Written by Megan Basham

In September, Wheaton College dean Ed Stetzer interviewed National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on his podcast, “Church Leadership” about why Christians who want to obey Christ’s command to love their neighbors should get the Covid vaccine and avoid indulging in misinformation.

For those not familiar with Stetzer, he’s not just a religious liberal arts professor and this wasn’t just another dime-a-dozen pastorly podcast. To name just a few of his past and present titles in the evangelical world, Stetzer is also the executive director of the Billy Graham Center and the editor-in-chief of Outreach media group. He was previously an editor at Christianity Today and an executive director at LifeWay, one of the largest religious publishers in the world. That’s to say nothing of the dozen-plus books on missions and church planting he’s authored.

Which is why, when Stetzer joined a line of renowned pastors and ministry leaders lending their platforms to Obama-appointee Collins, the collaboration was noteworthy.

During their discussion, Collins and Stetzer were hardly shy about the fact that they were asking ministers to act as the administration’s go-between with their congregants. “I want to exhort pastors once again to try to use your credibility with your flock to put forward the public health measures that we know can work,” Collins said. Stetzer replied that he sometimes hears from ministers who don’t feel comfortable preaching about Covid vaccines, and he advises them, in those cases, to simply promote the jab through social media.

“I just tell them, when you get vaccinated, post a picture and say, ‘So thankful I was able to get vaccinated,’” Stetzer said. “People need to see that it is the reasonable view.”

Their conversation also turned to the subject of masking children at school, with Collins noting that Christians, in particular, have been resistant to it. His view was firm—kids should be masked if they want to be in the classroom. To do anything else is to turn schools into super spreaders. Stetzer offered no pushback or follow-up questions based on views from other medical experts. He simply agreed.

The most crucial question Stetzer never asked Collins however, was why convincing church members to get vaccinated or disseminating certain administration talking points should be the business of pastors at all.

Christians and Conspiracy Theories

Stetzer’s efforts to help further the NIH’s preferred coronavirus narratives went beyond simply giving Collins a softball venue to rally pastors to his cause. He ended the podcast by announcing that the Billy Graham Center would be formally partnering with the Biden administration. Together with the NIH and the CDC it would launch a website, coronavirusandthechurch.com, to provide clergy Covid resources they could then convey to their congregations.

Much earlier in the pandemic, as an editor at evangelicalism’s flagship publication, Christianity Today (CT), Stetzer had also penned essays parroting Collins’ arguments on conspiracy theories. Among those he lambasted other believers for entertaining, the hypothesis that the coronavirus had leaked from a Wuhan lab. In a now deleted essay, preserved by Web Archive, Stetzer chided, “If you want to believe that some secret lab created this as a biological weapon, and now everyone is covering that up, I can’t stop you.”

It may seem strange, given the evidence now emerging of NIH-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan, to hear a church leader instruct Christians to “repent” for the sin of discussing the plausible supposition that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. This is especially true as it doesn’t take any great level of spiritual discernment — just plain common sense — to look at the fact that Covid first emerged in a city with a virology institute that specializes in novel coronaviruses and realize it wasn’t an explanation that should be set aside too easily. But it appears Stetzer was simply following Collins’ lead.

Only two days before Stetzer published his essay, Collins participated in a livestream event, co-hosted by CT. The outlet introduced him as a “follower of Jesus, who affirms the sanctity of human life” despite the fact that Collins is on record stating he does not definitively believe, as most pro-lifers do, that life begins at conception, and his tenure at NIH has been marked by extreme anti-life, pro-LGBT policies. (More on this later).

But the pro-life Christian framing was sure to win Collins a hearing among an audience with deep religious convictions about the evil of abortion. Many likely felt reassured to hear that a likeminded medical expert was representing them in the administration.

During the panel interview, Collins continued to insist that the lab leak theory wasn’t just unlikely but qualified for the dreaded misinformation label. “If you were trying to design a more dangerous coronavirus,” he said, “you would never have designed this one … So I think one can say with great confidence that in this case the bioterrorist was nature … Humans did not make this one. Nature did.”

It was the same message his subordinate, Dr. Anthony Fauci, had been giving to secular news outlets, but Collins was specifically tapped to carry the message to the faithful. As Time Magazine reported in Feb. 2021, “While Fauci has been medicine’s public face, Collins has been hitting the faith-based circuit…and preaching science to believers.”

The editors, writers, and reporters at Christian organizations didn’t question Collins any more than their mainstream counterparts questioned Fauci.

Certainly The Gospel Coalition, a publication largely written for and by pastors, didn’t probe beyond the “facts” Collins’ offered or consider any conflicts of interest the NIH director might have had before publishing several essays that cited him as almost their lone source of information. As with CT, one article by Gospel Coalition editor Joe Carter linked the reasonable hypothesis that the virus might have been human-made with wilder QAnon fantasies. It then lectured readers that spreading such ideas would damage the church’s witness in the world.

Of course, Stetzer and The Gospel Coalition had no way of knowing at that point that Collins and Fauci had already heard from leading U.S. and British scientists who believed the virus had indeed escaped from a Chinese lab. Or that they believed it might be the product of gain-of-function engineering, possibly with funding from the NIH itself. Nor could they have predicted that emails between Collins and Fauci would later show the pair had a habit of turning to friendly media contacts (including, it seems, Christian media contacts) to discredit and suppress opinions they didn’t like, such as questioning Covid’s origins and the wisdom of masks and lockdowns.

What Stetzer and others did know was that one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the world was calling on evangelical leaders to be “ambassadors for truth.” And they were happy to answer that call.

The question was, just how truthful was Collins’ truth?

Evangelicals of a Feather

Stetzer, CT, and The Gospel Coalition were hardly alone in uncritically lending their sway over rank-and-file evangelicals to Collins. The list of Christian leaders who passed the NIH director their mics to preach messages about getting jabs, wearing masks, and accepting the official line on Covid is as long as it is esteemed.

One of the most noteworthy was the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), an organization funded by churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S.

While a webinar featuring Collins and then-ERLC-head Russell Moore largely centered, again, on the importance of pastors convincing church members to get vaccinated, the discussion also moved on to the topic of masks. With Moore nodding along, Collins held up a basic, over-the-counter cloth square, “This is not a political statement,” he asserted. “This is not an invasion of your personal freedom…This is a life-saving medical device.”

Even in late 2020, the claim was highly debatable among medical experts. As hematologist-oncologist Vinay Prasad wrote in City Journal this month, public health officials like Collins have had a truth problem over the entire course of Covid, but especially when it comes to masks. “The only published cluster randomized trial of community cloth masking during Covid-19,” Prasad reported, “found that…cloth masks were no better than no masks at all.” [emphasis mine].

At this point, even the CDC is backing away from claims that cloth masks are worth much of anything.

Yet none of the Christian leaders platforming Collins evidently felt it was worth exploring a second opinion. And the list of pastors who were willing to take a bureaucrat’s word that matters that could have been left to Christian liberty were instead tests of one’s love for Jesus goes on.

Former megachurch pastor Tim Keller’s joint interview with Collins included a digression where the pair agreed that churches like John MacArthur’s, which continued to meet in-person despite Covid lockdowns, represented the “bad and ugly” of good, bad, and ugly Christian responses to the virus.

During Saddleback Pastor Rick Warren’s special broadcast with Collins on behalf of Health and Human Services, he mentioned that he and Collins first met when both were speakers for the billionaires and heads of state who gather annually in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. They reconnected recently, Warren revealed, at an “off-the-record” meeting between Collins and “key faith leaders.” Warren did not say, but one can make an educated guess as to who convened that meeting and for what purpose, given the striking similarity of Collins’ appearances alongside all these leading Christian lights.

Once again, Warren and Collins spent their interview jointly lamenting the unlovingness of Christians who question the efficacy of masks, specifically framing it as a matter of obedience to Jesus. “Wearing a mask is the great commandment: love your neighbor as yourself,” the best-selling author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” declared, before going on to specifically argue that religious leaders have an obligation to convince religious people to accept the government’s narratives about Covid.

“Let me just say a word to the priests and pastors and rabbis and other faith leaders,” he said. “This is our job, to deal with these conspiracy issues and things like that…One of the responsibilities of faith leaders is to tell people to…trust the science. They’re not going to put out a vaccine that’s going to hurt people.”

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that government does have a record of putting out vaccines that “hurt people,” is it truly the pastor’s job to tell church members to “trust the science?” Is it a pastor’s job to slyly insult other pastors who chose to handle shutdowns differently, as Warren did when he quipped that his “ego doesn’t require” him to “have a live audience to speak to.”

And still the list goes on.

The same week MacArthur’s church was in the news for resisting California Governor Gavin Newsom orders to keep houses of worship closed, Collins participated in an interview with celebrated theologian N.T. Wright.

During a discussion where the NIH director once again trumpeted the efficacy of cloth masks, the pair warned against conspiracies, mocking “disturbing examples” of churches that continued meeting because they thought “the devil can’t get into my church” or “Jesus is my vaccine.” Lest anyone wonder whether Wright experienced some pause over lending his reputation as a deep Christian thinker to Caesar’s agent, the friends finished with a guitar duet.

Even hipster Christian publications like Relevant, whose readers have likely never heard of Collins, still looked to him as the foundation of their Covid reporting.

Throughout all of it, Collins brought the message to the faithful through their preachers and leaders: “God is calling [Christians] to do the right thing.”

And none of those leaders thought to question whether Collins’ “right thing” and God’s “right thing” must necessarily be the same thing.

Why not? As Warren said of Collins during their interview: “He’s a man you can trust.”

A Man You Can Trust

Perhaps the evangelical elites’ willingness to unhesitatingly credit Collins with unimpeachable honesty has something to do with his rather Mr. Rogers-like appearance and gentle demeanor. The establishment media has compared him to “The Simpson’s” character Ned Flanders, noting that he has a tendency to punctuate his soft speech with exclamations of “oh boy!” and “by golly!”

Going by his concrete record, however, he seems like a strange ambassador to spread the government’s Covid messaging to theologically conservative congregations. Other than his proclamations that he is, himself, a believer, the NIH director espouses nearly no public positions that would mark him out as any different from any extreme Left-wing bureaucrat.

He has not only defended experimentation on fetuses obtained by abortion, he has also directed record-level spending toward it. Among the priorities the NIH has funded under Collins — a University of Pittsburgh experiment that involved grafting infant scalps onto lab rats, as well as projects that relied on the harvested organs of aborted, full-term babies. Some doctors have even charged Collins with giving money to research that required extracting kidneys, ureters, and bladders from living infants.

He further has endorsed unrestricted funding of embryonic stem cell research, personally attending President Obama’s signing of an Executive Order to reverse a previous ban on such expenditures. When Nature magazine asked him about the Trump administration’s decision to shut down fetal cell research, Collins made it clear he disagreed, saying, “I think it’s widely known that the NIH tried to protect the continued use of human fetal tissue. But ultimately, the White House decided otherwise. And we had no choice but to stand down.”

Even when directly asked about how genetic testing has led to the increased killing of Down Syndrome babies in the womb, Collins deflected, telling Beliefnet, “I’m troubled [by] the applications of genetics that are currently possible are oftentimes in the prenatal arena…But, of course, in our current society, people are in a circumstance of being able to take advantage of those technologies.”

When it comes to pushing an agenda of racial quotas and partiality based on skin color, Collins is a member of the Left in good standing, speaking fluently of “structural racism” and “equity” rather than equality. He’s put his money (or, rather, taxpayer money) where his mouth is, implementing new policies that require scientists seeking NIH grants to pass diversity, equity, and inclusion tests in order to qualify.

To the most holy of progressive sacred cows — LGBTQ orthodoxy — Collins has been happy to genuflect. Having declared himself an “ally” of the gay and trans movements, he went on to say he “[applauds] the courage and resilience it takes for [LGBTQ] individuals to live openly and authentically” and is “committed to listening, respecting, and supporting [them]” as an “advocate.”

These are not just the empty words of a hapless Christian official saying what he must to survive in a hostile political atmosphere. Collins’ declaration of allyship is deeply reflected in his leadership.

Under his watch, the NIH launched a new initiative to specifically direct funding to “sexual and gender minorities.” On the ground, this has translated to awarding millions in grants to experimental transgender research on minors, like giving opposite-sex hormones to children as young as eight and mastectomies to girls as young as 13. Another project, awarded $8 million in grants, included recruiting teen boys to track their homosexual activities like “condomless anal sex” on an app without their parents’ consent.

Other than his assertions of his personal Christian faith, there is almost no public stance Collins has taken that would mark him out as someone of like mind with the everyday believers to whom he was appealing.

How did Collins overcome all this baggage to become the go-to expert for millions of Christians? With a little help from his friends, who were happy to stand as his character witnesses.

Keller, Warren, Wright, and Stetzer all publicly lauded him as a godly brother.  When presenting Collins to Southern Baptists, Moore gushed over him as the smartest man in a book club he attends that also includes, according to Time Magazine, such luminaries of the “Christiantelligentsia” as The Atlantic’s Pete Wehner and The New York Times’ David Brooks.

In October, even after Collins’ funding of the University of Pittsburgh research had become widely known, Moore continued to burnish his friend’s reputation, saying, “I admire greatly the wisdom, expertise, and, most of all, the Christian humility and grace of Francis Collins.” That same month, influential evangelical pundit David French deemed Collins a “national treasure” and his service in the NIH “faithful.” Former George W. Bush speechwriter and Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson struck the most poetic tone in his effusive praise, claiming that Collins possesses a “restless genius [that] is other-centered” and is a “truth-seeker in the best sense.”

Except, apparently, when those others are aborted infants or gender-confused children and when that truth pertains to lab leaks or gain-of-function funding.

Since news began breaking months ago that Collins and Fauci intentionally used their media connections to conspire to suppress the lab-leak theory, none of the individuals or organizations in this story has corrected their records or asked Collins publicly about his previous statements. Nor have they circled back with him to inquire on record about revelations the NIH funded gain-of-function coronavirus research in Wuhan. They also haven’t questioned him on the increasing scientific consensus that cloth masks were never very useful.

The Daily Wire reached out to Stetzer, Keller, Wright, Warren, Moore, and French to ask if they have changed their views on Collins given recent revelations. None responded.

Francis Collins has been an especially successful envoy for the Biden administration, delivering messages to a mostly-Republican Christian populace who would otherwise be reluctant to hear them. In their presentation of Collins’ expertise, these pastors and leaders suggested that questioning his explanations as to the origins of the virus or the efficacy of masks was not simply a point of disagreement but sinful. This was a charge likely to have a great deal of impact on churchgoers who strive to live lives in accordance with godly standards. Perhaps no other argument could’ve been more persuasive to this demographic.

This does not mean these leaders necessarily knew that the information they were conveying to the broader Christian public could be false, but it does highlight the danger religious leaders face when they’re willing to become mouth organs of the government.

What we do know about Collins and his work with Fauci is that they have shown themselves willing to compromise transparency and truth for PR considerations. Thus, everything they have told the public about the vaccines may be accurate and their message a worthy one for Christians. But their credibility no longer carries much weight. It would’ve been better had the evangelical establishment never platformed Collins at all and shipwrecked their own reputations to showcase their lofty connections to him.

While these evangelical leaders were warning about conspiracy theories, Collins was waging a misinformation campaign himself — one these Christian megaphones helped further.

Why they did it is a question only they can answer. Perhaps in their eagerness to promote vaccines, they weren’t willing to offer any pushback to Collins’ other claims. Certainly, the lure of respect in the halls of power has proved too great a siren call for many a man. Or perhaps it was simply that their friend, the NIH director, called on them for a favor. If so, a friend like Collins deserved much, much more scrutiny.

There’s an instructive moment at the end of Warren‘s interview with Collins. The pastor misquotes Proverbs 4, saying, “Get the facts at any price.”

That, of course, is not what the verse says. It says get wisdom at any price. And it was wisdom that was severely lacking when so many pastors and ministry heads recklessly turned over their platforms, influence, and credibility to a government official who had done little to demonstrate he deserved them.

This article was originally published by The Daily Wire, which is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. 

Before anyone gets angry at me for the content of this article, please understand that you have paid for the research I’m about to describe, so don’t shoot the messenger.

Two homosexual “researchers” managed to get tax money to survey 429 homosexual men to find out whether they like to insert their penises in other men’s rectums (self-identified “tops”), or they prefer having penises inserted into their own rectums by other men (self-identified “bottoms”), or whether they are versatile (aka “versatiles”). This survey also sought to identify how “penis size, muscularity, height, hairiness, and weight” correlates with identification as “tops,” “bottoms,” or “versatiles.” The survey revealed that “Generally, tops reported larger penises than bottoms.”

What might be the academic or social value of such a survey, which was funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health, which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)?

The two homosexual “researchers” were Ryerson University professor of psychology Trevor A. Hart and New York Medical College Adjunct Associate Professor of Health Behavior and Community Health, David A. Moskowitz, who according to his academic webpage is an “active supporter of the Sex-Positive Movement.”

The “Sex-Positive Movement” is sexual immorality gussied up in euphemistic language to conceal its pagan/hedonistic ickiness. Wikipedia offers a good summary of the movement:

The sex-positive movement is a social and philosophical movement that seeks to change cultural attitudes and norms around sexuality, promoting the recognition of sexuality (in the countless forms of expression) as a natural and healthy part of the human experience. … Sex-positivity is “an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation.” The sex-positive movement also advocates for comprehensive sex education and safe sex as part of its campaign. The movement generally makes no moral distinctions among types of sexual activities, regarding these choices as matters of personal preference.

Bisexual Wiccan “Sexologist” Carol Queen describes “sex-positive” as a “simple yet radical affirmation that we each grow our own passions on a different medium, that instead of having two or three or even half a dozen sexual orientations, we should be thinking in terms of millions.”

And this is exactly why the term “sexual orientation” should never have been added to any antidiscrimination law or policy. All that “progressives” have to do now is add the millions of types of sexual orientations to the definition of “sexual orientation” and voilà, local, state, and federal law will force everyone to treat volitional sexual perversions like polyamory, sadomasochism, infantilism, and pony play like race, sex, and nation of origin.

Moskowitz studies sex a lot. He and three collaborators—two of whom don’t appear to be academics—received an NIH grant to subsidize a study titled “Physical, Behavioral, and Psychological Traits of Gay Men Identifying as Bears.” For those unfamiliar with all the terminology of sexually deviant subcultures, a “bear” is an overweight, hirsute, non-effeminate homosexual man. The “two large scale studies” resulted in these conclusions:

Our studies indicated that Bears were more likely to be hairier, heavier, and shorter than mainstream gay men. They reported wanting partners who were hairier and heavier. They were less likely to reject sexual partners and the partners they did reject were more likely to be young or weigh too little (i.e., were not bearish). Bears were more likely than mainstream gay men to enact diverse sexual behaviors (e.g., fisting, voyeurism) and were comparatively more masculine. Bears had lower self-esteem but were no less (or more) hypermasculine than non-Bears. We concluded that Bears are intensely sexual.

You paid for it, folks.

Moskowitz and four collaborators used taxpayer money via the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, which is also part of the NIH, to come up with ways to help adolescent boys between the ages of 13-18 who are having sex with other boys avoid contracting HIV. In the pseudo-scientific community these boys are referred to as “Adolescent Men who have sex with Men” (AMSM).

Moskowitz was the lead author on yet another survey that received funding from the NIH, this one titled, “What If My Dad Finds Out?!: Assessing Adolescent Men Who Have Sex with Men’s Perceptions About Parents as Barriers to PrEP Uptake.” PrEP is short for “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” and it refers to a daily oral pill that those who are HIV-negative can take to reduce the likelihood of contracting HIV when engaged in risky sexual behavior. The study surveyed 491 adolescent boys to ask how parental supportiveness for PrEP affects teen boys’ attitudes toward taking it.

One of Moskowitz’s co-authors on this survey was another homosexual, Brian Mustanski, Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University and Director of Northwestern University’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. Mustanksi and five other academics wrote “Age- and Race/Ethnicity-Specific Sex Partner Correlates of Condomless Sex in an Online Sample of Hispanic/Latino, Black/African-American, and White Men Who Have Sex with Men,” in which they “sought to identify” the factors that correlate with the willingness of colorless and colorful men to have “condomless receptive anal intercourse with HIV-positive or unknown status partners .”

Yep, you paid for it through a CDC grant.

According to his academic profile, Mustanski,

has been a Principal Investigator of over $40 million in federal and foundation grants and. … is a frequent advisor to federal agencies and other organizations on LGBTQ health needs and research priorities.

A principal investigator of grants is “the primary individual responsible for the preparation, conduct, and administration of a research grant.” A principal investigator is “responsible for directing” projects “intellectually and logistically.” By his own admission, Mustanski—an academic from outside the government with no accountability to the public—has been responsible for directing millions of dollars of taxpayer money toward his goal of inculcating other people’s children with his sexual assumptions.

Mustanski, who is faux-married to a man, works like the devil to use the federal government to normalize homoeroticism within the adolescent population—particularly the young male population:

I really felt like a calling to dedicating my career to focusing on young gay men and HIV.

In the service of his “calling,” he has created myriad programs and materials dedicated to teenage boys who want to have sex with boys. For all those pernicious efforts, in 2017 “NBC News selected him from 1,600 nominees as one of 30 changemakers and innovators making a positive difference in the LGBTQ community.”

To be clear, “positive” is based on the unproven, faith-based, and erroneous belief that homoerotic desires and volitional acts are intrinsically moral acts and that affirming an identity based on them is a positive act.

Remember when homosexual activists claimed relentlessly that all they sought was tolerance in the public square? Well, here they are today, using your money to serve their body-, soul-, and culture-destroying interests. And this is just the teeny tip of the enormous sexual anarchy-affirming iceberg paid for by but hidden from you.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to President Trump, U.S. Senators Durbin and Duckworth, and your U.S. Representative, urging them to stop using tax-dollars to fund pseudo-scientific “research” related to sexual deviance.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Sex-Positive.mp3

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U.S. District Judge William Conley has ruled that Wisconsin cannot exclude gender-reassignment treatments from coverage under the Medicaid program. Judge Conley struck down a 1997 Department of Health Services directive that excluded “transsexual surgery” and hormonal treatment, ruling that denying the treatments constituted sex discrimination under the federal Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).

The Judge misleadingly concluded that “there is now a consensus within the medical profession that gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition, which if left untreated or inadequately treated can cause adverse symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, serious mental distress, self-harm and suicidal ideation.” He added that insurance companies now “acknowledge that gender-confirming hormone and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria can be medically necessary.”

Wisconsin estimates that as many as 5,000 enrollees in its Medicaid program may have some form of gender confusion and that treating them could cost as much $2.1 million. The state contends that, contrary to the Judge’s ruling, there is no proven benefit to “transsexual surgery,” and that the scientific literature indicates that supporting gender confusion causes significant emotional harm in patients, up to and including attempted suicide.

A study published by the National Institutes of Health entitled “Transsexual attractions and sexual reassignment surgery: Risks and Potential Risks” states that “Physicians and mental-health professionals have a professional responsibility to know and communicate the serious risks, in particular risk of suicide, that are associated with SRS (sexual reassignment surgery).” The study notes that transsexual attractions in youth often resolve themselves on their own, and/or may be successfully treated through counseling.

The study warns that the idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter of choice has taken on “cult-like” status:

“It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.” 

The study also notes,

“despite the “lack of contravening evidence that SRS conveyed any benefits compared with any unoperated-upon control groups, the practice of SRS has continued and has been extended into younger age groups.”

Sadly, there is a growing movement of former transsexuals who have learned the hard way that one’s sex is immutable. They have experienced “sex change regret” and have “de-transitioned” back to their true sex. One former transsexual relates the painful surgical process of repairing the damage done to his body: “I still have scars on my chest, reminders of the gender detour that cost me 13 years of my life. I am on a hormone regimen to try to regulate a system that is permanently altered.” Providentially, this man was able to experience love and marriage as God intended: “Eventually, I met a wonderful woman who didn’t care about the changes to my body, and we’ve been married for 21 years.”

Unfortunately, in his ruling, Judge Conley chose to ignore the existence of regretful former transsexuals as well as evidence demonstrating the dangers of attempting to change one’s sex.  By so doing, he is causing great harm to young people and others who are suffering from temporary and treatable gender confusion.

Written by Steve Huston

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, …it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”

Many of you are probably familiar with these opening lines from the classic Charles Dickens’ story A Tale of Two Cities. Well representing so many areas of our nation and our culture today, I choose to apply these opening words to the vast landscape—or virtual wasteland—of information and entertainment via technology that is only a click away via our devices.

Dickens writes about a time of extreme opposites without any in-betweens; our goal here is to recognize the extreme polarization these devices offer, yet aim at some guidelines that will, hopefully, land us somewhere in-between. That middle ground being a wise use of screens, as opposed to not using them at all or using them without restriction, having no concern for the inherent dangers they bring. While children are my main concern here, adults have also been taken captive by the alluring blue glow of their screens.

On one hand our digital devices offer “wisdom,” “Light, “the spring of hope,” and seemingly hold out “everything before us.” After all, one can read our newsletter, listen to our broadcasts, and receive our emails or those of other ministries on their favorite screen. I often “join” a congregation in Pennsylvania on Sundays, to be encouraged by great messaging. I use screens for research and occasionally to study God’s Word with online resources; what a terrific tool our screens can be.

On the other hand, digital devices also epitomize “foolishness,” “Darkness,” “the winter of despair,” and a great wasteland of “nothing before us.” We seem compelled to waste vast amounts of time with them. Males and females of all ages post or view photos or movies that range from immodest to pornographic; multitudes go from being entertained to becoming addicted; what should be used for good becomes a tool for evil as our baser side is unleashed. We have written about the dangers of hiding behind screens, neither being seen nor seeing, as we respond to others or mention them on social media. After all, who is to see, know, or care? Well, God sees; God knows; and God definitely cares about our smartphone use.

Regardless of how our children are using their smartphones, the amount of time they are on them is an issue in itself. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) reports that nine- and ten-year-old children who spend more than two hours in front of a screen each day score lower on thinking and language tests—the average “tween” spends up to six hours a day on their screens.

Bloomberg reports that “the scans of children who reported daily screen usage of more than seven hours showed premature thinning of the brain cortex, the outermost layer that processes information from the physical world.”

There are studies that show a relation between smartphone use by children and sleep deprivation and poor attention span—two-thirds of children take their devices to bed with them; some even laying their phones on their pillow for fear of missing a text.

Digital addiction is a very real and growing problem.The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation introduces their 2010 study on “Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds,” in part: “Eight- to eighteen-year-olds spend more time with media than in any other activity besides (maybe) sleeping—an average of more than 7½ hours a day, seven days a week…”

In a recent USA Today article we read that over 200 million mostly obsessed people are playing an online game called “Fortnite.” Some of these players are engaging in battle during school instead of paying attention to their teachers. Digital addiction is becoming more commonplace and most parents are at a loss of how to handle it. Other sources warn that victims of digital addiction can experience “destructive dependence, extreme change of personality, isolation, and physical signs during withdrawal.”

Research shows that teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices are 71 percent more likely to have one risk factor for suicide—regardless of what they are viewing. Half an hour to one hour a day seems to be the ideal for teen mental health in terms of electronic devices. “Kids who use their phones for at least three hours a day are much more likely to be suicidal.” (Businessinsider.com)

None of the above should surprise us; especially considering that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs raised their kids mostly tech free. For that matter, most Silicon Valley parents are strict about technology use—shouldn’t that raise red flags? Shouldn’t that encourage us to set some very definite limits?

Setting limits is very important; but we must also model those limits. Here are some general guidelines to start; more to come at a later date.

Keep certain times and places “screen-free.”  For starters, at mealtimes we should focus on one another instead of our phones. Intentionally set aside device free “family time,” where you can play games, talk, or work on projects together. There are some families that put their cell phones in a basket upon entering their home to intentionally be present with their family. As for places, bedrooms should definitely be off limits and any zone you choose to allow devices should be public and always available for anyone else to view.

As you set limits, help them to understand that there are dangers associated with smartphone use.

As Christians we need to keep in mind that in all we do—including smartphone and other device usage—we are to glorify God and do in the name of Jesus. And let’s not forget Paul’s admonition in I Corinthians 6:12. “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be mastered by anything.”

This article was originally published at AmericanDecency.org

Written by Walter E. Williams

I’m thankful that increasing attention is being paid to the dire state of higher education in our country. Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has just published “The Diversity Delusion.” Its subtitle captures much of the book’s content: “How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.” Part of the gender pandering at our universities is seen in the effort to satisfy the diversity-obsessed National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, each of which gives millions of dollars of grant money to universities. If universities don’t make an effort to diversify their science, technology, engineering and math (known as STEM) programs, they risk losing millions in grant money.

A UCLA scientist says, “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mac Donald says, “Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.”

Diversity-crazed people ignore the fact that there are systemic differences in race and sex that influence various outcomes. Males outperform females at the highest levels of math; however, males are overrepresented at the lowest levels of math competence. In 2016, the number of males scoring above 700 on the math portion of the SAT was nearly twice as high as the number of females scoring above 700. There are 2.5 males in the U.S. in the top 0.01 percent of math ability for every female, according to the journal Intelligence (February 2018).

In terms of careers, females are more people-centered than males. That might explain why females make up 75 percent of workers in health care-related fields but only 14 percent of engineering workers and 25 percent of computer workers. Nearly 82 percent of obstetrics and gynecology medical residents in 2016 were women. Mac Donald asks sarcastically, “Is gynecology biased against males, or are females selecting where they want to work?”

“The Diversity Delusion” documents academic practices that fall just shy of lunacy at many universities. Nowhere are these practices more unintelligent and harmful to their ostensible beneficiaries than in university efforts to promote racial diversity. UC Berkeley and UCLA are the most competitive campuses in the University of California system. Before Proposition 209’s ban on racial discrimination, the median SAT score of blacks and Hispanics at Berkeley was 250 points below that of whites and Asians. This difference was hard to miss in class. Renowned Berkeley philosophy professor John Searle, who sees affirmative action as a disaster, said, “They admitted people who could barely read.” Dr. Thomas Sowell and others have discussed this problem of mismatching students. Black and Hispanic students who might do well in a less competitive setting are recruited to highly competitive universities and become failures. Black parents have no obligation to make academic liberals feel good about themselves by allowing them to turn their children into failures.

Many readers know that I am a professor of economics at George Mason University. A few readers have asked me about “Black Freshmen Orientation,” held Aug. 25 and advertised as an opportunity for students to learn more about the black community at George Mason University. GMU is not alone in promoting separation in the name of diversity and inclusion. Harvard, Yale, UCLA and many other universities, including GMU, have black graduation ceremonies. Racial segregation goes beyond graduation ceremonies. Cal State Los Angeles, the University of Connecticut, UC Davis and UC Berkeley, among others, offer racially segregated housing for black students.

University administrators and faculty members who cave to the demands for racially segregated activities have lost their moral mooring, not to mention common sense. I’m sure that if white students demanded a whites-only dormitory or whites-only graduation ceremonies, the university community would be outraged. Some weak-minded administrators might make the argument that having black-only activities and facilities is welcoming and might make black students feel more comfortable. I’m wondering whether they would also support calls by either white or black students for separate (themed) bathrooms and water fountains.

This article was originally published by Creators Syndicate.