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IFI Prayer Team: Abortion, Justice, Life and Peace

January 22, 1973 – This is a horrible date that we should all know — the day the horrific decision, Roe v. Wade, was issued and announced. Almost 50 years later and over 63 million lives taken, this drastic decision could finally be overturned.

On May 2, 2022 Politico obtained a leaked draft written by Justice Samuel Alito that contained the majority opinion that would overturn both Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).

We anticipate that the leaked draft indicating the decision will not change and that very soon we will hear the final decision announced.

Here are some matters for prayer both now and after the decision is made:

1] Let us pray especially for Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. We pray for their physical protection. We pray that all the adversity that they have faced will encourage them to stand more and more with truth against death and deceit.

2] We should pray that Chief Justice John Roberts will stand for the truth. We should also pray for the repentance of those expected to stand against this decision – Justices Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.

3] After the draft decision was leaked there were a number of cases where churches and pro-life pregnancy centers were attacked. Andy Ngô reported at least 15 cases where either churches or pro-life centers were targeted.

We should pray especially against the efforts of a radical, violent group called Jane’s Revenge that has carried out attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers with impunity. On June 15, they released a statement in which they stated the following:

“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,” and then they stated their threats.

“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.”

Jane’s Revenge claims to be responsible for sixteen different attacks.

We know very well that much of our justice system and many elected officials have not taken these attacks seriously. Pray for our government. Pray for your local pregnancy centers. (And perhaps you could help in other ways.) This is a serious time of spiritual warfare spilling over into threats and violence.

4] We pray that many states will take quick action to outlaw legal abortions or at a minimum seek to curtail abortions.

What about states like Illinois that have seen a 25 percent increase in abortions ? We must prayerfully consider how much work remains. We pray and work to see laws changed as well as hearts changed.

5] We pray that the Lord will have mercy on a nation that has been so blessed and yet has so rebelled against God’s truth. One of the most frightening things to consider is what we deserve.

Here are some additional prayer bullet points to petition our God, Yahweh-Nissi, through the name of Jesus in the days ahead:

Thank God

  • Praise and thank God for religious and civil liberty that we still enjoy today in the United States. Pray that parents and grandparents teach their children and grandchildren what an amazing gift God has given us in self-government. Pray that future generations would not take these freedoms for granted. May we utilize these freedoms for the spread of the Gospel and for His glory and honor.
  • While more and more of our neighbors are choosing to live secular lives, we thank God for Jesus Christ, the Light of the world.
  • Thank God for the exceptionalism of our nation.
  • Thank God for His countless blessings in our lives, in our families, communities and nation. Thank Him for the trials and challenges that draw us closer to Him. Thank God for the patience, strength and faith to wait out the storm.
  • PRAY for revival.

Please Pray

  • FOR THOSE IN AUTHORITY: For the next several weeks, please pray for the political leaders listed below. Of course, this includes praying for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and those who serve in their administration.
    • U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico)
    • U.S. Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas)
    • U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois)
    • U.S. Representative Veronica Escobar (D-Texas)
    • U.S. Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)
    • State Senator Meg Loughran Cappel (D-Plainfield)
    • State Senator Chapin Rose (R-Champaign)
    • State Representative Janet Yang Rohr (D-Naperville)
    • State Representative Dan Ugaste (R-St. Charles)
    • YOUR local County Board Members

Pray for the Sanctity of Life:

  • PRC’s: Lift up all pregnancy resource centers and those diligently reaching out to vulnerable mothers who feel as if abortion is their only option. Please pray for God’s hand of protection on those who work at these ministries, and that any planned attacks would be thwarted.
  • ABORTION: Scripture teaches us that the image of God dwells equally in ALL people [Gen. 9:6], yet far too many in our culture believe that killing pre-born human beings is a legitimate choice. Many so-called “progressives” advocate for this under the banner of “Reproductive Rights” for women. Yet these narratives deny God’s truth about the sanctity of life and when it begins. Moreover, we know that God hates the shedding of innocent blood. (Proverbs 6:16-19)  God forgive us!
  • Please pray for God’s forgiveness for our culture’s wickedness and complicity in the destruction of human life. Though God commands, “You Shall Not Murder,” we have instead legalized it and subsidized it with our tax dollars, and have failed to treat all human life as sacred to the Lord. We deserve God’s judgment, but please cry out to God for his MERCY on our state and nation. We are without excuse, yet call upon our loving God to cause the fear of the Lord to fall upon our state and nation so that we would no longer turn a blind eye to our sin or our nation’s sin.
  • Pray for a softening of hearts and minds. May God give us opportunities to minister to those who are hurting and may our conversations be filled with His grace and love.
  • THE CHURCH:  The Christian Church must step up to teach and defend God’s truth regarding the sanctity of life. We will see an increase in abortion trafficking into our state, as people come to abortion facilities in Illinois. The opportunities to be salt and light at prayer vigils, as sidewalk counselors, as friends and neighbors will certainly increase. Pray that we recognize these opportunities and ask God to work through you to help would be mothers and fathers avoid the sin of abortion. Because of our trust and hope in Jesus, we can boldly approach the throne and beg Him to have mercy upon us and use us to save lives and souls.

Pray for Families:

  • PARENTS: Pray that God will give us wisdom and the strength to raise godly children. Help us see the challenges we face as opportunities to train our children toward right thinking and right actions. May God help us to focus on teaching our children the Christian faith, to love the Word of God and to seek to do Thy will. Help us to disciple our children.
  • GRANDPARENTS: That God would use grandparents to fearlessly proclaim the Word of God regarding sin and God’s love. Pray for their role in the training of their grandchildren and wisdom on how to instill a Biblical worldview.
  • FAMILIES AS SALT AND LIGHT: Pray that God would help your family to be faithful in family worship, foster sweet unity and cooperation, and then use your family to spread the truth and light of the Gospel.

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him,
bears much
 fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.
If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered;
and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they
are burned.
 
If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will aske
what you desire, and it shall be done for you.
By this My Father is glorified...
~Jesus Christ (John 15:5-8)




Quick Analysis of Dobbs Oral Arguments at the SCOTUS

Written by Frederick W. Claybrook, Jr. 

The significance of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case cannot be overstated. Pro-life citizens across the nation were praying fervently for the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court as they heard oral arguments Wednesday morning.

The law at the center of this case is Mississippi’s late-term abortion ban for pre-born babies 15 weeks gestation and older. Many experts believe that the Court may overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, at least in part, returning the issue of abortion back to the states.

Oral arguments went much as one would expect. Justices Stephen BreyerSonia Sotomayor, and, to a lesser extent, Elena Kagan, all made clear that they thought stare decisis should rule the day because otherwise it would look like the Court caved to public opinion. There was also some talk about reliance interests built up over 50 years.

Chief Justice John Roberts cast doubt on how a viability rule makes sense in light of the interests supposed to be furthered for women, i.e., making her own decisions and her circumstances. He pointed out more than once that the only issue they granted cert on was whether to continue to adhere to the viability rule and whether a 15-week line could pass constitutional muster, so he might be angling for a middle ground of striking down the viability rule but not totally discarding the undue burden standard of Casey.

Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett didn’t seem to be following suit, though. Instead, Kavanaugh pointed out that in some of what are now considered the Court’s most important decisions, the Court overruled prior precedent. He seemed to stake out a position that the Court should be “scrupulously neutral” on this issue and leave it to state and federal legislatures. He said that the interests of the mother wanting to abort and of the fetus in living were irreconcilable, which makes this matter so hard and counsels for the Court to stay out of it.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Barrett raised some interesting questions about the purported interests of women on which Roe and Casey based their decisions. Barrett pressed on why laws that allow women to hand over their infants shortly after delivery, thereby terminating all parental responsibilities, do not eliminate talk in the decisions about women controlling their lives.

Thomas pointed out that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a state prosecution for abuse of a pregnant mother for ingesting controlled substances and harming her child. He never got a straight answer to why, if the state could do that if the ingestion was post-viability, it could not also do it if it was pre-viability or whether the Roe/Casey viability line would call for a different result because, if a woman can kill her child pre-viability, why can’t she abuse it.

Near the end of the clinic’s counsel’s argument, she said the common law provided a right to abort early in the pregnancy at the time the U.S. Constitution was adopted. The U.S. Solicitor General in her argument made a similar statement. Justice Samuel Alito jumped on appellee’s counsel, saying that the American Historical Association’s brief admitted that many states prohibited abortion at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, so how could it be considered a fundamental right. He didn’t mention Joseph Dellapenna’s brief, which obliterates these claims about the common law allowing abortion, but it seemed as if Alito was up on the common-law issue. (It is shameful, though, that counsel continue to spout these “myths,” also known as lies, about the common law.)

No direct questions were asked about whether an unborn child is covered by the due process and equal protection guarantees for “any person,” but Mississippi’s counsel, especially in his rebuttal, spoke of the many lives killed on account of Roe and Casey, although his overriding argument was that the matter should be left to the states.

The audio recording of the arguments is available HERE, and the transcript is available HERE.





Don’t Jump Out of The Boat

We recently read a great little sermon illustration in which a young boy asked his father, “Dad, I was watching a TV show about marine biologists. Why do scuba-divers jump backwards into the water?” His father wittily responded, “Because if they jumped forward, they’d still be in the boat!”

Scuba divers jump out of boats to investigate marine life in the coastal waters and oceans of the world. It is a way of visiting another ecosystem on our vast planet. Whether it is sunken wreckage, lost treasure or coral reefs, I can see how these diving excursions are great ways to escape the stresses of daily life.

Yet today, there are many people in our culture, in our families and even in our churches who might be tempted to jump out of the boat when things get stressful, depressing or uncomfortable. Those of us who still live in Illinois understand the added frustration of wicked and foolish political leadership. The temptation to move out of this state and into “calmer, peaceful waters” is very real.

Yet we should consider what Scripture has to say about escaping trials and tribulation. Right before He was arrested, Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. He prayed John 17:14:

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.”  

Jesus could have easily prayed that God would deliver us out of the troubled waters of our world, but He didn’t. He prayed that we would remain in the world and that we would be protected from the evil one. Why didn’t He pray for our complete rescue? His prayer continues in John 17:18:

“As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.”

Our Lord and Savior, the Son of God, prayed that we would remain so we could be on mission in this world for the advancement of the Kingdom of God.

Yes, our state and our culture is in trouble. But these troubles are a reminder that we are called to be salt and light to a dying world.  David Jeremiah once said, “Today is the day to be a light shining in a dark world, fueled by the joy of the Lord.” May we be that salt and light to a dark and decaying world, all to the glory of God.


PRAYER ALERT

We cannot stress the urgency of your fervent prayers this week as our state lawmakers return to the Capitol for the second half of the Veto Session. There are a number of bad proposals pending in Springfield. Prayer and action are vitally important.

Appeal to God for His Help

  • Pray that our state lawmakers would understand the wisdom in keeping qualified (or limited), immunity for police officers in Illinois. Pray that the anti-police agenda to dismantle, dishearten and make defenseless would fall short.

Abortion

  • Pray for the members of the U.S. Supreme Court as they will be hearing arguments regarding significant abortion regulations in Mississippi and Texas. Pray that God would touch the hearts of the nine Justices on the Court. Pray too, as the debate rages, that eyes and ears would be opened to the abortion industry’s murderous barbaric practices.
  • Please pray for the last week of this year’s 40 Days for Life campaign, which ends on Saturday, Oct. 30. Pray that many prayer warriors would take advantage of this opportunity to be a silent witness against the murderous practice of “choice.” Pray that workers at these abortuaries would have a change of heart about their work and leave.
  • Pray that every leader in our nation would come to realize that these are real human babies in the womb who deserve protection.
  • Pray that the agenda of Satan and his wicked disciples to kill pre-born babies in the womb and encourage immoral sexual activities to innocent young children in government schools would be exposed and stopped.

Public School Exit

  • Please continue to pray for our Rescuing Our Children initiative to encourage an exodus from government indoctrination centers. Rev. Ceasar LeFlore, our field director for this project, is meeting with pastors throughout the City of Chicago and suburbs and has been getting favorable responses.
  • Pray for Illinois Family Institute and our annual banquet which is scheduled for Friday evening. Pray that the event would be a success, and that our keynote speaker, Dr. Erwin Lutzer, would encourage and challenge us to live up to the high calling of our faith in Christ Jesus.

For Those in Authority

For the next several weeks, please pray for the political leaders listed below. Pray that they would seek God’s wisdom when they make decisions that affect the people they work for. Pray that God would turn their hearts to Himself. (Proverbs 21:1)

Of course, this includes praying for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, JB Pritzker and Julia Stratton and those who serve in these administrations. Pray also for our two U.S. Senators, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth.

Please pray for the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court: John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

In addition, please pray for the following officials:

    • U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal Bennet (D-Connecticut)
    • U.S. Senator Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)
    • U.S. Representative Bobby Rush (D-Illinois)
    • U.S. Representative Peter Aguilar (D-California)
    • U.S. Representative Rick Allen (R-Georgia)
    • State Senator Scott Bennett (D-Champaign)
    • State Senator Terri Bryant (R-Murphysboro)
    • State Representative Lakesia Collins (D-Chicago)
    • State Representative Dan Caulkins (R-Decatur)
    • YOUR local City/Village/Township Officials

The works of His hands are faithful and just;
All His precepts are trustworthy.
They are established forever and ever,
To be performed with faithfulness and uprightness.
He sent redemption to His people;
He has commanded His covenant forever:
Holy and awesome is His name!
~Psalm 111:7-9




Illinois Pro-Life Lawmakers Given National Voice to Overturn Roe v. Wade

A nationwide group of state legislators and attorneys have crafted an amicus (friend of the court) legal brief in support of the State of Mississippi in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, seeking to overturn the unlawful Roe v. Wade decision.

The Mississippi law being challenged, with a few exceptions, prohibits abortions within the State, including even the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, when modern medicine is still incapable of supporting life outside the womb.

The U.S. Supreme Court, on May 17th, granted a hearing on the following question raised by Dobbs: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

Of course, we know the truth that no prohibitions on elective abortion are unconstitutional. [1]

This brief contains three great strengths:

  • It represents the group who has truly suffered the greatest harm: the States and the People, whose right to justly govern, reserved to them in the 10th Amendment, has been taken by the Federal Government’s egregious Roe v. Wade decision,
  • It represents the opinion of a statistical majority of U.S. citizens and legislators, and
  • It affords legislators in the political minority in their own States, such as Illinois, a voice equal to, or possibly greater than, all legislators throughout the nation.

Republican lawmakers in Illinois are severely outnumbered (a “super-minority”) in both the Illinois House (45/118) and Illinois Senate (18/59), and are therefore typically unable to advance (or stop) meaningful (or harmful) legislation.  As friends of the Court, they can now have the same voice as all other legislators.

There are currently 7,383 [2] state legislators in the United States, duly elected by a majority of 168.31 million U.S. voters [3], of whom 3,977 (or 54%) are members of the pro-life, Republican Party, and have been invited to join the brief.

What did Roe really do?  It announced a new right, which removed Legislators’ (and thereby, the People’s) ability to protect unwanted humans from being murdered.

As stated in the brief, “State legislatures exist to protect the health and welfare of their States’ respective citizens.  This includes the creation of standards and regulations that protect the most vulnerable in society.  However, as demonstrated by the Fifth Circuit’s decision below, flawed precedent [4] interferes with this constitutionally delegated duty.”

“Substantive Due Process”: The Court’s Tool of Federal Tyranny Against the States.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. ~Judges 17:6

Substantive Due Process is the underlying legal concept used in Roe and others to justify the Court’s remaking of the U.S. Constitution to its own liking.

This logically inconsistent concept was invented in law school textbooks in the 1930s and not embraced by the U.S. Supreme Court prior to 1952 [5].

Of course, ordinary citizens and their children, possessing even the most basic grasp of logic, understand by the redundant term “procedural due process,” (Show me a “process” that isn’t “procedural,” and I’ll show you a bridge that is for sale.) that “substantive due process” is merely a cleverly-worded legal oxymoron which enables judges to justify making the law themselves (i.e., Positive Law, or law made by custom or convention, which can be changed as desired by those in power).

Substantive Due Process, as demonstrated by cases such as Roe, opens a wide door for an unelected committee of nine Ivy League lawyers to selectively remove virtually any topic from the political process (i.e., the States and the People) that it, in its great moral wisdom, sees fit.

From the beginning, the Rule of Law in the United States has been “Natural Law,” or existing law that applies consistently to everyone; certain unalienable rights, endowed to all mankind by their Creator (i.e., Jehovah of the Bible).

The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
He turns it wherever He will. ~Proverbs 21:1

Please pray fervently that God would:

  1. Continue to strengthen the resolve of the two Justices (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) who have unwaveringly upheld their oath to support and defend the Constitutional Rule of Law,
  1. Give great courage to four Justices (Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch and John Roberts) to understand that it is their duty to finally overturn this unlawful decision, and
  1. Forcibly turn the hearts of the three Justices (Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor) whose previous positions have contributed to the tyrannous legalized murder of tens of millions.

Footnotes

[1]In the 105 years between the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and Roe’s 1973 judicial fiat that it was unconstitutional, 46 states prohibited abortion, either entirely or with exceptions.  Illinois passed the 2nd such law in 1833.  During the 1866-1868 legislative sessions, several states passed criminal abortion laws while the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was circulating among them.  No one doubted the constitutionality of doing so. “That resolves these cases. When it comes to determining the meaning of a vague constitutional provision—such as ‘due process of law’ or ‘equal protection of the laws’—it is unquestionable that the People who ratified that provision did not understand it to prohibit a practice that remained both universal and uncontroversial in the years after ratification. We have no basis for striking down a practice that is not expressly prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment’s text, and that bears the endorsement of a long tradition of open, widespread, and unchallenged use dating back to the Amendment’s ratification.” – Antonin Scalia, dissenting from Obergefell v. Hodges (2015, creating a right to same-sex “marriage”).

[2]https://www.ncsl.org/research/about-state-legislatures/partisan-composition.aspx

[3]https://www.statista.com/statistics/273743/number-of-registered-voters-in-the-united-states/

[4]I.e., Roe v. Wade.

[5]https://humandefense.com/criminal-abortion-before-the-fourteenth-amendment/






Shocking SCOTUS Decision Shockingly Written by Gorsuch

In a shocking U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch voted with the axis of evil—that is, with Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the axis of evil decided that in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the word “sex” includes “sexual orientation” and “gender identity”—both subjectively constituted conditions. As a result, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment based on “race, color, religion, sex, and national origin,” now prohibits employers from firing employees who self-identify as homosexual or as the sex they are not and never can be.

The crux of the argument goes something like this: If a company that allows a woman who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work fires a man who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work, the company has discriminated against him based on his sex and, therefore, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Not only are “trans”-cultists eradicating all public accommodation of real sex differences, but they’re also eradicating every cultural convention that recognizes, honors, and reinforces sex differences. They’re saying that not only are they permitted to reject cultural conventions regarding hairstyles, jewelry, clothing, and makeup, but everyone else must. Further, even biological reality as a signifier of biological sex must be rejected by everyone. So, as the very liberal author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, has learned, no one may say that only women menstruate.

The tyrannical Supremacist Court of the United States has declared from on its high horse that no employer with over 15 employees may fire an employee who decides to cross-dress at work. For those who remain blissfully unaware, there are efforts afoot to make such a view apply to companies with fewer than 15 employees too.

What if the owner of an independent toy store with three locations in neighboring towns employs 15 people and one of those employees announces he will henceforth “identify” as a woman. Now he cannot be fired—not even if the store where the cross-dressing man works will be destroyed because parents will no longer bring their toddlers and young children to an establishment that will require them to explain perversion to children who are too young to understand it and may be disturbed by it.

Many obstetrician-gynecologists staff their offices with only women—including only women nurses. Now imagine that one of those nurses announces she will be socially, chemically, and surgically “transitioning” and hopes to look like this biological woman one day (yes, this is a woman):

Is it just for doctors to be prohibited from firing her?

In their dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito issued a stinging rebuke of the hubris of the majority opinion:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employment discrimination on any of five specified grounds: “race, color, religion, sex, [and] national origin.” … Neither “sexual orientation” nor “gender identity” appears on that list. For the past 45 years, bills have been introduced in Congress to add “sexual orientation” to the list, and in recent years, bills have included “gender identity” as well. But to date, none has passed both Houses. Last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would amend Title VII by defining sex discrimination to include both “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” … This bill remains before a House Subcommittee.

Because no such amendment of Title VII has been enacted in accordance with the requirements in the Constitution … Title VII’s prohibition of discrimination because of “sex” still means what it has always  meant. But the Court is not deterred by these constitutional niceties. Usurping the constitutional authority of the other branches, the Court has essentially taken H. R. 5’s provision on employment discrimination and issued it under the guise of statutory interpretation. A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.

The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of “sex” is different from discrimination because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” And in any event, our duty is to interpret statutory terms to “mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.”

Alito and Thomas preview the deleterious effects this decision will have on American life and liberty:

As the briefing in these cases has warned, the position that the Court now adopts will threaten freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and personal privacy and safety. No one should think that the Court’s decision represents an unalloyed victory for individual liberty.

While churches and other religious organizations, including religious schools, will probably be allowed what is called a “ministerial exception”at least for a timefor those involved in teaching the tenets of their faith, it is unlikely that exemption will apply to those employed in other positions. For example, a private Christian school will be prohibited from firing any math, science, Spanish, or P.E. teacher, secretary, custodian, cafeteria worker, playground supervisor, or crossing guard who decides to identify as the opposite sex, cross-dress, take cross-sex hormones, and surgically disguise his or her sex.

For those churches, Christian schools, and parachurch organizations that reassure themselves that such events are unlikely, just remember what’s happened to Jack Phillips, the Colorado baker who has been relentlessly sued by “LGBT” persons. Sexual subversives are going to specifically target Christian institutions.

Alito and Thomas warn that this pernicious SCOTUS decision will likely be used force the sexual integration of bathrooms, locker rooms, and women’s shelters; to force people to use “gender” obliterators’ “preferred pronouns”; to force employers to cover “costly sex reassignment surgery”; and to force colleges to assign dorm rooms based on the sex students wish they were rather than the sex they are.

This pernicious decision will be used too as a precedent when challenges to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 appear before the U.S. Supreme Court. How could the Court now conclude any way other than that the word “sex” in Title IX includes “gender identity.” When the axis of evil decides that, women’s sports are destroyed, and eventually all women’s records from high school, college, the Olympics, and professional sports will be broken by men.

Good job feminist supporters of the “trans” cult.

In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s separate dissent, he emphasizes the violation of the separation of powers that the decision represents:

Under the Constitution’s separation of powers, the responsibility to amend Title VII belongs to Congress and the President in the legislative process, not to this Court. … [W]e are judges, not Members of Congress. And in Alexander Hamilton’s words, federal judges exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.”… If judges could rewrite laws based on their own policy views, or based on their own assessments of likely future legislative action, the critical distinction between legislative authority and judicial authority that undergirds the Constitution’s separation of powers would collapse, thereby threatening the impartial rule of law and individual liberty. …

Both common parlance and common legal usage treat sex discrimination and sexual orientation discrimination as two distinct categories of discrimination—back in 1964 and still today. As to common parlance, few in 1964 (or today) would describe a firing because of sexual orientation as a firing because of sex. As commonly understood, sexual orientation discrimination is distinct from, and not a form of, sex discrimination. The majority opinion acknowledges the common understanding, noting that the plaintiffs here probably did not tell their friends that they were fired because of their sex. That observation is clearly correct. In common parlance, Bostock and Zarda were fired because they were gay, not because they were men. …

Who likes this SCOTUS decision? The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), that’s who. GLSEN’s raison d’être, is to use schools to normalize sexual deviance, which, of course, means eradicating theologically orthodox views on sexuality. GLSEN tweeted,

[T]oday’s landmark SCOTUS ruling will help to protect the many LGBTQ educators in K-12 schools who have faced harassment or job loss for simply being who they are. It also underscores the need for Congress to pass the Equality Act.

“Who they are” is a convenient bit of Newspeak to conceal what “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” really are. According to cultural regressives, “sexual orientation” is constituted by subjective, internal romantic and erotic feelings and volitional erotic acts. “Gender identity” is constituted by subjective, internal feelings about one’s maleness and/or femaleness or lack thereof. Now that SCOTUS includes conditions constituted—not by any objective criteria—but by subjective sexual feelings, all that remains is for sexual anarchists allied with other anarchists to expand the definition of “sexual orientation” and the job of sexual wokesters will be done. #CultureDestroyed.

So, in the service of “inclusivity,” they will work like the Devil and for the Devil to include polyamory, Genetic Sexual Attraction (i.e., consensual, adult incest), Minor Attraction (i.e., pedophilia, hebephilia, and ephebophilia), infantilism, zoophilia (i.e., bestiality), and every other sexual philia in the list of sexual orientations.

Then once that is accomplished, laws will protect celebrants of sexual disorder from being fired and schools will teacher kindergartners that love is love. Poly “love” will be called good. “Love” between two adult brothers will be deemed equivalent to interracial love. And teaching that “love” between humans and animals is wrong will be condemned as ignorant bigotry based on the hateful ideology of speciesism.

By the way, those naively depending on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) to protect their religious liberty can forget about it. The Equality Act, which eventually will pass, explicitly guts RFRA.

This SCOTUS decision is not a victory for the country or for freedom. It’s another tragic defeat for the constitutional separation of powers, self-government, morality, truth, speech rights, and religious liberty. Conservative Christians, you’ve been warned—again.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Shocking-SCOTUS-Decision-Shockingly-Written-by-Gorsuch.mp3


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Abortion and the American Conscience

America has been at war over abortion for the last four decades and more. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Roe v. Wade, the court’s majority attempted to put an end to the abortion question. To the contrary, that decision both enlarged and revealed the great moral divide that runs through the center of our culture.

Most Americans seem completely unaware of the actual contours of the abortion debate as it emerged in the early 1970s. In 1973, the primary opposition to abortion on demand came from the Roman Catholic Church. Evangelicals — representative of the larger American culture — were largely out of the debate. At that time, a majority of evangelicals seemed to see abortion as a largely Catholic issue. It took the shock of Roe v. Wade and the reality of abortion on demand to awaken the Evangelical conscience.

Roe v. Wade was championed as one of the great victories achieved by the feminist movement. The leaders of that movement claimed — and continue to claim — that the availability of abortion on demand is necessary in order for women to be equal with men with respect to the absence of pregnancy as an obstacle to career advancement. Furthermore, the moral logic of Roe v. Wade was a thunderous affirmation of the ideal of personal autonomy that had already taken hold of the American mind. As the decision made all too clear, rights talk had displaced what had been seen as the higher concern of right versus wrong.

Also missing from our contemporary cultural memory is the fact that many Republicans, as well as Democrats, welcomed Roe v. Wade as the next step in a necessary process of liberating human beings from prior constraints. Yet, we now know that even more was at stake.

Tapes recently released by the Nixon Presidential Library reveal that President Richard M. Nixon, who had been considered generally opposed to abortion, told aides on January 23, 1973 (the day after the decision was handed down) that abortion was justified in certain cases, such as interracial pregnancies.

“There are times when abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white,” said Nixon. President Nixon’s words, chilling as they are, are also a general reflection of the moral logic shared by millions of Americans in that day.

As a matter of fact, one of the dirty secrets of the abortion rights movement is that its earliest momentum was driven by a concern that was deeply racial. Leaders such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued quite openly that abortion and other means of birth control were necessary in order to limit the number of undesirable children. As she made clear, the least desirable children were those born to certain ethnically and racially defined families. Sanger, along with so many other “progressive” figures of the day, promoted the agenda of the eugenics movement — more children from the “fit” and less from the “unfit.”

President Nixon, speaking off-the-cuff about the Roe v. Wade decision handed down just the day before, did register his concern that the open availability of abortion would lead to sexual permissiveness and a further breakdown of the family. Nevertheless, he carefully carved out an exception for interracial pregnancies.

Nixon’s comment, made almost 40 years ago, was strangely and creepily echoed in comments made by Supreme Court associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In an interview published in The New York Times Magazine, Justice Ginsburg made her absolute support of abortion on demand unconditionally clear. She tied her support for abortion to the larger feminist agenda and lamented the passage of the Hyde Amendment which excludes the use of Medicaid for abortions. The Supreme Court upheld the Hyde amendment in 1980, surprising Ginsburg, who commented:

“Frankly I had thought at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.”

Justice Ginsburg’s comments were made in the context of comments about her hopes for feminism and her anticipation of being joined at the court by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, then about to begin confirmation hearings. The larger context of Justice Ginsburg’s comments do not provide much assistance in understanding whether she was speaking of her own personal convictions or describing what was being thought by others at the time.

Of greatest importance is the fact that Justice Ginsburg’s comments reveal the racial, economic, and ethnic discrimination that was at the very heart of the push for abortion on demand throughout much of the 20th century. Also revealed is Justice Ginsburg’s virtually unrestricted support for a woman’s right to an abortion. In the interview, she goes so far as to lament the fact that the language of Roe v. Wade mentioned abortion is a decision made by the woman and her physician. As Justice Ginsburg told The New York Times, “So the view you get is the tall doctor and the little woman who needs him.”

The American conscience remains deeply divided over the question of abortion. Tragically, we have never experienced a sustained, reasonable, and honest discussion about abortion in the society at large. One step toward the recovery of an ethic of life would be an honest discussion about the actual agenda behind the push for abortion on demand. Proponents of abortion rights do everything they can to hide the ugliness of the agenda behind the comments made by President Nixon and Justice Ginsburg.  Nevertheless, the truth has a way of working itself into view.

Just take a good look at the comments made by the late President and the current Justice. Furthermore, ask yourself why there is such racial disparity in abortion. Those comments turn more chilling by the day.