Our culture deals with the pervasive sin of sexual immorality to the point where many people just view sex outside of marriage (in every way possible) as “normal.”

It’s a serious problem, and the root of a lot of the current cultural chaos.

At Illinois Family Institute’s 2023 Worldview Conference, Dr. John Diggs spoke on “The Consequences of Sexual Immorality.” He does a deep dive into the consequences of sexual immorality, including STD’s, why it’s such big deal, and how the confusion about gender increases unbiblical disorder.

Please watch and share!

Sometimes our pro-life arguments can become overcomplicated by statistics, rabbit-trails, and long rebuttals to straw-man arguments from the other side. We want to defend the pro-life position with everything we can muster, but sometimes it seems like we must have an answer to every argument from a pro-abortionist to properly defend life.

Fortunately, that is not true. All we need to know in order to effectively engage is a simple syllogism and three questions, which you can find here:

In this video, Scott Klusendorf, a pro-life speaker and author with the Life Training Institute, speaks at Illinois Family Institute’s 2023 Worldview Conference on “The Issue of Abortion” and what we need to engage.

You’ll want to re-watch this multiple times, both for the instructive content and humor!

Parenting is tough. Aside from having to keep little people (often with sizeable attitudes) alive, parents are also entrusted with the responsibility of training their child in the way he (or she) should go – so that they love the Lord and live it out.

That last one is difficult and can easily fall by the wayside. So whether you’re a new parent who’s struggling, or a confident experienced parent, this sermon by Dr. Rob Reinow from Visionary Family Ministries is a must-see.

Focusing on Deuteronomy 6:5-9, he shares how God created and designed discipleship to take place inside the home and the when and how for parents to instruct their children.

It’s incredibly helpful for parents from any walk of life – give it a watch and share it with parents and grandparents in your circle!

On April 18, 2023, WGN News in Chicago reported on the 30 best high schools in Illinois, so the Good Soil Good Seed Foundation (GS2) looked into how Illinois students scored on standardized tests. We specifically wanted to know how many students were at grade-level proficiency in two core subject areas — reading and math.

The results may be surprising to some, but not to us. The State of Illinois has grade-level proficiency scores of 30 percent in English Language Arts (includes reading) and 26 percent in math, according to the Illinois Report Card for 2022. Simply put, Illinois Public Schools are failing, and failing infamously.

Between 70-75 percent of students in our public schools are not at grade level in reading and math, yet 87 percent of the students graduate! This reality of poor performance is not new in Illinois. Despite a dramatic increase in spending per student, academic performance has not improved in any meaningful way. According to Wirepoints, spending per pupil in 2019 was $16,227 versus $9,555 in 2007, a 70 percent increase. Proficiency scores have dropped during the same timeframe according to The Nation’s Report Card.

Certainly the 30 best high schools in Illinois (their list is just Chicagoland schools) would all be well above a score of F. See the results below:

Over 50 percent of the “best high schools” (17 of 30) received failing grade-level proficiency scores; 4 schools scored a D; 2 scored a C; 4 scored an A; and 3 did not publish and results.

Congratulations to the 4 outstanding academic schools in this grouping. What are those schools doing that all the others are not? Could it be that their focus is on learning and not on indoctrination into woke ideologies? Could it be that there is a focus on student outcomes and performance metrics that tell the true story of academic success in these schools?

Parents are instructed by God’s Word to raise their children to love and serve the Lord and to love others. The public education system in Illinois, and in America, is not focused on academic outcomes but on indoctrination into ungodly woke-ism.

At Good Soil Good Seed Foundation, we desire to get Illinois children out of academically failing, indoctrination-succeeding public schools and into an academically rich, biblically based education system right now! The Good Soil Good Seed Foundation provides scholarships for children to attend biblically based schools and grants to help organizations start authentic Christian schools.

Please consider donating to this vital mission today. This is America’s mission field. What we do today in our children’s education will literally determine what our country is like tomorrow. We are a registered 501(c)(3) organization, and all donations are tax deductible.

Prayerful consider a donation to GS2 today and thank you for your help.

Any parent knows that trying to raise children is difficult. Especially if you are trying to raise your kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in a post-Christian society, such as our own. Everywhere you turn it seems like the world is trying to destroy any semblance of innocence in the hearts and minds of the youngest in society. How is a parent supposed to compete when the world is so dark? One of the most important decisions a Christian parent can make is where their children are going to go to school – who is going to be teaching them, and what are they going to be taught?

Well, the Village Church of Barrington recently held a seminar that helped to answer this question entitled: “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,”

Elder Greg Nash kicks the seminar off by discussing what the Bible says about educating children and why so many young adults and kids have a worldly worldview. Videos of each speaker have been posted online, and we’ve linked the first video here. Please be sure to watch and share!

Written by Ed Straka

In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, author Neil Postman describes the growth and outright dominance of the entertainment industry and the all-pervading influence it has had upon American culture. More to the point – the book illustrated how a culture could literally be dumbed down by the type of entertainment it dealt with and consisted of. Equally telling in the author’s mind was how much time was spent viewing and reading material that was as frivolously meaningless as it was sensual and vulgar.

Yet, and co-relative to the above was the unfortunate reality that people no longer spent time reading, thinking about, or discussing things of import (Phil. 4:8). Rather, they chose to contemplate the words of some popular gadfly, movie star or rap musician, or lose themselves in endless hours of television. In other words, Proverbs tells us that the fool’s eyes are in the ends of the earth (Proverbs 17:24), but in our case – it’s the TV, video games and the tabloids. Postman suggested that our media was used like the drug “Soma” in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to medicate the masses into complacency.

Now and Then

As much as I agree with Postman’s assessment of our culture and the mindless rabble it appears to be producing exponentially, I would also like to suggest there is an even greater and more pernicious threat out there today that not only invites people into an alternative world – but a world of randomness and outright oblivion. A world so absorbing, not to mention stimulating, that young people prefer it to reality – and in time – seem to detach themselves from reality.

Consider: When we were growing up, the big thing was movies. There were no video games, only Checkers, Monopoly and pinball games at the bowling alley and the big concern of our parents was sexuality. Hollywood then – as it continues to now – constantly pushed the envelope with both language and the dress code. The racier movies were a cause of concern for our parents who, more often than not, banished us into the other room where we lamented our excommunication from the world of adults which meant access to movies with bad language and loose dress codes.

This was only natural: our desire was for the things that adults were aware of and participated in, accentuated by the fact that our parents kept it from us. Even to this day sexuality is cause for concern not only in the sense of living in a carnal society that seeks to seduce everyone and everything, but also in the real world of teen pregnancy and the unfortunate abortion of those unwanted babies (despite the recent overturning of Roe vs. Wade).

What movies especially did for the young, however, was to teach us about the world and the things in it. Above all, it taught us to dream about being a hero and heroes generally did the right thing. Even Jimmy Cagney when playing a gangster on his way to the electric chair could be counted on to say that his life was a waste and he had made a mistake if it meant scaring some kids straight. The biggest downside to TV back then was we probably watched too much of it.

Stories had a definite beginning with a goal, a problem, a solution to the problem and the struggle to apply the solution. All stories had an ending which was clear to the eye of the beholder. When it was all said and done, we kids knew they were only movies although we wanted to be like the people we saw in those movies.

Ideas Within

Today, however, things are different. In fact, there is an even greater problem in society that is wrapped up in the very fiber of our youth culture today that goes beyond bad language and loose dress codes. This “problem” stems from the pens and typewriters of men who rule the world from the grave, philosophically speaking: Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, B.F. Skinner, and Jean Paul Sarte.

Each of these men had a profound, atheistic philosophy of life that influenced various academic disciplines and their perspective on the field of anthropology and what it means to be human. We don’t see it as clearly for two reasons:

First off, it is embedded in many of the movies, music, video games and comic books that our young people are involved with and if we do catch a glimpse, we just label it as “violent.”

Secondly, most people don’t study philosophy, so they don’t know the major players and the terms and phrases used by these men nor the implications of these terms and phrases when applied.

I can assure you, however, our modern media is much more than just “violent” but decidedly dangerous in terms of the human psyche because it stems from the internal dynamic latent within us all: sin. Modern technology amplifies sin and the desire for it with all the bells and whistles and unbelievable graphics. Equally, there is something latent within the various forms of media in terms of the ethos portrayed philosophically.

What’s not realized by most people is that many philosophers over the centuries perpetuated various non-Christian beliefs through their writings and these ideas ended up in educational institutions and the students of these educational institutions eventually graduated and joined mainstream America as educators, musicians, script writers and novelists.

Playtime?…

In time would come the world of high-tech video game developers who themselves pirated many of these ideas they encountered in a class, or in a movie or book, and used them to build what is called in movies a “story line” or “plot” and in the gaming world a “scenario.”

Some movies are obscene in the true sense of the word’s definition: it belongs “off stage” meaning it’s not necessary to advance the plot of the movie or play. Hollywood is replete with these movies and with the rise of Netflix we now have access to movies from abroad that have no moral sensibilities at all in terms of what they allow on screen.

Video games are not much better. Although I’ve never seen the games, nor did my boys buy them, there are games one can play featuring scenarios that can be anything from shooting up a school or public building to rape and out-right destruction of a city. I believe the most infamous such game is called “Grand Theft Auto.”

What needs to be understood is this: these are not just games and movies! They are philosophical & psychological conditioners that proselytize a specific world and life view that is antithetical to Christianity. Equally, it is a world designed to draw us in because it panders to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life (1 John 2:16): the very things the script writers and game designers have given themselves over to (Jude 1:8).

The themes of most of these novels or movie story lines or video game “scenarios” are built on the witch’s brew of atheism and historical relativism and the reality of what men and women are capable of who were influenced by the ideas of the above-mentioned men if not restrained by a transcendent moral code.

In other words, if the above-mentioned men, and those like them are correct, and there is no fixed reference point in the universe residing metaphysically in an actual God – then there can be no ultimate standard of right and wrong to base morality upon. A prospect which leaves the human race “home alone” as it were, driven by the blind forces of nature which itself is driven by unknowable forces of biological necessity and determinism and nothing else. Man is all impulse and exercises his will with no remorse (1 Corinthians 2:14).

It is this world of relativism mixed in with the idea of man as animal trained by unknown outside forces with no beginning, no purpose, and thus no real goal in life that acts as the backdrop for these games and the various novels and movies available to young people today. All of which is designed to show that there is no ultimate meaning to life: only a colorful, high-tech invitation into the Void.

Granted, my generation caught glimpses of endless, violent life with little purpose in Clint Eastwood westerns and Charles Bronson fighter movies, yet these characters still portrayed a sense of crude justice and generally defended the weak and put down bad guys. Things are different now.

The dominating thing in all the movies, music, comic books, and games today is the quest for three things: ecstasy, escape or power. Each of those concepts has its appeal to different individuals for all human beings have a sinful tendency. But for those to whom God is a non-existent entity these three things are the focus of life, as opposed to what Scripture admonishes us to focus upon (Philippians 4:8).

When It’s All Said and Done

Understand: I’m not suggesting if you or your child plays a video game you will both become a nutcase. I am suggesting that those whose total free time is spent in the world of unreality end up with difficulty when faced with reality and will utilize those tools they have been “evangelized” with via entertainment (1 John 4:3). The new Avatar movie is case and point: history sold with fantastic colors, special effects and graphics that in the end suggests that Western Civilization is cruel, greedy and selfish and if we could only return to the pristine past of the noble savage – in this case blue with tails – all would be well. Ironically, the very system that Cameron castigates is the social-economics system responsible for his great wealth and fame as a director, but what’s $700,000,000 have to do with it?

Thus, as parents who seek to raise their children as well as educate them intentionally for hopes of a brighter, productive future serving in the Kingdom of God, it is important to realize that “education” does not stop with the homeschooling lesson of the day but continues with your child’s entertainment (1 Corinthians 15:33; ESV).

Choose wisely!

Edward Straka has spent most of his adult life in education having taught at the collegiate level  as well as the high school level in the areas of Ancient and Medieval History, U.S. History, World View, Economics and US Government. He has pastored churches in Wisconsin and Mississippi and taught Japanese at Honda of America, and Piqua Community College in Ohio. He has written both historical fiction and futuristic dystopian fiction with a bio-ethical slant as well as nonfiction social theory books available on Amazon. Currently, Mr. Straka teaches Theology and is the acting Director of Christian Liberty Homeschools headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois, yet having students throughout the world.

This article was originally published by our friends at Christian Liberty Homeschools.

In a free society, why should only one political side dominate the media? Yet social media, the networks, the cable channels, newspapers, and satellite programming are all completely dominated by the left. Recently, we saw quite a kerfuffle when DirecTV, owned by giant AT&T, decided to ignominiously drop Newsmax-TV from their lineup.

AT&T did the same a year ago to a much smaller conservative outlet, One America News (OAN). Why does it seem that the corporate decisions of companies like AT&T always push in only one political direction?

Numerous leaders have spoken against this censorship by the left against Newsmax, including:

• Dennis Prager
• Mike Huckabee
• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
• Speaker of the U.S. House Kevin McCarthy
• U.S. Senator Ted Cruz
• Actors Jon Voight and Kevin Sorbo

Many are calling for a boycott of DirectTV. Others are calling for Congressional hearings because of the potential impact on our political debate.

My big question is: Why must the left strangle what few conservative voices are heard on the other side?

When the founders of America produced the Constitution, a frequent criticism was that it did not spell out specific rights. So the founders agreed that if the Constitution were to be ratified, they would attach a Bill of Rights. These were the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution.

The First Amendment deals, first and foremost, with freedom of religion. But other rights enumerated there include the freedom of the press and free speech.

AT&T is a corporation. It is not a part of the government. But these companies wield a great deal of political power. Why are they using it to essentially stifle free speech?

There is no question that the mainstream media, the legacy media, the major networks, and so on present news from a skewed and biased perspective. National Public Radio (NPR), which receives government funding, has a program called “All Things Considered.” I remember whenever I would hear that title, I would think to myself—“Yeah, All Things Considered, from a leftist perspective.”

The founders envisioned a free society with a robust and free press. But today’s mainstream media is dominated by the leftist perspective, with only Fox News offering a significant counterweight.

Thankfully, even under dire conditions, there is always an alternative media. In the days of the American War for Independence, there were Committees of Correspondence, disseminating information to the 13 colonies contrary to royal-controlled sources.

There are different skirmishes in the battle over free speech, and some speech of more eternal significance than others. But let me use an analogy from the history of Christianity.

When the Apostles of Jesus set out to proclaim His saving message in first century Rome, the overwhelming power of the state was dead set against them. But God used them to eventually win over many converts. One of the ways was through letters that were written largely in prison.

Ultimately, there is a battle between good and evil, and the proclamation of the truth is often at the heart of that battle.

As the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” puts it, “Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong. Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future.” God is watching and making sure that truth will prevail, which it will—even if for a time, times, and a half a time, it suffers setbacks.

Of course, this is not to equate a commercial network like Newsmax with the Gospel. But it’s beyond question that elite interests often suppress truth wherever it comes from. I’m grateful to live at a time where there is readily available an alternative media. I’m sure if some elitists in our culture had their way, they would over-regulate the Internet, talk radio, satellite programming, Christian broadcasting, and so on, to make them essentially toothless—as sometimes happens in other countries.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter late last year, he suffered the ire of many on the left, as he opened up the Twitter files and exposed a great deal of censorship against conservative speech. Musk tweeted in late November: “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”

Dr. Richard Land, president emeritus of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, said of the left’s censorship of conservative speech in general: “They want to enforce conformity, they do not want to hear viewpoints, they want to stifle viewpoints that they disagree with. They’re acting like fascist Blackshirts….They can only get away with taking away our rights if we let them.”

Indeed, must the left strangle the flow of information? As the Bible notes: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”

This article was originally published at Jerrynewcombe.com.

This past Monday morning, I was teaching hundreds of ministry school students at Christ for the Nations in Dallas on the topic of demons and deliverance.

During the class, I stated that in the days ahead, I believed that satanic manifestations would become much more open and overt in our society. Rather than hiding himself in the culture, the devil will reveal himself more clearly.

After teaching, I got back to my room and began to read headlines and receive emails that confirmed the very thing I was saying.
(More on that in a moment.)

Of course, we’ve been seeing this trend for years now.

• One prominent example would be the rise of Drag Queens in our culture, some of them in overtly satanic attire, reading to toddlers in libraries and performing at churches.

• Another prominent example would be the “Shout Your Abortion” movement and the celebration of radical, pro-abortion legislation. This is in stark contrast to the old Bill Clinton adage that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.”

• Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a radical feminist group with the acronym WITCH, standing for the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. (I kid you not.) They certainly got their message across!

But most groups are not that overt (even if tongue in cheek), and gay activists learned decades ago that the in your face, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” approach was not working. Instead, gay strategists adopted a policy of presenting themselves to be exactly the same as the couple next door, just like you in every way, except gay. (This was laid out in the watershed 1989 book After the Ball: How America Will Conquer It’s Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90’s.)

So, from a strategic viewpoint, most groups wanting to bring about radical change to society do so in more covert, incremental ways rather than announcing, “We’re a terrorist conspiracy from hell!”

In the same way, Satan doesn’t march around as a huge, horned dragon carrying a pitchfork.

As a senior demon counseled a younger demon in C. S. Lewis’s classic book The Screwtape Letters,

“The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.” 

These days, however, it’s as if Satan is coming out in full force, red tights and all – if not literally, then metaphorically. What else can be said of the performance of “Unholy” at the Grammy Awards this past Sunday night?

As the Breitbart headline announced, “Non-Binary Pop Star Sam Smith Performs BDSM, Devil-Themed ‘Unholy’ at the Grammys.” How lovely!

But even that only told part of the story.

As explained in more detail by the American Family Association,

“During the annual Grammy Awards ceremony on Feb.5, originally designed to recognize outstanding artists in the music industry, Pfizer pharmaceutical company felt it fitting to sponsor performers Sam Smith, who claims to be non-binary, and Kim Petras, who claims to be transgender. These two gave the nation a Satan-themed performance of their song ‘Unholy,’ in which Petras performed inside a cage with drag queens dressed in devil costumes, while Smith gyrated in a costume with devil horns sticking out from a top hat.

“The entire ‘performance’ depicted a hellish scene with lots of darkness, blood red colors and flames.”

So, you have:

1. the name of the song, “Unholy”;
2. both lead performers denying their biological realities, one of them wearing devil’s horns;
3. drag queens in devil costumes;
4. BDSM-related themes; and
5. the fires of hell

I would say that is pretty clear!

No wonder podcaster Liz Wheeler tweeted, “Don’t fight the culture wars, they say. Meanwhile demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan. I could throw up.”

Compared to some other past hits (whose lyrics are virtually unrepeatable in moral circles), the lyrics to “Unholy” are relatively tame. It is the overall message of the Grammy performance that shouts out its depravity loudly and clearly.

Similar to this is the announcement from The Satanic Temple that it is raising funds to provide “free religious [meaning Satanic] Telehealth medication abortion care in New Mexico.”

But this could be good news for us as followers of Jesus.

The greater the darkness, the clearer our light is seen.

May it shine brightly in front of the whole world! And may we shine as lights without shame, without compromise, and without hypocrisy.

And don’t be surprised if, in the days ahead, in front of your very eyes, you witness scenes as if taken straight out of the Bible where, in broad daylight, visibly demonized people get set free in Jesus’ name – dramatically, gloriously, and in full public view.

Things are heating up.

This article was originally published at AsdDrBrown.org.

I just read an op-ed from a feminist author, published by CNN, who I will leave unnamed (no need to give her career free publicity), attacking the concept of parental rights.

One of her biggest arguments for taking decision-making rights away from parents and giving them to minors was related to LGBTQ+ students and more specifically transgender students. Ironically, she argues that adults should not have the authority to make decisions for minors, but then she infers that some adults SHOULD have that authority (just not parents). She believes it is abusive and potentially harmful to a child’s mental health to prohibit them from making life-altering decisions about their sexuality and even their own bodies.

The irony is she believes schoolteachers, physicians and politicians SHOULD have the right to facilitate major life-changes for these impressionable young people. The idea is that anyone who wants to help them reassign their name, gender or even physiology is good, but those who would keep them from doing so is an abuser (in this case…parents).

This is the kind of propaganda coming from the media, government-school system, Hollywood, the music industry, social media, and most of popular culture. Parents are bad and children need to be protected from their parents’ desire to help guide and direct the upbringing of their own offspring.

Targeting Young People

In America, the younger you are, the more susceptible you are to being targeted and groomed by LGBTQ+ activists. According to the Williams Institute, young people aged 13-24 are almost twice as likely on average to identify as transgender as those who are in older age brackets. It seems there is a “full-court press” (to borrow a basketball term) to reach those who are still too young to know the psychological harm of denying your biological sex.

The number of young people identifying as transgender in the U.S. has almost doubled since 2017, according to a Centers for Disease Control & Prevention report.

One psychological agency published a press release last year stating:

“The Government yesterday announced that the proposed ban on conversion therapy will not cover trans conversion therapy. We are disappointed at this decision. At (name withheld) we believe that talking therapy that has the intention of changing either someone’s sexuality or their gender identity should not be allowed, and should be a criminal offence.”

In their view, parents should be prosecuted for even talking with their child who is aligning with the LGBTQ+ lifestyle. This is despite the fact that depression and suicide attempts among LGBTQ+ individuals are very high compared to that of the general populace! This is especially true of those who experience gender reassignment surgeries.

The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (USTS) found that 81.7 percent of transgender individuals seriously consider suicide during their lifetime and 40.4 percent actually attempt taking their lives. Activists on the social left insist this is simply because there is a lack of acceptance (which to them means “celebration”) of their decisions, but this argument ignores basic facts. It wasn’t long ago we rightly used the term “dysphoria” who denied their biological sex. Today, confusion about one of the most basic aspects of our humanity is being touted as essential to “tolerance and diversity.” When someone becomes detached from their most basic biological identity, everything else in their life becomes clouded and confused.

What Can Parents Do?

On one level, parents cannot completely protect their children against the designs of those who would seek to morally corrupt them. There are so many inroads today it is almost impossible to turn them all off. But I would suggest:

1. Removing your children from government schools.
2. Restricting smartphones and other devices until students are older teens.
3. Using internet filters and accountability software to know what your teens are doing online.
4. Drastically reducing screentime and access to movies, music and gaming that encourages sexual activity for youth.
5. Limiting social activities where your teens are spending a lot of time alone with other young people who do not share your religious values.
6. Seriously rethinking on-campus college experiences. I have heard several stories just in the last month of conservative families whose students came home from college and announced they were “out of the closet.” Indoctrination on college campuses is rampant.

Most importantly, have conversations with your children from a young age about their sexuality and God’s design for men and women. Parents are the first and most important go-to for information about sex and children will usually embrace their parents’ values, unless of course the parents abdicate their training to others who don’t share their values.

The world will not encourage your right to be a parent to your children, so you need to insist on it. Despite what the world tells you, be the parent and never apologize to anyone for being a wise, guiding light for your own child. God gave you the right to parent your child, so do it regardless of whether anyone else agrees with you.

Social media is dangerous. It’s easy to lose your real life to a virtual one. One school district in Seattle, Washington has decided it’s had enough of students suffering from the designed dangers of social media. In a 91 page complaint filed against the parent companies of the social media platforms TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, Seattle Public Schools, recently joined by the Kent School district, asserts that these companies have specifically curated their social media sites to be addicting to youth by “exploit[ing] the neurophysiology of the brain’s reward systems,” and that “the content Defendants curate and direct to youth is too often harmful and exploitive (e.g., promoting a ‘corpse bride’ diet, eating 300 calories a day, or encouraging self-harm).”

The complaint also specifies how as social media usage has increased, so have mental health problems, such as:  depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidal thoughts (revealing that “from 2009 to 2019 there was an on-average 30 percent increase in the number of students… who reported feeling ‘so sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row that [they] stopped doing some usual activities.’”

The Seattle School District’s detailed complaint alleges that social media harms users in the following ways:

• Social media has been designed to manipulate users’ brains via social reciprocity and intermittent variable rewards.

• Social media is designed to create dopamine loops to keep users hooked.

• Social media capitalizes on “fear of missing out” (FOMO) to keep users coming back.

• Social media curates the feed to keep users on longer.

• Social media pushes content that is often inappropriate, immoral, and harmful.

• Social media encourages dangerous behavior.

• Social media can cause teens to act disruptively, including sexual behavior, self-harm, vandalism, and violence.

It’s no secret that social media is harmful. That cry has been sounded so often, it’s now apt to fall on deaf ears. It allows every user to be the star of the story. It demands constant attention, so you don’t lose followers or miss new features and stories. It pressures users to show off their best life, rewarding the diligent with likes and follows. Users defend this form of entertainment as an effective way to connect with others, whilst sidestepping the reality that it’s mostly just a waste of time. It’s easy to get on, difficult to leave, and many (if not most) people have developed a habit of checking it whenever they have a second of downtime. Even though the minimum age for most social media is 13, it’s not uncommon for younger users to already be hooked. It’s designed to be addicting, and often lets you stumble (or guides you) into things you can’t unsee and can’t get away from.

Social media is difficult to regulate, hard to get rid of, and deeply enmeshed in American society, making it a problem difficult to solve. The lawsuit filed by Washington’s Seattle and Kent Public School districts is a good place to start – and a glimpse of what it would look like for schools to take the safety of children seriously. Parents, grandparents and church leaders, please take note: Protect kids from the designed dangers social media platforms pose.

Project Veritas has just released another exposé in which a profiteering propagandist who self-identifies as an “educator” admits that he promotes critical race theory (CRT) to and in public schools by omitting the words “critical race theory.” Yes, Americans really are that gullible.

The racist scamster is Quintin Bostic, a homosexual who works for the Washington D.C.-based Teaching Lab that—according to Bostic—sells CRT-based curricula to school districts, including districts in the state of Georgia, where state law prohibits the teaching of “divisive concepts” related to race, most notably CRT.

In order to circumvent that law, Bostic gleefully admits to omitting the words “critical race theory.” To leftists hell-bent on socially imposing their moral beliefs and socially constructing their new world order, transparency is the enemy.

In the secretly recorded conversation between Bostic and Project Veritas’ undercover journalist, Bostic says,

If you don’t say the words “critical race theory,” you can technically teach it.

He then lightheartedly describes his work ethic:

I would say I’m a good salesman, but I’m also an evil salesman—like so bad.

He further admits that the good people of Georgia are paying for the curriculum his organization sells in violation of state law:

Project Veritas: “So, the state is paying for your curriculum without knowing what’s in it.”

Bostic: “They have no clue. And I’m like, “This is great—this is good!”

Project Veritas asks Bostic how he conceals the fact that the curriculum he sells is based on CRT, to which Bostic replies, “It’s a DEI work.”

Many will recall how leftists mocked conservatives relentlessly in the past few years for claiming CRT was being taught in public schools. As I wrote earlier, these deceitful or ignorant leftists were technically accurate. Public schools were likely not teaching CRT as an academic theory to middle school or high school students. Rather, they were teaching arguable ideas derived from CRT as objective truths and masking the arguable ideas under the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) rubric—an ever-present help to leftists in trouble.

The arrogant Bostic shared that his CRT-polluted curriculum is being taught in at least one kindergarten and that he couldn’t care less if Georgia parents are upset about the illegal use of CRT-based curriculum in their schools.

Like so many leftist activists, Bostic dismisses parents as their children’s teachers:

I hate to say it, but parents are like not teachers.

To emphasize his point, he says parents “are” ignorant.

I don’t at all hate saying this: Bostic is “like” not a teacher. He is a propagandist.

Bostic makes clear that he shares the widely held leftist goal of undermining children’s relationships with their own parents:

And these kids are also pushing against their parents, like, “Mom, that’s not right! You shouldn’t say that!”

Nothing sends a thrill up the legs of leftist “educators” quite like turning other people’s children into activists for leftist causes.

Bostic has other troubling goals not exposed in Project Veritas’ video but available in this interview:

I grew up in a real small town. Um, I was a minority as far as race and sexual orientation. … I also had no one to relate to and to connect with and talk to and to share those same like backgrounds and understanding. And so like with me and my identities, that moment let me realize like [teaching is] more than just opening the book and reading and teaching the standard. It’s you being here in this space and like being present, because as a teacher … you’re that everything for that child eight hours a day 40 hours a week. You are that person for a child who gives them comfort, who gives them love, who gives them passion, who gives them knowledge, who gives them guidance, and you cannot put a price and you cannot put words on that.

Take a moment to absorb Bostic’s claim: He says teachers are “everything” for children “eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.” Many leftists understand the profound affect teachers have on the minds and hearts of children and are exploiting their roles to destroy children.

For parents who believe—rightly—that homoerotic acts are dishonorable acts that put at risk the eternal lives of those who engage in them, the goals of Bostic are evil. No one and no organization that receives funding from the government has a right to promote controversial moral beliefs about sexuality to children.

No matter how many parents object to their children’s public school education being infused with controversial ideas derived from CRT and no matter how strenuously they express their objections, leftists will not stop using taxpayer money to promote those ideas. Increasingly leftists openly admit they seek to indoctrinate other people’s children with leftist views of race (and sexuality) even if doing so disrupts parent-child relationships. They justify their subversive actions as necessary to promote their disordered understanding of what is right, true, and beautiful. And the goal of leftists to indoctrinate children in their leftist ideologies relies on lack of transparency.

Two recent conversations over two days with two different people were variations on the theme of cultural dis-integration—or, perhaps more aptly, anti-culture integration.

We are in the midst of a revolution propelled by the integration of the government—including government schools—big business, social media, the arts and entertainment industries, medical and mental health organizations, the legacy press, and even the military industrial complex in the service of creating a monolithic anti-culture, one in which truth is suppressed and human flourishing undermined.

In the first conversation, we expressed our shared incredulity that America is becoming in our lifetimes in plain sight a totalitarian state in which the government—also known as Big Brother—is moving quickly to oppress Christians.

Leftists, who have not eyes to see, mock such a claim as absurd and paranoid, but Christians—especially those who have fled Communist countries—can see the portents.

• Laws are being passed that ban Christian counselors from helping suffering people identify and heal from bodily, emotional, and intellectual harms and to construct identities that comport with sexual truth.

• Theologically orthodox Christians are being banned from fostering children.

• Christians are losing the legal right to prevent their own children, confused by a science-denying ideology, from being chemically and surgically mutilated.

• Christians are losing the ability to make a living if they refuse to speak lies about physical embodiment as male or female.

• Lawmakers seek to rob churches and colleges of their tax-exempt status if they refuse to perform unholy ceremonies that solemnize homoerotic, non-marital unions as marriages.

• Lawmakers seek to rob Christian colleges of their accreditation for their refusal to participate in the evil lie that men can be women or vice versa.

• Government schools are intentionally concealing critical information from Christian parents about their own children and encouraging children to view their own parents’ beliefs as hateful.

• Style manuals, dictionaries, and university speech code manuals are redefining and/or “discouraging the use of” (i.e., banning) words in the service of, at least in part, an anti-Christian ideology, which seeks to coerce submission through language manipulation. With regard to university and corporate speech codes, failure to comply carries a high risk of punishment. This is quintessential Orwellian Newspeak that shreds the First Amendment.

The second conversation was precipitated by a Facebook post in which I included the following excerpts from reviews of the movie Babylon—Hollywood’s special Christmas gift to Americans:

From the Houston Chronicle:

But why opt for subtlety and insight when you can have upchuck and defecation?

From Mashable:

Babylon is a ghastly, sticky, indulgent mess of a movie, slinging shock value in lieu of anything interesting to say.

From Time Magazine:

Babylon is a manic sprawl that only pretends to celebrate cinema. It’s really about prurience, dumb sensation, self-congratulation and willful ignorance of history.

From Slate Magazine:

Babylon Is a Defecating Elephant of a Movie. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie star, but Damien Chazelle’s movie crawls up its own mammoth butt. Within the first 15 headache-inducing minutes of Damien Chazelle’s old-Hollywood epic Babylon, the camera has been on the receiving end of a flood of elephant sh*t and eavesdropped on a call girl hired to urinate on an obese and grotesquely self-indulgent movie star. This excretion-themed intro serves as a thesis statement for the 3-hour-and-9-minute-long movie to come.

And from Richard Roeper writing for the Chicago Sun-Times:

Self-indulgent, stomach-churning epic from director Damien Chazelle offers little insight on 1920s Hollywood. What a mess.

What a sprawling, grotesque, self-indulgent, wretched, occasionally mesmerizing but ultimately over-the-top mess we have in Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood epic “Babylon,” which one imagines was supposed to be a lurid and show-stopping and unvarnished celebration of the hedonistic madness that enveloped the movie business in the 1920s but comes across as a three-hour plus attack on our senses—a flashy, sometimes dazzling but curiously uninvolving and often nauseatingly gross spectacle.

Where do we start? How about the opening scene that affords us a closeup of an elephant’s rear as it defecates like a fire hose on an unfortunate immigrant, isn’t that hilarious and entertaining? Or what about the profoundly unfunny sequence in which an actress gorges herself on a lavish buffet before projectile vomiting as if she’s Regan from “The Exorcist” showing up in a Monty Python movie?

Wait, there’s more. So much more.

We’re also “treated” to scenes of a woman urinating on an obese party animal; a sad-sack moron getting his head stuck in a toilet; a muscle-bound and crazed giant of a man munching on a live rat, and various showbiz types getting coked up and liquored up and on and on it goes.

In response to this post about yet another manifestation of sexual deviance produced by denizens of America’s anti-culture, unmoored as it is from God—the source of goodness, beauty, and truth—a friend asked if we’ve “finally reached the bottom of the barrel.”

No, I answered, we definitely have not reached the slimy, rotten, fetid bottom of the barrel. The “love is love” crowd has barely scraped the surface of polyamory, pedophilia, incest, and “zoophilia” yet. And then there remains the arduous task of normalizing all the paraphilias the fertile imaginations of fallen man invent. Of course, the ground is softening, making the planting and tending this garden of poisonous weeds less arduous.

Who could have imagined a mere generation ago that we would see our government turn against Christians in such bold ways, abrogating their First Amendment rights and polluting the public square with body- and soul-destroying perversity?

But, tragically and unconscionably, many Christians have been accomplices. And for that they ought to confess and repent. Many have refused and remain committed to refusing to talk openly about God, Satan, and the cultural embrace of sexual degradation even as their neighbors—including children—suffer grievously.

Awash in unbiblical pride and worry, consumed by love of money, and so covetous of our reputations among men that many of us remain silent as the anti-culture uses our money to preach dark things to children that are abominations in the sight of God.

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution to ponder: Resolve to speak truth at every opportunity as an expression of obedience to God and love of our neighbors. In so doing, we will also stand a better chance of preserving the rights of our children and grandchildren to speak, worship, and raise their children freely.

Written by John Rustin

In a sickening example of just how far the liberal media is willing to go to normalize abortion, National Public Radio (NPR) aired a report recently (Nov. 3, 20220) that includes an audio clip of a woman undergoing a surgical abortion.

“You’re gonna hear this machine turn on now, okay, it makes a loud noise,” a female voice says—presumably the doctor—as a vacuum pump is activated. The next 20 seconds is heart-wrenching and nauseating, as a woman moans and groans while her unborn child is literally sucked out of her womb. The NPR reporter admits that the abortion procedure typically takes several minutes, but the short clip, as difficult as it is to hear, followed by an encouraging “You did it!” from the attending clinic staffer, makes the procedure seem quite routine and ordinary.

Moreover, the NPR story has an unmistakable “political” angle. The eleven-minute audio report is entitled, “What it’s like inside a Michigan abortion clinic, days before the midterm elections.” This comes less than a week before Michigan voters decide on a ballot measure that, if passed, would enshrine a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom” (i.e., abortion) in the state constitution.

According to NPR reporter Kate Wells, “In the Northland [Family Planning] waiting room, there are these inspirational quotes on the walls, like, ‘Good women get abortions.’ Another one says, ‘A lot of beautiful, wise women have been here before and are here today.’” Later, she describes the procedure room, “The lights are dimmed. There’s soothing music. It actually feels a lot like a childbirth.” “Whether it’s a birth or an abortion, it is often women guiding other women,” Wells says in an inspiring tone.

She interviews several women at the abortion clinic, most of whom already have young children and laud abortion as the solution to being pregnant. One woman, who has two daughters and is pregnant with twins from an abusive man says, “I’m so fertile, that it’s like literally I just have to stop having sex in order not to be pregnant.” Another married mother of three says she wants to go back to work and “just kind of have something for myself other than just being a mother all day every day,” so she is seeking an abortion.

The report also belittles pro-life pregnancy care centers, and paints them as deceptive, coercive, and unprofessional.

Of course, we have come to expect a certain level of bias in the media, especially from outlets like NPR, but the heartlessness of this report takes it to an entirely different level. NPR’s blatant attempt to normalize abortion and to influence the election in Michigan and across our nation is obvious and unmistakable.

I pray the callousness of this report will prick the heart and conscience of our nation as the evil of abortion is exposed.

After all, the lone voice not heard in NPR’s eleven-minute audio report is that of the child whose life was simply vacuumed away.

This article was originally shared as content from NC Family Action.

It’s the greatest gifts from God and the fundamentals of how He designed the world that are often attacked the hardest. God gave us gender as one of His very first gifts to mankind in Genesis 1. It’s the building block of the building block of society, for without gender, marriage wouldn’t exist in the way God created it to work: as an example of Christ’s relationship with the Church.

In our current culture, gender is attacked in pretty much every way possible. Gender and the innate things that go along with being male or female are caricatured, blown up, held to impossible standards, ignored as merely feelings or fancies, and beat down on as toxic or harmful. It creates a mess that harms both individual people and the society in which they live.

A recent interview Ulta (a large beauty retailer and make-up brand) did on their podcast, “The Beauty of…,” has gone viral, so-to-speak, because the host, David Lopez (a biological male who styles himself as nonbinary), spoke with Dylan Mulvaney (a famous TikToker who came out as “trans” and has been journaling his “journey to ‘girlhood’” through a series of videos – he’s a biological male) about the beauty of girlhood. Two grown men wearing make-up and talking about being a girl. This didn’t go over very well with Ulta’s clientele, probably because it’s made up of mostly women who didn’t appreciate two men telling them what it’s like to be a girl.

In fact, Ulta got so many negative comments about the interview that they’ve hid many replies on Twitter, and turned off comments on YouTube, and one of the clips posted to Instagram.

Ulta responded to the backlash by tweeting,

“The premise of ‘The Beauty Of…’ is to feature conversations that widen the lens surrounding traditional beauty standards. We believe beauty is for everyone. And while we recognize some conversations we host will challenge perspectives and opinions, we believe constructive dialogue is one important way to move beauty forward.  The intersectionality of gender identity is nuanced, something David and Dylan acknowledge themselves within the episode. Regardless of how someone identifies, they deserve our respect.”

It’s an answer that keeps accord with a non-biblical view of the world in a society driven by feelings and desires. Why shouldn’t gender be whatever you want it to be if you don’t believe God created everything for a purpose and has ordered the world to work a certain way? Feelings may be valid, but they certainly are not always accurate, and we shouldn’t use them to go by. God created each and every person fearfully and wonderfully and made them the gender He made them, and it’s good.

An attack on gender (and marriage) is especially egregious because these physical realities don’t just point to physical realities. We’re told in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”

Jesus later reiterates this in Mark 10:6-8, “But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’” Gender is the basis for one of the most significant symbols in scripture – marriage. God designed marriage to reflect salvation, as seen in Ephesians 5:24. It’s a wonderful gift from God, and therefore, the devil is going to attack it.

It’s good to be a man, and it’s good to be a woman in the way God created them to be. Listening to your feelings when they tell you differently is a sure way to hurt yourself and those around you. Feelings are wishy-washy, and they change often. Reality – and the truth of Scripture – doesn’t.