What we are witnessing in Ukraine is not a tragedy, it is an atrocity.  A tragedy is when an innocent person dies in an accident.  What Vladimir Putin is inflicting on the people of Ukraine, and to some extent on his own military personnel and citizens, is an abomination, an unjustified violation of every standard of justice and goodness.  It is an evil that Europe and the world have not witnessed since Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

Putin evidently does not mind being compared to Hitler, as he is visibly committing the same types of atrocities against innocent citizens of Ukraine, including children; but it is not so clear whether his associates and generals wish to go down in history as the 21 Century iteration of the Fuhrer. This ought to give them pause.

It is quite difficult to see anything good coming from this war, but we must recall that God still reigns, and for His own reasons allows evil men from time-to-time to manifest to the world how wicked the unchecked human heart is.

If there is any silver lining in this event it may be this: The entire world and especially people in the United States are witnessing the natural result of socialism. Carry BLM, Wokeism, Biden’s and the Democratic Party’s objectives to their logical conclusion and you will find yourself in Mr. Putin’s neighborhood. Every lover of liberty and justice ought to point out in every way possible the relationship between socialism and totalitarianism. It is not an accident that unchecked socialism always results in bondage for the people.

It may be that if enough Americans connect the dots, socialism, despite all protestations to the contrary, will finally be understood for what it is, the horse upon which modern tyrants ride to power.

Do not be fooled!

One of the most astonishing and disturbing trends in evangelicalism over the last few years is the significant number of leaders and organizations that have succumbed to the pressure of the “Woke” mob to join them in their attacks upon the so-called “White” culture. Organizations, such as The Gospel Coalition, and leaders of the SBC, among many others, have gone on record as supportive of the objectives of BLM, CRT, and other leftist groups. Voddie Baucham, in his powerful book, Fault Lines, highlights the dangers to the Church inherent in such actions.

The errors in this are not difficult to discern!  The Leftists are not clandestine with their motives and objectives.  We have clarity, though it may be discomfiting to Christians and pseudo-Christians who have fallen in love with the world and desire the world’s approval!

Setting aside the message of the Left for the moment, which at times and in some ways may be accurate concerning the majority culture, one need only look at their proffered solutions to recognize that they are not of the same spirit as the Church and despise the Gospel of Christ. It is impossible to be at peace with organizations such as BLM, and the CRT “woke” crowd and to also be at peace with Jesus Christ!

One need only consider how the movement deals with their own members’ faux pas to understand that they know nothing of grace. They are consumed by hatred, destruction, and irreconcilable animosity. They provide no pathway to peace. If they decide you are the enemy, you are forever the enemy. Mercy and forgiveness are nonexistent.

How can harmony or cooperation exist between the Body of Christ and such ungodliness? How can anyone who knows and has experienced God’s grace and forgiveness desire to join hands with a movement which despises it? Have they forgotten the admonition of Scripture which notes that “friendship with the world is enmity with God?” Christ noted tersely that those who denied Him He would deny before His Father. What is especially troubling about their climbing aboard the “Woke” wagon is that it is quite impossible for them to be unaware of the stark contrast between Scriptures and “Wokeness.” To this writer it recalls James’s blunt retort, “you adulterers and adulteresses!” While none of us has the ability or authority to judge whether another person is born again or not, one is reminded of Paul’s scathing remarks to the churches of Galatia that he “stood in doubt” about them.

The message of the Gospel breaths God’s grace. He who from before the foundation of the world provided that the very course of history would tell the story of His mercy and forgiveness. For those who at one time hated Him and rejected His rule yet turned to Him in repentance, He offers not only forgiveness but full reconciliation and close familial relationship!

Yet the “Woke” BLM, CRT crowd not only fails to offer a pathway to forgiveness and reconciliation they actively and publicly reject making such an offer. Their way is that of total and abject surrender by and subjugation of all of those they deem to be offenders.

Students of church history will remember that in the early Twentieth century unbelievers took control of many American Christian organizations, seminaries, colleges, and denominations. They did so by taking advantage of Christianity’s I Corinthians’ 13 principle of “believing the best” and giving others the benefit of the doubt to veil their active undermining and destruction of historic Christian doctrines.

Will we see a repeat of that fiasco in the 21^st Century?  We may if true believers do not respond biblically and soon.  For those who are paying attention, understand that the “Woke” movement is not about justice and peace. It is about power!

How completely antithetical to the Gospel of Christ!

Here’s a statistic that may surprise many: It is estimated that less than 17% of U.S. doctors belong to the powerful leftist lobbying group, the American Medical Association (AMA). Remember that figure as you read on about the AMA’s role in promoting critical race theory and sexual anarchy.

In May 2021, the AMA issued a press release announcing its 86-page critical race theory-infused “ambitious strategic plan to dismantle structural racism” which acknowledges “that equity work requires recognition of past harms and critical examination of institutional roles upholding these structures.”

In the press release, the AMA makes clear its leftist leanings:

[T]he plan … is driven by the immense need for equity-centered solutions to confront harms produced by systemic racism and other forms of oppression for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other people of color, as well as people who identify as LGBTQ+. 

The AMA’s ambitious plan seeks to eradicate “malignant narratives” like “a narrow focus on individuals,” the “myth of meritocracy,” and the “myth of American exceptionalism.” The AMA is committed to “rooting out racism and white supremacy in our workplace. … We must ‘get our house in order’ and direct significant focus on embedding equity within the management team.”

The 86-page plan makes even clearer that the AMA has abandoned commitments to equality in favor of collectivist notions of equity based on group membership. The plan is littered with quotes from far-left poets and activists like Ta-Nehesi Coates as well far-left jargon like this:

• “We must … ensure that we use the theories (intersectionality, critical race theory*, etc.).”

• “Equity solutions include … [e]liminating all forms of discrimination, exclusion and oppression in medical and physician education, training, hiring, [and] matriculation … by [m]andatory anti-racism … equity-explicit training … for all … staff [and] Publicly reported equity assessments for medical schools and hospitals … ensuring just representation of Black, Indigenous and Latinx people in medical school admissions as well as medical school and hospital leadership ranks.”

• “We operate in a carefully designed and maintained system that normalizes and legitimizes an array of dynamics … that routinely advantage white (also wealthy, hetero-, able-bodied, male, Christian, U.S.- born) people at the expense of Black, Latinx, Indigenous and people of color (also low wealth, women, people with disabilities, non-Christians, and those foreign-born).”

• “Where equality is a blunt instrument of ‘sameness,’ equity is a precise scalpel that requires a deep understanding of complex dynamics and systems with skill and practice in application. … Equity can be understood as both a process and an outcome. It involves sharing power with people … and redistributing resources to the greatest need.”

The AMA’s document includes this quote from “Sylvia” Rivera,” a deeply troubled drag queen who was homeless and working as a prostitute by age 11:

We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We have to show the world that we’re numerous.

The idea that no one should be ashamed of cross-dressing behaviors is a moral claim that falls far outside the purview of the American Medical Association, but grandiose moral and social engineering schemes is now apparently the business of the AMA.

At the end of June 2021, the AMA released a “resolution” created by a committee of homosexual activists and their collaborators calling for “Removing Sex Designation from the Public Portion of the Birth Certificate.” In a tortured effort to rationalize the AMA’s involvement in redesigning birth certificates to serve the desires of cross-sex impersonators, the activists wrote,

Gender is a social construct that describes the way persons self-identify or express themselves. A person’s gender identity may not always be exclusively male or female and may not always correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

To be clear, these medical doctors are just pretending that sex is “assigned” at birth. They know full well that obstetricians do not assign sexes—of which there are two—to newborns. Physicians identify the sex of newborns—an objective, immutable trait that never changes. There are a small percentage of babies born with disorders of sexual development whose genitalia at birth may be ambiguous, but those babies are not “transgender.”

While some persons may choose not to “identify” with their sex, they do have one and it never changes. The spanking new term “gender identity” was invented to disguise disordered feelings as something more substantive—something with a bit more ontological heft. While a “trans” identity—and every fanciful idea associated with it—is a social construct, biological sex is a material reality that cannot be erased by redesigning birth certificates, grammar, or bodies.

And while “trans”-cultists and their collaborators may believe that subjective feelings about maleness or femaleness (i.e., “gender identity”) are more important than objective biological sex, neither compassion, respect, nor justice obligates others to act as if such feelings are.

The committee cites a prior politically driven AMA policy that says,

“the AMA supports every individual’s right to determine their … sex designation on government documents and other forms of government identification.” The AMA supports policies that allow for a sex designation or change of designation on all government IDs to reflect an individual’s gender identity.

In other words, the AMA supports the bizarre notion that government documents should be falsified in order to conform to the socially constructed, science-denying belief that humans can be what they’re not.

Moreover, after the “trans”-cult has spent years establishing sex and “gender identity” as wholly severable and separate phenomena, they are now attempting to empty “sex designation” filling it with the socially constructed amorphous “gender identity.” George Orwell predicted this:

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all… a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. … This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meaning whatever. … [T]he special function of certain Newspeak words … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them.

The committee, a political interest group composed of self-identifying health providers, offers this pseudo-medical justification for their political effort:

For these individuals, having a gender identity that does not match the sex designation on their birth certificate can result in confusion, possible discrimination, harassment and violence whenever their birth certificate is requested.

Who may be confused? It seems unlikely that cross-sex impersonators would be confused, so how would the confusion of someone else be a health concern for cross-sex impersonators? What form of “possible discrimination”? Is harassment an issue that the AMA should address or the police?

And what about “trans”-agists, that is, people who identify as younger than their assigned birth date would suggest? If a 47-year-old man identifies as a 17-year-old, should he be able to change his birth date designation to reflect his age identity in order to avoid confusion, possible discrimination, harassment, or violence?

Come to think of it, if insurance companies are forced to pay for chemical and surgical procedures to make men look like women, shouldn’t they be forced to pay for chemical and surgical procedures to make old men look like the young men they identify as?

For some perspective on whose interest this resolution represents, a cursory look at the resolution process is in order. Resolutions are created by AMA Medical Student Sections (MSS), in this case the AMA MSS “Committee on LGBTQ+ Affairs,” which, to be clear, is an interest group.

The current Advisory Committee on LGBTQ+ Affairs has seven members, five of whom are homosexual. The remaining two are “LGBTQ+” collaborators. A committee’s resolution is voted on by the House of Delegates, which is the legislative and policy-making body of the AMA. The House of Delegates is composed of about 600 of the 240,000 AMA members. A two-thirds vote of the delegates present is required for adoption. So, the birth certificate redesign policy was conceivably created and passed by 400 of the 240,000 members of the AMA, and the AMA constitutes only 17% of all physicians in the U.S.

No further evidence is needed to prove that “progressivism” is an ideology of deceit than the spread of “trans”-cultic beliefs and practices throughout a society that purports to revere science and rationality. No sane person really believes men can be or become women. No sane person believes men can “chestfeed” or menstruate, become pregnant, or give birth. No sane person really believes that some women have penises and impregnate women—or men. Those who pretend they do are liars or cowards or both.

No further evidence is needed to prove that the ultimate goal of “progressives” is totalitarian political and social control than their tyrannical efforts to coerce Orwellian Newspeak. And no further evidence is needed to prove that America has become the land of cowards than the silence of many physicians on the chemical and surgical abuse of children by the medical community.

There are things that Americans can do to resist Big Brother and his apparatchiks and cowardly minions. Ask your pediatrician, obstetrician, gynecologist, and primary care physician if they support pseudo-scientific “trans”-cultic practices for the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors. If they do, find new doctors. And if you’re a doctor who belongs to the AMA, cancel your membership and tell the AMA why.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/amaIsWoke_Audio.mp3

During the decades-long slumber of conservatives, the woke have been continually hatching plans to abolish America piece by piece, replacing it with woke AmeriKa. Leftist control of culture is now virtually absolute, especially over education. Leftists control university departments of education where they turn impressionable students into revolutionary disciples who sashay into government schools armed with notebooks full of lesson plans and brains full of leftist dogma on race, sexuality, equity, oppression, and American history. From their ivory tower perches “education” professors launch not only missionaries but also professional journals, activist organizations, and blogs. Just as liberalism birthed “progressivism,” “progressivism” has now birthed anarchy in the form of the new “abolition” movement.

One of the chief proponents of the abolition movement is Bettina Love, associate professor in the Department of Educational Theory and Practice at the University of Georgia. Love is a black lesbian who co-founded the Abolitionist Teaching Network in 2020. In describing “abolitionist education,” Love makes clear its roots in critical race theory:

It comes from a critical race lens and applies methods like protest, boycotting, and calling out other teachers who are racist, homophobic, or Islamophobic.

When asked in an interview if she wants to abolish school, Love declares adamantly, “Yes” and defends her goal by alleging schools are irremediably infected by white privilege:

The way y’all [i.e., whites) set this (i.e., public school system) up is not fair. The way you set this up, some people get to play, some people don’t get to play. … [N]ot only do we not get to play, there are now structures, institutions, and conditions that make sure that I can’t play and my children’s children can’t play. So, what we’re asking for is to start over. … What makes abolition so radical is that now we’re saying, “Oh yeah, and we want to take away your toys too.” … We want a playing field that says, “the things that you have, the privileges that you have?  You no longer have those privileges because you didn’t earn them. And since you didn’t earn them, you need to give them up.”

And Love will not tolerate anything less than an immediate and wholesale adoption of her QAnon-esque belief that a structure of white privilege makes academic achievement for “queers” and persons of color impossible:

Abolitionist teaching is … about eradicating—not trying to reform, not trying to reimagine. … We’re done with gradual, incremental reform.

Love asserts that her critical theory-infused ideology is the interpretive lens that government schools must use to shape how children view sex, gender roles, cross-sex impersonation, Islam, and homosexuality:

If children of color are attending schools that do not help them interpret the racist, sexist, Islamophobic, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic world they are living in, then not only is the status quo maintained, but Whiteness is never disrupted; therefore, White supremacy stays on track.

While the Abolitionist Teaching Network was founded in 2020, Love’s been at this work for much longer. Speaking https://studentaffairs.psu.edu/spiritual at Penn State in 2015, Love said, “the world free of oppression is going to be led by Queer folk.”

Even more troubling, in a 2013 interview, Love shared that she speaks in schools a lot and that she—as a lesbian—seeks to be a role model for young girls.

According to her CV, Love’s areas of “expertise“ are “hip-hop based education, black girlhood, diversity and social justice, hip-hop feminism [and] critical media literacy.” She speaks on these topics as well as “abolitionist teaching,” racist “anti-racism,” and “queer youth.”

The Abolitionist Teaching Network is staffed by other unsuitable role models for children, including its communications and outreach manager, the “non-binary gender fluid” Ominira Mars whose pronouns are “they/them/theirs. She is a “Black southern queer-feminist student, educator, and writer” who is “passionate about political education, abolition, and building strategic counter-narratives through story-telling and radical imagination to disrupt systems of oppression.”

One of the “resources for agitators” recommended by Love’s Abolitionist Teaching Network is the Abolition Journal which fills in the contours of the radical plans of new abolitionists, plans that include “decolonization” and “abolition”:

Decolonization … is also a process of Indigenous Nations resurging and thriving based on Indigenous ways of being; knowledges; languages; land-based and water-based cultural practices; and political, economic and justice systems. Decolonization means the return of traditional territories to Indigenous Nations, renewed respect for the leadership of Indigenous women and 2S [two-spirit] LGBTQQIA people. … [D]ecolonization needs to happen in society to dismantle settler colonialism and ensure that non-Indigenous people respect the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations.

We understand abolition as an undoing of borders, prisons, police, settler states, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, colonialism and imperialism and all other forms of authority that are tangled together to produce the era we live in.

There you have it, the piece-by-piece destruction of America. Compare that dream to the dream of Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the organizations Love heartily endorses is Assata’s Daughters (AD) named after the terrorist Assata Shakur who was a member of the Black Panther Party and an accomplice in the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster in 1973, who left behind a young wife and three-year-old daughter. After being convicted, Shakur escaped from prison and eventually sought asylum in Cuba where she has lived openly since 1984.

AD is a Chicago-based “abolitionist organization led by Black women using a Black queer feminist lens” founded in 2015:

AD … was founded, planned, and operated by Black women, femmes, and gender non-conforming people to carry on the tradition of radical liberatory activism encompassed by Assata Shakur, to train up others in the radical political tradition of Black feminism, and to learn how to organize on the ground around the demand for Black liberation, particularly a demand for abolition. …

AD … has now broadened its scope to provide lessons to young men and boys on toxic notions of masculinity, [and] dismantling patriarchal systems of oppression.

AD provides a “political education program” to children between the ages of 6-13 “to deepen their political analysis of power and oppression.” Through this program, they introduce children “to Assata Shakur and her revolutionary politic” and “provide opportunities and support to help them tap into their skills as leaders and future organizers in the larger movement for Black liberation.”

How many conservative organizations offer programs to help teens understand the specious arguments used by cultural regressives to normalize racism or disordered sexuality?

Another organization Love admires is Critical Resistance whose toolkit for abolishing policing provides a manual for the further devastation of crime-ridden communities:

• [A]ny and every act of policing is violent, from stops and interrogations to patrols, arrests, surveillance and searches. Even acts of playing nice as “good cop” or cops playing with children and attending community events are strategies to overlook and legitimize the brutal harm policing causes.

• The term “gang” literally means a group, however this word has been used to criminalize groups of people who pose a threat to the status quo of racial capitalism. Communities rely on groups or “gangs” in order to survive.

• Defunding police, at its core, must be a strategy toward abolishing policing.

• Violence and racism are inherent to policing itself. Because it is not a broken system, policing can’t be reformed to be made less violent.

No mention of fatherless families or absence of faith in Jesus Christ as root causes of anti-social behavior by boys and young men. Public expressions of truth are vanishing as anarchists become THE MAN.

Many conservatives and even some traditional liberals have been gobsmacked by the tyrannical turn culture has taken. Riots, looting, arson, cancel culture, and men in women’s sports and locker rooms are awakening Americans to the propaganda their children have been ingesting in government mal-education camps.

The great unwashed, unwoke are prying open their sleep-encrusted eyes and seeing exactly what their decades of intellectual incuriosity and idolatrous worship of reputations, careers, and material stuff have facilitated in America. America’s children have been indoctrinated with false leftist dogma on sexuality, race, equity, oppression, and American history for decades, and the fruits of conservative inattention and cowardice are everywhere.

The questions are, do awakening Americans understand what it will take to preserve America? And do enough of them realize that the preservation or restoration of those principles upon which America was founded and that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in history will require courage and sacrifice—the kind of courage and sacrifice we admire in heroes but flee from in our own lives? I guess we’ll soon find out.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/The-Toxic-Spread-of-Oppression-Obsessed-Ideologies-in-Education.mp3