Pro-Abortion Snobbery

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David Carlin: What factors divide pro-life from pro-choice Americans? Mostly, it’s the difference between humility and arrogance.

This column is about abortion, but it will take a moment or two to get to the point.  Please bear with me.

If ever there was an obvious example of fallacious reasoning, it’s this: “I am rich, and you are not.  Therefore I’m right, and you’re wrong.”

What could be more stupid than an argument along these lines?  And yet this is precisely the reasoning that has been used, century after century, by those in the higher classes to dismiss complaints made by persons from the lower classes.  This is the reasoning that permitted lords of the manor to dismiss complaints by serfs, slaveholders to dismiss complaints by slaves, mill-owners to dismiss complaints by factory hands, etc.

In a society that places great value on wealth (and what society does not place great value on wealth?), rich people cannot help but feel that they are superior people: not just superior in wealth, but superior in almost every way.  And if you are superior in almost every way, then you must be superior in judgment.

If it happens, then, that a person from the lower classes disagrees with you, it becomes obvious – does it not? – that you must be right and the other must be wrong.

Your rightness and his wrongness are so obvious, in fact, that there really is no need for you (the rich person) to examine the other fellow’s case.  Save yourself time and trouble by dismissing it from the get-go as unworthy of consideration.

And don’t waste a lot of time trying to explain to the other fellow why he’s wrong. Out of a noblesse oblige kind of courtesy, you might offer him a brief explanation; but when you see (as you soon will) that he doesn’t buy it, move on to something else.

And now to abortion.  Considered on purely intellectual merits, the anti-abortion argument is vastly superior to the pro-abortion argument.  The anti-abortion or pro-life side argues that the entity that gets killed in an abortion is a human being, a tiny human being that grows less tiny every day.

And what else could it be if not a human being?  It is not a dog or a monkey or a fish or an elm tree.  The pro-abortion side has no counter-argument that comes even close to refuting the anti-abortion case.  The best the pro-abortion side can come up with are mindless slogans like “a woman’s right to choose” or “a woman’s right to control her own body” or “if you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.”

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This last is my favorite stupid argument.  It is strictly parallel to, “If you don’t like slavery, don’t own a slave.”

And yet, despite the obvious superiority of the anti-abortion argument, hardly ever is a pro-abortion person persuaded.  Why is this?

The answer, I think, can be found in the social class differences between pro-life and pro-abortion people.  The heart of the pro-abortion movement is found among men and women of the upper-middle classes: people who have (or soon will have when they finish college and get a few years older) good educations, good jobs, good cars, good houses, good food, good wine, high incomes, millions in assets, many important social and political connections, a cosmopolitan outlook, etc.

Given contemporary American standards, they are superior people.  They may not be superior according to the standards that prevailed in Plato’s Academy, or in ancient Sparta, or in the monasteries of St. Benedict, or in the Shaker communities. But they are without question “superior” according to present-day American standards.

By contrast, the heart of the pro-life movement is found among women from the lower-middle classes: persons with educations and incomes that are barely adequate in today’s high-price society; persons who lack the millions, the high culture, the good connections, etc.

These women tend to be religious; they tend to have more children than does the average American woman (and certainly more than does the typical pro-abortion activist); they tend to be sexually un-liberated – so much so that many of them (and this is truly shocking from a contemporary point of view) have had sexual relations with only one man, their husband.  According to present-day standards, these women are definitely inferior.

It will be pointed out that my ideas of the typical pro-life and pro-abortion person are stereotypes.  Of course. But stereotypes are often enough more or less accurate.

In any case, the typical pro-abortion activist, instead of taking seriously the arguments presented by the pro-life movement, says to herself or himself: “I am rich and well-educated, I own a handsome house or condo and a fine automobile, I am thin and athletic, and I am blessed with excellent taste when it comes to coffee, wine, food, furniture, music, movies, works of art, etc.  In short, I am a superior person.  The world is fortunate to have people like me in it.”

“And so, that anti-choice woman standing over there – whose education is limited, whose income is modest, whose house is small and unattractive and in the wrong neighborhood, whose body is unshapely and somewhat overweight, whose taste is appallingly vulgar – when she tells me that I am wrong about abortion, I would laugh at her if I didn’t pity her.  What could be more preposterous than to think that an inferior person like her might be right and a superior person like myself might be wrong?”

These “superior” people, let us remember, are the people who control the “command posts” of American culture. Which is to say that they are dominant in a number of our leading institutions: the mainstream journalistic media, the entertainment industry, our best colleges and universities, and one of our two great political parties.

They shape the public mind, especially the mind of younger generations.  If they won’t listen to reason (which they won’t), do we have any grounds to be hopeful for the long-run success of the pro-life movement?

Yes.  But I’ve run out of time (and space) today. More to come next time.

COLUMN BY

David Carlin

David Carlin is a professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America.

RELATED ARTICLE: How State ‘Birthday Abortions’ Bills Stack Up to Federal Restrictions

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. © 2019 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

ICE Field Operation Liberated Hundreds of Jobs — Interior enforcement of immigration laws helps American workers.

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On April 3, 2019, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) posted a news release: ICE executes federal criminal search warrant in North Texas which announced the administrative arrest of more than 280 aliens who were found to be working illegally at CVE Technology Group Inc. and four of CVE’s staffing companies.

Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is the division of ICE that conducted this highly effective field investigation which constitutes an element of the interior enforcement mission of our immigration laws.

The news release included this excerpt:

HSI is the federal law enforcement agency responsible for upholding the laws established by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which requires employers to verify the identity and work eligibility of individuals they hire.

These laws help protect jobs for U.S. citizens and lawful U.S. residents, eliminate unfair competitive advantages for companies that unlawfully hire an illegal workforce, and strengthen public safety and national security.

Unauthorized workers often use stolen identities of legal U.S. workers, which can profoundly damage for years the identity-theft victim’s credit, medical records and other aspects of their everyday life.

HSI’s worksite enforcement investigators help combat worker exploitation, illegal wages, child labor and other illegal practices. Work site enforcement investigations often involve additional criminal activity, such as alien smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, document fraud, worker exploitation and/or substandard wage and working conditions.

Immigration anarchists frequently justify their opposition to the enforcement of our immigration laws by making emotional appeals about how illegal immigration is all about desperate people who simply want to be able to live better lives. They often even raise the oxymoronic notion of enabling illegal aliens to achieve “the American dream.”

Indeed, the DREAM Act was actually an acronym for “Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.”

Compassion, however, is never a consideration for hapless American and lawful immigrant workers who lose their jobs to illegal aliens or suffer wage suppression because of the massive influx of illegal alien workers.

The rhetoric about how immigrants (actually illegal aliens) do the work Americans won’t do leaves out the second half of that sentence, that Americans won’t do those jobs for substandard wages under dangerous substandard conditions.

It is infuriating that the “American Dream” has become ever more elusive for Americans and lawful immigrants, particularly among America’s minority communities, while political con artists have the chutzpah to invoke the imagery of the “American Dream” to create the DREAM Act.

When the DREAM Act scam was properly voted down by Congress, President Obama created the sequel to the DREAM Act, DACA: Deferred Action Childhood Arrival, by Obama’s capricious executive caveat.

Employers who intentionally hire illegal aliens do so not out of compassion but a desire to exploit vulnerable workers, paying them substandard wages under conditions that are often so substandard as to be illegally dangerous.

There is nothing compassionate about exploitation!

Furthermore, as the ICE news release reported, many aliens who work illegally not only violate our immigration laws and take the jobs Americans need, but frequently engage in identity theft and commit other crimes.

Anyone who has ever fallen victim to identity theft can attest to how profoundly this crime has deleteriously impacted their lives.

Illegal immigration is anything but a “victimless crime.”

Economists are always concerned about unemployment rates and with the number of jobs that are created or lost by the American economy but omit the critical issues of whether American workers are gaining or losing jobs and how their wages are increasing or stagnating.

Political candidates on all levels of government frequently claim that if elected they would help new companies to create more jobs. Creating new jobs can be a risky and time-consuming proposition.

However, just as it is said that “A penny saved is a penny earned,” I would argue that a job that is liberated is no different from a job that is created. Effective enforcement of our immigration laws can result in jobs being liberated — that is to say, freed up by removing aliens who are working illegally thereby immediately providing Americans and lawful immigrants with those jobs.

Investigations into the willful employment of illegal aliens is known as “Worksite Investigations” and can help to put Americans to work and enable them to support themselves and their families.

To put this specific case into proper perspective, the HSI agents who participated in this field investigation liberated at least 280 jobs, making them immediately available for American and lawful immigrant workers.

Radical Democrats who have created “Sanctuary Cities” and demonize immigration law enforcement officers are now calling for the removal of any criminal penalties provided in the Immigration and Nationality Act for aliens who enter the United States without inspection, even though Senator Schumer has proposed legislation that would have made trespassing on critical infrastructure and national landmarks a federal crime with a five-year prison sentence to deter trespassing.

Cheap labor is anything but cheap, as I noted in my recent article, “Open Borders Facilitate America’s Race To The Bottom.”

Not only is there no compassion in exploitation of foreign workers, there is certainly no compassion in acting against the interests of American workers and their families.

Today more foreign workers enter the United States each year than the number of new jobs that are created. America’s generous immigration policies permit more than one million lawful immigrants to enter the United States each year. Additionally a human tsunami of illegal aliens enter the United States, as exemplified by the crisis on our southern border. Finally, hundreds of thousands of aliens who are lawfully admitted into the United States as non-immigrants violate the terms of the admission, not only by remaining in the United States after their authorized period of admission has expired, but by otherwise violating their terms of admission, frequently involving their illegal employment in the United States.

The Immigration and Nationality Act, as it now exists, would provide strong tools to combat illegal employment of aliens in the United States. However, what is lacking is an adequate number of ICE agents to actually enforce these important laws, resulting in Immigration Failures By Design.

Sanctuary Cities further encourage illegal immigration and hobble efforts to enforce our nation’s immigration laws.

Today there are roughly 6,000 ICE agents for the entire United States of America and more than half of their time is not dedicated to the enforcement of our immigration laws but customs laws and other non-immigration laws.

So, while mandatory E-Verify would be helpful to end the employment of illegal aliens, without an adequate number of ICE agents to conduct field investigations, unscrupulous employers will easily game the system by hiring illegal aliens “off the books” or otherwise defraud the immigration system.

Advocates for “Immigration Reform” are determined to undermine any efforts or resources to enforce our immigration laws and/or secure our borders.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in FrontPage Magazine and is republished with permission.

I Take This Woman . . .

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The internet provides everything you’d want to know about courtships, weddings, married life, but few of them include the instructions on wife-beating.  There is a brief but enlightening film, produced by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) and posted on Jihad Watch, of a Muslim sociologist who demonstrates the “proper” wife-beating technique.  Of course, the sociologist assures his audience that Islam is merciful, and that the man, the head of the household, should not have to beat his wife every day, and to do so lightly, never to hit her face or head, bruise, break bones or cause blood to flow (m10:12, Reliance of the Traveller, A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law – ROTT).  But the cautionary statement rings hollow when the wife’s bruises will never be seen because she must be covered from head to toe.  And, should she become inured to the discipline’s sameness, there are other means of control and punishment available to him, all sanctioned by The Religion of Peace.

When is it necessary to beat one’s wife?  The sociologist did posit that there are women who prefer domineering, authoritative, and even violent husbands.  For the most part, however, beatings are needed when the wife has disobeyed him and the strict Islamic rules of marriage.  She may have refused to wear a hijab (m:2:7-8, ROTT) or the finery he chose for her; or fancied attending school with the hope of one day having a career and earning a wage.  She may have wanted to leave the house unaccompanied or without her husband’s permission; she is literally under house arrest.

The Shari’a marriage contract contains her virginity status, the dowry amount, and grants sexual intercourse rights to the male, giving him total control over his wife or wives.  Should she refuse his advances, be too ill or too young to have sex, or if she engaged in sex with another man or was raped,  he could stop her daily (financial) maintenance.  The woman is considered a she-devil, equal to a domestic animal, harmful and with crooked character.  Therefore, he may disallow her to sleep in his bed; or lock her in a room, naked, and without food.  Should he choose to enact a simple divorce by repeating “I divorce you” three times – she may receive no more than three months’ maintenance and could lose her children older than age seven.

The Muslim husband has the right to accuse her of adultery, in which case he might gather his friends and neighbors together to bury her almost up to her shoulders and stone her to death.  The film, The Stoning of Soraya M, portrays the true story of Soraya, in Iran, whose husband Ali convinced their two sons and the townsfolk that she was committing adultery so that he could marry a 14-year-old girl.  The Internet has an actual film of a Syrian woman being stoned to death by ISIS.  About four women per day are murdered in “stove bursts” in Pakistan, by husbands or in-laws who claim the wives’ scarves caught fire while they were cooking.

We are assured, however, that the discipline of beating, although necessary, is done out of love and once that’s done, life can move on.  But from where does this sociologist get the concept of love?  Surely, not from the Qur’an, which clearly stipulates that women are inferior and may be taken by force or bought from her parents.  There is no Western-style courtship – no dating, no music or dancing under the stars, and no dining in a candlelit café.  In fact, there is no courtship whatsoever. Rather, a shari’a marriage is a document, usually signed at the home of the future bride, that grants sexual intercourse rights to the male with complete control over his wife or wives.  Revered Muslim theologian, Imam Ghazali (1058-1111) defined, “Marriage is a form of slavery.  The woman is the man’s slave, and her duty therefore is absolute obedience to the husband in all that he asks of her person.”

Interestingly, the marriage contract provides four blank spaces to be completed over time.  Below the signature of wife number one, there are three more signature lines for future wives, numbers two, three, and four.  The  realization that there could be three more wives with whom she would share her husband and home immediately negates love and devotion; the religious sanction of polygamy destroys the possibility of fidelity between one man and one woman, while also increasing rivalry, conflict and stress.  The message is unambiguous: “You can be replaced.”  Not only does the man have the divine right to four wives, but also to “pleasure marriages.” Only he, not she, has the right to such dalliances, and only he, not she, has the right to divorce.  He may even rid himself of the four he has and begin anew, with four wives plus “slave wives.”

The Islamic woman is among the poorest and most oppressed in the world, and regardless of her financial station, she is caged for life.  She cannot be rescued when beaten and her husband has the right to not provide an explanation to anyone for beating her, for the Prophet has said, “A man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.”  Sunan Abu Dawad 11:2142.  This must be reassuring.

Muslim societies are based on enslavement – the enslavement of society to the state/ideology and women to men.  The Saudi woman is always guilty, even if he breaks her ribs during a beating, and she is so victimized that denial of her situation is her only comfort.  Muslim women are imprisoned for sexual crimes done by men, yet Islam insists it honors women.  The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. (o4.9, ROTT).

In a Muslim society, the woman’s virginity is the basis of the family’s honor, and honor killings  are acts of vengeance executed by likeminded family members against the female family member, for reasons such as becoming “too westernized,” refusing an arranged marriage, being the victim of a sexual assault, seeking a divorce, or (allegedly) committing adultery.  The mere perception that a woman has behaved in a “dishonorable” way is sufficient reason for murder; methods include stoning, stabbing, beating,  mutilation, burning, beheading, hanging, throat slashing, lethal acid attacks, shooting and strangulation.  Women’s advocacy groups suspect that more than 20,000 women are killed worldwide each year. The UK recorded 2,823 such crimes in 2010.

Sex for the male in Islam is a plenteous buffet of alternatives, and he need never be indicted for adultery, pederasty, infant or youth pedophilia, rape, or honor killings. He even has permission to engage in sex with his wife’s cadaver within seven hours of her death.  During a televised show in Egypt,  Professor Sheikh Sabri Abdul Raeuf, of the Islamic world’s most prestigious madrasa, was asked if it is permissible for a husband to penetrate his wife after death (necrophilia).  He replied, “It is not favorable in Islam; however Islamic law considers it as halal,” it is permissible, not a crime or sin deserving of punishment in the here or hereafter.

Men, particularly “courageous” jihadis, are rewarded with sex with perpetually exquisite virgin women, so that women are not just in competition and threatened by other women (wives) on earth, but also by supermodels in the afterlife.  The Religion of Peace offers no peace to women at any time – not in infancy, not when they are genitally mutilated in childhood or married off against their will, not in their adulthood, and not even after their death.    We must never allow Shari’a laws to overtake our American laws.

Acknowledgment: Cruel and Usual Punishment, The terrifying global implications of Islamic Law, by Nonie Darwish

Reigniting the American Revolution slogan ‘No King but King Jesus’

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The American Revolution had many slogans that ignited the passions of the colonists to fight for independence from George III, the King of England. Slogans such as: Captain Nathan Hale’s “I regret I have but one life to lose for my country”, Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death”, General Christopher Gadsden’s “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and “No taxation without representation.”

One slogan that many have debated is “No King but King Jesus.”

Both those who defend and those who wish to debunk the “No King but King Jesus” slogan point to one historical fact. On April 18, 1775, a when British soldier ordered John Adams, John Hancock, and others to “disperse in the name of George the Sovereign King of England”, Adams responded with:

“We recognize no sovereign but God, and no king but Jesus!”

Many have written about this American Revolution slogan. Those who support it argue that John Adams and John Hancock, as well at the other Founding Fathers were orthodox Christians. Those who wish to portray this slogan as a myth point out that many of the Founding Fathers were Deists (see Molinism). Merriam-Webster defines deism as:

[A] movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe.

In a January 18, 2001 Slate article titled “Was “No King but Jesus” a Revolutionary War Slogan?” reported:

At a 1999 commencement speech at Bob Jones University, Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft said this phrase was a slogan of the founding fathers. He also said this sentiment is found in the Declaration of Independence in the phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

Slate asks: Was this the motivating cry of the Revolution, and was Thomas Jefferson alluding to it in the Declaration? Their answer is that “No King but King Jesus” was used but the slogan was “not central to the American Revolution.”

The Founding Fathers wrote the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Many misinterpret the Establishment Clause. The Establishment Clause was not intended to separate the Christian Church from government, rather it was intended to protect the Christian Church from the government.

In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled 8 -1 in McCollum v Board of Education that the practice of inviting religious instructors into public schools to give optional religious instruction violates the Establishment Clause. Justice Black, writing for the Court, said that the practice was “unquestionably” a violation of the Establishment Clause, which created “a high and impregnable wall” between church and state. In 1962 in Engel v Vitale, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the ruled that New York’s practice of beginning school days with a prayer drafted by school officials violated the Establishment Clause.

Perhaps it is time to reignite “No King but King Jesus”? The Founding Fathers would be taken aback by what has happened since to morality in America since religion has been taken out of our public schools and the public square.

Selwyn Duke in a column titled “Restoring Civilization: We Can’t MAGA Unless We MAMA” wrote:

Echoing many Founders, George Washington noted that “morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” The famous apocryphal saying goes, “America is great because America is good, and if she ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” For sure, we can’t MAGA unless we MAMA — Make America Moral Again.

To Make America Moral Again our culture must return to its Judeo/Christian roots. Every American must embrace the ideals in our Constitution or we are lost as a nation and as a culture.

MAMA and NKBKJ are simpatico. You can’t have one without the other.

RELATED ARTICLE: Thomas Paine Argues, “No King But God”

RELATED VIDEO: Democrats Delete God – OAN.

Are Democrats Pushing Islamic Sharia Law?

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A fan thought I exaggerated when I wrote Sharia Law will spread like wildfire across America if Democrats win the White House. She feared my over-the-top statement about the spread of Islam will damage my credibility.

My statement is not an exaggeration. For crying out loud, the federal government illegally funded a national curriculum titled, “Access Islam”. This indoctrination program outrageously teaches students how to become a Muslim – how to pray as a Muslim – how to perform Islamic “daily worship” and how to perform the “core duties” of being a Muslim. 

A California school banned all Christian-based books from its library, including books by Christian authors. Superintendent Dr. Kathleen Hermsmeyer says they do not allow “sectarian materials” on their state-authorized lending shelves. Public schools are celebrating Islam while banning Christmas.

Public education is the battlefield of the culture war. Democrats use public schools to normalize the LGBTQ agenda in the hearts and minds of our kids. Upon infiltrating public schools, LGBTQ activists began molding and shaping students into their image beginning in pre-k. Democrats continue to up the ante, expanding deviancy. Students are being indoctrinated to embrace numerous dangerous sexual perversions under the umbrella of “healthy sex education”; BDSM, rimming, anal sex, asphyxiation, gender-bending and more.

Beginning with portraying pedophiles as victims of our closed-minded society, Democrats are pushing to legalize pedophilia along with 11 other perversions. Civil unions granted homosexuals the same benefits as marriage. And yet, Democrats chose to use activist judges to destroy God’s sacred union of marriage. This is a long way down the road from LGBTQ activists claiming they simply wanted tolerance. Today, many Americans quake in fear opposing any demand of LGBTQ activists. Democrats want government to mandate that Christians throw away their Bibles to fully embrace Democrats’ anything-goes-sexually society.

Now Democrats are using government mandates to instill Islam in public schools while rooting-out Christianity. Remember Democrat AG Loretta Lynch threat to jail anyone caught speaking badly of Islam? Lynch’s boss, Obama, was the most pro-Islam and anti-Christian president in U.S. history. 

Democrats use blacks, women, homosexuals and Muslims as useful idiots to further their extreme radical leftist agenda. For example. Democrats and fake news said that opposing Obama’s punish-America policies was racist. Had Hillary won, opposing her leftist agenda would be branded sexist. If homosexual Democrat presidential candidate Mayor Pete wins the White House, opposing his extreme radical leftist ideas will be branded homophobia. If one of the antisemitic Democrats win the presidency, opposing their hate-Israel rants will be branded Islamophobic. This tactic is called “Shaming”. Democrats and fake news routinely use shaming to silence all opposition, while forcing their anti-American and anti-Christian agendas down our throats.

Judge Jeanine Pirro’s TV show was taken off the air for two weeks for daring to tell the truth about Muslim Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s rabid bold antisemitism. Rather than strongly rebuking Omar’s hatred for our ally, Israel, every Democrat presidential candidate decided to give Israel their middle finger by refusing to attend AIPAC. 

Can you believe there are “Muslim Community Patrol” cars in Brooklyn New York which look exactly like police cars? Disturbed residents are questioning why this is necessary because the NYPD is extremely diverse. These Muslim patrols are allowed to stealthily enforce Sharia Law in their neighborhoods; no homosexuals, no women wearing short skirts and so on. 

Respecting Islam, a California public school caved to Sharia Law by forbidding students to draw images of Mohammed. And yet, Democrats defended the NEA funding “Piss Christ” which featured a crucifix submerged in urine.

My late dad was a Methodist pastor. Dad said every year for decades LGBTQ activists brought ordaining homosexuals to the table at their annual conference. Due to the Bible’s clear rebuke, ordaining homosexuals was voted down. Then one year, it passed. We are seeing this same persistence tactic used to further Sharia Law.

Thank God Texas turned back the establishment of the first official Sharia court in America. Do not become complacent folks. These people will never give up and will keep coming back at us.

Traditions, principles and values everyday Americans and Christians hold dear are under relentless attack by Democrat enemies-within. As a Christian, I view Democrats’ aggression as the Spirit of Anti-Christ. Jesus proclaiming himself our savior and Lord is as repulsive to leftists as is showing Dracula the cross. This is why even though Islam clearly hates homosexuals and suppresses women, Democrats overwhelmingly prefer Islam over Christianity. Democrats are banning Christianity in public school while quietly replacing it with Islam.

No, I do not believe Sharia Law will overtake America. But if Democrats take the White House, Sharia Law will swiftly gain government-protected dramatic strongholds across America.

Putting Readiness First: Transgender Military Policy Finally Takes Effect

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Today is a banner day for any American who is committed both to the best interests of the military and the rule of law. After nearly two years of judicial obstruction, President Trump’s commonsense policy on transgender service in the military has finally taken effect (although legal challenges to it are still being litigated).

In July of 2016, as President Barack Obama’s second term was coming to a close, he left another gift to his far-left constituents by lifting long-standing restrictions on military service by transgender persons — those who identify psychologically with something other than their biological sex. Although long justified on grounds of both mental and physical health, President Obama and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter decided that political correctness was a more important priority than military readiness.

A year later, though, Donald Trump was President, and he fulfilled a campaign promise to stop using the military for social experiments, announcing on Twitter that he would reverse the Obama/Carter policy. After careful study by a panel of experts, in March 2018 Defense Secretary James Mattis announced the detailed new policy — and the substantial justifications for it — in a 44-page Report and Recommendations.

Lawsuits were filed against the policy in four different U.S. District Courts, though, and all four judges issued preliminary injunctions to prevent the policy from taking effect. It was not until after the Supreme Court intervened that the last of the injunctions was lifted, allowing the Trump/Mattis policy to take effect.

While none of the cases have reached a final decision yet, the Supreme Court’s decision — that the policy does not cause the kind of “irreparable harm” that would justify a preliminary injunction — is encouraging. It may rest in part on the fact that Service members who have “come out” as transgender from the time the Obama/Carter took effect until yesterday are “grandfathered in” and will still be allowed to serve.

In the end, the courts must uphold the commander-in-chief’s power to make personnel policy for the armed forces. To understand the details of the Trump/Mattis policy and the compelling justifications for it, see FRC’s publications “Summary of Trump Administration Policy on Transgender Military Service” and “Department of Defense on Why Those with ‘Gender Dysphoria’ Are Disqualified from Military Service.”

Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.

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Historians Will Know This As ‘The Era Of The Witch Hunt’

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There really is nothing new under the sun. The infamous Salem Witch Trials started with a group of young girls claiming they were doing bad things because they were possessed. They then said that it was witches who caused them to be possessed, naming them without providing any evidence. The “witches” were then summarily executed. Well, eight in total, over just a few months.

According to History.com:

“The infamous Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft. As a wave of hysteria spread throughout colonial Massachusetts…”

Sound familiar? Eerily familiar?

The reasonably legitimate origins of the  #MeToo movement, and illegitimate origins of the Trump investigations, have rapidly turned into a dreadful allegory of the Salem witch trials. Horrible men such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Les Moonves, Louis C.K., Bill Cosby, Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer are just the tip of the bad actors in power positions in Hollywood and the media to take advantage of their positions to sexually exploit women.

Things began to get questionable when it seemed that, as more women made accusations on more men, some were driven by money and some by politics. The movement was getting twisted, which was probably inevitable. But not until the unverified and then repudiated accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did it become clear how completely the movement had been hijacked for political purposes into witch-hunt land.

Really, this idea of women accusing men in heightened political atmospheres (almost entirely Democratic women accusing Republican men) really started with Anita Hill’s unsubstantiated and largely discredited accusations against Clarence Thomas during his Senate confirmation hearings to the U.S. Supreme Court.

(In a different sense, the accusations against Bill Clinton were by dozens of women over a couple of decades, with a fair amount of substantiation, witness corroboration and payoffs on some of them. Yet Clinton was elected twice as the media deeply scrutinized the accusers in the 1990s with the help of Hillary Clinton.)

George W. Bush had vague accusations made against him. Herman Cain was derailed when the conservative black businessman ascended to the top of the Republican presidential nomination fight in 2012 by claims he denied and that were never substantiated. Then came Kavanaugh and the absurd accusations that were clearly not true — two of the three witnesses suggested by the accuser to corroborate her story said the incident never happened, while the third said she never heard about it.

While not burned at the stake, Justice Kavanaugh and Justice Thomas are permanently stained for all of history by witch-hunt style charges. Their reputations are forever marred.

That, unfortunately, does not matter to those conducting the witch hunts.

Emily Lindin, a columnist for Teen Vogue magazine, tweeted during the Kavanaugh witch hunt:

“If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”

Meanwhile Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono astonishingly said Kavanaugh doesn’t deserve a presumption of innocence because of his “ideological agenda.” Given the chance to “clarify” that statement on the friendly CNN network the next day, she doubled down.

Of course, this extends beyond sexual assault accusations.

President Trump has been hounded on multiple fronts. (His sexual escapades, while tawdry, seem to have been consensual.) Most ominously and clearly, the entire Trump-Russia collusion accusation turned out to be a giant witch hunt conducted at the highest levels of the U.S. law enforcement apparatus.

It is quite obvious that after Attorney General William Barr released a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation that cleared Trump completely of the collusion accusations, Democrats say it raised more questions than it answered — and the media reported that straight as though that was even remotely possible.

And now, Democrats in Congress have promised to investigate Trump’s business, Trump’s non-profit, Trump’s holdings, Trump’s tax returns, Trump’s family members, Trump’s friends and Trump’s business partners.

Calling it a fishing expedition is far too gentle. It is a witch hunt, and one swimming in a growing sea of witch hunts. These are just more sophisticated than those launched by the girls in Salem more than three centuries ago.

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission.

VIDEO EXPOSE: Vicious Anti-Semitism at University of North Carolina and Duke University

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United With Israel in a column titled “SHOCKING: Rampant Anti-Semitism at US College’s ‘Gaza’ Conference” wrote:

Ami Horowitz exposes how a thin veneer of anti-Israel sentiment hides an ocean of open anti-Semitism at a recent conference on the Gaza conflict.

Filmmaker Ami Horowitz made some disturbing discoveries at a Gaza conference on the conflict in Gaza organized by the University of North Carolina and Duke University.

From the speakers to the entertainment, Ami quickly discovers anti-Israel sentiment is no more than a flimsy disguise for open anti-Semitism.

The fact that hate like this is acceptable at an American university in 2019 is absolutely horrifying.

The Daily Wire published this video titled “Ami on the Move: Open Anti-Semitism At UNC And Duke Conference” on its YouTube channel:

RELATED ARTICLE: One third of Americans do not believe six million Jews were murdered in Holocaust

VIDEO: Massive Pentagon Decision May Have Just Handed Trump 2020

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The Conservative Tribune published the following commentary and video on its YouTube channel.

Months after President Donald Trump declared a national emergency for the border crisis, progress is finally being made. The Department of Defense authorized nearly $1 billion for Trump’s campaign-promised border wall. The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that two different companies have been given $976 million in contracts to start building portions of the border wall, CNN reported.

SLSCO Ltd., a company based in Texas, has been given a $789 million contract to build a wall in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, and Barnard Construction Company, based in Montana, has been given a $187 million contract for work in Yuma, Arizona. Department of Defense spokesman Lt. Col. Jamie Davis said that the wall in the El Paso border sector in Santa Teresa would include a “30-foot bollard fencing and a five-foot anti-climb plate.” The Yuma sector project includes an “18-foot bollard fencing and a five-foot anti-climb plate.” These projects are both expected to be completed by October 2020, one month before the presidential election.

Read more…

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Pentagon awards nearly $1B in border wall contracts

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A Friendship that Changed History

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Thirty years ago, the good guys won the Cold War, yet today we have a front runner candidate for president, Bernie Sanders, who is an out-of-the closet socialist. He loved the old Soviet Union so much so that he spent his honeymoon there.

For decades, the Communists were aiming to take over the whole world. “We will bury you,” claimed Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1956.

Thirty years ago, two men played pivotal roles in helping to speed up the end of Russian domination—President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.

Dr. Paul Kengor, a professor of history and political science, as well as a bestselling author on Reagan and on communism, wrote a book called, A Pope and a President (2017). I have interviewed Dr. Kengor on my radio show on this subject. He told me,

“The story of the 20th century was atheistic, Soviet Communism, which ran from 1917 to 1991; and these two men, Reagan and John Paul II, lived it. They saw it as the great evil of their time, and they came together of one mind and mission to defeat it.”

Kengor is the chief consultant and a recurring guest in the brilliant, new film, “The Divine Plan.” This documentary was written, produced, and directed by Rob Orlando, and it shows how Reagan and John Paul II both miraculously survived assassination attempts within weeks of each other. The film depicts how they went to work together, mostly behind the scenes, to help Solidarity—the Polish labor union led by Lech Walesa, which defied the Communist government in Poland.

I asked Rob Orlando why he made this film and why now. He told me, “I started this film during and after the Trump election and the media attacks which were deeply cynical and I felt unhealthy for our nation. I wanted to be more inspirational. I also was drawn to the idea of exploring and uncovering the riddle of ‘The Divine Plan’ in the lives of Ronald Reagan and John Paul II.”

Orlando added, “From there it became more of an inspirational quest to also show how these two men, who were almost killed within 6 weeks of one another, would come together as Cold Warriors and crush the forces of Communism. It became a heroic tale, much like the super hero stories we see again and again.”

Orlando’s film is very well done, with driving music, compelling documentary footage, and fascinating interviews, including Kengor’s.

The faith of Reagan and of John Paul II helped bring about the chain of events that led to the undoing of the evil empire. The film highlights what could be called “the God factor” in this slice of history, and the connection between faith and freedom.

There is a distinct Catholic feel to the film. But it appeals to people of all faiths interested in this fascinating story.

My boss and pastor for many years was the late Dr. D. James Kennedy, a conservative Presbyterian minister, who warned people against Communism for decades. A few years into the Reagan presidency, Kennedy made a stunning prediction.

Kennedy declared in his televised pulpit message, “The Beginning of the End of Communism” (12/30/84):

“I believe, though I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet, that there is every possibility that by the year 2000, Communism will be a thing of the past. This specter, as Marx and Engels described it, which has haunted Europe, and now haunts the whole world, will have been exorcised from this planet once and for all… and the Gospel of Jesus Christ moves out with all its power across the world—then the mighty hand of God will be seen. The claws and teeth of the Communist bear will be extracted and that hulk, that carcass, will be swept by the arm of God on to the garbage heap of history, and hundreds of millions of people will rejoice.”

In the movie, “The Divine Plan,” we see President Reagan speaking at a University of Notre Dame commencement (5/17/81), in which he declares: “The West won’t contain Communism. It will transcend Communism.”

But young people today have grown up without the threat of Communism over their heads. More millennials have a warm and fuzzy feeling over the term “socialism” than they do “capitalism.”

It’s unthinkable that Communism, which killed in excess of a hundred million of its own people in the 20th century alone, is among the answers that some young people are considering today.

Communism needs to be defeated again—this time in the classroom and in the late night bull sessions in dorm rooms and coffee houses of American universities. “The Divine Plan” reminds us that it once was defeated in a virtually bloodless way. It tells the story of a beautiful friendship that changed history.

VIDEO: The Vortex — Religion Dying! Time for a rebirth.

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TRANSCRIPT

No matter how you look at it, religion in America is dying.

In fact, the number of people who now say they have no religion has almost tripled since 1991 and now stands at just about the same level as the number of Catholics and Evangelicals.

According to the General Social Survey, a long-established metric of Americans’ opinions and practices across a wide spectrum of topics, the “No Religion” crowd is 23.1% of the population, Catholics are at 23% and Evangelicals account for 22.5% as of 2018. That is a statistical tie.

Mainline liberal Protestants have taken a massive hit since the day of the WASP establishment, a two-thirds decline to just roughly 11% of all Americans.

So look at the board, with everything on it at the same time.

  • No Religion: 23.1%
  • Catholic: 23%
  • Evangelical: 22.5%
  • Mainline Protestant: 10.8%

Together, that represents four out of every five Americans in one of those categories. The remaining Americans are scattered across other religions like Judaism or Islam.

Catholicism has seen what appears to be a steady erosion, decreasing 4% since 1972.

While that rate of decline is somewhat small, certainly compared to mainline Protestantism with a whopping 68% decline, it still does not bode well for the Church.

While it is true Catholicism is the single largest religious body in the United States, it is not on track to maintain that pace. Less and less are becoming or remaining Catholic, a fact borne out in the drop of the overall percentage of U.S. Catholics from 27% to 23%.

Now, two very troublesome points looming on the horizon.

First: For the past roughly 10 years, hapless U.S. Catholic leaders have been putting all their eggs in the New Evangelization basket with non-Catholic programs like Alpha. That has obviously failed, as even Lansing Bishop Earl Boyea confessed in a letter to his diocesan priests last year.

Secondly: With the constant stream of illegal aliens into the United States, again, another focus of the U.S. bishops, reports indicate that whatever percentage arrive here as Catholic, half of them leave the Faith within one generation.

Something is seriously sick in the Church.

If you look deep into the numbers, a tsunami can be detected picking up huge force. Young Catholics are jumping ship at a frightening rate, with a huge percentage deciding to leave between the ages of 10 and 18.

Older Catholics — mostly those born before Vatican II — are the most likely to have stayed, but they are dying off, and within 10 years, there will not be many left.

All this points to the reality that the Church is undergoing an enormous change — shrinking, becoming less relevant overall and having very little appeal to future generations.

Between sex scandals — mostly homosexual in nature — and now a string of ongoing state and federal investigations, the much-talked-about possibility of a U.S. Justice Department RICO investigation could be what finally pushes the Church over the edge.

It’s taken decades of corruption and dissent to arrive at this point. The treachery of many leaders — treachery against the faithful, the Faith and ultimately Jesus Christ Himself — is finally catching up.

Many of those — in fact, most — of those responsible for this have either died, are retired or approaching retirement in the next handful of years.

They have left behind a trail of tears. When they were in grade school or high school back in the 1950s or so, there was much talk about how America was on the verge of becoming a Catholic country.

But with the infiltration of Communists, homosexuals and theological dissidents, almost all of which was unknown at the time to rank and file Catholics, that possibility never got out of the gate.

It was sabotaged by the demon and his human offspring before it ever got off the ground. For those remaining faithful Catholics, the challenge is enormous.

Only the Catholic Church was established by Christ, and, therefore, only it can lead to salvation.

The forced retreat of the Church on the cultural scene, its movement toward being irrelevant, is going to have to be countered with an even greater resilience than was needed when Catholics first came ashore during the mass migration from Europe.

But for that to happen, the purification inside the Church must happen. The treachery, the cowardice, the incompetency, the emasculated men, the politically minded men in charge, all of it needs to be faced down.

Those are the very elements that have caused this meltdown, which is about to go over the cliff in the next handful of years.

We need to realize that for all intents and purposes, we will essentially be starting over — not quite, but pretty darn close.

Most Catholics sitting in the pews — the one in five who still do — either don’t know or don’t agree with the Church’s teachings, and emasculated, non-offensive, theo-babble garbage like Alpha is not the silver bullet.

When it comes time to finally say goodbye to the squishy, whiny Church of Nice Catholicism, it won’t be a minute too soon. Stalwart Catholicism, as it has always been, is how a culture is won in the long run.

We know. We did it before, and the world was given Western civilization.

We did it once, and though it took centuries, we can do it again.

EDITORS NOTE: This Church Militant video is republished with permission.

VIDEO: Saving Kids from the Jaws of Terror

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Lisa Miara is doing amazing work with children who’ve been to hell and back – saving them from the jaws of terror.

The founder of Springs of Hope, Miara left her family behind to work with Yazidi child victims of Islamic State – those both brutalized and radicalized.

She tells nightmare stories and explains what we can learn in the West:

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Promoting Hate to Children

Documents Detailing Google’s ‘News Blacklist’ Show Manual Manipulation Of Special Search Result

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Google does manipulate its search results manually, contrary to the company’s official denials, documents obtained exclusively by The Daily Caller indicate.

Two official policies dubbed the “misrepresentation policy” and the “good neighbor policy” inform the company’s “XPA news blacklist,” which is maintained by Google’s Trust & Safety team. “T&S will be in charge of updating the blacklist as when there is a demand,” reads one of the documents shared with The Daily Caller.

“The deceptive_news domain blacklist is going to be used by many search features to filter problematic sites that violate the good neighbor and misrepresentation policies,” the policy document says.

That document reads that it was, “approved by gomes@, nayak@, haahr@ as of 8/13/2018.” Ben Gomes is Google’s head of search, who reports directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. Pandu Nayak is a Google Fellow, and Paul Haahr is a software engineer, whose bio on Google’s internal network Moma indicates that he is also involved in, “fringe ranking: not showing fake news, hate speech, conspiracy theories, or science/medical/history denial unless we’re sure that’s what the user wants.”

“The purpose of the blacklist will be to bar the sites from surfacing in any Search feature or news product. It will not cause a demotion in the organic search results or de-index them altogether,” reads the policy document obtained by The Daily Caller. What that means is that targeted sites will not be removed from the “ten blue links” portion of search results, but the blacklist applies to most of the other search features, like “top news,” “videos” or the various sidebars that are returned as search results.

In a section of the memo entitled “Eligibility for GNP [Good Neighbor Policy] enforcement,” the types of search results impacted by the policy are described:

“If your product shows any of the following, Misrep and GNP would apply to your PA.

  • Shows content from users and news publishers (percieved 3P voice). Ex: UGC, News corpus, etc.
  • Outputs single answers (perceived to come from the open web). Ex: Web answers, Video answers, etc.
  • Shows content owned, licensed, or edited by Google (perceived to come directly from Google). Ex: Knowledge panels, News summaries, Oneboxes, Munin carousels, etc.”

The “ten blue links” may not be impacted by the blacklist, but virtually every other kind of Google search result is. While hard numbers are not available for how much traffic is directed through the ten links versus the other search blocks, since the latter appear so high on the results page, the impact could be significant.

“Focus on the user,” said a source at Google who described the program to The Daily Caller. “Users need to trust any content that Google shows them, whether it’s the ten blue links or other special search results.”

Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee on December 11 of last year. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) asked why a search for the term “idiot” returned a photo of President Trump. In response, Pichai said “This is working at scale, we don’t manually intervene on any particular search result.”

A memo about the deceptive news blacklist was also obtained by the Daily Caller, showing its last edit as December 3, 2018, a week before Pichai’s congressional testimony This document, which describes the process by which a site can be blacklisted for deceptive news, clearly shows that there is a manual component:

“The beginning of the workflow starts when a website is placed on a watchlist which is used for monitoring of sites to determine if they violate the Good Neighbor Policy. This watchlist is maintained and stored by Ares with access restricted to policy & enforcement specialists working on the Good Neighbor Policy. Access to the listing can also be shared at the discretion of pcounsel and legal investigations on a need to know basis to enforce or enrich the policy violations. The investigation of the watchlist is done in the tool Athena, the Ares manual review tool, and intakes signals from Search, Webspan, and Ares in order to complete reviews. … Once a domain is determined to be violating the misrepresentation policy or the Good Neighbor Policy, such patterns are then added to deceptive_news_blacklist_domains.txt by the Trust & Safety team.”

The document indicates that there is, among other things, a “manual review tool” involved in maintaining the blacklist.

On the blacklist are a number of conservative sites, including Gateway Pundit, Matt Walsh’s blog, Gary North’s blog “teapartyeconomist.com,” Caroline Glick’s website, Conservative Tribune, a property of The Western Journal, and the website of the American Spectator.

“You can’t trust the human judgment of Google’s Trust and Safety team,” said the source at Google with knowledge of their practices.

Requests for comment from Google’s press team have gone unreturned as of publication time.

COLUMN BY

J. Arthur Bloom

Deputy Editor of The Daily Caller. Follow J. Arthur Bloom on Twitter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission.

The Red Thread: Who Runs the Anti-Trump Conspiracies [Video]

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Forbidden Knowledge TV published the below video about a new book by Diane West. Stefan Molyneux interviews Diane West, author of ‘The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy‘, which investigates why a ring of senior Washington officials went rogue to derail the election and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Watch the interview, then buy Diane’s book ‘The Red Thread’:

Pelosi Is Hijacking the Civil Rights Movement to Force LGBT Ideology on Kids

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“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Those aren’t just hollow words. Those words birthed a nation unlike any other and inspired its leaders and soldiers to give their very lives in the most sacred of blood oaths to uphold truth.

Those words sustained a country during its deepest sin and gave us the framework to begin anew. Those words are just as true today as they were when the great American experiment began.

Our nation has a rich history of fighting for equal rights for all.

One of the most intense examples of this is the story of racial desegregation in schools—because the pursuit of equal rights for all affected every family and every child. Even kindergartners experienced firsthand the rocky road to equality, and their parents were along for the ride whether they liked it or not.

Ultimately, in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation in public elementary and secondary schools was unconstitutional, violating equal rights. And the Civil Rights Act in 1964 added the full weight of the federal government to the process of desegregating schools—including federal funding and even military intervention in K-12 schools.

But the fight didn’t start with the famous Brown case. There were many cases centered in higher education leading up to Brown, but four in particular from 1938 to 1950 that laid the groundwork.

Along the way to full desegregation, civil rights leaders carefully constructed their legal strategy to prove first that black students needed to be offered the same educational opportunities as white students, even if in separate schools and programs.

Next, they were able to prove that it is very difficult for separate schools to be considered equal if black students do not get to interact and share ideas with white students, especially when the white students would be the majority of the population in their future career fields.

Finally, they proved that even when black students were admitted to the same schools, doctoral programs, and classrooms as white students—yet still subject to segregation—there was in fact no equality.

At the University of Oklahoma in 1950, for instance, black students attended the doctoral education program with white students, but they were forced to sit in designated rows in class or designated tables in the cafeteria.

Declaring that this treatment could never be equal, the Supreme Court stated that “[t]here is a vast difference—a constitutional difference—between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar. The removal of the state restrictions will not necessarily abate individual and group predilections, prejudices, and choices. But at the very least, the state will not be depriving appellant of the opportunity to secure acceptance by his fellow students on his own merits.”

In other words, the state cannot stop people from separating into their own groups, but neither can it require them to be separate.

This case was a critical turning point for black civil rights, and four years later, Brown turned the tide for K-12 schools—and the country.

Hijacking the Civil Rights Legacy

Flash forward several decades to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Top 5 priority bill, H.R. 5—the so-called Equality Act. Now, the left, with Pelosi at the helm in the House, wants to use the blueprint that helped our nation desegregate schools to manipulate schoolchildren to carry water for the LGBT political agenda—whether their parents like it or not.

Their argument is that just as black children were literally and forcefully segregated from white children, so are LGBT children segregated from all other children in schools—creating an oppressed, unequal class of American children.

There are two obvious problems for these activists.

First, they claim to be advancing civil rights for LGBT-identifying individuals—who constantly change their own personal identities, with new categories constantly being added to the group as a whole. This makes it extremely difficult to advance civil rights, as the public can’t accurately identify the group that is receiving protection, and what type of protection is needed on a given day.

Second, unlike the days of racial segregation, LGBT-identifying children are not in fact being forced by the government to attend segregated schools or sit in separate sections of class.

LGBT activists are ignoring the first problem, and they attempt to fix the second problem by claiming something oddly similar to the 1950 University of Oklahoma case.

They claim that LGBT-identifying students are treated unequally in schools not because they are forced to sit in different areas, but because the nation as a whole does not permit transgender students to use the restrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex, does not require featuring LGBT people and ideas in school, and doesn’t teach children about the social and experimental medical ways to “transition” to another sex.

In other words, they believe the state is complicit in “separating” LGBT students from the student body by not reinforcing their ideology in the classroom.

The racial desegregation of America’s schools was about upholding the truth: that all men are created equal and deserve to be treated equally.

H.R. 5 by its very nature is not about achieving equal educational opportunities for all. It’s about forcing every administrator, teacher, child, and parent involved in schools to give any person who identifies as LGBT a platform in our schools, and special rights above and beyond everyone else.

In short, H.R. 5 isn’t about actual equality. It picks “equality” winners and losers.

Serious Consequences

So if Pelosi succeeded in getting H.R. 5 through Congress (which recently held a hearing on the bill), and if the president were somehow to sign it, what would be the practical implications for public schools?

For starters, major changes in your child’s curriculum. Pelosi and the LGBT activists who fund her campaign want to ensure “equality” by requiring “LGBTQ sexual experiences” to be included in schools. Sex education class can’t truly be equal unless all types of sexual experiences are taught, so leftist groups say.

Colorado already requires that children as young as 9 years old learn about “LGBTQ sexual experiences.” And California sex ed guidelines even require teaching children about having multiple sexual partners, and warning children about “religion abuse” that would include “forcing others to adhere to rigid gender roles [or n]ot allowing a partner to do things they enjoy.”

Both of these states’ curricula came from policies requiring LGBT inclusion in sexual education.

Sex ed class used to be for the purpose of helping students understand human biology and reproduction, which by nature includes everyone. H.R. 5 elevates LGBT sexuality and gives it special emphasis in the classroom.

And the “equality losers”? Parents and teachers who don’t believe the material is appropriate for their children for health, moral, religious, or other reasons.

All-Pervasive Indoctrination

But the changes envisioned in H.R. 5 don’t stop at sex ed class. The idea is to weave LGBT-centric themes throughoutthe school’s entire curriculum.

Take, for example, New Jersey’s new “LGBT curriculum” policy. Imagine a literature or history class where students are not just taught the historic contributions of literary giants like Emily Dickinson or former U.S. presidents, but the curriculum also questions the sexual preferences of our historic figures.

One textbook example ponders the fact that President James Buchanan “never married and had a very good friend who was living with him. He may have been gay.” A former American president is reduced to the sort of suspect commentary found in newspaper tabloids and gossip magazines.

What’s worse, parents really would have no opportunity to opt-out their children from exposure to this type of teaching or the topic of gender transition, since it is woven into every aspect of the curriculum.

The “equality losers” are, once again, teachers and parents who object—but especially children whose precious academic time will be consumed by nonsense speculation over what kind of sexual exploits any given historical figure was having.

That’s not equal rights. That’s ideology masquerading under the guise of rights.

That’s not equal rights. That’s ideology masquerading under the guise of rights. It is special rights for some at the expense of many others.

The Death of Equality

H.R. 5 is vying for a spot in our nation’s Equality Hall of Fame, comparing a sexualized political agenda to the brave students who endured segregation and then crossed town, under great hardship, to achieve racial desegregation.

If “all men are created equal” now means ensuring young children are informed that “little boys can become little girls,” then the centuries of power contained in those words ends with H.R. 5.
COMMENTARY BY

Autumn Leva

Autumn Leva is vice president of strategy for the Family Policy Alliance. Twitter: .

Dear Readers:

Just two short years after the end of the Obama administration’s disastrous policies, America is once again thriving due to conservative solutions that have produced a historic surge in economic growth.

The Trump administration has embraced over 60 percent of The Heritage Foundation’s policy recommendations since his inauguration. But with the House now firmly within the grips of the progressive left, the victories may come to a screeching halt.

Why? Because they are determined more than ever to give the government more control over your lives. Restoring your liberty and embracing freedom is the best thing for you and the country.

President Donald Trump needs all of the allies he can find to push through the stone wall he now faces within this divided government. And the best way you can partner with him is by becoming a member of his greatest ally in Washington: The Heritage Foundation.

Will you activate your membership with a tax-deductible gift today?

ACTIVATE YOUR MEMBERSHIP TODAY

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission.