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The Trouble with Planned Parenthood

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In a stunning December 20, 2018 New York Times article  titled “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees”, former employees of the $1.5 billion dollar ($543.7 million in government grants and reimbursements) organization assert that they were discriminated against because of their pregnancies.

The New York Times has long been one of the staunchest supports of Planned Parenthood as a great champion of “reproductive choice” through abortion, so it is ironic that their article paints a terrible picture of how the organization treats its own employees when they make the reproductive choice to have a child.

The New York Times interviewed several current and former employees of Planned Parenthood who described discrimination that violated state or federal laws against pregnancy discrimination by declining to hire pregnant job candidates, refusing requests by expecting mothers to take breaks and in some cases pushing women out of their jobs after they gave birth.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking story was that of  Ta’Lisa Hairston, an employee who became pregnant but later started battling high blood pressure that threatened her pregnancy. However, her multiple medical orders stating she needed frequent breaks  were ignored by management. Her hands swelled so much that she couldn’t wear the required plastic gloves and her doctor ordered bedrest. When she returned with orders not to work over 6 hours, she worked a much longer shift and few days later had to have an emergency C-section at 34 weeks. She resigned after repeated calls urging her to return to work before her guaranteed 3 months under the Family and Medical Leave Act was up.

Dr. Leana Wen, the new head of Planned Parenthood, says that the organization is looking into the allegations and will be “conducting a review to determine the cost of providing paid maternity leave to nearly 12,000 employees nationwide.”

While the New York Times article admits that “most Planned Parenthood offices do not provide paid maternity leave”, it counters that “(d)iscrimination against pregnant women and new mothers remains widespread in the American workplace.” The Times also blames “conservative lawmakers (who) routinely threaten to kill” Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding, making the organization’s financing “precarious”.

THE REAL TROUBLE WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD

Planned Parenthood tries to downplay its’ role as the largest provider of abortion in the U.S. by touting  services like breast cancer screening (without mammograms), birth control pills and devices, pregnancy tests, etc. to low-income women even though the reality is that there are many more places, such as federally qualified community health centers (which do not provide abortions) that provide more comprehensive health care services than those offered by Planned Parenthood.

But the larger problem is that it is hard to reconcile two completely opposite philosophies: an unborn child is nothing more than tissue that can be removed by abortion if a woman so chooses vs an unborn child is a living human being deserving of protection. Planned Parenthood is firmly on the side of the first philosophy.

Thus, as Live Action found when it contacted 97 facilities at 41 Planned Parenthood affiliates, it is almost impossible to find a Planned Parenthood clinic that offers prenatal care as well as abortion, not to mention Planned Parenthood’s current campaign to encourage women to “Shout Out Your Abortion”.

So it perhaps it should not be a surprise that a pregnant employee who wants her unborn baby might pose a challenge in a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic.

This article was originally published at NancyValko.com.



The Grotesque Indecency and Arrogance of the “Trans” Cult

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America has become a cesspool of fetid water in which we’re all boiling alive like those frogs we’ve heard so much about. How else to account for the silence of most Christian leaders on the “trans” ideology, including those who pontificate on social injustice while saying and doing virtually nothing as children are being chemically sterilized and surgically mutilated? How else to account for the absence of protests at the pestilent drag queen story hours for toddlers that pollute public libraries across the country? How else to account for an 11-year-old boy cavorting in drag on stage at “BROOKLYN’S PREMIER QUEER BAR” to the leers and cheers of adult homosexual men who threw dollar bills at him? And how else to account for the parents of this exploited child being allowed to retain custody of him?

Desmond Napoles, better known by his drag persona “Desmond is Amazing” appeared at the 3 Dollar Bill club in Brooklyn, sashaying about the homosexual/drag club stage all decked out like singer Gwen Stefani. I wrote this about Desmond a year ago:

Wendylou Napoles, another feckless perversion-facilitating mother, supports her 10-year-old son Desmond in his drag queen aspirations. His drag persona, “Desmond is Amazing,” first came to the public’s attention in 2015 when he marched—or rather “vogued” in the New York City “pride” parade to the cheers of the sick crowd. A video of his unfortunate performance went viral, and his career as an exploited child-transvestite took off.

Desmond now has an Instagram account on which he posts photos of himself in drag as well as a Facebook page that has no normal little boy photos. He recently announced his plans for a virtual club that will be a “positive, encouraging, and safe online community for all drag kids to connect with one another.” Does anyone believe a fifth-grader would on his own come up with such an idea?

In a June 2017 interview in Out Magazine about Desmond’s “premature fabulousness,” Desmond’s mom, who admits to taking him to the NYC pride parade every year since he was about “four or five” and to buying his drag outfits for him, said she has known for “a long time” that her 10-year-old son is homosexual.

In another Out Magazine interview in October 2017, Ms. Napoles claims Desmond had his first crush at age seven on Jinkx Monsoon, an adult drag queen he saw on RuPaul’s drag show….

Is that really what Desmond experienced? A crush on an adult? How many seven-year-old boys have crushes on adults?

Not quite a month ago, Desmond appeared on three episodes of the YouTube show called Pe-eew! which is described as a “stinky, sit-down comedy talk show satire” hosted by two homosexuals, one of whom is 51-year-old Michael Alig. Alig was the premier “club kid” in New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In 2014, Alig was released from prison after serving 18 years for murdering his friend and drug dealer Andre “Angel” Melendez, leaving Melendez’ rotting body in his bathtub for 8 days, dismembering him, and throwing the dismembered body into the Hudson River….

In this Pe-eew! episode (click here), Alig and homosexual co-host Eric Glam ask Desmond about his pink lace and bejeweled hand mirror. Desmond describes it as his “Richie Rich” mirror, following which Alig and Glam start smirking and bantering about Richie Rich. No, not the Richie Rich a little boy should be talking about. They were talking about former club kid and fashion designer homosexual Richie Rich.

Wearing silver girl’s sandals and a tiara, Desmond appears in this video for Refinery 29, “a media and entertainment company that helps women see, feel, and claim their power,” to talk about his life philosophy and fashion.

Not so long ago, parents would likely have lost custody of their children for doing the things these mothers are doing. Today they’re celebrated by many on the Left. It’s hard to take seriously the moral outrage of Leftists over the abuse of adult women by adult men (#MeToo campaign) when they say nothing about this kind of egregious and very public abuse of children. 

Many questions are raised but not explored by the explosion in the number of children who identify as “trans”:

  • Could other “vulnerabilities” or co-morbidities like social problems, depression, anxiety, autism, or suicidal ideation contribute to the development of gender dysphoria?
  • What role does family dysfunction or trauma play in cross-sex identification? How many “trans”-identifying children have absent or abusive fathers?
  • How many “trans”-identifying children have experienced sexual abuse?
  • How many parents of famous “trans”-identifying children profit in material ways from their children’s fame?
  • How many mothers of famous “trans”-identifying children are, in effect, “stage mothers” or mothers with Munchausen Syndrome by proxy who derive pleasure from their children’s cross-sex identification?
  • What part do excessively rigid gender stereotypes play in convincing either children (and/or their parents) that they are “trans” based on interests in early childhood—a period during which sexual identity is fluid?
  • What part does pervasive cultural indoctrination with the “trans” ideology—including in government schools, social media, the arts, advertising, professional medical and mental health organizations, and the legacy media—play in causing children to identify as the sex they aren’t?
  • If, as many parents of “trans”-identifying children claim, God makes no mistakes, why are they allowing doctors to chemically and surgically alter the God-given, healthy bodies of their children?
  • If children experience a mismatch between their healthy bodies and their feelings about their biological sex, why do so many assume the error rests with healthy bodies rather than with subjective feelings?

In addition to devastating the hearts, minds, and bodies of children and adults, the “trans” toxin boiling us alive leaves a corrosive residue of overweening hubris. Those who identify as “trans” now feel entitled to bully others into submission. Like men who don evening gowns to conceal their sex, sexual anarchists conceal their tyrannical impulses beneath rhetoric about compassion, inclusivity, tolerance, equality, and justice. But make no mistake,  sexual revolutionaries are exploiting those appealing notions as weapons. Sexual revolutionaries use those noble ideals to confuse and intimidate the unpersuaded in order to silence the expression of views revolutionaries detest. And as conservatives acquiesce to every new initiative, capitulate to every rhetorical demand, and tolerate that which a decent society should oppose, the arrogance, intolerance, and sense of entitlement of “trans”-cultists grow.

Last week a grotesque display of arrogant entitlement took place in a GameStop store when a young clerk referred to a big burly man with a deep voice as “Sir,” following which the enraged burly-man set upon the young clerk with a volley of obscenities, issued a distinctly male taunt to “take it outside,” knocked down a store display, demanded the corporate number, and threatened to tattle on the young clerk to all “LGBTQ” organizations in the known world—all because of the clerk’s alleged offense of “misgendering” him.

But what the desperado furioso was really demanding was that the clerk mis-sex him. The enraged man in pink sneakers was demanding that the clerk use language that is appropriate only for a biological woman—which the brawny, brawling man clearly isn’t.

With cult-like fanaticism and tyrannical tactics, “trans”-cultists and their ideological allies now demand that all of society accept their arguable, subjective assumptions as gospel truth and kowtow to the real-world applications of those nonsensical assumptions:

  • All of society is expected to share with opposite-sex persons restrooms, locker rooms, and other spaces in which humans engage in personal bodily activities, thereby undermining not only fundamental principles of modesty but also the free exercise of religion.
  • All of society is expected to use incorrect pronouns or risk loss of employment or hefty fines, thereby undermining both the right to free speech and the free exercise of religion.
  • All single-sex clubs, organizations, and activities—including athletics—are being forced to become co-ed, thereby undermining assembly/association rights.

The First Amendment is being dismantled bit by bit by men in dresses, aided and abetted by conservative cowardice.

Ironically, the temerity of “trans”-activists in exploiting and indoctrinating children, coercing speech, demanding entrée into opposite-sex private spaces, and shrieking obscenities at those who tacitly admit the emperor is wearing drag exposes the lie that the perverse “LGBTQQAP” ideology has anything to do with tolerance, autonomy, inclusivity, diversity, or choice.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/The-Indecency-and-arrogance-of-the-trans-cult_01.mp3

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Having a Merry Pagan Christmas

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New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says the culture war in America may not be so much about secularism or atheism replacing Christianity but the rise of an old Christian foe – paganism.

This ancient religion differs from atheism in that it allows for a spiritual dimension to life and creation, but not an omnipotent, benevolent God.  The power is in the creation itself, which is why so many New Age adherents find divinity when they look at a sunset, a flower, or in some cases, their own mirror image.

Mr. Douthat explains the clash of worldviews presented in a new book by Steven D. Smith, “Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac”:

“What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent.”

This is quite different from, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1) and “All things were made through Him” (John 1:3).

Increasingly, “the universe” is replacing references to God in current TV shows and movies.  On the flip side, some of this year’s new Hallmark holiday flicks lean the other way, featuring sacred carols such as “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”

The pagan worldview is promoted by leading figures such as Oprah Winfrey, with her New Age version of “can’t we all just get along?” and the prolific writer Sally Quinn, widow of longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee.

Ms. Quinn writes on religious topics for the Post, and used to edit the Post’s religion page, which is a smorgasbord of modern heresies, the wilder the better.   The Left favors almost any religious expression other than orthodox Christianity, which is why it’s soft on paganism and even Islam.

The latter’s militants are inflicting terror all over the world, most recently when a gunman yelled “Allahu Akbar” before gunning down 16 people, killing at least two, at a Christmas market in Strasbourg, France on Dec. 11.  The Post, like the rest of the media, downplayed it, ignoring the religious motivation and playing up the shooter’s criminal past.

Ms. Quinn chronicles her own plunge into witchly pursuits in her 2017 memoir “Finding Magic” in which she describes dabbling with the paranormal and hexing people she didn’t like.

She says she left behind the dark arts following three deaths that occurred shockingly soon after her hexing.  But she’s not done with the occult.  In a Washingtonian magazine profile in August 2017, Michelle Cottle wrote, “Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans—Quinn embraces it all. And yes, she has been in contact with her husband since his passing. Through a medium. Repeatedly.”

A week ago Monday, Ms. Quinn moderated a bookstore appearance by porn star and Trump accuser Stormy Daniels.  She said, with her son looking on, that she planned to attend Daniels’ strip show that evening, and that “I’ve watched Stormy’s porn, and it’s good. She knows what she’s doing.”

If you wonder why the Post gives short shrift to the biblical view that sex is a God-given gift to be enjoyed only in marriage, well, it shouldn’t be a mystery.

Elsewhere in the Post’s Style section, columnist Monica Hesse admits an addiction to the classic movie “White Christmas,” but makes sure to point out its politically incorrect flaws, such as a song about minstrel shows.  The movie is redeemed when Danny Kaye rebuffs a kiss from the beautiful Vera Ellen.  Mr. Kaye “demures so vehemently that the ‘White Christmas’ message boards have speculated that the character might be gay. Well, if so, kudos to that subversive choice, too.”

Kudos for subversion of romance between a man and a woman?  This is liberal virtue-signaling at its purest.   In the progressive worldview, everything is political, including sex.

Ms. Quinn says that friends have repeatedly asked her to place a hex on President Trump, an idea which, to her credit, she’s rejected. But think about that. Sally’s lefty pals hate Mr. Trump so much they want him magically killed, not just removed from office.

Pre-and-Post Christian pagan societies are not known for their qualities of mercy.

Robert Knight is a Townhall contributor. His latest book is “A Nation Worth Saving:   10 Steps to Restore Freedom” (djkm.org/nation, 2018).

This article was originally published at Townhall.com



Baloney Served Up by Pretend-Woman to Coerce Mis-Sexing Language

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The New York Times has published an opinion piece by another young man who seeks to pass as a woman. In his essay, Manhattan, Illinois native Parker Marie Molloy tries futilely to mask the incoherence of his argument, which is that banning words passers don’t like from social media platforms is necessary to protect freedom of speech. His argument is composed of two dubious contentions:

1.) If language issues make passers feel really bad, they will choose not to speak, thereby undermining the free exchange of ideas, so conservatives need to get with “trans”-constructed Newspeak. In the mixed up, muddled up, shook up “trans” world, speech must be controlled in order to protect speech.

2.) There’s no point in debating the foundational questions regarding the meaning of biological sex, the relationship between sex and “gender identity,” and the meaning of language, so Americans should just move on to policy discussions.

What got Molloy all atwitter was public criticism of Twitter’s illiberal censorship, that is, its decision to ban “deadnaming” and “misgendering” on its allegedly open platform:

We prohibit targeting individuals with… content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. 

“Deadnaming” refers to using the names passers were given by their parents at birth or by their adoptive parents. “Misgendering” is a pejorative term invented to stigmatize the use of correct pronouns when referring to passers. In case anyone has forgotten, pronouns correspond to biological sex—not to subjective internal, non-material feelings about biological sex, maleness, or femaleness.

To be clear, Molloy is arguing for banning certain words in news media and on social media, and worse, he’s arguing for forcing everyone to speak certain words—words that embody, espouse, and imply acquiescence to a set of arguable assumptions.

Specifically, he wants to ban “deadnaming.” For example, he would want banned from social and news media the name “Bruce” when referring to the man who won the Olympic decathlon in 1976. Already Wikipedia is scrubbing facts from its biographies. While Wikipedia still “deadnames” John Wayne and Elton John, it omits the “deadnames” of Janet Mock, Jazz Jennings, and Kate Bornstein.

And Molloy wants to force everyone on social media and in the news media to use incorrect pronouns when referring to passers. Banning “misgendering” means mandating that people use incorrect pronouns when referring to people who seek to pass as the opposite sex. But banning “misgendering” would mean mandating mis-sexing. Oh what tangled webs….

Despite its evident belief to the contrary, the “trans” cult has no intrinsic right to revolutionize English grammar for the entire English-speaking world to make themselves feel better about their false beliefs or disordered desires about their biological sex. And normal people who reject the faith-based beliefs of passers have no moral or ethical obligation to use their Newspeak.

Twitter means serious censorship business with this new policy. Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy has already been Twitter-disappeared, which pleases Molloy because Murphy “regularly calls trans women ‘he’ and ‘him,’” and says, “men aren’t women.” Molloy believes no one should be allowed to publicly say that objectively male persons are not women.

Molloy describes his subjective, internal feelings about hearing others describe human reality truthfully, objectively, and accurately:

I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering—calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use—are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.

There is no right to be free from encountering ideas that we will find discomfiting—particularly in an open society committed to free speech. Molloy has a right to pretend he is a woman, and others have a right to acknowledge he is a man. He has a right to ask that others refer to him as a woman, and others have a right to refuse to speak lies. Molloy has no right to mandate that others pretend along with him that men can be women.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh points out the problems with pronoun diktats, which he opposes:

[W]hat if some people insist that their title is… “Your Holiness”?… [P]resumably the same logic that applies to gender-related self-chosen titles would apply to religion-related self-chosen titles. Both sex and religious discrimination are, after all, prohibited by the same laws…. The analogy [to “gender”-related pronoun mandates] would be if the government demanded that people have to be addressed using their own preferred race- or religion-linked titles—hypothetically, enforcing people’s demands that “you need to use the title ‘Sun Person’ when you refer to me, because I’m black,” or “you need to use the title ‘rav’ with me because I’m Jewish,” or “you need to use the title ‘friend’ with me because I’m a Quaker,” or “you need to address me as ‘thee’ rather than ‘you’ because I’m a Quaker.” 

While Molloy might find it degrading that others reject his faith-based assumptions about the nature, value, and meaning of biological sex, others find it degrading to be forced to pretend that his assumptions are true and good by being forced to use deceitful language.

Molloy muddies up the murky rhetorical waters even more when he claims that grammatically correct pronouns are “used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.” I can’t discern his meaning in the murk, so I’ll try to explain with clarity the real reasons grammatically correct pronouns are used.

Pronouns correspond to and denote objective biological sex, which has profound meaning. Sexual differentiation is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when undressing and engaged in private bodily functions. Sexual differentiation is also foundational to marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. It is foundational to Judaism and Christianity. It is foundational to single-sex schools and competitive athletics. It is foundational to law enforcement and criminal justice, including prison assignments and public decency laws. It is foundational to health care. Sexual differentiation is real, and it matters. Using incorrect pronouns to refer to “trans”-identifying persons constitutes lying about an objective and deeply meaningful ontological reality. Using grammatically correct pronouns does not deny the existence of people who wish they had been born the opposite sex. It denies that they can be the sex they are not.

Molloy argues that those opposed to mis-sexing “see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok.” He then ironically asserts that “voicing one’s personal ‘truth’ does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.” Did he hear himself?

Those who oppose incorrect-pronoun usage are not claiming “personal ‘truth.’” They’re acknowledging objective, scientific truth. It is Molloy who is voicing his “personal truth,” and quite literally trying to silence speech.

The ironies keep piling up. Next Molloy describes the absence of pronoun mandates as constituting a “content free-for-all” that “chills speech by allowing the dominant to control the parameters of debate, never letting discussion proceed past the pedantic obsession with names and pronouns.”

First, can there be better evidence that it is “trans”-cultists who have a pedantic obsession with pronouns than Molloy’s essay? Molloy demands ad nauseum which pronouns others must speak.

Second, Molloy’s argument here is a classic illustration of a question-begging fallacy. Pronoun-usage is the debate. To assert that everyone should just move on to the real debate assumes the proposed grammar revolution has been debated and settled. Just move on, you dominant conservatives, there’s nothing to debate here.

Molloy explains why he is reluctant to appear on television:

I wonder whether I’ll be able to discuss the day’s topic or whether I’m going to get roped into a debate over my own existence…. If this isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is.

How would this roping happen? Is Molloy suggesting that if a host or moderator were to use grammatically correct pronouns, Molloy couldn’t continue discussing the day’s topic? Why not? Would Molloy’s pedantic obsession with correctly sexed pronouns result in his refusal to discuss the day’s topic? If that’s what he meant, then he wouldn’t be “roped.” He would be tying himself up.

Molloy asserts that the use of grammatically correct (i.e., correctly sexed) pronouns constitutes harassment. But since mis-sexed pronouns embody moral, ontological, and political views, Molloy is implying that comity and respect require affirming all the beliefs and desires of others. Resist Molloy’s desires and stand guilty of harassment. Let’s add “harassment” to the growing list of terms the “LGBTQ” lexical pillagers have redefined.

Others view language mandates as harassment, and when fines or imprisonment is imposed for non-compliance, as has been done in New York City and California, the free flow of ideas is really impeded.

Molloy argues absurdly that,

Aside from the harm it does to trans people, it also impedes the free flow of ideas and debate, in the same way that conservatives often accuse student protesters of shutting down speech on college campuses. Sometimes, as the logic behind the campus speaker argument would dictate, we have to set parameters on speech if we want to actually have a debate on the issues.

By “it” in “it also impedes the free flow of ideas,” Molloy is referring (obsessively) to pronouns, suggesting that the refusal of television hosts to capitulate to his language rules—capitulation that would entail lying—is analogous to protesters shouting down speakers. Molloy says the use of pronouns he doesn’t like impedes the free flow of ideas and debates “in the say way” that drowning out speakers does. Really? In Molloy’s hypothetical television scenario, he chooses not to speak because he feels bad, whereas conservatives are trying to speak but being drowned out or disinvited.

Despite not establishing any points of correspondence between undesired pronoun-usage and screaming protestors or between his choice not to speak and conservative speakers’ inability to speak, Molloy goes on to say that what we’ve learned from these two (wholly different) scenarios is that we must set debate parameters. And the parameters Molloy thinks are not only just but necessary entail—you guessed it—acceding to Molloy’s begged question.

Molloy tries and fails again to construct a sound analogy. He points to an editorial in which Ben Shapiro argued that discussions about whether Trump’s actions or statements are racist are faulty if they start from the premise that he’s racist and, therefore, everything he says and does is racist. Shapiro says, “Perhaps Trump is a racist. Perhaps not.… But we can’t have a productive conversation that starts from the premise that Trump is a racist overall…. That conversation is about insults, not truth.”

Molloy responds,

Just as we can’t actually address the merits of any particular policy proposed by Mr. Trump if our focus is solely on the man himself, we can’t address the merits of policies that affect trans people if debate starts from the premise that trans people are and will always be whatever happens to be stamped on our original birth certificates. And as Mr. Shapiro notes, while there may or may not be truth to the statement that Mr. Trump is a racist, any discussion had through that lens will be “about insults, not truth.”

Molloy seems not to understand Shapiro’s point. Shapiro isn’t saying “Ignore the man. Just pay attention to his statements and policies.” He’s saying that presuming a character flaw—something we can’t know and is subjective—is unproductive. Evaluate instead, his statements and words.

The difference with the “trans” issue is that the premise Molloy wants us to elide is not an assumption about a character flaw. Being a biological male is a reality and saying so is not an insult.

The premise is a claim about the reality and meaning of an objective, constitutive feature of human beings and its meaning. The policies that Molloy prefers to discuss depend on answering the questions he wants to beg.

Molloy concludes by one last time implicitly begging readers to beg the question “Can men be women?” He introduces the Trump Administration’s possible clarification that the word “sex” in federal anti-discrimination policy refers to biological sex, a clarification that the “trans” cult ludicrously contends defines them out of existence. Molloy complained about the ensuing debate between “trans” cultists who oppose the change and conservatives who like it:

[T]he focus was almost universally on whether or not trans women are actually women and trans men are actually men. Rather than having a robust discussion about what practical effects a change to the Department of Health and Human Services definition of sex and gender might have… we found ourselves mired in the same stalemate.

Molloy desperately wants Americans to forgo a robust discussion of whether men can be women. He wants instead and only robust discussions of the practical effects of accepting his assumptions about biological sex. He acknowledges our responsibility as a “democratic public” to “hash out thorny policy issues,” but Molloy asserts we must set “guardrails for that conversation,” and those guardrails are based on his view that “trans”-identifying people are “not concepts, ideologies or philosophical questions to be pondered.” \

What a crock of sophistry. While people are not concepts, ideologies, or philosophical questions to be pondered, the choice to cross-dress, cross-sex-hormone-dope, mutilate healthy bodies, sexually integrate private spaces, and mandate grammatically incorrect pronoun-usage are justified by concepts and philosophical views that must be pondered and discussed openly and freely. Molloy might not want to discuss it, but one of the “practical effects” that is coming is the eradication of public recognition of sexual differentiation everywhere for everyone.

Don’t gobble up the baloney Molloy and his ideological compeers are serving to compel surrender to their cultural demands. And definitely don’t mis-sex people.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Baloney-Served-Up-by-Pretend-Woman.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; and Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman.

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!



The Sensation Nation

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A common refrain when people lament violence, sex and f-bombs in movies, goes: “How did we get from the golden days of Hollywood to this?”

Actually, Hollywood, with many notable exceptions, has been at war with decency and American values since its inception. It just wasn’t as starkly apparent.

If you don’t think so, take in some of those black and white films on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Sure, you won’t get nudity, gratuitous violence, or profanity, and some are delightful.  But many are not very good, with stilted dialogue and ham acting, and certain films from the Golden Era are surprisingly subversive.

A case in point is “Theodora Goes Wild,” a 1936 “screwball comedy” that netted Irene Dunn an Oscar nomination for her role as a prim, church organ-playing small-town girl who secretly writes racy novels under a pseudonym.  Upon meeting the randy illustrator of her book covers (Melvyn Douglas), she flees from the New England home she lives in with her two uptight aunts and goes hog wild in New York as the scandalous novelist “Caroline Adams.”  We’re supposed to think this is great.

What’s most subversive is the acidic portrayal of small-town America, and particularly the church ladies. They’re uniformly unattractive, small-minded gossips, backbiters and hypocrites.

The Christian life in “Theodora” is cold, boring and the enemy of a good time.   The only spark of life comes in nightclubs, parties or scenes when the protagonists put it over on the uptight yokels.  Absent is fellowship and community, the pursuit of truth, love of family and neighbor, happiness, mutual sacrifice, and God’s love, all of which are found in a vibrant church.

The deal is sealed for hedonism when the entire town turns out with a marching band to welcome home their heroine once her cover is blown. She’s now famous for writing smut, and lives happily ever after with the illustrator. Nobody but a prude would object. Life is colorful once more.  A literal version of this theme of salvific sex is expressed in “Pleasantville” (1998).

In a larger sense, this is where we find ourselves today. There’s no need for Hollywood to employ subtexts to attack the moral order when we’re already drowning in a sea of sensations. Unless you’re Amish, staying free from the pornified culture is like trying to focus on small print with a tiny book lamp in the middle of the Vegas strip.

Recent columns in Politico.com, the New York Times and National Review have explored America’s acquiescence to the porn culture. They point to the Internet tidal wave and the invention of the smart phone in 2007, which is putting adults –and children – at risk in ways undreamed of a dozen years ago.

Still, technology is only one powerful element.  The main factor is the mid-20th Century sexual revolution, in which morality, sexual roles, family and what constitutes the good life were upended.

In his 1941 opus “The Crisis of Our Age,” Harvard sociologist Pitirim Sorokin traced the waning of traditional American norms to just before World War II, when advertising imagery and movies became increasingly sensual.  America was an ideal-driven culture that honored virtue, duty and delayed gratification.  Then it began to slide toward a sensate culture that valued cultivating and sating appetites above all. Sorokin compared it to the decline of Greece and Rome, whose art evolved toward the sensual as the empires declined.

In “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud” (1990) and subsequent books, Judith Reisman has chronicled the enormous impact of Alfred Kinsey’s fraud-packed sex studies in 1948 and 1953.  Hugh Hefner drew inspiration from them to launch the Playboy empire, which mainstreamed porn and helped fund Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion. With the advent of the birth control pill and the explosion in visual stimuli, the wheels came off.

In his classic “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley envisioned a future in which every need was met and sex was noncommital.  Anyone experiencing discomfort could take the drug “soma” to zone out on “soma holiday.”  Unlike our opioid crisis, people did not overdose on soma, but both dull the body and soul.

So here we are, with every conceivable way to gratify our appetites.

Are we happier? Does constant pursuit of sensations bring sustained joy? Not likely. That comes from purpose, accomplishment, and close bonds with family and friends.  It comes from knowing that we’re valued and loved by a creator God Who cares enough to give us rules to live by, and, as shown in Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, forgiveness and reconnection.

Perhaps not all is lost.  There seems to be genuine concern among some in the intelligentsia over the culture’s destination. The campaign to label porn as a public health hazard is finding purchase, and what actually produces health and happiness is becoming more evident by the day.

Hollywood turns out some good flicks now and then, and there’s always hope for more uplifting fare even beyond the wholesome stuff on the Hallmark Channel. Three years after scripting “Theodora Goes Wild,” Sidney Buchman was nominated for a screenplay Oscar for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

Robert Knight’s latest book is “A Nation Worth Saving: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom” (djkm.org/nation, 2018).

This article was originally published at Townhall.com



The Left Has Chosen Open Rebellion to Science

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Written by Peter Heck

Pro tip: If you’re promoting the embarrassing pseudoscience of transgenderism, you’re an enemy not advocate of science.

It’s a fascinating spectacle to behold. On Monday of this week I wrote a piece defending the Christian conception of a much younger Earth than what modern scientists relying on a number of unproven assumptions propose. Though the target audience for that piece was Bible-believing Christians, it was widely panned by agnostic skeptics and non-theist scoffers who are all-in on the Darwinian faith and its requisite “millions of years” conception of Earth history.

That’s okay with me, and honestly to be expected. But you’ll have to excuse me when I snicker at the same voices, virulently attacking me for my betrayal of “science,” simultaneously promote the embarrassing pseudoscience of transgenderism. Please, for the sake of your own reputation, don’t appeal to the efficacy of science when retweeting this anti-science howler from the New York Times:

“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades.”

The degree to which liberal progressives are willing to beclown themselves over something so objectively, scientifically clear is remarkable. Take Hollywood activist George Takei. His abuse of science is exceeded only by his desperate political crusading:

“The Trump administration is trying to make Trans people disappear by defining gender as only male and female, determined by genitalia at birth. This is an egregious, callous attack on the LGBT community. Send a clear message on Nov 6th that there is no place for hate in America.”

This is just shockingly irrational. What the administration is prepared to do is correcting the confused, politically-motivated nonsense the Obama administration committed in muddling federal definitions of sex and gender as part of a pandering campaign. The Times explained it, albeit in their characteristically slanted manner:

A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept of gender in federal programs, including in education and health care, recognizing gender largely as an individual’s choice and not determined by the sex assigned at birth. The policy prompted fights over bathrooms, dormitories, single-sex programs and other arenas where gender was once seen as a simple concept. Conservatives, especially evangelical Christians, were incensed.

Now the Department of Health and Human Services is spearheading an effort to establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that bans gender discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.

Did you catch that? The administration is seeking to establish a logical, objective, rational legal definition of sex for programs falling under Title IX. George Takei’s politics notwithstanding, sex is only male and female, determined by genitalia at birth. Anyone who denies this, denies science.

And despite the hysteria, which again, is all generated for political purposes, this move would not make transgender people “disappear.” That is unless you believe that transgender people only “appeared” when the Obama administration meddled with Title IX to raise campaign funds from LGBT activists.

Having compassion towards people who are confused about their sexual identity is noble and good. It’s a hallmark of a moral society. But compassion never includes denying scientific reality or facilitating delusion for the sake of political profit. That is what the Obama administration egregiously and callously did. Correcting their error and restoring scientific sanity isn’t lacking in compassion, it’s embodying it.

This article originally posted at TheMaven.net



Jews as Parasites and Jews as Termites: From the Nazis to Farrakhan

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There is no hiding the ugliness of Louis Farrakhan’s latest antisemitic comments, in which he likened Jews to termites. There is one thing you do with termites. Exterminate them!

Termites are destructive. Termites are nasty. Termites survive by destroying. Termites do nothing good. Rid the earth of them!

My good friend, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, was therefore right to tweet this in response: “Louis Farrakhan calling Jews termites is a virtual call to genocide. The Nazis regularly referred to Jews as roaches and pests who needed to be exterminated. I call on African-American leaders like my close friend @CoryBooker to immediately condemn this vile and loathsome attack.”

These were Farrakhan’s exact words from a speech on October 14 in Detroit where he mocked his Jewish adversaries: “I can go anywhere in the world and they’ve heard of Farrakhan…I’m not mad at you, because you’re so stupid.”

Then, a little later in his speech, he said, “when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, call me anti-Semite…I’m anti-Termite. I don’t know nothing about hating somebody because of their religious preference.”

He then reinforced his message with this tweet, linked to a video from his message: “I’m not an anti-Semite. I’m anti-Termite.”

Remarkably, Twitter has declined to act, leaving Farrakhan’s tweet intact. This is beyond crazy. This is immoral.

In 1943, the Nazis printed an educational pamphlet titled, “The Jew as World Parasite.” (In German, “Der Jude als Weltparasit.”)

It begins by saying:

“In this war for the very existence of the German people, we must daily remind ourselves that Jewry unleashed this war against us. It makes no difference if the Jew conceals himself as a Bolshevist or a plutocrat, a Freemason or uses some other form of concealment, or even appears without any mask at all: he always remains the same. He is the one who so agitated and spiritually influenced the peoples that stand against us today such that they have become more or less spineless tools of International Jewry.”

You can imagine just how ugly the whole pamphlet is.

Better still, don’t try to imagine. Just read it. How much Jewish blood was spilled because of these lies?

But this rhetoric is far from dead.

On January 2, 2018, BBC News reported that, “A self-proclaimed Nazi told gatherings of far-right activists that Jewish people were parasites who should be eradicated, a court has heard.”

On July 28, 2018, a headline in Haaretz stated, “’Jews Drink Blood:’ Britain’s Labour Party Suspends Councillor for Facebook Post.”

Reference was then made to Facebook posts containing language like this: “Talmud Jews are parasites! . . . All Talmuds need executing!”

Last year, on December 15, 2017, the Times of Israel reported that, “A professor emeritus from an esteemed university in the Netherlands whose father was a Nazi called Jews ‘parasites’ in a televised interview.”

Jan Tollenaere, described as “a lecturer on medicinal chemistry who retired from the Utrecht University in 2001, is the son of Raymond Tollenaere. His father “was in charge of propaganda for the Belgian pro-Nazi collaborationist government of Flanders during the German occupation of Belgium in World War II.”

According to Jan, “Jews ‘are not a nice people, I don’t feel any warmth toward them.’ They are, he added, ‘parasites, speculators and mean people.’”

Parasites should be exterminated!

They suck your blood and drain you and eat you alive.

They are obnoxious and insidious and hard to get rid of.

Special efforts must be taken to destroy them before they destroy you!

Such is the mentality of violent antisemitism. And with full knowledge and clear intent, Louis Farrakhan played right into this mentality by likening Jews to termites.

Shame on Twitter, infamous for its overzealous censoring of conservative views, for letting this tweet (and Farrakhan’s account) remain intact.

And shame on all people of conscience who do not distance themselves from such remarks. (Can  you be a person of conscience and not denounce them?)

It is spineless passivity like this that leads to the shedding of blood. Jewish blood.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com



The Most Important Movie You’ve Never Heard Of

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Written by Michele Malkin

It’s here.

“Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer” debuts in theaters nationwide on Oct. 12. I do believe this groundbreaking film by indie producers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney is the most important movie in America right now — a true-life saga of good vs. evil, deadly medical malpractice, systemic government malfeasance and cultural apathy toward the most vulnerable members of our society.

I first reported on this real-life horror story nearly eight years ago, but you’ve probably not heard or read a word about “Gosnell” in the mainstream press, TV news or online. The conspiracy of silence is the result of both malign neglect and active suppression of inconvenient truths:

—One CNN commentator flippantly explained that the network’s lack of interest was a “business decision,” not bias.

—Pro-abortion censors at crowdsourcing giant Kickstarter banned McAleer and McElhinney from raising money for the project — leading small donors across the country to help conduct the largest-ever crowdfunded movie on Indiegogo. (Full disclosure: I put my money where my principles are and donated three times, in addition to using my social media platforms to lend a hand.)

—Taxpayer-supported National Public Radio refused to run sponsored ads describing Gosnell as an “abortionist” because its legal department determined the accurate description violated the left-leaning network’s “value neutral” platform. LOL.

—And this past week, Facebook banned advertising for the movie — a continuation of its systemic crackdown on conservative speech.

What are they trying to hide?

Philadelphia abortion practitioner Kermit Gosnell is behind bars, serving three consecutive life sentences for a murderous crime spree that places him in the same infamous pantheon of homicidal maniacs as Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy. But because his victims were hundreds of poor minority women and their children, Hollywood, women’s groups and the media — who usually never hesitate to sensationalize criminal masterminds — are AWOL.

Why? Because radical leftists zealously believe that abortion must be defended at all costs, even if it means whitewashing its bloody, half-century legacy of mass genocide in our nation’s inner cities.

Operating under the cover of providing “reproductive health services,” death doc Gosnell brutally executed hundreds of healthy, living, breathing, squirming, viable babies by stabbing them in their necks and severing spinal cords with scissors and knives. This twisted murderer kept newborn baby feet in specimen jars, which he crammed into the grisly refrigerators of his filthy “clinic” for “research.”

In 2013, Gosnell was convicted of murdering three babies born alive in his death factory and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of 41-year-old Bhutanese refugee Karnamaya Mongar, who died of a inhumanely administered drug overdose at Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society.”

For 15 years, public officials at the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Department of State, and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health officials did nothing to stop Gosnell. Nearby hospital administrators and “women’s health” advocates at the National Abortion Federation knew he was a butcher, but also sat on their hands.

In their 2017 Regnery book on Gosnell, which they adapted into the new movie, McAleer and McElhinney exposed the monster and his enablers with painstaking dedication to original documentation and investigative journalism. The PG-13 film stays true to the trial record without having to resort to gratuitous graphic imagery.

Actors Dean Cain, Sarah Jane Morris, Nick Searcy, Earl Billings, Alfonzo Rachel, and the entire cast bring the courtroom drama — and more importantly, the human drama — to life. Parents with teenage children can and should bring them. We cannot afford to shield them from the truth and leave them vulnerable to the pervasive propaganda of the culture of death.

Whatever your position on abortion, this brave, independent film is an eye-opener that will change hearts and minds. Perhaps what the speech-suppressers who don’t want you to know about “Gosnell” fear most is this chilling conclusion: Deadly indifference to protecting life isn’t tangential to the abortion industry’s barbaric practices — but at its very core.

Michelle Malkin is host of “Michelle Malkin Investigates” on CRTV.com. Her email address is writemalkin@gmail.com.

This article originally posted at Creators.com.



30 Years Later, Global Warming Still Hasn’t Sunk Maldives

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A report derived from government officials’ predictions shocked the world 30 years ago, warning that the tropical paradise archipelago would soon suffer the same fate as the lost city of Atlantis.

“A gradual rise in average sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation of 1196 small islands within the next 30 years,” the Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported in September 1988.

Scare tactics or numbers gone wrong?

Serving alongside the UN at the time, Environmental Affairs Director Hussein Shihab gave precise “calculations” about the extent to which the Maldives would become submerged.

“An estimated rise of 20 to 30 centimeters in the next 20 to 40 years could be ‘catastrophic’ for most of the islands, which were no more than a meter above sea level,” Shihab told AFP at the time.

The alarmism did not stop there, as many islanders were led to believe by affiliated of the global peacekeepers that they had just several years to evacuate the island before it became inhabitable.

“The article went on to suggest the Maldives – along with its 200,000 inhabitants – could ‘end’ sooner than expected if drinking water supplies dry up by 1992 ‘as predicted,’” The Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) reported. “Today, more than 417,000 people live in the Maldives.”

Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner mocked the alarmists at the UN and their affiliated climatologists.

“Call Noah and have him build another Ark,” the leader of the pro-energy group mused while speaking with DCNF. “Bring out the Coast Guard. Send all the boogie boards and floaties you can find – for the Maldives is going down!”

‘Poster’ islands for global warming

For decades, the UN has claimed that the Maldives would be the first to go under the sea once the “catastrophic” effects of climate change induced by human pollutants began.

“The Maldives are among the island nations often held up by United Nations officials as being on the ‘front-lines’ of man-made global warming,” DCNF Energy Editor Michael Bastasch noted.

In fact, Republic of Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed addressed other world leaders at the UN General Assembly Summit on Climate Change in August 2009 to alarm attendees that entire populations across the world will drown as glaciers melt – and increase the ocean depth by just 4.5 feet – because of manmade airborne pollution.

“You know that with a sea-level rise of over 1.5 meters, hundreds of millions of people would be dead,” Nasheed told the UN Chronicledays after speaking at the summit. “They would simply be wiped out.”

Behind the dire warnings of the Green agenda is reportedly the green glow of money, but the alarmism was not enough to quickly secure the exorbitant funds ultra-environmentalists were trying to pander from climate-change believing nations across the globe.

“The island nation was among the first to apply for Green Climate Fund aid, but the funding hasn’t been flowing, according to The New York Times,” Bastach explained.

Just last year, Maldives Energy and Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim made it clear that he wanted immediate access to funds … before it was too late.

“That’s too long to wait,” Ibrahim insisted to The New York Times in November. “There’s no use having a fund somewhere if you can’t access it quickly.”

However, 30 years of panic did not usher in the consuming seas or the desired funding for the UN, as the Maldives are still perched right above sea level, with its beautiful sandy beaches still beckoning tourists to lay down their towels and unfold their beach chairs – not to head for high ground … if there were any.

“The Maldives are indeed low-lying islands with its highest point only reaching about eight feet above sea level,” Bastach informed. “But obviously, decades-old warnings [that] the Maldives were on the verge of being swallowed by the seas didn’t pan out.”

Getting bigger, not smaller?

Despite what many climatologists report concerning rising sea levels, research conducted by New Zealand scientists on Tavalu’s nine atolls and 101 reef islands between 1971 and 2014 indicates that the Maldives and other coral islands in the region are actually getting larger – not shrinking and sinking.

“The Pacific nation of Tuvalu – long seen as a prime candidate to disappear as climate change forces up sea levels – is actually growing in size, new research shows,” a report on a University of Auckland study revealed in February. “It found eight of the atolls and almost three-quarters of the islands grew during the study period, lifting Tuvalu’s total land area by 2.9 percent – even though sea levels in the country rose at twice the global average.”

In fact, Paul Kench – co-author of the research – argued against climate change alarmists’ assertion that low-lying island nations will soon succumb to rising seas and be completely submerged.

“We tend to think of Pacific atolls as static landforms that will simply be inundated as sea levels rise, but there is growing evidence these islands are geologically dynamic and are constantly changing,” Kench contended the scientific report on the study. “The study findings may seem counter-intuitive, given that (the) sea level has been rising in the region over the past half century, but the dominant mode of change over that time on Tuvalu has been expansion – not erosion.”

This argument for island expansion – as opposed to island shrinking that global warming climatologists often claim – is corroborated by other research, as well.

“The results [of the Kiwi study] echoed a 2015 study by the same lead author that also found coral island expansion,” Bastach noted. “Study lead author and scientist Paul Kench told The New Scientist ‘that the Maldives seem to be showing a similar effect.’”

More warnings of old not coming to fruition

Several months before the UN’s September 1988 alarmism attempting to scare inhabitants off the Maldives with visions of overwhelming ocean waters, The New York Times was already busy putting illusions of catastrophic rising seas and temperatures in the minds of Americans through ominous predictions.

“[If] the current pace of the buildup of these gases continues, the effect is likely to be a warming of 3 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit [between now and] the year 2025 to 2050,” the Times’ Philip Shabecoff warned in a June 1988 article, according to WND. “[This should produce a rise in seal levels of] one to four feet by the middle of the next century.”

WND noted that Shabecoff was using predictions of Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer to come up his anticipated figures.

Such cataclysmic forecasts by past and present climate change activists have been derided as the foreboding climatic events never actually take place – or even appear to be taking shape, for that matter.

“In August, Rob Bradley, Jr., the CEO and founder of the Institute for Energy Research, described Shabecoff’s claim as the ‘opening salvo’ of global-warming activism, and also pointed to the failure of claims made by NASA climate scientist James Hansen and Al Gore,” WND’s Art Moore recounted. “Bradley – who has testified before the U.S. Congress as one of the nation’s leading experts on the history and regulation of energy markets – argued that the mid-point of Shabecoff’s predicted warming would be six degrees.”

He called out the global warming alarmists for grossly overestimating rising temperatures and sea levels.

“At the 30-year mark, how is it looking?” Bradley asked on his website, WattsUpWithThat.com. “The increase is about one degree – and largely holding (the much-discussed ‘pause’ or ‘warming hiatus’).”

It was also stressed that a very modest global warming trend has been in effect for thousands of years.

“[The world has naturally warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, which is] a good thing – if climate economists are to be believed,” Bradley added. “[Concerning rising sea levels,] the exaggeration appears greater. Both before and after the 1980s, decadal sea-level rise has been a few inches – and it has not been appreciably accelerating.”

The energy expert asserts that the extremist alarmism disseminated by climate change scientists and the activists behind them will fade away into the myths of yesteryear.

“[The alarmist temperature and sea-level predictions] constitute yet another exaggerated Malthusian scare – joining those of the population bomb (Paul Ehrlich), resource exhaustion (Club of Rome), Peak Oil (M. King Hubbert), and global cooling (John Holdren),” Bradley concluded.

This article was originally published at OneNewsNow.com



Leftists Redefine Bullying

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Leftists, controlled by “LGBTQ” activists and in thrall to their dogma, have redefined yet another term: bullying. They seek to impose their redefinition on all of society in their relentless quest to socially condition everyone into affirmation of their sexuality ideology. There’s no better evidence that they have redefined “bullying” than their claim that Melania Trump’s campaign against cyberbullying is hypocritical because her husband allegedly cyberbullies.

The often-foolish Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank recently made that claim in a column in which he argued that President Donald Trump cyberbullied former CIA director John Brennan by calling him a “political hack.” Milbank also accused Trump of cyberbullying special counsel Robert Mueller, former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, John Dean, U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Charles Schumer (D-NY), Governors Andrew Cuomo, (D-NY) and John Kasich (R-OH). Milbank’s evidence that Trump cyberbullied these people? He called them names on Twitter.

Milbank’s argument raises the question “What is a bully?”

My Random House Dictionary defines a bully as “a blustering, quarrelsome, overbearing person who habitually badgers and intimidates smaller or weaker people.”

My American Heritage Dictionary defines it as “a person who is habitually cruel, esp. to smaller or weaker people.”

My Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a tyrannical coward who makes himself a terror to the weak.”

My Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “a person who uses strength or power to coerce others by fear.”

Is calling famous adults in positions of cultural power names “cruel”? Are John Brennan, Robert Mueller, Chuck Schumer weak? Are they terrified by Trump’s tweets? Does tweeting mean things about famous adults in positions of cultural power constitute the use of coercive strength and power?

Apparently, the spanking new Leftist definition of “bully” omits all references to smaller or weaker people, which means that untold numbers of people—including countless “progressive” pundits, politicians, professors, teachers, and actors—are guilty of bullying.

If all epithets constitute bullying, then was former Obama press secretary, Jay Carney a bully when he called Milbank a “hack.”

When Milbank called U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) a coward and said the president is “surrounded by hooligans,” was Milbank bullying?

When perpetual power-seeker Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters “deplorables,” was she bullying?

When Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn called opponents of the legal recognition of homosexual unions as marriages sophomoric Bible-thumpers, hankie-twisters, and poisonous debaters, was he bullying?

When the editor and publisher of the “progressive” magazine The Nation, Katrina Vanden Heuvel, said former president George Bush was incompetent, untrustworthy, and dishonest, was she bullying?

When former President Barack Obama called Kanye West a “jackass,” was he bullying? When Obama called a segment of the population bitter Bible-clingers was he bullying?

Are “progressives” bullies when they call theologically orthodox Christians ignorant, hate-filled bigots for their belief that homosexual acts are immoral?

Was Jesus a bully when he called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers?”

If someone is a hack, a jackass, or a viper, is it bullying to say so?

If we use the true definition of bullying, it becomes clear who the bullies are. Bullies are those who possess cultural power—and by cultural power, I mean our dominant cultural institutions—and wield it against those with little or no cultural power.

It is “progressives” who control government schools, academia, the arts, professional medical and mental health organizations, mainstream media, social media, and corporate America. When Trump tweeted that John Brennan is a “political hack,” he was not guilty of bullying. When Carney called Milbank a hack, he was not bullying. When cultural power-brokers call an elderly florist a bigot, they’re bullying.

For tactical reasons, “progressives” have decided that when it comes to adults talking about adults, bullying no longer refers to coercive, threatening, cruel treatment of weaker people. They do that all the time. Now it refers to any speech by conservatives that’s not pleasant, sufficiently obsequious, or ideologically aligned with their views. But remember, no one has an obligation to acquiesce to Leftist language rules.

This is not an endorsement of speech that is uncivil or intemperate, but not all unpleasant speech is uncivil or intemperate. There is even a cultural place for expressions of hatred. Decent people with properly formed consciences will hate wicked acts and will say so even in the face of coercive bullying by the culturally powerful.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Leftists-Redefine-Bullying.mp3

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SJW Feeding Frenzy: Lesbian Actress Not Lesbian Enough to Play Batwoman

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Written by Taylor Lewis

Holy intersectional infighting, Batman!

Fans of the dime-a-dozen televised superhero dramas may be in for some unfortunate news.  The actress tapped to play Batwoman in the latest installment of The CW’s seriate “Arrowverse” has been determined not to be gay enough for the role.  That is, the actress is gay, but she doesn’t prefer women enough – or enough to silence her critics, at least.

DC Comics re-established the character of Batwoman as a Jewish lesbian back in 2006, just before it became fashionable to recreate classic heroes as some mix of sexual minority X and racial minority Y.  To stay true to form, Australian actress Ruby Rose, an out lesbian, was cast to play the nocturnal crime-fighter.  Little did Rose know her Sapphic tastes wouldn’t cut the intersectional mustard.

Social media outrage over Rose’s casting pushed the blindsided actress into leaving Twitter.  The mob’s point of contention: Rose has a history of identifying as “gender-fluid,” not strictly lesbian.  What’s the difference?  Beats me; keeping up with the sexual dialectic of the left is like knowing the differences among regional Chinese dialects.

Rose’s final Twitter messages provide a clue as to the nature of the debate.  She reportedly wrote before kicking the platform: “Where on earth did ‘Ruby is not a lesbian therefore she can’t be batwoman’ come from – has to be the funniest most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read.  I came out at 12?  And have for the past 5 years had to deal with ‘she’s too gay’ how do y’all flip it like that?  I didn’t change.”

She didn’t change anything, indeed.  The pace at which the social-justice left has altered the terms of proper debate is dizzying.  Mere toleration of deviant lifestyles is not sufficient; now a new vocabulary must be employed with a surgeon’s precision.

Rose doesn’t meet the strict definition of a lesbian.  She’s also not Jewish.  Thus, she’s disbarred from playing a Jewish lesbian who dresses up like a humanoid bat to beat evildoers to a bruised and bloody pulp.

This raises all types of questions of what is theatrically permissible to the social justice warrior.  Must straight men always play straight men?  Must Asian women always play Asian women?  Must gay black men with erotic asphyxiation fetishes always be played by gay black men with erotic asphyxiation fetishes?

And why limit ourselves to just race and sex, or even human performance?  Must Superman be played by a real Kryptonian?  Must Spock be played by a real Vulcan?  Must Juliet always be played by an Italian virgin who, halfway through Scene III, is deflowered?  Must Nick Bottom always be played by a half-donkey under Puck’s mischievous spell?

Surely, anything but the strictest adherence to the author’s original conception won’t do – except, of course, when it does.  The rumor that black actor Idris Elba could be playing the next James Bond was revived last week.  Ian Fleming, Bond’s creator, based his secret spy character off officers he knew in the Naval Intelligence Division.  It’s unlikely he pictured 007 as anything other than a martini-enjoying, woman-seducing white Scottish cove.

And yet, many of the same leftists who denounce the casting of Rose as Batwoman are cheering Bond’s sudden change in skin tone.  Liberal publications are encouraging the switch, singing hosannas to diversity.  “Every Argument Against Idris Elba Playing James Bond Is [BS],” squealed an angry mole at Esquire.

Back in 2014, Rush Limbaugh had the temerity to use the left’s racial casting logic against Elba, citing Fleming’s vision of the world-saving secret agent.  He was panned as a racist and bigot – not uncommon territory for the king of talk radio.

Two things can’t be true at the same time.  Ruby Rose can’t be unfit to don Batwoman’s leotard while Idris Elba can be right at home in James Bond’s patented tuxedo.

The matter is made worse by the stakes, which are extremely low.  Batwoman is a television show about a vigilante on a basic cable station.  We aren’t talking Macbeth at the Globe Theater.  To give over so much time and energy to perfect a depiction of Batman’s female alternative is an exercise in listlessness.  Basically: who really cares?

Does the left’s intersectional world have room for the concept of acting?  Clearly not.  What a painfully trite existence the race-and-sex-obsessed progressive must have.  It’s bad enough to have to look over your shoulder and check your vocabulary after every breath.  Not even to be comfortable with the simplest of forms of escapism because they don’t comport exactly with reality is a bore.

“I love acting.  It is so much more real than life,” said Lord Henry.  That sentiment is being taken quite literally by unimaginative leftists who care everything for sexual and racial politics and nothing for drama, or its more comprehensive title: life.

This article originally posted from Townhall.com.



Oprah Shouts for Abortion

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Written by L. Brent Bozell III

Over the years, Oprah Winfrey has seemingly evolved into America’s mom. After her TV career, she sounds like an evangelist preaching a feminist substitute to replace religion in her monthly Oprah Magazine. Her August issue carries this motivational nugget of Oprah wisdom on the cover: “We all want to feel radiant, joyful, and alive. It starts with choosing love — in any form.” No mention of faith, but no surprise there.

How do you feel “radiant, joyful, and alive”? Winfrey has the answer. In this very issue, she devotes a full-page ad to promote — ready? — the hashtag ShoutYourAbortion. According to Oprah Winfrey, a good way to show you’re “choosing love” is to murder your unborn baby.

This is a major reason most women don’t accept the term “feminist.” A new poll by the feminist site Refinery29 and CBS News found 54 percent of millennial women do not describe themselves as “feminists.” Of women over 36, only 34 percent identify as feminist. If you’re not a radical leftist, you decline the term. Only someone truly evil feels joy about an abortion, regardless of her (or his) position or predicament.

But Oprah Magazine editors put this under the category of “Inspiration.” Amelia Bonow was so horrified at the prospect of taking taxpayer funding away from the Democratic Party underwriters at Planned Parenthood that she touted and shouted her abortion, and now the hashtag has been “tweeted more than 300,000 times.” Ironically, that’s about a tweet for every life ended before it began in an average year of Planned Parenthood business.

This is not just a hashtag but an entire Twitter account and a website with video testimonials. One video is headlined “My abortion was gentle, irreverent, and empowering.” Gentle … for whom? Gentle, irreverent … for whom?

A woman from Seattle with badly overdone makeup and green hair discusses her three-day pharmaceutical abortion as not just “gentle” and “spiritually empowering” but “loving” and “joyful,” and, of course, “badass.” She explains how during this drawn-out procedure, she got drunk and had “brutal, metal sex,” which “you’re not supposed to do.” Somehow it wasn’t in the headline that she summarized it all as “female power-witchy s—-.”

The viewer is also treated to 10 gallons of the usual “pro-choice” boilerplate. It’s “like going to the dentist.” It’s not a difficult decision when a woman is “very single,” so she avoids ever getting “emotionally complicated.” When you’re “very spiritual, but … not religious,” an abortion is “something of a sacred act” of “taking one’s power,” a “sacred taking of agency.”

It’s sacred. Ponder that.

After these vague declarations of feminist dogma, the woman documents the entire abortion process. She shoves her urine sample into the camera but doesn’t show her ultrasound. “I didn’t look at it. … I didn’t look at the little speck,” she declares. They told her the pregnancy wasn’t far along — four weeks, six days. “I caught it really early,” she says. “I say it like a disease!”

At the end of the video, you hear the woman humming, and this text comes on screen: “I never did think of the cell cluster as ‘my baby,’ nor the sperm donor as ‘the father.’ … My whole view on the thing was quite neutral. Scientific.” Somehow it’s “neutral” and “scientific” to deny the humanity of “the thing.”

But behind this “science,” emotion dribbled out — and a sense of gravity. The video ended with this text: “It was a full moon, and I’m a sentimental, spiritual type. … So I sang a song to the spark.” She whispered, “I let go of you with love tomorrow.”

George Orwell, call your office. An abortion is letting go of the baby “with love.” That inspirational message of “female empowerment” is brought to you by Oprah Winfrey and her magazine.

We cannot avoid this truth: It is satanic. And if you think it’s not, then please tell us what is.

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. 

This article was originally published by Creators Syndicate.



The Real Reason for the Left’s Double Standard on Hate Speech

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Why is it that organizations like the SPLC can designate conservative Christians as hate groups while ignoring radical leftists like Antifa? Why is it that Facebook and Google and YouTube and Twitter appear to punish conservatives disproportionately for alleged violations of community guidelines?

The answer is as disturbing as it is simple. The left believes it is so morally and intellectually superior to the right that it can see nothing wrong with its extreme positions and hostile words. Is it wrong to be intolerant of bigots? Is it wrong to hate (or even punch) a Nazi?

In short, if I’m a member of the KKK, is it wrong for you to disparage and mock me? If I’m a dangerous homophobe, is it wrong for you to vilify and exclude me? If I’m a hate-filled propogandist spreading dangerous lies, is it wrong for you to mark me and marginalize me?

Of course, there are double standards on all sides of the debate, on the right as well as on the left. And there is more than enough hypocrisy to go around, from the most progressive to the most conservative.

All of us also have our share of blind spots, so we tend to condemn in others what we justify in ourselves. Welcome to human nature.

Still, it is conspicuous that the same behavior gets treated differently by the leftist elite (including many a university professor) and by watchdog groups like the SPLC and by the internet giants.

Back in 2004-05, when I first began to address gay activism, I was widely mocked for saying, “Those who came out of the closet want to put us in the closet.”

The response was consistent: “No one wants to put you in the closet!”

A few years back, I noticed a change in tone: “Bigots like you belong in the closet!”

But of course!

While being interviewed on a Christian TV program back in 2011, I quoted the comment of a Christian attorney. He told me that those who were once put in jail (speaking of pioneer gay activists) will want to put us in jail.

For having the audacity to say this on Christian TV, I was vilified and maligned.

Yet when Kim Davis was jailed in 2015 for refusing a court order to grant same-sex marriage licenses, there was widespread rejoicing on the left: “Kim Davis is ISIS! Lock her up!”

Again, I’m aware of double standards on all sides, and it’s a point of personal reflection and self-examination in my own life.

For example, I believed that, in 2004, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom should have been disciplined for issuing same-sex marriage licenses in violation of the law. Yet I believe that Kim Davis was within her rights in refusing to issue such licenses and her home state of Kentucky failed to protect her, under the law.

These are debates we can (and should) have.

What I’m talking about here has to do with fundamental attitudes, with the basis of our judgments, with the inability to see wrong on one’s own side. I’m talking about a dangerous hypocrisy. (For the record, I never compared Gavin Newsom to Muslim terrorists.)

In my May, 2016, article “Is Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg a Well-Intended Liberal with a Massive Blind Spot?”, I referenced the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the notorious Nazi mass murderer, who was apprehended by two Israeli agents while living quietly with his family in Argentina.

They had to wait for several weeks before smuggling him out of the country, during which time they spent many hours in private conversation with him, somehow managing to restrain themselves from taking the law into their own hands.

During one of the conversations, one of the agents realized that Eichmann had given the order to exterminate the village in which his wife’s family lived, killing every single one of them.

When asked how he could do such a thing, Eichmann seemed perturbed, responding, “But they were Jews.”

Of course he gave the order to kill them. What else was he to do?

Again, to be clear, I am not comparing the SPLC or Facebook or Google to Eichmann and the Nazis. That would be as bad as leftists comparing conservatives to Nazis. Not a chance.

I’m simply pointing out that in Eichmann’s twisted world, he was only following orders and doing what was right.

So also, in Antifa’s twisted world (although, again, I emphasize, not as twisted as that of the Nazis), they are doing what is right in violently opposing the tyrannical right. Somebody’s got to do it!

Thankfully, there is an ongoing, healthy push-back against this liberal hypocrisy. In fact, just this week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions called out the SPLC for using hate group labels to “bully” conservatives. Let their hypocrisy be exposed.

But remember: You have been prejudged as guilty, so your mistreatment is well-deserved.

It is this highly bigoted attitude we must overcome with truth, reason, determination, and love.

This article originally posted at Townhall.com.



Facebook Censoring? Say it Ain’t So!

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Among the reasonable and fairly well-defined criteria Twitter uses to censor content is this more ambiguous criterion: content “that incites fear about a protected group” or that “degrades someone.”

Does Twitter think it’s degrading to say “homosexual acts degrade persons”? What if homosexual acts do degrade persons? What words constitute an incitement to fear? Does it incite “fear about a protected group” to say that allowing biological males in women’s private spaces is an assault on decency and puts at risk the safety of girls and women? Does Twitter think saying “polyamory is wrong, and its normalization harms society” would incite fear about polyamorists?

Similarly, Facebook includes this expansive and ambiguous definition of banned “hate speech”:

We define hate speech as a direct attack on people based on what we call protected characteristics — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, caste, sex, gender, gender identity, and serious disease or disability….We define attack as violent or dehumanizing speech. (emphasis added)

Like obscenity (which Justice Potter believed he could recognize, but “progressives” clearly can’t), the powers-that-be at Facebook will apparently know dehumanizing speech when they see it.

This may explain why IFI has had so much trouble getting many of our articles boosted on Facebook. “Boosting” is, in effect, advertising. IFI pays Facebook to create an ad which is then shown to our target audience. The most recent article about which we have been battling Facebook is titled “Will ‘Progressives’ Affirm the Identity of Christ-Followers?”

We requested a boosted ad for this article and were declined. We appealed that decision, were approved for a few hours, and then our ad was taken down. We appealed that decision, were approved for a few more hours, and then the ad was taken down again. We appealed a third time, and moments before this writing, after a week and three appeals, it was approved. We wait with bated breath to see if this one sticks.

The criteria used by Twitter and Facebook to justify ideological-screening remind me of the criteria high school English teachers use to do the same. The text-selection criteria exploited by “progressive” change-agents in public high school English departments around the country are so flexible, so malleable, so protean as to justify including any resource that affirms, espouses, or embodies their biases and exclude any resource that dissents from their biases.

The Left is fond of declaiming that Twitter and Facebook are private companies that have the right to establish whatever criteria they deem fit for censoring content. True, but such a declamation ignores the monopolistic nature of these two social media behemoths.

Facebook has claimed to be a neutral social media platform that merely enables or facilitates “communication and distribution of information.” Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, if Facebook were a neutral platform, it would not be liable for content. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is “US legislation that paved the way for the modern internet by asserting that platforms cannot be liable for content users post on their sites.”

But both in court and before Congress, Facebook has acknowledged it is a publisher and “responsible for content.” In conjunction with its shutting down accounts and censoring posts for what appear to be ideological reasons, Facebook may have lost its legal immunity. And maybe that’s just the slap upside Zuckerberg’s pecuniary noggin that’s needed to restore his commitment to a neutral platform and to protect the First Amendment rights of conservatives that are eroding right before our gullible, obsequious eyes.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Facebook-Censoring-Say-It-Aint-So.mp3

A bold voice for pro-family values in Illinois! 

Click HERE to learn about supporting IFI on a monthly basis.



Mad. Hot. The ‘Resistance’ Is Seething

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Looking at the current political and cultural climate in Washington, D.C., you might get the idea that the ruling class is in the midst of a conniption.  Even the walls of the National Cathedral are vibrating with weirdness – more about that later.

In “Summer of Our Discontent,” Washington Post staff writer Dan Zak lays out the mood gripping Washington, D.C., or, as the headline in last Tuesday’s Style section describes it, “the capital of the resistance.”  Here’s the third paragraph:

“Here we all are. The start of a mad hot American summer in the nation’s capital. A president violating norm after norm. Immigrant children wailing for their mothers. A Supreme Court seat, open like a wound. A midterm election hurtling toward us like an avenging angel, or a killer asteroid. The resistance girding for war, or curdling into hysteria, depending on your view.”

Let’s opt for hysteria.   This is the shark fin of a Deep State that is determined to bring down the Trump administration by whatever means necessary.

“It’s reached a point of desperation,” explains Amanda Werner, described by Mr. Zak as a campaign strategist. “We’ve been civil (did she say this with a straight face?) and having endless debates, and all we’ve seen is the decimation of everything we care about.”

Two weeks ago, Ms. Werner and a dozen others invaded a D.C. restaurant to heckle Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and also came to her residence to scream, “We’re here to wake up your neighborhood.”  Last Sunday, the D.C. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America chanted slogans outside the Alexandria home of just-retired Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau Director Thomas Homan, accusing him of “fascism” (a socialist variant, but perhaps they don’t know that).  On June 22, the owner of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia kicked out White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and then led a crowd to heckle her party at another eatery.

“I think now is the time to start seeking them out and invading their spaces,” Ms. Werner told the Post.

So, what are we in for now?

Anthony Oiveira has some ideas.  The University of Toronto instructor wrote a column for the Post on Friday titled, “Welcome to LGBTQ Wrath Month.”  Not enough fealty was paid to LGBTQ demands during Pride Month in June, so he calls for something stronger: “Stonewall. The White Night. Riots. ACT UP. Wrath Month is a chance to remember that before our symbol was a rainbow, it was a hurled brick. Civility be damned….”

And it will be, if Rep. Maxine Waters has her way.  The Democrat from Los Angles has called for more crowds to harass Mr. Trump’s cabinet.

Here’s the amazing part.   After her party’s congressional leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, declined to endorse Ms. Waters’s mob warfare scheme, nearly 200 “Black women” and other Progressives for whom Ms. Waters “is our shero [sic],” signed a letter demanding that the top Democrats apologize.

The signers were torqued that Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer called the rent-a-mob tactics “unacceptable” and “not American,” and accused the Democratic leaders of — what else — racial insensitivity.  As a practical matter, this gives a free pass to Ms. Waters to say and do anything, no matter how offensive or bizarre.

Staring into the abyss of the upset election on June 26 in New York in which a socialist Millennial unseated Democratic House Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, a 10-term congressman, Pelosi promptly issued a statement blaming President Trump for the attacks on his staff and hailing Waters as a “valued leader.”

Moving on to the world of religion, the Post reports that the Episcopal Church USA has begun debating how to further edit the once-incomparable Book of Common Prayer that they “improved” in 1979.

Ms. Kelly Brown Douglas, the canon theologian at the Washington National Cathedral, wants to cleanse the book of masculine references.  Instead of “Lord,” which implies maleness, she wants to use “Creator, Liberator, Sustainer.”

The language will reflect “the God that I can see in the least of these.  The God that I can see in the face of a Renisha McBride or a Trayvon Martin – that tells me something about God.”

Another theologian on the language committee, Brite Divinity School Professor Wil Gafney, says she already routinely ditches “King” for “Ruler” or “Creator” and sometimes uses “she” to refer to God.

Others propose language about conserving the Earth, blessing a transgender person’s adoption of a new name and performing a same-sex “wedding.” So far, no one reportedly has offered up a prayer to bless having an abortion.  But wait for it.

Ms. Gafney did draw the line at altering Jesus’s opening to the Lord’s Prayer, which he gave his apostles in Matthew 6: 9.

“’Our Father,’ I won’t fiddle with that,” she told the Post.

What refreshing humility.   If only the rest of the Resistance could learn to be so humble.

This article originally posted at Townhall.com