The National Education Association’s (NEA) annual convention took place last week in Chicago. It opened with a theatrical speech act by NEA president, Rebecca (Becky) Pringle who has no dearth of pride in the “amazing accomplishments” of the NEA members. Pringle cited as inspiration for world transformation—not systemically oppressed persons of color like Thomas Sowell, Carol Swain, or Glenn Loury—but communist and former Black Panther who studied under Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis:

We must share [the] view Professor Davis holds dear whether it is a mind, a heart, a school, a community, or our world, transformation is always possible, change is always possible, NEA, because of you. [wild applause for themselves]

Of the many troubling things Pringle emoted, this may be the most troubling:

NEA, you are answering my call to lead a movement that unites, not just our members, but this entire nation, to reclaim public education as a common good, as the foundation of this democracy, and then transform it into something it was never designed to be—a racially and socially just and equitable system that prepares every student, every student, EVERY STUDENT, EVERY ONE TO SUCCEED IN THIS DIVERSE AND INTERDEPENDENT WORLD!

Yes, she was cacophonously shouting about the NEA’s goal to transform public education into something it was never designed to be.

Precisely how are “socially just and equitable” defined and by whom? How does the NEA propose to achieve their socially constructed goal?

The NEA plans to achieve that goal by using taxpayer funded schools with captive audiences to promote sexual perversity, sexual confusion, science denial, the slaughter of the unborn, compulsory language mandates, censorship of ideas they hate, and the destruction of the nuclear family. That’s how.

Pringle went on to bemoan recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions:

… [T]he rights many of us have spent a lifetime fighting to secure are being stripped away in our lifetimes.

… we’ve known since 2016, since that fateful election, that this day would come—that we would feel the effects of a radicalized Supreme Court, issuing decisions that do not reflect the views or the values of America.

We knew that the ground had shifted and the stage had been set to move us further away from the promise of America for all Americans, from decisions on school prayer that attack religious freedom to vouchers that threaten the right to a universal public education to the long-term devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to hijack the fundamental freedom to decide for ourselves when and how to have a family.

The U.S. Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade—a decision that even leftist law professors have long acknowledged had no grounding in the Constitution—is “radical” but the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned marriage for the whole country was not?

Allowing more powerful, more privileged “pregnant persons” the legal right to have powerless, non-privileged humans killed constitutes the “promise of America”? And here I thought the promise of America was to recognize that all men are created equal and endowed by our Creator with the unalienable right to life. Has Pringle read any books on history, civics, or government other than Howard Zinn’s People’s History of America and the 1619 Project?

Allowing a coach the freedom to choose to pray silently on a football field after a game constitutes an attack on religious freedom?

Providing school vouchers that help give impoverished families a tiny bit of freedom to choose where and how their children are educated constitutes threatening the right to a universal public education?

What Pringle and her thought-control collaborators don’t want is for moms and dads who must work two jobs in order to make ends meet to be allowed to choose not to have their children indoctrinated by leftists who want to turn public education into something it was never intended to be.

Pringle then began shrieking:

As we have for decades, we will fight tirelessly for the right to choose. We will never stop. We will fight unceasingly for the rights of our LGBTQ plus students and educators. We will say gay. We will say trans. We will use the words that validate our students and their families–words that encourage them to walk in their authenticity, to love themselves fully, to become who they are meant to be! 

What if walking in their authenticity includes sadomasochism, polyamory, infantilism, or any other of the myriad paraphilias that delight fallen humans? Will Pringle encourage those students to love themselves fully and become who they are meant to be?

Who exactly intends people to be “gay” or “cross-sex” impersonators, and how does Pringle know that’s how some people are meant to be? Is it the mere presence of persistent, unchosen desire that tells Pringle how someone or something intended those people to be? Do all unchosen, powerful, persistent desires have to be affirmed, in order for humans to fully love themselves?

Pringle’s proclamations “We will say gay. We will say trans,” are an allusion to the Florida law that prohibits teachers from initiating conversations about homosexuality and cross-sex impersonation in grades K-3. Pringle has announced defiantly that creepy members of the NEA should violate Florida law in order to impose their socially constructed assumptions about sexuality on other people’s 5–9-year-olds.

Funny how leftists, who now treat the appointments of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett as an outrage and insult to the Democratic process, were never exercised when, according to Politico,

Democrats almost exclusively named federal judges and Supreme Court justices for decades. … Of the 22 open Supreme Court seats between 1933 and 1968, 17 were filled by Democratic presidents. And Eisenhower’s five nominees included Earl Warren and William Brennan, two future progressive icons.

Pringle believes that the NEA’s ideological world domination goals are thwarted by unceasing attacks:

We have weathered countless attacks on our profession, on us. We have become exhausted by the demands created by a crippling educator shortage. We have felt our voices grow hoarse from demanding professional pay and the respect we deserve.

Maybe the NEA has something to do with the crippling educator shortage.

Maybe liberty-loving young people don’t want to enter the teaching profession because it is controlled by leftists who demand ideological conformity from faculty, who demand that teachers promote sexual deviance and ideas derived from critical theory, and who disrespect parental rights and transparency.

Maybe veteran teachers are dropping out for the same reasons.

Maybe teachers young and old don’t want to be forced to be vaccinated. Maybe conservative teachers young and old are tired of being “attacked” by taxpayers for the inappropriate decisions leftist teachers make and which dissenting educators are not free to criticize.

Maybe leftist “educators” are getting paid too much and are getting all the respect they deserve.

Maybe teachers or those considering the teaching profession don’t support the commitment of the NEA to profile

the largest 25 organizations “that are actively working to diminish a student’s right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identity, and teacher autonomy.”

Maybe they object to the NEA’s plan to “spend more than $47 million to elect friendly candidates …, pro-labor judges, lobby for or against legislation, and support state and local affiliates in ballot measure campaigns.”

Maybe they object to the NEA’s decision to “publicly stand in defense of abortion and reproductive rights and encourage members to participate in activities including rallies and demonstrations, lobbying and political campaigns, educational events, and other actions to support the right to abortion.”

The self-important Pringle arrogantly declares to the NEA members the importance of the NEA’s work:

You understand that our work is fundamental to this nation. You have accepted the profound trust that has been placed in us. 

No, the work of the NEA is not fundamental to this nation. In reality, the NEA’s work is fundamental to no one and nothing but leftist ideologues—their beliefs, their systems, and their socio-political agenda.

No leftist event would be complete without an attack on the 2^nd Amendment, and Pringle did not disappoint. She claimed to have “listened to the stories of young people who experience gun violence in their communities every day,” but Pringle never mentioned that virtually every mass killer in America’s history has come from a broken, dysfunctional family. Leftists can’t say that because they are committed to the lie that all family structures serve children equally.

The NEA’s work contributes to the slaughter of the unborn; to a false understanding of sexual differentiation, sexual ethics, marriage, and family; to an imbalanced/erroneous view of history; to the dismantling of democratic institutions; to the erosion of liberty, tolerance, ideological diversity, and civility. The NEA is destroying public education, disrespects parental rights, and foments division. The NEA is plucking out all the threads that hold society together. 

At least Pringle admits two true things:

You have found a way to resist even as you hold on to joy. Creative and courageous, prepared and persistent, you stand in the power of the N-E-A, and the NEA stands in the power that is you [wild applause for themselves].

It is true that the NEA has power—too much power. And it is true that the NEA resists. It resists relinquishing power.

Pringle waxes melodramatic as she focuses—not on the needs of children and their families—but on the weepiness of poor pitiful NEA members:

For over a year I have traveled this nation to listen to the voices of, to learn from and to be inspired by our NEA members. … I’ve listened to educators describe their challenges as tears stream down their cheeks.

Today’s “educators” live and move and have their being in narcissism, narrative, and DEEP FEELINGS, so anecdotes about themselves weeping are even better than self-congratulations.

There was little to inspire truth-seekers in Pringle’s performance, but there was this:

Resistance is the secret of joy.

It’s good to know that Pringle looks favorably on resistance, because finally parents are resisting the efforts of public servants to force their socially constructed views on the nature and morality of cross-sex impersonation, homoeroticism, and human slaughter on all American children.

I hope Pringle realizes that one person’s “attack” on the NEA is another person’s act of resistance—which Pringle believes is the secret of joy.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/The-National-Education-Association-Convention.mp3

By God’s grace, the American experiment has lasted for 232 years now, since the Constitution went into effect on April 30, 1789. Every political leader that is sworn in agrees to uphold the Constitution.

But now in our day of rampant political correctness, of Marxist revisionism, of “egg shell plaintiffs,” of “safe spaces,” of “hate speech” (which is often just the other guy’s opinion), even the Constitution has recently been labeled as “harmful.” It might offend someone.

Case in point. Recently, Ophelie Jacobson of Campus Reform approached students at the University of Florida to ask them what they think about the Constitution. Their responses, as seen in this video, were mostly negative.

Here were some of their comments on the U.S. Constitution:

• “Absolutely terrible. Needs to be redone immediately.”
• “I think it needs a lot more reform for the changes that happened since then.”
• “I think we just need to update it on like—more equality, equity, stuff like that.”
• It’s the product of “all old white men.”
• “It should have been made by a group of diverse people.”
• “The time period, you know, was rich, old white men; and that’s exactly what that document says and stands for and vouches for.”

No wonder so many of them were willing to sign a petition to abolish the Constitution!

Furthermore, even the keepers of the Constitution in Washington, D.C. have contributed to this negative view. On 9/24/21, The Federalist reported: “Over the summer, the National Archives issued ‘harmful content’ warnings on all its collections of online documents, including Founding-era documents like the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence.”

Why would they do this? The Federalist explains that the warnings “allegedly protect against documents that ‘reflect racist, sexist, ableist, misogynistic/misogynoir, and xenophobic opinions and attitudes; be discriminatory towards or exclude diverse views on sexuality, gender, religion, and more.’”

U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) and U.S. Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) want the National Archives to remove these “harmful negative alerts” from our founding documents.

This is getting ridiculous. If these views prevail, the Marxist attempt in America to “tear it all down” and start over might well succeed. May it never be.

The Constitution has brought unparalleled political freedom and prosperity. Marxism has brought unparalleled misery and death. People don’t clamor to get into the Marxist countries like China or Cuba or Venezuela. But they do risk their lives to get into the United States. That’s not despite the Constitution and what it represents. It’s because of it.

But many forces today, because they love power (and often the perks that come with that power) are willing to undermine the Constitution, so they may gather unto themselves more control. This does not bode well for the future of our republic.

Thomas Sowell warns, “It doesn’t matter what rights you have under the Constitution, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights. And it doesn’t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials’ power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.”

This point is reminiscent of a warning from the father of our country.

As Dr. Peter Lillback and I noted in our 2006 book, George Washington’s Sacred Fire, “Washington asserted that human depravity could ultimately destroy the Constitution, even with the checks and balances it possessed. In his proposed Address to Congress in April 1789, he described how the Constitution, with all of its wisdom, could ultimately come to naught by the depravity of the people and those who govern them, since the Constitution in the hands of a corrupt people was a mere ‘wall of words’ or a ‘mound of parchment.’”  (p. 220).

One of the geniuses of the Constitution is the way its principles were built by men who acknowledged the sinful nature of man. I believe that because it was based on a correct anthropology—one that recognizes our innate selfishness—that the Constitution has been so durable.

James Madison, a key driving force behind the Constitution, learned well from his teacher, Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, the devout Presbyterian who was the president of Princeton, who taught Madison what the Bible says about man’s corrupt nature.

Madison said, “All men having power ought to be distrusted.” Therefore, the founders separated power, explicitly, so that we would have liberty rather than tyranny.

I agree with William Gladstone, the distinguished 19th century Prime Minister of England, who declared, “The American Constitution is, so far as I can see, the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”

Why this constant attempt to tear down those things which are right in our world? The Constitution of the United States is one of them. We have our work cut out for us to convince many fellow Americans of that truth.

This article was originally posted at JerryNewcombe.com.

Written by Michael Barone

Speech suppression is a habit that the Biden administration and its liberal supporters can’t seem to break. Many staffers may have picked up the habit in their student years: Colleges and universities have been routinely censoring “politically incorrect” speech for the last 30 years. As Thomas Sowell noted, “There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals.”

Now, the Biden administration seems to be giving the colleges and universities some serious competition. Like many Democrats during the Trump presidency, they have come to see suppression of “fake news” as the ordinary course of business and indeed a prime responsibility of social media platforms.

For decades, print and broadcast media have been dominated by liberals, but Facebook, Google and Twitter have developed a stranglehold over the delivery of news which exceeds anything that the three major broadcast networks and a few national newspapers every enjoyed. If they suppress a story or a line of argument, it largely disappears from public view. And to the extent that it lingers, it can be stigmatized by these multibillion-dollar companies as “misinformation” or “fake news.”

Speech suppression was exactly what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki had in mind last week when she called on Facebook to suppress 12 accounts that she said were spreading “misinformation” about COVID-19 vaccines. These accounts, she said July 15, were “producing 65% of vaccine misinformation on social media platforms.”

“Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often remain up for days, and that’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”

And she wasn’t aiming her demand at just Facebook. “You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others,” she added a day later. The message was surely not lost on these companies, whose fabulously successful business models are vulnerable to government disruption.

Like most speech suppressors, Psaki protested her good intentions. As did her boss, President Joe Biden, who, when asked about Facebook on Friday, said simply, “They’re killing people.” The implication is that any advice contrary to the current recommendations of public health officials — contrary to “the science” — is bound to increase the death toll.

This is more in line with Cardinal Bellarmine’s view of science than Galileo’s. As Galileo knew, science is not acceptance of holy writ but learning from observation and experiment. Today, in dealing with a novel and deadly virus, current science is a body of hypotheses only partly tested and subject to revision based on emerging evidence.

There’s a long list of things once believed to be “misinformation” about COVID that are now widely accepted. One prime example: the possibility that the coronavirus was accidentally released from the Wuhan lab. For more than a year, this was widely treated as a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory. Facebook slapped “warnings” on it and boasted that it reduced readership — i.e., suppressed speech.

Then, in May, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, in an article that Facebook let slip through, argued a lab leak was likelier than animal-to-human transmission, and a group of 18 bioscientists called for a deeper investigation. The Biden administration, to its credit, soon reversed itself and opened its own investigation and, reportedly, multiple officials now believe the lab leak theory is likely correct. Some “misinformation!”

That example provides powerful support for Galileo’s view that debate over scientific matters takes place best out in the open. But of course the urge to suppress speech is not limited to science. As conservative commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote, “Removing information on vaccines will translate right over to anything they think is misinformation on gun violence, or climate, or healthcare or what defines a man or woman. Which is why they are doing this.”

If you think that’s extravagant, consider that, as Townhall’s Guy Benson argued, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been stretching its ambit to studying gun violence and climate change even while letting its core mission of advancing public health atrophy, as shown by its inability to produce a COVID test.

It’s easy to imagine this administration pressuring Facebook and other social media to suppress information on other issues. For example, as the New York Post‘s Michael Goodwin noted, his paper’s negative stories about Hunter Biden‘s shady business dealings, which were largely blocked from public view in the weeks before the 2020 election.

Speech suppression is evidently habit-forming. Which is why a constitutional amendment was passed back in the 1790s guaranteeing “freedom of speech, and of the press.” Or is that obsolete in these modern times?

Michael Barone is a senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

It’s a curious phenomenon that racists rarely see their own racism—the plank in their own eyes. That was true during the long, torturous days of slavery. It was true during the long torturous days of Jim Crow laws. It was true during the Civil Rights Movement. And it’s true now. No, it’s not conservatives who are spreading racism while remaining blithely blind to it. It’s Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and BLM who are spreading racism like manure throughout our cultural system. And it’s racist Ibram X. Kendi who sees himself as “anti-racist” and wrote,

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

And like racists of yore, they profit handsomely from their efforts to encourage Americans to judge people by the color of their skin.

Leftist change-agents posing as “diversity educators” have captured the wills of corporate executives. Now Big Business is in the business of not only selling goods and services but also in repackaging racism as “antiracism” and browbeating employees into pretending they believe it.

Prior to capturing the wills of corporate execs—not known for their familiarity with or investment in arcane academic theories or for steely-spined moral integrity—leftist change-agents in sullied ivory towers captured the wills of teachers and administrators—not known for independent or “critical” thinking, or for commitments to diversity, inclusivity, or tolerance. In my experience, will-capturing of yellow-bellied teachers and administrators is an almost effortless task. All it takes is a bit of name-calling topped by a dollop of mockery, and the spineless among us bend like paper straws dipped in a Big Gulp.

Now states are requiring ongoing critical race theory (CRT) indoctrination for staff and faculty. Schools are forcing white students to engage in exercises designed to make them feel shame for their skin color (goodbye self-esteem movement).  And schools are racially segregating students in what are euphemistically called “affinity” groups. “Separate but equal” has returned with a vengeance thanks to vengefully regressive “progressives.”

That probably explains why administrators and faculty said next to nothing when the increasingly woke, decreasingly conservative evangelical Wheaton College held a racially segregated pre-graduation ceremony for colorful people on May 8, 2021, which was advertised as “RACIALIZED MINORITY RECOGNITION CEREMONY” (all caps in original) and held in the campus chapel. While it was created “Especially for undergraduate students, staff, and faculty of color,” the school provided “limited seating” for colorless people. I wonder if those seats were way in the back.

One Wheaton faculty member who likely loves Wheaton’s embrace of re-segregation is associate professor of philosophy and critical race theorist Nathan Cartagena who was recently interviewed for leftist Christian Jim Wallis’ Sojourners’ magazine. In this interview, Cartagena explained how he sussed out Wheaton’s friendliness to CRT by delivering a visiting lecture on controversial critical race theorist Tommy Curry during the interview process:

I wanted to see: Is this a place that would welcome such reflection? I received a warm welcome from the students, my department, etc., so I thought “OK, this is a place where I can do this.”

And by “do this,” Cartagena meant, not expose students to the debate on CRT, but to promote CRT:

I taught a reading group my first year at Wheaton that involved one of the important texts in the critical race theory movement, Faces at the Bottom of the Well by Derrick Bell. The following year I asked if I could teach a half-semester class on critical race theory—I got a full thumbs up.

Derrick Bell is another controversial figure in the critical race theory movement “whose writings on ‘critical race theory,’” conservative African American economist Thomas Sowell explains “promoted an extremist hostility to white people.”

Sowell described the academic transformation of Bell, attributing it largely to his scholarly inadequacy at Harvard:

As a full professor at Harvard Law, Derrick Bell was … surrounded by colleagues who were out of his league as academic scholars. What were his options at this point?

If he played it straight, he could not expect to command the respect of either the faculty or the students — or, more important, his own self-respect. …

Derrick Bell’s options were to be a nobody, living in the shadow of more accomplished legal scholars — or to go off on some wild tangent of his own, and appeal to a radical racial constituency on campus and beyond.

His writings showed clearly that the latter was the path he chose. His previous writings had been those of a sensible man saying sensible things about civil-rights issues that he understood from his years of experience as an attorney. But now he wrote all sorts of incoherent speculations and pronouncements, the main drift of which was that white people were the cause of black people’s problems.

Cartagena openly admits the cunning way he gets his students to accept CRT:

When I was first teaching on CRT, I was very explicit about when something was a CRT essay or quote. Now, one of the things I do is I present CRT literature without telling students that it’s CRT literature. Then I ask them what they think about it. The overwhelming response from the students is: “Wow, this essay is so rigorously researched, so clear, and so well-argued. Even if I don’t agree with every claim, I learned so much,” etc. Then, after they’ve sung a little praise song, [laughs] I tell them they’ve read a piece by a critical race theorist. You can see a look of disillusionment set in — this part gets really hard, if I’m honest. On the one hand, it’s a healthy destabilization. You’ve gotta remember that a lot of my students are racialized white folks. If they’re not now going to say that everything they just said was false, how do they reckon with believing there are things to learn from critical race theorists while knowing that the stakes, in some of these communities they’ve been a part of, are so high that to say such is to find themselves ostracized?

While this tactic appears to be a means to enable students to approach ideas objectively, with a mind decluttered and “decolonized” by the detritus of white privilege and systemic racism, educators know it’s a tactic that can be used to propagandize. Presenting students with an interpretive lens beclouded by jargon, ambiguous language, assumptions, and subtexts with which students have no familiarity doesn’t educate; it indoctrinates.

At least as offensive is Cartagena’s evident pleasure in “destabilizing” his students and emotionally manipulating them by manufacturing cognitive dissonance.

Enquiring donors and parents considering sending their children to Wheaton may want to know if Cartagena spends equal time having students study any of the many works of criticism of CRT like Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyone or Voddie Baucham’s book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism’s Looming Catastrophe.

Anthony Esolen, professor and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine, and contributing editor at Crisis Magazine, opposes the teaching of CRT in schools:

The problem is that the schools shouldn’t be teaching any “theory” of human behavior at all, for two principal reasons. First, the students do not have anything close to the learning or the broad human experiences that would serve as evidence for checking the theory. For the same reason why it is pointless, and perhaps destructive, to teach literary theory to young people who have hardly begun to read literature at all, because they have no evidence or experience from which to judge the theory, and they will instead be prone to force what literature they do encounter to fit the predeterminations of the theory, so it is pointless, and probably destructive, to teach some theory of human behavior to children who need first to have the experiences, personal or vicarious, that the theory purports to explain.

But the second reason … is more grave. It is that human behavior does not admit of that kind of theory at all. I am not talking here about moral philosophy, or about anthropological observations, or about history and its more or less reliable guidelines. All “theories” of human behavior are necessarily ideological and reductive: whether it’s from Skinner or Marx, it doesn’t matter. The simplest things we do in a given day are steeped in so many motives, passions, thoughts, physical exigencies, and moral commitments, we dare not simply paste a label on them to explain them away and have done with them.

There are glimmers of hope that Americans on both the right and left may be approaching their limits with the racist “antiracism” movement. Virtually everyone on the right and increasing numbers of people on the left are fed up with the ubiquitous manifestations of critical race theory. Americans see CRT is corrosive and divisive. They see CRT is being used to control discourse. And they see that “progressives” are passing CRT off as inarguable, objective truth. “Progressives,” in control of most of the levers of power and influence, feel no obligation to debate CRT’s arguable assumptions. Nor will they acknowledge that CRT is arguable as they use hard-earned tax dollars to promulgate it in government schools. And hoo boy, are they promulgating.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CRT-at-Wheaton-College.mp3

Join us in Collinsville on Saturday, May 22nd for an IFI Worldview Conference about CRT!

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings to hardworking Illinoisans—which, by definition, excludes members of the Chicago Teachers’ Union—but there’s more news on the education front. Lefty swamp creatures in Springfield wallowing in their own presumptuousness and power have yet more changes in store for the unfortunate Illinois school children who haven’t yet been freed from the re-education camps that self-identify as schools.

The newest offenses from Springfield are buried in the thousands of words of a new bill just signed into law by Governor J. B. Pritzker on Monday March 8, 2021.

The first offense is providing general revenue funds to be used for the creation of a network of Chicago Freedom Schools (CFS) which will be breeding grounds for leftist social activists. This is an official photo from the school. Currently, Chicago has one Freedom School—a non-profit organization—which opened its doors to budding young social justice warriors in 2007. But leftists believe that one CFS and all public schools are not creating nearly enough community agitators.

The law states,

The State Board of Education shall establish a Freedom School network to supplement the learning taking place in public schools by creating a 6-week summer program. … A Freedom School shall intentionally and imaginatively implement strategies that focus on … Racial justice and equity. … The Freedom Schools Fund is created as a special fund in the State treasury. the [sic] Fund shall consist of appropriations from the General Revenue Fund, grant funds from the federal government, and donations from educational and private foundations.

The CFS makes clear its BLM/Critical Race Theory mission and tactics:

CFS uses social justice and anti-oppression practices to work to transform oppression into liberation by naming, analyzing, implementing and teaching actions that dismantle systems of supremacy that give power and privileges to some at the expense of others.

CFS invites “young leaders of color ages 13-17” who are “passionate about social justice” to apply for a Freedom Fellowship in order to build “community organizing skills” and “become community change-makers” by exploring current issues such as racism and climate change in order to “develop skills” for “dismantling injustice.” I’m not sure, but I think limiting government-subsidized fellowships to leaders “of color” might be racist and violate anti-discrimination law.

The CFS’s Summer Leadership Institute studies “issues of systemic oppression like racism, heterosexism, food justice, the school to prison pipelines, sexism, and more.” Something tells me that discussions of the pipeline to prison don’t include discussions of premarital sex, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and fatherlessness.

  2019 CFS fundraiser entertainment

Let your fingers do the walking right on over to the Chicago Freedom School’s Facebook page and take a gander at the photos of the school that your taxes will now be used to replicate all around Chicago. Check out the photos of their November 2019 fundraiser titled Moments of Justice: Unmasking Our Ancestral Gifts. By “unmasking,” they evidently mean unclothing, and by “gifts,” they evidently mean—well, you can see for yourself.

The man in the furry black vest is homosexual activist Tony Alverado-Rivera who is the executive director of Chicago’s only Freedom School. He wants to defund police, abolish ICE, and remove Chicago Police from dangerous Chicago schools. CFS supports “trans”-cultism and BLM, and offers workshops to help other leftist agitators build “social justice practices” into their schools, which presumably includes public schools.

And now, thanks to leftists in Springfield and the taxes of Illinoisans, Chicago won’t have just one ideological factory churning out activists; Illinois will have an entire network. And to make matters worse, it appears the law grants carte blanche to the reliably leftist Illinois State Board of Education to implement the Freedom Schools project for creating social justice change-agents:

The State Board of Education may adopt any rules necessary to implement this Section. (emphasis added)

The new law also includes a change in the school code regarding what must be taught during Black History Month. The school code already required every elementary, middle, and high school to teach a unit that addresses the following:

[T]he events of Black History, including the history of the African slave trade, slavery in America, and the vestiges of slavery in this country. These events shall include not only the contributions made by individual African-Americans in government and in the arts, humanities and sciences to the economic, cultural and political development of the United States and Africa, but also the socio-economic struggle which African-Americans experienced collectively in striving to achieve fair and equal treatment under the laws of this nation.

Further, existing law said, “The studying of this material shall [must] constitute an affirmation by students of their commitment to respect the dignity of all races and peoples and to forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers.”

While many Illinois schools haven’t yet been able through the study of “material” to get students to affirm the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, lawmakers think they will be able to get them to “forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers.” Wowzer!

As noble a goal as ensuring students forever eschew every form of discrimination in their lives and careers is, is that really the role and responsibility of government employees? And is there a comprehensive list of every form of discrimination that leftist lawmakers believe students must be indoctrinated to eschew in their lives and careers?

Remember, Springfield swampsters and their leftist allies on the Illinois State Board of Education believe that disapproval of volitional homosexual acts is a form of discrimination. The belief that marriage is by nature a sexually differentiated union is a form of discrimination. The belief that biological men—also known as men—don’t belong in women’s sports or locker rooms is a form of discrimination.

But, the social justice despots who rule Illinois are nowhere near done tinkering with laws in order to manipulate the minds of other people’s children. The new law adds the following to everything else that must be taught to Illinois children in order to satiate leftists who want to use public schools to turn children’s hearts against America and turn children into social justice warriors. Now, the Black History unit will have to include,

[T]he history of the pre-enslavement of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619 … the study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved … and the study of the American civil rights renaissance.

This change to the study of black history constitutes a means to weasel controversial 1619 Project ideas into curricula without Illinoisans realizing it.

Classroom time does not permit any public K-12 school to teach the history of any country or identity group comprehensively. The partisan view that K-12 schools should teach about “the pre-enslavement of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619” is both absurd and doctrinaire. Why just the history of blacks from that period? And why those specific dates? Well, we know why the dates. They’re lifted straight out of the much-condemned 1619 Project written by non-historian New York Times writer /social justice agitator Nikole Hannah-Jones.

If public schools are going to mandate the “study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved,” are they going to require that students study those reasons in context of the worldwide history of slavery and the participation of African blacks in the slave trade? Are they going to make clear that more black slaves were sold to Europe, South America, and the Caribbean than to the United States? Are they going to require students study the history of the role of Christianity in the abolition movement? Will resources used include those by conservative blacks like Carol Swain, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter?

Doubtful, because the goal of leftists is not historical accuracy or exploring diverse ideas. Their goal is partisan politics.

There will be no satiating the swamp creatures in Springfield who, in cahoots with leftist “educators,” are drowning government schools in leftist ideology, thereby turning education into indoctrination and Illinois children into leftist activists.

Read more:

Despite Nationwide Condemnation, Illinois Passes Leftist Teacher-Training Mandate (Laurie Higgins)

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Another-Woke-Education-Law-Just-Signed-by-Pritzker.mp3

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Warning: Reader Discretion Advised

Leftists in Springfield are still not done using public schools to preach “woke” beliefs to Illinois school children, thereby driving more families out of Illinois—which is a bad thing for Illinoisans who can’t leave—and driving more families out of government schools—which is a good thing except for those who can’t leave.

State Representative Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) has filed a jaw-dropping bill, HB 80, that doesn’t propose merely “standards,” or “guidelines,” or even a type of curriculum. Oh no, Flowers is going for the whole enchilada. If passed, this bill would mandate the teaching of specific books on race and feminism: 20 non-fiction books and 9 fiction. Every book is written by a leftist. There is not one book in Flowers’ list by either a person of color or a colorless person who criticizes or dissents from leftist assumptions on race or feminism.

Flowers’ bill says,

Amends the School Code. Sets forth a list of nonfiction, fiction, and children’s books about racism that shall [must] be required reading for students in every public elementary and secondary school beginning with the 2021-2022 school year. Requires that the instruction in the material presented by each book be age appropriate and taught at the appropriate grade level. Effectively [sic] immediately.

Maybe I missed it, but I can’t remember ever hearing of a lawmaker commanding that every public school in Illinois teach specific books. Did Mary Flowers’ constituents elect her to select texts for their elementary, middle, and high schools?

Having worked with teachers, I can say with a fair degree of certainty, that this bill will not be popular with many of them.

This proposed bill adds to the list of bills and laws that are transforming our government schools into woke re-education camps and our children into leftists. The list now includes the re-introduced REACH Act that will require comprehensive sex ed starting in kindergarten;  the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Here are some of the authors and texts on Flowers’ inclusive list of only leftist authors and texts:

bell hooks: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Ta-Nehesi Coates: Between the World and Me

Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers): How to Be an Antiracist

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Ben Crump (opportunist extraordinaire in the mold of Al Sharpton and “Rev.” Jesse Jackson): Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People

Jacquelyn Woodson (black and a lesbian, so a two-fer for intersectional identitarians): Brown Girl Dreaming

Jennifer Harvey (self-described “queer, antiracist-committed … white lesbian/dyke” and Drake University religion professor): Raising White Kids

Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Mikki Kendall: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Layla F. Saad: Me and White Supremacy

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

Ijeoma Oluo (identifies as a “a black, queer woman who has often found herself demonized at the convenience of white America): So You Want to Talk About Race

Wesley Lowery: They Can’t Kill Us All

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Phew. Good thing Coates, Kendi, and DiAngelo are here. No “woke” list would be complete without those three Wokateers—all of whom profit handsomely from the racial division they help foment.

National Review’s Rich Lowry writes this about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, which Flowers wants to force all public schools to teach:

Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview. He must erase distinctions and reject complexity.

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” he writes. What is this “white America”? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts, or is it Utah?

In a monstrous passage about 9/11, he writes of the police and firefighters who died trying to save people from getting obliterated into dust: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification?

I suspect there will be many parents who object to their children being exposed to such a toxic ideology.

Here are just two quotes from the book by racist, pro-“trans,” pro-homosexual feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race that Mary Flowers wants to force all Illinois schools to teach:

1.) “[R]acism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve.”

2.) “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist.”

We can’t overlook the list of books Flowers’ bill identifies as fiction, which includes Justin Simien’s satirical book Dear White People. One chapter in Dear White People is titled “So You’ve Decided to ‘Go Black’ and Not Come Back,” which has a section on busting the myth of “Giant Penises,” ,” that is, giant black penises:

Thanks to rap music and the tendency to exoticize people of color, the myth of the giant black d*ck has endured for some time. … the stereotype can lead to a number of awkward postcoital conversations and explanations. Though this stereotype might be helpful in wooing and courtship, there are few things less sexy than a man having to explain why his d*ck isn’t as big as his lover had hoped it would be. The truth is the average d*ck length and width is the same for men regardless of ethnic background. In spite of the sometimes helpful wide-angle lens on the iPhone used in d*ckpic-ing, most guys are packing between five and seven inches.

Please don’t send any email messages to IFI expressing anger that we have reported this. If you’re upset, contact Mary Flowers. She’s the person who wants to make this book required reading in Illinois schools.

Flowers also wants to force Illinois schools to teach bisexual Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which includes lesbian sex and many references to various characters “f*cking.”

And here’s an excerpt from the novel An American Marriage by Tayari Jones that Flowers wants to force Illinois schools to teach:

Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to f*ck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to f*ck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to f*ck her like a human being?

The married black man in this scene has just been released from spending five years in prison for the crime of raping a white woman—a crime he did not commit. The woman with whom he has sex is a friend—not his wife.

Just curious, who decided graphic lesbian sex was “age-appropriate” for any minor children, and what criteria was used to make such a determination? Who will decide which grade level is appropriate for graphic lesbian sex, language about “f*cking” friends, or about the myth of giant black penises?

While Flowers, evidently a devotee of Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and feminism, includes a few token colorless authors, she includes no ideological diversity, demonstrating that the only kind of diversity that matters to leftists pertains to skin color, biological sex, and disordered sexual predilections. What doesn’t matter is ideological diversity and intellectual exploration on these controversial topics.

In the service of inculcating Illinois minors with “progressive” beliefs about race, feminism, and sexual activities, leftists are fully committed to viewpoint discrimination. They have no interest in teaching children how to think critically via distinguishing sound, coherent arguments buttressed with relevant evidence from fallacious arguments deficient in logic, evidence, and coherence. Instead, they want to teach other people’s children what to think uncritically. Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds more like propaganda than pedagogy.

No one disputes the historical reality of the evil of the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and subsequent Jim Crow laws. Nor does anyone dispute the critical importance of ensuring that history is taught accurately.

The dispute broadly speaking is over how the history of racism should be taught. Many—including blacks—believe the way Critical Race Theory (and BLM and the 1619 Project) addresses slavery in America and its legacy is both imbalanced and inaccurate.

Further, the imbalanced and inaccurate coverage of American history promotes a false picture of an evil and systemically racist America, foments racial division, and robs persons of color of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives.

In the racialist—or some would say racist—theories of those whose writing Mary Flowers wants to force into Illinois schools, there’s a difference between being an “antiracist” and being not racist. Being antiracist essentially means embracing all the beliefs of Critical Race Theory, including forced confession and public repentance by whites, and becoming a community organizer. According to the ubiquitous Ibram X. Kendi,

Being antiracist is different for white people than it is for people of color. For white people, being antiracist evolves with their racial identity development. They must acknowledge and understand their privilege, work to change their internalized racism, and interrupt racism when they see it.

Many believe those dogmatic beliefs are divisive and destructive and will accomplish nothing but feed the greedy Intersectional Industrial Complex. And many non-racist parents do not want their children taught the lie that those who harbor no racist views or engage in any racist acts are still racist by virtue of their skin color or lack thereof.

If Flowers and other leftists are genuinely invested in sound education—which necessarily entails the full and free exchange of ideas on race, race relations, feminism, and sexuality—they could and should revise both this bill and existing curricula on these subjects. They could and should remove half of the non-fiction selections to make room for books and essays by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Carol Swain, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, Anne Wortham, and Heather MacDonald.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her vote against this outrageous proposal that usurps the jurisdiction of local school boards and administrators by mandating specific left-wing reading assignments.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

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Before you read this, you might want to have a fire extinguisher at the ready, because this news just may light your hair on fire.

State Representative La Shawn K. Ford (D-Chicago) held a press conference on Sunday in which he called for all Illinois schools to cease teaching history because he’s “Concerned that current school history teaching leads to white privilege and a racist society.”

In a press release titled a “Call for the Abolishment of History Classes in Illinois Schools,” Ford proclaimed from his high horse,

When it comes to teaching history in Illinois, we need to end the miseducation of Illinoisans. I’m calling on the Illinois State Board of Education and local school districts to take immediate action by removing current history books and curriculum practices that unfairly communicate our history. Until a suitable alternative is developed, we should instead devote greater attention toward civics and ensuring students understand our democratic processes and how they can be involved. 

Has Ford created and made public the criteria that would be used to evaluate the fairness of “history books and curriculum practices,” or does he just presume that all current history books and curriculum practices communicate history “unfairly”?

The press release announced that speakers would discuss “how current history teaching practices overlook the contributions by Women and members of the Black, Jewish, LGBTQ communities and other groups.” Take note of the implicitly racist bias in Ford’s press release that capitalized “Black” while not capitalizing “white.” Yes, persons of Color can be as racist as Colorless people.

Here’s a translation of Ford’s rhetoric: Ford wants schools to cancel all history classes until all textbooks can be reviewed by Big Brother to determine if they are sufficiently woke (i.e., leftist/revisionist) in their treatment of properly melanated persons, women (i.e., persons with DNA-determined vaginas), homosexuals, and opposite-sex impersonators. In the meantime, Ford proposes teaching “civics,” focusing on presenting BLM and Antifa riots as constitutionally protected intensely peaceful assemblies.

In the early stages of the pandemic, when most Americans were fretting about the Chinese Communist virus, leftists were hatching plans on how to weasel the widely criticized New York Times revisionist 1619 Project into Illinois public schools.

To achieve that goal, Ford first proposed the silly partisan bill HB 4954 to add yet more “commemorative holidays” to the school calendar and mandate the teaching of the Civil Rights Movement, which is already taught in schools everywhere.

Then just two weeks later, Ford, who in 2012 was charged “with eight counts of bank fraud and nine counts of submitting false information to the bank in a 17-count indictment,” filed an even more partisan and dangerous amendment that would require the following:

“The study of the pre-enslavement history of Black people from 3,000 BCE to AD 1619, including instruction about ancient civilizations, kingdoms, kings, queens, and warriors; their contributions to medicine, literature, technology, architecture, and economics; and their achievements,” and “The study of the reasons why Black people came to be enslaved.”

The amendment was the brainchild of community activist Meleika Gardner who also wrote the amendment.

According to Scene Chicago, Gardner attributes the murders of “her father, a stepfather, her nephew, and several friends to gun violence due to systemic racism,” which she seeks to eradicate through school indoctrination. I’m unable to find, however, any identification by Gardner of the systemically racist acts that allegedly killed her loved ones or explaining exactly how these racist acts killed them. It seems, for example, that her nephew, Xavier Joy, was the tragic victim of robbery in Woodlawn, a neighborhood on the South Side that is 98 percent black. Maybe some intrepid reporter will ask Gardner for some specific details on how systemic racism killed her friends and relatives.

Ford and Gardner were joined at the press conference by their collaborator, Evanston alderman Robin Rue Simmons, who tied the amendment that would mandate yet more leftist propaganda in government schools to both slave reparations and the riots destroying America:

Simmons, who has spearheaded the push for reparations in Evanston, called education “a key piece of what repair looks like.” Acknowledging the recent Black Lives Matter protests and nationwide “awakening” to the oppression black people face, she said “now is the time” to fight for this bill.

The collaborators know that it would be infinitely easier to get brown, yellow, red, and white Americans who have never owned slaves to support paying reparations to blacks who never were slaves if these Americans have been propagandized.

Ford, a former history teacher in Chicago Public Schools, made this jaw-dropping statement to Fox News:

We know that the history books that we have were written years ago, decades ago, centuries ago by pretty much one group of people, and that’s white men.

Does Ford think teachers are today using textbooks written centuries ago? Is he so racist that he thinks white people can’t write about historical events involving black people? Does he believe black people are similarly incapable of writing about historical events involving white people? I guess we should be glad Ford is no longer in the classroom.

Ford’s policies are likely shaped more by his desire for political power in a leftist city than by principle. When running for mayor in 2019, Ford was asked by the homosexual newspaper Windy City Times if he has any “experience working in LGBTQ-related issues.” Ford, who pretends to be Catholic while supporting abortion and issues related to homosexuality, acknowledged that his lesbian sister is a “strong adviser on issues.”

If this Trojan horse filled with 1619 Project swamp gas looks like it’s going to pass in the Springfield swamp, some good conservatives should file an amendment that would require a complete history of slavery throughout the world to be taught and would require that all resources used in history classes be ideologically balanced between conservative and leftist. So, if resources by 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones are used, then equal time must be spent studying resources by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and John McWhorter.

Let’s make sure Illinois children know that between 1501-1866, more enslaved Africans went to Brazil/Portugal (5,848,266), Great Britain (3,259,441), France (1,381,404), Spain/Uruguay (1,061,524), and the Netherlands (554,336) than the United States (305,326), and that “Less than one-quarter of white Southerners held slaves,” and that it is estimated that “3,776 free Negroes” owned slaves.

And let’s make sure they study the work of prolific black scholar Thomas Sowell who writes that,

Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18^th century. People of every race and color were enslaved—and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed. Everyone hated the idea of being a slave but few had any qualms about enslaving others.

Sowell further points out the hypocrisy of leftists on slavery:

The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves picking cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

Sowell offers a corrective to the myopic perspective offered by America-hating leftists—a corrective of which students should be made aware:

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilization, it is that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery, including in some cases armed resistance. Only the fact that the West had more firepower than others put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. …

Every American should be troubled by the goals of leftist demagogues and censors in government schools. Sowell makes clear that they are not interested in ascertaining truth but, rather, they seek to distort children’s understanding of America for power and money:

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who go back to mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization, have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today, at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

Why did Ford collude with other leftists to concoct this amendment? Leftists understand that it’s easier to forge 15-year-olds into good leftist foot soldiers than it is to forge 25-year-olds and easier still to squeeze malleable 5-year-olds into desired shapes by plunking them into government Play-Doh molds. Leftists want to prevent freethinkers who may later become incorrigibly resistant to leftist dogma and then have to be cancelled.

Conservatives best get their kids out of government indoctrination centers and re-education camps pronto. Leftists are not winning the culture war by the persuasive force and rationality of their ideas but by indoctrination and intimidation.

The Orwellian anti-freedom sharks smell and taste the blood of conservatives in the water. Every day that conservatives choose fear over courage, capitulation over resistance, and silence over bold dissent, they sacrifice the future freedom of their children for one more hour of uneasy peace.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers and urge them to vote no on both HB 4954 and Rep. La Shawn Ford’s amendment, which would politicize the teaching of history in Illinois schools and foment more division.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Leftist-Lawmakers-and-Activists-Call-for-the-Cancellation-of-All-History-Classes_audio.mp3

Please consider supporting the work and ministry of Illinois Family Institute.

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Written by Dr. Jerry Newcombe

Much of the mayhem we see today is linked to fatherlessness.

Around this time we celebrate Father’s Day. But fathers in our culture have not recently appeared very important—at least according to Hollywood and other culture-shapers.

We used to have programs like “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver” with a respectable father figure. Then we devolved to Archie Bunker on “All in the Family.” He was the stereotypical bigoted, benighted patriarch who was not worthy of emulation.

Then we devolved to Homer Simpson, the buffoonish dad, who was anything but a role model.

Of course, in many households today, there is no dad. And that’s a serious problem. So many of the children in fatherless homes begin life at a serious disadvantage. The breakdown of the family at large has caused a huge crisis in our society. For instance, statistics show that the majority of prison inmates come from broken families.

Fatherlessness is a serious blight on American life. As the family goes, so goes society. And, contrary to what the left says (who spend much of their energy diminishing traditional gender roles and arguing that whatever “family you choose” is just as good as the real thing), fathers are integral to the life of a child.

Take an example. What is it that is devastating the black community today? Many in our current climate would say the main issue is racism. But sociologically, cultural pathologies are linked closely to poverty. And poverty is linked closely to the structure of the family. Government subsidies (by which the left buys votes) has created a permanent underclass of people by subsidizing fatherlessness and unemployment.

Prior to the Great Society, the rate of illegitimacy in the black community was relatively low and families were intact. And as economist Thomas Sowell points out, the poverty rate for African-Americans fell by 40 percent from 1940 to 1960—just before the “Great Society” welfare programs. Today, the illegitimacy rate is over 75 percent, which is devastating—by virtually all accounts.

I remember many years ago when I attended an “evangelical church” in Chicago that was a little on the liberal side. One of the lay leaders, a man, got up and prayed, and he said, “Our Father, Our Mother….”

I was thinking, “What?!?” So I asked him after the service about the unorthodox prayer.

His response was that that church was in the shadow of the most notorious housing project in the city, Cabrini-Green. Fatherlessness was a huge problem there. Most people growing up there had a negative feeling about their earthly father because he was absent or drunk or abusive. Cabrini-Green was such a disaster that it has since been torn down.

In his book, Hearts of the Fathers, Charles Crismier notes that many American children today lack the “God-ordered earthly anchor for soul security” because dad is not in the home. He notes,

“It is well known but seldom discussed, whether in the church house or the White House, that fatherlessness lies at the root of nearly all of the most glaring problems that plague our modern, now post-Christian life.”

For example, take the issue of poverty. Says Crismier, “Children living in female-headed homes have a poverty rate of 48 percent, more than four times the rate for children living in homes with their fathers and mothers.”

He points out that fathers are so important in the Bible, beginning with God the Father, that the words “father,” “fathers,” and “forefathers” appear 1,573 times.

Obviously, children in fatherless homes can survive and even thrive despite that handicap. But what a better thing it is to follow God’s design for the family.

There’s also a link between fatherlessness and unbelief. About 20 years ago, when he was a professor at New York University, Dr. Paul Vitz wrote a book, The Faith of the Fatherless. In that book he showed how famous atheists and skeptics in history had virtually no father figure in their life or a very negative father.

As examples, he cites Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul Sartre, Thomas Hobbs, and Sigmund Freud, among others.

Conversely, Vitz found that strong believers often had positive fathers or father figures. In an interview for Christian television, he told me, “I would say the biggest problem in the country is the breakdown of the family, and the biggest problem in the breakdown in the family is the absence of the father. Our answer is to recover the faith, particularly for men, and we’ll recover fatherhood. And if we recover fatherhood, we’ll recover the family. If we recover the family, we’ll recover our society.”

If you’re a father and you stay with your children and you love your wife, you’re a real hero and role model. Keep it up—our nation is counting on you.

This article was originally published at JerryNewcombe.com.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees, a committed Christian, and, before last week, deeply admired and liked by people of all colors and no color, committed an almost unforgivable sin. He said this in response to a specific question about athletes kneeling during the national anthem:

I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country. Let me just tell you what I see or what I feel when the national anthem is played, and when I look at the flag of the United States. I envision my two grandfathers, who fought for this country during World War II, one in the Army and one in the Marine Corp, both risking their lives to protect our country and to try to make our country and this world a better place. Every time I stand with my hand over my heart, looking at that flag, and singing the national anthem, that’s what I think about, and in many cases, it brings me to tears thinking about all that has been sacrificed, not just [by] those in the military, but … those throughout the civil rights movements of the ’60s, and everyone, and all that has been endured by so many people up until this point. And is everything right with our country right now? No, it’s not. We still have a long way to go, but I think what you do by standing there and showing respect to the flag with your hand over your heart, is it shows unity. It shows that we are all in this together, we can all do better and that we are all part of the solution.” (emphasis added)

“Progressives” became apoplectic and splenetic. Judging from their attacks, one would think Brees had publicly celebrated Derek Chauvin.

Under withering attacks, Brees offered two apologies because the mob hated his first one. Then his wife, Brittany Brees, issued an apology in which she said,

Somehow we as white America … can feel good about not being racist, feel good about loving one another as God loves us. We can feel good about educating our children about the horrors of slavery and history. We can read books to our children about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X., Hank Aaron, Barack Obama, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman.. and feel like we are doing our part to raise our children to love, be unbiased and with no prejudice. To teach them about all of the African Americans that have fought for and risked their lives against racial injustice. Somehow as white Americans we feel like that checks the box of doing the right thing. Not until this week did Drew and I realize THAT THIS IS THE PROBLEM. To say “I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag” .. I now understand was also saying I don’t understand what the problem really is, I don’t understand what you’re fighting for, and I’m not willing to hear you because of our preconceived notions of what that flag means to us. That’s the problem we are not listening, white America is not hearing. We’re not actively LOOKING for racial prejudice.

If saying “I don’t agree with disrespecting the flag” also says “I don’t understand what the problem really is,” then does kneeling during the national anthem mean both “America is systemically racist” and “I don’t understand why you value the flag and national anthem. I don’t understand what you see that’s good in America. I’m not willing to hear you because of our view of America as pervasively evil and whites as oppressors”?

Unlike Brittany Brees, I can’t speak for all of white America. I don’t know what all of white America feels. But I do know that for a lot of white Americans, teaching our children about the horrors of slavery and lynchings, about Jim Crow laws, and about Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Hank Aaron, Jesse Owens, and the Tuskegee Airmen is not about “feeling good.” Raising our children to love others, to hate bigotry, and to stand up for mistreated friends is not about “feeling good” or “checking boxes.” It’s not about virtue-signaling or pride. It’s about serving Christ. It’s about loving our neighbors as ourselves. It’s about truth.

“Progressives” argue that people who explicitly condemn police brutality and all forms of bigotry and who have never said or done anything racist are the problem if they don’t endorse kneeling during the national anthem. Just curious, does that principle of collective guilt apply to all egregious sin? Are people who explicitly oppose the sexual exploitation of women and children in pornography, strip clubs, prostitution, and sex trafficking, and who have never viewed porn, visited a strip club, hired a prostitute, or trafficked women and children a problem? Should they kneel during the national anthem as a protest against the many Americans who watch porn, leer at women in strip clubs, hire prostitutes, and/or traffic in women and children? Are our flag and national anthem now symbols of the poisonous systemic abuse of women and children that colleges and universities promote through courses that celebrate porn? Are Americans who explicitly oppose the sexual exploitation of women and children, who are pro-actively teaching their children about its evil, and who have never been complicit in it via using porn, visiting strip clubs, hiring prostitutes, or sex-trafficking, the problem if they are not “actively” looking for the sexual exploitation of women and children?

Former NFL player Shannon Sharpe said this about Drew Brees’s response to an interviewer’s question about the knee-taking of athletes:

[Drew] issued an apology … but it’s meaningless because the guys know he spoke his heart the very first time around. I don’t know what Drew’s going to do, but he probably should just go ahead and retire now. He will never be the same. Take it from a guy that has been a leader in the locker room for a number of years. What he said, they will never look at him the same because he spoke his heart. It wasn’t what he said, it was how he said it. He was defiant. I will NEVER [yes, Sharpe shouted that defiantly] respect the man.

BTW, Brees did not speak defiantly as Sharpe falsely claimed—making Sharpe, therefore, a slanderer. Don’t believe me? Well, watch it yourself and see if you think Brees was “defiant”:

Sharpe expresses the “progressive” view of “tolerance,” and this is why “progressivism” will destroy both freedom and the country. Brees saying that he disagrees with knee-taking during the national anthem while at the same time saying the flag represents the sacrifices made during the Civil Rights era and acknowledging that right now we have a lot of work yet to do renders him—in Sharpe’s repugnant view—unsuitable for employment or respect.

Brees’s teammate Malcolm Jenkins castigated him too saying,

Drew Brees, if you don’t understand how hurtful, how insensitive your comments are, you are part of the problem. To think that because your grandfathers served in this country and you have a great respect for the flag that everybody else should have the same ideals and thoughts that you do is ridiculous. And it shows that you don’t know history. Because when our grandfathers fought for this country and served and they came back, they didn’t come back to a hero’s welcome. They came back and got attacked for wearing their uniforms. They came back to people, to racism, to complete violence.”

Brees never said anything like “everybody else should have the same ideals and thoughts” that he does. Moreover, Brees is justified in valuing the service of his grandfathers, and he is justified in his respect and love for America—the country to which emigrants the world over seek entry. He’s justified in loving America for her founding—though imperfectly realized—principles. He’s justified in celebrating the incredible integration of peoples of diverse races, ethnicities, and religions in America. He’s justified in appreciating how far we’ve come since slavery and Jim Crow laws.

It is possible for whites both to value the sacrifice and service of their fathers and grandfathers and to feel contempt for the injustice of black fathers and grandfathers being ill-treated following their service and sacrifice.

Vietnam war veterans—both black and white—were spit on by liberals when they returned home. Do we hold liberals who, not only didn’t engage in such behavior but also condemn it, accountable for that injustice? Do we blame such ugly behavior committed by some liberals fifty years ago on all of America? Does the American flag and national anthem symbolize their repugnant acts?

Jenkins continued,

And then here we are in 2020, with the whole country on fire, everybody witnessing a black man dying—being murdered—at the hands of the police, just in cold blood for everybody to see. The whole country’s on fire, and the first thing that you do is criticize one’s peaceful protest that was years ago when we were trying to signal a sign for help and signal for our allies and our white brothers and sisters, the people we consider to be friends, to get involved? It was ignored. And here we are now with the world on fire and you still continue to first criticize how we peacefully protest because it doesn’t fit in what you do and your beliefs without ever acknowledging that the fact that a man was murdered at the hands of police in front of us all and that it’s been continuing for centuries, that the same brothers that you break the huddle down with before every single game, the same guys that you bleed with and go into battle with every single day go home to communities that have been decimated.

Brees didn’t “continue to first criticize.” He has not been continually criticizing the kneeling protests. He didn’t initiate discussion of the topic. Brees was asked by an interviewer what he would do if teammates kneeled during the national anthem.

And while Brees didn’t mention George Floyd, he did acknowledge the suffering of the black community. To remind Jenkins, this is what Brees said:

[I]t brings me to tears, thinking about all that has been sacrificed, not just [by] those in the military, but … [by] those throughout the civil rights movements of the ’60s, and everyone, and all that has been endured by so many people up until this point. And is everything right with our country right now? No, it’s not. We still have a long way to go. … we can all do better and … we are all part of the solution.

What exactly did Jenkins mean when he said the kneeling protests were “ignored”? Likely he meant that there were many people who didn’t participate or support the protest. In other words, in Jenkins’ view, the only acceptable way to help decimated black communities is to protest the national anthem. But then isn’t Jenkins doing exactly what he accuses Brees of doing? Isn’t he demanding that everyone believe what he believes about the protests, the flag, and the national anthem?

Jenkins is ignoring that there are white people and black people trying to help decimated black communities. They’ve been trying for years, but they’re shouted down and called bigots for having different views than white and black liberals on how to solve the problems of racism and urban blight. Here are some of their ideas:

• How should we address actual racism committed by racist individuals in police departments—most of which are controlled by liberals? Punish them and/or get rid of them. How do we do that? Revisit/reform “qualified immunity” and policies that conceal police misconduct and protect brutal cops.

• How should we address crime in black communities? Work on transforming society by getting rid of no-fault divorce and using every resource available to promote true marriage and discourage out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Intact families with a mother and a father are the greatest protections against poverty and crime. And when crime is reduced in communities, businesses will move in.

• How do we improve education? Offer impoverished families school choice and end teachers’ unions that promote destructive policies and protect lousy teachers. And stop teaching divisive and false ideas from organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center’s education arm Teaching Tolerance, or Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, or The 1619 Project that present imbalanced views of American history and teach children of color that because of white oppression, they have no hope of moving up in the world.

• How do we help blacks improve their financial position? Deregulate businesses and reduce taxes in order to grow the economy, thereby providing jobs.

• How do we help eradicate bigotry, bitterness, and hatred? We preach the gospel—the whole gospel.

If Jenkins is concerned about the decimation in his community, why attack Brees? Why not attack “progressives” who have run the cities in which those decimated communities subsist? Why not attack the racism profiteers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson who make bank by fomenting racial division? Why not attack liberal leaders who deny school choice to poor black families? Why not attack teachers’ unions that protect lousy teachers in failing schools? Why not attack fatherlessness that results in criminality? Why not attack Black Lives Matter (BLM) that seeks to dismantle families, which are the single best hope for black children?

Here are just some of BLM’s principles and goals:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.

Note that mothers and parents are mentioned but not fathers.

Are those principles and goals helpful to black children? Are they unifying? Are they good?

Jenkins was not done with his accusatory screed:

Drew, unfortunately, you’re somebody who doesn’t understand their privilege. You don’t understand the potential that you have to actually be an advocate for the people that you call brothers.

Will Jenkins stand behind whites who advocate for school choice, true marriage, and the end of teachers’ unions? Will Jenkins cheer whites who advocate against premarital sex and out-of-wedlock births? Will Jenkins cheer whites who advocate for the end of divisive, destructive diversity training and The 1619 Project that teach lies and foster division? Will Jenkins cheer for whites who advocate the ideas of Candace Owens, Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, Bob Woodson and “1776 Unites” project? Or are whites expected to advocate for only ideas and policies that Jenkins, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones and her 1619 Project scam promulgate?

Liberals have had fifty years to solve the problems endemic to urban communities of color—including eight years with a black president whose presidency saw black unemployment and racial division surge. Is Jenkins willing to listen to the ideas of others on how to help, how to advocate, how to get involved? Is he willing to listen to diverse ideas on how to rebuild suffering communities? Or will he say to black conservatives what he said to Brees: “you should shut the f–k up.”

It’s ironic that progressives have controlled most major cities for decades and have been forcing Americans in government schools and the corporate world to endure years of “diversity training,” “sensitivity” sessions, and “social justice” indoctrination, and yet we just suffered through the worst race riots since 1968 when Boomers and their rotten ideas began corrupting academia.

Their rotten ideas have—as expected and predicted—produced rotten fruit that is poisoning the hearts and minds of Americans. Race relations had been improving slowly but surely until the Boomers’ ideas seeped from sullied towers in bastions of idiocy like Berkeley to countless colleges and universities and then into high schools. Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege Conferences, and Howard Zinn’s revisionist history of the United States turned young teens’ minds into burbling cauldrons of contempt for America and its founding principles—those very principles that had brought us so far from the days of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and red-lining. With an erroneous understanding of American history, young Americans falsely believe that America was and remains a wholly evil country that must be destroyed and rebuilt in the recriminatory image of “progressives.”

Former NFL coach and Christian Tony Dungy, who likes and respects Drew Brees, expressed disappointment with his initial comments. Dungy said that “we need unifying voices, not divisive voices.” Dungy’s comments were disappointing in that he didn’t address the divisiveness of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, The 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, or people like Al Sharpton. He didn’t address the divisiveness of the attacks on Drew Brees for saying—when asked—that he doesn’t agree with kneeling during the national anthem. But you see, Dungy wasn’t asked about any of that, just like Brees was not asked specifically about George Floyd.

Two apologies from Drew Brees and one long one from Mrs. Brees, all of which suggest they have joined BLM. These apologies bring to mind Winston Smith at the end of 1984. Sadly, it doesn’t take torture to get grown men (and women) to capitulate to a destructive ideology. All it takes today is a barrage of insults.

Every day, we see across America signs of hope and progress. We see interracial couples, multi-racial churches, multi-racial groups of friends, and upwardly mobile black families. Is America perfect? Of course not. No society can ever be perfect because humans are fallen creatures. Fallen creatures hate. People of all colors hate. But our founding principles are good, and they are guiding us toward better.

Over a dozen years ago, while working at Deerfield High School in Deerfield, Illinois, I was helping a high school junior on her paper for American Studies (still co-taught by the same two teachers today). She cheerily told me that by the end of first semester in American Studies, she hated America and hated being an American. “Social justice” mission accomplished.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Drew-Brees-the-Mob.mp3

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The young black man in the video below, Frederick Wilson II, expresses views that are arguably far wiser and more helpful in the debate over justice and racial reconciliation than anything Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, or Jesse Jackson has said in recent years.

And Wilson’s views are exponentially more helpful than these inflammatory words from Louis Farrakhan who spoke recently at Morgan State University:

The young are God’s children, and they’re not goin’ down peaceful. You may not want to fight, but you better get ready. Teach your baby how to throw the bottle [Molotov cocktail] if they can [he then imitates a child throwing, while the audience laughs and applauds].

We’re gonna die anyway. Let’s die for something. Elijah Muhammad said…near fifty years ago…there were 20,000,000 of us, he said “If 10,000,000 of us lost our lives, there would be 10,000,000 of us left to go free….”

In this book [Farakkhan holds up a book], there’s a law for retaliation: Like for like. The Bible says, an eye, a tooth, a life. As long as they kill us, and go to Wendy’s, and have a burger, and go to sleep, they’re gonna keep killing us. But when we die and they die [cheering and standing ovation], then soon, we’re gonna sit at a table and talk about it We want some of this earth, or we’ll tear this G##d#mned country apart! As-salaamu alaikum.”

Perhaps this kind of rhetoric contributed to some blacks believing that the way to end racial injustice in Ferguson, Missouri was to steal and destroy the property of fellow blacks.

I hope that those high school social studies teachers who currently use tax dollars to promote their Leftist social and political views about race would show the Wilson video to students to balance out the whole “institutional racism” theme.

A few years ago when I was helping a Deerfield High School (DHS) student with a paper for her American Studies class, she shared that by the end of her first semester in that class, she hated America and hated being white. Great job, teachers. I’m sure that’s just what American taxpayers want their hard-earned money to subsidize.

Political proselytizing in public schools continues unabated. DHS teachers Ken Kramer and Neil Rigler continue to teach American Studies, and this year’s curriculum includes an essay by Leftist homosexual playwright Tony Kushner and five essays (some of which come from controversial history book A People’s History of  the United States) by Leftist American history revisionist Howard Zinn:

“American Things” by Tony Kushner

“A Kind of Revolution” by Howard Zinn

“American Ideology” by Howard Zinn

“Columbus and Western Civilization” by Howard Zinn

“We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God” by Howard Zinn

“Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom” by Howard Zinn

Other authors include Eric Foner, Barbara Kingsolver, Lorraine Ali, and Leon Litwack, all liberal.

“Progressives” will argue that these scholars are well-respected scholars and prize-winners, which is true but ignores the bias that shapes their work, determining which facts to include, which to omit, which to emphasize, and how to frame their analyses. It also ignores the academic mission of both Zinn and Foner to use their role as historians to advance their political agenda.

Let’s take a glimpse at the writers whom public school “agents of change” promote.

Former Leftist, now conservative writer David Horowitz writes this about Eric Foner:

In 2002, Columbia University hosted a conference of academic radicals called, “Taking Back The Academy: History of Activism, History As Activism.” The published text of the conference papers was provided with a Foreword by Professor Eric Foner, who is a past president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, and a leading academic figure. Far from sharing Professor [Stanley] Fish’s view that a sharp distinction should be drawn between political advocacy and the scholarly disciplines, Professor Foner embraced the proposition that political activism is essential to the academic mission: “The chapters in this excellent volume,” wrote Foner, “derive from a path-breaking conference held at Columbia University in 2002 to explore the links between historical scholarship and political activism….As the chapters that follow demonstrate, scholarship and activism are not mutually exclusive pursuits, but are, at their best, symbiotically related.”

Kramer and Rigler include in their coursepack the essay “And Our Flag Was Still There,”  in which well-known author and liberal Barbara Kingsolver takes aim at patriotism:

Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth who’ve spent years learning our culture and contributing their talents to our economy. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder? Who are we calling terrorists here? Outsiders can destroy airplanes and buildings, but it is only we, the people, who have the power to demolish our own ideals.

Thomas Sowell (who happens to be black), Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution ), has this to say about Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States of which Kramer and Rigler are so enamored:

It speaks volumes about our schools and colleges that far-left radical Howard Zinn’s pretentiously titled book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely used across the country. It is one indictment, complaint, and distortion after another.

Anyone who relies on this twisted version of American history would have no idea why millions of people from around the world are trying, sometimes desperately, to move to this country. The one virtue of Zinn’s book is that it helps you identify unmistakably which teachers are using their classrooms as propaganda centers.

One wonders if all the “progressive” public school “agents of change” around the country tell their students and their parents that Zinn is a controversial historian. One wonders if they require their students to read criticism of Zinn’s revisionist history and discuss Zinn’s open admission that he used his work to advance his Leftist political goals. One wonders if Leftist “educators” require students to spend equal time reading the work of Thomas Sowell, and Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom—you know, in the service of diversity, balance, and “critical thinking.”

It’s not just curricula that are infected with biased Leftist ideas that distort American history and foster division rather than unity among disparate groups. School administrations also promote Leftist assumptions through professional development conferences, workshops, and seminars that taxpayers subsidize. These include controversial racism-profiteer Glenn Singleton’s National Summit for Courageous Conversations, Regional Summits for Courageous Conversations, and “Beyond Diversity” seminars, which suck money from Americans through their public schools.

For the uninitiated, liberal theories regarding oppression almost always address homosexuality. Here’s an excerpt  from one of the sessions offered at last fall’s National Summit for Courageous Conversations in New Orleans:

Phase 2 seminar. Journey back to a time when homosexual men and women were exalted in their native cultures (”Two Spirits”), only to have it stripped away when Eurocentric ways took control.

And we can’t forget one of the most infamous wastes of taxpayer money: the annual White Privilege Conference that seeks to persuade whites that they are racist oppressors by virtue of nothing other than their skin color.

The curricular choices of liberal teachers present a lopsided picture of America that over-emphasizes America’s flaws and de-emphasizes those aspects of America that have made this the greatest nation in history. Biased Leftist resources transform education into indoctrination and exacerbate rather than mitigate racial hostility.  The Leftist assumptions about race, oppression, and justice that emerge from the writings of Brazilian Marxist Paulo Freire, Peggy McIntosh’s invisible knapsack, the White Privilege Conference, and Glenn Singleton’s dizzying array of money-making seminars and summits are corrupting education and disuniting Americans.

Race ballyhooers who line their pockets from the sale of their snake oil that aggravates racial wounds thus ensuring the perpetuation of their schemes claim they seek courageous and honest conversations.  They don’t. The only kind of “conversations” they want are ones that involve them pontificating and others sycophantically echoing.

It would behoove taxpayers to send an email to their local school administrators, asking if any district money has been or will be spent on any of these professional development conferences.

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I was recently asked this question: “Do you believe that disapproval of interracial relationships is indicative of hatred or bigotry? Interracial relationships like homosexual relationships are freely chosen.”

What my interlocutor was really asking is, “Isn’t disapproval of homosexual relationships analogous to disapproval of interracial relationships,” to which I would offer a hearty “Are you kidding?”

Disapproval of interracial relationships makes as much sense intellectually and morally as disapproval of relationships between people who have different eye colors. Race is a non-behavioral condition. It is as meaningless in terms of morality as eye color. It would make no more moral sense to disapprove of interracial relationships than it would to disapprove of relationships between brown-eyed people and blue-eyed people.

Yes, interracial relationships are as freely chosen as same-sex relationships, but it is not the act of choosing that determines the moral status of a relationship. It is the nature of the choice being made that determines its morality or the irrelevance of moral considerations. My frequent reference to volition in discussions of homoeroticism is not to argue that the presence of volition renders an act immoral. Rather, it’s to say that conditions that have no behavioral implications whatsoever—like race or eye color—are, unlike homoerotic activity, devoid of moral implications. It is not the mere fact that someone chooses to engage in sexual activity that renders their sexual activity licit or illicit. Rather, it is the nature of the sexual activity they choose that determines its moral status.

Were laws that prohibited blacks and whites from marrying equivalent to laws that prohibit two people of the same sex from “marrying”?

As I have written earlier, anti-miscegenation laws were based on a deeply flawed understanding of both race and human nature. They were based on a false belief that different races possessed fundamentally different natures. As Dennis Prager explains:

There are enormous differences between men and women, but there are no differences between people of different races. Men and women are inherently different, but blacks and whites (and yellows and browns) are inherently the same. Therefore, any imposed separation by race can never be moral or even rational; on the other hand, separation by sex can be both morally desirable and rational. Separate bathrooms for men and women is (sic) moral and rational; separate bathrooms for blacks and whites is (sic) not. . . . a black man’s nature is not different from that of a white man, an Asian man, an Hispanic man. The same is not true of sex differences. Males and females are inherently different from one another.

Laws banning interracial marriages were based on the erroneous belief that whites and blacks are by nature different (and the false and pernicious idea that whites are inherently superior), when, in fact, whites and blacks are not by nature different. Laws that recognize only sexually complementary unions as marriages are based on the true belief that men and women are by nature different—a truth that even homosexuals acknowledge.

Whereas a correct definition of marriage emerges from and depends on a proper understanding of the natures of and real differences between men and women, anti-miscegenation laws emerged from and depended upon erroneous understandings of the natures of different races. Marriage is the primary cultural institution that recognizes and is centrally concerned with the ontological differences between men and women, differences that result in children whose rights and proper development are best served by being raised by their biological parents.

Thomas Sowell explains that “The argument that current marriage laws ‘discriminate’ against homosexuals confuses discrimination against people with making distinctions among different kinds of behavior. All laws distinguish among different kinds of behavior.”

A black man who wants to marry a white woman is seeking to do the same action that a white man who wants to marry a white woman seeks to do. A law that prohibits an interracial marriage is wrong because it is based on who the person is, not on what he seeks to do. But, if a man wants to marry a man, he is seeking to do an entirely different action from that which a man who wants to marry a woman seeks to do. A law that prohibits homosexual marriage is legitimate because it is based not on who the person is but rather on what he seeks to do.

The reason homosexual activists and their ideological allies continue to compare homoeroticism to race is not because homoeroticism and race are identical or even substantively similar in nature. Homosexuality is constituted by subjective feelings and freely chosen behaviors. Whatever contributive role biochemistry may one day be found to play in the development of same-sex attraction is wholly unlike the contributive role biochemistry plays in determining, for example, skin color.

Further, the role of biochemistry tells us precisely nothing about the moral status of freely chosen behaviors. Just as angry outbursts are not justified by the presence of biochemical factors that may contribute to aggressive feelings, neither are homosexual acts rendered inherently moral because biochemical factors may contribute to the development of same-sex attraction.

The reason “progressives” continue to compare homoerotic attraction to race is that such a comparison is strategically effective. They want to imply—without providing evidence—that the two conditions are alike in order to suggest that disapproval of homoerotic relationships is identical or similar to disapproval of interracial relationships. The Left is desperately trying to analogize homosexual relationships to interracial relationships in order to render homosexuality as morally neutral as race.

But since race is an absurd, non-rational analogue for homosexuality, interracial relationships are equally absurd, non-rational analogues for homosexual relationships. Disapproval of interracial relationships is wholly different from and unrelated to disapproval of homoerotic relationships in which morally dubious sexual activity is central.

Is Christian opposition to same-sex “marriage” equivalent to Christian opposition to interracial marriage?

Many “progressives” argue fallaciously that since Christians used Scripture to defend opposition to interracial marriage and were wrong, then Christians who use Scripture to defend opposition to same-sex “marriage” must be equally wrong. By that fallacious reasoning, opposition to plural and incestuous unions must be wrong too for Christians use Scripture to defend their opposition to the legalization of those forms of marriage.

When Christians used Scripture to oppose interracial marriage, they were twisting Scripture rather than adhering to scriptural truth. When Christians use Scripture to support same-sex “marriage,” they are twisting Scripture rather than adhering to scriptural truth. God has made abundantly clear how he views homoerotic activity. It is only the most convoluted and strained exegesis within the last 50 years that has led those, often with a vested personal interest, to arrive at the conclusion that homoerotic activity and relationships please God.

“Progressives” seem to believe that the fact that some Christians were wrong on one issue (i.e., race) is proof positive that they’re wrong on another (i.e., homoerotic activity). And/or they believe that the only point of correspondence between homoeroticism and African-American descent is the fact that some Christians disapproved of both, which, of course, says nothing about either condition per se.

The grievous failure of Christians to follow the clear teachings of Scripture on one issue (i.e., race) does not justify their abandonment of Scripture on other issues, in this case sexuality and marriage. The current twisting of Scripture on sexuality and marriage by the heterodox and by those who don’t even claim to be Christians but seek to use Scripture for their own selfish ends represents the same kind of destructive exploitation of Scripture that racists engaged in to promote their self-generated beliefs. Condemnation of racism and all its institutional manifestations grows out of a right understanding of Scripture. And so too do condemnation of volitional homoerotic activity and opposition to the legal recognition of same-sex unions as “marriages” grow out of a right understanding of Scripture.

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Rex Huppke, who purports to be a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, but is, in reality, a mouthpiece for homosexual activism, has written yet another propaganda piece about homosexuality. Huppke wrote an article — not an opinion piece — but an article that doesn’t even attempt a pretense of objectivity.

In language dripping with bias, Huppke wrote about the plight of Americans who define their identity by their homosexual desires and behavior and who have non-American sexual partners. Huppke wrote a thinly disguised endorsement of U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez‘ disastrous immigration reform proposal which would allow “foreign-born partners of gay and lesbian Americans the same path to citizenship as heterosexual spouses.” It was an endorsement so thinly disguised it could be mistaken for a bare-naked, Hollywood-produced public service announcement.

Congressman Gutierrez — and evidently his PR accomplice Huppke — seeks to write into law the unproven, a-historical assumption that relationships defined by unnatural homosexual desire and immoral homosexual acts are morally equivalent to heterosexual relationships.

In a 747-word article, Huppke allotted a whopping 21 words to an acknowledgment that opposing views exist. This is the entirety of his commitment to presenting both sides:

Invariably the addition of language to benefit same-sex couples will rile some who oppose extending marriage rights to gays and lesbians.

Here are some additional telling stats from the impartial, unbiased reporter Rex Huppke:

• Number of quotes from Gutierrez: 4
• Number of quotes from supervising attorney for the National Asylum Partnership on Sexual Minorities at the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago (yes, apparently, such a center exists): 2
• Number of quotes from homosexuals who have foreign-born partners: 3
• Number of quotes from opponents of Gutierrez’ proposal: 0

It’s not merely the inclusion of quotes from only supporters of the proposal that is problematic; it’s also the soap opera-esque content that is troubling.

Huppke quoted Gutierrez who said that “The underlying part of any comprehensive immigration bill is family unity.” This language manipulates Americans’ deep respect for family and family unity while ignoring the disturbing embedded assumption that two homosexual men constitute a “family” that per se deserves respect.

Huppke then quoted a homosexual Episcopal priest who frets about the possibility of his homosexual paramour being deported:

You can’t imagine the stress we live under daily…To wake up every morning and think this could be the day that we no longer have the resources or support to be together.

And then Huppke delivered his coup de grace in a concluding tear-jerking anecdote. Have your hankies at the ready:

For Josh Lampinen, a 30-year-old Chicago Web designer, a change in the law couldn’t come soon enough. His fiance, Jerome Lienard, lives in France, and the couple are struggling to find a way to be together.

…

Lampinen said the distance between them is always a strain, particularly in times of crisis. A year and a half ago, Lampinen’s grandmother died, and Lienard couldn’t be by his side.

“That’s when you want your partner there,” Lampinen said. “And he wasn’t. It just wasn’t possible. It’s instances like that that just make it evident how unfair this situation is.”

Unfortunately, in an increasingly non-rational, non-thinking culture, appeals to such tales of woe carry persuasive power. It is these kinds of “narratives” that are shaping the views of even conservative Christians, particularly younger Christians who are not being taught to think critically. As Thomas Sowell, African American Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, writes:

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

Huppke reported that Gutierrez met with “LGBT community leaders at noon on Monday at the [homosexual] Center on Halsted” where he was joined in his confab by U.S. Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) and openly homosexual Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO).

Some concluding and random thoughts:

• Appeals to emotion are not reasons.
• The presence of sad feelings tells us precisely nothing about the morality of homosexuality — or any other moral issue.
• The presence of emotional and sexual feelings and sexual interactions between two (or more) people does not render their relationship a family structure worthy of affirmation or legal status.
• Rex Huppke is not reporting; he is cheerleading and proselytizing.