to gas prices that influence-peddlers can afford, but ordinary Americans cannot.

Biden’s enthusiastic support for racist academic theories half-baked in Ivory Towers intensified racial division in America. Judge people by the color of their skin and their genitalia—especially if that genitalia is fake—say Biden and his collaborators. Normalizing racism and “trans” nonsense sits squarely at the top of Biden’s list of unprincipled convictions.

The anti-woman Biden embraced science-denying “trans” cultic beliefs, thereby robbing all citizens of their intrinsic right to privacy in shared private spaces, jeopardizing the safety of girls and women, and destroying women’s sports.

Biden opened wide the Southern border floodgates to law-breakers whom Bananas ships around the country under cover of darkness after giving them smart phones.

While Trump presided over the development and delivery of the COVID vaccine at lightning speed, Biden left his slimy, sluggish mark on the delivery of COVID-testing kits.

Worst of all, Biden the fake Catholic, dismantles every policy that protects preborn humans and supports any law that enables women to order the killing of their living offspring up until birth.

All of this harms ordinary citizens of every color, while the wealthy, powerful, and well-connected remain immune from the consequences of their corrosive decisions.

The achievements during Trump’s brief tenure were all the more remarkable in that he had to contend with Democrats in Congress who were determined to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to promote what they knew to be lies in order to unseat a duly elected president. That, in leftist la-la land is an ethically defensible way to refuse to accept the results of an election. Manufacturing a Russian collusion hoax involving FBI agents, wasting taxpayer money, and lying to judges to unseat a sitting president is the modus operandi of the proudly non-insurrectionist Democrat party

At the same time, Trump had to contend with relentless assaults by a shockingly partisan and hostile press more skilled at licking the muck boots of the DNC than at journalism. They will attack Republicans with a viciousness that only ethics-free bullies would engage in. This was a press so full of hatred and so petty that no women’s magazine invited the most beautiful First Lady in history to appear on its cover. Some might call that micro-aggressive.

Many on the left and a fair number of people on the right argue that Trump is a flawed man. No argument there. Who among us isn’t? Liar extraordinaire Adam Schiff? Nancy let-them-eat-cake- while-I-get-my-hair-done Pelosi? Hillary Clinton, whose list of ethical violations—including attacking the victims of her husband’s sexual predations—is too long to enumerate? Yet no mention of their corruption from the haters and liars on the left who concocted wild conspiracy theories and a web of lies involving powerful government agencies to—dare I say it—rig the election.

There are many ways to rig elections, at least three of which were at play in 2020:

First, the cognitively fading Joe Biden was largely concealed from the public eye, and the bootlicking press found nothing troubling with his cellar dwelling. Had any Republican, let alone Trump, engaged in such obvious campaign avoidance, he or she would have been savaged. Even a woman of color—if Republican—would have been savaged.

Second, social media superhero Meta-Man, aka Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife poured millions—$419 million—of their own money, laundered through two non-profits to ensure Biden’s win. In other words, they surreptitiously plopped down their bars of gold onto the scales of equity.

And third, another social media mogul, the pixilated Jack Dorsey, banned from Twitter a major story about the laptop of the second-in-command of the Biden crime family, Hunter Biden. Other press outlets followed suit, thereby keeping information from voters about a real influence-peddling/collusion scheme involving the Bidens, Ukraine, and China.

So, as we enter the presidential campaign season, let’s not be deceived by lies, nor distracted by a quixotic quest for a perfect candidate. There will be none. Support candidates whose policies will result in conditions that allow free speech, religious liberty, and human life to flourish. Reject candidates whose party seeks to constrain speech; undermine religious liberty; indoctrinate children; kill humans in the womb; foment racism; endanger the safety of girls and women; subordinate human needs to the desires of climate hysterics; facilitate border lawlessness and criminality in our cites; and render America less safe from enemies foreign and domestic.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Hatred-Animates-the-Left.mp3





Up, Up, and Away (Without) Masks

Anyone tired of “masking up” to enter an airport or get on a flight? There may be an end in sight largely thanks to U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).  Although the air travel mask mandate was set to end on March 18, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) extended the mandate until April 18. But the extension begs the question, “Will it really end then?” Now Paul and others have taken real action to end the mandates once and for all.

The first promising step is S.J.Res 37. This resolution, introduced by Paul this past February, passed in the U.S. Senate recently by a vote of 57-40. Better yet, it represents bi-partisan support with eight Democrat senators voting in support of the resolution: Michael Bennet (D-CO), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT). In typical fashion, U.S. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was the only Republican to vote against the bill.

Still, this measure, which expresses disapproval of the CDC’s mask mandate, faces significant challenges in the days ahead if it is to become law. The amount of votes it received are not enough to override President Biden’s veto threat. Moreover, proponents must garner enough support to overcome U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s reluctance to let the member of the House vote on it. But should the resolution fail to pass through its trip to becoming law, all hope is not lost.

Members of Congress, 17 to be exact, have filed a suit against the CDC which would end the federal mask requirement for passengers both on commercial flights and in airports. First names on the suit are, once again, U.S. Senator Rand Paul as well as U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), both of whom filed the suit in their home state of Kentucky. Other GOP House members: Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (D-AZ), Dan Bishop (R-NC), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Warren Davidson (R-OH), Bob Good (R-VA), Brian Mast (R-FL), Bill Posey (R-FL) and Matt Rosendale (R-MT).

One of the best implications of this suit is its potential to end the government and, especially, unelected bureaucrats’ overreach in making declarations — calling them mandates, but treating them as law. According to Rosendale, those practices are nothing more than part and parcel of

“the fear mongering narrative of COVID-19. The CDC has forced Americans to wear masks on commercial flights for two years without legal standing. A mandate is not law, and Congress never passed legislation codifying the CDC’s mask wearing demands.”

And there is science to back up the ending of the air-travel mask requirement: COVID-19 transmission on airplanes is unlikely due to the ventilation systems. These systems not only mix outdoor air with recycled air via HEPA filters, but they limit air flow between rows – a key reason behind the lack of connection between outbreaks and commercial air travel. According to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association,

“The risk of contracting COVID-19 during air travel is low. Despite substantial numbers of travelers, the number of suspected and confirmed cases of in-flight COVID-19 transmission between passengers around the world appears small.”

Confirming this view is Sebastian Hoehl, a researcher at the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany. “An airplane cabin is probably one of the most secure conditions you can be in,” he noted.

Given the above information, it is clearly time to end the unwarranted and unscientific policy of mandating masks in airports and airplanes especially since the mandates have ended in virtually all other public places. If you’d like to be sure they do. . . .

Take ACTION: Please click HERE to contact your U.S. Representative and let him/her know how you feel about this. Also, please click HERE to let U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi know she should allow a vote on the measure.

U.S. Senator Paul seems to truly be the hero in this fight for “following the science” and for ending government overreach. Early last week, he introduced a pertinent amendment, a “separation of powers” so to speak, that would eliminate Dr. Anthony Fauci’s position as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and replace it with three separate positions effectively limiting its power.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular is that no one person should be deemed “dictator-in-chief.” No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” said Dr. Paul, a physician. “To ensure that ineffective, unscientific lockdowns and mandates are never foisted on the American people ever again, I’ve  introduced this amendment . . .This will create accountability and oversight into a taxpayer-funded position that has largely abused its power, and has been responsible for many failures and misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

For more information, click HERE.





Legendary Hypocrisy and Deceit of Democrats

As Leftists unravel and incinerate the fabric of America, it’s helpful—unpleasant but helpful—to recall some of their now legendary acts of hypocrisy and deceit, including the widespread use of Newspeak. So, let’s start with that.

While claiming to have a corner on compassion and love, Leftists now refer to human beings by the soulless, utilitarian term “human infrastructure”—something to be used, manipulated, repaired, or destroyed and rebuilt in ways that better serve the omniscient and omnipotent among us. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that they are including the word “human’’—for now.

Leftists cheer for the acts alleged by Bob Woodward and Robert Costas in their book Peril to have been committed by General Mark Milley—acts that if true would be seditious and/or treasonous. Meanwhile, Democrats spent millions of taxpayer dollars to “investigate” alleged collusion with Russians by former President Trump even after they knew the story was false.

Leftists want hard-working Americans to pay for the food, housing, education, job-training, and medical expenses of 95,000 Afghan refugees. Meanwhile, the U.S. homeless population is over 580,000, of which 171,000 are in families and 37,000 are military veterans.

Leftists support falsified birth certificates and drivers’ licenses but oppose falsified vaccine passports.

Leftists shriek “our bodies, our choice” when it comes to destroying tiny bodies that are not theirs, while out of the other side of their mouths they hiss, “your body, our choice” when it comes to vaccines that have not been proven risk-free.

The ruling elite—including Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and sexually profligate California Governor Gavin Newsom—infamously imposed restrictions on the deplorables that they themselves had no intention of submitting to.

Leftists said nothing when Kamala Harris proclaimed she would not get the vaccine if Trump said to get one, but they are howling indignantly because rapper Nicki Minaj suggested people should do their own research before getting a COVID-19 vaccination.

Leftists want to force Americans to be vaccinated or regularly tested for COVID-19, and the Biden administration is requiring all foreign nationals who come to the U.S. legally to provide proof of vaccination and a negative COVID-19 test within three days of leaving their country for the U.S. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has been allowing thousands of illegal immigrants to flood the country without proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test.

Leftists support the lawlessness of border criminals who flagrantly violate our immigration laws, and at the same time, they object to the efforts of ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol, and police to enforce laws that protect citizens.

Leftists shrieked about “kids in cages”—cages that the Obama administration built—and said nothing about plastic pods with children of color packed in like sardines.

Leftists claim to love multiculturalism and hate the imposition of “white” ideas on other cultures, but then they spend buckets of taxpayer ducats to impose controversial leftist sexuality dogma that was socially constructed by privileged whites in off-white towers on Middle Eastern and African cultures.

Leftists claim to be the party that cares about women, but then they sexually integrate women’s locker rooms, restrooms, shelters, prisons, and sports, and they support the slaughter of approximately 430,000 girls in the womb.

Leftists call conservatives “fascists,” while they—leftists—eagerly support the efforts of Big Tech, Big Business, and Big Government to ban books, censor speech, compel speech, bury news stories, and prevent journalists from fully informing the public of Biden’s corruption and humanitarian disasters.

Leftists claim to value diversity, tolerance, free speech, and critical thinking and then silence ideas they hate from being studied and discussed in publicly subsidized schools.

Leftists claim to care about persons of color and yet steadfastly deny them the right to choose where their children are educated.

Leftists claim to care about persons of color but continually pass policies and laws that incentivize the destruction of the nuclear family which has resulted in a plague of criminal activity, dysfunctional schools, dangerous neighborhoods, and government dependence among those communities where many persons of color live.

When pressed a few leftists muttered an anemic tut tut about the 630 violent insurrections by BLM and Antifa that caused over a billion dollars of damage to private property, resulted in 2,000 police injuries, and included the destruction of government property, and yet all leftists fake-fume endlessly about the Jan. 6 riot.

Leftists paid to have criminals who were arrested in the 2020 BLM/Antifa insurrections sprung from jail and yet say nothing when those arrested for participating in the Jan. 6 riot languish in jail for months on end.

Leftists couldn’t care less about Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling, his corrupt father’s lies about not knowing a thing about Hunter’s influence-peddling business, or about Eric Swalwell’s sexual dalliance with a Chinese spy, but they fake-fumed tirelessly about a “pee tape.”

Leftists pontificate on the importance of “transparency” while saying nothing when cellar-dweller Biden stayed barricaded in his fortress rather than campaigning and saying nothing when the few press conferences he holds are micro-crafted with precision to conceal his cognitive decline.

Leftists couldn’t care less about Biden’s memory failures and verbal gaffes, but boy, oh, boy did they object to Trump’s inartful rhetoric.

In 2006, just before she became the first female U.S. Speaker of the House of liars, Nancy Pelosi  said,

We’ll turn the most closed and corrupt Congress into the most open and honest Congress. … The only way you can make the change that needs to be made for our country—a new direction where we’re there for the many and not the few—is to drain the swamp.

Pelosi meant none of it.

Throughout Trump’s tenure, America learned just how thick, deep, and fetid the swamp has become. The sewage has leached out into all power centers: all departments of the vast governmental bureaucracy, legacy news media, social media behemoths, academia, and corporate America.

And now, you can’t work in America if you say you oppose the slaughter of humans in the womb. You can’t work in America if you refuse to use transpeak pronouns. You can’t work in America if you say homoerotic acts are immoral and the union of two people of the same sex is not—in reality—a marriage. You can’t work in America if you won’t get a COVID vaccine.

This is no longer America.

To borrow the title of Rod Dreher’s book: Live not by lies.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Legendary-Hypocrisy-and-Deceit-of-Democrats.mp3





Self-Worship and the Slaughter of the Unborn

In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks revealed her over-inflated sense of the importance of Fleetwood Mac in her rationalization of the decision to end the life of her unborn child:

If I had not had that abortion, I’m pretty sure there would have been no Fleetwood Mac. There’s just no way that I could have had a child then, working as hard as we worked constantly. And there were a lot of drugs, I was doing a lot of drugs … I would have had to walk away. … And I knew that the music we were going to bring to the world was going to heal so many people’s hearts and make people so happy. And I thought: you know what? That’s really important. There’s not another band in the world that has two lead women singers, two lead women writers. That was my world’s mission.

In Nicks’ view, drug use and the music of Fleetwood Mac are of more value than the life of her child. Somehow the omniscient Nicks just knew that Fleetwood Mac’s music would “heal” more hearts and make more people “happy” than her child would have. In Nicks’ view her world mission depended on the intentional killing of her child.

Here are some questions for anyone nodding in agreement with Nicks’ self-absorbed, grandiose claims:

  • Has anyone’s heart been healed more by Fleetwood Mac music—or any music—than by the ministrations and love of people?
  • Is there a human who would choose to spend their last days listening to Fleetwood Mac songs over sitting with their spouses, children, grandchildren, or siblings?
  • What kind of a narcissist or fool thinks the glass ceiling-tapping presence of two female lead singers and writers in a rock band is of greater value than the existence of a human being—any human being—including those deemed imperfect, inconvenient, or the least accomplished by worldly standards?

Nicks is not alone in her self-centered ignorance. Recently, the morally vacuous political animal and Catholic apostate U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was asked by a reporter,

Is an unborn baby at 15 weeks a human being?

Pelosi hissed evasively,

Let me just say that I am a big supporter of Roe v. Wade. I am a mother of five children in six years. I think I have some standing on this issue as to respecting a woman’s right to choose.

Perhaps she could enlighten people as to why having given birth to five children in six years grants her some special standing to decide which humans can be slaughtered.

Since her viperish response didn’t answer the question, the intrepid reporter tried again. This time the always-humble public servant Pelosi ignored the question entirely. The arrogant and powerful assume the right to refuse to justify their words and actions—actions that potentially affect the lives and existence of millions of people.

Friday Night Lights and Titans actress Minka Kelly rationalizes her abortion via prophecy:

When I was younger I had an abortion. It was the smartest decision I could’ve made, not only for myself & my boyfriend at the time, but also for this unborn fetus. … Having a baby at that time would have only perpetuated the cycle of poverty, chaos and dysfunction I was born into.

Kelly employs the classic and relentlessly employed fallacy of the false dichotomy. She implies there are only two choices: abortion or a life of poverty, chaos, and dysfunction. But there’s a third choice: adoption. Moreover, it’s grotesque to suggest that it’s better for a human to be dead than poor.

Kelly continued, saying,

outlawing abortion has never stopped women from attempting it.

True, and outlawing murder, theft, and rape hasn’t stopped people from murdering, stealing, and raping either, so should we apply Kelly’s principle consistently?

Here are some surprising and relevant statistics from the pro-human slaughter Guttmacher Institute:

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women. … The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200.

Compare those numbers of tragic accidental deaths to the intentional slaughter of 63,000,000 humans in the womb in the United States since 1973. Every one of the 200 accidental deaths of women in 1965 could have been prevented by those women not choosing to pursue the murder of their unborn children. The 63,000,000 humans intentionally slaughtered since 1973 had no choice about what was done to their bodies.

In discussing her decision to have the child she conceived with Warren Beatty in 1961 killed, actress Joan Collins demonstrated the worldly values that impel child sacrifice:

It would have been absolute career death for me to have done that. … it would have been unthinkable to have a child.

[Warren Beatty] didn’t have any money, I had nothing, and I believe if you are going to bring a child into the world that you have to have a responsibility to that child.

I’m so happy that [Collins’ daughter] Tara … was my first child, I love her dearly and it would not have been the same had I had another child.

Collins’ warped view of familial responsibility apparently includes killing members of impoverished families. (Never mind that Collins had appeared in 22 movies between 1952 and 1961; that in 1961 Warren Beatty starred in the award-winning, box office blockbuster Splendor in the Grass; and that his sister Shirley MacLaine had been a Hollywood star for six years. Maybe Collins was using the phrase “didn’t have any money” figuratively. Or maybe Hollywood actors aren’t good at sharing or helping loved ones in need.)

What kind of moral compass leads a woman to conclude that the best solution to presumed future poverty is having her child killed? What kind of person believes her love for her second child would have been diminished had she not had her first child killed?

Perhaps feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s reason for having an illegal abortion in 1956 when she was 22 best illustrates the self-worship that impels the human slaughter movement:

I just knew that if I went home and married, which I would’ve had to do, it would be to the wrong person; it would be to a life that wasn’t mine, that wasn’t mine at all.

Like so many other cultural movements since the sexual revolution, the human-slaughter movement is shaped and impelled by self-worship and its necessary corollary, self-indulgence. Career aspirations, alleged lack of money, and a distorted understanding of love justify feticide for the selfish and self-absorbed.

Leftist entertainers pontificate endlessly about the value and importance of their “craft,” while denying the value and importance of their children, deeming them unworthy of even a drop of the sustaining milk of human kindness.

Tragically, in our idolatrous culture, these are our “influencers.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/2-Self-Worship-and-the-Slaughter-of-the-Unborn.mp3





What Is Becoming of America?

All those Anti-Trump Christians who either did not vote for the oft-unpleasant Trump or, worse, voted for befuddled Biden and his puppeteers now bear some culpability for ceding more control to those whose lust for power far exceeds their compassion for the weak or love of freedom. After leftists’ Russian-collusion disinformation ruse failed, they floundered about until the Chinese Communists came to their rescue. An ocean of blood has been and will be spilled at the hands of leftists, and all who played a part in facilitating their acquisition of more power bear a measure of guilt.

When the escaped Wuhan virus began its deadly circumnavigation of the world, the left mocked Trump for saying hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses opened. A nanosecond after Chinese Communist colluder, profiteer, and taradiddler (pun intended) Biden was elected via the mail-in voting allegedly impervious to fraud and the machinations of Big Tech, leftists said hydroxychloroquine was effective, children should be in school, and businesses should open. Can’t have all that Trump-caused misery associated with leftism (nudge nudge wink wink. Ssshhh! Don’t mention the suicides of children.)

In the midst of the Wuhan crisis, the rage of the fatherless and improperly tutored made our streets and businesses abominable infernos unfit for civilized humans for months. The left cheered and paid for the criminals’ freedom, thereby normalizing lawlessness. When, in a far less destructive or deadly riot, the Capitol was besieged by a crowd imitating the lawlessness they saw celebrated for months, the left marshalled a military response that would make Stalin, Chairman Mao, Kim Jung Un, and Xi Jinping proud.

Throughout “campaign” season, the daft old man shuffling between his cellar and the nearest Dairy Queen was left unmolested by the thoroughly corrupt press who would have made mincemeat out of any Republican candidate who so resembles Grampa Simpson. No hard questions about Biden’s plans for America, no inquisitorial questions about his crime syndicate family, no questions at all about his questionable mental agility.

Over the past five years, our thoroughly corrupt press has exposed exactly how committed to inclusivity they are.  The all-inclusive leftist press that licks the sneakers of Kamala Harris because she’s the first semi-black, female (whatever that is) vice president, and continues to drool over the sartorial style of Michelle Obama, shunned Melania Trump, the most beautiful First Lady in America’s history, who is also an immigrant and polyglot with a fashion sense surpassing Michelle Obama’s. The press revealed that leftist inclusivity and love of diversity looks remarkably like mean-spirited, petty, non-inclusive, middle-school-girl bullying.

And now the bloodletting and oppression are really gaining steam—thanks in no small part to anti-Trump Christians.

In a flurry of Executive Orders so furious that even the New York Times said, slow down, old man, Biden has increased funding for Calculated Carnage Planned Parenthood, and released U.S. taxpayer money to fund human slaughter all around the world. Yes, leftists seek the destruction of babies of color everywhere, and they get special pleasure from making you, Americans, fund it.

But remember, anti-Trump Christians insisted self-righteously that ensuring Trump’s loss would enhance the image of Christianity among the God-hating. Sure, sure, Trump’s administration did do more to protect the unborn than any administration since 1973, but getting Biden elected would do far more to make God-hating, baby-killing leftists think Christians aren’t so bad after all—or so anti-Trumpers insist. Never mind, that Jesus told his followers the world would hate them because it hated him first. Anti-Trump tub-thumpers know better.

In the name of unity, creepy Biden wants to unify boys and girls in college dorm room assignments. He wants to unify naked boys and girls in locker rooms. He wants young men with all their male “equipment” intact to be set loose in the showers and barracks of young women who have volunteered to serve our country. And what Biden wants, Biden gets with the stroke of a pen.

An Army training manual created in the wake of Obama’s efforts to unify males and females in military barracks and showers includes this:

[F]ollowing her [sic]transition from male to female (which did not include sex reassignment surgery) …  a transgender Soldier begins using female barracks, bathroom and shower facilities. Because she [sic]did not undergo a surgical change, the Soldier still has male genitalia. [Female] Soldiers must accept living and working conditions that are often austere, primitive, and characterized by little or no privacy.

I guess we should be thankful that leftists still recognize that forcing young women to shower in the presence of male peers is “primitive.”

The Trump administration began unraveling Obama’s obscene, science-denying offenses against women. Biden is reinstating them. Maybe anti-Trumpers can explain how their complicity in the sexual integration of the private spaces of girls and women enhances their Christian witness.

Brassy AOC and brittle Nancy Pelosi have accused Congressional colleagues of attempted murder without being censured. AOC has urged the creation of a blacklist to track Trump-supporters and keep them unemployed. Other Democrats have urged the creation of another spy agency to be used specifically for targeting “domestic terrorists.” Sounds benign, maybe even good, until you remember that Big Brother’s Ministry of Truthiness redefines everything. Division is unity, men are women, war is peace, and Trump voters are domestic terrorists.

Months of lawless riots that included direct brutal attacks on police officers and setting fire to federal buildings, state property, and private businesses are “mostly peaceful protests.” A 90-minute lawless siege on the Capitol during which there were no direct attacks on law enforcement is a seditious insurrection that necessitates an overwhelming show of military force and a lethal razor-enhanced border wall around the area where the elite sequester themselves from the deplorable rabble they rule serve.

Biden has committed to passing the “Equality Act,” which explicitly subordinates religious free exercise protections to sexual perversion. Or perhaps it won’t actually be Biden who will kill the First Amendment. Perhaps it will be an unseen Kamala Harris who in the dark of night like the unsexed Lady Macbeth will drive a knife into the heart of American freedom.

Unifier-in-Chief Biden is restoring federal funding for the dissemination of Critical Race Theory through government agencies. And Democrats under a Biden administration are gearing up with the help of gullible Republicans to usurp local control of education through a tricksy Common Core-type maneuver. Stanley Kurtz warns,

Remember, the Obama-Biden administration imposed Common Core on the country via a Rube Goldberg mechanism designed to circumvent the prohibition on federal curriculum controls. That mechanism was powered by money tucked away in the stimulus package and passed without debate. Obama hadn’t run on Common Core, and there was no national consensus in favor of it. Instead this ill-conceived experiment was imposed by stealth with the help of massive funding from the Gates Foundation, various businesses, and an education bureaucracy decidedly at odds with parents and voters.

There is every indication that this process is about to repeat itself under a Biden administration—this time in the culturally critical area of history and civics standards. The effort to create a civics version of the Common Core will be made by the “bipartisan education reform movement.”

Kurtz draws attention to a proposed “bipartisan” bill—sponsored by a Democrat and co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and one lone Republican, Tom Cole from Oklahoma—that has received too little attention:

Comprehensive proposals to create de facto national history and civics standards on the model of Common Core are in the works as well, and likely to be adopted by a Biden administration.

The text of the bill sounds innocuous enough until you remember who’s in charge of the organizations that will be creating curricula that will enable schools to get their mitts on federal dollars. What the government under a Biden administration will fund will not be curricula that conservatives like.

Totalitarian control requires this kind of indoctrination. Haven’t Americans learned anything from history? Oh, wait … Never mind.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_What-Is-Becoming-of-America.mp3


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Leftists Exploit Violence to Cancel Conservatives

This is how it’s going down, my friends—the eradication of speech rights for conservatives, that is. The stage was set years ago when “hate speech” laws were passed.

The Left argues that any rhetoric that is or may be in any distant way at any time related to acts of violence should be banned. So, if I say that volitional homosexual acts and relationships are abhorrent to God as Scripture teaches, and a lone, crazed, alienated, Godless sociopath or a few hundred alienated fatherless, Godless anarchists—people who may or may not have read my words—commit acts of heinous violence against homosexuals—my words should be banned. Of course, the banning of my words necessarily requires the banning of God’s Word as well as the words of any theologically orthodox Christian since the inception of the church.

If I say that humans born with healthy, normally functioning penises are male and can never be female, and some man deceived into having sex with a man who pretends to be a woman kills the deceiver, my expression of a moral proposition must be banned.

When Lila Rose, founder of the pro-life organization Live Action, tweeted, “Abortion is violence,” abortionist Dr. Leah Torres tweeted back this:

This is violent rhetoric. It is objectively false and meant to incite others to commit crimes against clinics, patients, and health care providers. This is what domestic terrorism looks like.

Note the three arguable claims Torres makes: 1. She says Rose’s claim is false, 2. She says Rose’s claim is meant to incite others to commit violent crimes, 3. She says Rose’s tweet constitutes domestic terrorism. How convenient that those claims are precisely the type of claims leftists now say are not protected by the First Amendment. See how that works?

Torres is also the author of this since-deleted tweet:

You know fetuses can’t scream, right? I transect the cord [first] so there’s really no opportunity, if they’re even far enough along to have a larynx.

She later claimed the “cord” was not referring to babies’ vocal cords but, rather, to their umbilical cords. So much better. So much less violent.

Those with eyes to see recognize that leftists are using their special skill in manipulating language—also known as sophistry—to turn good into evil and protected speech into violence requiring censorship.

Leftists argue that saying the election was “stolen” should be banned because some far-right anarchists who hold similar views engaged in violence. Therefore, a few words about the phrase “stolen election”—the newest bugbear used by dishonest leftists to crush the civil rights of conservatives—are in order.

The claim that “an election was stolen”—you know, like Hillary Clinton has claimed for four years—means that an election lacked integrity. Some may claim it was stolen via, for example, Russian interference, or algorithmic manipulation, or ballot-harvesting, or voting irregularities regarding signatures, or unconstitutional changes in election requirements, or the counting of late ballots, or Big Tech’s censorship of the Biden crime family’s corruption that likely affected votes, or dead people voting, or a combination of shady acts by shady actors. Someone needs to tell the liars and paranoiacs in the Democrat Party that the term “stolen election” is not a code word for “attack the Capitol.”

If, however, “stolen election” is a secret code word used to initiate violent lawlessness, then surely Hillary Clinton should be thrown in the slammer—a lot. Here are two of her many seditionist/insurrectionist statements:

You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you.

and,

[T]here was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level. We still don’t know what really happened. … you don’t win by 3 million votes and have all this other shenanigans and stuff going on and not come away with an idea like, “Whoa, something’s not right here.

The fact that her alleged attempts to incite insurrection and/or sedition failed shouldn’t matter. The law prohibits even attempts to incite insurrection or sedition.

Trump and many other Americans said the election was “stolen” in the sense that myriad dubious acts took place that cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the election. Some anarchists—angry about a boatload of corrosive leftist words and deeds, including election malfeasance—breached the Capitol. Therefore, leftists argue, anyone who attended the pro-Trump protest or voted for Trump must be banned from all social media, kicked out of elected office, lose their private sector jobs, or never be hired. Social media newbie Parler must lose all access to the Internet. Americans must lose their medical insurance and recording contracts.

Via a Royal Proclamation, Randall Lane, Forbes Magazine editor, has threatened to harm any company that hires Kayleigh McEnany, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kellyanne Conway, Stephanie Grisham, or Sean Spicer—Trump’s former press secretaries:

Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.

He actually wrote, “Let it be known.” Can the left get any more arrogant and oppressive? Rhetorical question.

Trump (again, like Hillary before him) and many decent, law-abiding citizens claimed the election was “stolen.” Some far-right anarchists also believe the election was stolen. Those far-right anarchists stormed the Capitol. Ergo, in the mad, mad, mad, mad world of cynical leftists, Trump is responsible for the storming of the Capitol. Anyone who attended the protest is responsible for the violence—including even those grandmas who abhor violence and didn’t know the violence was happening. Anyone who has prepared food for Trump is responsible because they helped sustain the life of a man who caused a 90-minute seditious violent protest. Anyone who sold food to anyone who prepared food is responsible for the violence. And any of Trump’s kids’ college friends who may have met Trump and thought he was not Hitler is responsible for the violence—obviously.

So, why aren’t YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter being tossed off the Internet, since all were used to organize both the Capitol riots and the BLM riots of 2020?

Why isn’t Kamala Harris who didn’t condemn BLM violence until late August, three months after it began, being accused of fomenting violence?

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi waited until three months after the BLM riots began to condemn them, did she facilitate violence and property destruction through her silence?

What about Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the inaccurate, leftist 1619 Project, who said in the middle of the BLM riots that “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” Was she guilty of inciting more property-destruction?

The goal of leftists isn’t really to prevent violence. Appeals to thwarting violence are merely stratagems for preventing the dissemination of ideas leftists hate. They must link ideas they hate to violence in order to undermine foundational American principles. How do I know? Because the linguistic ground is shifting. We are now hearing calls for banning or “reining in” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and discourse that “harms,” because—the argument goes—such information may lead to violence.

AOC recently said,

We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.

So, who determines what constitutes “disinformation and misinformation”? Remember Dr. Leah Torres calling Lila Rose’s statement “false”—in other words, disinformation or misinformation? And remember when just before the election CNN asserted—without conducting any investigation—that the New York Post story about Hunter and Joe Biden was “disinformation,” and then conveniently, after the election, declared it a legitimate news story?

If leftist rhetoric about violence, disinformation, misinformation, harm, and hate leads eventually to imprisonment of dissidents—i.e., conservatives—no problem. All conservatives need to do to avoid the inconvenience of imprisonment or “enlightenment camps” is agree with Big Brother, take some Soma, burn some books, and shut up.

At least leftist rhetoric won’t lead to violence—will it?

The arc of the shady leftist universe is long, convoluted, and bends toward injustice, tyranny, and a senile old man who’s shuffling around looking for his moral compass and a milkshake.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/audio_Leftists-Exploit-Violence-to-Cancel-Conservatives-.mp3


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Nancy Pelosi and Emmanuel Cleaver Womentally Unhinged

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable. … This was done partly by the invention of new wordsbut chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words. … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.” George Orwell, 1984

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


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Radical ’Heroes Act’ Is a Leftist Wish-List

Written by Ruth Moreno

On November 12,U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) held a joint press conference calling for the passage of the Heroes Act. The U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and White House have been dealing with this far-left bill for months, but Schumer claims that the results from the 2020 election prove the necessity of passing the Heroes Act as a “starting point” on a new round of coronavirus relief legislation. [Recently] on “Washington Watch,” FRC President Tony Perkins spoke with House minority whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) to discuss the Heroes Act and the Democrats’ latest attempt to push it through Congress.

Though formally titled the “Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act,” the $2-$3 trillion Heroes Act is much more than a relief package. It bails out mismanaged Democrat-led cities and states on the taxpayer’s dime, making Americans pay for the incompetence and overreach of Democratic leadership.

Worse, the Heroes Act applies “nondiscrimination” provisions which redefine the term “sex” to include “sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions.” In service of the Left’s radical social agenda, this redefinition undermines both pro-life values and broader pro-family values. It also precludes the exemption of religious organizations and private schools from qualifying for the relief the bill provides.

This, as Whip Scalise pointed out, comes in the midst of a time when many public schools are refusing to even teach students in the classroom.

“If somebody is going to take your money but not educate your child safely in person when other school systems are willing to, then parents ought to be able to go to those places that will safely educate their child while taking the money,” Scalise said.

As he observed, the Heroes Act would also release “untold thousands” of criminals from prison. The number of criminals that would be released is truly unknown, because the bill does not explain exactly to whom it would apply.

Also woven into the Heroes Act is the full text of the Safe Banking Act, which grants the marijuana industry direct access to banking services. Under the Controlled Substances Act, this is currently prohibited.

One must wonder, as Tony asked Whip Scalise, what any of this has to do with the coronavirus.

“There are bills that would get huge bipartisan votes that would just renew paycheck protection program loans for small businesses,” Scalise said, adding that “There are millions of families that don’t want to be unemployed and their businesses are about to go under. You could save those jobs. That’s where our focus ought to be.”

Instead, Democrats are pushing partisan legislation under the guise that it’s what the American people want. Despite what Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi may say, the still-disputed 2020 elections were not a “mandate” for the passage of the Heroes Act.

According to exit polls reported by the New York Times, 35 percent of American voters said their top political priority was the economy. Twenty percent of voters said it was racial inequality, followed by the coronavirus pandemic at 17 percent.

Seventeen percent is not a mandate. Americans want coronavirus legislation and relief, but it should not come at the expense of other important issues. And though the presidential race and certain Senate races are still lacking a clear winner, Republicans’ 10-seat gain in the House of Representatives proves that Americans are certainly not onboard with the Democrat’s radical agenda being pushed by Pelosi. Democrats spent enormous sums of money trying to flip House seats blue, but in states like Florida and Texas, the electorate came out in defense of common sense and traditional American values. Adding to this, Republicans will most likely hold on to the Senate, and even picked up gains in state legislatures around the country. When races are examined around the country, at all levels, the voters actually delivered a mandate for a conservative agenda — not the Heroes Act!

The 1,800-page long Heroes Act stands against just about every traditional American value imaginable. In addition to legislating bailouts, freed criminals, marijuana banking, and a complete redefinition of the family, the Heroes Act also includes Planned Parenthood loans, taxpayer-funded abortion, cash for illegal immigrants, and even election-altering provisions (the Heroes Act guts voter ID laws and other state measures which protect the integrity of elections). The bill also includes anti-free speech “hate crimes” provisions.

Indeed, after the 2020 elections, Senator Schumer and Speaker Pelosi should know better than to force upon Americans something as radical as the Heroes Act.

Take ACTION: The Heroes Act has already passed in the U.S. House of Representatives and is pending in the U.S. Senate. Click HERE to send a message to U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth to ask them to vote against this radical $3 trillion dollar boondoggle.

Roll Call: Twelve members of the Illinois Congressional delegation voted in favor of the Heroes Act. They are as follows: Cheri Bustos, Sean Casten, Danny Davis, Bill Foster, Jesus Garcia, Robin Kelly, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Mike Quigley, Bobby Rush, Jan Schakowsky, Brad Schneider and Lauren Underwood.


This article was originally published at FRC.org.




The Ideological Non-Sense and Hypocrisy of Leftists

One of the more grotesque demonstrations of leftist non-sense and hypocrisy was demonstrated a week ago following an episode of the wildly popular Disney show The Mandalorian when “Baby Yoda” eats the unfertilized eggs of a Frog Woman who is transporting her eggs to her husband so he can fertilize them thereby preventing their species’ imminent extinction. Fans of Baby Yoda freaked out, incensed at the lighthearted treatment of what they deemed genocide by the beloved Baby Yoda.

The moral incoherence and hypocrisy should be obvious. In the Upside Down where leftists live, when a human mother hires someone to dismember her own fertilized human egg—aka human fetus/embryo/baby—they demand that society affirm, celebrate, and shout the execution of those tiny humans. In fact, the voluntary dismemberment of fertilized human eggs at any gestational age is so morally innocuous and such an unmitigated public good that leftists think all Americans should pay for the executions of humans in utero.

In the Upside Down, the genocidal killing of all fertilized human eggs with Down Syndrome is at best morally neutral if not morally good, but the fictional devouring of unfertilized Frog Critters’ eggs is morally repugnant. Just wondering, if fertilized human eggs are parasites so devoid of personhood as to render them morally legitimate objects to kill, if it’s okay to dismember them because they’re imperfect non-persons, would there be anything wrong with eating their remains?

Leftists views on the slaughter of fertilized human eggs is just the most grotesque of their many morally incoherent views. Here are a few more:

  • According to leftists, concerns of conservatives about possible 2020 election “irregularities”—including via computer malfeasance and malfunction—are evidence of paranoid conspiracy theories, but when leftists express such concerns, they’re sound, reasonable, and legitimate. In 2019, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden proposed an amendment titled “Protecting American Votes and Elections Act” to the “Help America Vote Act of 2002.” His proposed amendment was signed by 14 co-sponsors—all Democrats—including a who’s who of presidential wannabes: Richard Blumenthal, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Tammy Duckworth, Brian Schatz, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tammy Baldwin, Bernie Sanders, Maria Cantwell, Kamala Harris, Sherrod Brown, Michael Bennet, and Patty Murray. Wyden provided a summary of his amendment that includes the following:

Votes cast with paperless voting machines cannot be subjected to a manual recount, and so there is no way to determine the real election results if they are hacked. H.R. 1 …  mandates paper ballots.

In order to detect hacks, this bill requires election bodies to conduct audits of all federal elections, regardless of how close the election, by employing statistically rigorous “risk-limiting audits.”

There are currently no mandatory standards for election cybersecurity, which has resulted in some states operating election infrastructure that is needlessly vulnerable to hacking. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) sets voluntary standards for voting machines, but states can and do ignore these standards. There are no standards at all for voter registration websites or other parts of our election infrastructure.

  • Leftists heartily endorse bodily damage and disfigurement as sound “treatment” protocols for those who experience a mismatch between their internal feelings and their sexual embodiment as male or female, but bodily damage and disfigurement of those who experience a mismatch between their internal feelings and their whole or healthy bodies (i.e., those with Body Integrity Identity Disorder who identify as amputees or paraplegics) are considered barbaric and ethically prohibited.
  • Leftists condemn conservatives as “science-deniers” for disagreeing with them on the degree to which climate change is caused by human action or on how to respond to climate change. At the same time, the purported science-worshippers claim that men can menstruate, become pregnant, and “chestfeed,” and they claim that the product of conception between two persons is not a person. Anyone who refuses to concede to such nonsense is mocked, reviled, de-platformed, and fired. Just ask Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling or Wall Street Journal writer and author of Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier.
  • Leftists claim that marriage has no connection to either sexual differentiation or reproductive potential. They vociferously claim that marriage is solely constituted by love, and that “love is love.” And yet most leftists don’t think two brothers in a consensual loving relationship should be able to legally marry.
  • Leftists claim there’s no story behind or within Hunter Biden’s emails and texts that prove Joe Biden straight up lied to the American public, and yet they claimed there was a story of such magnitude and enormity within Christopher Steele’s imaginative “dossier,” that it necessitated 24-hour coverage for years.
  • Leftists claim that eliminating the Electoral College and filibuster and packing the U.S. Supreme Court constitute necessary changes to enhance “democracy,” but implementing legal processes to ensure an election was fair undermines democracy.
  • Every gathering of leftists, including mostly violent protests, a takeover of six city blocks, trips to hair salons (Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi), a post-election street celebration (Lori Lightfoot), a holiday boating excursion (attempted by husband of Michigan Governor Christine Whitmer), restaurant dining (California Governor Gavin Newsom, CNN narcissist Chris Cuomo), a funeral/Democrat campaign event (i.e., John Lewis’ faux-funeral) are COVID-immune and justifiable. But an Orthodox Jewish funeral, an entirely peaceful protest of draconian COVID restrictions, and a march in support of a transparent and fair election are denounced as super-spreader events.
  • Serial killer of senior citizens, Andrew “Quietus” Cuomo, commands citizens to “admit” their “mistakes” and “shortcomings” with regard to how they responded to the Chinese Communist virus even as he refuses to apologize for his policies that killed scores of elderly.
  • To leftists, social science is the god that determines all moral truth, and yet despite social science demonstrating repeatedly that children—especially boys—need fathers, the left refuses to discuss how fatherless families may be contributing to the anti-social behavior that is destroying our cities.
  • Leftists claim to value free speech, religious liberty, inclusivity, diversity, tolerance, and unity while condemning not just the beliefs of those with whom they disagree, but also the persons themselves. Many leftists share an uncharitable, presumptuous, ugly, tyrannical, oppressive, and scary desire that those who believe homosexual acts are immoral, who believe marriage has an ontology, who believe biological sex is immutable and meaningful, and who believe bodily damage and disfigurement are improper treatment protocols for gender dysphoria should be unable to work anywhere in America.

To create the illusion that they’re not hypocrites and to defend their intolerance, exclusion, divisiveness, hatred of persons, book banning, speech suppression, demand for ideological uniformity, and efforts to circumscribe the  exercise of religion—which for Christians extends far outside the church walls—leftists resort to fallacious reasoning. The fallacies they employ are too numerous to list, but two of their faves are the ad hominem fallacy and the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Ad hominem is an informal fallacy in which an irrelevant personal attack replaces a logical argument. It proves nothing about the soundness, truth, or falsity of a claim. Instead it appeals to emotion and silences debate through intimidation.

The fallacy of circular reasoning occurs when the conclusion presumes the premise (i.e., the initial claim) is true without proving it true. So, for example, leftists–ignoring their purported commitment to the First Amendment–argue that homosexual acts are moral acts and, therefore, there is no need to tolerate the expression of dissenting views. But the intolerance they are trying to defend is based on the truth of their premise that homosexual acts are moral—a premise they simply assume without proving is true.

Here’s another: Leftists assert that marriage is constituted solely by subjective romantic and erotic feelings, and, therefore, the government has no reason not to recognize unions between two people of the same sex as marriages, because such couples can experience love and erotic desire. But the premise—i.e., that marriage is constituted solely by subjective romantic and erotic feelings—hasn’t been proved.

And here’s yet another claim about marriage based on circular reasoning: Leftists argue that the reason government is involved in marriage is to grant public legitimacy or provide “dignity” to erotic/romantic unions and, therefore, the government has an obligation to recognize homoerotic unions as marriages. The problem is that those who make this argument fail to prove their claim that the reason government is involved in marriage is to recognize, provide, or impart “dignity” to unions. Those who make this argument just assume their premise is true.

After employing fallacious circular reasoning and hurling ad hominem epithets at their opponents, leftists sanctimoniously wipe the dust off their dirty hands and assert that their hypocrisy isn’t really hypocrisy after all.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Ideological-Non-Sense-and-Hypocrisy-of-Leftists.mp3


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Wrecking the Suburbs on Purpose

Written by Robert Knight

President Trump caused a stir in July when he issued an order terminating some Obama housing policies aimed at killing off the suburbs.

“The [Democrat] plan is to remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern,” he wrote in a recent Wall Street Journal column jointly authored with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Benjamin Carson. “As usual, anyone who dares tell the truth about what the left is doing is smeared as a racist.”

Outraged Democrats called the president a racist.

The rule he overturned, Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) program, would “abolish single-family zoning, compel the construction of high-density ‘stack and pack’ apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods, and forcibly transform neighborhoods.”

Meanwhile, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doubling down. Their plan, costing $640 billion over 10 years, would unleash a tsunami of social engineering.

As the Biden website proclaims, “Housing is a right, not a privilege.”

Everybody needs a home, no doubt about it.  The question is how best to ensure liberty and encourage home ownership while still making sure the poorest have a place to live.  America’s “safety net” of welfare and public housing provides minimal needs, but it’s also created a permanent underclass of fatherless families. The Democrats’ war on marriage was tailor-made to create a dependent, Free Stuff Army.

Once-thriving cities have huge areas where it’s not safe to go even in the daytime. Newly elected Democrat district attorneys financed by George Soros have abandoned the “broken windows” method of curbing crime and are reaping the whirlwind.  BLM mobs are still rioting.

It’s no secret why millions of people, including minorities, have moved to the suburbs. They want a safer, better quality of life.  But the Democrats, motivated by extreme environmentalism and political ambitions, want to force urban patterns on the burbs.

Mr. Biden says he is going to ensure that “every American has access to housing that is affordable, stable, safe and healthy, accessible, energy efficient and resilient, and located near good schools and with a reasonable commute to their jobs.”

That’s sweeping. Maybe he should ask the Communist Chinese how to go about achieving this. They move millions of people around to where they want them.

The Biden scheme includes expanding the Community Reinvestment Act.  That was the Bill Clinton/Barney Frank law forcing banks to issue mortgages to people who could not afford them.  It triggered the collapse of the stock market and the Great Recession.

So, now Mr. Biden wants to apply it “to mortgage and insurance companies.”  This would create more ways to pressure lenders to issue toxic mortgages.  If only we had some experience as to how this sort of thing turns out.  Maybe Mr. Biden could get Barney Frank to run it.

The sneakiest part of the Democrat housing plan is to use zoning laws to end suburbia as we know it. “It will be as if America’s suburbs had been swallowed up by the cities they surround,” social anthropologist Stanley Kurtz wrote recently in National Review.

“They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing.”

Are all those suburban moms who supposedly are going to vote Democrat in November listening?

Some jurisdictions are already going down this road.  In January, Minneapolis, where the city council has also decided to disband the police department, became the first major city to ban zoning for single-family homes.

“Our landmark 2040 Comprehensive Plan helps advance those goals by tackling our city’s long history of exclusionary zoning,” Mayor Jacob Frey exulted.

Mr. Frey, if you recall, was shocked that he was shouted down by rioters during his foray into the war zone that BLM and Antifa created in the wake of George Floyd’s death.  He refused to say he would defund the cops, but did bemoan a “systemic racist system.”

This guy is doing his best to turn Minneapolis into a mob-ruled version of Stalingrad. You’d think the mob would show more gratitude.

Minneapolis is not alone.  In 2019, the state of Oregon banned single-family zoning in cities with more than 10,000 residents.

In California, a pending bill would require California cities and counties to permit duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes on residential land zoned for single-family homes.  Take that, Orange County! Wait. Ballot harvesting swept Democrats into power in the formerly conservative bastion. Maybe never mind.

Senate Bill 50, sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Senator Scott Wiener, has been endorsed by the leftist mayors of Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, and San Francisco.  Wonder if a fourplex will rise someday behind Nancy Pelosi’s mansion?  She could wave to the neighbors while scarfing down some of that $12 a pint ice cream from her giant freezer.

As for the Democrats’ lust for power over housing, letter-to-the-editor writer Roger Ruvolo put it this way in the Wall Street Journal:

In the Democratic vision of the future, antireligious automatons will live in small ‘multifamily’ units stacked sky high next to bus or train stations.

This election is no more about President Trump than it is about Vice President Biden; it’s about freedom, or not.


Robert Knight is a Townhall contributor. You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17 and his website is roberthknight.com.




Nauseating Performative Acts by Celebrity Racists

I had awarded Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey the award for Most Cringeworthy Performative Act/photo op of 2020 for his fake body-wracking sobbing while kneeling at George Floyd’s casket. Frey’s performative act/photo op topped even that of the genuflecting congressional thespians adorned in culturally appropriated African kente-clothe scarves led by prayer warrior Nancy Pelosi.

You might want to take some Zofran 30 minutes before watching this:

But now I must rescind the award and give it to the dozen apparently racist celebrities publicly confessing and self-flagellating before the Black Lives Matter Crusaders for their collective, systemic white transgressions.

In melodramatically somber tones, lesbian Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, bisexual Kesha (formerly Ke$ha), Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin TherouxDebra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and gymnast Aly Raisman are taking responsibility forevery unchecked moment, for every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was, for every not-so-funny joke, every unfair stereotype, every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small, every time” they “remained silent,” and “every time” they “explained away police brutality, or turned a blind eye.”

Eleven of the twelve sanctimonious celebrities work in an industry rife with sexism and exploitation of women and now we learn they are also, apparently, guilty of racism. While profiting from one of the most hypocritical and destructive industries in the country that creates and promotes soft-core porn and glorifies violence, all these self-indulgent, privileged celebrities are now confessing to being racists.

Are they really responsible for every not-so-funny joke, unfair stereotype, and blatant injustice in the world? Did all twelve of them really explain away police brutality? If that’s true, they have a lot to atone for.

The moralizers/offenders identify what they see from their snazzy digs:

Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes. Going for a job should not be a death sentence. Sleeping in your own home should not be a death sentence. Playing video games with your nephew should not be a death sentence. Shopping in a store should not be a death sentence. Business as usual should not be life-threatening.

No disagreement. Is there anyone in America who believes black people should be slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, killed while playing video games with their relatives, or killed while shopping?

But is there a pervasive problem with black people being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, or murdered while shopping? Well, yes, there is, but the slaughtering of blacks—including innocent children sitting on their porches, sleeping in their beds, and walking home from school—is being committed primarily by young black men raised without fathers.

Here are some data from scholar Heather MacDonald that the celebrity social justice warriors may want to consider:

However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is. …

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Of course, everyone knows the celebrity pontificators aren’t really confessing and don’t really feel guilty. They’re doing what socially insular, intellectually myopic, presumptuous, and self-righteous celebrities do best: scold the deplorables—oh, and act.

What other icky cultural manifestations of kowtowing to the destructive Marxist ideologies of BLM and Antifa fascists are emerging? Here are a few:

  • As of this writing, Seattle, a sanctuary city with a plague of homelessness, is now a lawless Antifa/BLM enclave, which has been named the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). At the command of political leaders, Seattle police surrendered the entire 6-block area to anarchists, including their own police precinct, which has been renamed “Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.” Leftists promptly erected borders around their zone and appointed a defacto armed police department. Lawlessness and chaos–which ultimately result in tyranny–are the logical ends of “progressivism.” Next up, the Purge. If current policemen all across this once-great nation walked off the job and BLM members took over “protecting” our rights and communities, would we have less racism, fewer bad “cops,” and communities better suited for human flourishing? I wonder if any businesses will open stores or corporate headquarters in Seattle? I wonder if any families will move there? Other than anarchists and zombies, who will want to move there?
  • There are a number of candidates vying for the title of “Progressive” Hypocrite of the Pandemic Year. Top of the list is Michigan governor Christine Whitmer, or as Andrew Klavan calls her, “Obersturmfuhrer Whitmer, ” who prohibited Michiganders from buying seeds or paint when they were shopping at Home Depot, who told Michiganders not to travel north on Memorial Day weekend as her husband traveled north on Memorial Day weekend to get their essential boat on the water early, and who banned lawn care workers from mowing lawns—alone. Well, here she is marching shoulder-to-shoulder with BLM. Sheltering in place is good for thee but not for she when there’s a campaign for the vice presidency that needs a photo op. #PerformativeAct
    Does anyone think that if there had been hundreds of thousands of conservatives marching peacefully in streets for the past two weeks to protest the crushing quarantine—with zero rioting, arson, looting, and brick-throwing—that leftist quarantine zealots would have been silent? Or would there have been mass rage, rending of clothes, and sanctimonious scoldings over the iniquitous disregard for human life demonstrated by demonstrators?
  • The mob is coming for your jobs. John Daniel Davidson writing for The Federalist warns that your position on BLM has consequences:

There will be no opting out of the Black Lives Matter movement. You’re either for BLM or against it—and if you’re against it, you’re a racist. You will either support BLM publicly and enthusiastically, or you will be harassed, shunned, and shamed out of mainstream America. If you dare to speak a word against BLM, you will be targeted, mobbed, and probably fired.

  • Leftists now want to burn books (and movies and historical monuments), but since they can’t actually say that, they had to figure out a way to conceal that they want to burn books. What to do, what to do? 💡Brainstorm!Just rename book-burning. Call it “decolonizing your bookshelf.” Oh, and when you’re done with all that decolonizing, call the Firemen:

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. (Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury).

We just put our American flag up at our house. I think it’s going to stay up for a while. I am deeply thankful to live in America where “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and where our forefathers wrote, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a remarkable country built on principles that enable it to become “a more perfect Union” as long as we remember the Creator who endowed us with Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no unalienable Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no transcendent truths, no moral absolutes. Un-created human lives don’t matter. Un-created humans create and inhabit a world of highly intelligent dogs eating dogs.

I hope Christians who, in the face of slander, hostility, and threats, offer feeble, vapid defenses of their silence on issues that both culture and Scripture address realize that 1. We the people are the government, 2. Children are watching as parents model cowardice and rationalization, and 3. Silent capitulators are feeding the behemoth that will devour their children’s and grandchildren’s hearts, minds, liberty, and maybe their bodies.

But by all means continue. Take up your crosses daily, and hide them in the basement.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/nauseating-performative-acts-by-celebrity-racists.mp3


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