Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to your U.S. Representative, urging him or her to rein in the unelected, leftist federal bureaucrats. Demand a stop to the federal takeover of bathrooms, locker rooms, overnight trips, etc.

You can also place a phone call to your federal lawmaker via the United States Capitol switchboard, by calling (202) 224-3121.

The last two weeks have been, of all things, about bathrooms. First, the U.S. Department of Justice notified the state of the North Carolina that HB2, or the bathroom law, violated the Civil Rights Act. Now to be clear, HB2 requires people to use public bathrooms and locker rooms that correspond to the sex listed on their birth certificate. Note the word “public.” The law allows businesses to determine their own bathroom policies. And, individuals who have undergone sex reassignment surgery can have their birth certificate changed to reflect their transition.

But according to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the common sense protections of HB2 is akin to Jim Crow laws. Sex specific restrooms are like segregated restrooms, water fountains, entrances, and lunch counters of the racially segregated south.

North Carolina responded to the DOJ’s threats to withhold federal funding by filing a lawsuit. And the DOJ responded by filing a lawsuit back of its own.

Then on Friday, lest we think North Carolina is an isolated case, Obama administration officials — specifically the assistant secretary of education for civil rights and the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department — directed schools, including “all public schools and most colleges and universities that receive federal funds,” to — as the Washington Post described it — “provide transgender students with access to suitable facilities — including bathrooms and locker rooms — that match their chosen gender identity.”

Schools that fail to comply with this edict from on high are, the officials announced, in violation of Title IX, the federal sexual anti-discrimination act, and would therefore — you guessed it — risk losing federal funding. Comply or you don’t get the money. It’s ideological extortion, not policy making. Please visit BreakPoint.org and we’ll link you to a legal analysis of this decree from our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom.

So how should Christians respond? We have to start by understanding the issues at stake. Did you catch all the references to civil rights in these stories? Transgender rights, like gay and lesbian rights before them, have been placed in the historical narrative of overcoming discrimination and bigotry. We aren’t dealing with just a policy issue; we’re dealing with a fundamental view of what it means to be human.

Also, many have long pushed to separate concepts of sex and gender. Sex is how you were born, they say, but gender was self-determined and therefore flexible. But in citing the Civil Rights Act, the administration is saying that the right of self-determination is sacred, akin to non-chosen traits such as ethnicity and race. And by citing Title IX the administration is going even a step further, saying that sex discrimination legislation now applies to gender. In other words, our biological sex should be considered as malleable as our conception of our genders.

Now if all of this sounds like a strange exercise in denying reality, well, it is. That’s the power of worldview. Like prescription glasses, worldviews will either clarify reality or distort reality. The ideas at work here are reality-denying.

Here’s an example of what I mean by reality-denying. Again quoting Attorney General Lynch, “None of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something or someone they are not.” Now in light of Friday’s edict, who exactly is legislating identity and insisting that persons — now school children across the nation — pretend to be something they’re not?!

You’ve heard us say on BreakPoint ideas have consequences, and they certainly do. But we must also say ideas have victims.

In this case, an edict advancing the sexual revolution will make victims by granting special rights to the few while trampling the rights of the rest. And those who resist will be victims of name-calling and public shaming. And precious, gender-confused children, taken deeper into their confusion, will be made victims of our illusions of moral progress.

This article was originally published on Breakpoint.org

There was good news from North Carolina Monday morning, when Governor Pat McCory announced North Carolina would be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ). That news was followed by bad news from the Department of Justice, announced in a stunning statement from Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who compares those who believe that restrooms should correspond to sex to racists who supported separate restrooms, restaurants, drinking fountains, schools, libraries, and parks for blacks and whites.

Here is an excerpt from the ignorant, bigoted, and demagogic statement from Lynch:

Today, we are filing a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state of North Carolina, Governor Pat McCrory, the North Carolina Department of Public Safety and the University of North Carolina….

This action is about….the dignity and respect we accord our fellow citizens and the laws that we… have enacted to protect them–indeed, to protect all of us. And it’s about the founding ideals that have led this country–haltingly but inexorably–in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all Americans.

This is not the first time that we have seen discriminatory responses to historic moments of progress for our nation. We saw it in the Jim Crow laws that followed the Emancipation Proclamation. We saw it in fierce and widespread resistance to Brown v. Board of Education…. Some of these responses reflect a recognizably human fear of the unknown, and a discomfort with the uncertainty of change….This is a time to summon our national virtues of inclusivity, diversity, compassion and open-mindedness. What we must not do–what we must never do–is turn on our neighbors, our family members, our fellow Americans, for something they cannot control, and deny what makes them human. This is why none of us can stand by when a state enters the business of legislating identity and insists that a person pretend to be something they are not, or invents a problem that doesn’t exist as a pretext for discrimination and harassment.

…This law provides no benefit to society–all it does is harm innocent Americans.

Instead of turning away from our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, let us instead learn from our history….[S]tate-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight. It was not so very long ago that states, including North Carolina, had signs above restrooms, water fountains and on public accommodations keeping people out based upon a distinction without a difference….Let us not act out of fear and misunderstanding….

Let me also speak directly to the transgender community itself. Some of you have lived freely for decades. Others of you are still wondering how you can possibly live the lives you were born to lead….[T]he Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that ….history is on your side.

Just a few thoughts about her remarkable piece of sloppy and insulting thinking:

• Lynch’s pernicious comparison of Americans who believe that objective, immutable sex matters and is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy to hateful, ignorant bigots is both morally indefensible and intellectually vacuous.

• Neither inclusivity, fairness, equality, diversity, compassion, open-mindedness, dignity, nor respect requires humans to ignore the objective, immutable sex of others. None of these qualities requires humans to treat objective, immutable sex as if it has no meaning. None of these requires women to share restrooms, changing areas, or showers with persons of the opposite sex. None of these requires Americans to make restrooms, changing areas, and locker rooms co-ed. None of these requires Americans to accept the view that restrooms should correspond to the feelings of people about their sex rather than their sex.

• Equality demands that we treat like things alike. It does not require us to treat unlike things as if they are alike. Men and women are substantively different as even gender-dysphoric persons and homosexuals acknowledge.

• Lynch urges Americans not to “turn” on friends, neighbors, and colleagues for “something they cannot control.” In her view, requiring restrooms to correspond to objective sex constitutes “turning” on gender-dysphoric persons. Does Lynch apply that odd principle consistently? Does she believe that a compassionate society must accommodate all behaviors impelled by powerful, persistent, unchosen, and seemingly intractable feelings, including those feelings that deny objective reality? Being loving and welcoming does not require women to share restrooms with objectively male neighbors, friends, and colleagues or vice versa. In fact, a case can be made that it is profoundly unloving to facilitate a desire to be the opposite sex.

• Lynch asserts that not allowing men in women’s restrooms is tantamount to denying “what makes them human.” Her claim is based on an arguable assumption about what makes a person human, which seems to stand far outside her professional bailiwick. Many would argue that physical embodiment as male or female is central to humanness—indeed, more central than feelings about physical embodiment.

• Lynch rightly states that separate facilities for blacks and whites were based on a “distinction without a difference,” implying that the difference between men and women is similarly insubstantial. This statement reveals a profound ignorance. Blacks and whites are distinct by virtue of their skin color, which is, indeed, a distinction without a difference. But men and women are substantively and significantly different. They’re so different, in fact, that gender-dysphoric men insist that they must use restrooms, changing areas, and showers with women only. If the difference between men and women constitutes a “distinction without a difference”—like the difference between blacks and whites—then why must gender-dysphoric men share private facilities with women only? Surely the differences between objectively male persons and objectively female persons are more significant than the differences between objectively male persons and objectively male persons who experience gender dysphoria.

  If there is no more difference between men and women than there is between blacks and whites—as Lynch seems to think—then why not eliminate all single-sex restrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms everywhere? Why not allow all men and all women to use the same restrooms, locker rooms, dressing rooms, showers, and shelters? After all, blacks and whites do.

• Since Lynch suggests that the unwillingness of women to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric men is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closemindedness, unfairness, lack of compassion, unjust regressive discrimination, and the denial of equality, how would she characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric men to share restrooms with non-gender-dysphoric men?

• How can Lynch possibly know that those who experience gender dysphoria were “born” to lead lives pretending to be the opposite sex? How can she possibly know with certainty that when there’s mismatch between one’s objective sex and one’s feelings about his sex that the error rests with his healthy, normally functioning body?

• America’s founding ideals did not include a commitment to deny objective ontological distinctions that have profound meaning.

North Carolinians and Americans everywhere better not treat this issue like they have treated every other incremental advance of a sexual ideology corrosive to truth and thus to human flourishing. They better be prepared to fight this with every fiber of their objectively male and female beings.

Written by Dr. Calvin Beisner

Since human nature hasn’t changed, it should come as no surprise that, even in our supposedly enlightened age, some people still want to use force, masquerading as law, to end debate.

It started with people just voicing their opinions that “climate skeptics,” or “climate deniers” (both deceptive caricatures) should be punished somehow. A few examples?

In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-style trials for skeptics. In 2008, NASA scientist James Hansen called for trials of skeptics for “high crimes against humanity,” and Obama advisor Joe Romm warned that climate skeptics would be strangled in bed.

In 2009,  the left-wing website Talking Points Memo provocatively asked, “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers?” and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called coal companies “criminal enterprises” whose CEOs “should be in jail … for all of eternity.”

Since then similar calls have surfaced repeatedly, but those who made them had no means to carry out their wishes.

More recently, things have become more serious. Fundamental liberties of free speech and free press, guaranteed by the First Amendment, are in jeopardy.

Last May, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), on the Senate floor, compared what he called “the misinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry about the dangers of carbon pollution” to “the tobacco industry’s misinformation campaign about the dangers of its product.”

Writing in The Washington Post he said corporations that support “the climate denial network” should face prosecution under RICO— the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (which Congress designed to target organized crime!).

In September, a group of 20 warmist scientists, apparently prompted by Whitehouse, wrote to President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, calling for “a RICO … investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.”

(Ironically, the group’s leader, Jagadish Shukla, then came under investigation for abuse of millions of dollars in government grants to his non-profit organization!) When World magazine quoted me calling the Shukla 20’s letter a “direct attack on the rights to freedom of speech and the press guaranteed by the First Amendment” and “horrifically bad for science,” Whitehouse responded angrily, naming me personally, on the Senate floor.

Free Speech, or Fraud?

Whitehouse claimed that the First Amendment didn’t apply because he was targeting only fraud, and the First Amendment doesn’t protect fraud.

True, but the legal definition of fraud is “intentional misrepresentation of material existing fact made by one person to another with knowledge of its falsity and for the purpose of inducing the other person to act, and upon which the other person relies with resulting injury or damage.”

The problem with Whitehouse’s call is that with the enormous range of opinions among scholars about:

•  how each of the thousands of subsystems of the climate system will respond to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.
•  how much warming will come from the added CO2.
•  how much harm and benefit will come from that warming.
•  how much benefit will come from the fertilizing effect of rising CO2 on almost all plants.
•  how to balance those harms and benefits against the benefits of the energy derived from fossil fuels; and
•  what would be the costs and benefits of efforts to reduce CO2 emissions by substituting other energy sources for fossil fuels

With all the legitimate scientific controversy over all those questions, proving that anyone who holds any particular position …

•  intentionally misrepresented material existing fact,
• with knowledge of its falsity,
•  to induce others to act,
• with the result that others actually did act,
• with resulting damage

… would be next to impossible, and at the rate at which climate is changing would take decades or centuries to determine because damage specifically traceable to human action, if it did occur, rather than natural factors won’t be clear for that long, if ever.

Comparing “climate skeptics” with defenders of the tobacco industry is patently absurd. The connection between tobacco smoking and cancer is infinitely simpler and more straightforward than that between CO2 emissions and (not simply global warming but) dangerous, man-made global warming.

Earth’s climate system is one of the most complex natural systems ever studied. It consists of thousands of subsystems — feedback mechanisms — most of which we still don’t understand. We don’t know how strong they are or in some cases even whether they increase or decrease warming or the balance of benefits and harms from it.

Providing energy to everyone is one of the most complex activities ever undertaken. The cost of reducing fossil fuel use — which now delivers about 85% of all energy in the world — is scores of trillions of dollars that could be used otherwise with far more benefit.

In the face of all the scientific and economic uncertainties, to prove that someone has (1) intentionally misrepresented an established fact, (2) knowing its falsity, (3) to induce others to act, (3) with the result that others do act and (4) are injured because of their acts, would, as I said, be almost impossible.

The only path to conviction would be for governments to judge which of the thousands of scholars were right, and which wrong, on hundreds of contested points.

In other words, our government would need a “Ministry of Truth” like that warned of in George Orwell’s 1984.

That is why I stand by my opinion that what Whitehouse and the Shukla 20 demand is a direct threat to First Amendment freedoms.

Nonetheless, on March 29 eighteen attorneys general calling themselves “AGs United for Clean Power” announced their intention to launch RICO investigations of organizations that challenge belief in catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming (CAGW).

One, the AG for the U.S. Virgin Islands, has subpoenaed ExxonMobil and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a CAGW-skeptic think tank, for over a decade’s worth of records.

Law or Politics?

The evidence is overwhelming that “AGs United for Clean Power” are clearly motivated not by concern for law but by partisan politics.

Their name incorporates part of the name of Obama’s legacy environmental regulation, the EPA’s “Clean Power Plan.” Al Gore, one of the world’s most outspoken climate alarmists, stood with them at their initial press conference. There’s not a single Republican among them.

And while they threaten fossil fuel corporations and organizations that question CAGW, they ignore renewable power companies that, despite federal subsidies of billions of dollars, have, like Solyndra, gone bankrupt, or, like SunEdison, are on the verge.

In short, the “AGs United for Clean Power” are abusing their legal powers to pursue a political agenda.

A Conspiracy to Deprive Citizens of their Rights?

And they might be committing a felony. Federal law—18 U.S.C. Sec. 241—says:

If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person … in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same; … They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both ….

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote of that in USA Today shortly after “AGs United for Clean Power” announced their intentions. But since U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, an Obama appointee, has announced her desire to investigate and prosecute climate skeptics, they aren’t likely to be held to account.

If they aren’t, they can wreak havoc on any person or organization that has voiced skepticism about CAGW. Even if they could never get a conviction, they could ruin their targets financially with legal and court costs.

Even if they never file indictments, the very threat has a chilling effect, and that’s dangerous — dangerous most importantly to our God-given rights to freedom of speech and press, yes, but also to the integrity of science.

That’s because science absolutely depends on free, wide-open, robust debate to progressively reduce error and replace it with truth. The appeal to “scientific consensus” to justify claims of CAGW and silencing skeptics is anti-scientific, because consensus is a political value, not a scientific one.

Want to know who won an election? Count votes. That’s politics.

Want to know how much an added amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise global average temperature? Study the climate system, try to understand how it works, make predictions based on your understanding, and compare your predictions with real-world observations. If the observations agree with your predictions, you might be right. And if the observations disagree with your predictions, you certainly are wrong. That’s science.

In short, science is the systematic process of testing all things and holding fast what is good — exactly what God commands us to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 — and you can’t do that if “all things” can’t be voiced.

So free inquiry and free speech are indispensable to good science.

Christian Faith and Freedom of Speech, Press, and Scientific Debate

They’re also implicit in the Christian faith because they are implied by the image of God in man. That image makes reason possible, and reason makes free choice possible.

When two billiard balls meet on a table, they don’t stop and discuss which will go where at what speed. They exchange energy and, by sheer force without reasoning, ricochet in their respective directions. But people, because we’re made in God’s image, have the capacity of rational choice.

That’s why, over the centuries, as Christians came to understand better and better the implications of their Biblical worldview and its doctrines of God, humanity, and sin, they became advocates of liberty — including freedom of speech, press and inquiry.

That’s why one of the earliest and most important defenses of intellectual freedom was by the Puritan poet John Milton (better known for Paradise Lost). His book Areopagitica, named for the Areopagus, the hill in Athens on which Paul debated over Christ’s resurrection.

The appeal to force to silence opponents in debates is consistent with an atheistic, materialist worldview, the one increasingly dominant among American progressives/liberals, but it’s utterly contrary to the Biblical worldview.

And indeed, because some people never tire of using force to silence truth, prison is a familiar place to God’s servants. Indeed, our word “martyr” comes from the Greek for “witness”: martus. And it’s not only for testifying of Christ that people suffer — they suffer for standing for many truths.

Joseph (Genesis 39), the prophet Hanani (2 Chronicles 16), Jeremiah (Jeremiah 37), John the Baptist (Matthew 14) and Peter and John (Acts 5 and 12) all went to prison because they stood for truth.

And before his conversion Paul imprisoned many Christians for their faith (Acts 8). Later, as an apostle, he spent years imprisoned in Philippi (Acts 16), Jerusalem (Acts 22), Caesarea (Acts 24), and throughout a long land and sea journey ending in Rome (Acts 27–28).

As Hebrews 11 says of heroes of the faith:

Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated — of whom the world was not worthy …. (Hebrews 11:35–38)

So Christians must not roll over and play dead in the face of bullies like “AGs United for Clean Power.” Instead, we must stand up to them, insist on our God-given and Constitution-guaranteed rights, and avail ourselves — as the Apostle Paul did (Acts 25:11) — when those rights are threatened.

Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, and a former Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary (2000–2008) and of Interdisciplinary Studies at Covenant College (1992–2000).

This article was originally posted at the Stream.org website.

In what is already a controversial session due to the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on many cases in the upcoming months that will have wide-reaching effects in American life. Here are three decisions that Christians should know about.

Health Standards: Protecting or Burdening Women?

Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt (formerly v. Cole) 

Pro-lifers across the country will want to pay close attention to this case arising out of Texas. In light of the haunting Kermit Gosnell story in 2013, the Texas state legislature enacted safety measures for abortion clinics. The law would require abortion clinics to adhere to the same standards as outpatient surgical centers and would require abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles in case health complications for the mother arise. If enforced, approximately three quarters of Texas abortion clinics now in operation would close.

Abortion advocates say this law violates the “undue burden” standard of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a doctrine which says any law that places a substantial obstacle to abortion is unconstitutional. In contrast, Texas argues that these are commonsense health regulations and that women are not burdened because the remaining abortion facilities are within reasonable driving distances throughout the state.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Texas law saying that it is not the role of the judiciary to consider the extent a state’s health laws have on restricting abortion access. The Supreme Court will now determine whether the Fifth Circuit properly used the “undue burden” standard in making its decision.

Of Nuns and Birth Control

Zubik v. Burwell 

What wins? Freedom of conscience or government interests? In Zubik v. Burwell, religious employers, such as Christian universities and Little Sisters of the Poor, are fighting Obamacare’s HHS mandate which requires them to cover the costs of “all FDA-approved contraceptives,” including abortion-inducing drugs, for their employees.

This may sound similar to last year’s Hobby Lobby case where the Court ruled the government cannot force employers with longstanding religious beliefs to pay for coverage that violates their conscience. To comply with Hobby Lobby, the Obama administration created an exception for religious employers that excludes the objectionable content from their insurance plans.

However, the federal government is still forcing the employers’ insurance companies and other third-party administrators to cover the costs of their employees who seek to obtain abortion pills. This means employers are still actively involved in providing drugs in their healthcare plans that violate their conscience.

The Court will weigh whether Obamacare’s HHS mandate and its “accommodation” violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Court’s decision will depend on whether the government can prove that this is the least restrictive way of advancing a compelling public interest.

A Separation between State and Playgrounds

Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley

The state of Missouri prevented pre-school and daycare centers from using a government program that provides recycled tires for safer playground surfaces. The reason? The pre-school is run by a church. Missouri claims that allowing the program to serve a church-run daycare will violate the principle of separation of church and state.

The Court will determine whether excluding churches from an otherwise neutral government program constitutes a violation of the Free Exercise and Equal Protection Clauses.

This article was originally posted at Mauck & Baker, LLC.

Education in America was originally the province of parents and churches. “Homeschooling” was the norm from colonial times through the mid-1800’s, and a classic education was the model.

Classical education consisted of the three stages of learning:

• The Grammar Stage — In this stage young children, whose minds are receptive to mass amounts of basic information, learn by memorization. Students learn the numbers, the alphabet, then words — the building blocks for the next stages of learning.
• The Dialectic Stage — In this stage the young students learn to compare and compartmentalize the building blocks. Sentence structure and grammar come into play.
• The Rhetoric Stage — In this third stage, students communicate “the truth of the subjects learned in the dialectic stage through writing, speech, or conversation…The third stage in learning a subject is to use what you’ve learned to solve a problem, write an original paper or speech, or lead a discussion.”

As noted at Classical Conversations: “This is the classical model of education that was used by the great thinkers and leaders of the past, including Aristotle, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Jefferson.”

What is stunning is to consider that America’s founders and early settlers often had superior knowledge of the world, languages, and sciences without computers or a Department of Education!

Until approximately 1940, the schools in America adhered to the classic education model, preparing students for college with “classical curriculum [which] included Latin, possibly Greek, often French or German, English, history, mathematics, and some science.”

People may scoff at someone such as my grandmother who only had an eighth grade education. Yet Grandma had had Latin, Algebra, extensive English grammar, and even some Calculus in those eight years. She had a work ethic and, with the help of her husband, my Grandpa Ole, bought and managed businesses and real estate and achieved, to a modest degree, “the American Dream.”

Following 1940, and after World War II, there was a demand for more workers in trades, and fewer students had the money or ability to go on to college. So American education took a turn away from solely classical education, to also providing vocational education, allowing young people to learn a trade, enter apprenticeship programs, and join the ranks of tradesmen and factory production.

But somewhere along the way, the Progressive (think socialist) principles of John Dewey, germinating since the 1920’s, began to take hold. Dewey, like President Wilson, and like modern day Progressives, believed that, rather than giving students facts and the eventual ability to reason and argue, that people should be led by experts. That young people should be molded in such a way that they would acquiesce to suggestions and mandates by the enlightened elitists.

Faith and the Bible had been a foundation of education in America. Noah Webster wrote often on the subject and claimed:

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Unfortunately, the Left has continued a quiet, but relentless war on that foundation, often aided by SCOTUS opinions and rulings. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Abington Township School District v. Schempp — decided on June 17, 1963 — “prohibiting school officials from organizing or leading prayers and devotional Bible reading in public schools.”

Though Schempp did not outlaw prayer and Bible reading in schools, but prohibited teachers from leading Bible study or prayer, the 60’s radicals (the latest permutation of Dewey and Wilson’s Progressives) took advantage and schools took a left turn. Gone was the classical education and in its place came a host of programs — sex ed, new math, whole language learning, and revisionist history.

What was the subtle, though potent, effect of all this “new curriculum?” Students were weaned from a reliance on parents and faith standards, from facts and reasoning, and pointed toward reliance on the “enlightened experts.” A new generation of students were raised up to question authority (at least their parents’ and grandparents’ authority) and blindly follow their teachers and profs.

Also, during this time the Federal government began to be more involved in education:

By 1965, the federal government, through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), expanded its involvement beyond areas with explicit defense connections. Importantly, the government did not mention increased federal control over education; rather, funding was the primary justification for this expansion

In 1979, the Department of Education was created, largely at the behest at the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA was, at this point, a new teacher’s union (albeit a very large teacher’s union). When Jimmy Carter was elected President, power over education became further concentrated in Washington.

Jump ahead to 2009, with Obama promising to fundamentally transform America. And one area of transformation was education. The Obama administration proposed criteria to evaluate every state’s education system, and the only way to standardize the education was through Common Core.

What in the world is “Common Core?”

That’s hard to pin down because it can be a different set of standards in different states. Some of the standards are terrible, some not so much.

But the REAL, issue with Common Core? Federalization of education. As written at Heritage:

Why is Common Core problematic? As evidence from both inside and outside the United States makes clear, centralization and control do not work; rather, freedom is the force that sparks educational improvement. Freedom unleashes competition, which, in turn, drives innovation and leads to specialization. The idea that there should be one monolithic set of standards and that everybody should move at the same rate makes no sense, as anyone who has met more than one child can readily attest.

Moreover, real accountability, immediate accountability, comes from freedom, choice, the ability to leave a provider that is not giving you what you want and take your business elsewhere. That is why there are a lot of recommendations for what to do when states get rid of Common Core.

Ultimately, the solution to America’s education problems is not more centralization. Instead, the answer is to create school choice for everyone.

Common Core appeals to Dewey disciples, to Progressives, because finally the masses of unenlightened Americans can be molded and coerced into a proper worldview and leave antiquated ideas and values behind.

But Common Core is nothing more than a Trojan Horse, enslaving towns and local communities to the mandates of Washington, and thereby the Progressive-driven NEA.

This country was birthed by people seeking freedom to live and worship, freedom to raise their offspring with a certain knowledge of God and the world He created. Common Core in the hands of über Progressives would seek to supplant the wisdom and role of parents with the mantra of secular and socialist ideals.

Common sense and real wisdom should warn us away from the centralized control of Common Core, and back to the time-tested truths of our forebears.

Dr. Duke Pesta on Common Core: DVD

IFI video recorded an event we had earlier this year with Dr. Duke Pesta, a nationally renown expert on the dangers of Common Core.  This DVD is available with any donation of $20 or more.

If you are a taxpayer, have young children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, are an educator, are a therapist, are a religious leader, are an elected official of any party, or care about very young children getting an excellent education in grades K-12, it would be worth your time to learn more about the federal takeover of education.  Watch it yourself or with a group!

Now that President Barack Obama has nominated Federal Judge Merrick Garland for the U.S. Supreme Court, Senate Republicans are under pressure to confirm the selection before the Presidential election.

But a conservative legal expert and a leading life activist in Illinois are hoping lawmakers will hold out. They note that the outcome of the voting in November could determine the direction of the High Court for decades to come.

The Illinois Family Institute is completely dependent on the voluntary contributions of individuals just like you.  Without you, we would be unable to fight the radical agenda being pushed by the godless Left.

Please consider a gift of $10 or $20 to support our work.

To make a credit card donation over the phone, call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.

[On Friday] in a 170-page ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion by issuing its own Judgment in favor of Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus. In the petition, Liberty Counsel demanded on behalf of its Alabama clients – Alabama Policy Institute (“API”) and Alabama Citizens Action Program (“ALCAP”) – that the state’s probate judges obey Alabama’s Constitution and laws. On March 4, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered the probate judges to immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

“The ruling last year by the Alabama Supreme Court was historic, and is one of the most researched and well-reasoned opinions on marriage to be issued by any court in the country. Today’s opinion by the Alabama Supreme Court calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion ‘illegitimate’ will be remembered in history like the ‘shot heard around the world,’” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Following the June 26, 2015, U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Obergefell opinion on marriage, the Alabama Supreme Court requested the parties to file additional briefs. [On Friday], the Alabama Supreme Court issued its final Judgment, thus affirming and implementing its March 4, 2015 opinion.

“The Alabama Supreme Court has openly rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 marriage opinion, labeling it ‘illegitimate’ and without legal or precedential authority. This is a clear victory for the rule of law and an historic decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The Judgement makes permanent the Alabama Supreme Court’s order prohibiting probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected the illegitimate opinion of five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Staver.

Chief Justice Roy Moore and Justice Tom Parker issued concurring opinions openly criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court marriage opinion. Using Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s term of “five lawyers” when referring to the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell opinion, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote a blistering 105-page concurring opinion:

• Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

• I agree with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, and with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, that the majority opinion inObergefell has no basis in the law, history, or tradition of this country. Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

• Based upon arguments of “love,” “commitment,” and “equal dignity” for same-sex couples, five lawyers, as Chief Justice Roberts so aptly describes the Obergefell majority, have declared a new social policy for the entire country. As the Chief Justice and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito eloquently and accurately demonstrate in their dissents, the majority opinion in Obergefell is an act of raw power with no ascertainable foundation in the Constitution itself. The majority presumed to legislate for the entire country under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. 

• The Obergefell majority presumes to amend the United States Constitution to create a right stated nowhere therein. That is a lawless act. 

• I submit that our Founders knew a lot more about freedom than [Justice Kennedy’s opinion] indicates. They secured the freedoms we enjoy, not in judicial decrees of newly discovered rights, but in the Constitution and amendments thereto. That a majority of the Court may identify an “injustice” that merits constitutional correction does not dispense with the means the Constitution has provided in Article V for its own amendment.

• Although the Court could suggest that the Constitution would benefit from a particular amendment, the Court does not possess the authority to insert the amendment into the Constitution by the vehicle of a Court opinion and then to demand compliance with it. 

• Novel departures from the text of the Constitution by the Court are customarily accompanied by pretentious language employed to conceal the illegitimacy of its actions. Justice Scalia in hisObergefell dissent refers to this abandonment of “disciplined legal reasoning” as a descent into “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

• Some of the ostentatious phrases used in the majority opinion [are] more suitable to a romance novel.

• The majority seeks to invoke the grief, sorrow, and compassion associated with a Greek tragedy. Riding a tidal wave of emotion, the ensuing tears and pathos then suffice to fertilize a new constitutional right nowhere mentioned in the Constitution itself.

• Abandoning the role of interpreting the written Constitution, the majority has instead decided to become the supposed “voice” of the people, discerning the people’s sentiments and updating the document accordingly. The function of keeping the Constitution up with the times, however, has not been delegated to the Court — or to Congress or the President; that function is reserved to the states under Article V. 

• Historically, consummation of a marriage always involved an act of sexual intimacy that was dignified in the eyes of the law. An act of sexual intimacy between two men or two women, by contrast, was considered “an infamous crime against nature” and a “disgrace to human nature.”Homosexuals who seek the dignity of marriage must first forsake the sexual habits that disqualify them from admission to that hallowed institution. Surely more dignity attaches to participation in a fundamental institution on the terms it prescribes than to an attempt to wrest its definition to serve inordinate lusts that demean its historic dignity.

• A “disgrace to human nature” cannot be cured by stripping the institution of holy matrimony of its inherent dignity and redefining it to give social approval to behaviors unsuited to its high station. Sodomy has never been and never will be an act by which a marriage can be consummated.

• Government exists to secure that right. Because liberty is a gift of God, it must be exercised in conformity with the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

• Liberty in the American system of government is not the right to define one’s own reality in defiance of the Creator. . . . But the human being, as a dependent creature, is not at liberty to redefine reality; instead, as the Declaration of Independence states, a human being is bound to recognize that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by God. Those rights are not subject to a redefinition that rejects the natural order God has created.

• Citing Genesis 2:24 — The Obergefell majority’s false definition of marriage arises, in great part, from its false definition of liberty. Separating man from his Creator, the majority plunges the human soul into a wasteland of meaninglessness where every man defines his own anarchic reality. In that godless world nothing has meaning or consequence except as the human being desires. Man then becomes the creator of his own reality rather than a subject of the Creator of the Declaration.

• This false notion of liberty, which permeates the majority opinion in, is the ultimate fallacy upon which it rests. In a world with God left out, the moral boundaries of Scripture disappear, and man’s corrupt desires are given full rein. The end of this experiment in anarchic liberty is yet to be seen. The great sufferers will be the children — deprived of either a paternal or a maternal presence — who are raised in unnatural families that contradict the created order.

• The invocation of “equal dignity” to justify the invention of a heretofore unknown constitutional right is just another judicial mantra to rationalize the invalidation of state laws that offend the policy preferences of a five-person majority.

• The majority opinion in Obergefell represents the culmination of a change in our form of government from one of three separate-but-equal branches to one in which the judicial branch now exercises the power of the legislative branch.

• The Obergefell majority, presuming to know better than the people themselves how to order the fundamental domestic institution of society, has usurped the legislative prerogatives of the people contrary to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

• In short, the majority acts not as a court of law but as a band of social revolutionaries. The Chief Justice, amazed at this presumption, exclaims: “Just who do we think we are?”

• The Chief Justice’s quotation of Justice Curtis’s Dred Scott dissent merits serious consideration. If acquiescence to Obergefell indicates that “we have no longer a Constitution,” then the legitimacy of Obergefell is subject to grave doubt. If five Justices of the Supreme Court may at will redefine the Constitution according to their own policy preferences, the mechanism of judicial review, designed originally to protect the rights of the people from runaway legislatures, has morphed into the right of five lawyers to rule the people without their consent.

• Indeed, as the Chief Justice warns, the plenary power the majority asserts to redefine the fundamental institutions of society offers no assurance that it will not give birth to yet further attacks on the social order.

• If, as the Chief Justice asserts, the opinion of the majority is not based on the Constitution, do state judges have any obligation to obey that ruling? Does not their first duty lie to the Constitution? 

• The right to change the form of government in this country belongs to the people themselves through the amendment process, not to judicial oligarchs.

• These metaphors identify the essence of the majority’s actions: an illegal displacement and usurpation of the democratic process. Chief Justice Roberts accuses the majority of imposing “naked policy preferences” that have “no basis in the Constitution.” Accordingly, the majority’s “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy” is “dangerous for the rule of law.” The unmistakable theme that emerges from these critiques is lawlessness.

• Justice Scalia also emphasizes the revolutionary character of the majority’s assault on the social order — elevating the “crime against nature” into the equivalent of holy matrimony. This decision, “unabashedly not based on law,” represents a “social upheaval” and a “judicial Putsch.” Justice Alito sounds the same themes. The Court has not unwittingly tread into forbidden territory; instead, it has acted “far beyond the outer reaches” of its authority, boldly trampling the right of the people “to control their own destiny.” 

• For the last 50 years, the Supreme Court has consistently misused the Fourteenth Amendment to destroy state laws that protect the marital relation and its offspring. Obergefell is the latest fruit of this corrupt tree (refer to Matthew 7:17-18).

• Truly, the less basis the majority has for its innovations upon the Constitution, the grander is the language employed to justify them, as if high-blown rhetoric could compensate for the absence of constitutional substance. 

• Obergefell is but the latest example of the Court’s creation of constitutional rights out of thin air in service of the immorality of the sexual revolution. Like Roe, Obergefell is no more than “an exercise of raw judicial power … an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

• Amendments to the Constitution are the business of the people pursuant to Article V; they are not the business of the Court under Article III. Truth may not always be clearly seen, but the majority’s reasoning should not blind us to the reality that the Court seems determined to alter this nation’s organic law. 

• The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has existed for millennia and has never been considered an “ill tendency.” By contrast, the Court’s attempt to redefine marriage is “a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.” 

• The Obergefell majority, conspicuously overlooking the “essential and historic significance” of the connection between religious liberty and “supreme allegiance to the will of God,” failed to appreciate the seriousness of imposing a new sexual-revolution mandate that requires Alabama public officials to disobey the will of God. 

• Religious liberty, however, is about more than just “teaching” and “advocating” views of marriage. The majority condescendingly approves religious speech against same-sex marriage but not religious practice in conformity with those beliefs. As Chief Justice Roberts states in his dissent: “The First Amendment guarantees … the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, this is not a word the majority uses.”

• Obergefell promises to breach the legal protections that have shielded believers from participating in acts hostile to their faith. As Chief Justice Roberts points out, the Obergefellmajority piously declaims that people of faith may believe what they want and seek to persuade others, but it says nary a word about them practicing or exercising their faith as the Free Exercise Clause provides.

• The Free Exercise Clause, an express constitutional provision, logically takes precedence over a pretended constitutional right formulated from whole cloth by “five lawyers.”

• Foreseeing the dire consequences for religious freedom in the principle that same-sex marriage must be given equal stature with holy matrimony and foreseeing the inevitable pressure to compel religious institutions, businesses, and practitioners of professions to conform to that unreality, it would be imprudent to wait for the onset of these persecutions, to stand idle until Obergefell “usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.” Rather “the axe [must be] laid unto the root of the trees,” (refer to Matthew 3:10) and the consequence avoided by denying the principle. To allow a simple majority of the United States Supreme Court to “create” a constitutional right that destroys the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment violates not only common sense but also our duty to the Constitution. 

• I disagree with the conclusion that the “rule of law” requires judges to follow as the “law of the land” a precedent that is “a super-legislative imposition,” “a mockery,” “a legal fiction,” and “an utter travesty.”

• By the plain language of Article VI, state judges are bound to obedience to the Constitution, laws made in pursuance thereof, and treaties made under the authority of the United States, not to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. 

• Thus, in the plainest terms and employing emphasis, Hamilton declared that acts of the federal government that invade the reserved rights of the states are “acts of usurpation” that deserve to be treated as such. Such acts “would not be the supreme law of the land, but an usurpation of power not granted by the Constitution.”

• The Supremacy Clause, quite obviously, by this chain of reasoning, does not give the United States Supreme Court or any other agency of the federal government the authority to make its every declaration by that very fact the supreme law of the land. If the Court’s edicts do not arise from powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, they are to be treated not as the supreme law of the land but as mere usurpation. 

• Thus, if precedents are “manifestly absurd or unjust,” “contrary to reason,” or “contrary to the divine law,” they are not to be followed.

• Applying Blackstone’s analysis, which is compatible with that of Hamilton, one must conclude that the Obergefell opinion is manifestly absurd and unjust, as demonstrated convincingly by the four dissenting Justices in Obergefell and the writings of two Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court in Costanza. Basing its opinion upon a supposed fundamental right that has no history or tradition in our country, the opinion of the Obergefell majority is “contrary to reason” as well as “contrary to the divine law.”

• The Obergefell opinion, being manifestly absurd and unjust and contrary to reason and divine law, is not entitled to precedential value. 

• If, as an individual who is sworn to uphold and support the United States Constitution, I were to place a court opinion that manifestly and palpably violates the United States Constitution above my loyalty to that Constitution, I would betray my oath and blatantly disregard the Constitution I am sworn to uphold. Acquiescence on my part to acts of “palpable illegality” would be an admission that we are governed by the rule of man and not by the rule of law. Simply put, the Justices of the Supreme Court, like every American soldier, are under the Constitution, not above it. 

• The general principle of blind adherence to United States Supreme Court opinions as “the law of the land” is a dangerous fallacy that is inconsistent with the United States Constitution. Labeling such opinions as “the rule of law” confuses the law itself — the Constitution — with an opinion that purports to interpret that document.

• Opinions of the Supreme Court that interpret the Constitution are, as Lincoln said, “entitled to very high respect and consideration,” but only insofar as they are faithful to that document. In a case like Obergefell, the “evil effects” Lincoln described should be confined to the unfortunate defendants in that case. We must protect the institution of marriage from judicial subversion and maintain loyalty to the principles upon which our nation was founded.

• Finally, we should reject the conversion of our republican form of government into an aristocracy of nine lawyers.

• Some contend, however, that Obergefell, by its mere existence, abrogates the March 2015 orders in this case. Those orders, of course, were not the subject of review in Obergefell. 

• The Court had no jurisdiction to order nonparties to Obergefell to obey its judgment for they have not had an opportunity to appear and defend.

• No Alabama probate judges were parties to Obergefell. Neither were they officers, agents, or servants of any of the defendants in those cases, or in active concert or participation with any of them. The Obergefell defendants were state officials in the four states in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, namely Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Needless to say, Alabama probate judges were not agents, servants, or employees of any of those state officials. Nor were they in “active concert or participation” with any of them.Thus, the judgment in Obergefell that reversed the Sixth Circuit’s judgment does not constitute an order to Alabama probate judges.

• The dissents of Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito provide ample justification to refuse to recognize Obergefell as a legitimate judicial judgment. Obergefellconstitutes an unlawful purported amendment of the Constitution by a judicial body that possesses no such authority. As Chief Justice Roberts stated: “The right [Obergefell] announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”

• Rather than limiting themselves to the judicial function of applying existing law to the facts and parties before them, the Obergefell majority violated “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” by purporting to rewrite the marriage laws of the several states to conform to their own view of marriage.

• Even more injurious to the rule of law, the Obergefell majority “overleap[ed] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people” as expressed in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The majority thus has jeopardized the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and the right to acknowledge God as the author and guarantor of true liberty. 

• By transgressing “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” and “overleap[ing] the great Barrier” which protects the rights of conscience, the Obergefell majority “exceed[s] the commission from which they derive their authority” and are “tyrants.” By submitting to that illegitimate authority, the people, as Madison stated, become slaves. Free government, rather than being preserved, is destroyed.

• Obergefell is completely without constitutional authority, a usurpation of state sovereignty, and an effort to impose the will of “five lawyers,” . . . on the people of this country. 

• In my legal opinion, Obergefell, like Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade that preceded it, is an immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical opinion. Its consequences for our society will be devastating, and its elevation of immorality to a special “right” enforced through civil penalties will be completely destructive of our religious liberty.

• Obergefell contradicts “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” that were invoked in the organic law upon which our country is founded. To invariably equate a Supreme Court decision that clearly contradicts the Constitution with “the rule of law” is to elevate the Supreme Court above the Constitution and to subject the American people to an autocracy foreign to our form of government. Supreme Court Justices are also subject to the Constitution. When “that eminent tribunal” unquestionably violates the limitations set forth in that document, lesser officials — equally bound by oath to the Constitution — have a duty to recognize that fact or become guilty of the same transgression.

In a separate concurring opinion, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Parker wrote:

• “Obergefell conclusively demonstrates that the rule of law is dead.”

• “Obergefell … trampled into the dust the last vestiges of the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.”

• “Obergefell is not based on legal reasoning, history, tradition, the Court’s own rules, or the rule of law, but upon the empathetic feelings of the ‘five lawyers’ in the majority.”

• “[The Supreme Court] majority illegitimately imposed its will upon the American people. We now appear to be a government not of laws, but of ‘five lawyers.’”

• “Obergefell is ‘no judicial act at all’ because it is ‘without principled justification.’”

• “Obergefell is without legitimacy.”

• “This is not the rule of law, this is despotism and tyranny.”

• “Despotism and tyranny were evils identified in the Declaration of Independence as necessitating the break with King George and Great Britain.”

• “Obergefell is the latest example of judicial despotism.”

•  “As justices and judges on state courts around the nation, we have sworn and oath to uphold the United States Constitution. We have not sworn to blindly follow the unsubstantiated opinion of ‘five lawyers.’”

Justice Parker quotes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 abortion decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

[T]he Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court’s power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands…. [A] decision without principled justification would be no judicial act at all…. The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decision on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court’s legitimacy depends on circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.

“Justices and judges are bound to interpret the U.S. Constitution. When they write opinions that have no legal foundation, then their opinions lack legal legitimacy. That is what the five lawyers did on the U.S. Supreme Court in the marriage opinion. They ignored the Constitution, the Court’s precedents, and millennia of human history. Their opinion calls into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. When we the people lose trust in the Justices, the authority of the Supreme Court is undermined. If the people accept this 5-4 opinion, then we have transitioned to a despotic form of government. The people must now decide if we are governed by the rule of law or the whim of unelected judges,” concluded Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

Dr. Wayne Grudem says “moral character” still matters as the nation chooses a new President. During an Illinois Family Institute sponsored meeting with faith leaders the renowned theologian and author challenged pastors to let their congregation know that the future of America is at stake and how the nation votes will not only determine who our next President will be, but also the direction of the Supreme Court. New additions to the High Court will likely decide life and religious liberty cases.

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Written by Rachel Lu

Men were built for fighting. Women were built for childbearing. It’s interesting to note how stubbornly true—even obvious—these statements remain, despite aggressive efforts to bury them.

Modern people have a penchant for denying obvious things. Dysfunctional politics and political correctness have brought us to the point of potentially approving women’s inclusion in a military draft. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently entertained arguments in favor of requiring women to register for the selective service, and three candidates endorsed the plan in New Hampshire’s Republican debate. The trickle is turning into a stampede. Suddenly political correctness requires that we all agree that girls can fight just as well as boys.

The problem is that it’s just not true. We need to return to some basic Aristotelian principles in order to explain why drafting women would be both imprudent and unjust.

Playing Politics

From a political standpoint, it’s easy to understand why Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie were all prepared to agree that women should register for the selective service. (U.S. Senator Mike Lee is pushing legislation to block the drafting of women, which has won support from Rubio and from Ted Cruz.) Somewhat farcically, all three candidates treated selective service registration as a wonderful new “opportunity” for women. That’s silly; the system exists to enable conscription in a time of extreme need. Women already have the opportunity to enlist in the military if they meet the relevant requirements.

Rubio specified that most likely a draft would apply only to women who met the physical requirements. But this would be a foolish policy in an emergency scenario. If you desperately need a large number of soldiers in a hurry, is it sensible to start screening populations of people that will mostly be unfit for the job? Should children and retirees also be included, in case a few turn out to be suitable for active service? This is nonsense. Every society in history has built its armies primarily of young men, for an excellent reason: They are overwhelmingly the most fit for the job.

If the Republican candidates were thinking clearly, they would be racing to specify that they support drafting women only to non-combat roles. This is a more sane position, modeled on the example of other nations (such as Israel) that use female conscripts primarily in supporting roles (as medics, logistical support, etc.). Considering that a draft would only be implemented in a time of extreme need, asking unattached young women to serve their country in these capacities could be reasonable. Demanding that they serve as infantry would not be.

The Collapse of Gender Sanity

It’s disconcerting to see even Republicans sanctioning this kind of foolishness, but there may be a silver lining here. There is value to discussing this issue at a moment when we desperately need a starting point for a more reasonable conversation about sex and gender. Sending thousands of young women to die in battle would be morally monstrous, but luckily, we are not currently threatened with a draft. Instead we are facing a near-total collapse of gender sanity.

With schools banning the concepts of “boyhood” and “girlhood,” single-sex restrooms being treated as an affront, and even the Olympics allowing anatomical males to compete in women’s events, American gender politics has reached freakish levels of absurdity. If there is any chance of returning to sanity, our understanding of gender will need to be rooted in reflections on something objective and measurable: the body.

Americans have been suspicious of stark gender claims for a long time, and in some cases this is actually reasonable. Do boys really excel in math and science? Are girls really more nurturing or “emotionally intelligent”? These stereotypes are not groundless, but it may not be appropriate or necessary to assert them too forcefully. Boys and girls are indeed different in certain respects, including in how their brains develop. Nevertheless some boys are well attuned to emotion, while some girls may be assertive, independent, or analytical. Gender skeptics may reasonably ask: Isn’t it time we stopped defining people by dated stereotypes and allowed them to prove for themselves what they can do?

Much of the public finds these arguments persuasive, which is why politicians are happy to echo them—even on the political right. Most of us don’t mind when increased gender-role flexibility means a girl can become a sportswriter or an electrical engineer. In our time, however, the lines of reasonableness clearly have been crossed. Given that so many of our compatriots have rejected tradition as offensive and anachronistic, what other grounds are there to restore some sort of natural order?

The case of women in the draft may fit this purpose, because the objections are so obvious and so rooted in physiology. One can understandably argue that stereotypes play a role in holding women back from, say, achievements in the STEM fields. But military service is an entirely different animal. By significant margins, women are physically weaker and slower and have poorer reflexes than men. On the battlefield, these shortcomings make a literally life-or-death difference.

The Marine Corps commissioned a study that found that their strongest female recruits (top 25%) were about on par with the weakest male recruits (bottom 25%). Women undergoing entry-level marine training were an appalling six times more likely to suffer injury, including especially high rates of musculoskeletal injuries due to movement with heavy loads. (Even women who seem spectacularly fit may still sustain pelvic fractures from long marches with a standard military pack.) Mixed-gender units were slower and less lethal, and sustained more casualties.

In short, women don’t make very good soldiers. The exceptions are few and don’t stand out much by elite military standards. Women can certainly be courageous, patriotic, and self-sacrificing, but the female body was not built for combat.

From Biological Determinism To Biological Escapism

Suppose you consider chivalry outdated or even sexist. Perhaps you scoff at the idea that all-male units will have a stronger sense of fraternity, and you’re unworried about the possibility of romantic entanglement. But have you considered the strong evidence that female conscripts would be less effective in achieving military objectives, but far more likely to die trying? Are you moved by the consideration that under-qualified soldiers are a danger to everyone in their unit? Drafting women to combat roles just doesn’t make sense.

You may reply, won’t girls feel bad if we tell them they are weak, slow, and generally unimposing in combat? Isn’t this tantamount to saying that women are physically inferior?

Not at all, if you put the claims in a larger context. Women have bodies of amazing power: Nothing can compare to holding a newborn and realizing with awe, “My body built that.” It’s a remarkable feat that men can never simulate.

Women are physiologically awe-inspiring, but not in a way suited for soldiering. Their energies go towards something else; indeed, the female reproductive system is far more “expensive” in terms of invested energy, whether or not a woman ever bears a child.

Might these physiological differences tell us anything about what a flourishing life should look like, for men or women? Modern feminists would say “no”; that kind of reasoning is angrily rejected as “biological determinism.” Gloria Steinem famously declared, “Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.”

Steinem’s comment is a good illustration of how far feminist thinking is removed from reality. Singing opera is a highly rarified use of a part of the anatomy that most of us use all the time, whereas wombs are useful for gestating babies and really nothing else. Still, feminists are right to object against any claim that a person who is physically suited to X must be restrictively mandated against doing anything besides X. But does anyone make this claim? It is possible to find moral significance in the body without engaging in hackneyed reductionism.

Women should not be commodified as baby-builders, any more than men should be commodified as body-builders. It turns out, though, that a flight from “biological determinism” sometimes ends in a kind of biological escapism. If we insist that our physiology has no moral significance, we may find ourselves desperately trying to hide from the obvious consequences of refusing to be what, in fact, we are.

Being Corporeal

We see manifold evidence of this escapism in modern life. Schools tie themselves into knots trying to prevent boys from doing what boys of virtually every culture like to do: wrestle, compete, and play warlike games. Boys are not suited to sitting in chairs all day long: The lack of movement in school is a huge problem for them that seems to be undercutting their scholastic achievement. Later in life, if they enlist in the military, the physical standards they are expected to meet will probably have been lowered to make it more possible for women to compete. Let’s have no overt expressions of masculinity in the military, please! It makes the ladies feel bad.

In a different way, girls are taught to suppress their most uniquely feminine characteristics. Progressive liberals have poured enormous energy into ensuring that girls can suppress their reproductive potentialities without cost, without judgment, and preferably as early as possible. Obsessed with lifting the “burden” of reproduction, these liberals lose any sense of healthy respect for motherhood or new life. They regularly reveal their disdain for pregnancy, children, and families, as we saw when NARAL activists threw themselves into a frenzy of indignation over a Super Bowl commercial that presented unborn children as humans.

Virtually no one would argue that either men or women should be enslaved to their physiology. But should we see it as an awkward physiological accident that men have (larger) biceps, and women the power to bring forth new life? Surely it’s more reasonable to incorporate these features into a complete and fully humane understanding of manhood and womanhood, in a way that gives meaning and social purpose to both.

What this means is that both boys and girls should be raised to embrace the unique potentialities of their bodies. Not every boy will grow up to be a soldier, but every boy can be taught to channel his natural competitiveness and aggression towards good. Young men should view themselves as protectors,ready to do what is needed to prevent the wicked from victimizing the innocent.

In a similar vein, not every girl will become a mother. Most will, but a woman who is unafraid of her physiology will find a healthy outlet for her life-giving impulses whether or not she literally bears a child. That doesn’t mean she can’t also (if she wants) learn to write software, but it does mean that she should expect her contribution to society to take the form of giving life, not taking it.

Again and again, the progressive left has proven that prudent living, once neglected, is soon spurned. Drafting women would be a particularly tragic illustration of this point: Even women who don’t want to serve could be forced to throw their lives away in a desperate effort to act like men. Might we use this moment to walk the conversation back in the other direction? Our military needs at the moment are happily not so dire, but in the war against nature and common sense, the enemy seems to be winning. Let’s step up our recruitment efforts.

Rachel Lu teaches philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and three boys. Dr. Lu earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell University.

This article was originally posted on ThePublicDiscourse.com.

“All of life is partisan.” ~ Saul Alinsky

In the 24 hours since Josh Earnest announced that President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle would not attend the funeral of renowned U.S. Supreme Court Justice, much virtual ink has been spilled about the appropriateness of this choice. Even a number of liberals have expressed puzzlement and disappointment. In light of the ceremonial duties that Obama has performed, including pardoning turkeys, throwing baseballs, and visiting dictators, it is passing strange that he won’t attend Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral.

Obama sought and won—twice—the highest office in the greatest nation in history and then spurns the funeral of arguably one of the greatest legal minds ever to grace the U.S. Supreme Court—a claim that even Justice Scalia’s ideological foes acknowledge. Justice Scalia’s public service did not begin with his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served another ten years in various governmental positions. Not even forty years of highly esteemed public service merits Obama’s presence at his funeral. As many times as President Cool has exposed the depth of his contempt for his ideological opponents, for convention, and for true principles, he manages to dig a little deeper, confounding even his allies.

A Leftist writer tried futilely to defend Obama’s indefensible, childish, and partisan decision by saying Obama’s presence would be a distraction. Isn’t a world leader’s presence at funerals always a distraction? Wasn’t it a distraction when Obama appeared at Former U.S. House Speaker Tom Foley’s funeral, or U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye’s, or U.S. Senator Robert Byrd’s, or U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy’s, or Walter Kronkite’s?

In light of Obama’s divers dubious actions, including this most recent egregious symbolic insult, surely Obama can’t expect Americans to believe these statements of his:

• We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
• What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly.
• Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values.
• Those of us who have the privilege to serve this country have an obligation to do our job as best we can. We come from different parties, but we are Americans first.
• What the American people hope—what they deserve—is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics.
• We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

Perhaps his light-hearted quip most truly reveals his political philosophy:

That’s the good thing about being president. I can do whatever I want.

I am reminded of a recent Chicago Tribune front-page headline that read: “Politics imperils court’s prestige.” Perhaps it should be rewritten: “Politics imperils presidential prestige.”

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Earlier this month, a group of Marine Corps and Army generals dropped a bombshell on an unsuspecting U.S. Senate committee. In doing so, they opened a can of worms that our society desperately wants to keep closed: the one containing the real-world consequences of denying the innate differences between men and women.

General Robert Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, in response to a question from Missouri U.S. Senator Clair McCaskill told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft.”

Neller’s position was seconded by General Mark Milley, the Army Chief of Staff.

While their responses delighted McCaskill, it put the current secretaries of the Navy and Army in an awkward position. While the Obama administration has pushed for the full integration of women into combat roles, it has not come out in favor of requiring women to register for the draft when they turn eighteen.

The problem is that in opening up combat roles for women, the Obama administration has removed the only legal justification for treating men and women differently when it comes to the draft.

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this differential treatment on the grounds that “the purpose of registration was to prepare for a draft of combat troops.” Since women were excluded from combat, they could be excluded from registration. Doing away with the exclusion from combat logically leads to taking away any exclusion from the draft.

Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is absolutely correct when he wrote that the proposal to make women register for the draft isn’t just a military proposal; “it’s about an entire worldview built on the bankrupt ideology of egalitarianism.”

This ideology denies that there are any meaningful differences between men and women, and that all legal and cultural distinctions are impermissible discrimination against women, even when women are the beneficiaries of these distinctions.

This ideology has led to what Walker has called our culture’s “weakened understanding of masculinity that makes male obligation optional if women are willing to do the duty of men.” This weakened understanding is reflected in public opinion polls showing that strong majorities favor allowing women in combat units.

It’s against this cultural setting, and the “tectonic shift” it represents, that we must see this proposal. A society that is increasingly reluctant to make men fulfill their obligations as husbands and fathers is, not surprisingly, increasingly reluctant to make them fulfill their obligation to protect those in need of protection.

Let me be clear: I’m not against requiring young people to perform public service, whether in the military or in some other capacity. And I wouldn’t dare imply that women aren’t as tough or as capable as men. As a happily married man and the father of a talented daughter, I can tell you that if anything, the opposite is true.

But subjecting women to the military draft ignores the way God created us, male and female. As Walker says, “God didn’t make us automatons. He didn’t make us asexual monads. He made us gendered, embodied, and different. The differences extend to all levels of our being—our emotional, physical, and psychological selves. The Christian tradition finds these differences beautiful; and we embrace them with glad acceptance.”

And because we Christians embrace these beautiful differences, we should vigorously oppose drafting women into the military. It’s a bad idea—one that would sacrifice our daughters on the altar of an ugly ideology.

Read more:

Experimental barbarism: Why drafting women is wrong
Andrew Walker | erlc.com | February 8, 2016

Threats Of Drafting Women Reveal The Lies Of Equality
D.C. McAllister | The Federalist | February 8, 2016

This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org

Written by Mark. J. Fitzgibbons

The importance of Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away this past weekend, is based not just in what he said in his U.S. Supreme Court opinions, but how he said it.

Famous for his biting and even entertaining dissents, Scalia at times (and usually the right ones) expressed a common sense moral outrage at both his liberal and less consistent conservative colleagues. He was the ‘everyman’ in his outrage, saying what we might want to say about their departures from sound constitutional jurisprudence, but far more gifted with a legal genius shaped by an originalist view of the Constitution — and a wittiness that made conservatives smile and chuckle.

His flamboyant style of writing legal opinions made him what marketing guru Seth Godin calls a “purple cow.” He stood out in a field of more common brown cows. But more than that, it was the boldness of his style that made him an intellectual leader for originalism. In a city and system of institutions that tend to stifle and hold back the candid, he made candor about the original intent of the Constitution his brand.

He gave conservatives hope that the Constitution would not be lost for a lack of honesty or standing by principle, the shortage of which are trademarks of Washington and government.

Scalia understood that American constitutional law is based in the morality that civil society should be structured such that we should do no harm to others. The “we” includes government. The Constitution is structured to limit government’s harm to individuals and our God-given rights. Scalia understood the need for judicial fidelity to that structure.

This rule of law over government itself is a key to originalism, and creates a bright-line contrast with the progressive view that the ends of those in government are at least almost always what are best for the rest of us despite transgressing the Constitution. The Founders understood both the perpetual necessity and dangers of government, and therefore structured the governing law over government — the Constitution — to limit the dangers.

Scalia was criticized by liberals in the legal profession, particularly academicians, for his famously biting opinions. Some claimed Scalia’s ‘zingers’ created contempt for the courts. To the contrary, it was Scalia’s deep and passionate respect for the role of the courts in our constitutional structure that led to his judicial poking at how some judges have an inflated and faulty sense of their authority.

In his dissent to the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision recognizing a constitutional right to gay marriage, for example, he wrote this about the majority opinion: “I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of [founding-era Supreme Court Justices] John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

Justice Scalia was certainly not above growing in his understanding of the Bill of Rights. Known to many as a law-and-order conservative, Scalia nevertheless wrote one of the most important decisions in recent decades about the protections guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment for searches and seizures.

His majority opinion in U.S. v. Jones from 2012 brought the Fourth Amendment back to its roots in concepts of “trespass.” His opinion countered a dangerous neglect of property rights by progressives who, not fond of property rights, favored a less comprehensive “privacy” focus, which had controlled Fourth Amendment jurisprudence for some decades to the exclusion of a property rights approach.

Scalia wrote,

[F]or most of our history the Fourth Amendment was understood to embody a particular concern for government trespass upon the areas (“persons, houses, papers, and effects”) it enumerates . . . But as we have discussed, the . . . reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test has been added to, not substituted for, the common-law trespassory test.

Scalia led for civil liberties by returning to this originalist understanding of the Fourth Amendment, which mentions property but not privacy. The common law concepts of trespass on our persons and property, and our rights in their security vis-a-vis others who seek to intrude on that security, are broader that mere privacy. Scalia recognized in this opinion that to prevent harm — but only after following basic procedures or protocols designed to limit abuses by government — may searches and seizures occur. When government neglects the notions of trespass inherent in the Fourth Amendment, even our privacy is threatened.

Scalia also became more of a First Amendment champion. His disappointing dissent in McIntryre v. Ohio Election Commission from 1995 about anonymous political speech was countered by Justice Clarence Thomas in a short treatise on the subject in the form of a concurring opinion.

Scalia would later become one of the most reliable justices on the First Amendment. In expressly targeting the “dangerous dissent” by Justice Stevens in the Citizens United case, Scalia exposed Stevens’ poor attempt to come across as using an originalist approach against the First Amendment. Stevens, no originalist, was throttled by Scalia’s scathing concurring opinion:

The Framers didn’t like corporations, the [Stevens] dissent concludes, and therefore it follows (as night the day) that corporations had no rights of free speech. Of course the Framers’ personal affection or disaffection for corporations is relevant only insofar as it can be thought to be reflected in the understood meaning of the text they enacted—not, as the dissent suggests, as a freestanding substitute for that text. But the dissent’s distortion of proper analysis is even worse than that. Though faced with a constitutional text that makes no distinction between types of speakers, the dissent feels no necessity to provide even an isolated statement from the founding era to the effect that corporations are not covered, but places the burden on petitioners to bring forward statements showing that they are (“there is not a scintilla of evidence to support the notion that anyone believed [the First Amendment ] would preclude regulatory distinctions based on the corporate form.”

As the life and work of Justice Scalia are honored and remembered, conservatives would do well to be grateful for his bold leadership on behalf of the originalist moorings of constitutional jurisprudence.

This article was originally posted at AmericanThinker.com

A 1,061-page rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which is better known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), suddenly popped up in the House on Monday and was voted on late Wednesday, passing 359-64. All 64 “no” votes were cast by Republicans.

At over 1,000 pages, S. 1177, the Every Child Achieves Act (ECAA) [also known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)], like Obamacare, was too lengthy to read and digest in just two days, and yet House Republicans rammed it forward despite Paul Ryan’s prior assurances that as House speaker he would provide voters ample time to read bills prior to votes.

On November 19, Erin Tuttle, writing for the non-partisan Truth in American Education argued that Americans are entitled to read this bill before the vote:

Because the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) will be the largest piece of federal education legislation Congress will pass in over a decade, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) should allow the bill to be made publicly available for at least 60 days before the House considers it.

The bill is not scheduled to be made publicly available until November 30^th. Thus, a vote should not be scheduled until late January. Currently, it is scheduled for December 2; two days is clearly not sufficient. House members will be forced to vote on a bill they haven’t read.

The American people expected a new style of leadership under Speaker Ryan, not more of the same. If he allows a bill of this magnitude to become law without adequately vetting its merits and faults, it will affirm that the same ills that plagued Congress under Speaker Boehner remain fully intact.

ECAA includes some positive changes in terms of diminishing the role of the federal government in state education business, such as eliminating onerous Adequate Yearly Progress mandates. That said, there are serious problems with the bill, including the following change explained by Education Week:

[S]tate accountability systems would be required to include “not less than one indicator of school quality or student success that allows for meaningful differentiation in school performance and is valid, reliable, comparable, and statewide, which may include measures of – (I) Student engagement; (II) Educator engagement; (III) Student access to and completion of advanced coursework; (IV) Postsecondary readiness; (V) School climate and safety; and (VI) any other indicator the state chooses that meets the requirements of this clause.”

These criteria or measurements are troubling for several reasons:

• Several are woefully ambiguous.
• Several are difficult to measure and would be based on subjective responses.
• Evaluation of “School climate and safety” would surely be based at least partly on subjective responses by students and would likely be used to justify further school involvement in controversial, political school-sponsored activity related to homosexuality and gender dysphoria.

Another troubling aspect of ECAA is its involvement with pre-kindergarten programs. Under Title IX, ECAA authorizes $250 million for a new federal preschool program to be administered by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. This massive expenditure of money the government does not have is being made despite the fact that many scholars like Grover Whitehurst at the Brookings Institution doubt the efficacy of pre-kindergarten programs:

The best available evidence raises serious doubts that a large public investment in the expansion of pre-k for four-year-olds will have the long-term effects that advocates tout. 

This initiative requires that preschool curricula align with Head Start (which is administered through HHS). Few are aware that since 2012, Head Start has been quietly working to align its standards with Common Core, which explains why some are calling ECAA “Baby Common Core.”

If you’re not troubled yet by the prospect of Big Brother poking his proboscis through the preschool door, perhaps this excerpt from a Head Start document will illuminate some of the goals Head Start has for our nation’s disadvantaged little ones:

Last month the Early Head Start National Resource Center hosted a conversation with key stakeholders to explore how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) families are being served by Early Head Start programs….Stakeholders included program and parent representatives, federal staff, Head Start training and technical assistance representatives, and experts from the LGBT community….what do welcoming Head Start/Early Head Start programs look like?

The group brainstormed ideas of what a welcoming program looks like. And some of the characteristics of welcoming programs include:

• Welcoming symbols for LGBT families such as  the rainbow flag or equality stickers, and diverse images of parents and families in marketing materials
• Inclusive intake and enrollment forms that are not specific about the gender of parents and caregivers
• Partnerships with organizations that help LGBT families get information and support that they need

Is this the organization Americans want to receive more tax dollars?

ECAA does not allow Title I funds to be portable, thus limiting school choice for parents.

ECAA does not include an Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success (A-PLUS) provision that would have allowed states to opt out of programs that fall under ECAA and instead direct money in ways that best serve their state’s needs.

ECAA neither eliminates wasteful, inefficacious, and duplicative programs, nor reduces spending, nor establishes funding limits.

So, who loves this bill? The National Governor’s Association, which gave us Common Core; the Third Way, a center-left think tank; the Center for American Progress, a leftist public policy and advocacy group; the National Education Association; and President Obama.

Who dislikes this bill? Heritage Action, a conservative grassroots activist organization that deems a vote for ECAA to be a “key vote,” that will be reported on the lawmaker’s legislative record.

All that remains is for President Obama to sign it into law, which he has promised he will.

How Did Illinois’ Congressional Delegation Vote?

TheECAA passed late yesterday afternoon in the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 359 to 64.  Democrats voted 181 to 0. Republicans voted 179 to 64.  Unfortunately, our Illinois Congressional Delegation voted unanimously in favor of this intrusive, immoral, big government bill.

Voting Results:

Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D)—YEA
1st Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-4372
District Phone: (773) 224-6500
Webform

Rep. Robin Kelly (D)—YEA
2nd Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-0773
District Phone: (708) 679-0078
Webform

Rep. Daniel Lipinski (D)—YEA
3rd Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: 202-225-5701
District Phone: 312-886-0481
Webform

Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D)—YEA
4th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-8203
District Phone: (773) 342-0774
Webform

Rep. Mike Quigley (D)—YEA
5th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-4061
District Phone: (773) 267-5926
Webform

Rep. Peter Roskam (R)—YEA
6th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-4561
District Phone: (630) 232-7393
Webform

Rep. Danny K. Davis (D)—YEA
7th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202)225-5006
District Phone: (773) 533-7520
Webform

Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D)—YEA
8th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-3711
District Phone: (847) 413-1959
Webform

Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D)—YEA
9th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-2111
District Phone: (773) 506-7100
Webform

Rep. Bob Dold (R)—YEA
10th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-4835
District Phone: (847) 793-8400
Webform

Rep. Bill Foster (D)—YEA
11th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-3515
District Phone: (630) 585-7672
Webform

Rep. Mike Bost (D)—YEA
12th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-5661
District Phone: (618)-233-8026
Webform

Rep. Rodney Davis (R)—YEA
13th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-2371
District Phone: (217) 791-6224
Webform

Rep. Randy Hultgren (R)—YEA
14th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-2976
District Phone: (630) 584-2734
Webform

Rep. John Simkus (R)—YEA
15th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-5271
District Phone: (217) 347-7947
Webform

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R)—YEA
16th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-3635
District Phone: (815) 708-8032
Webform

Rep. Cheri Bustos (D)—YEA
17th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-5905
District Phone: (309) 966-1813
Webform

Rep. Darin LaHood (R)—YEA
18th Congressional Dist.
Washington Phone: (202) 225-6201
District Phone: (309) 671-7027
Webform

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