Tag Archive for: gender identity

10 Times as Many Teachers Say Trans, CRT Lessons Hurt Rather Than Help Schools

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A new survey reveals a cavernous gap between teachers’ unions and the views of most parents, teenagers, and teachers on whether public schools should teach LGBT ideology to students — and whether parents should have the right to opt their children out of those classes.

While elite teachers’ unions such as the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) believe schools should teach sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) classes to children, their customers — parents and students — disagree, as do many of their members, according to a series of new polls released last week.

More than 10 times as many teachers said debates over LGBT ideology, including sexual orientation and gender ideology, “have had a negative impact on their ability to do their job,” compared to 4% who said they improve learning, according to the Pew Research Center: 41% to 4%. Social Studies and English teachers were the most likely to say SOGI topics harmed their teaching time; they were also the classes most likely to discuss those issues, the survey found.

Yet some left-wing activists are working to change that. MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated $10 million to a group that instructs math teachers to “infuse social justice into mathematics.”

Teachers, Parents, and Students Do Not Want LGBTQIA+ Issues in the Classroom

Half of all teachers say “students should not learn” about gender identity issues in school, including 62% of elementary school teachers, 45% of middle school teachers, and 35% of high school teachers. Among those who believe the school should weigh in on such divisive topics, 33% of teachers say gender “can be different than sex assigned at birth,” while 14% believe in biological sex. More than twice as many elementary teachers believe transgender ideology as believe in biology; the proportion reaches three-to-one among high school teachers (45% vs. 15%).

The poll apparently shows those supportive of transgender beliefs are more likely to address the topic in school. Just under one-in-three teachers say sexual orientation or transgender ideology come up occasionally (21%) or frequently (9%). But teachers who belong to the Democratic Party were 15 points more likely to confess that LGBT issues creep into their classrooms than Republican teachers (36% to 21%).

Although a plurality (48%) of teachers believe parents should be able to opt their children out of transgender ideology indoctrination classes, one-third of instructors believed such classes should be compulsory.

“On both topics, parents’ views were more evenly split than the views of teachers,” according to the Pew survey. For instance, a majority of parents (54%) believe they should be able to determine whether teachers can subject their children to trans ideology.

The largest percentage of teens do not want to hear about LGBT ideology in the classroom, either: 48% say the topics should not be taught at school. Teens are also slightly more likely to believe in biological sex than in transgenderism (26% vs. 25%). But Democratic students are 525% more likely than Republican students to say gender identity is not tied to physiognomy.

Teenage students are more likely to feel uncomfortable hearing about transgender or sexual orientation issues than feel comfortable (33% vs. 29%). More than twice as many Republican students are more likely to feel uncomfortable hearing about such topics than to feel comfortable.

Only 14% of all teens say transgenderism or homosexuality “has never come up in any of their classes.”

The poll seems to indicate many teachers believe parents have too much say in their children’s education. While a plurality of teachers said parents had “the right amount” of influence, teachers were more likely to say parents had “too much influence” than not enough (32% to 19%). Democrats were 42% more likely than Republicans to believe parents had too much influence.

Republican-leaning teachers are more likely to honor parents’ views on these subjects, the poll found: 69% of Republican teachers say schools should not be in the business of teaching LGBT issues, and 80% say parents should decide whether their children attend such classes. Half of Democratic teachers say public school LGBT classes should be mandatory, and 53% say schools should teach transgender ideology.

A strong majority of teachers (58%) belongs to the Democratic Party, Pew noted.

Asian and “[w]hite Democrats are more likely than [b]lack and Hispanic Democrats to say parents should not be able to opt their children out of learning about sexual orientation and gender identity,” Pew stated. In all, 53% of Asian Democrats and “six-in-ten [w]hite Democrats say this, compared with 42% of Hispanic Democrats and 34% of [b]lack Democrats.” A plurality of black Democrats say parents should be able to opt out of LGBT indoctrination (46%, compared to 34% who oppose it).

Teachers’ Unions Out of Touch with Students, Poll Shows

The views of teachers, parents, and students strongly conflict with the stance of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, the three-million-member NEA and the 1.5-million-member AFT. The NEA provides model legislation to teach LGBT ideology in public schools and carries out numerous training sessions to promote gender ideology to teachers.

The NEA’s “Pronoun Guide” includes “Ze, Zim, Zir, Zay or Zee.” It urges teachers, “Inspire and encourage your student” with its two-page list of “LGBT+-affirming books.” It instructs teachers in 33 states how they can obtain a free “Rainbow Library” from GLSEN.

“You can use your work environment,” e.g., the classroom, “to show support for students of all backgrounds — for example, by hanging a Black Lives Matter poster or Pride flag or making clear that you will use a student’s personal gender pronouns,” the NEA advises teachers.

The union’s leadership has strongly emphasized its commitment to radical LGBTQ advocacy, regardless of parental objections or, seemingly, state law. “We will say gay! We will say trans!” bellowed NEA President Becky Pringle at the group’s 2022 Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly, taking aim at the popular “Parental Rights in Education” law, signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), who went on to win a rousing double-digit reelection months later. The bill says teachers may not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade. The NEA stated its union members would “validate our students,” presumably when children’s gender choice conflicts with their parents’ values.

The NEA’s chief union rival, the AFT, “also coached its members on how to inject gender identity politics into the classroom,” found a report from the Defense of Freedom Institute. The AFT’s Together Educating America’s Children (TEACH) conference last July held sessions on “Affirming LGBTQIA+ Identities in and out of the Classroom” and “The TGNCNB [Transgender, Gender-Nonconforming, Nonbinary] Inclusive School and Classroom.”

Teachers in Tennessee’s Clarksville-Montgomery County School System, which strongly supported President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, learned that the U.S. operates as a “system of oppression” that confers “privilege status” on “white,” “able-bodied,” “men, cisgendered,” “heterosexual,” “Christian” Americans; but the U.S. allegedly brands an “oppression status” on any “person of color”; “woman, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer,” “LGBQ+, polyamorous”; and people whose religious views are “pagan.”

The LGBTQ movement’s advocacy goes outside the classroom to the restroom, locker room — even the hotel room. Last summer, teachers at Governor’s Ranch Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado, attempted to force a fifth-grade girl to share a bed with a boy who identified as a girl on an overnight field trip. Last July, the AFT adopted a resolution supporting “inclusive” policies allowing men to access female facilities, “including, but not limited to, bathrooms and locker rooms.” AFT President Randi Weingartenwalked away from a reporter who asked her about girls who do not feel safe undressing in front of boys in their locker rooms.

“Both teacher unions ignore the reality that most teachers want to teach, not affirm a student’s gender identity, either due to their personal values or their beliefs that doing so oversteps their authority and encroaches on the role of parents,” says the Defense of Freedom Institute.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

After Male Basketball Player Injures 3 Female Players, Team Forfeits Game

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J.K. Rowling, the famous author of the “Harry Potter” series, has received vehement backlash from LGBT activists over her belief that men who identify as women should not be held in women’s prisons. “If you support putting violent and sexually predatory men into women’s prisons, you are knowingly forcing those women to live in fear of, and, in some proven cases, to suffer abuse that many of them will have endured pre-incarceration,” she wrote on X Tuesday.

She concluded, “Women have the basic human right not to suffer cruel and unusual punishment.” And while Rowling’s grievances centered on trans-identifying men in women’s prisons, her sentiments reflect what many fear within the realm of women’s sports, namely, girls getting hurt by physically stronger boys.

Since the presence of trans-identifying men in women’s competitions have increased, the number of women winning first, second, and third has decreased. The women and girls in swimming, track and field, golf, volleyball, dance, cross country, and other sports, are repeatedly defeated by men. For some, this alone is enough to demand a change. But when women losing to men isn’t enough to spark change, many are asking if women being hurt by men, which has happened repeatedly over the last few years, will prove to be the final straw.

Footage from a girls’ high school basketball game earlier this month is raising a lot of questions about the safety of trans participation. In a viral video from a game between Massachusetts Collegiate Charter School of Lowell and KIPP Academy, a large, male figure (who reportedly is six feet tall and has facial hair) from the KIPP team throwing a female player from the charter team to the ground as he seized the ball from her — a move that resulted in the girl gripping her back in pain. But this wasn’t the only incident.

A total of three injuries resulted from the play of this trans-identifying athlete, all of which happened before halftime, and with only five players able to play, KIPP chose to forfeit because they couldn’t afford to have any more girls get hurt.

Allegedly, the male athlete was competing among girls to reflect “the school’s commitment to ‘inclusivity and safety.’” Riley Gaines, a former NCAA All-American swimmer, posted on X, “A man hitting a woman used to be called domestic abuse. Now it’s called brave.” She added, “Who watches this [and] actually thinks this is ‘compassionate, kind, and inclusive?’”

Mary Szoch, director of Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, expressed her concern to The Washington Stand. “As a former Division I basketball player at one of the top women’s basketball programs in the country, at practice, I competed against men every day.” She said this was common for Division I women’s basketball teams, because it gave the women a chance to practice against men who were “stronger, faster, and quicker.”

However, Szoch emphasized that the male players were instructed “to be humble enough to know they are there to help the women’s team become better — not to use their physical advantages to humiliate or hurt a player.” Szoch added that men, on average, are stronger and better at sports when competing against women, and “when we don’t recognize this, women get hurt. … [A]nd deep down, everyone knows this.” But it’s a truth that “people don’t want to acknowledge … because they are afraid of being called a bigot.”

FRC’s Meg Kilgannon also commented to TWS, “It seems abusive to make the girls endure this situation.” However, she added that “seeing girls on the opposing team physically injured by ‘inclusive’ athletic participation policies is only half of the story.”

“We have to also consider the girls on the team with the male player, who have to share a locker room with him, change clothes in front of him, and pretend that he is ‘just one of the girls,’” she pointed out. “I can’t say which situation is more abusive, but both are intolerable.” For Kilgannon, it seems evident that “Massachusetts public schools, charter or not, don’t protect the educational interests or rights of women and girls, but rather advance the interests of men and men who identify as women.”

Kilgannon insisted, “This story is all the more enraging because we knew it would happen, we tried to prevent it, and now girls are getting hurt.”

Szoch added that, ultimately, “telling a biological male that he is a female and allowing him to play women’s sports doesn’t help anyone — least of all the man.” She concluded, “As a former athlete who now has a daughter, I am hopeful that the presence of men playing women’s basketball will be a wake-up call for our country. Women deserve a chance to compete on a fair and safe playing field.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED VIDEO: Anti-White Gemini | TONIGHT on TIPPING POINT

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

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

Opponents Call SAFE Acts ‘Extremist,’ but 5 Veto Overrides Suggest Otherwise

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The Ohio state legislature on Wednesday became the fifth to override a governor’s veto to enact a law protecting minors from gender transition procedures. With every successful veto override, claims of “extremism” lodged against the bill appear more and more far-fetched.

Accusations of extremism began with the very first Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, passed by the Arkansas legislature in 2021 (HB 1570). The bill sailed through the House (70-22) on March 10 and the Senate (28-7) on March 29. Despite these wide margins, Human Rights Campaign (HRC) President Alphonso David complained on March 13 of that year, “The furious pace of these bills shows that hateful anti-equality groups across the country and extremist legislators alike realize that equality is gaining momentum.” After then-Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed the bill, the Arkansas legislature responded by overriding the veto (72-25 in the House, 25-8 in the Senate) on April 6.

The campaign to protect children accelerated in 2023, when 20 state legislatures joined those of Arkansas (2021), Alabama (2022), and Arizona (2022) in passing laws to protect children from gender transition procedures (although the Ohio veto override occurred this month). As the movement grew, so did the opposition. When Tennessee enacted a bill in March, a coalition of left-wing groups including the ACLU and Lambda Legal claimed that they had “chosen fearmongering, misrepresentations, intimidation, and extremist politics over the rights of families and the lives of transgender youth.”

“Extremist, anti-LGBTQ+ politicians and their allies are waging a dangerous and cruel misinformation campaign that seeks to stigmatize not only gender-affirming care but transgender and non-binary people as well,” claimed HRC’s new president Kelley Robinson. “Through fear-mongering and propaganda, extremist leaders are working overtime to manufacture panic, rile up their base, and coax them into opposing healthcare for transgender people.”

Left-wing groups were not above indulging in a little fear-mongering of their own. “Across the country, anti-transgender extremists and politicians are putting the lives and well-being of transgender people at risk,” said Movement Advancement Project Senior Policy Researcher Logan Casey, “by attempting to outlaw access to best practice medical care not only for youth but for all transgender people.” No states have passed laws to ban gender transition procedures for adults because, although these procedures harm adults too, society recognizes that adults are competent and therefore free to make their own decisions.

Nevertheless, “extremism” remained the buzzword across the left-wing activist-sphere, especially when a governor’s veto raised the bar for passage and gave activist groups time to pile on additional pressure. “For the extremist groups that are pushing these laws, the guard rails are off,” insisted Campaign for Southern Equality executive director Rev. Jasmine Beach-Ferrara of Louisiana’s SAFE Act-style bill. GLAAD President and CEO Sarah Kate Ellis claimed that “Ohio’s extremist lawmakers inexplicably refused facts, expert testimony, and deeply personal pleas” by overriding the governor’s veto.

Despite the pressure and accusations of extremism, four state legislatures have overridden their governor’s vetoes in the past 12 months. On March 29, 2023, the Kentucky Senate (29-8) and House (76-23) voted to override Governor Andy Beshear’s (D) veto of a bill to protect minors from gender transition procedures, which also included protections for women’s sports and parental rights. On July 18, the Louisiana House (76-23) and Senate (28-11) voted to override then- Governor John Bel Edwards’s veto of the Stop Harming Our Kids Act, which told doctors to do just what the title said. On August 16, the North Carolina House (74-45) and Senate (27-18) voted to override Governor Roy Cooper’s (D) veto of that state’s bill to protect minors from gender transition procedures.

Then, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) vetoed that state’s SAFE Act at the end of the year (December 29), the first Republican governor to oppose such a measure since Hutchinson in 2021. Almost immediately, nearly every other statewide official criticized the veto, and legislators in both chambers announced plans to override. The House overrode the veto 65-27 on January 10, and the Senate overrode the veto 24-8 on January 24, 2024.

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins extracted a lesson for governors from the veto override trend. “Given that five legislatures have overridden gubernatorial vetoes of legislation protecting minors from the transgender activists pushing experimental drugs and surgeries,” he remarked, “any governor who vetoes these SAFE Act-type laws is either politically tone-deaf or being influenced by those who profit from this morally devastating, but financially lucrative, industry.”

Another implication of the trend is that protecting minors from harmful, experimental gender transition procedures is not an “extremist” position, as its opponents keep on insisting. This is because of the role that executive vetoes play in America’s system of checks and balances.

In Federalist Paper 73, Alexander Hamilton explained that an executive veto “furnishes an additional security against the enaction of improper laws. It establishes a salutary check upon the legislative body, calculated to guard the community against the effects of faction, precipitancy, or of any impulse unfriendly to the public good, which may happen to influence a majority of that body.”

Hamilton was defending the veto power given to the U.S. president under the not-yet-ratified U.S. Constitution, but his reasoning is general enough to apply to gubernatorial vetoes against state legislation, too.

The “propriety” of a veto, Hamilton added, turns “upon the supposition that the legislature will not be infallible.” He articulated three general scenarios in which a veto could serve as a useful check. First, “the love of power may sometimes betray it into a disposition to encroach upon the rights of other members of the government.” Second, “a spirit of faction may sometimes pervert its deliberations.” Third, “impressions of the moment may sometimes hurry it into measures which itself, on maturer reflexion, would condemn.”

While the first scenario is not relevant to the SAFE Act debate, claims of “extremism” certainly suggest a “spirit of faction,” and they may also suggest the legislature itself would change its mind upon “maturer reflection.” The multiple vetoes issued against SAFE Acts provide case studies to see whether these applications prove true.

If the SAFE Acts were imprudent bills that legislatures passed too hastily, we would expect to find many legislators switching their votes during the veto override attempts, perhaps even enough that the bill would fail to reach whatever supermajority threshold was required. That is emphatically not what we find. The Arkansas bill lost one vote between its first passage and the veto override. The Kentucky bill lost one vote in the Senate but gained one in the House. The Louisiana bill lost one vote in the Senate, while four House members switched their votes two-and-two, canceling each other out. The North Carolina bill actually gained two votes. In Ohio, no legislators switched their votes.

Thus, after hundreds of legislators voted on these bills, and then voted on them again after they had been vetoed, the net effect was a change of zero votes (excluding different vote totals caused by absent legislators). These five bills lost a total of five votes and gained a total of five votes between first passage and the veto override.

The other claim raised against the SAFE Act is that it is the product of an extremist faction — in this case, its detractors allege, having swept through nearly the entire Republican Party. This claim would be more plausible if all the legislators who voted for the SAFE Act were of the same party, but that is not what we find. In Louisiana, multiple Democrats in the Senate voted for the bill both on initial passage and in overriding the governor’s veto — a governor of their own party. In North Carolina, two House Democrats actually switched their votes during the veto override, to approve the bill against the wishes of their own party’s governor.

For that matter, the North Carolina legislature would not have even taken up a SAFE Act-style bill if not for the extremism of Democrats in the chamber. Earlier in the year, Representative Tricia Cotham had switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party because her fellow Democrats were bullying her over introducing a school choice bill. Her party switch gave the Republicans the supermajority they needed to advance legislation the governor would likely veto.

There is a tendency today to view things like veto power and legislative supermajorities as simply a matter of who has power to do what. Succumbing to that tendency would be a mistake, because it capitulates to a Marxist view of politics that sees everything through the lens of power dynamics. Sometimes, the usual political divisions break down, and government officials make decisions based upon what they believe is best for society, a certain group in society, or at least for their reelection chances. As noted above, some Democratic legislators voted for SAFE Act-style bills, while some Republican governors vetoed them. The veto even exerts a restraining influence in the far-Left, one-party state of California, where in September Governor Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed an anti-parent bill. The more statesmanlike use of the veto propounded by Hamilton may not always exert itself, but it still plays a role too large to dismiss.

An executive veto serves to “increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws, through haste, inadvertence, or design,” said Hamilton. “The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest.”

SAFE Act-style bills have now been considered a great many times across a great many states. In just a three-year span, nearly half of all U.S. state legislatures (23, to be exact) have seen fit to implement protections for minors suffering gender dysphoria, who lack the long-term vision and decision-making prudence to clearly see the harms of irreversible gender transition procedures. Each of those states conducted extensive hearings, featuring testimony from both sides of the debate, and were exposed to public input (including rather rude protests from the Left) on the bills’ potential merits and effects. There has been no lack of examination or due deliberation.

In almost every state, a supermajority of the legislature (often two-thirds, or even three-fourths) voted in favor of the measures. In five states, a supermajority enacted the bills of a governor’s veto. Such overwhelming support, almost by definition, implies that these bills enjoy support from more than just an “extremist” faction, notwithstanding the slanders of their detractors.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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

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

Ohio Becomes 23rd State to Protect Minors from the Transgender Industry

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The bellwether state of Ohio has become the 23rd state to protect children from transgender injections and surgeries, and the 24th to safeguard fairness and privacy in women’s sports, as lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to override the Republican governor’s veto. Yet Democratic opponents claimed Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus Christ would have supported transgender surgeries for kids, a transgender activist changed the words of a Christian hymn to support transgender surgeries, and liberals likened withholding cross-sex hormones from children to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

The Ohio State Senate voted 24-8 on Wednesday afternoon to reverse the veto of Substitute H.B. 68 by Governor Mike DeWine (R). (The Senate erroneously announced the tally as 23-9 immediately after the vote.) The bill — which combines the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act (SAFE) and the Save Women’s Sports Act — bans the use of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and gender mutilation surgeries to anyone under the age of 18. It also prohibits men from competing against women in sports, prevents courts from denying or limiting custody to a parent who refuses to “affirm” their child’s transgender identity, and refuses to fund minors’ transgender procedures through Medicaid.

The Ohio House of Representatives overrode the veto on January 10 by a 65-27 margin — four more votes than when the House first passed the bill on December 14. The bill will become state law in 90 days.

“Given that five legislatures have overridden gubernatorial vetoes of legislation protecting minors from the transgender activists pushing experimental drugs and surgeries, any governor who vetoes these SAFE Act-type laws is either politically tone-deaf or being influenced by those who profit from this morally devastating, but financially lucrative industry,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins. (Emphasis in original.) Supermajorities of state legislators voted to override Democratic governors’ vetoes of various gender protection bills in Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina in 2023. Arkansas lawmakers also enacted the first SAFE Act over the veto of then-Governor and failed 2024 presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson (R).

Ohio to Trans Industry: ‘We Reject Your Junk Science’

“Today, Ohio has told an exploitative medical industry that we reject your junk science and will no longer allow you to experiment on our children,” said Aaron Baer, president of the Center for Christian Virtue (CCV), an Ohio-based citizen action group that spearheaded support for the override. “This marks a turning point in Ohio: we will not remain silent when our children are being harmed.” Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Matt Sharp thanked Ohio lawmakers for rejecting “the politicized and harmful practice of pushing minors towards irreversible drugs and surgeries in favor of compassionate mental health care that gives them time to grow into comfort with their bodies and true identities.”

“No one has the right to harm children, and, thankfully, states have the power — and duty — to protect them,” said Sharp. “Our most basic duty as parents is to protect our children,” said Peter Range, CEO of Ohio Right to Life, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “Our children are our greatest legacy, and today’s vote ensures our children are protected in Ohio.” Thanks to the vote, “Child gender mutilation and gender ideology as a whole will end with a whimper,” said Chloe Cole, a detransitioner who testified in favor of the bill and returned to Columbus for Wednesday’s vote.

Democrats Invoke Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Japanese Internment Camps to Argue for Transing Kids

The override vote overcame procedural roadblocks, disruptions by radical transgender activists, and disputes over whether the bill represented God’s will. Sen. Bill DeMora (D-25) moved to adjourn before the chamber could vote on the measure.

A transgender activist interrupted the very first speaker, Sen. Kristina Roegner (R-25), by singing an edited version of “Jesus Loves the Little Children” after fellow transgender activists booed and raised their middle fingers. “Jesus loves the little children. L-G-B-T-Q-I-A, He would be here — Jesus would be here — on their side today!” the activist belted out in the manner of a show tune, before being escorted out of the Capitol.

Democrats picked up the talking point, as Sen. Paul Hicks-Hudson (D-11) insisted overriding DeWine’s veto “does not show that Jesus does love all of us.”

“That same Jesus has determined the gender of every child. Let’s respect truly what Jesus” created, retorted Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-18). “Jesus does love all the little children, including the women who compete [in] sports,” said Sen. George F. Lang (R-4).

Yet Senate Democratic Leader Nickie Antonio (D-23) — who announced, “I’m a lesbian” during her floor speech — said refusing to experiment on children “wasn’t the Christianity I was brought up with.”

Hicks-Hudson also told lawmakers, “We are slapping” the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., who once said it is necessary to become “maladjusted.”

Another Democrat compared Republicans denying minors cross-sex hormones and gender-reassignment surgeries to Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s order herding Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II. Sen. Kent Smith (D-21), who noted he encountered men who identify as female in his “side-hustle” as a part-time roller derby announcer, compared his fellow Democrats to then-Colorado Governor Ralph Carr (R), who opposed Roosevelt’s order.

Smith, who accused his opponents of the “systematic dehumanization” of trans-identifying people, said one public school official told him she had more trans-identifying children in school than those who identified as homosexual.

Antonio invoked Issue 1, stating, “A majority of the voters spoke when they told us in November that the government shouldn’t be involved in their own personal, private health care decisions.” Yet during the debate over Issue 1, proponents steadfastly denied the amendment had any impact on transgender procedures for minors.

DeMora also inveighed that H.B. 68 “is anti-science and very hateful,” “horrible,” and “the inevitable outcome of this bill will be loss of life.” Legislators should pass laws “to make it easier” for children to get hormone injections, he stated.

Cross-sex hormone injections have caused females to suffer from side effects including “erythrocytosis, severe liver dysfunction, coronary artery disease, cerebrovascular disease, hypertension, increased risk of breast and uterine cancers, and irreversible infertility,” states H.B. 68. “For biological males,” such injections cause “thromboembolic disease, cholelithiasis, coronary artery disease, macroprolactinoma, cerebrovascular disease, hypertriglyceridemia, breast cancer, and irreversible infertility.”

“Suicide rates, psychiatric morbidities, and mortality rates remain markedly elevated above the background population after inpatient gender reassignment surgery has been performed,” the bill notes.

Lawmakers reluctantly added a grandfather clause for children who had already begun transgender procedures before the bill’s passage at DeWine’s request; yet he vetoed the bill anyway.

Transgender procedures are not what gender-confused minors need, said Sen. Roegner. “What they need to know is that they are loved for who they are. They need compassion; they need counseling. What they do not need is chemical castration, sterilization, or physical mutilation. We cannot let this happen to the children of Ohio,” she said. “It is medical malpractice, and it needs to stop.”

Similarly, Sen. Shane Wilkin (R-17) said safety guided his support for allowing girls to have their own space. “I, along with many in my district, do not want shared locker rooms with boys,” he said. “I find this issue is not as difficult as we’re making it out to be.”

Ohioans largely agree. Sen. Andy Brenner (R-19) revealed on Wednesday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” that 90% of the constituents who contacted his office urged him to protect children.

DeWine Yielded to ‘Experts’ on Transgenderism and COVID

Some in Ohio expressed surprise when DeWine, a centrist Republican, vetoed H.B. 68 on December 29. One week later, DeWine banned transgender surgery for minors by executive order, and he announced new regulations requiring greater psychological counseling for adults before and after transgender procedures. “I think it’s a good way to take this issue off the table” and “talk about other things,” said DeWine.

Brenner said, in lieu of longitudinal studies tracking the long-term impact of puberty-blockers on children, DeWine yielded to the dubious “consensus” of “experts” on transgender studies — much as he did “masking and lockdowns a few years ago” in response to COVID-19. “They don’t really have the data to back up what they’re doing,” Brenner noted.

Between DeWine’s executive actions and H.B. 68, “Ohio now has one of the strongest pieces to protect children in the nation,” said Cole at a press conference alongside the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Gary Click (R-88), shortly after the vote.

“The SAFE Act and Save Women’s Sports Act are the civil rights issues of our day, ensuring that children have the right to grow up intact and that women are no longer subject to men invading their spaces,” said Click.

Wednesday was a “great day for Ohio women,” agreed State Rep. Jena Powell (R-80), who championed the Save Women’s Sports Act. “I promised to fight for integrity in women’s sports, and I did not give up until we won.” Liberty Counsel Action also called H.B. 68 “a win for the safety of women and children.”

Not everyone was pleased. “F*** the Ohio Senate,” cursed the Ohio Women’s Alliance Action Fund (which did not censor its message). OWA helped craft Issue 1, which opponents said was written to create a constitutional “right” to transgender procedures for minors without parental notification — a position OWA and many of its sponsors support. OWA Deputy Director Jordyn Close, who describes herself as “a sex and pleasure advocate … working on destigmatizing and uplifting sex work,” has said “all barriers to abortion are racist,” because “every abortion is essential.” Similarly, the capital city’s chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Alliance — YWCA Columbus — excoriated the allegedly “discriminatory bill” as “another demonstration of the state weaponizing control over bodily autonomy.”

Ohio Republicans said they stand ready to protect the state’s progress toward protecting the vulnerable and creating a more compassionate state. “I am prepared to defend it against the inevitable legal challenge,” said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R).

While the bill’s passage is “a milestone for Ohio and the nation, there is still more to be accomplished,” said Rep. Click. “We must ensure that all individuals who experience regret have full access to both medical and mental health resources as they realign with their authentic selves.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

WHO Chief: Nations Must ‘Counteract Conservative Opposition’ to Abortion, Promote Transgenderism

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A global government body has told nations it is “imperative” that they “counteract conservative opposition” and “enact progressive laws” that legalize prostitution and intentionally infect people with AIDS. At the same time, the international body has indicated it plans to roll out guidelines normalizing transgender cross-sex hormone injections worldwide.

The World Health Organization (WHO) ushered in 2024 with a bulletin titled “Advancing the ‘sexual’ in sexual and reproductive health and rights: a global health, gender equality and human rights imperative,” co-written by WHO’s director-general, Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus, a former associate of Ethiopia’s repressive Marxist government.

“Political leaders at all levels must champion sexual health as part of sexual and reproductive health to counteract conservative opposition,” states the WHO Bulletin released on January 1. “Policy-makers must enact progressive laws and policies to expand access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services,” it says.

“Countries must repeal laws that criminalize homosexuality, sex work and HIV transmission,” the bulletin advises. Ghebreyesus calls on world leaders to “foster societies where all people can experience their sexuality safely, positively,” couching the advancement of the Sexual Revolution as a moral imperative.

“Upholding sexual health is a moral obligation. Immense suffering is caused when people lack bodily autonomy; control over their fertility” — a likely reference to abortion — as well as “the freedom to experience safe, consensual and pleasurable sexual relationships,” states the bulletin. The bulletin did not explain how having sex with strangers for money and allowing people to spread AIDS with impunity increases sexual pleasure. Surveys have continually found the most sexually satisfied people are committed married couples who had no previous sexual experience.

The WHO bulletin also advocates population control measures in the name of reducing carbon emissions. “Sexual health even impacts environmental sustainability. Slowing unsustainable population growth by investing in family planning and education reduces pressures on natural resources and helps break cycles of poverty,” writes Ghebreyesus.

The bulletin insists that such libidinous concerns as the “right” to pleasure are “not fringe issues” but flow naturally from “universal values that cut across religious, partisan and cultural divides.”

The WHO missive echoed a 2012 report from the Global Commission on HIV and the Law — formed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and funded in part by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations — which called on nations to repeal laws that “prohibit commercial sex, such as laws against … brothel-keeping.” It also opposed laws criminalizing intentionally infecting others with HIV/AIDS, while criticizing “conservative interpretations of religion” and laws based on “morality.”

The new WHO bulletin advocates a broad agenda rooted in the extreme left-wing concepts of intersectionality and equity. “Violations of human rights in the context of sexual health are embedded in hierarchical structures of gender, generation, lineage, race, class, and caste, in which more powerful or privileged people control the bodies and emotions of the less powerful. People with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities often face stigma and discrimination,” states Ghebreyesus.

WHO condemned medical researchers for fixating on 99% of the global population through their “focus on predominantly cisgender and heterosexual populations.”

Ironically, WHO encourages politicians to enact new policies, because “[s]exual health of women and girls and gender-diverse individuals is politicized.” Yet WHO wishes for global support of the Sexual Revolution to go beyond political leaders to become a whole-of-society undertaking.

“Civil society and affected communities must mobilize to demand services, promote rights and reduce stigma,” writes Ghebreyesus. “Global leadership and funding are essential. International institutions should ensure sexual health is integrated within health, development and human rights frameworks.” Foreign aid should prioritize WHO’s goals, as should private nonprofit organizations, the memo states.

The New Year’s Day bulletin came as the World Health Organization asked for comment on the group of radical transgender activists WHO recruited to draw up global health guidelines on transgender procedures. The vast majority have no background in medicine.

After public backlash, WHO announced the group would not decree how doctors should care for minors who say they’re experiencing gender dysphoria. However, the adult guidelines will clearly affirm the transgender industry’s invasive procedures in the name of human rights.

“This guideline has a specific focus on adults and will not address issues relating to children and adolescents,” WHO announced last Monday, January 15.

WHO groused that many global health care settings “lack policies to facilitate access to inclusive and gender affirming care.” It clarified that “gender-affirming health care can include … a number of social, psychological, behavioural or medical (including hormonal treatment or surgery) interventions,” but “these new technical guidelines … will not consider surgical interventions.”

However, the new guidelines will insist doctors “provide more inclusive, acceptable and effective” care for trans-identifying people — by which they mean cross-sex hormone injections. “The guideline will reflect the principles of human rights, gender equality, universality and equity,” the January 15 statement proclaimed. It will also advance WHO’s alleged commitment to two United Nations statements “to protect all people from discrimination and violence on the grounds of gender identity and/or gender expression” and “eliminate discrimination in healthcare settings, including discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression.”

Banning alleged “discrimination” against transgender people could penalize Christian health care workers with faith-based objections to carrying out gender-conversion procedures.

“This is obviously highly concerning for several reasons,” Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “One is the aggregation of worldwide power into entities like the World Health Organization, which are far removed from the proper decision-making authority.” But a more pertinent objection, he said, is the content of global governance bodies’ decisions.

“We’re seeing WHO and other world bodies — the U.N., Organization of American States, World Economic Forum — increasingly aligned with the anti-Christ position,” advancing views that are “antithetical to the Word of God. They are opposed to what Jesus says,” Weber told TWS. “God speaks to us about creation, about creating us male and female, about how before He formed us in the womb He knew us. That’s very different than what the world power centers are saying about reality.”

It is all the more concerning such ideological impositions are being carried out in the name of “science,” he said. Weber compared the use of the word “science” to a cargo vehicle driving down the highway: “We see the car moving, but we don’t see what’s being carried inside it. What’s inside [WHO’s use of the term ‘science’] is ideology. The term ‘health’ is taking on an ideological bent — not only on gender ideology but on abortion, which is the taking of an innocent life. The term health is being used to promote a pro-abortion ideology worldwide.”

The new documents come as the U.S. government is asking citizens to comment on the proposed WHO Pandemic Agreement, originally called a treaty, which the Biden administration is considering adopting without Senate confirmation. The WHO agreement would require the U.S. to redistribute 20% of all vaccines and other equipment to WHO for redistribution, adopts a “One Health” policy equating human health with animal and plant life, and calls on governments to crack down on any social media post WHO dubs “misinformation.”

WHO’s decision to promote legalized prostitution, transgenderism, and population control measures in the name of health makes the global body “a dangerous place for everyone,” Weber told TWS.

The deadline to comment on the WHO Pandemic Agreement is Monday, January 22 by 5 p.m. Eastern time.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

‘The Lost Boys’: Documentary Looks at Impact of Transgenderism on Young Men

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A new documentary is exposing the horrors that the transgender movement wreaks upon men, as well as the social and medical-industrial conditions that have led to those horrors. The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network released “The Lost Boys: Searching for Manhood” this week, featuring interviews with numerous men in both the U.S. and the U.K. who have undergone gender transition procedures, in addition to leading psychologists in the field of gender dysphoria.

The documentary examines the key common factors that lead young men to question their biological sex and seek gender transitions — namely, pornography, grooming, and the latent cultural detritus of feminism. It also explores how the medical industry promotes transgenderism, and how the young men wounded by transgenderism seek recovery and healing.

Some young men begin to question their biological sex during puberty, according to the documentary. One of the chief reasons behind this is the socially prevalent claim that men are inherently dangerous or toxic. “I think the messaging these boys have heard throughout their childhoods about ‘toxic masculinity’ has instilled a sense of shame, shame about being male,” explained clinical psychotherapist Dr. Joe Burgo. “And when puberty hits, that shame is deeply intensified because they don’t know how to process this sexual drive that they’ve got, which is often — I wouldn’t say ‘violent,’ but forceful. It’s fueled also by pornography that’s online.”

Pornography seemed to be a key factor for the young men interviewed in “The Lost Boys.” A man named Brian explained that he discovered pornography at a very young age and quickly became addicted, progressing from gay porn to transgender to what he called “this bizarre subgenre of pornography called sissy hypnosis porn.” Brian said, “I was able to sort of keep a lid on it while I was going to college. When I graduated college, that’s when I spiraled out of control.”

Another young man, Ritchie, explained that he became heavily involved in online forums, where he was groomed by older men in transgender chat rooms. He said he went to these websites seeking answers and advice from men who he presumed had transitioned genders. Most of those men turned out to be homosexual, not transgender, and convinced Ritchie to self-manufacture and distribute child pornography. Other men told Ritchie how freeing and liberating it was to transition and encouraged him to start. “The way I see it specifically in the actual sense of grooming is, say, a trans-identified boy has assignations online with older men who encourage him to dress up in female clothing and they give him lots of praise,” Burgo commented. “They’re predatory men, there’s no other word for them. There’s a whole predatory group of men out there who are exploiting the insecurities and the shame of these young men.”

Ritchie also explained that he was told by older men online that his testosterone made him “toxic.” He said he was told that “testosterone is poison.” Another young man interviewed, Torren, also talked of the influence that social media and online chat rooms had on him. “I keep hearing the messages, from media, reddit and Instagram being big things, and you see all of these people transitioning and they just seem happy. You see them on social media, they seem like they’re just saying like it solved all their problems,” he said. “I think I knew that it was too good to be true, but I struggled with it.”

Graham Linehan, an Irish comedy writer who was largely blackballed for speaking out against the transgender agenda, stated, “There is obviously a problem with young men.” He explained, “Part of the problem is that they are — the things they naturally find funny, the things they naturally find interesting, the things they naturally find sexy have all been problematized — they’re being made to feel like there’s something wrong with all these things, these very natural things they’re feeling.” Linehan added, “On top of that, you have an increasingly censorious kind of atmosphere where they really can’t say what they want to say.”

Burgo agreed, saying, “Pretty much all the messaging they’ve been given — during grade school and growing up, in media, from their families, from their teachers, everywhere — is that men, traditional men are really bad and that men need to be more like women.” He further noted, “I mean, if you look at the American Psychological Association’s guidelines for working with men and boys, they basically pathologize traditional masculinity. These boys grow up feeling like being a man is awful.”

Dr. Az Hakeem, who is billed as the U.K.’s top gender expert, explained that another key factor is mental health conditions that pro-transgenderism medical professionals often overlook. He stated that all of the male patients he has worked with over the past 23 years have been on the autism spectrum. “The thing about the autistic mind is it’s very ‘black and white,’ it loves categories, it loves rules,” Hazeem said. “And what I was hearing from my male patients were, ‘Well, to be male you have to be like this, this, this, and this. I’m not like this, therefore I’m other, I’m non-male, therefore I must be female.’” Burgo explained that young men on the autism spectrum tend to be “very dissociated from and uncomfortable with their bodies and the sensory world, they don’t like touch. And the emergence of sexuality and all the sensations it’s provoked is deeply disturbing and often dissociative.”

Yet medical professionals don’t seek to help autistic young men uncomfortable in their bodies find ways to fit in and accept themselves as they are: they rush to promote gender transition procedures without even diagnosing any other condition. Ritchie described how he was put on a regimen of hormone drugs, approved by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), and began seeing a “gender therapist.” He said, “The first question I got asked by the NHS psychiatrist was, ‘Do you want genital reassignment surgery?’ And that was my very first psychiatric session at the NHS and I was like, ‘I don’t think so. I think I want therapy to be honest…’”

But his doctor kept asking Ritchie if he wanted surgery. “It was just all the time, constant, constant, constant, ‘Do you want surgery? Do you want surgery? Do you want surgery?” he said. Ritchie responded that he wanted to know what the risks are and wanted to give the procedure careful thought, afraid that he might regret it. He even brought his mother with him to the doctor, and she expressed concern over how the estrogen drugs he was taking were reacting with his antidepressants and how surgery might affect that. Ritchie said the doctor “did his best to shut my mother down and make her believe that if she said anything else [against surgery] it would drive us to suicide.”

A young Norwegian man, Alexander, explained that psychotherapy in Norway is rare, and very serious conditions must be met before an individual may be assigned a therapist. So Alexander “exaggerated” and pretended to be suicidal in order to get an appointment with a therapist who would prescribe him estrogen drugs. After beginning his hormone battery, Alexander talked to his therapist only three times before being given a letter of recommendation for genital surgery. “How can you come to a conclusion that this kind of surgery, life-changing surgery, is the best choice for the patient after talking to the patient three times?” he asked.

All of the young men interviewed talked about the effects estrogen had on them, particularly noting a “brain fog” resulting from the drug. “I never really felt suicidal or anything until I took estrogen. It didn’t make my life any better — in fact, it made my life worse, because I started to feel really depressed,” Brian explained. Estrogen decreases testosterone, and as testosterone decreases in men, they become depressed, lethargic, and unmotivated. As estrogen increases in men, it worsens those issues, impairs memory and attention span, and clouds reasoning and judgement. Both Ritchie and Alexander explained that they likely would have decided against surgery if they hadn’t been placed on estrogen.

“Medical professionals really led me astray with this,” Brian said. “Some people are now messed up for life — I’ll never be able to have kids, my rugged masculinity is never gonna come back. It’s all patient-led, it’s patient-led. ‘I wanna do hormones and I wanna have this surgery.’” He explained, “A good therapist, I think, would have said, ‘Well, maybe you’re transgender, who knows? But let’s get sober for a while and then let’s revisit this topic.’ But that’s not what happened.” Hakeem added, “Parents have bought into it, they’re being fed all this propaganda, like if you don’t let your child do this they’ll kill themselves. There’s no evidence to suggest that’s true.”

By the documentary’s end, everyone agreed that men cannot become women — that the chief claim of transgenderism is a lie. “Gender ideology does not believe that there’s biological sex, it believes that ‘felt gender’ has replaced biological sex, it believes that there are a hundred genders. And I think it’s nonsense. There’s biological sex. You’re male, you’re female, and a very tiny proportion of the people are intersex,” Hakeem explained. Burgo said, “I do not believe that anyone is born in the wrong body nor do I believe that anyone has an innate ‘gender identity’ that might be out of alignment with their sexed body. We are lying to children, I think we need to stop lying to children.”

Ritchie said he started a recovery group for young men who have gone through gender transition procedures. “We’ve all opted for something we call ‘recovery’ rather than ‘detransition,’” he explained. “Because there was no transition, I never went to female, and I’m not going back to male. I never left.” Alexander said, “I’m at peace that I’m a man, that I cannot change that, and I think of it as a biological reality. In Norway we don’t have a word for ‘detransitioner.’ We have a word that can be loosely translated to ‘a regretter.’” Torren stated that he has accepted who he is, saying, “I … realized that all these steps that I was taking to try to somehow ‘be my true self’ were actually taking me away from my true self, were actually taking me away from who I was.”

“The Lost Boys” is currently available for free on YouTube.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Christian Teachers Reinstated as Lawsuit over Transgender Policy Continues

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

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

Airlines Prioritize Wokeness Over Safety: But at What Cost?

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My dad is a certified physician assistant. As such, he often shares spontaneous medical advice with me (although part of that is just because he’s my dad and cares about my wellbeing.) For instance, some advice he’s given me that he would give to anyone is if you or someone you know needs surgery or a medical procedure, be sure to ask the doctor in charge two questions: “How many times have you performed this operation? And when was the last time you did it?”

According to my dad, these questions are crucial to ask because you want to make sure you can fully trust the person who’s handling your safety and survival. And that can be said about nearly anything, right? The fear of flying, for instance, is extremely common. But I’m sure more people will come to feel the same as the pilots and airlines responsible for passenger safety and survival are increasingly untrustworthy.

Last week, an Alaska Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing after loose parts caused a portion of the plane’s body to blow off less than 20 minutes after takeoff. Passengers on that flight were terrified, and many thought they were “going to die.” Thankfully, there were no casualties, and even the boy closest to the danger was left relatively unharmed. Some, perhaps, consider it a miracle.

But here’s the reality: “To an incredibly dangerous extent,” wrote Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, “The airline industry is in the process of actively making itself less competent and reliable.” But why? It’s simple. The airline industry is prioritizing wokeness — in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — over safety and qualified personnel.

If your grandfather needed heart surgery, you want to know, as much as humanly possible, that you can trust the cardiothoracic surgeon holding the life of your loved one in their hands. Yes, tragedies do still occur sometimes, but the difference is taking every precaution you can up to that point. This same concept should apply to the pilots flying hundreds of people across oceans and continents. Pilots are very much responsible for the lives of those on board. And yet, airlines such as United and Alaska have decided their priorities must be fixated on skin color.

United, Alaska, and other airlines aren’t focused on hiring qualified individuals — those who not only received their pilot license, but truly earned it. Instead, these airlines only seem to care about what their employees look like. Or as Walsh put it, “[I]n their various public statements and press releases, United Airlines has made it very clear that they’re mainly interested in hiring pilots on the basis of skin color and gender, rather than competence.”

I find it hard to fathom that a staple in the industry, Boeing, cares more about scoring perfectly on tests that evaluate LGBT policies than whether their aircrafts are equipped to take off without crashing. Which, by the way, Boeing did score perfectly on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2023 Corporate Equality Index. Oh, and so did American, Southwest, Alaska, and some 545 other businesses. And while not everyone scored perfectly on their radical gender and sexuality quiz, most airlines at least share the same DEI goals. But at what cost?

The trend seems to be that any time woke principles are prioritized, people get hurt — physically or mentally. The transgender movement is a perfect example. Minors are told they’re born in the wrong body, and that the puberty they’re experiencing is actually a sign to defy basic biology. So, they proceed with the hormone blockers and the “gender-affirming care.” So-called medical professionals sign off on double mastectomies and testosterone for healthy teenage girls. And in the end, they suffer the consequences of constant pain, rashes, and infections for the rest of their lives.

Too often, it’s permanent, life-changing damage. It’s heartbreaking. And that’s the reality of prioritizing wokeness: It destroys lives. And the companies like Boeing thatemphasizing wokeness over safety will perhaps, sooner or later, be responsible for ending lives. That is, if they continue to hire pilots who don’t know how to fly and engineers who don’t know how to build.

Paul Fitzpatrick, president of 1792 Exchange, shared with The Washington Stand, “It’s time to free Boeing from their captivity to political activist groups so they can get back to building safe and innovative aircraft. Distractions are many at Boeing when they are pleasing and funding divisive and extreme ideologies.”

He continued, “To score 100% on Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, Boeing allowed a political stakeholder to dictate policies on personnel, marketing, operations, and lobbying. Whether it is that issue set, divisive DEI policies, or climate extremism, Boeing should reject stakeholder capitalism and return their financial and mental focus to hiring the most qualified talent to produce the safest airplanes possible.”

To Boeing and all other companies who have misplaced priorities, Fitzpatrick reiterated, “[T]heir duty [is] to shareholders and customers. They must get back to business.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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

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

Top 10 Underreported Stories of 2023

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Although the legacy media lift up non-stories every year, they offset the spilled ink by underreporting stories of great national importance. Here are 10 of the most significant stories ignored by the legacy media in 2023.

1. The Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto

On March 27, Audrey Elizabeth Hale entered Nashville’s Covenant School and murdered six innocent people: three nine-year-old children and three adults. Although school shootings have become distressingly commonplace, elements of this atrocity set it apart from other mass shootings: Hale identified as a transgender male named “Aiden,” and her target was a Christian school.

“One day, this will make more sense,” Hale texted her former middle school basketball teammate, Averianna Patton, on the morning of the shooting. “I’ve left plenty of evidence behind.”

Yet the government-media industrial complex has assured that day has not come. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department has continued to withhold Hale’s manifesto nine months after the shooting — and the legacy media largely ignored leaked pages of Hale’s diary, posted on social media by talk show host Steven Crowder on November 6.

Crowder obtained only three pages of Hale’s diary, but reading Hale’s words, it’s easy to see why the media suppressed them: They shatter the media narrative about mass shooters. “Wanna kill all you little crackers” with “your white privileges,” wrote Hale. “I hope I have a high death count.”

“God let my wrath take over my anxiety,” she mock-prayed.

The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on the leaked diary pages — without quoting a single word of their content. (The Post story quoted the manifesto … of Payton Gendron, a teenage white supremacist who targeted black shoppers in a supermarket in Buffalo in 2022.) NBC News covered the police investigation into the leak, not Hale’s words. When news leaks thwart conservative aims, they’re news; when leaks harm liberal causes, they’re prosecutions. (See Daleiden, David.)

What’s more, the media know the profound pain their silence has caused the people of Nashville. “Spiritually it’s eating me, it’s eating me alive right now right now [sic], because I’m trying to make God help me wrap my mind around what, what is this God?” said Patton shortly after Hale’s rampage. The media could have answered her question and assuaged her existential angst, but they let her suffer for political ends.

2. Studies Show the Dangers of Transgender Surgeries and the LGBTQ Lifestyle

When historians look back, they may say 2023 marked a turning point when the harms of transgender surgeries became public knowledge. Several studies this year revealed the dangers of the LGBT lifestyle.

Perhaps most dramatically, the chair of a transgender surgery department found that people who have transgender surgeries are lonelier and more depressed than those who do nothing — as are trans-identified people who play on sports teams of the opposite sex. “[H]igher loneliness levels were significantly associated with … already having a gender reassignment surgery [and] more than 4 [hours] a week of sports activities,” as “compared to no sports activity,” said a study by Dr. Marco Blessmann, the founding chair of University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf’s plastic surgery department. The German facility carries out such common transgender procedures as “labiaplasty” and “breast augmentation,” as well as “other surgical services,” and has every financial incentive to come to different conclusions, yet its peer-reviewed studies detail the harm its own procedures cause.

A different study found a majority (55%) of women who had vaginoplasty experienced pain, sometimes for years after the procedure, and one in three has difficulty urinating and having sex. The data come from a study of patients who underwent “bottom surgery” from the Postoperative Care Clinic at the Women’s College Hospital (WCH) in Ontario between 2018 and 2020. Media reported the study, sparsely, in January.

Among the unlikely sources contradicting the LGBTQ narrative that all lifestyles are equally healthy, the Biden administration noted the deep ties between identifying as LGBT and mental illness. As this author reported:

“‘Female students, LGBQ+ students, and students who had any same-sex partners were more likely than their peers to experience poor mental health and suicidal thoughts and behaviors,’ said a Biden administration report released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Teenagers who identified as LGBTQ were twice as likely to report ‘poor mental health’ as those who identified as heterosexual, three times as likely to have ‘seriously considered attempting suicide’ or ‘made a suicide plan,’ and 366.6% more likely to have attempted suicide. Not only do they contemplate suicide more frequently, but they are 700% more likely to have injured themselves in a suicide attempt. While only three out of every 100 straight students have been injured in a suicide attempt, the number soars to one out of every seven teens who identifies as LGBTQ.

“‘Nearly 70% of LGBQ+ students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness … and more than 20% of LGBQ+ students attempted suicide,’ said the CDC report.”

3. Who Leaked the Dobbs Decision?

Weeks before the Supreme Court acted to right a legal and historical wrong by overturning Roe v. Wade, something truly unprecedented happened: Someone leaked a draft copy of the decision in the case — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — to Politico. The activist Left exploded in rage. A year-long campaign of violence targeted pro-life churches and pregnancy resource centers, while an armed man traveled to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home intent on shooting him. The Supreme Court launched an investigation but officially announced in January that it could not determine who leaked the report.

“I personally have a pretty good idea who is responsible, but that’s different from the level of proof that is needed to name somebody,” said Justice Samuel Alito, the author of the Dobbs decision, in April. (The International Business Times has noted many conservatives believe the leaker is Amit Jain, a clerk for Sonia Sotomayor with a history of contacting Politico.) But to their shame, the media — which took pains to identify every individual within miles of the U.S. Capitol on January 6 — did not pursue the story doggedly, because it did not fit their narrative.

Another honorable mention in this category is, “Who brought cocaine to the White House?” Like the leaked Dobbs decision, the identity of the individual who left a bag of cocaine in the West Wing this July remains officially unsolved.

4. Our Open Border Transforms America

Joe Biden has set a number of records; unfortunately, they are all for new national humiliations. Among his worst failures is the open U.S. border with Mexico, where illegal immigration has broken all U.S. records each successive year of the Biden administration. In all, a reported 10 million illegal entries have taken place since Biden took office — and they have radically and deliberately transformed the nation we live in, against the will of the American people.

Thanks to this influx, the United States now has the largest number and percentage of foreign-born residents in American history: 49.5 million people, or 15% of the U.S. population. The illegal population grew so precipitously in part, because the Biden administration has failed to remove 99% of the illegal immigrants released into the United States. Among these illegals is a record number of border-crossers whose names are on the terrorist watchlist. Yet the Biden administration has reduced criminal alien deportations.

The problem has finally reached America’s “sanctuary cities,” as Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) sent busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, Chicago, Los Angles, and the Big Apple. New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) has said the problem will “destroy” his city and implored the Biden administration to send illegal immigrants to every city, town, and village in America. (Which, for all we know, the administration is already doing.) No one knows where the planeloads of illegal immigrants Biden flies around the country are going.

The Left plans to withhold border security until Republicans give in and approve another 1986-style amnesty plan, which will transform the electorate into what SEIU and socialist organizer Eliseo Medina called “a governing coalition for the long-term.” (See my previous writing on the topic — which includes Democrats discussing their plans to win by relying on voting demographics as far back as 2002 — in this article.) If the corporate GOP rewards the Democrats’ lawless behavior, it will assure America’s permanent transformation.

5. The LGBT Agenda Is Losing Support

Although the legacy media give the LGBTQ political agenda uniformly positive coverage and focus on the group far out of proportion to that demographic’s share of the population, this year they omitted several salient stories: Multiple polls found the LGBTQ cause has lost political support in 2023, even among its most supportive generation.

Among Americans born since 1997, known as Gen Z, support for same-sex marriage fell by a whopping 11 percentage points since 2021, according to a study released in November by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life. Broadly, the percentage of Americans who believe same-sexual relationships are “morally acceptable” fell by 7% this year, the largest decrease of any of the moral issues posed by Gallup pollsters in their annual Values and Beliefs poll, released in June. Most Americans do not see “a married gay or lesbian couple raising children together” as “completely acceptable” (47% do), and even fewer believe an unmarried same-sex couple should raise a child (41%), the Pew Research Center found in September.

Even the Biden administration’s U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) admitted people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are far more likely to suffer from major depression, abuse illegal drugs, and are up to six times as likely to attempt suicide. Transgender ideology also lost support, with a 55% majority of Americans saying “changing one’s gender” is morally wrong, according to a Gallup poll in June — a 4% increase in two years. Transgender extremism was one of the major issues that brought down the leader of Scotland, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, in February.

These results may seem counterintuitive, since Americans said to identify as LGBTQ more than ever, according to the same polling firms. It could be polling agencies, which are masters at manipulating results, wish to create a sense of complacency in the midst of a social revolution. Or something more ominous may be occurring: Americans may be moving in both directions at the same time. It could be that more young people are caving to social pressure to identify as LGBTQ, while older people (and members of Gen Z who do not buy in to the latest trends) resist the bandwagon effect, which they see will harm themselves and their loved ones.

6. Biden Family Corruption

Even as much as conservative media reported the ever-growing evidence that Joe Biden and his family prospered from deals intended to influence The Big Guy, the broader media have presented the story as a vengeful, political witch hunt waged without evidence. Yet the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s wealth of evidence has earned a dearth of coverage, often being falsely presented as “debunked” and “refuted.”

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) has noted that Biden made Ukraine’s firing of prosecutor Viktor Shokin a U.S. priority only after receiving a pay-off. Even the first U.S. hostage released by Hamas had a relative who bought Hunter Biden’s artwork. Biden seems to have used the resources of the U.S. government to further an influence-peddling scheme. As Barack Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden sent thousands of pseudonymous emails under such names as Robert Peters, including informing Hunter Biden about news regarding nations his son was doing business with.

Like Hunter, Joe’s brother Frank Biden also interrupted calls with VIPs to take calls from then-Vice President Joe Biden, referring to the veep as “The Big Guy.” Frank Biden exploited his surname to take a position promoting Mavericks In Education, a charter school chain intended to cater to at-risk students, but which was accused of lying about membership to increase taxpayer funding. He reportedly did this again while taking a job at Berman Law Firm. James Biden has reportedly traded on his brother’s name since the 1970s to gain everything from a night club to foreign deals to legally dubious schemes involving health care companies treating cancer patients. (Note: Many of these stories were originally reported by the legacy media … during the 2020 Democratic primaries. After clinching the nomination, the Biden stories seemed to dry up.) Biden family corruption allegations have led the House to an impeachment inquiry. (For an hour-long discussion of the proof in the Biden family’s scandals, listen to this episode of the “Outstanding” podcast.)

7. The Biden Administration Tells Title X Recipients to Talk to Minors about Sex Behind Their Parents’ Backs

Biden doesn’t simply seek to corrupt his own family; his administration would like to corrupt yours, as well. Taxpayer-funded guidelines encourage Title X providers — those who dole out contraception to those who ask at taxpayer expense — to talk about sex with minors behind their parents’ back, even describing ways to get their parents out of the room. As The Washington Stand reported exclusively:

“Federally-funded guidelines instruct adults to pause before discussing sex with minors and to ask, ‘Are you alone in the room?’ These instructions specify tactics to follow ‘if you’re really having a hard time getting a parent’ to leave the room during the sex talk. They suggest children as young as 13 discuss sex with groups like Planned Parenthood in a parked car or communicate in writing, so their parents cannot hear the adults’ side of the conversation. And they encourage offices to have vans roam neighborhoods giving minors federally funded contraceptives; to mail birth control to adolescents in ‘plain, unmarked packaging’; and/or to have teenagers receive contraceptives at public meet-up places.”

Protecting children against the mental and physical harms of early sexual initiation is hard enough for parents without their government undermining parents’ authority — and forcing them to pay for it.

8. Churchgoers and Married People are Happier

Despite an endless barrage of negative media about the drudgeries of married life and the pointlessness of faith, multiple studies this year verified the benefits of both. Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than non-believers and single people, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken in March. Practicing Christians who regularly read the Bible report a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index — which measures “happiness & life satisfaction,” “mental & physical health,” “meaning & purpose,” “character & virtue,” “close societal relationships” and “financial & material stability.”

Active Christians score 7.8, compared to 6.9 for inactive Christians and 6.7 for religious unaffiliated, according to an American Bible Society report released this June. The biggest difference between active Christians and non-Christians came in “meaning & purpose.” (They’re also far more likely to vote Republican.) The aforementioned AEI study also found that “Overall, religious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious.” Evangelical Christians are 33% more likely than unbelievers to say their actions matter in the grand scheme of things.

Even the Biden administration issued a warning this year saying Americans’ health may be undermined by not attending church. A report from Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, which was released in May, says loneliness harms physical health “even greater than [the risk] associated with obesity and physical inactivity” and is as bad for your health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

“Religious or faith-based groups can be a source for regular social contact, serve as a community of support, provide meaning and purpose, create a sense of belonging around shared values and beliefs, and are associated with reduced risk-taking behaviors,” Murthy writes. “As a consequence of this decline in participation, individuals’ health may be undermined.”

When a Balaam like Biden blesses church attendance, Christians should listen.

9. COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Still Hurting America

Locking down the entire population over a virus with a near-100% survival rate may prove to be the most misguided decision in 21st century domestic policy — an arena with stiff competitors. To this day, Americans of all ages continue to pay the price for this policy error, chief among them children.

An analysis from the Associated Press found 50,000 children remain missing from school two years after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (which the World Health Organization only declared ended on May 5). An incredible 35% of children in kindergarten through second grade fell “below benchmark” in reading (placing them at “high risk for persistent reading difficulties”) in Fall 2021, according to a University of Virginia analysis. These gaps will impact their development as human beings, stifling their cognitive faculties, limiting their lifetime income and fulfillment, and capping their ability to make a difference for Christ and the church.

U.S. taxpayers also literally paid the price for the bipartisan consensus to roll out $5 trillion in COVID emergency relief. The Justice Department announced this summer it had arrested nearly 3,200 people for defrauding U.S. COVID relief funds; at the time, it was investigating $8.6 billion in fraud. The nation’s largest abortion chain, Planned Parenthood, received $90.41 billion in COVID relief, although the CARES Act seemed to be written to exclude it; indeed, taxpayer funds continued to trickle down to abortionists this year.

In reality, we have no idea how much fraud was committed in the name of COVID-19 relief — and we won’t for at least a century. Small Business Administration Inspector General Hannibal “Mike” Ware said his COVID fraud hotline got an immense number of tips about COVID fraud, “more than 90,000 have been identified as actionable leads, which amount to more than 100 years of investigative case work.” Funding those investigations alone will cost American taxpayers for years to come.

10. Huge Increase in Homeschooling, Stay-at-home Moms

According to The Washington Post, homeschooling has become the “fastest-growing form of education” in the United States. The United States has seen a 51% increase in homeschooling in five years — between the 2017-2018 school year and this school year. With school strikes, lower educational standards, and teachers hiding children’s transgenderism and teaching Woke curricula (repeating the lies of the 1619 Project and stocking school libraries with gay pornographic books), it’s easy to see why.

At the same time, the number of stay-at-home mothers has increased, according to two studies released this year. The number of stay-at-home moms skyrocketed from 15% in 2022 to 25% in 2023, according to Motherly’s Annual State of Motherhood survey. The Pew Research Center said 26% of mothers worked exclusively in the home in 2022, up from a low of 23% two decades ago.

The children raised by mothers who care enough to sacrifice their career advancement for their children’s development and education may just offset the kids neglected by the public school system since COVID-19 (at the latest). They will be our nation’s greatest hope, and the source of our nation’s good news stories, for years to come.

The legacy media have not given these stories the exposure they deserve but, Lord willing, The Washington Stand’s coverage of newsworthy stories in the pivotal election year of 2024 will prove out-Stand-ing.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

‘Jesus Would Go to Prison:’ Catholic Cardinal Addresses Hostility against Biblical Marriage

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A Roman Catholic cardinal is claiming that Christ would be imprisoned in today’s Western society for His position on sex, marriage, and gender. Appearing on GB News America on Sunday, German Cardinal and former head of the Vatican’s doctrine office Gerhard Müller addressed the threat that transgender ideology poses to the family. “Christ does not impose any conditions but rather gives all people — rich and poor, righteous and sinners — the chance of conversion and of a new beginning,” Müller said. “But Jesus also contradicts ideological ways [that] want to relativize or even destroy marriage of man and woman and the family of the parents with their own children.”

Referring to Jesus’s words in the Gospel of Matthew, the cardinal said, “He answered the Pharisees who wanted to trap Him, ‘Have you not read that God created man in the beginning, male and female?’” He added, “I believe that today, Jesus would not be condemned only because He is the Messiah, but He would in Canada or in the United States or in European countries go to prison because He spoke out the truth about marriage between a man and a woman.”

Müller’s comments were in response to a question from English Catholic parliamentarian Jacob Rees-Mogg on Pope Francis’s governance of the Catholic Church, particularly the pope’s recent approval of baptizing those who have undergone gender transition surgeries and allowing them to serve as godparents. At the time, Müller went to great lengths to explain that baptizing those who have undergone gender transition procedures requires them to have repented of their sin and committed to living virtuously, which would include identifying as their biological sex and, as much as possible, undo the effects of their surgeries. The same would be necessary for an individual to serve as a godparent.

The Vatican also issued a controversial statement on Monday approving blessings for same-sex couples, though still nominally maintaining Catholic moral doctrine on sex and marriage and barring approving same-sex relationships. In October, Müller warned that LGBT activists were actively promoting blessings for same-sex unions. He said that LGBT advocates claimed that “the Church must be open, not to these persons but to the ideology. The ideology is to blame for this.”

The German prelate also addressed on Sunday the pope’s treatment of theologically-conservative clerics like Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, and American Cardinal Raymond Burke. Müller said, “I don’t know more about Bishop Strickland and Cardinal Burke than what is written in the newspapers, but I can personally testify that both are devout Catholics and zealous pastors.” Strickland was forced to retire last month for reasons unspecified by the Vatican, and the pope will no longer be subsidizing Burke’s apartment in Rome, jeopardizing the cardinal’s eligibility for his salary. Müller added, “Cardinal Burke is the best-qualified canonist in the College of the Roman Cardinals.”

Müller was appointed as the head of the Vatican’s doctrine office by the late Pope Benedict XVI, but criticized how Pope Francis dismissed him from his post in 2017, saying it was “unacceptable.” The pope did not inform Müller that he would not be reappointed to the role until the day his term expired. He was later appointed to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s highest court.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Americans Put the Holiday Hurt on Disney, Target, Others as Boycotts Bleed into Christmas

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When Disney CEO Bob Iger sat down to talk with employees about his bumpy year at the helm Tuesday, he said, “I knew there were myriad challenges that I would face.” What he didn’t count on was those “myriad challenges” being millions of still-angry Americans. After management ran the brand into the ground over a popular parental rights’ law last year, nothing seems to be rehabilitating the company’s image. Even the second coming of Iger, who was behind the wheel for some of Disney’s best chapters, hasn’t brought back the magic for consumers. Now, staring down a holiday season with crashing stocks, box office losers, and even less goodwill, will Iger stop riding this polarized express?

Experts have their doubts. Stephen Soukup, who’s spent years analyzing Disney’s radical evolution, worries that as long as Iger is in charge, the right lessons won’t be learned. Still, the author of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital” was encouraged by last week’s news that Disney was at least admitting that it was on the wrong side of public opinion when it comes to their extreme LGBT advocacy.

In its annual report to the Security and Exchange Commission, management conceded that they “face risks relating to misalignment with public and consumer tastes for entertainment, travel and consumer products, which impact demand for our entertainment offerings and products and the profitability of any of our businesses.”

“What they’re saying,” Soukup translated, “is that their values differed from what the values of their expected audience are — and that’s a big deal,” he underscored on “Washington Watch.” “For a long time, Disney has professed to be the arbiter of values. And it turns out that the American public said, ‘No thanks. We’re not interested in allowing you to tell us what we should or should not believe. We’re not interested in having you inculcate our children in what they should believe, and we’re not going to spend our hard-earned money rewarding you for trying to do so.’”

But is that enough to force them back to neutrality on an agenda that includes, among other shockers, the open “queering” of children? “It should be,” Soukup agreed. “I think Disney faces a couple of very serious problems in trying to recover from this ‘misalignment,’” he explained. “The first of these is the fact that it’s in the business of selling values. You know, storytellers from Aesop to Jesus to the Grimm Brothers all the way forward, have been in the business of using storytelling to transmit values and virtues from one generation to the next, and that’s the business that Disney [is] in. If its values and virtues do not align with the public, then it becomes a serious problem. It’s not as if they can simply say, ‘You know what? … We’re going to take politics and social policy out of our films. We’re no longer going to tell stories that have values.’ I mean, that’s the business they’re in. They have to tell stories that have morals. They tell stories that are intended to transmit values from one generation to the next. And that makes it very difficult.”

The second problem, Soukup insisted, is the guy at the top of the food chain: Iger himself. The two-time CEO, who was behind the wheel of Disney’s woke transformation from 2005 on, is the author of a lot of the extremist tendencies that got his company in hot water in the first place. And while there were some who thought Iger would find a way to rein in Disney’s activism, the last 12 months have given them zero reason for hope. “Disney is a political organization because of Bob Iger,” Soukup insisted.

“This didn’t start this year. It didn’t start in Florida. It didn’t start with Governor Ron DeSantis. As I note in my book, ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,’ Bob Iger has been fighting a political battle, particularly against conservatives, for at least the last decade. He’s fought the battle in North Carolina. He’s fought the battle in Georgia. He’s fought the battle in Florida. This is something that he believes firmly in. And the fight against Governor DeSantis in Florida that made so much news over the last several months was, in fact, Bob Iger’s doing.”

“If you look at what Disney has said about when it decided to get involved,” the vice president of the Political Forum continued, “it was when Bob Iger emailed the then-current leadership and said, ‘We have to do something about this law in Florida. We can’t sit idly by and allow this to happen.’ And what Disney decided to do was fire [CEO] Bob Chapek and bring back Bob Iger. So I think Disney has two serious problems. Their business model is one of selling values. And the man who runs the company is an aggressively and overtly political player.”

And it’s not just Disney who’s thumbing their nose at shareholders. Target, Bud Light, Starbucks, Nike, and a slew of other companies made a very intentional corporate calculation to prioritize politics over profits. “In order for any of these businesses that have been punished by the public over the last year for being political, in order for any of them to make any headway in winning back their customers, they first have to get it,” Soukup emphasized. “It’s become clear, for example, that Target does not get it. That Target does not understand why its customers left it behind, why its customers got upset, why its customers started to boycott, and that they’re doubling down on the tactics that in fact alienated [people].”

While Target CEO Brian Cornell talks a good game, telling investors, “We are firmly focused on getting back to growth,” shelves of rainbow Santas and the hire of a senior-level Pride Lead say otherwise. “It was bad enough when they decided to politicize and sexualize the month of June,” Soukup said, “… but now they’re doing very much the same to Christmas. Their Christmas displays are reportedly very aggressively sexualized and very aggressively politicized. And that is a demonstration of the fact that the management of Target doesn’t understand or is unwilling to accept the verdict delivered to it by the public.” Until they do, they’re “courting the wrath of both customers and shareholders,” he insisted.

Maybe these Fortune 500 companies thought this wave of consumer activism rocking the country was a fad, that it would just blow over, and we’d all return to business as usual. But, as the latest quarterly reports for Target, Disney, and Bud Light prove, Americans’ outrage has staying power. At a time when retail sales are up, these trans-embracing giants are underwater.

“I think the public is exhausted with politics being everywhere and in everything. It’s not that Target is left-wing. It’s not that Bud Light embraced left-wing values. It’s not that Disney is liberal. They are,” Soukup said. “… But that’s not the point. The point is that people are tired of having politics shoved down their throat at every possible occasion. They’re just exhausted with the whole thing, and it’s not something that’s going to go away as long as they keep doing this. This is something that the public is going to react to negatively.”

And while these businesses can survive a good bit of public pressure, “The question is, how long does management survive?” Soukup asked. “How long do the boards and the shareholders agree to keep Bob Iger on, for example, if he doesn’t get it — if he continues to pursue the agenda that got Disney into trouble in the first place? … He may have built Disney into a giant entertainment company, and he may be the nicest man in entertainment, as everybody says. But … eventually, the Disney board and Disney shareholders are going to get tired of what he’s doing and his inability to recognize that he’s a big part of the problem.”

For now, the biggest takeaway is that Americans are finally sending a message companies can’t ignore. Sure, some CEOs will stubbornly carry on, willing to kamikaze their brands for radical causes, but there are plenty of rational executives who see the writing on the wall.

“I think it’s pretty clear that the general zeitgeist in American business is to depoliticize as much as possible at this point,” Soukup pointed out. “Sometimes that’s going to be very difficult, given positions that have been taken just in the last three, four, five years. But I think that a great many executives and managers have seen just how potent customer reaction can be.” And that’s a significant change from decades past.

“It used to be the case that nobody feared conservative consumers very much because conservative boycotts always failed. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I think that even though these are not organized boycotts, they have been very effective — and they have certainly sent a message to the companies that have been affected and to others who might go down that same road. … To use The Godfather analogy, these guys are Luca Brasi [sleeping] with the fishes. They’re the warning to the rest of business that if you push this too far, you will end up the same way. So I think that what we’re starting to see among a great many corporate leaders is a desire simply to get out of the politics business.”

Whether Disney ever wakes up and joins them is anyone’s guess. Until then, Soukup advises, make the most of this Christmas season: “Vote with your dollars and invest with your dollars.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Seattle Middle School Teacher Made Students Write Hate Mail to Moms for Liberty

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Moms for Liberty, a conservative parental rights group, received a surprise package from Jane Addams Middle School in Seattle. It consisted of letters that appeared to be written by the middle school students with phrases such as “Say Gay,” “Gay is slay, stop being a rat,” and a repeated use of “Stop bullying.”

The social studies teacher, Ann Christianson, included her own note, which read, “Dear Moms for Liberty, please read the enclosed cards from concerned middle school students in Seattle, WA.” Christianson is also the coordinator of the Gay-Straight Alliance at the school.

The mothers’ group posted pictures of the package on X, writing, “Seattle Public Schools are spending class time indoctrinating and weaponizing your children.” And the Jane Addams Middle School report card seems to affirm their claim that students’ time is not as prioritized on learning as it should be. According to The Post Millennial, “38.6 percent of students failed to meet the grade level in English. Almost half the students failed to meet the grade level in mathematics and 34.2 percent failed to meet the grade level standard in science.”

But this isn’t the first time this Seattle school district has promoted progressive ideas. Shortly after the 2020 George Floyd riots, Seattle Public Schools removed police from campuses and promoted the “defund the police” movement. Schools in the district have also offered free “gender-affirming care,” including hormone blockers and gender transition surgery referrals for middle and high school students.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “The most important lesson a school club can teach is the value of serving others. The best student clubs are the ones that serve others in love — by visiting the elderly in nursing homes, working at food banks or soup kitchens, or performing volunteer service at the school itself.”

She continued, “Are these children reading at a high enough proficiency to help kindergarteners with ABCs? Based on their test scores, one [would] think they might not be, and that a better use of their club time, rather than sending passive aggressive missives to Moms for Liberty, might be to improve their reading and writing scores.”

For Kilgannon, this controversy should prompt a lot of questions from local parents: “Who paid for the postage and supplies? How did they decide where to send the letters? Were the parents of the students who sent the letters allowed to know their child participates in such a club at school?” The Post Millennial’s Ari Hoffman attempted to reach the school to get some answers, but he received only an auto-reply message from the teacher responsible for the hate mail that stated she was on a leave of absence.

“As a mom and as someone who gets ‘love letters’ like these from time to time,” Kilgannon added, “I can assure you that the effect of these letters is to strengthen the resolve of Moms for Liberty, a group that loves ALL children and works in the tireless service of human rights. We should join with Moms for Liberty members in praying for these students and the teachers who directed this sad little project.”

Kilgannon concluded, “We live in the greatest country in the world; our school children and families deserve much more than this demeaning exploitation.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Christians Forced Out of Competition for Biblical Views on Gender

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Thousands Sign Petition to Boycott Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade over Trans Agenda

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‘Tis the season to boycott. At least that’s what 40,000 petitioners have signed up to do with the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Dating back to 1924, the parade has been a beloved kickoff to the holidays. As New York City streets are filled with floats, costumes, dancing, music, and all kinds of talent, the event has traditionally been designed for family fun. But One Million Moms (OMM), an organization of Christians, have launched a campaign against the parade for its “liberal nonsense.”

This year, two performances will be featured from the Broadway musicals “& Juliet” and “Shucked,” which both have key actors who identify as either transgender or non-binary. OMM and those participating in the protest are concerned with the LGBT agenda being so heavily promoted at an event geared toward the family. As the group stated, “Shame on Macy’s for promoting and sponsoring this type of entertainment. … It is clear that Macy’s does not have our children’s best interests in mind.” The statement concluded, “Macy’s needs to know that trust must be earned, and once trust is lost, it is difficult to get back.”

Kristen Waggoner, president of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), also added to the criticism, insisting, “Macy’s inclusion of a non-binary transgender character in a parade is just another example of an ideological war that’s being waged on families, and customers are saying they’ve had enough. But it seems that corporate brands that were once trusted just still aren’t getting the message.”

This isn’t the first time the parade has featured LGBT content. In 2018, there was a same-sex kiss that was broadcasted for thousands to see. And in 2021, Kim Petras, a man who identifies as a woman, performed. Petras recently said in an interview that his “goal” is for his fans to engage in sex during his performances.

The protest is geared toward two non-binary identifying actors who will be featured in the performances during the parade. The musicals being showcased are “& Juliet” and “Shucked.” The actor, Alex Newell, uses all pronouns and plays the character, Lulu, in “Shucked.” The other actor, Justin David Sullivan, also identifies as all pronouns. He plays the non-binary character, May, in “& Juliet,” the reimagined Shakespearean classic where Romeo dies, but Juliet goes on to experience love and life “her way.”

OMM’s petition has received pushback, and the organization is now considered a “hate group” by The Southern Poverty Law Center, a controversial leftist group with their own internal scandals. The New York Times’ Stefanos Chen wrote that this boycott is “the latest attempt to force companies to reverse course on social issues that some far-right groups consider too liberal.”

But despite opposition, Waggoner said what we are seeing is “parents stand up” against woke ideology to keep events such as these “family friendly and not teach our children values that we object to.” Ultimately, OMM, ADF, and those who are speaking out have made it clear that families just want to be able to enjoy events without worrying about what they or their kids will be exposed to.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “I hope there is a dog show or something else possibly appropriate for family viewing on broadcast television that day.” She explained how moms “are busy making delicious Thanksgiving meals for their families and friends to enjoy” and serving their communities, and that “it would be nice if Hollywood or Broadway could show their appreciation for families by not forcing a sexual agenda into what seems like every kind of entertainment.”

Kilgannon concluded, “The innocence of childhood and the excitement of the Thanksgiving Day parades should not be mutually exclusive. It’s important to keep this kind of activity family friendly for the other participants in the parade as well, since high school marching bands, community dance troupes, and other family organizations have traditionally participated in the parade.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLES:

This Thanksgiving, Remembering Families Fractured by Transgenderism

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Taxpayer-Funded Trans Procedures Lead Even Pioneers to Say Things Have ‘Gotten Out of Hand’

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U.S. taxpayers funded life-altering transgender surgeries, despite that fact that one of the global pioneers in the field says “gender transition has gotten out of hand” and likened it to the “recovered memory” craze that hurt vulnerable patients and tore families apart during the 1980s.

The hospital that opened the nation’s first pediatric gender transition facility, Boston Children’s Hospital, received $1.4 million from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts for inflicting “gender transition services” between January 2015 and May 2023. The hospital’s Center for Gender Surgery carried out 204 transgender surgeries between 2017 and 2020 — including 65 gender-conversion surgeries on minors. The controversial facility offers double-mastectomies to children as young as 15 and phalloplasty to girls at the age of 17.

Boston Children’s Hospital would not disclose whether state taxpayer funds paid for minors’ transgender surgeries, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation, which broke the story.

This is far from the only time politicians have compelled taxpayers to fund transgender procedures at the child-mutilating facility. Boston Children’s Hospital received a $3.3 million grant from the Biden administration’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to build a website targeting young people in other states who identify as transgender, as well as to train the hospital’s staff. The hospital also took part in a five-year, NIH-funded study that monitored minors aged 12-20 who received cross-gender hormones; 240 of its 315 participants were underage. Two committed suicide, and 11 more contemplated ending their lives.

The negative outcomes trans-identifying youth suffer as a result of “gender-affirming care” matches the experience of Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a Finnish psychiatrist who established a gender transition clinic for minors in 2011. She has since participated in the evaluation of 500 children dealing with gender dysphoria.

“Soon after our hospital began offering hormonal interventions for these patients, we began to see that the miracle we had been promised was not happening,” she writes in an exposé in The Free Press. “The young people we were treating were not thriving.” Even when “young people insisted their lives had improved and they were happier,” the evidence belied their self-assessment. “They were withdrawing from all social activities. They were not making friends. They were not going to school.” And her colleagues across the continent “were seeing the same things.”

These patients, and the detransitioners who followed, are the “kind of patient who wasn’t supposed to exist.”

In 2015, the children visiting her changed from young men who had always identified as female. Now, the overwhelming majority of her patients were young women suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD): “90 percent of our patients were girls, mainly 15 to 17 years old, and instead of being high-functioning, the vast majority presented with severe psychiatric conditions.”

“Some came from families with multiple psychosocial problems. Most of them had challenging early childhoods marked by developmental difficulties, such as extreme temper tantrums and social isolation,” she writes. “In adolescence they were lonely and withdrawn. Some were no longer in school, instead spending all their time alone in their room. They had depression and anxiety, some had eating disorders, many engaged in self-harm, a few had experienced psychotic episodes.” One of their patients was mute, and “more than a quarter of our patients were on the autism spectrum.”

An American whistleblower, Jamie Reed, said the same conditions held at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she said clinicians regularly ignored their patients’ panoply of other psychological and social conditions.

Most of the Dutch patients had never presented any gender dysphoria before coming to Dr. Kaltiala, who says ROGD had become the dominant patient profile for everyone working in the pediatric transgender field. The patients’ stories shared so many similarities, “We realized they were networking and exchanging information about how to talk to us.”

Although she authored a 2015 study questioning some aspects of the transgender-industry orthodoxy, she and her colleagues around the world felt pressured to keep their concerns private. “Even during the first few years of the clinic, gender medicine was becoming rapidly politicized,” Dr. Kaltiala writes. Activists in psychologists’ poses promised that young people would find “all their mental health problems would be alleviated by these interventions. Of course, there is no mechanism by which high doses of hormones resolve autism or any other underlying mental health condition.”

The condition holds true in the United States, she affirms, where the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry have refused to hear dissenting voices or read data that contradict their predetermined conclusions. Yet “one new study shows that nearly 30 percent of patients in the sample ceased filling their hormone prescription within four years.”

“Anyone, including physicians, researchers, academics, and writers, who raised concerns about the growing power of gender activists, and about the effects of medically transitioning young people, were subjected to organized campaigns of vilification and threats to their careers,” she states. “We were being told to intervene in healthy, functioning bodies simply on the basis of a young person’s shifting feelings about gender,” she writes. “Identity achievement is the outcome of successful adolescent development, not its starting point.”

The doctor finds the transgender industry’s high-pressure sales tactics, in which they falsely claim a child will commit suicide unless parents allow the industry to begin transgender procedures, disreputable. Research, she notes, showing transgender-related “suicide is very rare. It is dishonest and extremely unethical to pressure parents into approving gender medicalization by exaggerating the risk of suicide.” The U.K.’s Tavistock Institute, which until recently carried out transgender procedures on minors, reported only four out of 15,032 patients had ended their lives. “The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide was 0.03%,” reported a 2022 study. Although these deaths are tragic, “[t]he fact that deaths were so rare should provide some reassurance” to parents.

Dr. Kaltiala likens “[w]hat is happening to dysphoric children” to the “recovered memory craze of the 1980s and ’90s. During that period, many troubled women came to believe false memories, often suggested to them by their therapists, of nonexistent sexual abuse by their fathers or other family members.” The psychologist-guided lies tore families apart, as children falsely believed their family meant them harm.

“[L]ike recovered memory, gender transition has gotten out of hand,” writes Dr. Kaltiala. “When medical professionals start saying they have one answer that applies everywhere, or that they have a cure for all of life’s pains, that should be a warning to us all that something has gone very wrong,” she concludes.

Americans caught up in the transgender debate welcome the skepticism of Dr. Kaltiala and others across Europe, where nations have progressively changed their protocols to protect children and adolescents from these experimental interventions.

“Gender dysphoria is far more invasive than any other diagnosis in the DSM,” Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Center for Family Studies at Family Research Council, told FRC President Tony Perkins earlier this month. “Not only are we diagnosing early with something that would be considered a lifelong enduring pattern, but we’re also attaching interventions that are really dangerous and life-altering while a person is still a child.”

“Despite the popular spin, even the leading advocates of medically transitioning youth concede there are substantial research gaps and a lack of knowledge concerning long-term outcomes,” states “The Trans Youth Phenomenon: Critiques & Hard Questions,” a publication co-written by Bauwens as a collaboration between Family Research Council and the Center for Urban Renewal and Education.

Nationally, the transgender industry carried out transgender surgeries on 3,678 minors between 2016 and 2019 nationwide, and “405 patients (11.0%) aged 12 to 18 years underwent genital surgery,” according to a report from the Journal of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open. More than one in four (25.3%) of the 48,019 people who underwent transgender surgeries during that time paid the bill with taxpayer-funded Medicaid. After the Obama-Biden administration swelled the ranks of Americans eligible for Medicaid, surging “Medicaid spending is ‘crowding out’ spending on other major state programs, most notably education and transportation infrastructure,” reported the Mercatus Center.

Transgender activists are advocating for Ohio’s Issue 1, which would make it illegal for the state to “directly or indirectly” burden any “individual” right to make “reproductive decisions,” language broad enough to require taxpayer-funded abortion and transgender surgeries for minors without parental notification — a position favored by several of Issue 1’s authors/sponsors.

Dr. Kaltiala’s decision to oppose transgender procedures for minors grew out of the reason she got into psychiatry in the first place: “My patients’ adult lives are still ahead of them, so it can make a huge difference to someone’s future to help a young person who is on a destructive track to find a more favorable course.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Amid War, Naval Academy Seeks Another Gender and Sexuality Professor

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In the Middle East, thousands of innocent civilians are losing their lives in the crossfire between Israel and the Hamas terrorist group. Since October 7, men, women, the elderly, children, and infants have become victims of war — and the fighting only continues. “This is very bad,” said Linda Robinson, a senior fellow for Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The risks for a wider war and for the region going back into full-scale war are very, very high.”

Women have been raped in the streets, babies are found decapitated, protests are breaking out globally, and the Naval Academy has decided to put their effort — not into lethal combat training — but gender and sexuality studies.

According to the Academy’s website, the school’s mission is to “develop Midshipmen morally, mentally and physically and to imbue them with the highest ideals of duty, honor and loyalty in order to graduate leaders who are dedicated to a career of naval service and … to assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship and government.” Apparently, the Navy has interpreted that to mean hiring gender and sexuality “experts” and featuring drag queens in recruitment videos. And it’s not just the naval Academy.

The U.S. Military Academy, considered among the most “prestigious universities in the nation,” has also incorporated gender and sexuality into Army officer education. West Point and the Air Force Academy even offer a minor in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Additionally, Nellis Air Force Base has developed a track record of hosting drag shows, regardless of opposition.

National Review contacted the Naval Academy for clarification on the purpose of the new position and whether it “would prepare graduates to fight the nation’s war,” but officials did not respond. But in 2021, shortly after West Point added critical race theory to their curriculum, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, denied that the armed forces were “going woke.” Rather, he stated it was a “complicated topic” he was “not going to address.”

However, Travis Weber, a Naval Academy graduate and vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at Family Research Council, did address it with The Washington Stand. “This job posting — while only one data point — is an indicator of where our nation’s military is focused. And it’s not good,” he said.

He insisted the U.S. should be focused on “fires burning around the world [such as] the Russia-Ukraine war, an emerging war involving Israel in the Middle East, Azerbaijan displacing the Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh in the blink of an eye without much notice from anyone, and the looming threat of China invading Taiwan.” But instead, the U.S. is “pouring our nation’s increasingly thinning economic resources into a tenure track faculty position at one of our nation’s top military institutions that is focused on ‘Gender and Sexuality Studies.’”

Lt. General (Ret.) William G. Boykin, FRC’s executive vice president, also shared his concern with TWS, stating that “the hiring of a gender and sexuality studies Professor for the Naval Academy is another example of how unaware this administration is in training and preparing young men and women for war and to be victorious.” He emphasized the Navy seems “oblivious” to what midshipmen really need.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at FRC, agreed, adding that ironically, the more gender studies increase, “the less people [seem to] understand … men and women.” She continued, “Whether in the field of education or military service, basic understanding about how bodies work and human nature itself should be as uncomplicated as possible.”

Experts say that not only is this topic being overcomplicated by the LGBT narrative, it is also having devastating consequences on recruitment. According to The Heritage Foundation, “[L]eaders from the Army, Navy, and Air Force all dutifully reported that they expected to miss their annual recruiting goal this year by thousands.” Despite adding new benefits and bonuses, recruitment rates continue to worsen. Woke “actions are a major contributor to the low enlistment in all our military services,” Boykin said.

As military institutions prioritize gender and sexuality education and recruitment suffers, “China is taking advantage of our distracted world to deport hundreds of North Korean defectors back to North Korea — where they will almost certainly be sent to forced labor camps,” Weber emphasized. He further noted that the West’s influence is on decline, and the East is seeking to “take its place.”

What this means, Weber continued, is “an unstable, multipolar world order, in which violent flare-ups are more likely.” He concluded, “This is a world that needs American leadership, not American naval gazing. The diversion of resources into areas like this one faculty opening portrays a distracted America, not an America focused on dealing with the challenges of its day. We need an adjustment of our focus if we are going to effectively lead into the years ahead.”

As Boykin stated plainly: “It is time for the Navy and all other services to wake up and start providing good leadership.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Kevin Sorbo’s New Children’s Book Promotes Biblical Masculinity

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In a world increasingly opposed to masculinity, actor, writer, and producer Kevin Sorbo has entered the fight in defending it. In his recently published children’s book entitled, “The Test of Lionhood,” Sorbo addresses the topic of gender identity while promoting biblical masculinity. “The attack today on masculinity is a call for us to stay vigilant right now,” he told Fox News. “Let’s let boys be boys and let girls be girls. And let’s stop this whole thing about chopping down the men in the world.”

Sorbo further expressed how being brave and “manly” are not bad attributes, and stated young boys need to understand this. “They’re going out there and protecting people — and they shouldn’t be afraid to confront things that are dangerous,” he said.

Sorbo has been criticized for years as a man who promotes conservative and Christian values in Hollywood, from which he was booted out several years ago, he says. In an interview with The Washington Stand, Sorbo shared further insight. “I guess people are afraid of the truth,” he said. “I’ve always said we need to wake up the lions out there. And all these people talk about the quiet silent majority. Well, when are they going to wake up?”

He went on to say how the Left can cancel whoever they want, whenever they want. “We’re losing free speech more and more all the time,” he said. Between the Left’s constant hypocrisy and the cultural war on gender, Sorbo felt called to write this book. But despite the opposition who want to deem Sorbo’s book as evil, he stated that he simply wants to help boys to understand the importance of their role as boys who will one day be men. “Kids are growing up realizing how the father is not that important to the family unit,” he shared. “And that’s what Hollywood has done. And they’ve done it on purpose.”

But this issue expands beyond Hollywood and what people see on the big screen. For years, experts have acknowledged the crisis of fatherlessness as an increasing one, which negatively impacts the development of boys, and contributes to poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and the crumbling of society at large. “No matter what I put out there, I’m gonna get backlash,” Sorbo shared. But regardless of inevitable backlash, he stated how he is going to keep making movies that promote masculinity, family, and “good messages.” Movies that aren’t “celebrating evil, hate, anger, sex, and violence,” Sorbo emphasized — the themes Hollywood often promotes.

Sorbo made it clear he wants to use his films to bring back the kind of movies Hollywood used to put out. “You know, movies that make you laugh, think, react, maybe relate to somebody on the screen. … Give them hope, Give them redemption. Give them a chance to live in a more positive world instead of a negative one. I want to live in a world that’s got light in it, not [a] world that lives in darkness.”

Sorbo concluded by offering encouragement for those who need it. “You have to work hard to have success in life,” he underscored. “Most people do not have the strength to do it because they’ve learned just to give up and let the government take care of them. … [But] don’t let anyone set your limitations.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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