Big Marijuana Inc. has saturated our state with $1.5 billion in sales last year alone, and State Representative La Shawn Ford (D-Chicago) hopes to further expand the drug culture in Illinois. State Representatives Jehan Gordon-Booth (D-Peoria), Jonathan Carroll (D-Northbrook), Anne Stava-Murray (D-Downers Grove) and Kevin John Olickal (D-Chicago) are co-sponsors of this terrible proposal.

La Shawn Ford is the chief sponsor of HB 1, which sets the stage for more drugs on the streets and in our communities. The bill creates the “Compassionate Use and Research of Entheogens Act” for the purpose of legalizing psilocybin, among other hallucinogenic drugs, which is the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms — a Schedule 1 drug.

As a way to justify legalization, in Ford’s eyes, HB 1 starts out with everything we’ve done wrong trying to keep drugs off the streets and out of our communities through criminalization. According to the text, we’ve spent too much money, circulated too much misinformation, made drug use less safe, (say what?) and attached unnecessary stigmas – all contributing to the increase of drug use, in his limited opinion. So, Ford’s solution is to remove restrictions and legalize everything. This at a time when drug overdose deaths have reached record levels.

The “harm reduction tools,” which Ford wants in facilities that offer “psilocybin services,” include drug-checking kits, scales, and capsules and would allow “users to make safe and more accurate, evidence-based decisions about their personal use of these substances.” What user wouldn’t like to get these “tools” from the State to make using illegal substances easier? Common sense tells us that these so-called “tools” would inevitably increase drug use, and at taxpayer expense.

HB 1 lays out the groundwork for “psilocybin services” taking place in “administration sessions” for “clients” which is a fancy way of saying they will provide facilities where 18-yr-olds can hallucinate with a paid Dept. of Public Health licensed “facilitator” present.

To make the case that psychedelics are safe for the purpose of legalization, HB 1 relies on sketchy research to support the use of psychedelic compounds to treat mental health and other disorders such as anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, PTSD, and headaches. And there you have it. This is right out of the “medical marijuana” handbook, which was right out of “Big Tobacco.”

‘It’s safe because it has medicinal properties because we say it does. Therefore, it should be legal.’ That’s how they think. They’ll license, regulate, and make available these psychedelics to anyone 18 and older. This is very serious.

But they’ve gotten ahead of themselves, because a few pages into the bill, you’ll find that a person does not have to have any medical or mental condition in order to engage in “psilocybin services.”

And it’s not just psilocybin that they want to decriminalize and legalize. The bill also mentions dimethyltryptamine, ibogaine, and mescaline – all entheogens/hallucinogens/psychedelics.

Let’s take a look at what an entheogen is and what it’s used for:

From Wikipedia: “Entheogens are psychoactive substances that induce alterations in perception, mood, consciousness, cognition, or behavior for the purposes of engendering spiritual development or otherwise in sacred contexts. Anthropological study has established that entheogens are used for religious, magical, shamanic, or spiritual purposes in many parts of the world.”

From the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition) 2012, “Among psychologists of religion, entheogen has become the preferred term for chemicals such as psilocybin that are psychoactive drugs that have profound effects on consciousness.”

In Neuropathology of Drug Addictions and Substance Misuse, 2016 entheogens are described as “psychoactive substances known to induce profound changes in perception, including changes in the experience of time or space, as well as alterations in moods, thoughts, and other mental states.”

Mark A. Hoffman in Toxicology in Antiquity (second Addition) 2019, states in his abstract: “The Mystery Religions of the ancient world frequently, if not always, employed the use of psychoactive drugs or entheogens to induce altered states of consciousness.” (emphasis added)

Entheogens are psychedelics most often used in spiritual rituals. This raises an important question:

If Entheogens are used frequently in religious and spiritual rituals* and HB 1 establishes locations in which DPH licensed facilitators will be skilled in “heightened transference in expanded states of consciousness,” is State Representative La Shawn Ford planning to open state-sponsored New Age Eastern Mysticism religious facilities?

The bill goes on to say that on or before July 31, 2024, the Department of Public Health shall publish “medical, psychological, and scientific studies, research, and other information relating to the safety and efficacy of psilocybin and other entheogens in treating mental health conditions, including, but not limited to, addiction, depression, anxiety disorders, headache disorders, and end-of-life psychological distress.”

We’re not holding our breath.

This is wrong on so many fronts. How can allowing mind-altering drugs to be easily made available ever be a good thing? Shame on lawmakers whose job it is to protect its citizenry and do what’s best to help families flourish!

Moreover, what message are they sending to the children and families of Illinois? Say “yes” to drugs? Say “yes” to addiction and a life of mediocrity? That’s the message we are hearing.

TAKE ACTION: Click HERE to contact your state lawmakers. Urge them to reject all bills that decriminalize and legalize any additional Schedule 1 Drugs. Tell them families are suffering enough already as a result of the foolish legalization of marijuana and the lax or non-enforcement of other highly addictive drugs. Tell your lawmakers that it’s his/her job to pass laws that strengthen families, not tear them down.

*Scripture is clear that when we disobey God’s plan for His creation, we open the door to demonic activity. It’s much better NOT to open that door. God always knows what’s best for us.

“…if you refuse to do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires you, but you must master it.” Genesis 4:7

“…you are slaves to the one you obey, whether you are slaves to sin leading to death, or to obedience leading to righteousness.” Romans 6:16

“Therefore, do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires.” Romans 6:12

Protect Children & Taxpayers From Radical Gender Ideology

On May 15, U.S. Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) introduced two bills to the U.S. Senate—one that would prohibit federal funds from supporting gender transition procedures, and another that would altogether ban such procedures on minors.

These bills are so radical in light of contemporary opinion, yet so simple and straightforward in achieving their goals, that when I read their respective texts, I was awed that the U.S. Senate still contains the type of statesman who will stand for the truth in this way.

And Marshall isn’t alone; co-sponsoring one or both of these bills are U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mike Braun (R-IN), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Steve Daines (R-MT), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), Mike Lee (R-UT), Markwayne Mulllin (R-OK), James Risch (R-ID), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Josh Hawley (R-MO).

On the one hand, the End Taxpayer Funding of Gender Experimentation Act of 2023 (S. 1595) would prohibit several of the current ways that federal dollars can fund gender transition procedures. Under this bill’s provisions, federal funds may not directly fund gender transition therapy or surgery. Neither may they be shuttled into health care plans that include such practices in their coverage.

Further still, no health care service that is furnished by a physician employed by the federal government or even furnished in a facility owned by the federal government may provide gender transition procedures.

The bill does clarify that non-federal health care providers would be free to provide such treatment, and that customers would still be free to seek out separate (non-federal) plans that cover such treatment should they want it. Yet, the federal government must stay out of it.

On the other hand, the Protecting Children From Experimentation Act of 2023 (S. 1597) takes it a step further when dealing with minors; it would ban gender transition procedures for minors in almost all cases—excepting rare medical situations. Under its provisions, any physical or mental healthcare professional would be fined (or face up to five years in prison) for performing or even referring a gender transition procedure.

The bill makes sure to clarify that minors may not be prosecuted for receiving such treatment; however, recipients of the treatment are allowed to bring civil action for relief against the physician who performed it.

Marshall and his colleagues’ stand for the truth deserves three whole-hearted cheers. They are daring to suggest that physicians performing supposedly “essential” gender transition care should be imprisoned! While it seems harsh, it is not any less harsh than the “care” they are purporting to provide—nothing less than a 21st-century version of the self-mutilation practiced in pagan rites for millennia, an abomination which defiles God’s created order bestowed to each one of us since our conception.

Now, it’s one thing to sit back and cheer for U.S. Senators who are willing to take stands like this, drawing clear lines between black and white in a world filled with multitudinous shades of grey. But politics is not a spectator sport. “The people” are more than just the hypothetical but fictitious “12th man” on the football team. “The people” send the players onto the field, tell them how to play, and recall them when they don’t do their jobs right.

Many of Marshall’s colleagues are assuredly shocked at his audacious proposal. But it’s audacious when viewed from a worldview that presupposes society has already settled the question—or at least the toleration—of gender transition procedures.

Thankfully, U.S. Representative Doug LaMalfa (R-CA) has introduced the same legislation in the U.S. House (H.R. 3328 and H.R. 3329), which has 40 co-sponsors, including U.S. Representatives Mike Bost and Mary Miller from southern Illinois.

If we all called or emailed our representatives right now and let them know that we—their very own constituents—agree with Marshall’s stand for the truth, the excuses to dismiss his position as audacious and radical, will start disappearing. Let them know that you sent them on to the field to represent you, and you will not tolerate government support of lies.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to U.S. Senators Dick Durbin, Tammy Duckworth and your local U.S. Representative to ask them to support or even co-sponsor these two bills. Impressionable children should not be making life-altering, body-mutilating decisions about their sexuality and adults should not be pushing woke sexual anarchy either.

U.S. Representative LaMalfa rightly points out in his press release,

let kids be kids and wait until adulthood to make a choice they likely wish they hadn’t as a child. Adults and the medical field shouldn’t be allowed to coerce this “woke” agenda onto them when they should be their protectors. Adults need to realize that their coercion is abuse, and should face appropriate consequences.

There is a new poll from one of the politically bluest states in the nation expressing regret for their liberal ways. It didn’t take long.

In 2020 Oregonians voted nearly 60-40 percent to decriminalize drugs, a fairytale notion supported by libertarians and leftists. The results were the exact opposite of what advocates claimed would happen. Social problems, crime, addiction, and homelessness exploded. New tax money from legal drug sales disappeared into the government bureaucracy with no visible benefits to society.

Now, a poll by Portland-based DHM Research finds that support has flipped – 63 percent of Oregonians support reinstating criminal punishments for drug possession.

“Oregon has turned into an international spectacle and I think we looked at each other and realize that we made an enormous mistake,” Portland-based trial attorney Kristin Olson told Fox News.

A majority of every demographic in the poll, including younger Oregon voters ages 18-30, now support reinstatement of criminal penalties for drug possession and use.

“I think we didn’t realize that what we were signing up for was the deterioration of civilized norms and the public spaces being ceded to people in late-stage drug addiction and engaged in all sorts of criminal activity to keep that addiction going,” Olsen said.

An audit also found the state’s health authority could not provide data showing how hundreds of millions of tax dollars earmarked for addiction services through new decriminalization policies were spent.

On another note, Quest Diagnostics recently looked at 10.6 million workplace drug test results and found that positive tests for marijuana following workplace accidents are now at the highest levels in 25 years.  Not surprisingly, states that have legalized medical or recreational use had higher workplace test positivity rates.

Things are truly upside-down. Christians, who have been scorned forever as weak and milk-toast, are suddenly public enemy number one. And while Christianity has been the source of thousands of American charities and the inspiration for hospitals, medical care, and education worldwide, it is now labeled by the Left as hateful and bigoted. Then we see destructive anarchist groups like Antifa and BLM glorified in the Media and academia as forces for good! How could this be?

The Left has had an advantage over conservatives in shaping the public’s perception of things for many years because they have controlled the narrative. They have presented themselves as caring and compassionate, sympathetic to the poor and the disadvantaged. And, because of the Christian ideal of giving people the benefit of the doubt, we have accepted that maybe they were truly concerned for those who are less advantaged.

However, because Leftists now have so much power, they no longer feel the need to hide their true objective. They seek political dominance and the elimination of Christianity in all public forums and will do whatever is necessary to accomplish those goals. They have portrayed themselves as selfless champions of the downtrodden, and conservatives as greedy. However, we must no longer tolerate that narrative. It is a lie, and their duplicity is clear to all whose eyes are open.

Leftists have done well at creating the perception that they are not in politics for money, thus masking their greed. But make no mistake! They are as greedy as one can be. However, if you have enough power, you do not need personal wealth because you control other peoples’ money.

With the power to tax, politicians can live as if they are wealthy by legally confiscating and spending other people’s money. Creating wealth is difficult and requires certain skills and discipline. But if you are not talented in this area and are lazy and unethical, politics provides you with a vehicle to achieve your dreams without the hard work and risk that capital creation requires.

What we have seen over the last 60 years is the Left demonizing those who create wealth in order to justify confiscating it.

At the same time, the leftists, who disdain wealth creators, have convinced the public that they (the Leftists) are better and more selfless stewards of that wealth. Thus, we have people who are incapable of creating wealth, taking it from those who do and spending it according to their own desires and accruing to themselves more power in the process. It is interesting how many politicians have become multimillionaires even as they denounce those who created the wealth in the first place.

We are now governed by people who have no idea how to create or wisely manage wealth, and whose real motivation is that of controlling the rest of us. They are the embodiment of greed. They are concerned primarily for themselves and serve others only as a means of accruing power and wealth to themselves.

While one would expect that they would alienate most everyone because of their greed, they have managed to gain a substantial following among three groups who sustain them in power: those who are content to take a handout and produce nothing, those who are genuinely needy and have become dependent upon the politicians, and a third group who are equally cynical and see an opportunity to accrue some personal power and prestige by supporting the Leftists and their sordid process.

Sadly, the Media, whose primary responsibility is to hold public figures accountable, cover for their corruption. There is no way to describe it other than that of non-producers stealing and controlling what the producers have created. They are truly parasitic.

This brings us to the very important question: what does the Bible say about all this?  As “pilgrims” here are we to be compliant and silent? Compassion and generosity are certainly Christian values! But as an aside, let us put to rest the nostrum that Leftism is compassionate. It decidedly is not! After decades of the federal government spending literally trillions of dollars on numerous supposedly compassionate programs, the poor remain poor and the powerless remain powerless.

If these programs are as bad as they appear, we should turn our attention to their impact on society in general and on those who contribute. Is it moral to confiscate resources from those who create and earn it only to squander it on ineffective programs? I believe the evidence suggests that the exorbitant taxation upon the middle and upper classes in America over the last 50 years has been both immoral and counterproductive.

So, what does the Bible teach about such things? One need not be a Bible scholar to know that stealing is wrong. Therefore, without having good reason the government should not take from one citizen to give to another. Having the government’s imprimatur does not change the reality that transferring wealth from earners to non-earners without Constitutional authority is theft.  The right to personal property guaranteed in the Constitution is not simply to provide for an individual’s greed, but rather to protect his life.

Unprotected property rights place every citizen’s life at risk. If the government can take, at will, one’s wealth, it can starve that person to death. And the fact that even after trillions of dollars have been transferred, primarily from earners to non-earners, there are still many millions in poverty underscores the need to rethink our “compassionate” welfare system. As constructed, it is a colossal failure.

Foundational to the issue is the fact that government is incapable of ministering compassion. It must fall to other social institutions and organizations, such as churches, to resolve the poverty problem.

The Bible notes that “wisdom is justified of her children,” (Luke 7:35), meaning that the wisdom of an act is revealed by its consequences; and Jesus stated that “a tree is known by its fruit,” (Luke 6:44). Therefore, if a particular activity repeatedly produces bad results one can assume the act is foolish and ought to be discontinued. One’s intentions mean nothing in this.

While the Left burnishes their “compassion badges,” boasting of how much they care, virtually everything they have done for over fifty years has produced nothing but heartache, misery, poverty and increased public unrest. It cannot be ignored that as Christianity has been pushed to the fringes of society there have been tragic increases in crime, depression, suicide, divorce, sexual perversion, and confusion.

Setting aside for the moment those who cannot provide for themselves, the Bible is very clear that anyone who refuses to work should not eat. Witness the sorry tales of so many lottery winners to understand that we do not do well with unearned wealth! Therefore, government should do nothing to facilitate a comfortable life for those unwilling to work. Sources, secular and sacred, confirm that generally, those who are diligent, disciplined, and work hard do not go hungry.

Scriptures tell us that God gives rain to those who love Him and those who don’t. He is gracious! This does not mean that His provision will always be abundant. We should all be grateful to him for his care and provision for us whether it be modest or abundant. It may be that one of our biggest errors, culturally, is that we have raised a generation of Americans who believe they are owed a rich and comfortable existence even though they have done little or nothing productive. To give it to them would be immoral and destructive!

Colonial Jamestown, VA scholar, Martha McCartney, wrote in Encyclopedia Virginia, (Dec 7, 2020) that Captain John Smith, early President of the colony, would have nothing of slothfulness, declaring that

“the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine a hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.”

Whatever his motives, it is quite clear that his stubbornness preserved lives. Very few died under his leadership while a large number perished under the leadership of his successor who was not so strict. As McCartney noted,

“Regardless of whether Smith recognized this fact, he found that even small amounts of work improved both the material life and health of the colonists.”

These realities are so obvious that no politician can honestly deny them. To create a public welfare system where productivity and hard work are discouraged by the government’s confiscation of wealth from producers to distribute it to those who are unwilling to work is simply immoral and will, if not corrected, contribute to the collapse of the entire economy. It is impossible for our politicians not to understand this, therefore, we need no longer accept the notion that they are well-intentioned but misguided.

No, they are simply greedy, either for money or power, or both. They are snakes in the grass who ought to be exposed for what they are. Their programs have produced virtually nothing of value and instead an abundance of suffering.

In seeking a biblical perspective, the faithful Christian should consider two primary principles: First is his responsibility to the poor. Numerous biblical texts in both Old and New Testaments give God’s answer. On one hand, Christ Himself noted that, “the poor you have with you always.” This is merely a sad acknowledgement of reality. People are poor for a variety of reasons, many of which are intractable.

This must not be construed as cause for doing nothing. Many Christians and others have seen the impossibility of eliminating poverty as cause for discouragement and apathy.

However, Christ’s parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us that while we may not be able to do much about poverty across the globe, we can do something about people in need who cross our paths regularly. Therefore, the Christian ought to be known for wise generosity: encouraging work for those able, and compassionate giving to those who cannot provide for themselves.

Which leads to the second principle: Just as it is wrong to ignore genuine need, it is wrong to indulge the indolent. The Scriptures teach that if a man refuses to work, he should not be given food. It is for his own betterment that others refuse to support him in his slothful choices. He will gain more than a meal when he learns the value of hard work.

America is at a fork in the road. Will we return to the imperfections, yet relative goodness of a society guided by the principles and truths of Christianity and the Bible, or adopt Marxism and fall back into the despotism and misery that has otherwise characterized human history from its beginnings?

The choice seems pretty clear to me!

If you’ve never heard of Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known by the moniker Mr. Beast, ask your child who he is. He (or she) likely knows. Mr. Beast is a highly popular YouTuber with multiple channels dedicated to various things, such as friendly competitions, gaming, and philanthropy. He has 146 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel and anywhere between 12.8 million to 32 million on each of his spin-off channels.

Mr. Beast’s videos, which are designed to look like a group of friends hanging out and filming as they go along, generally revolve around giving away large sums of money. For example, a few of his videos are titled, “Survive 100 Days In Circle, Win 500,000,” “I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!” or “Last To Take Hand Off Jet, Keeps It!”

Mr. Beast is incredibly popular among youth, especially teenage boys. His videos have over 100 million views each.

The first time many adults heard of Mr. Beast was a couple of months ago when he received a lot of flak (mainly from the Left) for a video detailing how he paid for cataract surgery for 1,000 blind people. Now Mr. Beast is in the news again, but unfortunately, it’s for something a lot less philanthropic.

Chris Tyson is a member of Mr. Beast’s cast of friends. Over the past couple of months, viewers noticed that Tyson has started to look and act differently in videos. The reason why became clear when Tyson revealed on Twitter that he has been going through hormone treatments to try and ‘transition’ into a girl. What makes this even sadder is that Tyson has a wife and son, who now must deal with the inevitable fallout of Tyson’s decision.

Tyson’s transition can be directly linked to an apparent addiction to pedophilic anime pornography, illustrating just how powerful influences can be. Tyson went from a typical, regular man, to a confused-looking guy in girl’s clothing.

Parents will want to know that Mr. Beast has given his full support to Chris Tyson in the form of a tweet that uses foul language:

Unless something changes, Mr. Beast’s channel is now a wolf in sheep’s clothing; another place for the LGBTQ+ agenda to be normalized and funneled into your kids. The things you watch and read and listen to really do influence you. The catalyst for Chris Tyson’s change was the porn he is reportedly addicted to and watching.

This should serve as a warning for each of us individually, and especially for parents when it comes to what they let their children watch or have access to. Finding porn online is as easy as mistyping a web address, and even if what you watch is not as evil as porn, the things you fill yourself with – books, movies, TV shows, etc., – really do influence and change you.

Bad company ruins good morals (1 Corinthians 15:33), and if what you keep company with is sinful, you’ll find yourself warped by it. Mr. Beast is sending a message to millions of kids around the world through his acceptance of Tyson’s change. Even if he doesn’t make a big deal of it and simply keeps Tyson on the show, kids all around the world are going to see that someone they look up to, admire, and wish to be thinks this is okay and normal.

This news provides a great discussion opportunity for you and your kids. Sin is awful, especially sexual sin, and those who are caught in it become slaves to it. These are chains that are incredibly difficult to throw off.

Chris Tyson is bound by the chains of this sin. We need to pray for him, Mr. Beast, and the rest of the Mr. Beast crew to see the light of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

(Picture of Tyson’s transition)

America is being turned upside down. As it is going, the country will soon be unrecognizable, with personal freedoms limited if not erased and our Christian heritage and principles obliterated. Despite the Leftists proclamations that they are the defenders of democracy, what they are promoting will eliminate democracy, for it destroys its foundation.

No one denies that America has been good for the majority of its citizens, but the Left declares that some have been held down or marginalized by design; therefore, radical change must be brought about for the benefit of those who have been marginalized. It may be wise to ask just who are these for whom the Left would undo America? Maybe we ought to take a look! If we are going to allow the destruction of the nation, I for one would like to know who is supposed to benefit from its destruction, and why destroying my country is the only way to accomplish that mission.

First, let us consider what they mean by “marginalized.” The Left uses the term to engender sympathy and compassion, as though society, or more specifically, traditional Americanism and Capitalism have “conspired” maliciously against them to keep them from enjoying what the majority experiences. The word implies that they are on the edge of society, and not participating in the general activities others enjoy. Though the percentage of Americans who might be termed as “marginalized” is small, they probably number in the millions, and cannot be easily categorized. They are marginalized, obviously, because they cannot or will not participate in society’s “mainstream.” The important question is why? And each one will have his or her own story as to why they do not fit into what one might generally term as “normal.”

Whoever they are, and whatever the reason for their marginalization, we must understand that the Left is using them to bludgeon the rest of society into making radical changes to the country. The issue is not whether one ought to have some sympathy for those who are “marginalized,” for they may well warrant sympathy. The question is what is to be done for them, and maybe more germane, is their situation amenable to outside intervention? Can anything substantive be done to improve their situation? And, at what cost? It should be noted that there have always been, and always will be some people who don’t fit into the majority culture. No society in history has had one hundred percent positive participation of its citizens. The federal government has spent trillions of dollars over the last six decades attempting to correct many of the social issues supposedly responsible for these people’s predicament to no avail. A wise person will look askance at anyone’s suggestion that they now have solutions that will truly fix these societal problems.

When you consider that these people represent an untold number of different problems: a variety of mental illness issues, drug use, broken homes, alcohol, physical and sexual abuse, criminal behavior, and so on, you will understand that trying to solve them is a staggering proposition, and explains why all attempts to date have been largely futile.

To suggest that socialism and communism will so certainly correct America’s inequities as to justify destroying America displays woeful ignorance! Do your homework and see what Communist countries always do with such people. It will bring no comfort to your heart!

Destroying America’s historical cultural norms to make nonconformists comfortable is like allowing anyone who claims to be a doctor practice medicine. These cultural norms did not come into existence arbitrarily, they were rooted in ancient truths, such as the Bible, and practical experience. It has been wisely stated that one should never take down a fence until he knows why it was erected in the first place.

Many years ago, driving with my parents and siblings to a picnic in the Colorado Rockies outside of Denver, a motorcyclist rocketed past us heading for who knows where. He disappeared around a bend, and we thought no more about him. Later, as we ascended toward Denver, we approached the area where that man had passed us to find an ambulance and police securing the site where he had apparently lost control and had flown off the road onto the rocks below. He was not satisfied to live by the “norms” of society and paid with his life!

There is now a concerted effort on the part of the Left to create a cynical sympathy for those who resist or reject biblical, cultural, and societal norms, as if they are being victimized by those norms. Wisdom would say that such standards are designed as guard rails to keep people safe, even alive! As young Americans die by the hundreds of thousands annually due to drug overdoses, suicide, and violence, and millions of others suffer the agony or lingering deaths from STDs, drugs, and the depression resulting from promiscuous sex, the Left makes no effort to hinder the foolish behavior behind it all, but rather encourages it! And worse, they label those who issue warnings against the foolishness as “haters!”

The vicious wolves, ironically regaled as the caring ones, sit in the seats of academia, hold the levers of power in state capitals and in D.C., and flaunt their poison from their perches of Hollywood popularity, and seem to relish the destruction their philosophy promotes.

But make no mistake: they must be judged not by their claims of compassion, but by the fruits of their wicked deeds!

I was, for a short time during college, a volunteer fireman, and my responsibility was to operate the equipment while more experienced firemen entered the burning building.  Following a fire at one house, another student who had gone inside told me how he stood in the smoke-filled kitchen spraying water at the flames to no avail.  It wasn’t until he realized that he was facing a mirrored wall and that the flames were actually behind him that he turned and was able to extinguish the fire.  As long as he was sending water in the wrong direction the fire continued unabated.

With every mass shooting in America there is a repetition of the same demands from the Left to take “substantive” action against guns and gun owners to stop such tragedies.  These demands go nowhere because sensible people understand that, like spraying water at a mirror instead of the fire, such actions will not and cannot make a difference.

You will never solve a problem so long as you are aiming at the wrong target.  We are not dealing with people who are under the control of God or law.  In other words, good people do not kill each other and do not need gun control!  As Paul wrote in I Timothy 1:9, the law is made “for the lawless and insubordinate, for the ungodly and for sinners. . . for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers. . . . “

Tragically, murder has been with us from the very beginning of human history.  I expect we are all familiar with Cain’s killing of Abel.  And in the approximately six thousand years since, things have not improved.  Cain did not need a firearm to kill his brother, and the absence of such weapons has never been an obstacle to those who are bent on killing someone.

So, is there a “Christian” view of guns?  Does the Bible give us any indication of what God might say about such things?  A former president mocked traditional Americans for relying on their “God and guns.”  Clearly, Leftists delight in throwing Scripture texts or generalities into our faces thinking they can embarrass us into yielding to their demands.

But their efforts are based upon twisted understandings of the Bible, passages taken out of context, or simply ignoring important relevant texts.  Superficially, one might think that God would frown on the existence and use of guns in general, but to conclude this would be to overlook a large body of Scripture.  And it is clear that the only people who would benefit from taking firearms from law abiding Americans would be criminals and tyrants.

A thorough examination of the subject would require writing a book, so the best we can do here is to hit a few high points.  God’s heart can be seen in the fact that the first environment He created for us was that of a garden, symbolizing both beauty and serenity.  It was mankind who introduced discord and violence to creation, and we learned immediately that God disapproved of that violence.

While allowing Cain to live following his killing of his brother, God, shortly thereafter (Gen. 9:6) instituted the death penalty for murder, declaring that murderers were to be executed.  Thus, God’s justice requires that violence be met with violence.

Interestingly, there is no evidence in Scripture for a wholesale surrender of peaceful people to violent people.  “Turning the other cheek,” which we read of in Matthew five applies in the context of Christ’s Kingdom (which was rejected then but will be established in the future) where God will take revenge for His people.  Therefore, if God approves of meeting violence with lethal force, if necessary, it only makes sense that guns are not forbidden by Him.

It is certainly applicable to the topic to consider that David, a “man after God’s own heart” used a high-velocity projectile (slingshot) to take out the giant, Goliath.  Modern studies suggest that a stone released from an ancient sling would have the approximate killing power of a  44 magnum!  David became the progenitor of the Davidic dynasty, from which Christ, the world’s future Ruler has come, and it was he who noted that God taught his “hands to make war.”

God is not anti-war when there is an evil, mortal enemy to fight.

Third, the Apostle Paul addressed the responsibility of a man to his family.  In I Timothy 5:8 he wrote that if a man does not provide the essentials for his family, “especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”  The idea that providing for one’s family includes food and a roof over their heads but not their protection against intruders is ludicrous.

Virtually whatever a man needs to keep his family safe is legitimate, and with the weapons available to criminals, one has no alternative but to be able to meet force with force, if need be.  This would include firearms.

Finally, the US Constitution provides in its Second Amendment a protection of the individual’s God given right to own firearms for the express purpose of protecting “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and only the naïve would say that this amendment provides merely for hunting.  Rather, its intention was for the citizen to protect himself and his family from a tyrannical government, which the colonists had just defeated in a bloody war.

It is precisely for this reason that Leftists beat the drum for more gun control.  The most significant obstacle to their achieving a strangle hold on the American public is the citizens’ right to “keep and bear arms.”

Therefore, all who love liberty and life and understand that these are God given rights, will not yield an inch in the battle for the Second Amendment.  What we must understand is the Left’s willingness to allow and even create suffering for the nation’s citizens in their quest for power.  They cynically believe that if enough innocent people die, eventually tender-hearted citizens will change their minds and allow the government to disarm the public.  Once the public is sufficiently disarmed, our chains will be forged and we will be subjugated, just as they are in China, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, and other socialist countries.

Do we understand that the Left has no interest in stopping these killings?  There are substantial things that could be done to reduce the killings without violating the Constitution, but the Left fabricates reasons to oppose them all.  We who are truly concerned about the deaths of innocent people struggle to accept the fact that Leftists, whether politicians or academics, don’t care!  Every week in cities like Chicago there are killings equivalent to a mass shooting, yet those in charge do nothing.

There are also over one hundred thousand drug related deaths annually in America, and the Left’s response is to make those drugs more available and curtail efforts to interdict the narcotics crossing the southern border.  Their utter lack of concern for these tragedies underscores the fact that Leftists, regardless of their rhetoric, do not care for America’s citizens, even the children.

What can be done?  The evidence is that training and arming teachers and other staff at every school would be one quick and effective improvement.  But you will get no encouragement from the Left in this.  And there are other available options we won’t get into here because I would like to go to the two most important and effective tools in the tool chest, both of which are hated by the Left.

First, reintroduce students to God and the Bible.  “We can’t have a state church,” you say.  Well, we already do, it’s called Humanism, its priests are teachers, and its cathedrals are the public schools.  But, even at that, the expression “separation of church and state” is seriously misunderstood.  Few Christians want a state church, but all desire to see the principles of righteousness that are sourced in Christianity taught to the Nation’s children.

There is a great difference between a “state church” and teaching morality and goodness to children.  Under the guise of “protecting” children from a state church Leftists have thrown out the principles that are essential to a healthy culture, good citizenry, and safe neighborhoods.

Leftists hate Christianity so virulently that they would rather have the chaos and death across the culture than to hear someone proclaim, “Thus saith the Lord!”  They deeply resent being told that lying, cheating, stealing, and adultery are sinful, but they have no problem declaring that traditional values are evil!

They claim that children are “damaged” by being told about God and their accountability to Him.  Apparently, having a sense of guilt (for which Christianity also provides relief) is worse to Leftists than dying of violence or a drug overdose!   Regardless, the issue is not whether somethings are good and some evil, but rather, who decides what is good and what is evil!

The Left went public with its war on God and the Bible in the 1960s, and that war has only escalated over time.  The horrific violence witnessed daily across America is just one consequence.  One could ask, “America, how is this war on God working out for you?”  The best thing America could do to encourage a God-consciousness in young people.

The second thing we must do, which is related to the creation of a cultural God-consciousness, is to reinvigorate the traditional family.  The chaotic culture we now have is clearly the opposite of a safe, stable culture that would not produce these mass shootings.  The single most important factor in a safe, stable culture is intact, traditional families.  This is indisputable.  Just as darkness cannot exist in the presence of light, chaos cannot exist in a stable society! Duh!  Only a brainwashed Leftist would seek to dispute this.  But it is in fact the very reason for the Leftists’ war against the family.

They understand that the public would never yield to their tyranny if we were experiencing a safe, stable, and prosperous culture.  Understand this: the violence, unrest, and destruction we have witnessed over the last several years are not the natural manifestations of a normal culture.  It has all been orchestrated to achieve a simple objective: the subjugation of the American people.

Opponents of liberty seek to shame those of us who love America’s freedoms with false narratives regarding love.  No, love is not tolerant toward those who would destroy that which is good and right.  A good man does not sit idly watching intruders victimize his family.  As long as predators exist, good men will protect those they love!

“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,” is not merely a pleasant platitude.  It is the one most essential element for a peaceful, prosperous nation.  I again call on all Americans to repent and submit to the Holy, yet gracious Lord and God, Jesus Christ!

Sadly, so long as fallen mankind and tyrants run things here, weapons will be necessary to protect one’s life and liberties.  When Christ, the Prince of peace reigns, however, we will see such things come to an end and weapons will be repurposed into plows and pruning hooks!  Eden will be restored!

Will you be there?

America’s children are being targeted by sex predators. Their recruiters are already in our schools and libraries. These “transgender” people need your children as converts. Consider:

• Children returning from school carrying “gender unicorn lessons,” which teach strange ideas of sex and gender.
• Public libraries are conditioning your children through “drag queen readings” to get children familiar with these recruiters.
• Schools are hiding from parents that they’re giving puberty blocking drugs to their children.

The transgender people insist that they be allowed to access and recruit children, and that you accept them as being of their assumed sex – even in private places like separate-sex bathrooms. They claim, “trans rights are civil rights.”

If you oppose them, you’re charged with genocide- of mass murdering hordes of children. But, if you don’t oppose them, you’ll end up losing your rights as parents and all of the children will be prey to sexual and financial abuse. Read on to become aware of how the transgender agenda destroys parents’ oversight, age of consent, and causes bodily harm to their young victims.

Sexually flailing against God’s creation

People practicing homosexuality want to be accepted as normal by society. That is what the “love is love” campaign is all about. Likewise, people practicing transgender behaviors want us to affirm their choices. Why, then, do Christians actively oppose homosexuality and transgenderism? It’s not out of hate for these people, but because God hates these behaviors. Even if we wanted to affirm them, we couldn’t do that and also have a God-honoring society.

In Genesis, we read how God created everything, including Adam (a man) and Eve (a woman). God told Adam “from any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17, NASB). But Adam decided he didn’t trust God’s version of good and evil, and sought his own understanding. This was the sin of Adam– that he pursued his own version of right and wrong.

Homosexuality is a manifestation of Adam’s sin. God hates it because, at its root, it is rebellion against Him and rejecting His creation. They’ll have man-to-man, or woman-to-woman, sex and curse us if we tell them that this is wrong. An article from Got Questions calls it “shaking our fists at God.”

Homosexuality is not the cause of a society’s decline, but it is a symptom of it; it is the result of people making themselves the final authorities. Romans 1 gives the natural digression of a society that has chosen idolatry and sinful pleasure instead of obedience to God. The downward spiral begins with denying that God has absolute authority over His creation (Romans 1:21-23).

The result of a society’s rejection of God’s rule in their lives is that God gives “them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:24-25). Verses 26 and 27 say, “Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.” The phrase “God gave them over” means that, when we insist on shaking our fists at God, He finally lets us have the perversion we demand. And that is a judgment in itself. Homosexual behavior is the result of ignoring God and trying to create our own truth. When we defy God’s clear instruction, we reap the “due penalty” of our disobedience (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9; Revelation 21:8).

Transgenderism is a variant of homosexuality. The important difference between them is that a man or woman claims to be of the other sex – an assertion in defiance of the facts. It’s another claim of godhood, that someone can declare their own sex and it becomes true because they say so. We’re all supposed to chime in and affirm this claim, much like throwing a pinch of incense to Caesar. Frequently, but not always, transgender behavior also includes surgical removal of a person’s sex organs.

A key thing about transgenderism is how you can’t just ignore it. People are in your face about you acknowledging the sex assertion, and about you using “preferred pronouns.” Woe to you if you disagree with them. Walter Hudson, a state legislator from Minnesota, commented about this:

We used to take our differences a lot more seriously. But we eventually settled on a social contract rooted in classical liberalism, the notion that neighbors should be able to peacefully co-exist without demanding renunciation of sacred belief. The transgender community has not received that memo. Despite individual exceptions, the general rule among the dominant trans culture is an illiberal insistence upon affirmation. It’s not enough for them to believe that “transgender women are women.” You must believe it too. You must confess it with your mouth upon every social interaction. You must call a guy cosmetically altered to appear as a woman “she,” or you will be found guilty of heresy and summarily convicted in the court of public opinion. At the very least, your sentence will be social censure and condemnation. More likely, you will lose your job or face other grave consequences that hobble your capacity to live…

The dominant trans culture has successfully employed a repressive cultural strategy of social censure and unearned indignation to enforce a code of conduct that “affirms” their beliefs. Of course, it amounts to gaslighting. No one believes that the man cosmetically altered to appear as a woman has become a woman. But you’re expected to “affirm” that lie with every use of a “preferred pronoun” as an act of fealty and submission. It’s enforced with severe social censure for violations of trans decorum, which typically involves being treated as beneath contempt.

Christians aspire to proclaim the gospel, and to build a Christian society (Matt. 13:33, 28:18-20). America still has a strong Christian influence, and our standards of right and wrong are measured by what the Bible says. God hates homosexuality, in either form, and judges a society that approves of it (Gen. 19:15-26; Rom. 1:26-27). This means that building a Christian society includes opposing homosexuality and transgenderism.

Transgenderism brings unwelcome surprises

Are Christians being meanies, not letting an “oppressed minority” experience full acceptance into American society? No, we’re trying to protect our society from predators, who would use this acceptance to exploit and hurt children. After everything is said and done, this conflict is over recruiting children into transgenderism.

Consider the rage over a  Texas bill, which would ban sexual transition surgery on minors. And look at the concern about a Florida bill that, only modestly, regulates when transgender concepts could be taught in public schools. It certainly is about the children.

If America gives these advocates what they demand, if they convince us that it’s fair and just to yield to their claims, then look at the life-changing surprises awaiting us.

Surprise #1: Transgender education is already in American schools

Of the things a people can expect of society, perhaps protecting the vulnerable is its most important task. And children are its most vulnerable group, because they’re innocent of how the world might mistreat them. American society provides them special protection through concepts like “age of consent,” and by the understanding that their parents are their legal guardians. This has been consistently confirmed, most famously in the Wisconsin v. Yoder Supreme Court case:

The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children. This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.

However, teaching children about transgender behaviors has already been forced into public schools, without seeking parents’ consent and usually without notice. It’s done because  teachers believe that the students belong to them. In practice, teachers, administrators, and school boards act like they can they can do as they please with their students.

They approve, not merely permit, teaching transgenderism, and seek to indocrinate students even in kindergarten. They teach propaganda like “assigned sex at birth”and “gender unicorns.” They even seek to reach three-year-old children with these lessons! To evade parental oversight, they counsel children in secret, and deny what they’re doing.

Don’t be fooled in thinking that your “excellent school district” doesn’t do that stuff. They probably do already, for so much of their agenda is set by state bureaucracies. Remember what Ronald Reagan said: “Trust, but verify.”

Surprise #2: Transgender agenda overrules “age of consent”

The point of the “age of consent” is that the parents protect a child from making uninformed or immature decisions. The child increasingly learns how the world works, and his or her parents give increased personal control.

Young children know nothing about how “gender-affirming” therapy changes the body’s development. Even drug therapy has permanent consequences. If you stop taking the drugs the body doesn’t play “catch-up” for the years of missed development. No youth of nine or ten has the wisdom, or skepticism, to understand the implications of tampering with puberty.

Non-parental counselors are conflicted, having self-interests to not tell the youth of any potential problems. We used to call people like this “predators” and “child exploiters.” Yet transgender advocates demand that youth be allowed to make these decisions without parental approval. For example, the Minnesota Lt. Governor said, “when our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them,” she added. “That’s what it means to be a good parent.” Not true, because a good parent looks for the best interests of a child, and much of love means saying “no.”

Surprise #3: All ages of consent could be nullified

If a child can consent, without having parental approval, to body-altering procedures, even surgery, then the “age of consent” is nullified. Perhaps some advocate will then petition a judge that the sexual age of consent should also be nullified. A similar argument exists for removing the minimum age for entering into financial contracts. This results in many exploiters, and many hurt children.

Surprise #4: Parental oversight would effectively be abolished

In a transgender-affirming world, a child can ask for, and expect to get, body-altering treatments without parental permission. And the schools can effectively ignore the parents, teaching things and transitioning youth without their parents’ knowledge. After all of that, what is left of parental oversight?

In Minnesota, the enmity towards parents is so strong that the legislature passed a law, making the state a sanctuary for children who want to run away and get transgender treatment there. And the state will fight the parents when they ask for the return of their child. By the way, isn’t it a crime for an adult to help a child make that journey across state lines?

Let’s take this farther. If parental oversight isn’t respected, then what purpose is served by a family? Why should society, or the law, honor it? In 1920 the socialists in Soviet Russia asked this question, and decided that abolishing the family was a good idea. That turned out horribly, and families were again honored – but only after many lives were ruined.

Affirming transgender behavior opens a big box of trouble

As you see, we can’t simply say “let them have their way” and we all live happily together. A decision to normalize, to affirm, transgender behavior, in the scope they want it for, will soon lead to widespread child exploitation and neutering of the protective family environment. This would be a major change in American society. Decisions like this shouldn’t be made by manipulating some judges, or through bureaucracy. It is a major deal, and demands public debate.

Opposing transgender agenda is not genocide

We’ve seen how submitting to transgender demands would cause much harm to American children. A Christian culture ought to prevent this harm by rejecting their assertions, and not changing society to suit these demands. At minimum this means:

• A man might claim to be a woman, or a woman a man. But that doesn’t grant any rights or privileges other than those of the person’s biological sex.
• A person doesn’t have any legal right to require others to recognize him or her as their claimed, non-biological, sex.
• Civil rights laws don’t favor someone’s pretending to his or her non-biological sex.

However, transgender activists claim that opposing them amounts to genocide. Here’s the advocacy site, OutFront Magazine, claiming that denying transitioning drugs or surgery amounts to a crime against humanity:

While, of course, this convention, passed by the Third United Nations General Assembly in 1948, does not specifically mention sexual orientation, gender identity, romantic orientation, etcetera, the objects of the oppression of the queer community, including the trans community, such communities should obviously be included under such a definition.

The sentiment of the opening clause is that, in short, genocide is the purposeful destruction of an oppressed societal out-group on the basis that they are that group, and such unequivocally includes the entirety of the queer community.

Regarding the transgender community specifically, many enacted policies, or policies attempting to be enacted, in the modern-day meet such a definition. The aforementioned policies of banning transgender healthcare for trans youths are potentially the most egregious instances of violation of this definition of genocide.

Puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, the topics of these policies, have been shown to drastically reduce the horrifically high suicide rate of transgender youths, saving lives. To block trans youth from such a treatment manufactures a higher suicide rate and thus manufacture more suicides, more deaths within the transgender community, specifically amongst youth.

That is, it’s genocide because they wish it were so. But they are preying on our youth, and blaming us when their targets despair. It seems far more likely that the children are hanging out with the wrong adults, “groomers” if you will. And according to the articles I provided earlier, our public school teachers and employees seem to be at the forefront of transgender recruitment.

On the Dr. Phil show, a transgender man (biological female) named Reece explains her decision process. Note that she thinks that using transitioning drugs at age eight is a really fine and normal thing. And if you should deny these drugs, she thinks that this would be genocide.

One of Dr. Phil’s guests not only defended trans medical procedures for minors but claimed that it is absolutely vital for their mental health.

“Being able to start my transition at 11 was just so overwhelming and scary, but exciting, and I feel grateful. Say that a trans person came out at 8, and they had to wait till they were 18 to start hormone replacement therapy and not even able to get puberty blockers so their body has to fully now go through puberty,” Reece, a trans man, said. “That now makes transitioning 10 times more hard and traumatizing.”

Reece went on to say that legal regulations to prevent these procedures being done to minors is akin to mass-murder.

“It’s extremely important for trans youth to be able to transition at puberty, I think, without that, all of these kids who know who they are deep down inside would never get the opportunity to live their childhood as their truth. And I think that’s just horrendous. And I think it’s just transgender genocide. If I was not able to transition at the age I was, I would not have made it to 18. I do not think the government should be denying trans health care. It’s life-saving healthcare,” Reece said.

The guest went on to contradict themselves when describing hesitation to actually go through with a double mastectomy at a young age and deciding to “wait till I’m older.”

Reece then said, “I didn’t want to wait. I was eligible at 15. I went to get it at 15 and I just was too young to go through with it at that age for myself personally, but someone who has a bigger chest who is also that age would definitely need it if they felt like they did and I think they should be able to get it.”

These two articles underline that the transgender community wants your children. After all, it’s hard to assume the appearance of the other sex after you already have adult genitals. So they evangelize the children early, before puberty, especially before they’ve got the wisdom to resist.

In a more general sense, stopping this agenda will indeed shut down the transgender community. Without getting easy converts, it won’t be much fun for them to do their role playing. But it’s not genocide. By that logic, you may as well claim that enforcing traffic laws is “genocide against speeders.” So saying “genocide” is just using a scary word. Why not also call us “fascists” and “racists,” to get full value out of using scary sounding, but no longer meaningful, words.

Don’t be afraid to eliminate child abuse, and child maiming, by opposing the transgender agenda. But this agenda would be implemented not through legislation, but by top politicians changing bureaucratic rules, such as the words in the Civil Rights Act. We must be loud and persistent in getting our politicians to behave, because we really do care.

For the last century, the United States of America has engaged in a great secular experiment: what if we pretended that God was irrelevant? What if we pretended that we could make laws that ignored God? Could the ‘public square’ be a place of free, rational discourse—free from claims about the implications of Christian theism on public life? This pretended neutrality has served to reveal one thing: that the line between secularism and paganism is dangerously thin. I’ll revisit that point later, but let’s first take a brief diversion into the hazy world of Cannabis and Constitutionalism.

The International Church of Cannabis (yes, you read that right) is in the midst of a battle with the city of Denver, Colorado, over what the ‘church’ claims to be its First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The battle began after the ‘church’ was ordered to remove an eleven-foot, bright pink statue that it erected on their property, a street corner in a residential area.

Striking, isn’t it? A religious group dedicated to smoking weed is appealing to the U.S. Constitution on the grounds of the First Amendment, an amendment designed to protect the Christian conscience. Now, without getting into debates about originalism versus living Constitutionalism, what does this tells us about the state of our nation? More than anything else, it indicates that the Constitution is no longer fit for the American people. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to put it the other way: the American people are no longer fit for the Constitution.

The Constitution has very little to say about God—it only mentions God indirectly, noting that the document was drafted ‘in the year of our Lord, 1787.’ While some might want to read this as a latent atheism in the Founders (or at least an etiolated deism), there is another way to explain the apparent lack of God. As John Adams famously said, “the Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people, and is wholly inadequate for any other.” That is to say, the Constitution presupposes widespread belief in God and the accompanying Christian social behaviors that stabilize a society.

Nevertheless, the lack of explicitly Christian language in the Constitution has been exploited as a ‘get out of morality free’ card by progressives for the last 150 years. And that’s just how we find the International Church of Cannabis appealing to their ‘Constitutionally-protected’ religious freedoms. Because our nation—Christians included—has gone along with the belief that the Constitution, and consequently all law, can exist and preserve social order without a Christian foundation, we now find ourselves confronted with open paganism.

Why is this the case? Why does a silent secularism end up manifesting itself as open paganism? Because nature abhors a vacuum. If there is a moral vacuum, something has to fill it. Man is homo adorans, he was created to worship something, so when God is stripped of his public relevance, the public will find other things to worship, like cannabis, or himself, or whatever that thing on the courthouse in New York is.

Secularism is never truly secular. There is always a god of the system. In a liberal democracy such as our own, the god is demos, the people. Just listen to any political pundit invoking Omniscient Polls and Almighty Consensus—such things are imbued with godlike characteristics, and everyone must fall down and worship before demos.

Christians must reclaim the public square, not ceding an inch to secularism. We must not buy into the notion that laws can be value-neutral. Law, morality, and social order have no rational basis other than the Triune God of Scripture.

A new study from the University of Illinois Chicago used death certificate data to compare mortality rates in states that legalized recreational cannabis dispensaries with states that only provided access to medical cannabis.

The UIC researchers found that there was a substantial increase in crash fatalities in four of the seven states used in the study with legalized recreational markets and that, on average, recreational markets were associated with a 10% increase in motor vehicle accident deaths.

“To see a 10% increase in motor vehicle accident deaths associated with recreational markets is concerning. Previous studies have found cannabis impairs driving ability and that driving while high is fairly common among regular cannabis users,” said Marinello, a postdoctoral research associate with the division of health policy and administration at the UIC School of Public Health.

For each cause of death, the researchers compared deaths in states with legal markets with those in states with comprehensive medical cannabis programs and similar trends in death rates prior to implementing markets.

The data revealed significant increases in crash fatalities in Colorado (16%), Oregon (22%), Alaska (20%), and California (14%).

“The impact of recreational cannabis markets on motor vehicle accident, suicide, and opioid overdose fatalities” is published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. READ

With the vast number of books, movies, and songs written commiserating the consequences of bad choices (which would include most every Country and Western song written), one would think that young Americans would not need to be told to think carefully about their choices in life.  A popular British band sang, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” not that long ago, but America’s youth apparently never got the memo!  They are being led down the primrose lane to danger and destruction as lambs to slaughter, being told they can live however they wish and suffer no ill consequences. It is, I suppose, another example of human nature’s “it’ll never happen to me” mentality!

The ignorance of the young regarding important life matters is tragic.  It is a fundamental of science that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  This law is not confined to steel balls suspended in a Newton’s Cradle gadget.  It affects everything we do; from the food we eat to the words we use with each other.  And we are fools indeed if we believe that we can make major life decisions recklessly without suffering any consequences!  It is as certain as the sun rising every morning that the pain and suffering of America’s youth right now is largely the result of their being told they can do whatever they want and that they should not let anyone tell them what they can and cannot do.

Studying predators’ ability to camouflage themselves in their search for dinner is most instructive.  From tiny spiders blending in with their environment, to lions hiding in grass of the same color as their fur, to human hunters who create sophisticated ways to hide from their game, we all understand the purpose of camouflage.  It generally works to the detriment of the prey.  We may joke about the smooth salesman who talks you into buying a car you can’t afford, but the “sales job” being foisted upon America’s youth is not about their money.  It may well cost them their lives!  It has already cost the lives of millions of unborn babies; and those who are behind this sales pitch have no more regard for your 10-year-old than they do for the baby in your womb!

The words “con job” or ”scam” are too kind to be applied to what the Left is doing to America’s children and youth. If another country was destroying our children as the Left is, we would consider it an act of war; yet the prevailing message of cultural leaders and the Media is that the Left, and only the Left, really cares.  American children are plagued by depression, suicide, drug use, violence, and murder as never before in our history but are given no tools with which to deal with their suffering.  The Left has preached for 60 years that there is no God, no truth, no right or wrong, and that people can do as they want sexually without consequences.  So, young people do as one would expect them to do when given such a green light, only to find themselves overwhelmed with trouble and pain they cannot understand or resolve.  Then to add insult to injury the Left gets filthy rich off the misery they have created by legalizing more drugs and selling abortions to kill the babies the nation’s children have produced.

How has this deception been so successful?  How has the Left been able to become wealthy and powerful off the very lives they have been exploiting and destroying?  Tragically, they have employed tactics the Bible has been warning mankind about for thousands of years, and largely by disconnecting America’s youth from the Bible which, if known and followed, would have protected them from the tragedies they are now experiencing.

The Bible is Truth, and abundant research reveals that following its principles generally protects one from the dangers promulgated by the Left, similar to how a thorough knowledge of currency protects one against forgeries.  Christ said, “you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”  He is also personally called “Truth,” meaning that He is the source of all that is true and is in perfect harmony with truth.  To turn one’s back on truth leaves one with only lies to live by, and if the truth “sets you free,” what will lies do?  For starters, look at America’s youth and you will see.  They are slaves to destructive false narratives and addictive behaviors.  The fact that these lies are so hurtful and self-contradictory is lost on them as they have no standard by which to judge what is true, what is real, what is good or what is evil. They flounder along hoping that some new experience will make them happy, give them a reason to live, or fill the inexplicable void in their hearts.

They are told that there is no real meaning in life, and no purpose or consequences for their daily choices, yet they find they have pain, guilt, and confusion.  Told that their sexuality is nothing more than a “bodily function” to be experienced and experimented with for their own pleasure, they do not understand why they feel dirty, used, and disconnected.  Confusing young people by offering them freedom, but giving them license, Leftists place these naïve children, as it were, in the cockpit of a plane flying through dense clouds and tell them to fly like birds!  But, when they crash and burn, it is always  someone else’s fault.

Potentially sealing these young peoples’ doom is the fact that the ones who have abused them have convinced them that Leftism, alone, is virtuous, and through lies and deception have isolated them from the Truth that would bring them life and peace.  Christianity is rarely considered by young people today because Leftists and scorners have maligned Christ and believers and have created inaccurate and damaging caricatures of the faith thus transforming the public perception of Christianity into a parody.  The majority of what the public now sees as Christianity has virtually no relationship whatever to genuine Christianity; but due to most true Christians’ unwillingness to fight back, and the Left’s near monopoly on messaging, millions have been fooled.

Thus, the nation which was founded by “. . . the People, of the United States,” with a clear vision of self- sacrifice for the benefit of “(themselves and their) posterity,” has become a nation of vultures, quite literally sacrificing children for adults’ pleasures and prosperity.  On every hand innocent, vulnerable, and powerless children are victims of Leftist schemes.  Millions have died in the womb, and multitudes more are being groomed and exploited for adults’ deviant pleasures through explicitly sexualized school curricula, and prurient events such as “drag queen story hours.”  In the cases where state governments are awakening to the threats against women and children and institute protections, the predators lurk at the state borders, seeking to lure panicked women into their grasp with death-mobiles, specially equipped vans where young women facing a crisis pregnancy are offered the faux fix of a quick abortion.

It has been said that good people plant trees the shade of which they will not live long enough to enjoy. They simply live for others.  We now live in a day when the Left has managed to convince a large number of people, young and old, that selfishness and leeching off others is somehow virtuous!  The Bible warns, “Woe to those who call good, evil and evil, good.”  We all know better but many are intimidated by the Leftists who sit so powerfully, calling “good” those who yield to their corrupt demands and “evil” all who resist.

And so, we are in what some are calling a “cold” civil war!  We are not competing against well-meaning but misinformed people, but against powerful, well-connected, and formidable adversaries who see children and the weak as prey to be devoured and the population in general as sheep to be shorn.   They display a disgusting elitism that has no place in America.  In their arrogance they consider themselves our superiors, while we exist for their pleasure.  This phenomenon is new to most Americans, but it was very familiar to America’s Founders; and it is understood by those who have lived under Leftism across the globe.   We have no delusions about convincing the Leftists to abandon their wickedness, but we do hope, by God’s grace, to warn the vulnerable so that they might escape.

The great hope of the elites is that through subterfuge and deceit they can gain the power necessary to wield the same control over Americans that President Xi has over the Chinese people, and Putin has over the Russians.  When we consider the incalculable harm they have already done to Americans, especially children, one can only imagine the destruction they would unleash if they were to gain absolute power.  They are not benefactors of America’s youth, they are predators!

It is said that John Wycliffe wrote in his 1382 English translation of the Bible that the “Bible is for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  It is not an accident, then, that the first country in history to use biblical principles in formulating its constitution and laws, has provided the greatest individual liberties of any government ever created.   It is also not surprising that as the Bible has been gradually rejected over the last fifty years that the body politic has been flipped upside down.  Government officials now have the power and Individuals have become their prey.  What is evident is that the God of the Bible has a personal interest in individuals, and a critical view of mankind’s governments.  In fact, He promises to one day destroy all human governments to establish His own!  (Know this, generally speaking, any human who seeks to overthrow his government is violating God’s word (Rom. 13:1,2).  Genuine Christians will not be involved in destroying America’s government.  God alone has the authority to do such).

In Ezekiel 34, God address the “Shepherds,” the political and cultural leaders of Israel.   He says, “’Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves!  Should not the shepherds feed the flocks?  You eat the fat and cloth yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatlings, but you do not feed the flock.  The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost; but with force and cruelty you have ruled them. . . .” (34:2-4 NKJV).   Thus, we see the heart of God for children, and we see that godless political leaders haven’t changed in three thousand years!  God declares Himself the Protector of the powerless, and He will avenge their abuse at the hands of the political and cultural elite.

Parents,  wake up and protect your children!  And you who abuse these young ones, understand this!  You will not escape the judgment of God!

According to Plato the two most important questions for society is who will teach the children and what is taught to them. That was true 2,500 years ago and it is still true today. Sadly, today there simply is no agreement on who teaches the children and nothing but confusion and wildly different positions on what should be taught.

Therein lies the greatest threat to children in our modern age.

Children are inundated from all sides with conflicting messages. Some say that America is the greatest country to ever exist, while others assert that America has never been great. The United States always rushes aid to areas anywhere in the world that suffers any kind of disaster. Yet we remain reviled by many for greed, corruption and overuse of natural resources. We fought a civil war to free the slaves, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and many more than that disabled. Yet there are a significant number of people who claim we remain a systemically racist nation. Some believe and teach that we should be sexually abstinent until marriage, while others encourage sexual experimentation whenever and with whomever you want, at any age.

In many of our schools it is the dark view of America that is being taught to students. Since 2003 the percentage of Americans who report they are extremely proud of our country fell from 70% to 38% today. For those 18 to 34 years old it’s fallen to 25%. Increasingly, our schools are indoctrinating children with negative messages about our history, about our form of government, about the state of our environment, about racial and sexual injustices. Children are simultaneously becoming hooked on a host of social media platforms which have been designed, intentionally, to be addictive. Much of what we learn about current events is learned through ideologically skewed and biased social media.

Entertainment—television, movies, music, video games—likewise has become a vehicle for promoting a progressive ideology. Even formerly family friendly Disney has become fully woke, promoting race and sex-based agendas. The left leaning tilt of corporate entertainment is now being mimicked by the rest of the corporate world under the guise of ESG (environmental, social, governance).

Government at all levels has adopted one of two polar opposite approaches, progressive vs. populist. The progressives aim for more centralized government control, more socialist policies. The populists favor smaller government, more personal control and more free market polices.

Children do not understand these differences. Not even high school students have brains that are developed sufficiently to effectively sort through the key factors necessary even to understand the differences. The brain continues to grow until about age 25, when the frontal lobe, the center of reason, becomes fully developed. Until then, children tend to be governed by their feelings and are highly vulnerable to suggestion and to manipulation by adults.

Parents today largely are disengaged from their children’s education, involvement with their children’s friends, even with their extra-curricular school activities—other than acting as cab drivers. This leaves the education and influence of their children mostly in the hands of other people. Many parents do not even know what their children are learning in school, other than in very general terms. They may pay no attention to what they are watching on television, what movies they go to, who their friends are or anything about their friends or their friends’ families. Nor do they often have any idea how their children are using the smart phone they gave them or the computers and laptops they use. On average, those between 8 and 28 spend 44.5 hours a week on their digital devices, according to the Center for Parenting Education.

Remember, all during these 44.8 hours per week, as well as in school, or hanging our with their friends, children are being bathed in conflicting information. Conflicting information they are mentally incapable of resolving other than by relying on those who are most influential in their lives. Too often the most influential are peers or teachers whose values and perspectives may not align with those of the parents. Frequently, children remain confused, depressed and anxious as a result of the conflict and chaos that reigns in most elements of our culture.

It is unhealthy for children to live in this state of confusion. Children need clarity, certainty, stability. Our society is increasingly becoming hostile to childhood. In 2020, 12% of children 3 to 17 years old “had reported as having ever experienced anxiety or depression, up from 9% in 2016.” It’s no wonder. Children increasingly are being taught that it’s not even certain they are boys or girls. Instead, the educational trend now is to teach children that doctors guess what sex they are based on how they look at birth. It is up to the child, they say, to determine as they grow older what sex they really are.

One of the lesser-known experiments by Ivan Pavlov involved dogs distinguishing between a circle and an oval. The dog would be rewarded if it pointed to a circle, but punished if it pointed at an oval. The experiment involved gradually changing the oval to look more and more like a circle to see how the dogs reacted. At some point the dogs became confused. Some dogs refused to choose, but others became agitated and anxious, spinning around in circles, barking and yelping. This is what we are doing to our children.

Parents need to retake control of what their children are being taught. We can no longer depend on proxies to do our job.

The most important job of a parent is to provide a stable, safe and secure home. A big part of that is for parents to be actively engaged in what their children are being taught at school, involved in their children’s activities, fully knowledgeable about their children’s friends and their families, and actively involved in supervising their children’s online life. If parents do these things, many of the dangers children face in our culture become somewhat insignificant.

It is especially important to help their children differentiate between right and wrong, between true and false, between good touch and bad touch, between safe people and unsafe people. They need to know the difference between good guys and bad guys. And don’t neglect describing what the wolves look like.

Children need to be raised with clearly understood values, preferably Christian values. If parents do not have a clear understanding of a biblical worldview (less than 10% of Christians do) then they need to educate themselves to pass it along to their children. The Bible identifies three kinds of people: the wise person, the foolish person and the evil person. There are no other kinds. Learn how to identify them, and teach your children to do so as well.

Predators, whether sexual predators or other kinds of predators, tend to target lonely children whose parents are not engaged or whose parents are easily fooled. They capitalize on the confusion of children in order to emotionally manipulate and exploit them. Children whose parents have not provided emotional stability or are uninvolved in the child’s life, are prime targets.

Don’t let your child become one.

It is simple: good people don’t commit murder. Murderers do!  Multiple mass shootings over the last few years, and especially recently, have caused a great sense of frustration among citizens, yet the only message coming from some politicians is about reducing the number of guns in society. They never address the fundamental issue which is that guns in the hands of good people never cause a problem, and in fact often save lives. Yet law abiding citizens are always the target of Leftists’ gun control laws.

Americans have always had an abundance of firearms. Guns are not the problem. People willing to commit violent crimes is! The problem of mass shootings in America will not be corrected with changes in the laws, but rather with changes in hearts.

The multiple shootings of young people which have occurred over the last few years are worse than tragic. But sadly, they are the logical consequence of a society in denial regarding mankind’s sinfulness and in rejection of God’s authority. From the first murder recorded in Genesis 4 to the recent rampage on the campus of Michigan State University, every one of these killings is a direct assault upon God the Creator and a rejection of His command not to commit murder.

It is irrational to think that we can pick and choose which of God’s commandments we obey and which we flout.  Why would we expect young people to selectively obey God’s 6th commandment when we collectively scorn them all?  Why should young people listen to anything our leaders say when those leaders lie, cheat, steal, and advocate for the killing of the unborn and euthanasia for the elderly? The left has ridiculed America’s founders, the Bible, God, and everyone who promotes historic Judeo-Christian virtues. They then wring their hands in faux dismay when people violate those same virtues. C.S. Lewis got it right when he wrote, “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

We could expand on his point: We deny truth exists yet get angry when people lie. We mock integrity and are overwhelmed by crime. We say “follow your heart” but are then appalled by people’s selfishness. We scorn God and are surprised by the violence and chaos of a godless society.

Do the Leftists who promote expanded drug use, defunding the police, removing God and the Bible from culture, who trash America’s history and replace science with woke nonsense, not understand what they are doing? Are they well-intentioned but mistaken? Sadly, no!  They know exactly what they are doing and why! Their goal is not a better culture with healthier, happier citizens but rather a godless society that becomes so chaotic the citizens plead with them to take control and bring order even if it means totalitarianism.

But we know better because we know God, we love the truth, and we understand how it all ends! Psalm 2 addresses leaders and citizens who think they can free themselves from God’s principles and cast off his sovereign lordship, “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: The Lord shall have them in derision. . . .” And ultimately, He will “dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

We who love God do not fight this battle with the weapons of men, but with truth. While battles rage on, the ultimate victory has already been won. Jesus Christ won it over 2000 years ago with his death on the cross, and His resurrection!

It would be quite humorous, if it weren’t so ironic, to witness Leftists, who hold such power in American culture, pose as martyrs claiming to “speak truth to power!”  No, at the moment it is Christians, who are the butt of comedians’ late-night jokes, who are mocked and scorned on every hand, who are sued for living their convictions, who are speaking “truth to power.”  Every forum of public discourse and power is dominated by the left.  Government, education, the Media, Arts, Hollywood, Big Tech, business associations and more are firmly controlled by Leftists.  It is a testimony to the power of truth that these Leftist powerbrokers are doing everything they can to silence the few dissenting voices that remain, even as those voices have virtually no cultural power!  It may also be evidence that these Leftists know, in spite of their protestations otherwise, that truth is not on their side!

What are we who love and proclaim truth to do?  We must not yield an inch.  We must make no apology for the truth.  We must shun the methods of the Left.  We must live and act with grace. Scriptures are not merely poetic when they proclaim, “the righteous are bold as a lion,” but “the wicked flee when no one pursues,” (Prov. 28:1).

Jesus Christ told His disciples that they are “the salt of the earth.”  Salt has many beneficial uses, one of which is to inhibit decay.  No one can deny that America is in the state of moral decay pushed by the Left.  However, because of our resistance to this decay, we are hated.  Our presence, words, and actions are irritants and even obstacles to the decadence being promoted by influential God-hating Americans.  In contrast to the “men without chests” being created by the Left, Christians reflect the eternal principles and authority of the God who has redeemed us.  So, if we are to inhibit the decay of our culture, in practical terms, how are we to do that?  We cannot change people’s hearts.  God, alone, does that work.  But we can and must proclaim the message of the Gospel and live so as to represent Christ well.  The Apostle Paul told his young protégé, Timothy, to “. . .reprove, rebuke and exhort. . . .” all who would hear him.  These things do not make a person popular, but they do make him faithful and most effective in confronting the decay that is the ongoing result of Adam’s sin.

If you are a born-again Christian, you, too are “the salt of the earth” and have the grave responsibility to oppose the direction of our culture.  You cannot shrug it off as belonging to someone else.  The immorality, violence, and victimization of children we are witnessing is not an accident but the intentional repudiation of God, the Bible, and righteousness, and God has called no one to be spectators of the conflict!  We all have a high calling on our life!  You can’t afford to sit this out.

The confused and addicted all around us do not need “support” or agreement from us to be happy. They will only be happy when they come to agreement with God, repent of their sin, and trust His grace and forgiveness.

This is truly the message of hope every person on earth needs!

As society decays and moves away from God, morality, and truth, more and more people — especially children — are being put on dangerous psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants. Meanwhile, a new study confirms once again that there is a strong correlation between school attendance and child suicide. What is going on?

A leading expert in the field who spoke with the Illinois Family Institute, Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Peter Breggin, is sounding the alarm about these escalating crises and the enormous threat they represent. The world-renown author and critics also warned that leaving public schools was now the “only real hope” for families concerned about the horror.

The data from across the Western world paint a troubling picture no matter how you look at it. The numbers consistently show, for instance, that prescriptions for antidepressant drugs have surged in recent years. In fact, data shows more than one in six Americans now take psychiatric drugs, mostly antidepressants, with numbers continuing to rise.

According to data highlighted by the American Psychological Association, the number of Americans on antidepressants surged by almost two thirds in just fifteen years. The rate of suicides among American children is soaring, too. The phenomenon was almost unheard of prior to a few decades ago, and yet now it is a leading cause of death in American children and still surging.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Illinois Family Institute, Dr. Peter Breggin, a psychiatrist trained at Harvard who is also one of the world’s leading critics of the psychiatric industry, said Americans should be very concerned about what is happening. “I think it’s terrible in every way,” he said about the growing use of antidepressant drugs.

“Antidepressants cannot change a person’s attitude toward life or how they treat other people, it can’t change or improve their capacity to love or make them more concerned parents, or more well-disciplined children,” he explained. “Almost all psychoactive substances have one common effect: they blunt the emotional response of the individual.”

The problems that are being diagnosed psychiatrically, Dr. Breggin continued, “are never biochemical in origin,” something that runs counter to conventional wisdom. “The problems we call psychiatric are based on our human experiences — our suffering, our loves and hates. They are psychological, spiritual, political, and emotional issues: the stuff of life.”

Psychiatrists, continued Dr. Breggin, “are unfit to deal with these complex problems.” In fact, the prominent expert compared the field to a “biological, materialistic, humanistic religion — in the worst sense of humanistic.” This is why psychiatry and its tools “are so beloved by communists to control people, because they have the same godless materialistic religion,” he added.

Speaking of how the drugs work, Dr. Breggin, who served as an expert in multiple high-profile cases involving antidepressants, said they “cause multiple biochemical imbalances where there were none before.” Beyond that, these chemicals are basically classes of “neurotoxins” that cause long-term harm to the brain, he added.

Perhaps even more alarming, there is “no question” that the drugs “increase rates of violence and suicide, in every age group, not just children,” continued Dr. Breggin, who wrote the hugely influential book Talking Back To Prozac and led the push to end psychiatric lobotomies. He also served as medical expert in multiple cases involving antidepressants and murder, and “the cover up is just amazing.”

Asked why rates of antidepressant use were increasing so rapidly, he said it was not clear to what degree there was, in fact, a “mental health” crisis ripping through the U.S. population in recent decades. While he acknowledged that the actions of “predators” during COVID caused widespread disturbances, Dr. Breggin pointed to public schools and Big Pharma as potential sources of what is being observed.

Among other concerns, the psychiatrist suggested marketing and advertising by the pharmaceutical industry was a big part of the problem. “A lot of fear and turmoil is created by elites, and then those same elites turn around and make a lot of money selling drugs to deal with that,” he said, blasting Big Pharma and the industry’s “indifference” to the harm caused. The FDA serves as the industry’s “accomplice,” Breggin argued.

Interestingly, two separate studies in recent years have found a very strong link between attending school and suicide. The latest, from the National Bureau of Economic Research, noted that child suicides surge when children are back in school, and slow down by large margins when school is out for the summer. Covid lockdowns and re-opening confirmed the trends.

Dr. Breggin was blunt. “I do believe the only real hope is for families to get out of the public school system,” he said, noting that parents could do a far better job of providing or securing education with the money spent by the state on schools. “We’ve got to get people out of the public schools and into institutions that support God, their religious beliefs, the Constitution, and so on.”

But the problem goes far beyond just public schools. “Right now all institutions serve Mammon, the totalitarians, and Big Government,” he said, noting that he “did not talk like this before I started studying what was going on with COVID.” The institutions, he added, “are designed to serve the rich and powerful and make them more rich and powerful.”

Dr. Breggin, who forced authorities and the industry to investigate the link between antidepressants and suicide and violence, is hardly the only expert sounding the alarm. In fact, a report by the Citizens Commission on Human Rights citing dozens of examples and over 30 studies concluded that psychiatric drugs “create violence and suicide,” including school shootings.

The epidemic of mental and spiritual issues plaguing America went into overdrive in the 1960s, as Bible and prayer were expelled from school. Today, by throwing fuel on the fire in the form of dangerous “medications” to deal with the fire this created, a raging inferno threatens to consume even more lives and families.

Gov. JB Pritzker continues to make sure Illinois has more than its share of pot dispensaries. And as Illinois Family Institute warned repeatedly that what was happening in Colorado would also happen here, there are consequences. Dire consequences.

Marijuana use among adolescents has now surpassed alcohol use.

A 20-year study shows a 245 percent increase in marijuana use by children aged 6-18 since 2000, while alcohol use has steadily declined.

This is very bad news for several major reasons. Let’s start with the detrimental effect on brain development in early adolescents.

The Frontal Lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain. It’s liable for final decision making, judgment and reasoning. It’s not fully developed until around the age of 25. With marijuana use, however, blood flow is slowed to the Frontal Lobe. The results can be memory loss, sluggish learning, impulsivity, lessened inhibitions, impaired judgment, and more.

There’s ample research indicating regular use can result in a permanent loss of IQ by about 8 points in adolescents. It doesn’t sound like much, but it means more college dropouts, more out-of-wedlock pregnancies, more crime, more homeless – more of things citizens don’t want and our state cannot take.

In addition to reducing IQ, early adolescent use of pot can cause serious mental health problems like anxiety, depression and schizophrenia that lead to psychotic episodes.

A National Library of Medicine’s article concluded that adolescent use of marijuana speeds up psychosis development by three years, especially for those whose parents have psychotic disorders.

“Young people with a parent or sibling affected by psychosis have a roughly one in 10 chance of developing the condition themselves—even if they never smoke pot. Regular marijuana use, however, doubles their risk—to a one in five chance of becoming psychotic,” say researchers at Harvard.

Knowing these scientific facts, you would hope any compassionate governor would be alarmed and be discouraging the use of pot. Instead, Pritzker recently marked a milestone by attending the opening of the first “social equity” marijuana dispensary. (Pritzker boasted that all 192 “social equity” licenses have been issued and more dispensaries will be opening in upcoming months.)

“Social equity” dispensaries are those that have specifically been placed in communities that have had a higher rate of past marijuana use resulting in arrests and imprisonment. This includes arrests for more serious crimes that resulted in jail time for lesser crimes due to plea bargain negotiations. These folks have all been released.

As if 192 more “social equity” dispensaries are not bad enough, Pritzker is fine with marijuana delivery – like pizzas. As long as it’s regulated. That’s a buzz word for taxed.

“At first blush, without the data in front of me, I think that as long as it is regulated, as long as we make sure that the person who is ordering it gets it, and that they’re legally allowed to, then it would seem to me like the same as somebody coming into a store,” Pritzker said, according to ABC News.

The dramatic increase in child cannabis use since 2017 coincides with a wave of decriminalization and commercialization in the US. Marijuana edibles and vaping products have been found to be the most used and are actually marketed in ways attractive to children. Although they are perceived as harmless (i.e. “medical” marijuana), this is not the case.

And adolescent marijuana exposure cases have risen since 2011 and skyrocketing from 2017 to 2020.

Since marijuana use is already on the steady rise among adolescents, making the delivery system easier will only elevate the problem. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that adolescent use of marijuana today means increased use of harder drugs when they are adults; it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that this will hamper tomorrow’s job growth because it hampers tomorrow’s workers. And it doesn’t take a moral scholar to know this will lead to breaking up the traditional family even more in a society that has been on the fast-track to begin with.  It does take a governor to deny these things, though, and then happily double down to accelerate the citizens’ misery. And we have a governor who does this well.