Trump Administration Accomplishments on Life, Family and Religious Freedom

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To date, the administration of President Donald Trump has taken significant action on issues of concern to social conservatives — life, family, and religious liberty:

2017

  • On January 23, President Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, renaming it the Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance Policy (PLGHA), which blocks funding for international organizations that participate in abortion.
  • On February 22, the Department of Education rescinded President Barack Obama’s guidance that had required public schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms and showers of their choice.
  • On April 7, President Trump’s nominee Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Justice Gorsuch has already developed a reputation as an originalist who will rule the right way on religious liberty issues. Gorsuch is representative of President Trump’s judicial nominees overall.
  • On May 4, President Trump signed Executive Order 13798, emphasizing the need to protect religious liberty and requiring the Department of Justice (DOJ) to issue new guidance on religious liberty.
  • On August 25, President Trump announced changes to the Obama administration’s Department of Defense (DOD) policy which had allowed military personnel to openly serve even if they self-identified as transgender (a DOD study found the Obama administration policy to be detrimental to military readiness, lethality, and unit cohesion).
  • On September 7, the Trump administration’s DOJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending the religious freedom rights of baker Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. This action is reflective of other actions defending religious freedom taking place throughout the Trump administration DOJ.
  • On October 6, the Trump administration DOJ issued guidance (as instructed by the May 4 Executive Order) to all federal agencies explaining religious freedom law and how religious liberty must be protected. This guidance laid out a broad defense of religious liberty based on multiple statutes and provided guidelines for each federal agency on how to protect religious liberty.
  • Also on October 6, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed two regulations to deal with the Obamacare “HHS contraceptive mandate.” These new regulations exempt organizations with moral or religious objections from purchasing insurance that includes coverage of contraceptives and abortifacient-type drugs and devices.

2018

  • On January 19, HHS issued a new proposed regulation on conscience protections related to abortion. Specifically, the regulation proposed to implement 25 laws that protect-life healthcare entities against discrimination by federal agencies – or state or local governments receiving federal funds – due to their objections to participating in abortion.
  • On January 24, Sam Brownback was confirmed as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. In choosing Brownback for this role, President Trump demonstrated the administration’s commitment to religious freedom by choosing someone with gravitas and experience on the issue.
  • On March 23, 2018, the White House and DOD issued a new policy allowing existing personnel to remain in the military while preventing those who have been diagnosed with“gender dysphoria” or had undergone gender transition surgery from joining the military. Those who are transgender and stable for 36 months could join so long as they serve in accordance with their biological sex.
  • On April 26, Mike Pompeo was confirmed as Secretary of State. In choosing Pompeo for this position, President Trump chose someone who deeply cares about religious liberty and would make it a priority to see the issue advanced through this administration.
  • On April 30, during a press conference with Nigeria’s president, President Trump raised the issue of religious freedom and the killing of Christians in that country. This resulted in security forces being committed to deal with the problem.
  • On May 22, HHS issued a new proposed regulation reversing the Title X family planning regulations implemented by President Bill Clinton. The new regulation would restore the separation of abortion services from the federal Title X family planning program, which President Ronald Reagan first implemented. The new regulation would also ensure parents are more involved in the decisions of minors to obtain services from Title X clinics. It reverses the discriminatory abortion referral requirement the Clinton regulations implemented and is poised to put a dent into Planned Parenthood’s roughly $60 million annual revenues from this federal program.
  • On July 24-26, the State Department held the first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. Political and civil society leaders from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C. for a three-day summit to discuss religious freedom issues and solutions. The Potomac Declaration was issued at the Ministerial. It made a strong statement about the state of religious freedom around the globe and provided a plan of action for promoting global religious freedom. The U.S. also announced the International Religious Freedom Fund(to provide emergency assistance to victims of religiously motivated discrimination and abuse around the world), and the Genocide Recovery and Persecution Response initiative(which has provided nearly $373 million to help persecuted ethnic and religious minorities in northern Iraq restore their communities). The U.S. was among 25 countries who signed a statement condemning terrorism and the abuse of religious believers by non-state actors.
  • On July 30, the Trump administration DOJ announced a Religious Liberty Task Force to fully implement religious liberty guidance and policy across all components in the DOJ.
  • On August 1, the Trump administration relied on Executive Order 13818 (which builds on global Magnitsky Act authority) to sanction two Turkish officials over the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson due to his Christian faith. This Executive Order ultimately resulted in Pastor Brunson’s release.
  • On September 24, HHS terminated a $15,900 contract with Advanced Bioscience Resources to procure fetal tissue from aborted babies for research. The termination of this contract led HHS to announce an audit of all acquisitions and research involving human fetal tissue to ensure consistency with statutes and regulations.
  • On October 6, President Trump’s nominee Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court, marking the second constitutional originalist the president saw confirmed to the court.
  • On November 7, HHS issued two final regulations to deal with the Obamacare “HHS contraceptive mandate.” These two regulations exempt organizations with either a moral or religious objection from purchasing insurance with coverage of contraceptives and abortifacient-type drugs and devices. The regulations took effect on January 14, 2019.
  • Also on November 7, HHS released a new funding opportunity for the Title X Family Planning Services Grant that will fund organizations beginning April 1, 2019. This new funding opportunity clarified the intended purpose of the Title X Family Planning program and made successful grant applications available so that pregnancy resource centers and other pro-life organizations could be competitive in the selection process.
  • On November 9, HHS proposed a new regulation to address an abortion surcharge hidden in many plans purchased on the Obamacare exchange. This proposed regulation would enforce the requirement that abortion surcharges are to be collected separately from other insurance premiums. This requirement was not closely followed under the Obama administration, leading HHS to now more strictly enforce the separation of payments.
  • On December 26, the Trump administration DOJ filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court defending a cross-shaped veteran’s memorial that had been challenged as a violation of the Establishment Clause. This position is representative of the Trump administration’s originalist approach to the Constitution concerning First Amendment rights and other issues. This approach results in legal analysis that interprets the law rather than injecting policy preferences into it.

2019

  • On March 4, HHS finalized rule changes governing the Title X family planning program. Consistent with federal law, these rule changes ensured that Title X clinics would be financially and physically separate from abortion facilities and would not refer patients for abortions. Since the implementation of the rule, Planned Parenthood and several pro-abortion states voluntarily decided to withdraw from the program rather than quit performing abortions or referring patients for abortions.
  • On March 8, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback gave a speech in Hong Kong during which he criticized China’s poor religious freedom record.
  • On April 12, the Trump administration policy regarding military service by those with gender dysphoria went into effect.
  • On May 21, HHS finalized a rule to expand the structure in which federal conscience laws are enforced. In 2011, President Obama issued a rule to enforce only three federal conscience provisions. This new regulation expands this number to cover 25 existing statutes. These statutes will be enforced under the new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, part of the HHS Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The effective date of this regulation is November 22, 2019. Even though this new regulation enforcing conscience protections is not yet in effect, it has not stopped the administration from protecting conscience under the old regulations. On August 28, HHS announced that they sent a violation notice to the University of Vermont Medical Center for forcing a nurse to participate in an abortion despite her conscience objection. This marks the third time that the Religious Freedom Division under President Trump has investigated a conscience complaint related to participating in or promoting abortion.
  • On May 24, HHS proposed a new regulation that clarifies that discrimination on the basis of sex in section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act was to be interpreted under the plain meaning of the word, and therefore does not include “gender identity” or “termination of pregnancy” as set forth by a 2016 Obama administration regulation. Under President Trump, the HHS regulation will continue to enforce existing civil rights protections; however, it makes clear that the federal government will not use discrimination on the basis of sex to force physicians to participate in gender reassignment surgeries or abortions.
  • On June 5, after an extensive audit into fetal tissue research, the Trump administration announced a major change in the enforcement of research contracts. HHS would no longer conduct intramural (internal) research using tissue from aborted babies and would greatly increase the ethics rules and safeguards that govern extramural (external) fetal tissue research contracts. All new external contracts will be subject to a congressionally authorized ethics advisory board, making it much more difficult for fetal tissue or research contracts to be awarded by the National Institute of Health.
  • On July 16-18, the State Department held the second Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a new global initiative, the International Religious Freedom Alliance, meant to provide a way for like-minded countries to work together to advance religious freedom. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai gave a compelling speech condemning the use of technology to track and control the lives of religious minorities, and the United States was among 14 signatory countries on a statement of concern about technology and religious freedom. The United States was also one of the 34 countries that signed a statement of concern on counterterrorism as a pretext for the repression of religious freedom; one of 27 countries that signed a statement condemning blasphemy, apostasy, or other laws that restrict religious freedom; and was one of 46 countries that signed a statement that called government officials to condemn attacks on places of worship and to work with religious communities to protect these places. The State Department and USAID also announced new religious freedom training programs for foreign service officers.
  • On July 16, the State Department placed targeted sanctions on Burmese military officials for their human rights and religious freedom violations committed against the Rohingya Muslim population.
  • On July 18, HHS Secretary Alex Azar and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a joint letter to the international community. It defended the ability of nations to formulate pro-life policies and invited other nations to join the U.S. in this effort.
  • Also on July 18, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and HHS Secretary Alex Azar issued a joint letter on International Partnerships that called states to join a coalition of countries that seek to advocate against pro-abortion policies at the World Health Organization and theUnited Nations.
  • On August 15, the DOL proposed a new regulation that would clarify the scope and application of religious exemptions for federal contractors. Under the Obama administration, the scope of religious exemption at the DOL was severely narrowed. The current DOL relied on the history of our nation’s preservation of religious liberty, the First Amendment, and Supreme Court decisions to re-invigorate the exemption to its historical and constitutional parameters.
  • On September 10, the State Department placed targeted sanctions on Russian officials for their religious freedom violations and torture of Jehovah’s Witnesses.
  • On September 11, President Trump saw his 150th federal judge confirmed – a number which includes 105 district court judges, 43 appeals court judges, and 2 Supreme Court justices. An overwhelming number of President Trump’s judicial nominees have been constitutional originalists, who will interpret the law as written, rather than interpret it according to their personal policy preferences. As judges, these nominees will rule correctly on religious liberty and pro-life issues.
  • On September 23, President Trump hosted a meeting during the U.N. General Assembly and gave a speech solely on the topic of religious freedom. During the speech, he announced a U.S. policy initiative to protect places of worship, pledging an additional $25 million in funding to protect religious sites and relics. President Trump also announced the U.S. would form a coalition within the business community to protect religious freedom. This is the first time a U.S. president has hosted a meeting focused solely on religious freedom at the U.N.
  • On September 24, President Trump discussed the need to protect religious freedom during his U.N. General Assembly speech, in which he also discussed China and Iran – two major violators of religious freedom.
  • On September 25, HHS Secretary Alex Azar delivered a statement at the U.N. General Assembly stating that there is no international right to an abortion, and that the U.S. does not support ambiguous terms like sexual and reproductive health in U.N. documents.
  • On November 27, President Trump signed the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act into law, which affirms Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status and protects against Chinese government encroachment, which is a threat to Hong Kong’s religious freedom.
  • On December 19, HHS issued a rule removing burdensome requirements that all grantees, including those that are faith-based, must accept as valid same-sex marriages and professed gender identity in order to be eligible to participate in grant programs. This included the adoption and foster care space where these requirements had been used to shut down faith-based providers of foster care and adoption.
  • On December 27, HHS finalized regulations that require Obamacare health providers to collect two separate premium payments, one for abortion coverage and one for all other health care coverage. This final rule brings federal regulations into alignment with section 1303 of the Affordable Care Act ensuring that consumers know their health care plan covers abortion, and funding for abortion is kept separate from all other covered services.

2020

  • On January 16, HHS Secretary Alex Azar hosted 34 countries for a meeting on how to promote women’s health in a way that does not include abortion. This meeting followed an invitation sent by Secretary Azar and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to 70 different countries inviting them to join a coalition to oppose international efforts to enshrine abortion as a human right.
  • On January 16, the Departments of Education and Justice issued guidance on constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression in public elementary and secondary schools. This guidance ensures that prayer in schools is properly protected and not unconstitutionally prohibited or curtailed.
  • On January 16, The White House Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to the heads of executive departments and agencies to provide guidance on applying Executive Order (EO) 13798 “Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty.” This memo required the agencies to review the EO and publish policies on how they will comply, in order to protect the ability of religious organizations to operate in the public square.
  • On January 17, nine federal agencies proposed rules leveling the playing field for faith-based organizations wishing to participate in grant programs or become a contractor. The rules eliminated two requirements placed on faith-based organizations that were not placed on secular organizations.
  • On January 22, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) at HHS approved a family planning waiver for Texas to implement a state-run Medicaid program that excludes abortion providers like Planned Parenthood. This makes Texas the first state to receive Medicaid funding for a family planning program that does not include abortion providers.
  • On January 24, President Trump became the first sitting president to give remarks in person at the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C. In his address, he stated the eternal truth that every child is a sacred gift from God and reiterated his effort to defend the dignity and sanctity of every human life.
  • On January 24, HHS Secretary Alex Azar announced live at FRC’s ProLifeCon event that the Trump administration issued a notice of violation to California for violating the federal Weldon Amendment by mandating all health insurers provide coverage for abortion. California’s abortion coverage mandate has deprived over 28,000 residents of plans that do not cover abortion. This marks the second time that HHS has issued a notice of violation to California for violating federal conscience laws, and is the fourth enforcement action taken by the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division of the Office of Civil Rights at HHS.
  • On February 4, during his State of the Union address, President Trump called on Congress to pass legislation that would ban late-term abortions. To highlight the need for this legislation, he invited special guest Ellie Schneider, who was born at just 21 weeks gestation.
  • On February 5, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance. The Alliance will unite government leaders from like-minded nations to strategize on ways in which they can promote religious freedom and protect religious minorities around the world.
  • As of February 12, 2020, the Trump administration has overseen the confirmation of 192 federal judges, including 2 Supreme Court justices and 51 federal appeals court judges.

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

9th Circuit: Trump Administration Stripping Funding From Abortion Clinics Is Constitutional

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The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday that the Trump administration can continue stripping federal funding from clinics that offer abortions.

The court upheld the Trump administration’s June 2019 declaration that taxpayer-funded clinics must stop referring women for abortions or be stripped of their Title X funding.

Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote Monday’s majority opinion, stating that “there is no ‘gag’ on [nondirective] abortion counseling.”

The Department of Health and Human Services followed the decision in June by alerting clinics that it would enforce the administration’s ban. Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X federal family planning program, thereby forgoing about $60 million a year, in August 2019 rather than comply with this decision.

The rules, which advance President Donald Trump’s promise to stop funding businesses that perform abortions, require that organizations that perform abortions and make abortion referrals will have to do so in separate buildings from those that receive Title X federal funds.

“Today’s ruling is a vindication of President Trump’s pro-life policies and a victory for the American people,” Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a statement, adding that abortion is not family planning and that “a strong majority of Americans” oppose taxpayer-funded abortions.

“President Trump’s Protect Life Rule honors their will and the plain language of the Title X statute by stopping the funneling of Title X taxpayer dollars to the abortion industry, without reducing family planning funding by a dime,” Dannenfelser added. “We thank President Trump and HHS Secretary [Alex] Azar for their strong pro-life leadership and look forward to the end of further frivolous litigation by the abortion lobby.”

Americans United for Life President and CEO Catherine Glenn Foster said in a statement that AUL is “grateful that the court of appeals has seen through the false cries of the abortion industry and upheld a rule that protects women’s health as well as taxpayer’s consciences.”

“We look forward to the implementation of the rule in a way that ensures that no public funding is ever used for elective abortions,” Foster said.

Other organizations, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, protested the ruling.

“The rule prohibits family planning clinics—which previously served as the source of health care for more than four million low-income people every year—from providing Title X patients with referrals for abortion care and imposes other onerous requirements that have resulted in the widespread loss of critical Title X providers,” the ACLU said in a press release.

ACLU senior staff attorney Ruth Harlow noted that the ACLU is “deeply disappointed” at the decision.

“We are looking at any further options to rescue the Title X program and to restore the critical care it has provided to marginalized patients for almost five decades,” Harlow said in a statement.

COLUMN BY

Mary Margaret Olohan

Mary Margaret Olohan is a reporter covering social issues for The Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter: @MaryMargOlohan.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved. Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

VIDEO: On the Left, a New Clash Between Feminists and Transgender Activists

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In January, the august New York Public Library withdrew as host of a forum organized by a self-described radical feminist group called the Women’s Liberation Front, or WoLF.

The irony was palpable: The planned meeting was titled “An Evening With Canceled Women,” since the five speakers from WoLF all claim to have been “deplatformed”—i.e., shouted down by hecklers or kicked off speakers lists—because they questioned claims made by transgender advocates regarding sexuality and identity.

In other words, as some conservative news outlets gleefully reported, the New York Public Library canceled the “canceled women”! Why?

The library had no comment, but it likely feared that it too would become a target of activists who have demonstrated and even threatened violence during other programs sponsored by the group.

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“It’s very common for people to say we deserve to die,” Kara Dansky, a board member of WoLF, said in a phone interview.

Actual death threats seem rare, but there are plenty of signs of an angry front opening up in the culture wars. Although religious figures and people on the right have challenged the transgender movement, the conflict with WoLF involves feminist stalwarts of the social justice left who support their fundamental rights but reject the idea that a man can truly become a woman, or vice versa.

Specifically, the ire of trans activists and their supporters has been aroused by some basic positions taken by WoLF and others, namely: 1) that a person’s sex is biologically determined and can’t be changed, even by surgery; and 2) that the pieces of legislation passed or pending in several countries and American states to extend civil rights protections to transgender people, usually called Equality Acts, are wrongheaded and harmful to women and children.

The number of liberals making those arguments publicly is still small. But it is growing. And it has already given rise to a strange reshuffling of the political deck, as some feminists of otherwise impeccable leftist credentials have formed alliances with conservative and evangelical groups that would fervently disagree with them over just about everything else—abortion and gay marriage most conspicuously.

Last January, the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., hosted a panel called “The Inequality of the Equality Act: Concerns From the Left,” during which several speakers from WoLF explained their point of view to a supportive Heritage audience.

Instead of provoking a full debate, these disagreements have prompted efforts to silence speech. Last year, for example, protesters accused the Toronto Public Library of endorsing “hate speech” because it agreed to provide space in one of its branches for an event featuring Meghan Murphy, the Canadian editor of an online journal, Feminist Current, and a prominent figure in the anti-transgender-rights movement.

“There is a difference between denying free speech—and what is known as de-platforming, which is when you refuse to allow hate speech to be disseminated in your facility,” read a Change.org petition assailing the library’s decision, signed by more than 9,000 people.

In Seattle, hundreds of trans supporters—some shouting “No hate, no fear, every gender is welcome here”—protested on Feb. 1 outside a public library where Murphy was on a program sponsored by WoLF.

In Toronto last year, according to the National Post, a resident of a shelter for female victims of sexual abuse, Kristi Hanna, 37, was accused of bias by the Ontario Human Rights Support Center after she complained that being forced to share a small room with a bearded male-to-female transsexual person made her feel unsafe. She left the shelter.

Lisa Littman, a professor in the School of Public Health at Brown University, lost an outside consulting position after local clinicians joined critics who objected to her peer-reviewed study that found many adolescents who claim to be trans and are being given body-altering medical treatment may be responding more to “social contagion and peer influences” than to a genuine, permanent condition.

In Britain, 54 transgenderism researchers signed a letter to The Guardian newspaper describing the intimidation they’ve experienced because they’ve raised questions about some provisions of a Gender Recognition Act being considered by Parliament.

“Members of our group have experienced campus protests, calls for dismissal in the press, harassment, foiled plots to bring about dismissal, no-platforming, and attempts to censor academic research and publications.”

Similarly, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling was sharply criticized in December after she tweeted support for a British researcher who lost her job at a think tank for expressing “offensive and exclusionary” language, after she said “men cannot change into women.”

Even the feminist icon Germaine Greer has been reviled because she argues that even a man who takes hormones and undergoes sexual reassignment surgery is still a man.

“I’ve had things thrown at me,” she said in a now famous BBC interview. “I’ve been accused of inciting violence against transgender people. That’s absolute nonsense.”

Welcome, in other words, to the censorious world of the identity-politics left, where transgender rights have been recast as the new frontier of the broader civil rights movement.

New terms have emerged, including “transphobic,” which takes its place with racist, homophobic, and misogynist as the voguish terms of opprobrium for people who in many cases are by no means racist, homophobic, or misogynist, but simply depart from one or another plank of the identity-politics orthodoxy.

Women like the members of WoLF have been accorded a new pejorative acronym: TERF, for trans exclusionary radical feminist.

What’s “driving their influence” is “the false claiming of a feminist mantle to anti-transgender positions,” Ria Tabacco Mar, director of the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Washington Post, speaking of groups like WoLF. “This is not a crossing of party lines. This is a principle of exclusion.”

No doubt these terms emerge from a deeply felt sympathy for trans people, who certainly do experience discrimination and even violence.  Still, the speed with which this once marginal effort has gained acceptance has created ideological whiplash as new modes of thought clash with older ones.

Some feminists and other more liberal skeptics of transgender rights note there has been little conversation about a movement that makes broader demands than other pushes for civil rights.

Until now marginalized groups have demanded equal status and protection from discrimination, but they haven’t called into question some of the basic ways in which people identify themselves.

Gays and lesbians never fought to be considered straight; black people don’t fight to be considered white. But the core tenets of the ideology embraced by many transgender advocates requires society to redefine basic signifiers of identity in profound and somewhat contradictory ways, most significantly demanding that biological men be considered women, thereby recasting traditional definitions of male and female.

At the same time, it also demands that society replace such binary notions of sex with a fluid, vague, not-very-scientific notion of gender as the key defining element of a person’s identity.

The groups challenging these notions assert that sex is entirely biological and can’t be changed. But trans women have received more attention from some feminists (and others) because they believe that trans men do not present the sort of danger or discomfort to biological men that trans women do to biological women—such as sexual aggression or participation on sports teams.

Specifically, some feminists are defending protections and opportunities won expressly for women. WoLF and other critics reject the idea that a man should legally be a woman with the right to occupy protected women’s spaces simply because he says he’s one, feels like one, wears dresses, takes hormones, or even has a sex-change operation.

Beyond that, they argue that far from promoting hateful “transphobic” notions that ought to be shouted down, their goal is to protect women and children from wrongheaded ideas that would harm them.

“Disagreements over sex and gender have cleaved the feminist community,” Libby Emmons, a member of WoLF, wrote in the online magazine Quillette. This is, she continued, “an unusually vicious front in the culture war.”

There’s an irony in this. The feminist revolution of the past quarter-century was at least partly responsible for shaking up traditional notions of gender and sex; it advanced the idea that gender (like race) is largely a social construct, that most differences between the sexes are the result of culture, expectations, and upbringing, rather than biology.

As the pioneering feminist Simone de Beauvoir put it, “One is not born but becomes a woman.” This view gave rise to the emphasis on gender, or how a person feels about himself or herself, as the major element in identity, rather than sex, and from there it was only a short step to the idea that “gender identity” should have the same protected status as racial or sexual equality.

Members of WoLF and others like them dispute this, maintaining that the sexual barrier is unbridgeable.

“The third-wave feminist movement that came out of the 1990s made a mistake in saying there were no differences between men and women related to evolution and biology,” Murphy told me in a phone interview from Vancouver, where she lives. “But the big problem is the ideology of transgenderism itself, which conflates sex and gender and says it’s possible to ‘identify’ your way out of biological sex.”

“Sex is real, and it is immutable,” Murphy said at the “Canceled Women” conference in January, after it was moved to another venue in New York. “One is born either male or female and remains so for life, regardless of preference, surgery, or hormone treatments.”

“To be clear, I’m not saying that trans people don’t suffer, whether from body dysphoria or other forms of mental illness, or that people in general don’t suffer when they step outside the gendered roles laid out for us,” she continued.

“What I’m saying is that there’s no clear definition of what a ‘trans’ person is. … Trans is nothing more than a personal feeling or an announcement, which does not qualify you as part of a definable class of people who are inherently marginalized or subjected to discrimination.”

Emmons put it this way: The idea that by dressing in stereotypical women’s fashion and acting “like a woman,” a man can legally become a woman erases women as a separate category.

Moreover, she argues, the very idea that a man can be considered a woman by, say, putting on a dress and high heels derives from a stereotype about femininity that, she says, is itself “misogynist.”

“The word ‘woman’ is on the verge of having no meaning at all,” Emmons told me.

In practical terms, members of WoLF and others appear to be fighting an uphill battle, as trans rights, gender fluidity, and the nonbinary nature of some people have become widely accepted and promoted by many elite institutions, including universities, the media, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and even the NCAA, the governing body of intercollegiate sports.

Last year the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the Equality Act, now before the Senate, banning discrimination based on “sexual orientation and gender identity.” About 18 state legislatures as well as the Canadian and British parliaments have adopted similar bills or are considering them.

Although less than 1% of adult Americans identify as transgender, it is becoming de rigueur at colleges and universities for everyone to announce their pronouns. “He” and “she” are no longer the only singular options; “they” and “them,” for example, are now used to refer to one trans person as opposed to a group.

The Associated Press, The New York Times, and other news organizations now mandate the use of those pronouns. A libertarian columnist, Joe Caldera, says he was let go by the Denver Post in January because of a column that questioned the AP’s style guidelines.

The political climate on the left is such that at a town hall meeting in Iowa in January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren vowed to give a young transgender person veto power over her potential nominee for secretary of education.

Gestures like Warren’s were seen by some social media critics as pandering to a politically correct orthodoxy, but it was clearly an applause line at that town meeting.

So, why shouldn’t people who feel they were born in the wrong body be able to transition from one sex to another, and to be treated legally and socially in accordance with their adopted gender, not the sex they were born with?

“We don’t frame this as a question of trans rights,” Dansky told me, answering that question. “We want to protect the privacy and safety of women and girls.”

For WoLF’s members and those who agree with them, the implications of trans rights are stark. Because they consider trans women to be men, they are concerned about efforts to let males enter female spaces.

They argue, for example, that the “equality acts” being passed across the English-speaking world would allow biological men into spaces that have always been reserved for women, like bathrooms, changing rooms, sports teams, and prisons.

Much discussion has focused on public bathrooms. But Jennifer Finney Boylan, who identifies as a transgender woman, noted in a New York Times op-ed there is no evidence that “big hairy men” are invading ladies rooms.

Boylan further argued that there’s also no evidence on the sports teams question or any other concern that transgender people are changing things in a substantial or worrisome way.  And, indeed, overall, evidence about the actual effects of equality laws and other efforts to recognize transgender rights seems largely anecdotal.

Still, some of that evidence indicates that there are plenty of instances where biological males claiming to be women have gained access to what used to be women’s-only spaces.

“I’ve spoken to two women in Texas forced to share a cell with two physically intact male prisoners,” Dansky told me. In fact, local newspapers have reported on complaints by women prisoners at Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, that they are being forced to share showers and bathrooms with transgender biological male inmates being treated there.

In Massachusetts and other states, trans women are being accepted into shelters for battered women, a practice that gave rise to the case of Hanna, the victim of sexual abuse who left a shelter when she was forced to share her room with a person she deemed to be a man.

As of last year, at least 17 states allowed transgender athletes to compete without restriction, according to Transathlete.com, a website that tracks the issue.

More serious perhaps than the impact of trans rights on women’s sports or women’s prisons is the issue of medical interventions for sexually dysphobic young people, teenagers, and sometimes even younger children.

For the past 10 to 15 years, specialists in sexual dysphoria have been treating children and adolescents with medications and surgery that enable them to align their bodies with their sexual identities. The practice has passionate defenders.

Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, described in a TED talk a few years ago how his experience with sexually dysphobic children—who, he emphasizes, are few in number—led him to believe strongly in the benefits of medical interventions.

For several years, he directed a program at the hospital that administers drugs to delay the onset of puberty for younger children and hormones for adolescents that make effectively irreversible changes in their bodies, like breasts for transgender girls who were born male.

“Not doing anything for them not only puts them at risk of losing their lives through suicide,” Spack says in his TED talk, “but also says something about whether we are truly an inclusive society.”

Spack maintained that children treated in his program are rigorously evaluated and, if under 18, have to undergo months of counseling and have parental consent before they can be given drugs or undergo surgery.  But there are many critics of sex-change procedures who contend that their advocates do them too quickly, dispensing with psychological examination.

Littman has found that some adolescents are responding more to social pressure than to deep psychological need, suggesting that treatment with hormones like estrogen and testosterone could be a grave mistake. She cites, for example, the case of four girls, all of whom “came out” as transgender after their coach did.

Then there is the matter of surgery, especially mastectomies on girls who want to transition to being boys.

One study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2018 concluded that women and girls wishing to become men who had double mastectomies were generally happier than those who had not undergone surgery. But what disturbed some critics was the disclosure that among the people studied, 33 of them had had mastectomies before they were 18, and 16 of them had had their breasts removed when they were 15 or younger.

Not all professionals in the field believe this to be a good thing. In 2018, the American College of Pediatricians concluded that the sex reassignment protocol for children and teenagers being followed in some clinics “is founded upon an unscientific gender ideology, lacks an evidence base, and violates the long-standing ethical principle, ‘First do on harm.’”

Emmons, the member of WoLF, says there are plenty of women in their 20s who underwent hormone treatments and mastectomies who now regret them, and, indeed, a Google search for “detransitioners network” or “Pique Resilience Project” will turn up plenty of examples of exactly that.

She adds bluntly: “Children are not allowed to get a tattoo, to drink, or to vote. The only thing they’re allowed to do is destroy their reproductive systems.”

Originally published by RealClearInvestigations

COLUMN BY

Richard Bernstein

Richard Bernstein, formerly of The New York Times, is a journalist and writer who currently contributes to RealClearInvestigations. A Brooklyn resident, he is the author of nine books.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Saving Babies’ Lives More Important Than Winning Sports Titles, Tim Tebow Says

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Former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow says he prefers to be remembered for saving babies from abortion than for winning college football’s Bowl Championship Series.

Tebow is known for both his athletic achievements—winning the 2007 Heisman Trophy and leading the University of Florida Gators to two national championships in 2007 and 2009—and for being a Christian and crusading pro-lifer.

“It really does mean a lot more than winning the Super Bowl,” he said at a recent football-themed banquet for Kansans for Life, according to National Right to Life News. “One day, when you look back, and people are talking about you, and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, what are you going to be known for?’ Are you going to say ‘Super Bowl,’ or ‘We saved a lot of babies’?”

The theme of the annual banquet was “LIV-ing in Victory,” a reference to Super Bowl LIV, won Feb. 2 by the Kansas City Chiefs. About 1,200 people attended the event, including a group affiliated with the Super Bowl champion Chiefs. Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt Jr. served as the master of ceremonies.

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Tebow, 32, now plays baseball in the New York Mets minor league farm system. Despite his success in sports, he told Martha MacCallum in a February 2019 interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Untold Story” that his work outside of athletics is more important to him.

“Although I’m extremely competitive and driven in sports, you’ve also got to remember that it’s just a game,” he said. “And that life is more important, and people are more important, and the way you can impact them is more important.”

During his Feb. 11 speech at the Kansans for Life Valentine’s banquet, Tebow turned toward the group associated with the Chiefs and acknowledged their achievement.

“What an accomplishment,” he said. “But you know the best part of that accomplishment is that it gets you an even bigger platform.”

Tebow, who married former Miss Universe Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters on Jan. 20,  has used his platform as a former college football champ and ex-NFL player to share his story and pro-life message.

In his speech, Tebow recounted his own experience, describing the pressure that was put on his mother to abort him. Doctors in the Philippines, where his parents were serving as missionaries, urged his mother, then 32, to have an abortion amid medical complications.

He was carried to term, however, and his mother survived and now calls Tebow her “miracle child.” The American-trained doctor in Manila told Tebow’s mother that in his 37 years of being a physician that it was the biggest miracle he’d ever seen.

“I’m so grateful that my mom trusted God with my life and her life,” Tebow said in his speech.

In the interview with MacCallum, Tebow said his parents’ kindness is what has inspired him to lead a life of service.

“To be able to have a mom and a dad that didn’t tell us about loving people—they showed us what loving people really looked like,” he said, adding, “And to have a dad that has given so much of his life to serving people that could truly never do a thing for him.”

Tebow concluded his remarks by affirming—and at the same time, challenging—those attending the banquet.

“What you’re doing here matters. You’re fighting for life. You’re fighting for people that can’t fight for themselves,” he said, adding:

And my question to you is: Are you willing to stand up in the face of persecution, in the face of adversity, in the face of criticism, when other people are going to say it’s not worth it, when other people won’t stand beside you?

COLUMN BY

Allison Schuster

Allison Schuster is part of the Young Leader’s Program at the Heritage Foundation and interns at The Daily Signal.

RELATED ARTICLES:

What You Need to Know About 2 Major Pro-Life Bills in the Senate

The 9th Circuit Court upheld a Trump administration rule requiring that recipients of Title X funds must not provide abortion.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

‘Sex Change’ Isn’t Surgically Possible, My Surgeon Testified in Court

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Many people wonder why I’m so outspoken about the madness of prescribing cross-sex hormones and genital mutilation surgery for patients who suffer from the desire to be the opposite sex, known clinically as gender dysphoria.

I speak out because I consulted the “gender experts” when I had gender confusion, and they told me sex change was the only way to get relief.

But they were wrong. I didn’t need sex change—I needed effective psychotherapy to resolve childhood issues.

“Sex change” is pure balderdash. No one can change his or her sex. I have the document saying so.

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Here’s how it came about.

After eight years of living as a woman, I finally admitted that truth to myself and sought to reclaim my male identity. In an effort to restore my birth certificate to “male,” I formally asked two acclaimed experts in 1990 to testify to my being male in California Superior Court.

They were Dr. Stanley Biber, the world-renowned sex-change surgeon who performed my operation and over 4,000 others in his career, and psychologist/sexologist Paul Walker, my gender therapist and the esteemed author of the original Standards of Care for transgender health.

These two men, both dead now, were the leading experts in the nascent field of “gender” medicine. In the document they co-authored, signed, and submitted to California Superior Court, they admitted that sex changes do not occur medically.

No Change of Sex Occurs

The court document from July 25, 1990, states that I meet the medical criteria for the male sex, even after a full-blown sex change. Men do not become women through surgery or hormones.

Paragraph 5 of the document reads:

This Patient, by the criteria established by John Money, Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is indeed now considered a male. We plead that the court will reestablish this man’s legal identity as male. The patient’s medical sex is evaluated as follows:

Genetic Sex ………………………………………………………..Male

Hormonal Sex……………………………………………………..Neuter

Internal Morphology…………………………………………..Male

External Morphology………………………………………….Mixed

Gonadal Sex……………………………………………………….Neuter

Social Sex (gender role)……………………………………..Male

“Genetic Sex [is] Male.” According to the testimony of both doctors, sex-change surgery fails to change a person’s genetic sex.

“Internal Morphology [is] Male.” That is, the internal form and structure of the body remains male even after years of hormone use and sex-changing surgical procedures.

In retrospect, it’s a game-changing bombshell. The renowned gender experts testified that even when a person undergoes sex-change surgery and takes cross-gender hormones for many years, genetic sex and internal morphology do not change.

Transgender identity doesn’t exist except in one’s imagination.

So What Does Change?

What does change, then, according to the sex-change surgeon and the gender expert?

  • “Gonadal Sex [is] Neuter.” The male reproductive organs are refashioned surgically into a pseudo-vagina and the ability to provide sperm is destroyed.
  • “Hormonal Sex [is] Neuter.” The ability to produce testosterone is destroyed.
  • “External Morphology [is] Mixed.” Outward appearance of the male body is a mix of male and female. Cosmetic procedures and hormones have a feminizing effect on appearance, but many male traits remain, such as hand size, foot size, and physical strength.

The court document attests that only social sex (gender role) and external morphology (outward appearance) can change.

Therefore, people can skip the hormones and ditch the radical genital surgery because they are not medically necessary. By providing them, the medical professionals commit medical malpractice.

Sex change at its heart is only a social sex change, staged by gender-confused people themselves through a change of clothes and name.

Transgender Women in Sports

Men who claim to be women and then intrude in women’s sports competitions because men’s sports are too difficult for them are only socially pretending to be women.

Their muscle mass, physical strength, and internal bone structure remain even if their testosterone levels later drop—all determined at puberty by the flood of testosterone.

It’s folly to place men on the cover of magazines and celebrate their courage to “come out” as a transgender female when, according to this court document, they are still genetic men.

I think that transgender women (men who are impersonating women) have pulled off one of the biggest misogynistic scams against women in history. Transgender women are saying, in effect, that the beautiful, distinct female sex—womanhood itself—is nothing more than wardrobe choices and some cosmetic surgery.

Pure balderdash.

This Explains the Unhappiness

This court document also helps explain the explosion of reported unhappiness, regret, and detransition stories emerging from the U.K., Canada, and the U.S.

Some of the regretters after changing gender tell me they feel like they are in “gender hell” or that “it was the biggest mistake of my life.”

“I realized I could never become a real woman,” one said. “Now I want my life back; can you help me?”

I detransitioned 30 years ago, in 1990, and have written many articles and books to shine a light on the harm this grand experiment has caused for so many people: suicides and attempted suicides, fractured marriages, deserted children.

Two renowned gender experts, sexologist Paul Walker and surgeon Stanley Biber, exposed the reckless and false ideology in the 1990 court document. Inadvertently, I’m sure, considering they continued to guide hurting people along the same destructive path.

This document filed by experts with the Superior Court of California plainly says that sex-changing surgery does not change men into women, or vice versa. So let’s stop pretending it does.

COMMENTARY BY

Walt Heyer

Walt Heyer is a public speaker and author of the book, “Trans Life Survivors.” Through his website, SexChangeRegret.com, and his blog, WaltHeyer.com, Heyer raises public awareness about those who regret gender change and the tragic consequences suffered as a result.

RELATED ARTICLE: End California’s Illegal Discrimination Against Pro-Lifers

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Twitter piles on Richard Dawkins over Eugenics tweet

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The eminent expert in communicating science botches his explanation.

Twitter may not be the best medium for explaining the science of eugenics to a wary public, as the sometime Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Richard Dawkins, discovered this week.

Professor Dawkins, now aged 78, renowned as an evolutionary biologist and as the author of best-sellers about genetics and atheism, most recently Outgrowing God, chose to tweet about eugenics. This may have been prompted by a Twitter storm about back room boys at 10 Downing Street (of which more below). His words were not calibrated to endear him to the public:

Reactions? They ranged from “You absolute pin-headed simpleton” to “How’d the application of this play out in 1940s Europe?” to “The thing about people who believe in eugenics is that they always believe themselves to be the superior kind of human. No-one ever thinks that it could make people like them obsolete”.

Dawkins had to back-pedal very quickly to explain himself:

Dawkins was clearly not playing in the First Division this week. Professors in the Simonyi chair are supposed to make the public sympathetic to science, as its website explains:

The task of communicating science to the layman is not a simple one. In particular it is imperative for the post holder to avoid oversimplifying ideas, and presenting exaggerated claims. The limits of current scientific knowledge should always be made clear to the public.

Even scientists were exasperated. Dave Curtis, the editor of Annals of Human Genetics (a journal which was once titled Annals of Eugenics), posted a long Twitter thread explaining why humans cannot be bred like cattle and roses, contra Professor Dawkins. First, “humans have long generational times and small numbers of offspring. This would make any selective breeding process extremely slow”. Second, humans live in very different environments and most of the variation in their traits is due to the environment. It would be very difficult to identify individuals with ideal traits.

“We should bear in mind,” he adds, “that harsh selection pressures have been acting on humans up to the present and that there may be very little scope for overall improvement. In any event, we can confidently say that selective breeding to improve desirable traits is not practicable.”

The long and the short of the matter, in Dr Curtis’s opinion, is this: “People who support eugenics initiatives are evil racists. Also, modern genetic research shows that eugenics would not work.”

It’s surprising that Professor Dawkins thought that his puff for human eugenics would be applauded. James Watson, who won Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering DNA, has become a non-person after expressing eugenicist opinions which were interpreted as racist.

Just a whiff of eugenics was enough to force the resignation of one of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s advisors recently. Opposition research on Andrew Sabisky, a political “contractor” at 10 Downing Street, uncovered six-year-old opinions which were quickly denounced as eugenic and racist.

For example, in a comment on a 2014 blog post made by a user called “Andrew Sabisky”, it was suggested that compulsory contraception could eliminate a “permanent underclass”. It read: “One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty.”

Having used internet history to make Sabisksy history, the media moved on to savaging Dominic Cummings, a key advisor to the PM who had hired Sabisky . A blog post from 2014 contained ideas which were described as eugenic. He suggested that the UK’s National Health Service IVF service should offer human eggs sorted by IQ to make a level playing field for rich and poor parents who want babies with a high IQ.

Prof Richard Ashcroft, a medical ethicist at City University, told The Guardian that this was nonsense: “This idea that we can use biological selection to improve individuals and society, and that the state through the NHS, should facilitate this, really is pure eugenics.”

The fracas demonstrates the schizophrenic attitude of the public towards eugenics. On the one hand, the word “eugenics” evokes racism and Nazism. It is this sense which has been weaponized to undermine the new PM. On the other hand, parents who want perfect children are encouraged to eliminate “defective” embryos. The media happily provides a platform for bioethics to promote such ideas. Another Oxford professor, Julian Savulescu has often explained why he supports eugenics:

“We practise eugenics when we screen for Down’s syndrome, and other chromosomal or genetic abnormalities. The reason we don’t define that sort of thing as ‘eugenics’, as the Nazis did, is because it’s based on choice. It’s about enhancing people’s freedom rather than reducing it.”

COLUMN BY

MICHAEL COOK

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge.

FOR MORE ARTICLE ON EUGENICS CLICK HERE.

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Is it time to kiss the nuclear family goodbye?

The response of Wuhan Christians to the coronavirus outbreak puts the government to shame

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

Pro-Life Is ‘Today’s Civil Rights Issue,’ Black Anti-Abortion Activists Say

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African American pro-life leaders decry what they call the eugenics mentality of abortion providers perpetuating the high abortion rate among black women and urge promoting crisis pregnancy centers as an anti-abortion outreach to minority communities, as an alternative to Planned Parenthood.

The black anti-abortion activists also say the right to life is the civil rights issue of our time.

A recent panel discussion, “How Defunding Planned Parenthood Impacts the Black Community,” weighed in on those and other abortion-related issues at the recent National Pro-Life Summit 2020, a one-day training conference for young pro-lifers, held at the Marriott Marquis hotel in Washington.

“Eugenics is more than just a philosophy. It is directly implanted in policies that target African Americans and minorities,” said panelist Patrina Mosley, director of life, culture, and women’s advocacy at the Family Research Council, a Washington-based research group that supports pro-family legislation and education. “You can abort a child because they’re black, in some states, and you can abort a child because they have a disability.”

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Ryan Bomberger, a co-founder of the Purcellville, Virginia-based Radiance Foundation, a group that advocates for human dignity, has spearheaded numerous public campaigns aimed at exposing what he says are Planned Parenthood’s eugenicist roots.

The foundation has used public advertising, including a billboard campaign, to address the fact that abortion rates are much higher among black women, compared with the rest of the population.

“The NAACP and Planned Parenthood denounced our billboards as ‘horribly racist’ because they said the billboards gave the false impression that Planned Parenthood kills black babies,” Bomberger told the Jan. 25 gathering. “In truth, Planned Parenthood kills black babies, white babies, and every hue in between.”

Because of the lengths that Planned Parenthood goes to in order to be the primary pregnancy resource in minority communities, Christina Bennett, communications director for the Family Institute of Connecticut, stressed the need to “combat the narrative that Planned Parenthood is the only place people can go when they’re dealing with a crisis pregnancy.”

According to Bennett, connecting women with pro-life crisis pregnancy centers and lobbying state legislatures to support pro-life issues are ways to address the problem.

“In my state of Connecticut, the legislators and elected officials really think that Planned Parenthood is the one serving women of color and low-income women,” Bennett said. “But really, [crisis pregnancy centers] are the ones offering women holistic care.”

When asked about how to reach out to minority communities on the topic of abortion, the panelists advocated forming personal connections with the women, rather than just presenting the facts of the issue.

“Once you identify what they really care about, you can connect it to the issue of life,” Mosley said. “If they want to talk about institutional racism or Black Lives Matter, we can work with that. You don’t have to agree with them on everything, but keep giving them the facts, and let God’s eternal truth do the work.”

Bomberger said that kind of relational development is key to attaining pro-life victories.

“The pro-life movement is today’s civil rights issue,” he said. “We have to work together, and if we aren’t willing to have relationships, we can’t expect much. We have to be able to build friendships.”

Mosley encouraged the African Americans in the audience to tell their pro-life stories.

“In this business, you will be the minority for a while, but that needs to change,” she said. “We need more African Americans in the business of advocating for pro-life policies, at the state legislature, and at the Capitol. No one can tell the story like you of how this systematically impacts you.”

COLUMN BY

Virginia Aabram

Virginia Aabram is part of the Young Leader’s Program at the Heritage Foundation and interns at The Daily Signal.

A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

RELATED ARTICLE: Liberals Oppose Equal Status for Faith-Based Organizations

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

The Tradwife movement reminds us of the virtue of service in marriage

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In a culture that has championed feminism, the Women’s March, #MeToo, and national campaigns to close the gender pay gap, life as a full-time homemaker seems anything but progressive. And yet, the growing #TradWife social media movement celebrates the classic domestic female as its role model.

The movement, often illustrated with 1950s posters of apple-cheeked housewives brandishing vacuums or serving their husbands dinner, consists of a growing multitude of women who proclaim their choice to be “traditional” wives by staying at home and fulfilling household duties rather than pursuing a career outside the home.

Not surprisingly, the trend has met fierce backlash. Critics have called it backwards, dangerous, and even racist. The reactions generally claim either that misogynistic males are hypnotizing their wives into submission, or that women who somehow prefer domestic life are spreading an insidious message that hinders the female crusade for equality.

The critiques raise plenty of questions about gender roles and feminism, but they also prove that our culture has largely abandoned an important reality: that while a happy marriage has nothing to do with servitude, it has everything to do with service.

Alena Pettitt, one of the most prominent public faces of the Tradwife movement, makes this abundantly clear. In a BBC interview with Victoria Derbyshire last month, the British marketing-manager-turned-housewife explained why she embraced the Tradwife life: “My talents lie in domesticity and cooking, and I love it,” she said. Soon after, she added, “It’s also an act of service for my husband, and it’s a way I demonstrate and show love.”

Derbyshire’s immediate follow-up: “Is it servitude?”

Even though Pettitt continued to speak about her free decision to work in the home, the question had already proven that Derbyshire, along with most modern feminists, missed the point.

By and large, full-time female homemaking is interpreted as servitude, even when it is freely chosen. In part, that is because it is associated with a time in which women were restricted legally, professionally, financially, and socially. While many of those restrictions have been lifted, the interpretation remains. Why? One big factor is that our culture’s emphasis on individual career success, particularly for women, has fuelled and intensified it.

Within a worldview that urges women to be just as successful (if not more so) than men, domestic life is an entirely backwards choice, because 1) it limits a woman’s chances to achieve that success, and 2) it hands over the glorious career path to the man in the house, thereby placing her below him.

While there is certainly a place for voicing women’s needs when they are overlooked and fighting for their rights when they are violated, hyper-individualism and careerism do neither. They overshadow the reality that any kind of work is more fulfilling when it is done not for me but for you. And not you in a collective, abstract sense of community, but you as a real person within a relationship. In marriage, that means that whatever work is being done (inside or outside the home) has meaning when it is placed at the service of one’s spouse and the family that grows from that bond.

My husband, for instance, has always referred to his work not as “my career” but as “our career.” To him, the sole purpose of his profession is to give me and our children a happy life, and he works hard to excel at his job for that purpose.

The same logic of loving service applies to the work of the home. All of us have experienced its impact: When we walk into a dining room with the table set, napkins folded, and delicious food beautifully presented, we can’t help but feel loved. Someone not only took the time to prepare that meal but also invested effort to do it well, with attention to detail. Like any profession, doing something with precision and finesse leaves an impression. And when it is done for someone, it becomes more than an accomplishment. It becomes a gift.

This is what makes Pettitt and so many women (myself included) find deep fulfilment in homemaking. Some of us may have a better knack for housework than others, but for all of us, our work in the home is essentially about creating a bright and cheerful space for our families.

That total, loving dedication is not oppressing but empowering. It brings joy. It spreads love. That’s how humans are wired: when we give of ourselves in a full-hearted effort of love, we receive love abundantly in return. In Pettitt’s interview, one comment from a viewer captured this virtuous cycle of giving: “The more my wife puts me first, the more I put her first.”

With that outlook, life is no longer about “your career” versus “my career,” or about housework placed at the service of one spouse’s career advancement. Instead, it’s about “our home,” with each spouse’s work devoted to making that home flourish.

Such an outlook need not be confined to the #TradWife setup. A thriving marriage and family is possible whether or not both spouses work full time, and whether or not spouses share the work of the home. But regardless, the dedication to each other and the primacy of the family must remain constant.

Alena Pettitt’s approach has simply shone new light on the beauty of service within marriage, and for that, it is anything but a regression. It is a breath of fresh air in our individualistic culture, one that could rescue the happiness in homes of all shapes and sizes.

COLUMN BY

Sophia Martinson

Sophia Martinson is a writer with a primary focus on cultural and family topics. She lives with her husband in New York City.

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

Parents Ask Court to Stop Schools From Helping Children Make Gender Transitions

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A group of Wisconsin parents is asking a state court to halt a public school district’s policy that they say instructs teachers to assist and encourage children in adopting transgender identities without notifying—and possibly while deceiving—parents.

The lawsuit is being brought by 14 parents, representing eight families, who allege the Madison Metropolitan School District’s policy violates constitutionally protected parental rights.

The lawsuit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court, includes an affidavit from Dr. Stephen B. Levine, a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, in which he asserts that gender transitions for minors expose vulnerable children to dangerous, lifelong physical, social, and mental health risks.

“For a child to live radically different identities at home and at school, and to conceal what he or she perceives to be his or her true identity from parents, is psychologically unhealthy in itself, and could readily lead to additional psychological problems,” Levine writes in the affidavit. “Extended secrecy and a ‘double life’ concealed from the parents is rarely the path to psychological health. For this reason at least, schools should not support deceit of parents.”

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Levine’s affidavit continues:

 Most children are both legally and developmentally incapable of giving informed consent to such a life-altering intervention. And parents, of course, cannot give informed consent if the fact of their child’s wish to assume a transgender identity is concealed from them.

The 14 parents are represented by lawyers with Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, both nonprofit, public interest legal organizations.

“This is a life-altering decision that educators have no business making,” Roger Brooks, ADF senior counsel, said. “As Dr. Levine explains based on decades of experience and extensive scientific literature, putting children on a pathway to puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones can have devastating effects across a lifetime. That should serve as a wake-up call to parents and all Americans: When schools cast aside biological reality in favor of gender-identity ideology, it’s children who are hurt the most.”

The legal motion formally requests the court to impose a temporary injunction against the school district’s policy.

The school district hadn’t been served with the lawsuit as of late Wednesday, said Tim LeMonds, public information officer for Madison Metropolitan School District. LeMonds said the district wouldn’t comment without reviewing the claims.

The school district “prioritizes working in collaboration with families to support our students and it is always our preferred method of support,” LeMonds said in a formal statement, adding:

MMSD must also prioritize the safety and well-being of every individual student who walks through its doors each day. It is with this focus [that] the district stands by its guidance document on transgender and non-binary students, and recognizes its tremendous responsibility to uphold the right of every child to be educated in a safe, all-inclusive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment.

The lawsuit calls for school officials to be transparent and honest when dealing with parents, and to meet standards of informed consent.

The 50-page affidavit from Levine says that multiple studies show that among children who experience gender dysphoria or transgender identification but do not socially transition, 80% to 98% “desisted,” or became comfortable with their biological sex, by young adulthood, according to Alliance Defending Freedom.

The affidavit also says that among boys “who engaged in a partial or complete social transition before puberty,” according to other data, fewer than 20% had desisted when surveyed at age 15 or older.

“It is profoundly unethical to reinforce a male child in his belief that he is not a boy (or a female child in her belief that she is not a girl), and it is particularly unethical to intervene in the normal physical development of a child to ‘affirm’ a ‘gender identity’ that is at odds with bodily sex,” Ryan T. Anderson, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email, adding:

To do any of this without parental involvement not only harms children but violates parental authority. Childhood and adolescence are difficult enough as it is. Adults should not corrupt the social ecology in which children develop a mature understanding of themselves as boys or girls on the pathway to becoming men or women.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

RELATED ARTICLES:

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Science, sex, and suicide

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Lawmakers in 9 States Move to Protect Children From LGBT ‘Transition’ Agenda

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Conservative lawmakers have decided to become proactive about the transgender epidemic infiltrating the nation’s youth.

In the past couple of months, Republican lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced legislation to ban medical providers from helping boys and girls undergo a medical transition via surgery and/or hormone replacement therapy before they turn 18.

Some of the bills would make it a felony to prescribe hormones or perform related surgeries for minors.

In South Dakota, state Rep. Fred Deutsch, a Republican, spearheaded the effort. The South Dakota Legislature passed its version of the bill just this month.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

If Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, signs the bill into law, doctors who offer medical transitions in the form of hormone replacements or surgery to children under 16 could receive a one-year jail sentence or a hefty fine.

Colorado, West Virginia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Missouri, Florida, Illinois, and Kentucky all have similar provisions in the works, although the details vary.

In a tweet, Deutsch said: “The world is upside-down that protecting children from sterilization and mutilation is causing a firestorm.”

In a statement emailed to USA Today, he said:

Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures. The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs.

Sex reassignment surgery—a phrase the LGBTQ lobby hijacked and changed to “gender reassignment surgery,” a subtle but important difference—has had enough success and failure for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle to use to their advantage.

Or so they think. A USA Today article, which is rather thorough, paints GOP lawmakers as interventionists who suddenly want to get involved in people’s “personal” lives. It cites professionals who voice disdain for lawmakers who would keep today’s youth from living as their feelings dictate.

These lawmakers face an uphill battle because of LGBTQ backlash and public relations. Reputable medical groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have come out in favor of providing surgical and hormone replacement transitions as appropriate treatment for children struggling with gender dysphoria, despite little evidence it cures the dysphoria.

In fact, while little evidence exists either for or against medical transitions, because it’s such a new phenomenon, statistics show that some people who transition experience regret.

Fortunately, conservative lawmakers who propose these bills come from a place of education, combined with empathy and caution.

Because this is optional surgery, and not a life-or-death medical procedure (such as neurosurgery following a stroke), Republican lawmakers propose banning the surgery for teenagers, to err on the side of safety.

Although a speckling of success stories are told by medically transitioned teens and adults, more tales of failure, and horror, are out there.

These stories abound, though critics of the proposed bills seem to ignore them entirely.

In a powerful essay published by The New York Times in 2018, a writer who was born a man and was about to medically transition to a woman admitted, as the headline stated: “My new vagina won’t make me happy.” But the writer wanted to go ahead with the surgery anyway.

Jazz Jennings, 19, was born a biological male but socially transitioned to female years ago. The teen’s transgender journey has been a hit TLC show.

Doctors recently performed a third surgery on Jennings to further the transition from young man to young woman. Jennings suffered from severe complications after receiving a “new vagina.”

Walt Heyer is well known for his crusade against such medical transitions. Heyer, a fellow contributor to The Daily Signal, lived as a woman for several years. After taking female hormones, he had breast implants but was still suicidal after a short reprieve.

Eventually Heyer came to the belief not only that sex reassignment surgeries didn’t make him female, but that his issues were rooted in trauma and abuse—as they are for most people.

Heyer wrote in The Daily Signal in 2017:

Too many post-surgical patients contact me to report they deeply regret the gender change surgery and that the false hope of surgical outcomes was a factor. For children, the focus on encouraging, assisting, and affirming them toward changing genders at earlier and earlier ages, with no research showing the outcomes, may lead to more suicides.

Although it’s true that many conservatives would reject government involvement in the family via heavy-handed legislation, there are times when it’s necessary, specifically when safety—even common sense—is rejected in favor of the cause du jour.

This is such a time, when parents and activists are blindly answering the rallying cry of progressives who favor feelings over facts, even when it means leading our own children down a path of pain and regret.

COMMENTARY BY

Nicole Russell

Nicole Russell is a contributor to The Daily Signal. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, National Review, Politico, The Washington Times, The American Spectator, and Parents Magazine. Twitter: .

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

Margaret Sanger and the Racist Roots of Planned Parenthood

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Recently, Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest (R-N.C.) came under fire for comments he made regarding Planned Parenthood and its founder, Margaret Sanger. Speaking to an MLK Day breakfast at Upper Room Church of God in Christ in Raleigh, Forest said this: “There is no doubt that when Planned Parenthood was created, it was created to destroy the entire black race. That was the purpose of Planned Parenthood. That’s the truth.” Forest later defended his comments to McClatchy News: “The facts speak for themselves. Since 1973, 19 million black babies have been aborted, mostly by Planned Parenthood. I care too much about the lives of these babies to debate the intent of Sanger’s views when the devastation she brought into this world is obvious.”

Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, and Fania Mindell opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York on October 16, 1916. The clinic was later raided by the NYPD, and all three women were arrested and charged with violating the Comstock Act for distributing obscene materials. After laws governing birth control were relaxed, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921, which was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

While Lieutenant Governor Forest was attacked by many on the Left for pushing an uneducated, insensitive agenda, history backs him up. The fact is that Margaret Sanger strongly believed the Aryan race to be superior and that it must be purified, a view that finds its roots from Charles Darwin’s defense of evolution in The Origin of Species. Darwin argued that a process of “natural selection” favored the white race over all other “lesser races.” Sanger advocated for eugenics by calling for abortion and birth control among the “unfit” to produce a master race, a race consisting solely of wealthy, educated whites. Sanger said she believed blacks were “human weeds” that needed to be exterminated. She also referred to immigrants, African Americans, and poor people as “reckless breeders” and “spawning…human beings who never should have been born.”

Sanger once wrote “that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.” In an effort to sell her birth control and abortion proposals to the black community, Sanger said: “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” In 1926, Sanger was also the featured speaker at a women’s auxiliary meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

Sanger opened her clinics in largely minority neighborhoods because she believed immigrants and the working class were inferior and needed their population controlled so as to purify the human race. That trend continues today where almost 80 percent of Planned Parenthood facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. In fact, although only 13 percent of American women are black, over 35 percent of all black babies are aborted in the United States every year. Abortion is the leading cause of death for blacks in the United States. According to Students for Life of America, “more African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.” Black babies are about five times more likely to be aborted than whites. On Halloween in 2017, Planned Parenthood’s “Black Community” Twitter account tweeted: “If you’re a Black woman in America, it’s statistically safer to have an abortion than to carry a pregnancy to term or give birth.”

While Margaret Sanger tried to portray Planned Parenthood as a merciful organization that helps needy families, the facts speak for themselves. In her testimony to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in September 2015, former Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards openly admitted that over 80 percent of her organization’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions and not basic health care for poor or disadvantaged women. When you dive deeper, well over 90 percent of Planned Parenthood’s annual revenue comes from performing abortions.

Despite this sordid history, Margaret Sanger is almost universally recognized as a pioneer for women’s rights rather than the racist she actually was. When accepting Planned Parenthood’s Margaret Sanger Award, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that she “admired Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision…I am really in awe of her.” Those like Hillary Clinton are ignoring the explicitly racist statements that Margaret Sanger made throughout her life. The fact is that Sanger normalized birth control and abortion in the United States as a means to accomplish eugenics. Her ultimate goal was to eliminate non-white races, people with sickness or disabilities, children born to felons, the poor, and immigrants, to name a few.

Margaret Sanger is no heroine, and Planned Parenthood is not some merciful health care provider as the Left paints it to be. Margaret Sanger repeatedly stated her racist intentions for the whole world to see and hear, and Planned Parenthood was and still is the manifestation of those racist ideologies. America was founded on the idea that no matter your race, creed, national origin, disability, or station in life, everyone who comes here or is born here has the opportunity to live a successful, fulfilling life. Margaret Sanger didn’t believe that.

As pro-life activists, we must do our part to expose Margaret Sanger for who she really was. We must also expose the racist history of Planned Parenthood and how that history is still relevant today. For more information on Margaret Sanger and the racist roots of Planned Parenthood, check out these FRC resources: Planned Parenthood Is Not Pro-Woman and The Real Planned Parenthood: Leading the Culture of Death.

COLUMN BY

Worth Loving

RELATED ARTICLE: Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger In Her Own Words

EDITORS NOTE: This FRC-Action column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

Amazonia Dreaming

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Robert Royal: Despite ambiguity in the pope’s post-synodal Exhortation, there are no doctrinal changes. An olive branch to tradition or a strategic retreat?

Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis’ Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (released yesterday) is, at a first reading, a mostly pleasant surprise. It shows little of the freewheeling radicalism that bulked large – in the synod hall and Vatican gardens, and even on the streets, during the Synod last October. He quotes copiously from his own texts, to be sure, but also from St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. So much so that Cardinal Gerhard Mueller, a powerful voice in current Church debates, has called the Exhortation an effort at reconciliation.

That may – or may not – be so.

There’s no mention of married viri probati as a remedy for the Amazonian priest shortage – but nothing about priestly celibacy either. Instead, for now, the pope wants bishops in the region to emphasize priestly vocations and the responsibility of priests from the region to stay there instead of heading to North America and Europe. And he invites priests inclined to missionary work to go to Amazonia.

The question of deaconesses is actually turned in the opposite direction to where it seemed headed, again for now. Francis says that innovations along that line would be a “clericalization” – a strongly negative term for him – of the true contributions women have made and continue to make in accord with their true nature, which is noteworthy for “tender strength.”

There are hints here and there of liturgical adaptations, but not the full-blown “Amazonian Rite” much debated during the synod (a seeming impossibility given the hundreds of different tribes and language groups in Amazonia that would have to be accommodated).

And there’s a bit of what might be called temporary syncretism – a patient toleration of the blending of native and Catholic practices preliminary to a purification of indigenous ways, the kind of thing missionaries sometimes allow and not necessarily a problem, if you’re confident about the ultimate goal. And why it’s being done. And by whom.

The one large caveat in all this, which is presented in a way clearly intended to avoid adding fuel to already raging fires, is the ambiguity – a Bergoglian trademark – in how this relates to the Final Report of the Amazonia Synod, which was far more radical and controversial on these very points. The pope says at the outset that he won’t quote from the Report because he wants us to read the whole thing. And beyond reading: “May the pastors, consecrated men and women and lay faithful of the Amazon region strive to apply it, and may it inspire in some way every person of good will.”

So there’s an olive branch being offered, at least on the surface. Or maybe there’s been fear in Rome that pressing further at this moment might take the Church to the breaking point. One of the pope’s guiding principles is: “It is more important to start processes than to dominate spaces,” as he put it in Amoris Laetitia (§261). What is really happening here will only become clearer as the process of striving “to apply” the Report – not the Exhortation – takes shape. The bulk of this conceptual iceberg may lie below the waterline.

The Report spoke almost compulsively of the need to “listen” to indigenous peoples, so much so that you wondered why they needed missionaries or other outsiders at all. The Exhortation wants “listening” as well, but adds:

If we devote our lives to their service, to working for the justice and dignity that they deserve, we cannot conceal the fact that we do so because we see Christ in them and because we acknowledge the immense dignity that they have received from God, the Father who loves them with boundless love. They have a right to hear the Gospel. . . .Without that impassioned proclamation, every ecclesial structure would become just another NGO and we would not follow the command given us by Christ: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.

The bulk of the Exhortation, however, is devoted to various social justice themes. Of its four chapters, only the last touches directly on central Church matters. Each chapter is animated by a “dream,” sometimes illustrated with passages from major Latin American poets like the Chilean Pablo Neruda and the Brazilian Vinicius de Moraes:

     I dream of an Amazon region that fights for the rights of the poor, the original peoples and the least of our brothers and sisters, where their voices can be heard and their dignity advanced.

    I dream of an Amazon region that can preserve its distinctive cultural riches, where the beauty of our humanity shines forth in so many varied ways.

   I dream of an Amazon region that can jealously preserve its overwhelming natural beauty and the superabundant life teeming in its rivers and forests.

  I dream of Christian communities capable of generous commitment, incarnate in the Amazon region, and giving the Church new faces with Amazonian features.

As with the pope’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, these somewhat Romantic notions rightly remind the developed world that other kinds of lives have value. And that we need to recover a sense of the world as Creation, not merely matter and energy, to be manipulated for any end, irrespective of God’s order. The “transgender” movement is the final station stop for that train, wherein people may claim to be something, at mere will, that their bodies down to the molecular level deny.

We can all learn from each other, to be sure, but the primitivist model of community, harmony with nature, and buen vivir (“good living”) that Rome has latched on to has a long literary history, but only very general lessons for a world of 7 billion people. It would have been better to acknowledge that somewhere.

And it would be better if Rome made clear that the Amazon’s priest shortage also has limited lessons for a global Church. The processes now in motion need to be guided by something steady and different than we’ve seen so far. With the new Exhortation, we still can’t say whether that’s emerged or not. But doubtless we’ll soon see.

COLUMN BY

Robert Royal

Dr. Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent book is A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century, published by Ignatius Press. The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, is now available in paperback from Encounter Books.

RELATED ARTICLE: Pope Francis’ Amazon exhortation calls for holiness, not married priests

EDITORS NOTE: This Catholic Thing column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. © 2020 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org. The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

PODCAST: Manslaughter or Medical Choice? Ask a Democrat.

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The pills were supposed to kill her baby. Kalina Gillhum had ordered them from India and taken 12. She was in her third trimester, a dangerous time to try an at-home abortion. But Kalina and her boyfriend, Braden, had decided they didn’t want their son. So when he was born in their bathroom, alive and breathing despite the drugs, they let him die. When police found the baby’s body in a trash bag, tucked away in a shoebox, an Ohio prosecutor charged the couple with manslaughter. The question Princeton Professor Robbie George has for Democrats is: “Should they be?”

For liberals, the story out of Licking County couldn’t come at a more inopportune time. Senate Democrats had just spent the day defending infanticide in committee when this pair of 20-year-olds put a face on the horrific crime they call “choice.” If a local hospital hadn’t been suspicious of the couple, this baby — like the thousands of other abortion survivors — would have probably gone unreported. Only when a doctor noticed Kalina’s overly large umbilical cord, with no child attached, did they realize something was horribly wrong. It was far too big, the police were told, “for it not to be a full-term infant.”

A search of the apartment found what nurses and eyewitnesses say happen every day: a born baby, treated like common waste. The only difference is, this newborn was left to die home — not at a hospital or abortion clinic, where Democrats argue he’s fair game. Apparently, if it’s do-it-yourself infanticide, it’s murder. But if a doctor does it, 44 senators say, it’s “health care.”

It’s an absolutely shocking position for anyone to take, let alone four dozen leaders in the U.S. Senate. And yet, for whatever reason, these men and women refuse to acknowledge that at its very core, protecting born-alive babies has nothing to do with abortion. “This is not about a woman’s body,” FRC’s Patrina Mosley, one of the expert witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing, argued. “This is about the infant who’s become the patient.” Eighteen years ago, this was a no-brainer for both parties. “We’re about a living, breathing infant who survived one of the most violent acts you can undergo — abortion — defied the odds and survived. Shouldn’t they be given a chance to defy the odds again and receive medical care? You would think that would be bipartisan.”

Of course, Democrats rushed to their familiar talking points: we don’t need a born-alive law because we already have homicide laws on the books. (A lie, since 35 states and the federal government don’t have adequate protections for babies who live through a botched abortion.) This is just another attack on reproductive rights, others cried. But, as Patrina and so many conservatives fired back, this doesn’t have anything to do with abortion! “We’re just saying don’t discriminate against infants who are born as a result of a failed one.”

In all honesty, Patrina said, “there is no good reason for obstructing care to infants born alive from abortion, except for two reasons. One, that you buy into the philosophy of eugenics, meaning [you believe in targeting] the disabled, the minorities, and the poor. You think these children should not have been born at all, so why not kill them? Or, you have something to gain financially from the illegal harvesting of fetal parts that we know has been taking place for years now and [thanks to video] captured by the Center for Medical Progress.”

As Senator Marsha Blackburn pointed out on “Washington Watch,” under any other circumstance, a newborn in distress “would be rushed to the hospital and given neonatal care… But [Democratic leaders] think this… should be a mother’s choice. But they don’t stop and think about it… [T]hey’re saying it’s okay for a woman to decide if she wants to keep that baby or kill that baby. But they try to change the language and nuance this so that it doesn’t sound quite that barbaric.” But barbaric is exactly what this is. And no civil society — least of all ours — should tolerate it.

Tony Perkins’s Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
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‘Frustrating and Disheartening’: 3 Girls, Losing to Biological Males in Track, Announce Lawsuit [Video]

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When Chelsea Mitchell, ranked as the fastest girl in the 55-meter dash in Connecticut high school track, showed up for a competition last year, she knew it would be a challenge.

Her competitors included two biological males who said they identify as girls.

Mitchell, a senior at Canton High School, had seen the speeds posted by the two. She was aware that other girls had lost to athletes born as boys who identify as girls. But at the time, she says, she “could feel the adrenaline in my blood.”

That adrenaline wasn’t enough, though. Mitchell came in third behind the two biological males.

In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>

Ultimately, because of Connecticut’s high school athletics policy on transgender competitors, she lost four girls state championships and two all-New England awards to biological males who identify as females.

“It was definitely frustrating and disheartening to be right there, running for the biggest honors in the state, and to work so hard and try so hard to be the best in the state,” Mitchell told The Daily Signal in an exclusive telephone interview Tuesday.

Mitchell and two other girls from different Connecticut high schools, Alanna Smith and Selina Soule, are suing the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference over the policy that allows biological males to compete as girls with biological females in high school sports.

The suit, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut, claims that the state athletic conference is violating Title IX, the section of federal law designed to protect equal athletic opportunities for women and girls.

Smith is a sophomore at Danbury High School and Soule is a senior at Glastonbury High School whose story has been chronicled by The Daily Signal since last May.

Although Soule has spoken at length to The Daily Signal, and later other news outlets, Mitchell and Smith are speaking on the record for the first time.

The two biological males are Terry Miller of Bloomfield High School, who won the 55-meter dash, and Andraya Yearwood of Cromwell High School, who came in second.

The lawsuit states that Miller and Yearwood have won 15 girls state championship titles and “taken more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions from female track athletes in the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone.”

Mitchell and Smith were anonymous in Soule’s original complaint last June to the U.S. Department of Education, which the agency is investigating.

This is the first lawsuit of its kind in the nation, according to Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal aid organization that represents the three high school students.

Smith’s father, former Chicago Cubs pitcher Lee Smith, was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame last year.

As a freshman, Smith won the 400-meter at the 2019 outdoor New England Regional Championships. She came in third in the 200-meter at the championships, behind a biological male.

“This makes us work harder and most of the time we know we are not going to get the top spot, just achieve a personal record,” Smith told The Daily Signal in an exclusive phone interview Tuesday, referring to the athletic conference’s decision to allow biological males to compete against girls.

It’s a complex issue, she said, but the court case is about fairness in competition.

“We want to be able to make sure there is fairness,” Smith said.

Soule missed qualifying for the state championship in the 55-meter final and, by one spot, an opportunity to qualify for the New England championships in the 2018-2019 season.

Two spots above her were taken by biological males.

Because 18 other states have similar policies for high school athletics, the three girls’ case in Connecticut could set a national precedent, said Christiana Holcomb, legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom.

“The objective is fairness in women’s sports,” Holcomb told The Daily Signal.

“Title IX is there for a reason,” she said. “It’s to give athletes like Chelsea [Mitchell] and Alanna [Smith] the opportunity to excel and be victorious.”

Mitchell said that she drew on her training and knew how to maximize her performance. She recalled looking at the running times for the biological male athletes in her race and realizing that beating them would be quite difficult.

“They are leaps and bounds beyond my fastest time,” Mitchell said.

The three girls’ lawsuit notes that college scholarships are among the missed opportunities they faced in losing to biological boys in competitions specifically intended for girls.

“I’m left wondering,” Mitchell told The Daily Signal. “I can’t measure the college scholarship, and I don’t know what opportunities could have come if the rules were different.”

Like Soule before them, both girls stressed that they do support fairness for transgender individuals, but that the current policy in Connecticut high school athletics isn’t fair to girls.

The Connecticut Association of Schools-Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school sports in the state, has argued that the transgender policy is based on federal and state anti-discrimination laws.

“This is about someone’s right to compete,” Executive Director Glenn Lungarini told the Associated Press last year. “I don’t think this is that different from other classes of people, who, in the not too distant past, were not allowed to compete. I think it’s going to take education and understanding to get to that point on this issue.”

The lawsuit filed Wednesday states:

This discriminatory policy is now regularly resulting in boys displacing girls in competitive track events in Connecticut—excluding specific and identifiable girls including Plaintiffs from honors, opportunities to compete at higher levels, and public recognition critical to college recruiting and scholarship opportunities that should go to those girls.

As a result, in scholastic track competition in Connecticut, more boys than girls are experiencing victory and gaining the advantages that follow even though postseason competition is nominally designed to ensure that equal numbers of boys and girls advance to higher levels of competition.

Compared to boys—those born with XY chromosomes—in the state of Connecticut those who are born female—with XX chromosomes—now have materially fewer opportunities to stand on the victory podium, fewer opportunities to participate in post-season elite competition, fewer opportunities for public recognition as champions, and a much smaller chance of setting recognized records.

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

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A Note for our Readers:

This is a critical year in the history of our country. With the country polarized and divided on a number of issues and with roughly half of the country clamoring for increased government control—over health care, socialism, increased regulations, and open borders—we must turn to America’s founding for the answers on how best to proceed into the future.

The Heritage Foundation has compiled input from more than 100 constitutional scholars and legal experts into the country’s most thorough and compelling review of the freedoms promised to us within the United States Constitution into a free digital guide called Heritage’s Guide to the Constitution.

They’re making this guide available to all readers of The Daily Signal for free today!

GET ACCESS NOW! >>

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

VIDEO: South African Doctor in China discusses Wuhan Flu misinformation (Canada is among worst)

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H/T Matt Bracken

Coronavirus – China’s Lies affect us all

EDITORS NOTE: This video posted on the Vlad Tepes Blog by Eeyore is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.