With So Much at Stake in 2024, Christians Must Vote in November

While former President Donald Trump’s recent comments on the life issue have brought concern to many pro-life leaders, it remains important to recall the totality of what is at stake in the 2024 election.

Of the five Republican presidents elected after the infamous Roe v. Wade (1973) decision legalizing the abortion of children throughout the entire pregnancy, Donald Trump is the only one who secured the appointment of enough United States Supreme Court justices to reverse Roe: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. President Trump appointed a total of 231 judges to federal courts (District, Appeals and the Supreme Court).

The Supreme Court decided 5-1-3 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) that the “right” to an abortion is neither a fundamental right recognized by the Constitution, nor part of America’s national history and traditions. The court’s reversal of Roe returned the legality of abortion to the states as it had been before Roe was decided.

Abortion State Referenda in 2022-2024

The Dobbs decision apparently galvanized pro-abortion advocates, who won all of the state ballot referenda in 2022 that instituted pro-abortion constitutional amendments for California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana, as well as Ohio in 2023. Two pro-abortion candidates for state Supreme Courts won in 2023 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania with support for abortion as the deciding factor. Pro-life organizations lost all nine state referenda on abortion even in politically conservative states. In May, however, a pro-life Republican judicial candidate in Georgia beat the pro-abortion candidate, a former 10-year Democrat congressman, who had Planned Parenthood’s support.

Abortion referenda are on the 2024 ballots in 10 states: the swing states of Arizona and Nevada, the solid blue-leaning states of Maryland, Colorado, and New York, and the red-leaning states of Florida, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. In June, Planned Parenthood announced it will spend $40 million ahead of November’s election to help elect Democrats in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

Political commentator Victor Davis Hanson said in August that Democrats “have nominated two neo-Marxists who are openly proud of what they have done.” Steve Forbes noted that the Harris-Walz team is promoting “the most radical leftist Stalinist policies in American history.”

The Communist Party USA, which has the identical abortion policies of Harris-Walz including providing taxpayer-funded abortions, noted:

“The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade casts a shadow over the country … Our own party has rightfully joined the chorus in condemnation of the Supreme Court’s decision … The October Revolution gave birth to the first successful socialist experiment. … In 1920 the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on request. The People’s Commissariats of Health and of Justice passed a decree, noting that the procedure was to be ‘made freely and without any charge …’”

Freedom of Speech, Press, and Assembly

  • The First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech and petitioning government for redress of grievances is the foundation of the entire Bill of Rights! At the Faith and Freedom Coalition Rally in June, President Trump promised to pardon the peaceful, pro-life picketers imprisoned by the Biden-Harris justice department.
  • Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) stated recently, “There is no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” But in Matal v. Tam (2017) the Supreme Court ruled (9-0) that “we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’” For Harris-Walz, hate speech or misinformation is any speech they disagree with. During the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, Harris urged Twitter to shut down Trump’s account: “Donald Trump, who has 65 million Twitter followers … he and his account should be taken down.”
  • As California’s attorney general, Harris “co-sponsored” a 2015 bill compelling California pro-life pregnancy centers to distribute abortion facility information to their clients (AB 775, the Reproductive FACT Act). Fortunately, the Supreme Court ruled that the bill violated the First Amendment (NIFLA v. Becerra, AG of California, 138 S.Ct. 2361).
  • In September 2024, a federal district court in Louisiana decided in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. v. Joseph R. Biden that the Biden-Harris administration illegally censored Kennedy, who opposed the Biden-Harris COVID-19 policy: “The Court finds that Kennedy is likely to succeed on his claim that suppression of content posted was caused by actions of Government Defendants … there is a substantial risk that he will suffer similar injury in the near future.”

Freedom of Religion and Conscience

  • As California’s attorney general, Harris filed a brief asserting that Hobby Lobby’s owners had no religious liberty or conscience rights and should be compelled to supply abortion drugs to employees. The Supreme Court disagreed in 2014 (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. 682).
  • In 2018, Democratic Senators Kamala Harris (Calif.) and Maise Hirono (Hawaii) opposed President Trump’s judicial nominees Brian Buescher, Paul Matey, and Peter Phipps, claiming they could not be impartial because they belonged to the Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus, which opposes abortion and same-sex marriage. The Harris-Hirono “religious test” violates Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution; “[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust.” The Senate confirmed Trump’s nominees despite the Democratic senators’ anti-Catholic bigotry.
  • Harris introduced the “Do No Harm Act” (S. 2918) in 2018 to stop churches from relying on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Supreme Court has ruled exempts religious organizations from being required to support abortion, LGBTQ+ ideology, and other polices against their religion. Fortunately, S. 2918 failed.
  • The Biden-Harris Equality Act (HR 5 from 2021) compels Christians and Christian institutions to accept behavior condemned by Scripture, or pay huge fines. It prohibits federally chartered banks from loaning money to non-compliant churches and also allows up to $500,000 in fines for not “celebrating” same-sex marriages. Churches and schools would lose tax-exempt status and school certification unless they promoted LGBTQ+ policies. (HR 5 has failed so far.)
  • Tim Walz mandated that education administrators and public and private school teachers certified by the state who do not accept or affirm a student’s transgender identity and sexual orientation will not receive a teaching license per the latest version of the regulations.

Right to Life and Reproductive Ethics

  • The Planned Parenthood Votes super PAC stated that it “is working to ensure Kamala Harris and Tim Walz make it to the White House.” Planned Parenthood sent a mobile clinic to the Chicago Democratic Convention, offering attendees free abortions and vasectomies.
  • Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) boasted that Harris was the “first vice president in history to visit an abortion clinic.” What colossal hubris and utter disregard for babies!
  • Senator Kamala Harris introduced S.510 (2017) to forbid states from requiring that only doctors do abortions, and to make it illegal to delay abortions or increase costs (think of informed consent, parental consent, 24-hour waiting periods, health/safety regulations, and banning taxpayer-funded abortions).
  • On CBS’s “Face the Nation” in September 2023, Harris was asked, “At what week of pregnancy should abortion access be cut off?” Harris answered, “We need to restore … Roe v. Wade.” In February 2019, The Daily Caller asked Senator Harris if there was any point in pregnancy at which she thought abortion was immoral. She said, “I think it’s up to a woman to make that decision, and I will always stand by that.”
  • Tim Walz told the Democratic Convention, “[T]he government stays the hell out of your bedroom.” But Walz justified China’s forced late-term abortion, infanticide, sterilization and IUD policy. Walz claimed it was necessary because, “the Chinese population was so large.” Steven Mosher of the Population Research Institute) states that “hundreds of millions of Chinese women didn’t just pay a tax. … Their babies were ripped out of their wombs by cesarean section by Red doctors who went on to sever the fallopian tubes of those who violated the one-child policy.” So much for Walz’s “choice” or government staying out of the bedroom.
  • Walz signed HF 1 in 2023, stating that, “Every individual has a fundamental right to make autonomous decisions about the individual’s own reproductive health, including the fundamental right to use or refuse reproductive health care.” Walz’s law includes teen minors. Reproductive care includes transgender drugs/surgery. The Minnesota Senate voted 34 to 33, and Minnesota’s House voted 69 to 65 to pass HF 1.
  • Senator Kamala Harris, in an interview with The Root in 2019, was asked whether she thought sex work “ought to be decriminalized.” “I do,” Harris responded.
  • The 2024 Democratic Platform states, “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe the law of the land again. … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment [which bans taxpayer-funded abortions].” Harris-Walz will force all Americans to fund abortion in every state.
  • The Human Rights Campaign states, “The Biden-Harris Administration has been the most pro-LGBTQ+ administration in history … [and has] appointed a record number of LGBTQ+ … to key posts … including the first gay cabinet secretary, first Senate-confirmed transgender appointee, and historic federal judges. … [W]e must stop Donald Trump.”

Second Amendment

  • In 2019, presidential candidate Harris said, “I support a mandatory gun buyback program.” That is confiscation. Law abiding citizens would lose their means of self-defense. What policies do they intend to impose that warrant ending the inalienable right of self-defense? In 2008, Harris filed a court brief asserting that the Second Amendment (2A) allows a total hand gun ban, and that 2A applies only to the militia. The Supreme Court ruled firearm ownership is an individual right (District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008; McDonald v. Chicago, 2010); and that it is a self-defense right to carry outside the home (New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 2022).
  • In a 2023 poll, Gallup asked Americans if handgun possession should be banned, except for police or authorized persons. It found that “just 27% of U.S. adults believe that no one outside of police or other authorized persons should be able to possess a handgun.” Still, Harris-Walz push a radical anti-self-defense agenda.

Select Pro-Life, Pro-Family Actions of the Trump Administration

2017: The Trump administration ended Obama’s funding for international organizations that carry out or promote abortions, Obama’s policy requiring public schools to allow transgender students to use restrooms and showers of their choice, and Obama’s Department of Defense transgender policy.

2018: Trump ended Obama’s abortion policy that restricted states’ ability to stop abortion funding under Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Program, prevented those who identify as transgender from joining the military going forward, issued an executive order to release American Christian pastor Andrew Brunson who was jailed in Turkey, terminated a $15,900 HHS contract for securing fetal tissue from abortion for “research,” and exempted groups with religious or moral objections from being forced to purchase health insurance with birth control or abortion coverage.

2019: President Trump informed Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) he would veto any bills that weakened current pro-life policies or legislation and prevented Title X family planning grantees from referring or carrying out abortions.

2020: Under Trump, HHS authorized Texas to operate its Medicaid program without paying for abortion, the DOJ filed a statement of interest on behalf of a Virginia church which received a criminal COVID-19 violation by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam for holding a 16-person service, an HHS final rule clarified that in the Affordable Care Act “discrimination based on sex” did not include “gender identity” or “termination of pregnancy,” and that the federal government would not compel doctors to do abortions or gender reassignment surgery, and withheld $200 million in Medicaid funds from California for its abortion insurance policy requirements.

2021: An HHS final rule eliminated requirements that all grant recipients including faith-based foster care and adoption providers must accept same-sex marriage and profess gender identity policies to receive federal grants.

Republican Platform

The 2024 Republican Platform opposes late-term abortion and defends the religious liberty of businesses, hospitals, churches, and individuals from supporting or carrying out abortion. It recognizes parental authority over children, prohibits taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures (drugs/surgery) of minors, protects students’ religious freedom, and the right to pray and read the Bible in schools, and keeps men out of women’s sports. It opposes federal funding of schools for critical race theory or radical gender ideology classes. Harris-Walz and the Democratic Platform oppose these policies.

November 5 Voting

This race is very close. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently endorsed Donald Trump, is attempting to remove his name from the ballots in 10 “swing states.” Although Democrats tried to keep Kennedy off the ballot to protect President Biden, they are now working to keep him on the ballot to undermine Donald Trump in some states!

If neither Trump nor Harris receive the necessary 270 electoral votes to win, the House of Representatives would vote by state to pick the president (26 to win). Each senator would cast a single vote for vice president (51 to win). This happened in 1800 and 1824. Therefore, the majority party emerging from the 2024 election could choose the president and vice president in January 2025.

Conclusion

If a sufficient number of pro-life Americans decline to vote, and Harris-Walz wins along with their Democratic down-ticket colleagues, the Republicans will likely lose the majority in Congress. With so much at stake, how can anyone justify not voting?

AUTHOR

Bob Marshall

Bob Marshall served 26 years in the Virginia House of Delegates and was the chief House sponsor of the 2006 voter-approved Virginia Marriage Amendment and a ban on late term abortion. He authored 60+ laws and studies, and was Chairman of the General Assembly Stem Cell Study.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘We Will Be Relentless’: One. Simple. Trick … And Corporations Scramble To Kill ‘Divisive’ Diversity Policies

Robby Starbuck has been collecting scalps.

First came Tractor Supply Co. Then John Deere. Most recently, Coors scrapped their participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equity Index, a social credit score-style running tally of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) marks for publicly traded companies.

The corporations all dropped their participation in HRC’s index after Starbuck simply started highlighting them in public, amplifying complaints from internal whistleblowers to his massive X (formerly Twitter) following.

Harley Davidson, FordLowe’s and the parent company of Jack Daniels have all joined the ranks of companies that ended their participation in the index and committed to backtracking on woke corporate policies like deploying racial quotas, segregating employees into resource groups based on race and sexuality and celebrating pride events.

Each company announced the policy shift after Starbuck merely shined a spotlight on their practices.

“We’ve shown our teeth here. We’ve shown what we’re capable of. We’ve shown that we will be relentless when a company does not do the right thing, and that we will not stop, will not back down,” Starbuck, a conservative activist who focuses mostly on issues of family, told the Daily Caller.

The First Domino To Fall

Tractor Supply Co. was Starbuck’s first target after an internal whistleblower tipped him off to some of their HRC-compliant policies like providing LGBT and intersectionality training and sponsoring a “family friendly” drag show.

“I didn’t believe it until we vetted the information,” Starbuck told the Caller. “I go to Tractor Supply … I took my kids there every week,” Starbuck said.

But upon review, Starbuck found that the Brentwood, Tennessee-based farm supply company was engaged in things like selling the Queer Agenda card game on their website.

Starbuck released a seven-minute video detailing the company’s comprehensive compliance with the HRC’s index and their CEO Hal Lawton’s support for progressive causes in early June.

WATCH: ‘We Will Be Relentless’: Corporations Scramble To Kill ‘Divisive’ Diversity Policies

He included contact information for the company in the video. What happened next, he told the Caller, was the result of a grassroots campaign of thousands of the company’s customers calling and placing pressure on the company to drop their policies.

Three weeks after his video, Tractor Supply Co. released a statement detailing policy changes that included ending their submission of data to the Human Rights Campaign, eliminating DEI roles and DEI goals and a withdrawal of their carbon emission goals.

“This monumental change is thanks to all of you who supported my work exposing this, to the whistleblowers in Tractor Supply and my fellow farm owners who respectfully spoke up,” Starbuck wrote on X.

Others took notice. “Robbie Starbuck is a hero. He’s a one-man band,” Monica Crowley, a former Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs for the U.S. Treasury Department under President Trump, told the Caller.

“It’s perfectly within the American consumers’ right to understand and decide for themselves whether or not they want to support those companies with their hard earned disposable income,” Crowley said.

Starbuck replicated this model for other companies, continuing to use social media — X in particular — to highlight companies with a largely conservative consumer base for their woke policies.

“When I recognized that a company that depended on conservative consumers had fallen for this woke nonsense, I said they’re probably not the only one.”

Social Credit Scores For Business

The companies all announced they would stop sending data to the HRC, which had previously given many of them high scores on its Corporate Equality Index (CEI).

The CEI is a social credit score-like rating system that awards businesses up to 100 points on a scale that includes criteria like “nondiscrimination policies,” “equitable benefits for LGBTQ+ workers” and “supporting an inclusive culture,” according to their website.

The seemingly innocuous language stands in front of policies that, upon closer inspection, represent explicitly discriminatory policies like requiring companies to buy from suppliers with specific same sex preferences.

“82 percent of rated employers in this year’s CEI have supplier mandates with respect to non-discrimination in place, and 98 percent of these mandates (1105 of 1131 companies) explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity alongside other named categories,” the HRC touts on its website.

The index also encourages businesses to “provide education, training, and accountability measures on diversity and inclusion in the workplace.” The index specifically mentions the formation of LGBT employee resource groups and “diversity councils.”

“When a company offers ’employee resource groups’ to support workers of certain skin colors or ethnicities, it’s also unwittingly supporting a form of segregation by separating employees based on their immutable characteristics,” Monica Harris, the Executive Director at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR), told the Daily Caller. “When employers separate people who are supposed to work together, it’s not inclusive; it’s divisive,” she said.

Before breaking with the HRC, some of the businesses courted high scores on their index by setting targets for hiring specific percentages of employees of different racial heritage.

John Deere said they aspired to increase black hires by 85 percent, hispanic hires by 61 percent and Asian hires by 10 percent, according to company documents obtained by Starbuck.

John Deere also apparently tied employee bonuses and pay raises specifically to DEI performance, writing in their 2022 Sustainability report that “DEI is the only global behavioral performance metric upon which salaried employees are evaluated,” according to Starbuck.

They also encouraged employees to snitch on each other. In July, their mandatory code of conduct included a pledge to “report any diversity, equity, or inclusion-related concerns to a manager … ” a screenshot Starbuck took of the code of conduct shows.

John Deere dropped their participation in the HRC’s index after their stock price reached a one-year low and announced it would stop its participation in “social or culture awareness parades, festivals, or events,” following Starbuck’s campaign.

HRC has pushed back against the companies’ rejection of their index in a big way, noting that they would still be indexing companies that choose not to send them data. Their website landing page now has a large graphic highlighting Ford and other companies that rejected their index and says “This Isn’t Just Policy. It’s Personal. Millions of hardworking Americans and their families count on these companies.”

They’ve also returned fire on Starbuck, starting their own pressure campaign against him.

“They’re doing a text and email campaign against me right now,” Starbuck told the Caller. “It’s silly, but in a weird way they’re actually helping me, and I don’t think they realize it. They called me a MAGA weirdo. You’re only proving my point to these major companies that you are a partisan actor. You just said MAGA weirdo. So that means anybody who believes in MAGA that shops in one of these stores at these Fortune 500 companies is going to be thinking, ‘Why are they partnered with a group that calls people who think like me a MAGA weirdo?’”

Many of the companies mentioned the HRC by name in their announcement in policy shifts. A Ford spokesman said their CEO Jim Farley did so because it was the group their employees asked about the most often, according to The Wall Street Journal.

HRC’s President Kelley Robinson said in a statement the decision “will hurt the company’s long-term business success, from employee retention to consumer decisions about how they will spend their dollars.”

Starbuck, however, disagrees.

“If DEI and wokeness were making these companies money, and nobody on my end was making them feel pressure, these companies would not change policy,” he told the Caller.

Some experts note that these extremes are not the only way to go about building an inclusive workspace. Before the DEI craze, companies centered their diversity efforts along non-racial lines like differences in class, geography, religion and political perspective, Harris told the Daily Caller.

“My sense is that companies adopting aggressive, discriminatory DEI policies are out of sync with the current racial landscape in our country, but they don’t realize it,” Harris told the Caller.

“They’re being advised to use a sledgehammer to swat a fly. Does racism still exist in America? Unquestionably, yes. But unlike 60 years ago, race no longer defines the experience of black or white Americans. Increasingly, class, not race, is what’s causing system inequities. As a society, we’ve made tremendous progress in race relations that is being minimized and even ignored and, sadly, many DEI programs lean hard into this distortion of our racial reality,” Harris said.

American corporations spend a pretty penny on DEI training, over $8 billion, according to a review by Harvard’s Iris Bohnet. A McKinsey analysis predicts that number to nearly double by 2026.

While companies are incredibly secretive about the specific figures they spend on DEI initiatives (both Starbuck and the Daily Caller have conducted extensive reviews of HRC-indexed company financials and have been unable to find concrete figures), American educational institutions publicly spend millions on their efforts.

A January analysis by University of Michigan professor Dr. Mark J. Perry found the school was spending over $30 million in salary for employees “whose main duties are to provide DEI programming.”

A 2021 report by the Jefferson Council found the University of Virginia was spending almost $7 million yearly for their DEI efforts.

“I Felt Like I Was Sinning”

Rather than driven by financial motives, the DEI initiatives, incubated at the HRC, are pushed upon companies by their human resources and public relations departments, a nerve center Starbuck likens to “tumors.”

“Those two departments worked in tandem to convince executives you needed to do this or you were going to look racist,” Starbuck told the Caller.

An HR initiative at one of the companies Starbuck took down, Harley-Davidson, apparently encouraged employees to read the book “White Fragility” by author Robin DiAngelo, which among other things, claims “a white supremacist worldview” is “the bedrock of society.”

Other companies encouraged employees to sign LBGT ally pledges. Employees felt pressured to sign the pledges, telling Starbuck they felt they might be fired if they didn’t.

“I thought I would be fired if I didn’t do it. I’m a Christian. I felt like I was sinning by doing it,” Starbuck told the Caller, echoing an employee’s sentiments.

Harley-Davidson even sent white male employees to white male only diversity training, according to Starbuck.

The HR and PR departments are the “nerve center” of these movements, with the CEOs of the companies often wholly unaware of the radical takeovers, Starbuck said.

“They said, ‘Honestly, I watched the video you sent us, and I was shocked. I didn’t know this was going on,’” Starbuck said of some executives he’s spoken to. “‘It’s a real wake up call,’ is the term he used. There were things that were being done that he just didn’t know. He had kind of lost control of a certain department of people, and their ability to just do certain things without him ever knowing about it.”

Outside of the CEOs, many of the companies’ corporate leadership and executive class are simply out of touch with their consumer base, Crowley told the Caller.

These executives tend to all come from the same socioeconomic and educational class, Crowley said.

“There’s tremendous peer pressure to toe the social justice line, policy line, because their social group is all doing it, and that if they refuse to do it, that somehow they would be ostracized from their social group, their economic group, their fellow CEOs,” Crowley said.

Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at Arkansas State University, concurred with Crowley’s assessment.

“The root issue here is a total disconnect between an Ivy League and Big 10 educated executive class and hard workers at their own companies … regular Americans who buy motorcycles, heavy equipment and Bud Light,” Reilly told the Caller.

The HR and marketing departments, Starbuck told the Caller, are often spearheaded by young, radical leftists who attach to pseudo-Marxist ideology in college and infect the companies with it.

“The belief system coming out of a lot of colleges that folks have … They think it is their job to inject this stuff into the DNA of a company. Those folks, in many ways, use the fear of CEOs after George Floyd against them to create a lot of the space for wokeness in the workplace, and then it takes on a life zone. It becomes a disease that spreads to every part of the company’s body. And I would say what we’re doing is something akin to removing the tumor.”

While Starbuck has been able to declare victory over many of the companies, he’s not stopping. He has thousands of whistleblowers in his inbox ready to expose more of the over 500 companies who the HRC lists in their index.

“If they were able to shift the Overton window that fast, I realized we could do the same thing by waking up companies to where their customers are,” he told the Caller.

The majority of the companies he’s gone after so far have had largely conservative consumer bases, but Starbuck says it doesn’t have to be solely right-leaning companies who feel the heat.

“If conservatives even just make up 20% of your customer base, you really can’t afford to do things that are just openly sort of discriminatory toward them or violating their values in some way,” Starbuck said.

AUTHOR

Robert McGreevy

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Bush, Bowman, Gay, Kendi. All Disintegrated. Their Commonality? Woke Acolytes Are On The Run

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Harris Supported Taxpayer-Funded Trans Surgeries in 2019, Called ‘Transition Treatment … a Medical Necessity’

The Kamala Harris campaign kept her policies (and person) away from the mainstream media for so long that the media went snooping through the past. On Monday, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski first reported Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries on federal prisoners and detained illegal immigrants, revealed in a candidate questionnaire she filled out for the ACLU during her abortive 2019 presidential campaign.

On the questionnaire, Harris marked the “yes” box in answer the following question: “As President will you use your executive authority to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care? If yes, how will you do so?”

The questionnaire also allowed candidates to explain their answer in 500 words or less. In the space provided, Harris wrote, “It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition. That’s why, as Attorney General, I pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates.”

She continued, “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained. Transition treatment is a medical necessity, and I will direct all federal agencies responsible for providing essential medical care to deliver transition treatment.”

“This questionnaire is really an interesting snapshot-in-time of that 2019 Democratic primary,” said Kaczynski. “Kamala Harris was trying to get to the left of [Independent Vermont Senator] Bernie Sanders. She was trying to get to the left of [Massachusetts Democratic Senator] Elizabeth Warren, and you really see that in a lot of these answers.” In a now-archived ranking, GovTrack.us rated Harris as the senator with the most liberal voting record in 2019.

Some snapshots can be consistent across time, as this one appears to be. Harris’s 2024 campaign finally published a page on policy issues on the eve of the one-and-only presidential debate (to quote Edna Mode, “Coincidence? I think not”). In a section on “fundamental freedoms … at stake in this election,” the Harris campaign touted their candidate’s record of LGBT advocacy as far back as 2004.

In particular, the Harris campaign said their candidate would “fight to pass the Equality Act to enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” This extends the continuity because, as a senator in 2019, Harris was an original cosponsor of the Equality Act. While the campaign website elaborates no further, this far-reaching legislation would “virtually do away with sex-segregated spaces” by allowing “biological men into women’s private spaces,” Family Research Council director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty Mary Beth Waddell warned in 2019.

This means that, under the Equality Act, male prisoners who identify as women would have a statutory right to be housed in a women’s prison, wrote Abigail Shrier. This is already law in Harris’s native California, where at least 47 biological males, including violent criminals and sexual offenders, were housed in women’s prisons, as of March 2023. Harris’s pledge to provide gender transition procedures to trans-identifying prisoners at taxpayers’ expense not only implies such a permissive housing policy, in which inmates get to self-define their gender, but it takes it one step further by placing the state’s endorsement behind their gender transition.

While Harris’s policy-light campaign has not explicitly reaffirmed her 2019 endorsement of taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for trans-identifying prisoners, its brief comments are consistent with that position. Fellow Senate progressive Sanders said Sunday that Harris was not “abandoning her ideals” but merely “trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

Even if Harris wanted to change her mind, the transgender lobby would not let her. This summer, left-wing activists poured out their wrath against the Biden-Harris White House over a statement softly opposing gender transition surgeries for minors. The administration quickly folded to the pressure and backpedaled from that position to appease the transgender lobby. If Harris became president, nothing in her record suggests that she would respond differently to pressure from the transgender lobby.

In her 2019 questionnaire, Harris also promised to provide taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries to detained illegal immigrants. However, at the rate the Biden-Harris administration is releasing detained immigrants into the U.S., this seems like a moot point. It would be rendered even further irrelevant if Harris fulfilled another pledge from her 2019 questionnaire, namely to “end … immigrant detention facilities.”

Also in 2019, Harris also pledged to codify abortion-on-demand, “eliminate the Hyde amendment,” “legalize marijuana,” end cash bail, defund ICE, provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, and oppose legislation to impede or prohibit anti-Israel protests.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Cleaning Up Kamala’ | TRAILER OUT NOW

A couple months ago, Kamala Harris was the worst VP in American history. Now, she’s heralded as the Savior of the Republic.

Suffering from whiplash? We are too. That’s why we set out to expose how this inexplicable 180 happened.

The Daily Caller’s new documentary, “Cleaning Up Kamala,” shows that one doesn’t just become a warm, joyful “Momala” overnight. It takes a whole billion-dollar media effort.

“Cleaning Up Kamala” debuts Sept 13. and is available exclusively for Patriots subscribers. Catch a first glimpse below.

First, the Daily Caller uncovered the true cost of the Defund the Police movement in “Lawless.”  Then “Rigged” exposed the issue Democrats fear most: how their political machine managed to secure Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Now, with “Cleaning Up Kamala,” we take on a corrupt corporate media establishment that built a new presidential candidate, their candidate, out of whole cloth.

Harris was nobody’s first choice. Voters resoundingly rejected her in the 2020 primaries. Joe Biden chose her as VP to check an identity box, but she proved more incompetent than anyone could have imagine. A revolving door of staffers found it unbearable to work with her. She failed miserably as the border czar and her cackle made everyone uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, her approval rating stood deep underwater — until she was made into the new Queen of the Democratic Party.

With hilarious clips and insightful interviews, “Cleaning Up Kamala” shows how the media turned this trainwreck into a tulip.

The Daily Caller’s documentary productions are made possible by our faithful Patriots members, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without them. To watch “Cleaning Up Kamala” on Sept. 13, and to help support future investigative documentaries, please consider subscribing.

AUTHOR

Gage Klipper

Commentary and analysis writer.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column with video is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Difference between a Christian Conscience and a Secular Conscience

The Trump conundrum is now well understood. Though his positions and decisions as president were surprisingly good in some ways, his self-centeredness, history of crudeness, and penchant for insults have led many to say their Christian conscience won’t allow them to vote for him. A growing number claim their Christian conscience is so offended by Trump they feel compelled to vote for Kamala Harris to ensure Trump doesn’t take office. “Evangelicals for Harris,” a group that recently hosted a Zoom call attended by 200,000, declares on their X bio they are “voting for someone who better reflects Christian values.”

To her credit, Harris doesn’t have an insulting nickname for everyone she perceives as a political obstacle, but she is the most radically pro-abortion presidential candidate our country has ever seen. She is in favor of taxpayer-funded abortion up to the point of birth and favors no restrictions of any kind. When, as attorney general of California, she learned the abortion industry was illegally harvesting and selling aborted baby body parts, she did nothing to the people who dissect babies but aggressively went after David Daleiden, the man who exposed it. She is also the first vice president to visit an abortion facility, a move intended to demonstrate just how supportive of abortion she is.

Unfortunately, abortion is just the beginning of her joyful war on the Imago Dei. Harris has aggressively opposed state legislation protecting minors from chemical and surgical mutilation. She staged a photo op in the White House with a bearded man in a dress as if men in dresses and six-inch heels have always been discussing important ideas in the White House. She is also the first vice president to appear on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” to show her solidarity with drag queens.

Not only was she an early proponent of same-sex marriage, she refused to defend California’s natural marriage law as AG even when it was her sworn duty to do so. Though Harris talks about the importance of following the law, she doesn’t follow laws she doesn’t like either.

America’s vice president formally opposes everything God said was good. She denies God made us male and female. She denies God ordained marriage to be a relationship between a man and a woman. She denies we should be fruitful and multiply but believes people are a threat to the planet, part of the reason she is an evangelist for reducing the population generally. But never mind all that, she laughs a lot.

Christians are forced to navigate the reality that perfect people are never on the ballot, so we’re always picking sinners — and it’s appropriate to have minimum qualifications for our leaders. But not all sin is the same. Yes, all sin separates us from God and requires forgiveness, but not all sin is equally harmful. This is part of the reason Jesus warns us not to neglect logs in favor of specks and mentioned that those who delivered Jesus to Pilate were guilty of “greater sin” (John 19:10-11). It’s also the reason Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for straining at gnats while they swallowed camels (Matthew 23:24). Indifference to grave evil because you’re busy being outraged over real but less serious matters is its own form of sin.

We do not want our children speaking disrespectfully to their teacher, but even more than that we don’t want them planting pipe bombs in the school bathroom. “Evangelicals for Harris” is overlooking the pipe bomb in Johnny’s backpack so long as he promises not to talk back to his teacher.

Kamala Harris works to advance the agendas of people who dissect babies and sell their organs for profit. Other things are also evil, but there is nothing worse than that. However bad you think January 6 was, it’s less bad than dissecting babies. Just because good-looking people in expensive suits are telling you it’s not a big deal doesn’t mean it’s not a big deal. If you can get over baby organ harvesting because it’s done with joy, but you can’t get over the fact that Trump is insensitive, that’s not a Christian conscience in operation.

Yes, Trump has made repeated, awful statements about women — including jokes about assaulting them. There’s no excuse for it. But if your moral outrage compels you to affirmatively support someone who facilitates the mutilation and sterilization of children in response, that’s a cultural conscience, not a Christian one. That’s a conscience formed by “The View,” not the Bible.

People have convinced themselves that because they agree with God slavery is wrong, they’re on God’s team. Not so fast. While we have fortunately reached a consensus about the evils of slavery, the test of whether you have a Christian conscience or a cultural conscience occurs when the culture and God disagree. There’s no cost to taking God’s side on the issue of slavery, but there is a cost to taking God’s side on gender, marriage, identity, sexuality, sin, and a host of other issues. If you take sides with the culture against God every time there’s a conflict, you don’t get to claim to be on God’s team just because you also want to help the poor. Everyone wants to do that. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved.

A blessing of living in a free country is that we get to vote for anyone we want or abstain entirely. Obviously, I have opinions, but this is less an effort to persuade you to agree with me and more an effort to get us to stop lying to ourselves. Efforts like “Evangelicals for Harris” are lying to themselves and others. Take your “better reflects Christian values” nonsense elsewhere. Man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. There are a lot of people in the process of straining out gnats and swallowing camels right now. Kamala Harris is at war with God, and I’m not joining that war.

AUTHOR

Joseph Backholm

Joseph Backholm is Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Kicks Off Coalition to Shore Up Catholic Support

Former President Donald Trump is launching a new initiative to bolster his support among American Catholics. On Wednesday, Trump’s campaign launched the “Catholics for Trump” coalition.

“The Catholics for Trump Coalition is committed to safeguarding the vital principles of religious liberty and the sanctity of life that President Donald J. Trump has ardently championed,” the coalition’s mission statement says. “Under President Trump’s leadership, our nation witnessed unprecedented support for religious freedoms, with significant victories both domestically and globally. President Trump restored protections for faith-based organizations and bolstered the rights of religious institutions against governmental overreach.”

“Unlike the Harris-Biden administration, which has systematically undermined these fundamental rights, President Trump has stood unwaveringly in defense of traditional values and the sanctity of human life,” the mission statement continues. “Catholics for Trump stands with President Trump to continue building a nation where the rights of every individual to practice their faith freely is protected. Together, we have the opportunity to secure a future that honors the principles of freedom, faith, and life that are integral to our American heritage.”

Trump has been encouraging Catholics to back his reelection, noting the anti-Catholic policies of his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D). Trump recently posted on social media, “Catholics are literally being persecuted by this Wack Job, just ask the Knights of Columbus. They say that she is the most Anti-Catholic person ever to run for high office in the U.S.” He called on “ALL CATHOLICS TO VOTE AGAINST KAMALA…”

While polling over the years has shown Trump — and the Republican Party more generally — gaining support from American Catholics, especially as the Democratic Party embraces increasingly extreme positions on abortion, a more recent EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research survey found that Trump is trailing Harris among Catholic voters, though neither candidate has the support of a clear majority. Abortion has proven to be a dividing issue, with Trump’s declaration that the federal government has no role in abortion-related legislation finding little favor among Catholic voters. Like most Americans, Catholics rank inflation and the economy, as well as border security and illegal immigration, the most pressing issues ahead of November’s election.

The Catholic Church is strictly and directly opposed to abortion, unequivocally declaring the practice a grave moral evil. Trump’s positions on abortion, voiced over the course of this year, along with the positions of his running mate, Catholic convert and Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), have caused some concern among pro-life Americans, including Catholics. For example, Trump recently suggested that he would support an amendment to Florida’s state constitution allowing abortion, which is currently prohibited past the sixth week of pregnancy in the Sunshine State. In response to backlash from pro-lifers, including Catholic pro-life activist Lila Rose, Trump reversed his position and announced that he would be voting against the amendment. The former president’s abortion-related comments have thus been a source of consternation for Catholic voters.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Catholic League President Bill Donohue explained, “Most practicing Catholics are pro-life (the non-practicing ones are more in tune with the secular pro-abortion side), but they also want to win, and that means we need to be pragmatic.” While Donohue did say that Trump “did the right thing initially” by focusing on politically winning issues like inflation, the economy, and illegal immigration, his more recent comments on abortion show that he has “faltered” and needs “to rebound” on the issue. “He will find a sympathetic audience with Catholics, and most Americans, if he talks about the real extremists — Democrats who favor late-term abortions and who vote against bills that protect the life of a child who survives a botched abortion. He needs to be more consistent on this issue,” Donohue continued.

He added, “Trump won the Catholic vote in 2016, 52% to 45%, but he barely won it in 2020. Given the anti-Catholic animus of the FBI, and other agencies under Biden-Harris, the Catholic vote should be his in 2024.”

The “Catholics for Trump” coalition boasts that, while in office, Trump “did more for Catholics than any administration in history!” Among the achievements listed are conscience protections to ensure that Catholics in the health care industry are not forced to commit or support abortions, pro-life executive orders, and Trump’s address to the annual March for Life — the first time a sitting U.S. president ever spoke to attendees of the event.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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RELATED VIDEO: Rasmussen Reports: Trump is on his way to WINNING the national popular vote

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

We need to fight the misinformation campaign waged by the trans lobby

Several key medical journals, including JAMA, have identified the profound harms caused by medical and health misinformation. They assert that health misinformation on social media disproportionately harms female adolescents, racial and ethnic minority youth, LGBQT+ youth, and other marginalized groups.

The recent conference of the American Psychological Association in Seattle, USA, offered a session titled Safeguarding public health in the misinformation eraThe abstract stated:

There’s been a backlash against the very concept of misinformation. Independent researchers who study how to halt it are under attack by activists and advocacy groups. Many social media platforms are scaling back their content moderation programs. Institutions working to stop misinformation and improve health communication are facing lawsuits to halt their work. Health misinformation … is a global harm with drastic consequences, like disrupting population health efforts and increasing health inequities.

The most recent egregious example of misinformation occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic during which a strident diaspora of lay people and medical practitioners decried vaccinations and recommended ineffective and dangerous treatments like ivermectin to treat the virus.

In a commendable display of assertion and common sense, the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) revoked certification for two physicians who fronted an organization that promoted ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 and that offered treatments for people who had suffered “vaccine injury.” The physicians challenged the decision on the grounds that it was an attack on freedom of speech but they lost their appeal, leaving them limited to no avenues for re-certification. ABIM spokesperson said, “There are limits to what you can do.”

This is apparently not the case when it comes to gender identification and medicalized gender treatments for minors. In this realm, the misinformers have been granted immunity to do harm using treatments that have no sound evidence base.

I have reached this conclusion after reading a paper published last year and endorsed by the National Institute of Health, Current Opinion in Paediatrics:

Medical treatments for GD have a positive effect on mental health, suicidality, psychosocial functioning, and body satisfaction…Political targeting and legal interference into social inclusion for TGD (transgender and gender dysphoric youth) and medical treatments for GD are rooted in scientific misinformation and have negative impacts on their wellbeing.

Almost every word in this statement is demonstrably false. Reviews in the UKSwedenFinlandDenmark, many systematic reviews, amicae briefs in various states of the USA, including a recent one from Alabama, and the Cass review all beg to differ.

I have recently written about the shameful organization, WPATH, whose muddled, misguided misinformation about “gender affirming care” is a scourge on a generation of children, adolescents and their families. Yet the very organization and the journal that elsewhere recognizes the harms of misinformation, JAMA, wrote an endorsement of the WPATH guidelines, citing its expanding evidence base of mostly flawed and rejected studies!

NSW equality legislation

Against this background of misinformation about the nature of sex and gender, in Australia, Alex Greenwich, independent state MP, and the Greens party in the state of New South Wales are attempting to push through the Equality Legislation Amendment (LGBTIQA+) Bill 2023.

The primary objective of the Bill is “to provide full equality for LGBTIQA+ communities in New South Wales by amending various Acts to address discrimination and promote inclusivity.” This Bill affects no fewer than 20 other pieces of legislation. This proposed legislation creates disturbing cognitive dissonance and downright confusion. Below are a few of the proposed amendments consequent to the passing of this Bill.

  • Amendment of Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 No 48: Schedule 1[3]–[5] provides that for the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 a transgender person is a person who lives as a member of another sex. This is an extraordinary definitional assertion of how to define a transgender person, using the terms “another sex” with no mention of “gender identity” that is purportedly the foundational definitional identifier.
  • Amendment of Law Enforcement (Powers and Responsibilities) Act 2002 No 103 Schedule 15[9]: provides that a strip search must not be conducted in the presence or view of a person who is a different sex to the person being searched, except for a parent, guardian or personal representative of the person being searched, or a medical practitioner, with the consent of the person being searched.

Again, sex is asserted to be primary. Will the legislation allow for a transman (biological woman) to strip search a transwoman (biological male)? Or a cisman to strip search a transman?

  • Amendment to the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act 1995. Proposed changes will allow individuals to alter the record of their sex. But it seems that the Bill cannot explain itself without reference to the prohibited binary or the conflation of sex with gender/gender identity. An example of the incomprehensibility of the text of this Bill is contained in Schedule 14.

“… a word or expression that indicates one or more particular genders is taken to include every other gender. A word or expression that indicates a person’s relationship with another person by reference to the person’s gender is taken to include any person in the same relationship, regardless of gender. A word or expression that indicates one or more physical or body attributes or body capacity by reference to a particular gender are taken to be a reference to every person with the physical or body attribute, regardless of gender.”

In general, the language throughout the Bill is inconsistent, referring in various places to “recognised transgender person” (Section 38B), “another sex” (s.38A), “acknowledgement of sex” (Schedule 2), “male and female” and “opposite sex” (s.23 & s.34A), “former sex” and “different sex” [s. 38B(1)(c)].

Bizarrely, there is no mention of gender identity, or those citizens who choose to identify as non-binary, queer, genderqueer, genderfluid, or agender. Are these descriptors referring to different sexes? Does this proposed legislation even address these identification categories? Is it sufficient in law to identify as a sex other than one’s anatomical sex if that person has not undergone any medicalized sex altering interventions?

On what hospital wards do we place non-binary persons or self ID trans females who remain fully male bodied? This section of the proposed legislation appears to require only a “recognition certificate” to permit an individual to be treated as if s/he were of the sex stated in the recognition certificate.

Further, there are no provisions in the Bill for children under the age of 18. Lower age limits are not even mentioned. How could the political leaders of a nation draft such a nonsensical Bill?

As concluded in the Genspect submission in relation to this Bill:

…the amendments are profoundly anti-women and anti-parent and present a danger to children. Legal recognition of a supposed change of sex is a powerful psychological message for a gender questioning child that will lock them into a pathway of lifelong medical treatment and health harms. Allowing a change of “sex” on a birth certificate (including to categories that are not sexes) falsifies data, perpetuates a myth that sex change is indeed possible, and does not encourage an individual [to develop] a healthy acceptance of [his/her] body.  

Tickle v Giggle

The recent Federal Court of Australia ruling in the matter of should fill us with disquiet. The case was essentially a legal contest about the category “woman” and who can properly qualify for membership. It is the first case brought to court arguing gender identity discrimination in which a trans female was banned from a women only app on the grounds that she was not a woman. It is no surprise that the Federal Court ruled in favour of Tickle, disseminating the message that sex can be changed at will, and that gender identity trumps biological sex, which, of course, is the basis of the proposed Self ID legislation.

In addition to erasing the meaning of biological sex, this proposed legislation boasts in its title that it is an “equal legislation amendment.” In fact, it does the reverse—it renders other categories including women and lesbian and gay communities disadvantaged by denying them safe single-sex spaces and criminalizes those who assert their rights under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984.

Australia now lags far behind our more enlightened counterparts in the northern hemisphere. Can we please return to a semblance of sanity regarding the nature of reality and the immutable fact of biological sex? And perhaps we can send Alex Greenwich, at taxpayers’ expense, to enrol in courses in logic, English expression, and biology.


Forward this article to your friends!  


AUTHOR

Dr. Dianna T. Kenny is a retired Professor of Psychology at The University of Sydney and currently an expert psychologist who offers a range of services including individual adult psychotherapy, child, adolescent, couple, and family therapy, mediation and family dispute resolution, and medico-legal consultancy. She specializes in psychotherapy for gender dysphoric young people and their families. Her book, “Gender Ideology, Social Contagion, and the Making of a Transgender Generation” will be published later this year by Cambridge Scholars Press.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

The Unsinkable Ship Titanic America

One of my readers sent this to me this morning. I do not know the original source but it speaks for many of us.


I woke up, and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same.

I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life–so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may well have entered the Twilight Zone.

You can’t justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!

  • If a man pretends to be a woman, you are required to pretend with him.
  • Somehow it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.
  • Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections are good.
  • It was cool for Joe Biden to “blackmail” the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquires about it.
  • Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote.
  • People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.
  • People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.
  • Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.
  • Irish doctors and German engineers who want to emigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-banger who jumps the southern fence is welcome.
  • $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
  • If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
  • People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.
  • We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan for us.
  • Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
  • Criminals are caught and released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it’s a violation of THEIR rights.
  • And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us “racists”?!

Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it’s racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China. We are clearly living in an upside down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.

Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast.

The choice is yours to make. What will it be?

Time is short, make your choice wisely!

AUTHOR

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EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Why aren’t governments tackling the epidemic of sexual abuse in America’s public schools?

This week the Washington Post ran a long feature about a school police officer in South Carolina who has been accused of several sexual assaults on high school girls. It turns out that more than 200 police officers have been charged with child sexual abuse between 2005 and 2022.

These officers are patrolling schools to prevent mass shootings. But a few bad apples amongst them have been sexual predators. “The Justice Department and many law enforcement agencies and school systems have failed to take basic steps to prevent sexual misconduct and root out abusive cops,” the Post claims.

The tragic thing is that these allegations come as no surprise. It is just the latest in a steady trickle of stories in the media about sexual abuse in American public schools. No doubt the problem is similar in other countries. The difference is that collecting meaningful information about abuse in schools is far more difficult in the US because of its sheer size and the number of jurisdictions – 50 states plus the District of Columbia and other territories, divided into more than 13,000 school districts.

Three articles by journalist James Varney for RealClearInvestigations highlight a massive problem which emerges from time to time but has never been comprehensively studied. He writes: “For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.”

Lack of data is a consistent problem which seems almost insurmountable. Last year a journalist for Business Insider dug into the issue after he discovered that the public high school which had attended in southern California had become “a stalking ground for child predators”. He concluded that “shoddy investigations, quiet resignations, and a culture of secrecy have protected predators, not students”.

How many victims?

How many children have been abused in American schools? It’s impossible to put a number on it. A tally of newspaper reports would leave out the teachers and school employees who have been quietly dismissed or who are never reported.

However, Varney writes that “Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.”

Millions? This certainly dwarfs the abuse problem in the Catholic Church, which has been pilloried for shielding abusive clergy from the law.

The key study of the prevalence of sexual abuse in public schools is 20 years old and controversial, but it raises questions which remain unanswered.

In 2004, Charol Shakeshaft, of Hofstra University, was commissioned by the US Department of Education to analyse the extent of sexual abuse in public schools. She relied upon surveys by the data collected for American Association of University Women. Her methodology is not above criticism, but what she found is still being used as a reference point. And it is deeply disturbing.

Shakeshaft found that 9.6 percent of all students in grades 8 to 11 reported unwanted sexual misconduct by school employees. “Misconduct” covered a wide range of behaviours, from jokes to touching to leering to rape. If that percentage is correct, she calculated that “more than 4.5 million students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade”.

Around the same time, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released the results of an independent study of abuse by clergy. The John Jay Report found that between 1950 and 2002, 10,667 people made allegations that priests or deacons had sexually abused them as minors.

“So we think the Catholic Church has a problem?” Shakeshaft said in an interview with Education Week in 2004. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.” Presumably she meant the number of victims, not the rate of offending.

The cover-up

Numerous reports have declared that the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse has been worse than the crime itself. The UK’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, published in 2022, is one amongst many. It found that:

“The protection of personal and institutional reputations above the protection of children was a frequent institutional reaction. Statutory agencies were not informed, perpetrators were ‘moved on’ and there were failures by those in authority to thoroughly investigate allegations. Records about child sexual abuse allegations were not kept.”

When a grand jury released a report on sexual abuse in the state of Pennsylvania in 2018, it said that the Catholic Church had developed “a playbook for concealing the truth”. That report was badly flawed, as Mercator pointed out at the time, but the metaphor is a useful one. American public schools are using that playbook. Amongst educators, it’s called “passing the trash” – abusers are quietly dismissed and allowed to move to another school district where they abuse again.

Billie-Jo Grant, of California Poly State University, an expert on school abuse, told Varney that the federal Department of Education (DOE) “does not and never has tracked sexual misconduct committed by adults against students. DOE has never aggressively worked to stop teachers’ unions and administrators from passing the trash. DOE does not hold accountable the many enablers who have created a pool of mobile molesters in our schools nationwide.”

“Passing the trash” is “a shockingly frequent phenomenon in America’s public schools,” according to a 2023 study by the Defense of Freedom Institute. It also cites research by Billie-Jo Grant in which she found that abusive teachers will be passed to three different school districts before they are fired or charged by police and can have as many as 73 victims.

There are laws on the books to ban this practice, but they are ineffective. Activists are lobbying for model legislation called the SESAME (Stop Educator Sexual Abuse, Misconduct and Exploitation) Act. Progress has been slow; only a handful of states have passed it.

The common thread

Outrage over abusive clergy and cover-ups by bishops in the Catholic Church is understandable. The Church sets the moral bar high for its faithful and they deserve to have exemplary pastors. The vast majority of priests are, and have always been, upright and decent men and in recent years the incidence of abuse has declined sharply. But the scandal of predatory priests, negligent bishops and the ruined lives of children cries out to heaven for vengeance. The Church’s tarnished reputation may be part of its atonement for these offences.

However, it is incomprehensible that public school systems in the United States and other countries, like Australia and the UK, have learned nothing from that disaster and are not scrutinised with the same vigour. This negligence makes one suspect that most governments, federal and state, are more interested in weakening Christian churches than they are in protecting students. This places children at risk. As one activist told Varney, “we are not mandated to send our children to church; we are mandated to send them to school.”

It’s not just a question of fairness. Over the past few decades, an epidemic of child sexual abuse has swept through institutions in Western countries, from churches to the Boy Scouts to public schools. The Catholic Church is definitely not an outlier. There may be a deep cultural problem in our society which we are afraid to face – we no longer understand what our powerful sexual drives are for. As a consequence, they are flailing about like live electric wires and innocent children get burnt.

Until governments come to grips with this and stop using churches as whipping boys, the problem will continue unabated and millions of children will be hurt.


Have you had any experience with sexual abuse in government schools?


AUTHOR

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

This is not fake news: U.S. Surgeon General warns that parenting is a health hazard

The US Surgeon General, Dr Vivek Murthy, just issued an official advisory warning against the stressful nature of parenting and labelling it “an urgent public health issue.” The document says Surgeon General Advisories “require the nation’s immediate awareness and action.” So, according to the Surgeon General, what exactly is the urgent issue and what immediate actions should be taken to rescue parents from the stress of raising their own children?

In short, the advisory cites data showing that parents experience more stress than non-parents and that sometimes, some parents’ stress levels are so high they cannot function. It says parental stress can negatively affect children. It says major sources of parental stress include “financial strain and economic instability, time demands, concerns over children’s health and safety, parental isolation and loneliness, difficulty managing technology and social media, and cultural pressures.”

All true.

I’m a mom of five children, and I birthed four of them within a time span of roughly five years. 12 years later, I had a baby in my 40s. We had diapers and dating going on at the same time. I’m no stranger to stress. I have known financial strain, the instability of layoffs, bone-deep fatigue, and so much more.

As for not being able to function, that depends on your definition of the word “function”. (Does inventing games where I lay motionless on the bed while my kids pile heaps of clean laundry on top of me count as “functioning”?) Parenting has beat the stuffing right out of me at times. But through all these years, I never saw my children as a threat to my mental health.

Children are a danger to their parents

This Surgeon General’s Advisory is the first time I recall seeing an official government entity framing children as a clear and present danger to their parents. It reminds me of radical feminist Sophie Lewis’ assertion that babies in utero commit “fetal violence” toward their mothers by introducing health threats to and demanding nourishment from their unfortunate maternal hosts. Likewise, Suzanne Sadedin says an unborn baby employs “manipulation, blackmail, and violence” against its mother while floating in the womb and usurping whatever sustenance it can suck from her body.

Collectivism is always the answer

What does the Surgeon General say should be done about this assault on parents’ health? The “We Can Take Action” section of the advisory starts with this preface: “[W]hile parents and caregivers may have the primary responsibility for raising children… [it] is a collective responsibility.” It then gives a laundry list of collectivist solutions including the following:

  • “Bolster support for childcare financial assistance programs such as childcare subsidies and child income tax credits; universal preschool; early childhood education programs.”
  • “Establish a national paid family and medical leave program.”
  • Prioritise “poverty reduction, prevention of adverse childhood experiences… and improve access to healthy food and affordable housing.”
  • “Strengthen public and private insurance coverage of mental health care.”
  • Expand workplace policies, including “paid parental, medical, and sick leave” and “access to childcare (in the community or on-site)”.

Unsurprisingly, most of the solutions call for more government intervention and lots more childcare. (Sorry, but universal preschool has not been shown to improve the situation of the majority of children or their parents.) We will never fix the problem by encouraging less family unity and more government “help” that comes at the cost of higher taxes.

There doesn’t seem to be acknowledgment in the Surgeon General’s Advisory that the separation of parents and children for most of the waking hours of every day and the reality of both parents focusing most of their time and efforts outside the home may be contributing to the very problem they’re trying to solve: the widespread breakdown of the mental health and happiness of both children and their parents.

The advisory does have some solid suggestions that deserve kudos. For instance, it urges friends and family members to offer practical support to parents, including “lending assistance with household chores, childcare responsibilities, or running errands” and “looking for ways to support parents and caregivers so they can take breaks, attend needed appointments, and engage in self-care activities.” Bravo.

Humble solutions

Here are some additional suggestions for policymakers and individuals:

  • Live near familyGrandparents and others can offer vital support. Studies show that living near grandparents can benefit children, parents, and grandparents.
  • Ease parents’ financial burdens by lowering taxes; do this by eliminating social programs, not increasing or expanding them. Largely let families solve their own problems with their own money.
  • Cultivate an economy in which one parent can primarily support the family financially, and one parent can primarily focus on the physical and emotional needs of their children.
  • Spend more time and effort preparing children for parenthood. Cultivate selflessness, sacrifice, and responsibility in children (Hint: Large families often foster this.)
  • Limit time spent on electronic devices for both parents and children (for more vital information on this, see my articles here and here.)
  • Revitalise THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Initiate simple neighbourhood gatherings to get to know the people around you. Use social media neighbourhood groups to support each other, like offering to pick up a gallon of milk, etc., for the family next door.
  • Don’t wait for the government to save you. If you are overstressed — as I was at one time when my kids were young — ask another parent to swap babysitting with you every week (or as often as needed.) Doing this reduced my stress level significantly.
  • Reconsider and revise your priorities. If work has become more dominant than home life, or if your life is overrun with too much to do, simplify and sacrifice in order to focus on what matters most to you.

Despite the often chaotic and stressful nature of parenting, most parents see their children as a deep and satisfying source of joy — despite the pain. There is work and struggle in parenthood. That’s part of what you sign up for when you decide to welcome a helpless person into your life.

But you also sign up for a life of purpose and boundless adventure beyond what you could have imagined. And almost all parents rise to the occasion. They embrace the adventure of raising a family, and it gives them both daily and lifelong purpose. At the end of the day — and at the end of their lives — most parents consider themselves better off rather than worse off for having embarked on the irreplaceable adventure of becoming parents.


What do you make of the US Surgeon General’s advisory? Leave your thoughts below.


AUTHOR

Kimberly Ells is the author of The Invincible Family. Follow her at Invincible Family Substack.

EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

‘Radicalized And Increasingly Out Of Touch’: Texas Dem Abandons Party

A Texas Democrat ditched her party in a scathing rebuke Friday and added that she plans to defect to the GOP.

Shawn Thierry declared the party switch while attending the Moms for Liberty summit in Washington, D.C., noting that she cannot support some of the liberal policies like sex change surgeries for minors and stripping Title IX protections for female athletes. The Democratic representative lost in the May primaries to opponent Lauren Simmons, which kept Thierry from a fifth term, The Texas Tribune reported.

“This is not the party I grew up with,” Thierry said in a statement posted to X. “I have witnessed firsthand how the so-called ‘liberal’ left now stifles thoughtful debate, silencing dissent with an iron fist—demanding blind allegiance to ideology, where one must ‘comply or be cast out.’ This is not the Democratic Party I once supported and represented.”

“As the years have passed, I have watched with dismay as the party I once knew has drifted far from its roots,” Thierry said. “It has become almost unrecognizable—radicalized and increasingly out of touch with the values that millions of everyday Americans hold dear.”

Thierry faced significant backlash from her liberal constituents and the Democratic party for supporting a bill banning cross-sex hormones and sex change surgeries for minors, a press release accompanying Thierry’s statement notes. The representative now serves in her fourth term in the Texas Legislature.

“In 2024, the Republican Party champions economic empowerment, by investing in Historically Black colleges and universities like the one I proudly graduated from,” Thierry noted in her statement. “It’s the party of parents, believing that they have the fundamental right to determine the best educational environments for their children to learn, grow, and succeed.”

“I am leaving the left because the left has abandoned Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that has lost its way, lost its commitment to hard working families,” Thierry’s statement says.

AUTHOR

Jennifer Nuelle

Contributor.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.


All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Tim Walz’s Lies: The Top 7

CNN thinks it understands what sets Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz apart from the average politician: honesty. “[W]hat Walz has — and it’s rare in politics these days — is that he’s totally comfortable in his own skin. He knows who he is. He’s authentic. And he doesn’t try to be someone else,” said CNN’s Chris Cillizza.

Yet Walz stands accused of purveying a string of lies, errors, and prevarications stretching back to his earliest days in politics, fibbing about everything from his military service to whether he won an obscure award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce as a 29-year-old man. Here is a far-from-exhaustive list of the mistruths Walz has communicated.

1. Stolen Valor #1: Serving in War

Tim Walz served 24 years in the National Guard, an honorable action worthy of praise in its own right. During his National Guard service, Walz was stationed in Norway and, when a different unit deployed to Afghanistan, he took their place in Vicenza, Italy from August 3, 2003, until 2004, according to NPR. Walz retired in 2005, as the unit he led was about to be deployed to Iraq.

Yet over the years, he has implied he faced combat during the War on Terror, as well as allowing others to repeat the claim without correction. In a video clip the Harris-Walz campaign shared of a 2018 event calling for gun control legislation against law-abiding citizens in violation of the Second Amendment, Walz said, “We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, is the only place where those weapons are at.”

The campaign muddied the waters, telling CNN, “In his 24 years of service, the [g]overnor carried, fired and trained others to use weapons of war innumerable times. Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country.” A Harris-Walz campaign spokesperson, Lauren Hitt, later claimed Walz “misspoke.”

Yet the errors had piled up for years. A 2006 article in The Atlantic claimed Walz faced a hostile interrogation at a George W. Bush rally after security saw evidence that Walz supported 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry:

“His challenge prompted a KGB-style interrogation that was sadly characteristic of Bush campaign events. Do you support the president? Walz refused to answer. Do you oppose the president? Walz replied that it was no one’s business but his own. (He later learned that his wife was informed that the Secret Service might arrest him.) Walz thought for a moment and asked the Bush staffers if they really wanted to arrest a command sergeant major who’d just returned from fighting the war on terrorism.”

Numerous video clips have shown figures, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), claiming Walz served in combat, without any correction, provoking charges that Walz engaged in “stolen valor.”

A group of 50 military veterans in Congress wrote a letter to Walz expressing their “grave concern” over the fact that Walz may be “a heartbeat away from becoming the Commander-In-Chief. You’ve already demonstrated your unwillingness to lead in time of war and a lack of honor through your blatant misrepresentations exploiting and co-opting the experiences of America’s combat veterans for personal gain.”

The lead author of the letter — Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) — lost both legs while serving in Afghanistan.

“America’s veterans and servicemembers are rightfully concerned about what would happen to them should you ascend to the Presidency. When America asked you to lead your troops into War, you turned your back on your troops.”

“Until you admit you lied to them, there is no way you can be trusted to serve as Vice President,” they wrote.

Those who served in uniform seem the most upset.

Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who escaped Appalachian poverty first by enlisting in the Marine Corps, before enrolling in Ohio State University and Yale, said when his country “asked me to go to Iraq to serve my country, I did it. I did what they asked me to do, and I did it honorably. When Tim Walz was asked by his country to go to Iraq, you know what he did? He dropped out of the Army and allowed his unit to go without him, a fact that he’s been criticized for aggressively by a lot of the people that he served with.”

“For 20 years, they let this guy go by with a lie that he deployed to Iraq, which he didn’t, and that he retired as a command sergeant major, which he did not. I mean, that’s just blatant lies,” said Hung Cao, a retired Navy captain and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia.

“I served in the Minnesota National Guard with him. He literally abandoned us when we were about to be deployed to Iraq. He’s a coward and should be treated as such,” stated J.R. Salzman. Multiple members of Walz’s unit, including a chaplain, have spoken out against Walz’s misrepresentation of his military record.

Legacy media outlets, so quick to pounce or artifice any misstatement from President Donald Trump, have proven remarkably understanding about Walz’s erroneous comments. The New York Times ran an article “Explaining Claims About Tim Walz’s Military Service,” which noted that four veterans “do not believe the governor is guilty of ‘stolen valor,’ but that he did misrepresent his record at times.” Some seemingly confessed that they have concerns over the political impact of Walz’s claims, which legacy media fact-checkers minimize or otherwise spin. “False and misleading claims of such a trivial nature might not seem particularly harmful, but a deluge of them could easily add up to real damage at the polls, according to experts. This is especially true when they go after a figure such as Walz, who is still relatively unknown on the national stage,” admitted CBS News.

Yet a few have corrected the record. “There is no evidence that at any time Governor Walz was in the position of being shot at, and some of his language could easily be seen to suggest that he was. So that is absolutely false when he said that about gun rights out there,” said CNN correspondent Tim Foreman. More recently, USA Today columnist Ingrid Jacques referred to Walz’s “disturbing record” as “a bit of a fabulist.”

2. Stolen Valor #2: ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’

Walz has repeatedly referred to his rank as “retired command sergeant major,” including in the official Walz-Harris campaign biography. Yet Walz actually retired as a master sergeant, because he failed to complete required coursework at the U.S. Sergeants Major Academy when he quit his unit in 2005 to run for U.S. Congress.

“You have stated that you are ‘damn proud’ of your service, and like any American veteran, you should be. But there is no honor in lying about the nature of your service,” stated a letter from 50 veterans serving in Congress. “Repeatedly claiming to be a ‘Retired Command Sergeant Major’ when you did not complete the requirements was not honorable. Nor was it honorable to claim to carry weapons ‘in war’ when you had not served in war, and abandoning the men and women under your leadership just as they were getting ready to deploy was certainly not honorable either.”

Eventually, the Harris-Walz campaign website stealth edited Walz’s biography. Yet in an official video shown on the third night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention before his vice presidential acceptance speech, said that Walz “served 24 years in the National Guard, rising to Command Sergeant Major.”

3. Walz Claimed His Wife Conceived through IVF

The Democratic Party has repeatedly claimed the 2022 Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, has unleashed a torrent of pro-life laws that threaten everything from miscarriage care to in vitro fertilization (IVF). Tim Walz claimed to have a very “personal” connection to IVF, claiming he and his wife, Gwen, owe their two children to IVF.

In fact, Walz invoked the Lord’s divine providence for the controversial procedure. “Thank God for IVF, my wife and I have two beautiful children,” Walz told MSNBC in July. Walz weaponized the issue against J.D. Vance in August, alleging, “If it was up to him, I wouldn’t have a family because of IVF.” (Vance has spoken in favor of IVF, a controversial procedure in which nine out of 10 children are never born and unknown millions have been “discarded,” aborted, or abandoned.)

But in an August 19 interview with Walz’s wife, Gwen, Glamour magazine reported that the couple did not conceive via IVF at all. The Walzes participated in a different fertility procedure, known as intrauterine insemination (IUI), in which sperm are injected into the uterus. Gwen Walz thanked a nurse in her neighborhood who assisted her “with the shots I needed as part of the IUI process.”

The Harris-Walz campaign attempted to defend Walz’s misleading IVF statements. “Governor Walz talks how normal people talk,” said Mia Ehrenberg, a campaign spokeswoman. “He was using commonly understood shorthand for fertility treatments.”

Despite Democratic claims to the contrary, IVF was never threatened by an 8-1 Alabama Supreme Court ruling which allowed the parents of children negligently destroyed in IVF clinics to file a civil case under the state’s 1872 Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

4. Walz Misled about His 1995 DUI

As a candidate for Congress in 2006, Tim Walz apparently misled voters about his 1995 arrest for driving under the influence. Walz had claimed the entire arrest was a misunderstanding, based on hearing loss from his valorous military service. But CNN reported:

“According to court and policerecords connected to the incident, Walz admitted in court that he had been drinking when he was pulled over for driving 96 mph in a 55 mph zone in Nebraska. Walz was then transported by a state trooper to a local hospital for a blood test, showing he had a blood alcohol level of .128, well above the state’s legal limit of 0.1 at the time.”

Walz accepted a plea deal, admitting that he put himself and others in danger by getting behind the wheel.

“It’s just a dangerous situation,” Walz said in a court transcript, which Alpha News, a conservative Minnesota outlet uncovered in 2022. “Not just to myself, but to others who aren’t even involved with it.”

5. ‘Outstanding Young Nebraskan’?

When Walz ran for the House of Representatives in 2006, his official campaign biography stated that in 1993, he “was named the Outstanding Young Nebraskan by the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce for his service in the education, military, and small business communities.” Yet he never won any such award.

“We researched this matter and can confirm that you have not been the recipient of any award from the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce,” wrote Barry Kennedy, then-president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce, in November 2006. “I am not going to draw a conclusion about your intentions by including this line in your biography. However, we respectfully request that you remove any reference to our organization as it could be considered an endorsement of your candidacy.”

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Walz’s opponent, Gil Gutknecht, who told The Washington Free Beacon that the fabrication “fits a pattern of misleading and fabricated statements he has made throughout his political and personal life.”

Walz’s campaign later updated the biography, claiming he won an award from the “Nebraska Junior Chamber of Commerce.” His campaign manager waved off the controversy, telling local media the misstatement had been a “typographical error.”

6. Phony Headlines

Despite the Democratic Party’s continual warning about misinformation — something Tim Walz has erroneously said is not protected by the First Amendment — the Harris-Walz campaign has doctored headlines in its online advertisements.

The campaign reportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaign ads that presented actual news stories from the Associated Press, USA Today, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and other outlets — but with glowing headlines written by campaign staffers. The intention is to convince readers the unbiased reporters heaped praise on the candidates.

Some of the website’s purveyors say the campaign’s actions have undermined their journalistic integrity. “They lied to every single person that saw that ad. It’s misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts us as the company, our news brand,” Steve Hallstrom, president and managing partner of Flag Family Media, told the Daily Caller in August.

7. ‘White Guy Tacos’

Tim Walz appears to have even misled the American people about his pallet. In an online video, he apparently stated that “black pepper” is the spiciest food he eats, although Walz has a taste for spicy food.

In the video, Walz gestures toward a table and tells Kamala Harris, “I have white guy tacos.”

“What does that mean? Like, mayonnaise and tuna? What are you doing?” replied Harris, repeating a racial stereotype.

“Pretty much ground beef and cheese,” explained Walz.

When Harris asks if he “put any flavor in it,” Walz said, “No,” because “black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.”

“Listen, I’m just not much of a spice guy,” said Walz, posting the clip on social media.

Yet in Minnesota, Walz is apparently known for enjoying spicy food. In January 2022, Walz referred to his “award-winning recipe for Turkey Taco Tot Hotdish” (which contains chiles and other peppers) online.

Rolling Stone magazine, which has a strained relationship with the truth, described Walz’s original comments as a “joke.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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RELATED VIDEO: Comrade Kamala, “With a stroke of my pen I could have someone arrested.”

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘Gender-Industrial Complex’ Worth Billions Annually: Report

The most mysterious feature of the 2023 SAFE Act Wars was that virtually every major hospital system — across 20+ states — lobbied vehemently against the bills. At nearly every public hearing, the speaking roster was saturated by three groups speaking in opposition: transgender activists, families with trans-identifying youth who hadn’t yet come to regret the procedures, and medical professionals, typically associated with a local hospital system.

Yet 2023 was a tipping-point year, in which the number of states with laws protecting minors from gender transition procedures increased from four to 22. This dramatic shift occurred because the dangerous, experimental nature of these surgeries became increasingly apparent. Otherwise progressive European countries such as the U.K.Norway, and Denmark pulled back on providing gender transition procedures to minors. Even state legislators, many of whom lack a medical background, were able to clearly grasp the lack of medical evidence and the potential for harm with these procedures, often articulating those reasons in the legislation they passed.

This raises the question, if the fundamental unsoundness of providing gender transition procedures to minors was evident to everyone from Norway to North Dakota, why couldn’t hospitals see it? A recent report from the American Principles Project suggests an explanation: hospitals and drug manufacturers were blinded by the Benjamins — billions of dollars’ worth.

The American Principles Project (APP) commissioned business consulting firm Grand View Research to conduct a market analysis measuring the volume of the gender-reassignment surgery industry. They recently estimated its value at a whopping $4.12 billion in 2022, with a compounded annual growth rate of 8.4% through 2030. The APP published those numbers this summer in an 88-page report.

Estimate Is Likely an Undercount

Due to various complications in data collection, nearly all estimates of the U.S. gender transition industry will be conservative (tending to undercount rather than overcount), the APP report stated, including the one they commissioned. American health care lacks the comprehensive, centralized data collection of socialized medicine, so researchers must compile data in other ways. For instance, a 2022 study by Komodo Health analyzed insurance claims and found 42,000 minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021, but this necessarily excluded all medical activity not covered by insurance.

Other studies have also struggled to find complete datasets. For example, studies that analyze gender transition procedures based on their medical code will necessarily fail to detect gender transition procedures labeled with a generic medical code. In a 2019 video, Dr. Shayne Taylor explained that this was a deliberate strategy. “For the patient who gets a big bill because their insurance doesn’t cover any transgender-related codes, I usually write ‘endocrine disorder not otherwise specified’ to allow me to order the labs that I want,” Taylor said.

Taylor was influential in convincing Vanderbilt University Medical Center to practice gender transition procedures because “these surgeries make a lot of money.” Based on figures from the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, “female-to-male chest reconstruction could bring in $40,000,” and “around $20,000 for a vaginoplasty,” Taylor cited. “That doesn’t include your post-op visits. That doesn’t include your anesthesia, your OR. So I would think this has to be a gross underestimate. I think that’s just, like, the surgeon’s piece of it.”

Leaked video of the profit rationale behind the gender transition program at Vanderbilt University Medical Center may have played a role in Tennessee enacting legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures in March 2023.

Another reason to believe these numbers represent an undercount is that estimates of the number of trans-identifying people in America are significantly higher. The pro-LGBT Williams Institute estimated in June 2022 that 1.6 million Americans identify as transgender, including approximately 300,000 youth aged 13-17. While it’s possible that the Williams Institute has a political motive to inflate these numbers, it still yields a much larger estimate than studies that look at medical data.

Transgender activist Robbi Katherine Anthony “(who prefers going by RKA),” APP notes, multiplied the number of transgender-identifying Americans with the “average cost of transition,” estimated at $150,000, to speculate that the potential gender transition market could be valued in excess of $200 billion, “larger than the entire film industry.”

Even if these studies are significant undercounts, they do serve to show the trend. Every study shows a dramatic increase over time in people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria, especially among young people. One study reviewed for the APP report showed that “health system encounters for gender identity disorder rose from 13,855 in 2016 to 38,470 in 2020.”

Costly Procedures

Why such staggering costs? Gender transition surgeries are attempting to reshape — or more accurately, war against — a person’s natural biology. Advanced plastic surgery techniques can recreate the appearance if not the function of different organs. But, as Taylor suggested, the price tag for each individual procedure can be pricey. The APP includes a list of common procedures and their prices:

  • Augmentation Mammoplasty, $6,000-12,000
  • Voice Feminization Surgery, $5,000-9,000
  • Reduction Thyrochondroplasty, $3,500-7,000
  • Orchiectomy, $5,000-8,000
  • Vaginoplasty, $10,000-40,000
  • Chest Masculinization Surgery, $6,000-10,000
  • Scrotoplasty, $4,000-6,000
  • Hysterectomy, $9,500-22,500
  • Phalloplasty, $20,000-150,000
  • Mastectomy, $15,000-50,000
  • Metoidioplasty, $20,000-30,000
  • Facial Feminization Surgery, $20,000-50,000+
  • Electrolysis, $50-200 (one-hour session)
  • Laser Hair Removal, $200-1,000
  • Vocal Training, $50-200 per hour

In general, these are surgeries to a person’s face, throat, chest, or genitalia that result in him or her looking more like the opposite sex. Readers who want more specificity can do their own research. It will not be family-friendly or conducive to good digestion. You have been warned.

These costs add up as trans-identifying individuals pursue multiple procedures. The APP estimated that the “total cost of fully transitioning” ranges from $87,300-410,600 for males and from $66,500-605,500 for females. This assumes five years of puberty blockers (at $3,000-$25,000 per year) and 60 years of cross-sex hormone use (from age 16 to age 76, the average life expectancy, with estrogen estimated at $240-2,400 per year and testosterone at $200-4,200 per year).

These cost estimates do not factor in related medical costs, such as hospital stays and anesthesia. Nor does it factor in the potential for secondary surgeries. “A study in the medical journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that up to a third of patients ‘undergo secondary surgical revision to address functional and aesthetic concerns after penile inversion vaginoplasty,’” cited the report. “A similar study in Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that revisions for transfeminine vaginoplasty are frequent. These are lifetime, repeat customers, and there are more of them all the time.”

Market Competitors

Whether the market is worth $4 billion annually or a somewhat larger amount, that’s a large pot to split between relatively few players.

According to the market analysis from Grand View Research, 11 hospital and surgery systems account for nearly half (48.7%) of the sex reassignment market revenue in 2022, with other medical systems comprising the rest. Seven of these are in California and New York (including Cedars Sinai, Mount Sinai, and Kaiser Permanente), and the other four are: Regents of the University of Michigan, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, and The Johns Hopkins University.

(Keep in mind, however, that hospital and surgery centers operate in somewhat location-specific markets; coastal surgery centers are likely not competing for clients with, for instance, Sanford Health, the pro-transgender hospital giant of the upper Plains states.)

Grand View Research also attempted to construct a snapshot of the top drug companies providing gender transition hormones. However, this picture was far less complete; many puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are prescribed off-label, making them harder to track, the APP explained.

The research only accounted for an estimated 14.6% of the market, totaling $234 million in 2022. The top five companies Grand View Research tracked were Pfizer, Inc. (4.6% estimated market share), AbbVie, Inc. (3.2%), End International plc (2.9%), Novartis AG (2.1%), and Lilly (1.8%).

Disaggregated data such as these contribute to the reliability of Grand View Research’s overall estimates. It shows their work, demonstrating that the overall estimates were not invented out of thin air, but represent the aggregate of more minute and concrete estimates, which are more likely to be accurate.

Lobbying Incentive

With such large potential profits on the line, it puts in perspective the efforts by hospital lobbyists seeking to defeat bills protecting minors from gender transition procedures.

If hospitals view gender-confused children as potential lifelong patients, then state laws protecting children from the depredations of gender transition procedures are a direct threat to their business model. Not only does it delay their ability to profit off these children for five years or so, but it also threatens their ability to recruit that child as a lifelong patient at all. Research cited by the Indiana State Medical Association in 2023 has shown that 60% to 95% of minors with gender dysphoria will eventually embrace their biological sex, if puberty is allowed to occur normally, whereas 95% of children who begin puberty blockers will proceed to cross-sex hormones and surgery.

These lobbying campaigns cannot be reduced to the simple question, what is the best practice medical care for children? The APP report notes, “There lurks beneath the surface of ‘best practices’ an incentive structure and a market, both real and potential.” That incentive structure and market are preventing medical systems from seeking the best interest of their gender-confused patients.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: On the ‘Weaponization of U.S. Healthcare System’ from FDR to Today by Dr. Tamzin Rosenwasser

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

‘My Grammar’s Not Always Correct’: Fact-Checking Harris and Walz’s CNN Interview

A full 39 days after being anointed the Democratic Party’s presumptive leader, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris sat down for her first in-depth interview. As CNN’s Dana Bash rattled off numerous flip-flops and apparent lies, Harris said her “values have not changed,” that she is “very proud” of her record on inflation and illegal immigration, and that she has no regrets over describing Joe Biden’s mental health as “strong” in late June. Meanwhile, vice presidential candidate Tim Walz blamed his misstatements about serving “in war” on poor grammar and before pivoting to an alleged “national abortion ban.”

Unlike most presidential candidates, who are elected in primaries and vetted by voters, Kamala Harris — who received the nomination through a virtual roll call 27 days ago — has yet to hold an extended in-person interview. To date, she has not held an in-depth interview or press conference on her own, opting to have Walz at her side throughout the process.

Word Salad

The interview got off to a rocky start. When asked what she would do on day one, Harris replied she would “do what we can to support and strengthen the middle class,” to “look at the aspirations, the goals, the ambitions of the American people,” and provide “a new way forward” filled with “hope and optimism.”

“So, what would you do day one?” Bash repeated.

Twice, Harris said she represents “a new way forward” from polarization “dividing our nation,” because “the last decade … I believe has been contrary to where the spirit of our country really lies.” Bash pointed out Harris has served as vice president for 40% of the last decade.

In a question about her apparently evolving views on fracking and climate change (see below), Harris said: “I believe it is very important that we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate. And to do that, we can do what we have accomplished thus far.”

Harris also received mockery for saying, since “the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter,” the U.S. government “should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time.”

Perhaps the most memorable comments of the interview came, not from Harris, but from Walz, when he tried to explain allegations of stolen valor.

Walz Blames ‘Stolen Valor’ Claim on Poor Grammar

Tim Walz has stated he carried “weapons of war … in war,” allowed others to say he served in active combat zones during the War on Terror without correction, and claimed for two decades to have retired from the National Guard at a higher rank than he earned. Critics accuse him of stolen valor, which is viewed as perhaps the most shameful activity among veterans. The Harris-Walz campaign claimed the Minnesota governor “misspoke” in his remarks.

In his CNN interview, Walz blamed poor English skills.

“You said that you were in war,” pressed Bash. “Did you misspeak, as the campaign has said?”

“Yeah,” replied Walz. “My wife the English teacher told me my grammar’s not always correct.”

Walz taught English during a stint in the People’s Republic of China, leading to a long series of trips to the communist nation.

Walz’s explanation was “hilarious,” said former collegiate athlete Riley Gaines, scoffing at the notion that falsely “claiming you fought in war is just a silly grammar mistake.”

“I certainly own my mistakes when I make them,” claimed Walz, moments after replying he made counter-factual statements, because “I speak like” the American people.

Bash also asked about Walz’s erroneous remarks that he conceived through IVF. Walz replied his comments cut “quite a contrast [against] folks that are trying to take those rights away from us.” Ultimately, Walz refused to offer any remorse for his statements, saying, “I won’t apologize for speaking passionately, whether it’s guns in schools or protection of reproductive rights.”

Walz then pivoted to a hypothetical “abortion ban.” Most Americans, he said, are not splitting “hairs on IVF or IUI. I think what they’re cutting hairs on is an abortion ban and the ability to be able to deny families the chance to have a beautiful child.”

Donald Trump — who has repeatedly announced he opposes any abortion ban at the federal level during his second term — earlier in the day announced during a rally in Potterville, Michigan, that “under the Trump administration, your government will pay for, or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for, all costs associated with IVF treatment, fertilization for women.” During an unscripted interview, he also implied he would vote for Florida’s Amendment 4 to institute an on-demand abortion regime in Florida before his campaign released a statement walking his remarks back.

‘My Values Have Not Changed’ about Fracking, et. al.

Faced with a series reversals and flip-flops from her previous policy proposals, Harris repeated a variation of the phrase “My values have not changed” three times.

“Let’s be clear. My values have not changed” on “the Green New Deal,” which she supported as a 2020 presidential candidate and co-sponsored as a U.S. senator. “I have always believed and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real,” she said. She repeated the phrase on her anti-fracking stance.

Harris forcefully rejected the notion that she had changed her mind on fracking, despite recordings showing her saying there is “no question” fracking should be banned.

“No, and I made that clear on the debate stage in 2020, that I would not ban fracking,” answered Harris. “In 2020 I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024, and I have not changed that position, nor will I going forward. I kept my word, and I will keep my word.”

Harris appears to be referring to her debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on October 7, 2020. Yet she did not say she opposed a fracking ban during the debate — commenting only that Pennsylvania native Joe Biden did.

“Joe Biden will not end fracking,” said Harris in 2020. Later, she repeated, “Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact. That is a fact.”

“Nowhere in there does she make clear that she had abandoned her previous support for a fracking ban,” noted CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale about an hour after the interview. “Rather, she repeated that Joe Biden, the head of the Democratic ticket at the time, would himself not ban fracking.”

During the campaign, Harris had endorsed a fracking ban. At a 2019 town hall meeting, a participant asked Harris, “Will you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking your first day in office, adding the United States [to] the list of countries [that] have banned this devastating practice.”

“There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. Yes,” replied Harris.

“It makes perfect sense that at the time she was speaking on behalf of Biden, the president, not the vice president,” said Dale. “I certainly did not hear anywhere in there Kamala Harris saying she personally had abandoned her 2019 view rather she was speaking for Joe Biden.”

Did Kamala Harris Reduce Illegal Immigration?

Harris defended her record on illegal immigration, as well.

“Why did the Biden-Harris administration wait three and a half years to implement sweeping asylum restrictions?” asked Bash.

“Thee root causes work that I did as vice president, that I was asked to do by the president has actually resulted in a number of benefits,” replied Harris. “The number of immigrants coming from that region has actually reduced since we’ve began that work.”

It’s not clear that is correct. After being appointed Border Czar by Joe Biden, Harris raced to pare down the job, saying she merely examined the “root causes” of “migration” from the three countries in Central America that had historically provided the largest share of illegal immigrants aside from Mexico: the “Northern Triangle” nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

The number of apprehensions at the southern border fell from 684,000 in fiscal year 2021 to 447,000 in 2023. But experts say those statistics alone do not tell the full story.

The number of illegal immigrants from the Northern Triangle processed for removal under Title 8 exploded from 177,000 in fiscal year 2022 to more than 309,000 in 2023, and the Border Patrol is “on track to make about 418,600 Title 8 apprehensions by September 30,” reported the Center for Immigration Studies. At the same time, illegal entrants from the region who were denied admission at ports of entry steadily rose from about 17,000 in fiscal year 2021, to 21,000 in the following year, to about 48,000 in fiscal year 2023. “In other words, while total apprehensions FY2022-24 (projected) declined by roughly 20 percent, apprehensions under Title 8 grew by 138 percent over the same time period,” states CIS.

In raw numbers, Title 8 expulsions rose by 241,000 in just one year of the Biden-Harris administration, not including other illegal entries. Nor does this include Biden-Harris programs to expedite the legal entry of putative “refugees” from these and other countries.

There are two additional reasons to question the relevance of the statement: While most illegal immigration has come from Mexico and the Northern Triangle, “in December 2023, 54% of encounters involved citizens of countries other than these four nations,” according to the Pew Research Center. And the number of illegal immigrants has broken historic records each consecutive year since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office.

No Regrets about Telling Americans Joe Biden Is ‘Extraordinarily Strong’

“Right after the debate, you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong. Given where we are now, do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?” Bash asked.

“No, not at all,” replied Harris, reiterating, “Not at all.”

A mere 63 days earlier, Harris not only described Joe Biden as the picture of health but placed an onus on those who questioned his acuity. Moments after Biden’s disastrous June 27 debate with former President Donald Trump, Harris told ABC News Biden had “a slow start, but a strong finish.”

“Joe Biden is extraordinarily strong, and that cannot be debated,” she quipped.

The legacy media have revealed it was precisely the threat of a cognitive test that helped force Biden out of the presidential race. The New York Times reported that, according to two attendees of a July 11 meeting between Biden and U.S. senators, Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) issued an ultimatum (in the Times’ words): “If Mr. Biden wanted to stay in the race after a disastrous debate performance that underscored concerns about his condition and mental acuity, he should submit to examination by two independent neurologists who were willing to report their findings at a news conference.”

Harris ‘Very Proud’ of Bidenomics

“You have been vice president for three and a half years. The steps that you’re talking about now, why haven’t you done them already?” Bash asked Harris.

“I’m very proud of the work that we have done that has brought inflation down to less than 3%,” the vice president responded.

“So, you maintain Bidenomics is a success?” asked Bash.

After rattling off a list of the administration’s putative accomplishments, Harris concluded, “I’ll say that that’s good work. There’s more to do, but that’s good work.”

Inflation for 2023 stood at 4.1%, a marked increase from the 1.2% the Biden-Harris administration inherited. Wages have barely kept pace with inflation, as groceries, gasoline, and other household staples have increased by double digits — the highest inflation level in 40 years.

Despite pressing for clear answers from the pair, many observers faulted Bash for not following up on key assertions made by both Harris and Walz, as well as her question choice. Megyn Kelly noted Bash asked “not a single Q on the Emotional Support Governor’s radical trans policies.”

CNN also appeared to make a few misstatements about the interview. Although the network prerecorded the interview, the network’s feed claimed it was aired “live.” After the interview, anchor Abby Phillip referred to the closed-doors segment as a “town hall” event.

Despite reports that CNN would not offer a transcript of the interview, CNN has issued its official transcript of the historic interview.

Kamala Harris will debate former President Donald Trump on ABC News September 10 at 9 p.m.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Exposing the transgender money machine

Transgender advocacy is welded into Kamala Harris’s campaign for US President. Her choice of Tim Walz was interpreted as a strong signal to the LGBTQI+ movement, partly because he made Minnesota a “refuge” for trans people.

The participants in a Zoom call convoked by Trans Folks for Harris recently were confident that she would support them.

“We have so much power,” said activist Charlotte Clymer. “We have way more power than they think, that’s for damn sure. And when we use that power, when we organize together and have each other’s backs, we can do great things.”

If trans folks do have power, part of it is surely due to the poorly appreciated fact that trans medicine is a big, powerful, and growing industry worth billions of dollars. So it’s not just the minuscule number of trans people who are involved, but a myriad of investors, corporations, doctors, nurses, and support staff as well.

A trans entrepreneur told Forbes magazine in 2020 that the potential market is immense. “Trans-tech is a budding industry with an enormous opportunity,” said Robbi Katherine Anthony. “Our estimates place the average cost of transition at $150,000 per person. Multiply that by an estimated population of 1.4 million transgender people, we’re taking about a market in excess of US$200 billion. That is significant. That’s larger than the entire film industry.”

This is just pie-in-the sky hype aimed at attracting venture capitalists. But the trans medicine industry is huge.

Last month the American Principles Project published an eye-opening study of the facts and figures for trans medicine, “The Gender Industrial Complex”. It had commissioned a market research company, Grand View Research, to estimate the cost of the drugs and surgical procedures involved in transitioning, the estimated current and future revenue growth of the market, and the most significant players.

After reading the report, it’s hard not to conclude that “the gender industrial complex” is a factory of cruelty and misanthropy. “The prevention, delay, or whatever pharmacological and especially surgical disruption of the process we call puberty is a crime against humanity. It’s horrible what we do to kids,” one surgeon who used to work in trans medicine told the authors of the report. “The surgeries, the revisions, and all that stuff—it’s big business.”

Some of the findings of “The Gender Industrial Complex” include:

  • While the total cost of transitioning varies widely by individual, lifelong use of cross-sex hormones could cost up to $300,000 or more per person, while a full surgical transition could cost more than $150,000.
  • The potential health effects of undergoing transition are numerous, including increased risk of cancer, nerve damage, chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, mental health issues, and the need for additional surgeries.
  • A number of transgender surgery providers, including Cedars Sinai, the Regents of the University of Michigan, the Mount Sinai Health System, and several others, were each estimated to bring in over $100 million in revenue in 2022 from these practices.
  • Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and AbbVie lead the way in hormone production, with 2022 revenues of $74 million and $51 million, respectively, from those products.
  • Total revenues for transgender drugs and surgeries in 2023 were estimated to surpass $4.4 billion. And by 2030, the market is expected to grow beyond $7.8 billion.

The APP points out that these projections could be very conservative. In 2020 an LGBT think tank, the Williams Institute, estimated that there were about 300,000 minors who identified as transgender. If that is correct, the market for paediatric transitions alone could be as high as $37 billion.

Transgender transitioning is not just a matter of a few visits to a doctor and a few injections. It’s a lifelong commitment to regular medication and a long series of surgical procedures.

The report estimates that a male transitioning to a female will have to spend between $87,300 and $410,600 over a lifetime, assuming that he is on puberty blockers for five years and on feminising hormones for 60 years. The surgical component includes:

  • $20,000 to 50,000 for facial feminisation surgery
  • $6,000 to $12,000 for breast implants
  • $10,000 to $40,000 to create an artificial vagina
  • $5,000 to $8,000 to remove testicles
  • $5,000 to $9,000 for voice feminisation surgery
  • $3,500 to $7,000 for shaving the Adam’s apple

For a female transitioning to a male, the lifetime cost ranges from $66,500 to $605,500. The surgical component includes:

  • $15,000 to $50,000 for a double mastectomy
  • $9,500 to $22,500 for a hysterectomy
  • $20,000 to $150,000 to create an artificial penis
  • $6,000 to $10,000 for chest masculinisation surgery
  • $4,000 to $6,000 to create an artificial scrotum

These operations are not like removing a wart or whipping out an appendix. They are complex procedures which often have painful complications – which involve more visits to the surgeon.

And trans folks are forking out these enormous sums to deal with their gender dysphoria, a psychological condition which probably cannot be solved with hormones and surgery anyway.

Let Dr Shayne Taylor, of the Vanderbilt Clinic for Transgender Health, have the last word.

A whistleblower filmed a presentation that she gave in 2018. She declared that that “gender-affirming care” is “a big money maker.” “A patient just on routine hormone treatment, who we’re only seeing a few times a year, can bring in several thousand dollars because it requires lots of visits and labs that actually makes money for the hospital,” she said.

Transgender medicine turns the Hippocratic Oath upside down. Its first principle is not “do no harm” but “do make a profit”.


Is transgender medicine really that big a deal? Tell us what you think in the comments.    


AUTHOR

Michael Cook is editor of Mercator

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EDITORS NOTE: This Mercator column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.