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The Democrats’ War on Reality: Spending Bills Reveal a Twisted Vision for the Future

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It’s almost September, and that can only mean one thing: Congress is returning to Washington, and Americans should hold on to their wallets. Several things could combine to make this fall a budget-buster: The fiscal year end means that $6 trillion worth of federal budgeting must be renewed by September 30th; the last three weeks of September are the last time Congress will be in session before the November 5th election; and, liberals in Washington only know one way to win — by buying reelection with your taxpayer dollars.

Dear taxpayer, September ain’t gonna be pretty, so buckle up.

Already in July, well ahead of next month’s funding fights, several reporters who cover Capitol Hill suddenly began simultaneously reporting that House Republicans are “fighting culture wars” by stuffing supposedly unrelated provisions into congressional spending bills. They are repeating Democratic talking points that characterize the spending bills in the Senate (controlled by Democrats) as neutral and bipartisan. The obvious implication of this reporting is that the “fair” approach would be to reject House conservatives’ “inflaming” language and instead adopt the Senate’s “neutral” language. Look for that framing to be used in force in September, when the House and Senate return to Washington to try to pass a budget.

This framing gets at least two things wrong.

First, the House and Senate are miles apart, not just on moral issues but on basic spending levels. Last year, the House and Senate fiscal year 2024 (FY24) spending bills were more than $150 billion dollars apart. (Neither set of spending bills balanced the budget, much less made a dent in the national debt, but the Republican-controlled House was proposing spending levels that were either pared down or more modestly increased than the Democrat-controlled Senate.)

This year will be no different, and the difference between what House Republicans and Senate Democrats (with some Republicans) want to spend will likely be even greater. With inflation ballooning under the Biden-Harris administration because of government spending, Democrats in Washington and their friends in the media would like nothing better than to deflect attention onto so-called “culture war issues.” Don’t miss the sleight of hand.

Second, when it comes to standing for life, marriage, and religious liberty, it’s important to realize that conservatives on Capitol Hill are actually playing defense against the Biden-Harris administration’s aggressive offense. Last year, for example, Planned Parenthood received one-third of its budget — $699.4 million — from taxpayers. The Biden-Harris administration is actively and aggressively using the levers of government to advocate for false sexual identities (LGBT) in everything from federally-funded school lunch programs to foreign assistance to poor countries. The government is being weaponized against people of faith and people with no faith at all who continue to believe that marriage is between one man and one woman.

In other words, if there is a “culture war,” it is one that the Biden-Harris administration is waging, with the help of Congressional Democrats who dominate the Senate. Meanwhile, House Republicans — the only bulwark to this onslaught — comprise a bare majority that is split into several factions. Conservative House Republicans are pushing back against the Democrats’ radical agenda, but other House Republicans try to stay as far away from the issues as they can, and some Republicans even join Democrats in destructive efforts to underminemarriage and target the unborn. Senate conservatives often do not have the votes to block harmful Democratic policies.

While some Republicans seem embarrassed by conservative principles, Democrats have seemingly no shame in using taxpayer funding to advance a radical leftist agenda. In the Senate, for example, here are some examples of radical, “culture war” earmarks that Senate Democrats have offered in this year’s spending bills:

Supporting abortion providers

  • $5,106,000 in earmarks for a hospital that provides the abortion drug, mifepristone, up to 10 weeks and surgical abortions up to 23 weeks, when some infants would be able to survive outside of the womb (Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., ChristianaCare Health Services, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies — Labor-HHS appropriations bill, in two separate earmarks).
  • $500,000 earmark for a hospital that provides abortions through 13 weeks and six days (Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., Stroger Hospital, Labor-HHS bill).

Pushing false sexual identities on youth

  • $1,050,000 earmark for an LGBT advocacy organization that pushes this ideology on youth and advocates for them to undergo harmful gender transition procedures (Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., The Trevor Project, Labor-HHS bill).
  • $750,000 earmark to push gender ideology on youth ages 11-18 years old (Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth, Inc., Labor-HHS bill).
  • $500,000 earmark for a “mental health support initiative” to counsel youth through the lens of LGBT ideology (Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.M., and Schumer, Lesbian and Gay Community Services, Inc., Labor-HHS bill).
  • $356,000 earmark for an all-expenses-paid “training intensive” for self-identified transgender and non-binary theater artists in New York City (Schumer, D-NY, Unremarkable Productions, Labor-HHS bill).
  • $238,000 earmark for an organization said to serve not only girls, but “gender-expansive youth,” signaling that the organization pushes gender ideology on youth (Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., Asian Girls Ignite, Labor-HHS bill).

Directing funding for women’s services to serve men, and vice versa

  • $2,846,000 in earmarks for a young men’s organization to provide “accessibility” to YMCA programs regardless of certain characteristics, including gender identity, suggesting that the money will be used (in part) to facilitate the provision of services meant for men to women who identify as men (Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, D-Va., Young Men’s Christian Association of Central Virginia, Transportation, Housing, and Urban Development, and Related Agencies — T-HUD appropriations bill).
  • $1,500,000 earmark to provide “gender-inclusive shelter” to victims of abuse, raising the concern that biological men will be housed with women, increasing the latter’s risk of harm in the name of inclusivity (Tina Smith, D-Minn., Alexandra House, Inc., T-HUD bill).

House Democrats are no slouches, either, offering at least one “culture war” earmark and many, many amendments to stop conservatives from pumping the brakes on the radical Biden-Harris agenda.

Here are some examples of ways they have prioritized false LGBT identities:

Pushing false sexual identities on youth

  • $125,000 earmark for a heretical church seeking to establish a taxpayer-funded program that would likely push LGBT ideology on at-risk youth struggling with their gender or sexual identities under the guise of “juvenile justice prevention and education” (Mark Pocan, D-Wis., First Congregational United Church of Christ, Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies —CJS appropriations bill).

Discriminating against Americans who believe in one-man, one-woman marriage

Advocating for false sexual identities

Putting women at risk, paying for false sexual identities

  • Amendment to strike a section preventing the Bureau of Prisons from assigning placements based on gender identity, which would allow the placement of men in women’s prisons (Tlaib, D-Mich., amendment to the CJS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section that would prohibit placement in federal prisons based on gender identity, and a section prohibiting public funding of gender transition procedures (Lee, D-Pa., amendment to the CJS bill).
  • Amendment to strike sections barring funding for gender transition procedures, defunding Biden’s anti-religious liberty in adoption final rule, and barring funding for schools that allow males to participate in women’s and girls’ sports (Craig, D-Minn., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).

Here are a few examples of ways House Democrats are prioritizing the promotion of abortion and other policies leading to the destruction of human life:

Advocating for dangerous, do-it-yourself, at-home abortions

  • Amendment expressing the sense of Congress that the abortion drug, mifepristone, was appropriately approved and is appropriately regulated under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and that this law supersedes any state effort to regulate this drug to mitigate harms to women (Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., amendment to the Ag bill).

Paying for/subsidizing abortions and the destruction of human life

  • Amendment to strike the Hyde Amendment, which has been in place for 47 years and prohibits HHS funds from being used for abortions (Barbara Lee, D-Calif., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to restore Title X Family Planning Funding to FY23 levels. Title X pays for drugs and devices that can destroy human embryos, and programs that bypass parental consent laws for minors; it also heavily subsidizes abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood (Kathy Manning, D-N.C., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section barring funding for certain organizations that provide abortions, including Planned Parenthood (Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section that would allow an individual to sue in court for a suspected violation of the Weldon amendment, which prohibits funding for programs/agencies that discriminate against healthcare entities that decline to provide/pay for abortions (Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section prohibiting the NIH from using fetal tissue obtained from an elective abortion in medical research (Diana DeGette, D-Colo., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section barring funding for elective abortions for federal prisoners (Lois Frankel, D-Fla., amendmentto the CJS bill).
  • Amendment to narrow the scope of the Dornan amendment, which prohibits D.C. funds from paying for abortions, allowing the use of local funds for this purpose (Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., amendment to the FSGG bill).
  • Amendment to prevent the Office of Personnel Management from contracting with Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) carriers unless their plans cover IVF, a procedure that results in the routine destruction and perpetual freezing of living human embryos (Gerry Connolly, D-Va., amendment to the FSGG bill).
  • Amendment to strike a provision prohibiting abortion coverage under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (Ritchie Torres, D-Calif., amendment to the FSGG bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section prohibiting funds to establish, support, administer, oversee, or issue a grant, contract, or cooperative agreement to provide information on, promote access to, or facilitate an abortion (Lizzie Fletcher, D-Va., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).

Paying for abortion advocacy

Allowing the District of Columbia to side-step pro-life federal protections

  • Amendment to strike a section requiring D.C. to submit a report to Congress on its enforcement of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, keeping Americans in the dark about unlawful abortions being performed on (sometimes viable) babies (such as the DC Five) in D.C. (Norton, D-D.C., amendment to the FSGG bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section barring D.C. from enforcing its law allowing physician-assisted suicide and from passing any other similar legislation in the future (Norton, D-D.C., amendment to the FSGG bill).

Discriminating against Americans who are pro-life

  • Amendment to strike a section prohibiting funds to implement the EEOC’s rule requiring reasonable accommodations for employees to get abortions, even if such actions would be against the employer’s conscience (Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., amendment to the CJS bill).
  • Amendments to prevent Republicans from protecting the conscience rights of employers from being forced to provide coverage of or accommodations for abortions and contraception for their employees (Norton, D-D.C., amendment to the FSGG bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section that would bar funding for post-graduate physician training programs if they don’t provide an opt-out option for abortion training or if they discriminate against physicians who do opt-out (Kathy Castor, D-Fla., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section barring funding for two pro-abortion Biden executive orders — the first contained directives to convene volunteer lawyers to sue against pro-life legislation, use the FTC to go after pregnancy resource centers, and convene an interagency task force to promote abortion while the second set up policies to pay for out-of-state travel for abortion through Medicaid and used sex discrimination laws to go after health care providers that will not provide abortions because of moral objections (Manning, D-N.C., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).
  • Amendment to strike a section prohibiting funding for HHS to administer, enforce, or finalize its proposed rule that would stop taxpayer dollars from going to pregnancy resource centers, which provide practical support for women facing unplanned pregnancies (Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., amendment to the Labor-HHS bill).

Jim Wallis, a liberal theologian, left-wing activist, and author of the ambitiously titled “Politics According to the Bible,” famously helped coin the phrase, “A budget is a moral document” to argue that it is immoral to cut federal spending. For close to two decades, Democrats have used itto cloak policy prescriptions for everything from wide-open borders to abortion-on-demand in biblical-sounding verbiage and to berate conservatives who opposed the expansion of the federal government far beyond its authority or means.

Maybe it’s time for conservative Republicans to take liberals at their word and take the fight to them. (Hint: They started to last year, and many of those spending provisions either made it into the final package or at least blunted radical Democrats’ counter-proposals.)

Whether or not spending bills are moral documents, they are a battleground. Those are your tax dollars being spent, and you have a right to demand that they reflect your values.

AUTHORS

Chantel Hoyt and Quena Gonzalez

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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.

Revised 2024 Democratic Platform More Extreme than the Draft

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The final version of the Democratic Party’s 2024 Platform has added references calling transgender procedures “medically necessary,” claiming that Christian schools may further “discrimination,” shifting blame on the U.S. border to the previous administration, and promising American children a more “multilingual” education. The platform maintains its promises to keep “fighting” parents’ efforts to keep pornographic books out of children’s hands, expanding abortion nationwide, and promoting transgender procedures for children and prisoners.

Delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Committee in Chicago adopted the revised platform last week inside Chicago’s United Center. The final version contains minor modifications from the draft platform, which was released on July 13 and obtained by Politico. At that time, Joe Biden remained the presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate.

Curiously, the 2024 Democratic Party Platform did not update that previous version’s references to the nominee’s name: It contains 20 references to 2024 being an election for Joe Biden’s “second term.” For example, the 2024 platform states, “In his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion” and “stand with Ukraine.” It contains less than 10 references to Kamala Harris in an individual capacity, rather than conjoined with Joe Biden or as part of the “Biden-Harris administration.”

Yet the alterations made between the two drafts indicate a Democratic Party moving ever further to the Left. The revised platform added a brand new promise — not to average citizens but to the transgender industry: “Democrats will vigorously oppose state and federal bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families, and doctors — not politicians — in making health care decisions.”

Yet Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz (D) signed a bill disrespecting the role of parents in their children’s health care by allowing children whose parents will not allow them to undergo transgender procedures to flee to Minnesota, a “sanctuary” where the state will reassign custody until the child has undergone a transition against his/her parents’ wishes. Walz also signed a bill outlawing so-called “conversion therapy,’ even if parents and children want it.” The 2024 Democratic Party Platform doubles down on transgender procedures, adding that Biden “protected transgender Americans’ access to health care and coverage, including medically necessary gender-affirming care” (emphasis added).

The platform also strengthened promises to come after individuals accused of holding the wrong positions on hot-button issues. The revised platform changed its promise of “protecting LGBTQI+ children from bullying and assault” to stopping anti-LGBTQI+ “bullying and discrimination” (emphasis added). The platform still mentions the party’s intent to prosecute “hate crimes,” noting, “The Justice Department is taking an all-of-department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights.”

That promise may be directed at Christian schools, which may lose federal funding for holding to biblical morality under the vague language of the 2024 Democratic Party Platform. A new section added to the platform states: “We oppose the use of private-school vouchers, tuition tax credits, opportunity scholarships, and other schemes that divert taxpayer-funded resources away from public education. Public tax dollars should never be used to discriminate” (emphasis added). Teachers’ unions and LGBTQ pressure groups have accused Christian schools of “discrimination,” because they do not allow teachers who flout biblical morality to set that example for their students, or because they do not allow GSA Networks clubs like the one Tim Walz founded in his high school, which promotes transgender transitions without parental notification. Traditional Christianity teaches that one’s biological sex is unalterable, a gift from God, and should be treasured, as well as opposing all sexual activity outside biblical marriage.

The revised platform also deals with language, promising a greater cacophony inside public schools: “[W]e’re working to provide every student with a pathway to multilingual education, while ensuring equitable access to a high-quality education for English learners, who’ve historically been underserved.”

The revised platform pledges to tax U.S. citizens and their communities to facilitate giving U.S. citizenship to non-citizen immigrants. A new sentence states the Harris administration “will also help to fund community-based organizations that host clinics to assist with immigration cases.”

Seemingly, the revised platform added references to the LGBTQIA+ movement wherever possible. The revised platform adds that, not only did President Joe Biden pardon gay veterans, but he “pardoned approximately 2,000 gay,lesbian, and bisexual veterans who were convicted years ago just for being themselves” (emphasis added). Again, “President Biden … expanded funding for campus sexual assault prevention and is keeping students safe on campus by restoring and strengthening protections under Title IX, including explicit protections for LGBTQI+ students” (emphasis added). At other times, it worsens the reputation of those who disagree. It notes that Biden and Harris “reversed Trump’s un-American ban on transgender service members and ended the disgraceful and discriminatory ban on blood donation by gay and bisexual men” (emphasis added). It also replaced the term “gay” with the ever-more expansive “LGBTQI+.”

The platform still contains its promise to expand taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand nationwide: “With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe [v. Wade] the law of the land again. … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment. And in his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion, appoint leaders at the FDA who respect science and appoint judges who uphold fundamental freedoms.”

A second abortion-related plank invokes the so-called Equal Rights Amendment, a relic of the 1970s feminist movement led by Gloria Steinem. “Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land,” although the never-ratified ERA has been interpreted to codify both a constitutional right to abortion and women’s eligibility for the military draft.

At times, the revision nods toward reality. It edits a sentence saying “the cost of living can still feel too high” to say the cost of living “is too high.”

The revision specifies that national rent control is coming in a Harris-Walz administration. A new sentence states that their housing policy “offers corporate landlords a basic choice for the next two years: either cap rent increases at 5 percent, or lose a valuable federal tax break.” The new platform added another line on housing policy: “and we will go after negligent landlords who don’t maintain basic habitability standards. We will also crack down on those who violate the Fair Housing Act, and on landlords who discriminate against low-income and minority renters and people with housing vouchers.” The Obama-Biden administration ignored written law and interpreted the Fair Housing Act as though it applied to people who identify as transgender. If you are renting out a room in your home but do not want your children sharing a bathroom with a trans-identifying male, you could become the target of a federal lawsuit.

A new section also alleges that former President Donald Trump “and his allies benefit directly from the housing shortage.”

The language does soften some of its anti-Trump rhetoric in light of the July 13 assassination attempt. Rather than saying, “Trump is a greater danger to democracy than ever,” the revised platform states, “Trump refuses to defend core tenets of our democracy: the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of checks and balances.” In two other instances, the platform changes some variant of the word “threat” to softer language (e.g., “The stakes in this election for the soul of our nation are profound.”). It also deletes a sentence stating Trump “has never respected service because he does not understand sacrifice.”

Yet it seeks to blame Trump and others for an historic influx of illegal immigrants over the last four years, and away from the Biden-Harris administration, discussing “a broke immigration system decades in the making” (emphasis added).

The revised platform contains the pledges made in the previous draft, as well, to continue “fighting” alleged “book bans.”

Since delegates did not revise the nominee’s name — or pronouns — the platform gives an insight into what a Joe Biden reelection campaign might have looked like. Until her rebranding as the candidate of “joy,” Kamala Harris was seen as the weaker link on the ticket, with major publications calling on her to drop out so Biden could choose a stronger running mate in articles with titles such as “The Case for Biden to Drop Kamala Harris,” in New York Magazine last September, or “For the country’s sake, Vice President Harris should step aside” in The Washington Post this March.

The Republican National Convention in Milwaukee adopted a slimmed-down document containing only a handful of campaign promises that resonated with Donald Trump’s campaign. Notably, the 2024 Republican Party Platform jettisoned its traditional language vowing to protect life from the moment of conception until natural death. Over the weekend, vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance indicated that President Donald Trump opposed any federal legislation to protect life, leaving the matter entirely to the states.

That is, however, significantly less pro-abortion than the 2024 Democratic Party Platform.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand c0lumn 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.

What Do the Trump and Harris Campaigns Say about the America They Want to See?

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A political campaign can, should, and very often does tell the American public something about who the candidate is that’s running the campaign. There are, of course, some basic questions, common to any job application, that a campaign should answer: What are your qualifications? What are your achievements and accomplishments? What are your goals and ambitions? In a political campaign — especially a presidential campaign — there are some additional yet crucial questions: Who are you? Who are you running against? What is your vision for America?

In these days of vitriol and polarization, the latter slate of questions, and the final one in particular, have become of paramount importance. Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have White House experience; each can point to achievements and accomplishments (whether factual or falsified); and the goals and ambitions of each candidate are necessarily wrapped up in the question of “What is your vision for America?” Thus, as political solutions to pressing problems are more desperately sought, the answers to the questions “Who are you? Who are you running against? What is your vision for America?” become of greater and greater significance.

The Harris campaign makes no bones about the current vice president’s vision for America. As if her policies — open borders resulting in rampant crime, abortion extremism, LGBT worship, and the aggressive prosecution of pro-life and Christian Americans — aren’t enough of an indication already, Harris reiterates her ambitions for America’s future in her inaugural campaign ad. That ad explicitly asks, “What kind of country do we want to live in?” The answer for Harris is simple: video footage shows Harris spending time with LGBT activists and abortion devotees. There is no room in Harris’s America for straight, white men, for Christians, for pro-lifers, or for anyone, it seems, who isn’t as far-left as Harris herself.

The vice president’s choice of running mate further confirms this. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) is, if it’s at all possible, just as pro-LGBT and pro-abortion as Harris. He has supported unrestricted abortions up to birth, gruesome gender transition procedures for children, and proudly presided over the destruction of Minneapolis in the BLM riots of 2020.

Harris is also staffing her campaign with the kind of people she wants to see more of in America. The Washington Stand previously reported that the Harris campaign is asking job applicants to choose from a slate of “neo-pronouns” if they want to help the vice president become the president. The Harris campaign is also requiring that staffers have the controversial COVID-19 shot.

Thus far, the Harris campaign still has no policies listed on its website, even though the Democratic National Convention has decided this week on a party platform. Harris has also continued to avoid media interviews and even shied away from debates against her political opponent. However, she never turns down an opportunity to vilify her challenger, calling Trump a harbinger “of chaos, of fear, of hate.” During the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Trump was mentioned nearly 150 times by Harris and her allies, while issues like “the economy” and “inflation” garnered a combined total of 30 mentions.

So what is Harris’s vision for America? According to the campaign she’s running, it would seem to be LGBT activism, abortion extremism, a dozen made-up pronouns and “gender identities,” the resurgence of COVID hysteria, and the demonization of political dissidents — in this case meaning about half the country.

And what kind of campaign is Trump running? Unlike Harris, the 45th president actually speaks to reporters, hosts solo press conferences, and generally seems comfortable speaking without a teleprompter. In late June, when debating then-presumptive Democratic nominee and President Joe Biden, Trump said, “I wish he was a great president because I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be at one of my many places enjoying myself. I wouldn’t be under indictment because I wouldn’t have been his political opponent. Because he indicted me because I was his opponent.” He continued, “I wish he was a great president. I would rather have that. I wouldn’t be here. I don’t mind being here, but the only reason I’m here is he’s so bad as a president that I’m going to make America great again.”

Trump tells the American people who he is. More than that, he shows the American people who he is. Just a few weeks after the debate, when Trump was shot in the side of the head at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania last month, he pushed his security detail aside to face the crowd of his supporters — and the shooter — and raise his fist while telling his countrymen to fight for their nation. He demonstrated to the American people that he is a man of courage, a man willing not just to fight for his country but, if need be, die for his country.

And who is Trump running against? The former president has received much criticism — including from his own party — for his attacks against Harris, from questioning her racial identity to highlighting the failures and flawed policies on her record. Among the chief of those failures and flawed policies in Trump’s crosshairs are Harris’s immigration and economic policies. One of the Trump campaign’s latest ads took footage of Harris at one of her own presidential campaign rallies discussing inflation: “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic. Ground beef is up almost 50%,” Harris said. Trump’s team cut the clip there and added, “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message” over the former president’s campaign logo. The Trump campaign has also launched documentary-style ads compiling news clips reporting on violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants allowed in the U.S. by the incumbent Biden-Harris administration.

But Trump’s vision for America is slightly less clear. Where Harris takes a strong and even an extreme stance on such issues as abortion and the LGBT agenda, Trump’s 2024 campaign has not been as clear as his campaign four years ago. His attention is focused, almost solely it seems, on mass deportations and tackling inflation. While these positions are, no doubt, of great importance to Americans, they are far from comprehensive.

The nation is, as Trump himself has declared on numerous occasions, in steep decline. Economic disaster and a seeming flood of illegal immigrants are part of the problem, but they do not address the problem in its entirety. What of morality? What of the slaughter of innocent unborn babies? What of marriage and family? Trump has told the American people who he is, he has shown the American people who he is running against, but what is his vision for America? Does it really stop at low gas prices and a border wall?

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer 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.

What’s in a Pronoun? Harris Campaign Asks Job Applicants to Pick ‘Neo-Pronouns’

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A common enough feature of job applications is a list of prior professional positions, and maybe a list of skills or characteristics a prospective employer might appreciate. Far less common are lists of “neo-pronouns,” but that’s exactly what Vice President Kamala Harris is looking for from prospective campaign staffers.

The Harris campaign’s “Work with Us” website lists multiple open positions. When a candidate clicks on a job to apply, space is provided to attach a resume or CV, type a name, and pick a set of pronouns. Options include “He/him,” “She/her,” “They/them,” “Xe/xem,” “Ze/hir,” “Ey/em,” “Hir/hir,” “Fae/faer,” and “Hu/hu.” Applicants may also request that they be addressed only by their names instead of by pronouns, or may create their own “custom” set of pronouns. An explanatory note below the pronoun selection section reads, “Let the employer know what pronouns you use so that they can address you correctly.”

Social media has already erupted with jokes over the Harris campaign’s pronoun selection section. YouTuber and podcaster Blaire White quipped, “Kamala Harris has more pronouns (9) than policies (0) on her website.” Richard Hanania, founder and president of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, joked, “I would love to see someone ask Tim Walz to explain the difference between ze/hir and hir/hir,” referring to Harris’s running mate. Indicating the “neo-pronouns” on the list, one social media user commented, “Half of those are just the noises Joe Biden makes when he tries to talk.” Another social media user more soberly observed, “That’s kind of all they are running on. Identity politics and abortion.”

In addition to standard questions regarding professional and campaign experience, start date, and willingness to relocate, the application also asks, “How would you contribute to building a diverse culture?” and “Describe a time when you had to overcome adversity.”

At the bottom of the application are two optional surveys. The first is a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity questionnaire, which asks for an applicant’s gender. The only options are “Male,” “Female,” or “Decline to self-identify.” Below that is a “diversity survey” from the Harris campaign. Options for “gender identity” include “Female,” “Male,” “Transgender,” “Non-binary/non-conforming,” or “I do not wish to identify.” Other questions on the survey ask, “Do you identify as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community?” and “Do you identify as a member of the disability community?”

The Harris-Walz ticket has been branded as the most far-left in American history. “This is the most Radical Left duo in American history. There has never been anything like it, and there never will be again,” former President Donald Trump declared of the Vice President and Minnesota Governor Walz (D). “He’s very heavy into transgender — anything transgender he thinks is great,” Trump later said of Walz, who has been an outspoken advocate of the LGBT agenda.

Last year, Walz signed legislation that would remove children from their parents’ custody if they do not support the child’s supposed efforts to transition gender, including the use of hormone drugs and genital surgery. Walz also supported putting feminine hygiene products in boys’ bathrooms in Minnesota public schools, earning him the nickname “Tampon Tim.” Harris also has a long record of left-wing policies, having been rated by GovTrack as the furthest-left member of the U.S. Senate before ascending to the vice presidency. As part of this White House, Harris has overseen arguably the most pro-LGBT administration in American history.

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. ©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.

Draft Dem Platform Vows to Keep ‘Fighting’ Parents over Porn and Promotes Abortion, Trans ‘Care’

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The Democratic National Convention meets next week to nominate Kamala Harris for president, drawing renewed scrutiny to the party’s platform. Last month, the Democratic Party released a draft of its 2024 platform that vows to nationalize abortion-on-demand across all 50 states, support taxpayer-funded abortion, protect the predatory transgender industry, and continue “fighting” against parents who seek to keep pornography out of their children’s school libraries.

The draft platform, released on July 13, places a high premium on abortion and extreme gender ideology. “The word abortion is mentioned 13 times. [The concept of] reproductive rights is mentioned 14 more times. The term LGBTQI+ is mentioned 35 times. Climate change, or climate in the context of climate change, occurs over 70 times,” said Brent Keilen, vice president for Strategic Initiatives at the Family Research Council, on Tuesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.”

“But I could not find one mention of the word God in the platform draft,” noted Keilen. “I also couldn’t find one mention of the word Christian.”

The draft platform, clearly drafted under the assumption Joe Biden would be the presidential nominee, states:

“With a Democratic Congress, we will pass national legislation to make Roe [v. Wade] the law of the land again. … We will repeal the Hyde Amendment. And in his second term, President Biden will continue to support access to FDA-approved medication abortion, appoint leaders at the FDA who respect science and appoint judges who uphold fundamental freedoms.”

The document boasts of the Biden-Harris administration’s executive branch actions to distribute the abortion pill in local pharmacies and compelling taxpayers to fund abortions for currently enlisted military women and veterans, which Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby called America’s “foundational sacred obligation.”

“Democrats will fight to make the Equal Rights Amendment the law of the land,” although the never-ratified ERA has been interpreted to codify both a constitutional right to abortion and women’s eligibility for the military draft.

That vision conflicts with the Republican platform, and numerous Republican spokespeople, who have begun “promoting [the right to life] as a states’ rights issue. The Democrat[ic] Party platform draft does not list that as their position. It does not want states to even have the ability to protect life in any form or fashion. It actually goes after the states who have instituted any type of pro-life laws since the Dobbs decision,” said Keilen. “They leave nothing to guess about where they stand, what they want to see passed.”

“The Democrats are going to make this a federal issue and force it upon states, and the Republicans need to wake up to that reality,” agreed former Congressman Jody Hice, the guest host of “Washington Watch.”

A future Kamala Harris administration could continue nationalizing the fight against concerned parents, as well. The draft 2024 Democratic Party platform pledges to keep “fighting book bans that censor LGBTQI+ content,” by which they mean parents’ attempts to place graphic novels containing graphic depictions of sodomy in an age-protected part of the library.

“We’ve seen the parental rights issue become a really big issue over the last few years. The platform does talk about parents, but never really in the context of parental rights and wanting to make sure that those are safeguarded,” said Keilen.

The platform also takes aim at laws such as the SAFE Act, which protects minors from experimental treatments, transgender surgeries, and sterilizing hormonal injections. Trump “and his MAGA Republican allies have pushed a tidal wave of extreme anti-LGBTQI+ bills in statehouses across the country,” it states.

The Biden-Harris administration, it boasts, “protected transgender Americans’ access to health care and coverage including gender-affirming care” and is “combating the dangerous and cruel practice of so-called ‘conversion therapy,’” the platform continues. It also blasts President Donald “Trump’s un-American ban on transgender servicemembers.”

The draft platform also mentions the Biden-Harris commitment to fighting “hate crimes,” noting, “The Justice Department is taking an all-of-department approach to protecting LGBTQI+ rights.”

“LGBTQI+ Americans continue to inspire and bring hope to all people,” asserts the platform.

The draft touts Biden’s signature of the so-called “Respect for Marriage” Act, a sweeping piece of federal legislation requiring all states to recognize a marriage license issued in any other state, effectively imposing same-sex marriage nationwide. The DNC also pledges to “make federally-funded seniors programs LGBTQI+ inclusive.”

Faith is muted in the 2024 draft platform, which nevertheless mentions a few worldviews. The section on freedom of religion notes the Biden-Harris administration’s actions to combat anti-Semitism and “Islamophobia.”

The Democratic Party platform makes no specific mention of, or promise to, faithful Christians.

The section contains one generic statement that “Democrats will protect the First Amendment right to free exercise of religion for everyone, and we will maintain the separation of church and state.” The reference to “separation of church and state” is the only time the platform uses the word “church.”

The situation seems reminiscent of 2012, when conservative critics noted that Barack Obama’s reelection platform did not contain the word “God.” Ultimately, the Democratic National Committee resorted to unpopular procedural means to reinsert the Creator of the Universe into the platform, drawing boos from party delegates. “It looks like maybe we’ll be seeing the same thing play out this year,” Keilen told Hice on Tuesday.

Both parties have gradually secularized their pitch to voters, whom polls show are less committed to faith and church attendance than at any time in modern history. “Even the Republican platform basically reduced God to an adjective that’s only mentioned a couple of times,” noted Hice. “So, on both sides, that’s pretty alarming.”

Despite the fact that the 80-page draft Democratic Party platform leans heavily into social issues, the DNC’s press release mentioned the party’s position on abortion in only one sentence, saying Democrats “will pass a law codifying” Roe v. Wade (which is mentioned twice) “and support access to FDA-approved medication [e.g., chemical] abortion.”

The Democratic National Committee contrasted its platform adoption with the narrow, stifling, controlled process that watered down the GOP’s historic commitment to protect life at the 2024 Republican National Committee in Milwaukee. (This author interviewed multiple people present at the meeting; you can read the article here.) “Donald Trump and the RNC crafted an extreme MAGA Platform behind closed doors,” said DNC Chair Jaime Harrison. “Our Drafting Committee incorporated a diverse set of expertise and perspectives, inviting Democrats from across the nation to participate in our process and contribute to our Platform. The breadth and depth of this Platform is rooted in our collective experience and reflects a bold agenda that affirms Democrats’ commitment to protecting fundamental freedoms.”

The two competing national platforms show one party dedicated to making abortion an integral part of America’s national covenant, while the other party endorses the notion of protecting life in some instances.

“The contrast couldn’t be clearer,” said Harrison.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: CBS Accidentally Admits that Harris Thinks Medical Care for Infants Born Alive after Abortion Is ‘Extreme’

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.

9 Facts about Tim Walz’s Church

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Vice President Kamala Harris selected Governor Tim Walz (D-Minn.) as her running mate on Tuesday, and many Americans are naturally curious to know more about him, including his religious beliefs. Walz does not often discuss his faith, but he occasionally mentions that he attends Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minn. (both instances are from 2020). Here are nine facts about Walz’s church.

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church in St. Paul is a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), a liberal offshoot of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS).

In 1976, Pilgrim Lutheran left the LCMS to join what would become the ELCA over “views on the inerrancy of the Bible,” the church explains on its website. “The Missouri Synod was quite firm in the belief that the Bible was without error. Others — pastors, scholars, and lay persons — felt that the Bible, while inspired, had portions where informed people could have differing opinions.”

  1. The lead pastor of Pilgrim Lutheran Church is Jen Rome.

According to the church website, Jen Rome (“she/her”) “received her Masters of Divinity Princeton Theological Seminary in 2000” and “has 17 years of experience in bringing people of all generations to deeply experience and creatively connect with God, the world, and each other.” She is married with two daughters, and the family lives “inter-generationally” in a duplex with her in-laws.

On Sunday, August 4, Rome delivered a homily based on a reading from John 6, in which, after feeding the 5,000, Jesus teaches that he is the bread of life. “Jesus goes on and on forever, it seems,” said Rome, but “what Jesus is talking about is setting aside or being healed from what causes you and the ones around to perish, to receive what is life-giving.”

Drawing an object lesson from a fictional, young-adult book series in which a young girl studies dragon science in defiance of societal expectations, Rome urged all her hearers to free themselves from the “garbage” of societal norms. She discussed her struggle with aging, saying her body no longer attains what she believes society expects from the female figure, adding that “it is amazing garbage that can go through this feminist’s head.”

“We humans love to make systems or hierarchies, whether that’s government, or religion, or gender, or race. We just live in all that stuff. We breathe it in, and the dynamics just circulate around in ourselves,” she said. But she imagined that Jesus would deliver quite a different message: “You, with the sick body, you are important. You, who do something for a living that others don’t appreciate, you are my child. You, who have been excluded by society for simply being who you are, whatever shape your body took, you are God’s child.”

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church pursues a ‘varied and creative’ liturgy, particularly at evening services

“Evening worship at Pilgrim is varied and creative, focusing particularly on contemplation and a sense of calm mindfulness, most notably in the music, readings, use of silences, and lighting,” the website explains. “There is no sermon, so the Celtic Contemplative Communion and Contemplative Prayer from Nordic and Other Lands services use a unique style of ‘Word Weavings.’” The church website lists multiple staff experienced in Celtic and Nordic music, led by Composer-in-Residence Dick Hensold (“he/him”).

The church’s “word weaving” aims to “combine scripture and poetry in a way that is inspired by the ancient practice of ‘Lectio Divina.’ These ‘weavings’ juxtapose phrases from the readings in new ways to inspire deeper experience with the texts.”

While most deliberate in its evening services, Pilgrim Lutheran also embraces an open-ended worship liturgy in its Sunday morning gatherings. In the most recent service on August 4, for example, Pastor Rome announced a “U-pick hymn sing” after the conclusion of her homily and prayer, inviting attendees to select their favorite hymns out of the hymnal.

  1. At Pilgrim Lutheran Church, anyone may partake in the Lord’s supper.

“All people are ALWAYS welcome to receive Holy Communion,” announced the church newsletter. Rome confirmed this at the most recent service, declaring, “You are all welcome at this table. Whatever your age, wherever you are at in your life of doubt and faith … you are welcome at Christ’s table.”

This differs from the practice of many churches that restrict the Lord’s table to baptized believers, based on Paul’s warning to the Corinthians:

“Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:27-30).

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church recites a modified version of the Lord’s prayer.

After reciting Jesus’ instructions about the Lord’s supper from Matthew 26:26-28, Rome led the congregation in a modified version of the Lord’s prayer. “And now,” she said, “we pray together the prayer that Jesus taught us, saying, ‘our guardian, our mother, our father in heaven, hallowed by thy name …’”

According to the gospel of Matthew, Jesus said, “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name …’” (Matthew 6:9). The gospel of Luke contains a similar, but slightly abbreviated, teaching, in which Jesus says, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, hallowed be your name …’” (Luke 11:2).

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church welcomes and affirms people who identify as LGBT+ and follow those lifestyles.

“Pilgrim is a Reconciling in Christ church,” their website states, “which includes a partnership with Reconciling Works, a ministry devoted to welcoming, celebrating, and advocating for the full inclusion of LGBTQIA+ individuals in Lutheran faith communities.”

“Reconciling Works advocates for the acceptance, full participation, and liberation of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions within the Lutheran Church,” according to their website.

Reconciling Works offers trainings with titles such as “Lutheran Introduction to Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, & Gender Expression [SOGIE]” and “Let’s talk SOGIE.” It directs youth and families to PFLAG, an LGBT activist group that lobbies for explicit books in school libraries and against legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures.

All six members of the Reconciling Works Board of Directors identity as LGBT, not including their non-binary chaplain. The current chair of the board has three children, two of whom (ages nine and 14) also identify as LGBT, while she considers the youngest, age four, to be “he/him until otherwise declared).

In addition to their partnership with Reconciling Works, Pilgrim Lutheran also incorporates LGBT-inclusivity throughout their church culture. Their staff page lists the preferred pronouns of every team member, including one, a Kindergarten teacher, who identifies as “she/they.” The church also hosts a trans-friendly, monthly event for mothers, advertising, “All those who identify themselves as mamas from Pilgrim are invited to a Pilgrim Mamas get together approximately once a month in the later evening.”

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church promotes at least five anti-racism initiatives.

On its “ministries” page, Pilgrim Lutheran Church lists an Advocates for Racial Equity (ARE) team, which works “to overcome white supremacy by aligning with Pilgrim’s ‘Mission of Outreach and Welcome’ and ‘Doing Justice’ as we live out the counterculture values of the gospel through education, relationship building and advocacy.”

The ARE team developed a land acknowledgement statement “to acknowledge the traditional Indigenous inhabitants of the land we are on, inspiring us towards ongoing awareness and action. The full land acknowledgment is below (the ARE team also approved a shortened version that omits the bracketed material):

“This land is not just this address. From time immemorial the Dakota people’s lives and stories have been woven together with this land. [They were forcibly exiled from their land starting with the treaties of 1837 and 1851 and were nearly exterminated after the 1862 US Dakota war. We acknowledge the Dakota people, past and present, for their ongoing story and care of this land. We condemn and lament the way colonialism pillaged both the land and the Dakota way of life. Pilgrim Lutheran Church commits to ongoing efforts to recognize, support, and advocate for the Dakota and other Indigenous peoples.] Let us take a moment of silence to honor the Dakota people, their heritage and resiliency.”

Additionally, Pilgrim Lutheran Church maintains a reparations fund “directed specifically to respond to inequities in homeownership for BIPOC families.” The ARE team has led the church in a “process of making reparations for its tacit participation in the system of housing segregation.”

Pilgrim Lutheran Church also participates in a Joint Church Anti-Racism Team (JCART), “a collaborative effort of study and action” of four local mainline churches. JCART studies varied topics and is currently engaged in studying “Indigenous/Native understanding and issues.”

Most broadly, Pilgrim Lutheran Church participates in “a multi-racial, state-wide, nonpartisan coalition” called ISAIAH, which is “fighting for racial and economic justice in Minnesota” through “activism, organizing, and political action.” ISAIAH celebrated the “bold, progressive agenda” that passed the Minnesota legislature in 2023 and laid out its 2024 legislative priorities: expansion of green energy, publicly-funded daycare, publicly-funded health care, rent control, and trimming down voting requirements.

Pilgrim Lutheran Church also offers a Pilgrims Caring for Creation group, which aims “to reduce material and energy waste on our church campus” and sponsors “education and public events on issues of environmental justice.” The Environmental Justice Movement battles “environmental racism” by working “to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment, especially for communities of color.” Pilgrim Lutheran has been designated a “Caring for Creation” Congregation by Minnesota Interfaith Power & Light.

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church emphasizes social issues in its prayer requests.

On the penultimate page of its church newsletter, Pilgrim Lutheran Church lists concerns for prayer. The lower half of the page lists ongoing health concerns, those mourning the loss of loved ones, and ministry partners. The upper half of the page reads as follows:

“We pray for God’s loving presence for these Pilgrims who need healing, hope, comfort, and care:

“We pray for the people of areas torn by war and violence, including Gaza and Ukraine, for peace and safety. We also pray for those who are refugees fleeing violence seeking help and hope.

“We pray for the loved ones and communities of all victims of gun violence across our country.

“We pray for our governor and all elected officials and public servants. Guide them and support them in their work to care for our cities, our state, and our nation.

“We pray for those whose lives are altered by climate events. We pray for creation and for an increased will to care for it.

“We pray for all in the LGBTQIA+ community who face bias, rejection, and violence. We pray that we may all grow in acceptance and each become a voice for acceptance, advocacy, and support as an expression of Pilgrim’s status as a Reconciling in Christ community of faith.

“We keep in prayer our Native, Asian, Latino, and Black siblings who continue to face the legacy of racism. We pray for change in systems of oppression and injustice, and that we all may learn to follow the path of anti-racism, and each become a voice for inclusion, equity, and justice.

“We pray for our Muslim and Jewish siblings, as well as our siblings of other religions, in our country, state, and community facing prejudice, threats, and destruction of their places of worship.”

  1. Pilgrim Lutheran Church maintains a partnership with a Lutheran Congregation in Tanzania.

Pilgrim Lutheran has maintained a partnership with the Luganga Lutheran congregation, of the Iringa Diocese of Tanzania, since 2002. Luganga Lutheran is part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT).

In contrast to its mainline American counterpart, the ELCT prominently displays on its website its mission “To make people know Jesus Christ and have life in [his] fullness by bringing to them the Good News through words and deeds based on the Word of God as it is in the Bible and the Lutheran teachings guided by the ELCT Constitution.”

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: A Walz to the White House?

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.

John Deere Listens to De-tractors, Bails on DEI and Pride Parades

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Americans are having a literal field day calling woke companies on the carpet this summer. Their latest conquest — a corporation that arguably never should have been in this mess — is agricultural icon John Deere. Three weeks after their rural relatives at Tractor Supply Co. did a complete U-turn, disavowing their LGBT activism in a public apology, the famous green and yellow logo has not only felt the heat, it’s seen the light.

You can almost smell the fear in executive board rooms now that conservatives have started pulling back the curtain on the advocacy that a surprising number of heartland CEOs are quietly engaging in. Robby Starbuck, who almost singlehandedly brought Tractor Supply to heel, started digging into the tractor manufacturer’s corporate policies and was stunned to find a deep root of DEI, leftist campaign donations, and climate and trans activism.

According to Starbuck, employees were blunt about the business’s priorities under CEO John May. “I’ve never worked at a company that values DEI more than John Deere,” one admitted. Their shared experiences spanned from “listening to the ‘Experience of the LGBTQ+ community across generations” to “[P]ride photoshoots at the office.” One of the most disturbing measures of the business’s abandonment of its consumer base was the 95% it scored on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2024 pro-trans Equality Index. As if that weren’t enough, the brand went so far as to declare in a recent annual report that “DEI is the only global behavioral performance metric upon which all salaried employees are evaluated.”

No more. Three weeks after Starbuck went public with his findings, May’s failure to read the room has come home to roost. The CEO, who’s been at the helm since 2019 and presided over the brand’s sudden downturn, has at least partially come to his senses. In an X post Wednesday, John Deere wrote, “Our customers’ trust and confidence in us are of the utmost importance to everyone at John Deere. We fully intend to earn it every day and in every way we can.”

Based on “ongoing conversations,” the business explains, “we have committed to the following:

  • “We will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.
  • Business Resource Groups will exclusively be focused on professional development, networking, mentoring, and supporting talent recruitment efforts.
  • Auditing all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages, while being in compliance with federal, state, and local laws.
  • Reaffirming within the business that the existence of diversity quotas and pronoun identification have never been and are not company policy.”
  • We fundamentally believe that a diverse workforce enables us to best meet our customers’ needs and because of that we will continue to track and advance the diversity of our organization.”

Starbuck celebrated the victory but argued the company could go further. “Customers want to hear that DEI policies are entirely gone.” That said, he went on, even this “shows that we’re a powerful force to be reckoned with. … This is another massive win.” The pushback is working, he reiterated. “You just need to report the truth to people about what’s happening in corporate America. We have over 1,000 different whistleblowers coming from many different companies. Woke corporate executives all fear that their company is next to be exposed.”

He’s right about that. Ever since shoppers’ shellacking of Target and Bud Light, executives have had a collective panic attack about their radical extra curriculars. As recently as this week, Jim Fielding, a former CEO of Claire’s and a former president of Disney stores, admitted to The Wall Street Journal, “I’m very nervous. Who’s next?”

Adding to the Left’s headaches, this year’s Pride Month was a disaster for the Left, who watched companies flee the tradition in droves — desperate to put some distance between themselves and their LGBT alliances. Then came Tractor Supply’s sweeping mea culpa, the most thorough repudiation of internal wokeness the country has ever seen. “Wall Street is on notice,” Starbuck insisted. “Corporate America is afraid of YOU. Every woke company is wondering if they’re next.”

The full power of the American consumer is on display — and even the media isn’t disputing it. “Your favorite brand no longer cares about being woke,” Vox declared. In fact, this grassroots revolution is such a formidable force, so persistently potent, that Starbuck believes some companies “will drop their programs without us ever doing a story.”

For conservatives who’ve been in these trenches for years, like Strive’s Justin Danhof, this is an especially gratifying moment. The brainchild of presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Strive is the anti-ESG answer to the woke asset management of firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. “When people invest their money in a company, they should be able to have confidence that the people who run it are making decisions that are what’s best for the value of the company,” Danhof told The Washington Stand. “That’s basic common sense. And to the extent that Strive is helping to convince executives to care about shareholders rather than stakeholders, then I think we’re making progress.”

Here’s hoping. Until then, everyone should heed Robby’s advice: “You really do NOT want to make customers angry. [It’s] just a terrible idea.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

RELATED ARTICLE: The Fairness Fraud: This is behind the DEI, CRT, Woke charades

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.

Trans Activist Group Pressuring Corporations To Cover Child Sex Change Drugs In Insurance Plans

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A transgender activist group is pressuring corporations to provide insurance coverage for child sex change drugs and genital surgeries.

The Humans Rights Campaign (HRC) is an LGBTQ+ activist group that champions pediatric sex change interventions such as puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex change surgeries. Since 2002, the HRC has issued their Corporate Equality Index (CEI) survey, which scores corporations based on their commitment to LGBTQ+ activism and adherence to LGBTQ+ ideology; corporations can score up to 100 points if they fulfill all criteria outlined by the HRC.

The HRC claims the benefits of participating in the CEI survey include gaining positive publicity and attracting top talent, noting that the majority of Fortune 500 companies have participated in the survey. Conversely, receiving a low CEI score can make a company a target of media criticism.

However, HRC recently announced they will be updating their 2026 CEI criteria to require corporations offer insurance coverage for child sex change medications to obtain a top CEI score.

The updated criteria state corporations must offer pharmaceutical coverage for sex changes, specifying this includes “puberty blockers for youth.” Corporations will also have to provide insurance coverage for cross-sex hormones and genital surgeries, as well as offer short-term medical leave to transgender individuals.

Additionally, companies can score 10 of the needed 100 points by offering insurance coverage for at least five other transgender healthcare benefits described as “essential services and treatments.” This list of “essential” services includes hair removal required for reconstructive surgery, tracheal shave/reduction, facial feminization surgeries, voice modification surgery, voice modification therapy and lipoplasty/filling for body masculinization or feminization.

HRC has suspended the CEI score of companies they’ve perceived as faltering in their support of the LGBTQ+ agenda. For example, when Bud Light received pushback over their partnership with transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney, HRC suspended Anheuser-Busch’s perfect CEI score for not standing by Mulvaney during the controversy, according to the Associated Press.

They’ve also publicly chastised companies attempting to distance themselves from the index.

For instance, Tractor Supply Company, who obtained an almost-perfect CEI score in 2023, recently faced public criticism for engaging in LGBTQ+ activism. After receiving significant pushback, Tractor Supply Company issued a public statement on June 27, 2024, suggesting they were ending their relationship with the HRC and would not be participating in the survey.

HRC responded by launching a petition against Tractor Supply Company which was posted their social media pages and accused the company of “caving to right-wing extremists.”

“Tractor Supply is turning its back on its own neighbors, including LGBTQ+ people, by caving to far-right extremists on social media,” the petition stated. “Tractor Supply’s decision to no longer participate in the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, halt its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts, and desert its carbon emissions goals is only going to hurt customers and families in the communities they call home.”

The CEI is related to the trend of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, a movement that evaluates companies as targets for investment based on how they align with certain left-wing ideas. Companies with low ESG ratings can be viewed as riskier investments by ESG investors.

In fact, the ESG reports of several Fortune 500 companies such as Walmart, Amazon, and Disney explicitly cite the HRC’s index, and the companies’ respective scores. Two major investment firms, Blackrock and Vanguard, obtained perfect CEI scores in 2023.

If companies want to remain appealing to investors by obtaining a perfect CEI in 2026, they will be required to cover insurance coverage for pediatric sex change medications, such as puberty blockers.

Puberty blockers, which are given to children as young as eight years old, can have irreversible effects such as infertility, bone density loss and disruption of brain development.

The harmful impacts of puberty blockers were acknowledged by top child sex change doctors in a series of private educational recordings hosted by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH). The recordings were part of WPATH’s Global Education summit in September 2022 in Montreal, Canada, and exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request.

Several European countries, including England and Scotland, have discontinued treating gender distressed children with puberty blockers citing weak evidence to support their use.

In 2023-2024, 1,384 companies participated in the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index with 595 businesses earning a perfect score by meeting all criteria, according to the “Equality 100” page.”

The HRC recently completed their 2025 CEI survey, according to a copy of the survey on their website. To achieve a perfect score, companies had to have written policies that support employee sex changes, support trans-inclusive restrooms and facilities and offer LGBTQ-inclusive products and services.

The HRC has established LGBTQ+ activism criteria for other domains, including the Healthcare Equality Index, State Equality Index, and Municipal Equality Index.

The Human Rights Campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

MEGAN BROCK

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

THE WPATH TAPES: Behind-The-Scenes Recordings Reveal What Top Gender Doctors Really Think About Sex Change Procedures

Top Psychiatrist Argues Schizophrenic Patients Can Consent To Sex Change Surgeries

House Votes to Overturn Biden’s Transgender Title IX Rewrite

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

Unsealed Court Docs Show Top Gender Medical Org Twisting Science For Politics, Colluding With Biden Admin Official

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A Biden administration official pressured the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) to quickly issue its Standards of Care Version 8 (SoC 8) guidelines and remove minimum age recommendations for transgender procedures, despite a glaring lack of scientific justification, according to unsealed court documents.

Canadian sex researcher James Cantor wrote in an unsealed expert report that WPATH saw “evidence-based” medicine as a threat to its “policy goals,” allowing its S0C-8 to be influenced by “political pressure, litigation and legislative advocacy strategy, and the financial self-interest of WPATH members.” Internal WPATH communications contained in Cantor’s report reveal Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine pushed for the development of SoC 8 in order to advance the Biden administration’s political goals, even having a staff member suggest the removal of “specific listings of ages” that could “result in devastating legislation for trans care.”

“I have just spoken to Admiral Levine today, who—as always is extremely supportive of the SOC 8, but also very eager for its release—so to ensure integration in the US health policies of the Biden government,” one message from a WPATH member states. “So, let’s crack on with the job!!!”

Another message stated Levine’s eagerness “should be taken as a charge from the United States government to do what is required to complete the project immediately.”

Despite these concessions, internal communications show certain WPATH members responsible for developing the guidelines agreed with concerns that youth were receiving “sloppy” medical care and worried about the strength of their evidence. Additionally, members recognized privately there is “no agreement” on the use of puberty blockers.

“I’m not clear on which ‘agreement regarding the value of blockers’ is required to be espoused by a WPATH member/mentor,” one message states. “My understanding is that a global consensus on ‘puberty blockers’ does not exist.”

Cantor further claims that WPATH did not ask SoC-8 committee members to identify conflicts of interest, even though some members worked as paid expert witnesses in legal cases relating to transgender procedures.

Moreover, one member of the development group later explained during WPATH’s annual conference that minimum age recommendations were removed “to protect clinicians from lawsuit should the clinician decide to provide a treatment to someone younger than a specified age minimum.”

“Again, this reflects both the existence and the harmful impact of the financial conflict of interest that WPATH and its members faced while developing SOC-8,” Cantor wrote.

Cantor’s report is part of a case, Boe v. Marshall, challenging Alabama’s ban on sex change procedures for minors. WPATH released its SoC 8 in September 2022, rolling back prior recommendations that set age limits for various procedures.

The White House, the HHS and WPATH did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

AUTHOR

KATELYNN RICHARDSON

Contributor.

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Pride Month Goes Out with a Whimper

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It’s been a long time since Americans could sit back and actually enjoy the month of June. It was always an insufferable four weeks, breathing in the rainbow-saturated air that fell heaviest across our favorite sports, stores, shows, and social media. But the most remarkable thing about this year’s Pride Month may be just how unremarkable it was. Sure, there were still parades, over-the-top political pronouncements, and colorful flags billowing from too many government buildings, but the characteristic dread and fatigue from Pride is gone — replaced by a quiet confidence that maybe, just maybe, we’ve been heard.

For the conservatives in the movement fighting this battle the longest, 2024 didn’t just feel different. It was different. Heading into these final days of June, the biggest story across the mainstream media isn’t who’s celebrating Pride, but where did it go? The Associated Press, NBC News, Vox, and others have talked to countless experts, who all have the same thing to say: Executives are too worried about rocking the consumer boat.

“They’ve been rattled,” Drexel University Marketing Professor Daniel Korschun insists of CEOs and other industry heads. “There’s been a definite scaling back in both big and small ways,” Joanna Schwartz, another professor at Georgia College & State University, agreed. “I had expected some brand caution, but this year seems [to be] a near full-scale retreat.”

For people whose livelihoods are actually tied to the LGBT activism that June represents, “bad” doesn’t begin to describe the year they’re having. For Tim Bennett, co-founder of a firm called Tribury that specializes in reaching gay- and trans-identifying audiences, business has been a bust. A lot fewer clients are “reaching out for Pride Month collaborations,” Bennett admitted to Vox. “In speaking with my peers,” he said, “most of us are experiencing the same pullback or wait-and-see approach.” Brand sponsorships are especially low.

Rob Smith, who sells gender-neutral clothing, told the AP that he’s seen a 25% drop in the number of stores carrying his line just over the last several months. That jives with what Alysse Dalessandro has experienced as an LGBTQ content creator. She went from 35 clients who hired her as a model for their Pride Month campaigns in 2022 to nine in 2023 — and just five this year. Even The Trevor Project, an extreme trans-affirming youth nonprofit, conceded to Marketing Brew that it’s seen “a decline in corporate giving in the last couple of years.”

Maybe this is just a “natural progression,” some have tried to spin it. If “transgender and queer people are regarded as part of the norm, there’s no point in making a big statement,” Barbara Kahn, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, argued.

But in a country where corporate America is routinely blackmailed by LGBT pressure groups, any hint of moderating that message would be seen as betrayal. Stephen Soukup, an expert in woke capital, who’s tracked the progression of corporate activism for decades, pointed out that for the last 15 years, businesses have tried “very hard to please one specific [activist] group, the Human Rights Campaign, which is an LGBTQ interest group.” And every year, [HRC] puts out its Corporate Equality Index — and every year, corporations are expected to do different types of things … in order to receive a 100% rating.”

Lately, that’s included everything from offering health care coverage for gender reassignment surgery to giving a certain amount of dollars and time to LGBT advocacy. If HRC doesn’t like the level of support they receive from a business, then, as “Outstanding” podcast host Joseph Backholm pointed out, they’re “going to try to destroy your reputation and make it hard for you to do business. So the companies feel an obligation.”

Frankly, Joseph argued, “I see this as a kind of extortion, where unless you do the things the [activists] want you to do, they are going to affirmatively try to harm you. Because in the marketplace, of course, your reputation is a big part of what your brand is.” He compared it to a gangster showing up at a store, “tapping their nightstick on their palms saying, ‘You know, it’s a great business you have here. It’d be terrible if something happened to it.’”

The difference now is, American consumers have managed to collectively hurt brands’ bottom lines more than HRC’s ostracization ever could. After Dylan Mulvaney’s beer cans and Target’s “tuck-friendly” swimwear, the backlash was so explosive and so sustained that companies had no choice but to recalibrate. These were billion-dollar mistakes that sent plenty of boardrooms into desperate PR tailspins — and everyone else on a year-long soul search.

This whole grassroots sea change that’s taken hold in sports, business, and other industries has been an astounding thing for longtime conservatives to witness, especially those like Soukup, who’ve been fighting the corporate beast virtually alone for the better part of two decades. “There’s definitely been a retreat,” he agreed. “When I sat down to write the book ‘The Dictatorship of Woke Capitol’ four years ago this summer,” he admits, “I was pretty pessimistic. I didn’t think that there was a whole lot we could do to push back against ESG, to push back against the broader stakeholder movement, to push back against all of this politicization of American corporations. … Even after the book came out, the following spring, I did interview after interview [and] I was asked, ‘What do you think is going to happen?’ I was still pretty dour. I [was] still pretty pessimistic about what our prospects were to get … capital markets back to neutral.”

Now, he looks around at this nationwide movement to roll back LGBT activism and can hardly believe it. “Over the past three years, there’s been really an explosion in the pushback. And there are a lot of people who’ve been involved in this, a lot of people who deserve a lot of credit for this.”

It was almost like a great awakening for everyday Americans, who finally got fed up and realized the amount of power they wield. “We’ve seen a lot of people say, ‘You know what? This is not right. This is not the way that American capitalism is supposed to function. This is not the way American democracy is supposed to function. And it’s important for us to get this right, because if we don’t, then we lose everything.’ … I’m so much more optimistic now than I was three or four years ago about how effective we can be in halting this ideological, political takeover of business and capital markets.”

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. ©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.

Expert: Military’s Pride Posts ‘Prioritize the Trivial to the Detriment of the Significant’

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In honor of Pride Month, the U.S. Navy SEALs and Naval Special Warfare Command’s Facebook page shared a post that read, with the words spread out across a rainbow background, “NSW. Dignity. Service. Respect. Equality. Pride.” The Navy SEALs, which are often regarded as one of the U.S. military’s leading and most respected fighting forces, was not able to walk away from the post free of backlash. It “brought a tsunami of criticism and ridicule,” LifeSite News reported. They added, “The message was hugely ratioed, eliciting 7,000 mostly negative comments to just 1,500 ‘likes.’”

One comment, which received significant attention, said, “This is a slap in the face of every special warfare operator that has put their lives on the line for our nation.” Adding to the criticism, the conservative Libs of TikTok, wrote, “The Navy Seals have gone woke. Our elite special forces. This is terrifying.” But it would seem the Navy SEALs were not alone in their promotion of Pride, as the Department of Defense shared a similar post. It stated, “Pride Month is a time to come together to honor the contributions of LGBTQ+ service members. We are committed to ensuring and promoting an atmosphere of dignity and respect for all civilian and military personnel.”

Followers weren’t pleased with that either, as users said things like, “You have purposely made a mockery of our country and my grandfather who died defending it.” Another commented, “Your account is a disgrace to our country. Delete it.” Additionally, someone pointed out, “This is NOT the Department of Defense’s mission. Stay out of the American people’s politics.”

In addition to this backlash, some have acknowledged the fact that June is also Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Month — which was also recognized by the Navy after the Pride post. And while other U.S. military social media accounts did not initially share posts related to Pride Month, the Air Force, Navy, Space Force, Coast Guard, and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency now have. Those accounts also received overwhelming backlash.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) William G. Boykin, Family Research Council’s executive vice president, wasn’t surprised by the military’s Pride Month posts. He shared with The Washington Stand, “The negative comments regarding the support for Pride Month reflect the deep-seated sentiments of these sailors and other military personnel regarding the value of this woke program that exists in all the services.”

Boykin continued, “In a world like the one that we live in today, war is inevitable — and being ready for war is the responsibility of all our military leaders. I have not found anyone who can explain how this focus on the LGBT agenda is going to enhance the readiness of our armed forces.” The general added, “I personally applaud those that have the courage to say what they believe, as their expressions reflect the sentiments of the majority of people serving in our military today.”

According to Joseph Backholm, FRC’s senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement, the posts reveal a lot about the priorities of the military’s leadership. “This is yet another reminder that our current national leadership prioritizes the trivial to the detriment of the significant,” he shared with TWS.

“In theory,” he continued, “you can maintain military readiness while also posting silly and false things on social media. But we’ve seen plenty of other evidence that politics have caused our military to take their eye off the ball.” Ultimately, Backholm emphasized, “They make these statements because they believe in the cause” they’re representing. He went on to explain how, in their eyes, “negative responses” serve as fuel that “simply affirms how important it is for them to continue on the path.”

While some of the users that left negative comments wondered why the military supports an agenda many people reject, Backholm noted that, at the end of the day, it’s because the branches promoting it “don’t care that most of the country finds it bothersome and that most of the world finds it offensive.” Rather, he observed, “They have no doubt they are correct” in backing it. Backholm concluded, “They believe they are defending the oppressed and anyone who disagrees with them are one of the oppressors.”

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.

Scholastic Book Publisher Offers ‘Pride Guide’ to Teachers During LGBT Campaign

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This obsession with sexualizing children is indicative of a sick and depraved society. It must stop.

“Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone!”

Scholastic Publishes ‘Pride’ Guide for Teachers, Vows to Distribute LGBT Books Banned by Schools

Book publisher Scholastic announced a “Read with Pride” campaign, providing educators a list of “LGBTQIA+ stories” for “kids and teens” and vowed to use company resources to fight efforts by local school districts and parents to determine what content is appropriate for students.

In its section on “why it’s essential to support LGBTQIA+ youth,” Scholastic states that almost 10 percent of teens in the United States are “lesbian, gay, bi, or trans,” that “about half (52%)” of all Americans who fall under the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are “people of color,” and that a quarter of children and teens who fit that description …

Continue reading.

Scholastic releases Pride educator guide with resources for fighting anti-LGBTQ+ book bans

The book publisher Scholastic has published a Pride guide giving educators and child advocates a list of LGBTQ+-themed books for children of all ages as well as support resources for mental health and fighting right-wing book bans.

The guide comes eight months after the company was widely criticized for allowing schools to opt out of offering “diverse” books on racial and LGBTQ+ issues at its school book fairs. Though Scholastic introduced the policy to help educators adhere to state legislation and district policies banning queer content and “critical race theory” in schools, it reversed the opt-out policy after authors and educators blamed the company for complying to book banning rather than challenging such bans.

“As a teacher, librarian, educator, or caregiver, how you interact with all children and teens around queerness matters,” Scholastic’s guide states. “What literature you provide them with, and how you talk about both literature and identity, can have an immense, life-changing impact on the young people in your life…. Whether or not they are out to themselves or you, you absolutely know queer children and interact with them in your classrooms, libraries, and communities.”

Continue reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

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

LGBT Activists Spend $15 Million Reminding Voters about Biden’s Most Unpopular Agenda

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If you’re one of those rare voters who just can’t get enough of LGBT extremism, you’re in luck! The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) plans to drop big bucks reminding swing-state Americans how they’ve successfully overtaken classrooms, sports, business, entertainment, and politics with radical gender ideology under Joe Biden. Of course, most people would say they don’t need the recap. As far as they’re concerned, the last three years of the Biden administration have been one long ad for the LGBT movement.

According to HRC, the $15 million campaign will focus primarily on six battleground states they believe could “make or break Biden’s reelection bid”: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Organization President Kelley Robinson told NBC, “This group of voters, when you break them down by state, can actually make the difference. … This is a powerful constituency, a powerful community. It’s our job to make sure that they have the tools that they need to show out to the polls. So we’re going to be knocking on doors, making phone calls, engaging every member that we’ve got to make sure that our people turn out.”

And while no constituency should be happier with Biden — after all, he did more to advance radical transgenderism than every president combined — the LGBT population’s outsized influence in the White House doesn’t exactly translate to election politics. Even this 7.6% of the country (a generous estimate, many believe) isn’t exactly thrilled with Biden, despite his unpopular decision to declare war on every social, scientific, and biological norm.

Despite the White House’s incessant pandering, his most overrepresented base (apart from illegal immigrants, who, at least for now, can’t technically vote) doesn’t necessarily believe that Biden’s overt LGBT gestures are enough. “Like much of the country, LGBTQ+ Americans aren’t particularly enamored with the president,” ABC News warns. “Though they’re more likely to approve of the job Biden is doing than Americans overall, the president’s approval rating was still flat with this group: An equal share (47 percent) said they approved of the job Biden was doing as said they disapproved.”

That’s bad news for an administration that’s put all of its eggs in the transgender basket. Interestingly, “a plurality (30 percent) of LGBTQ+ Americans identified their political leanings as “moderate centrist/independent” in March polling. “When asked to place themselves on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most liberal and 10 being the most conservative, the average response was 3.9. Similarly, a plurality said that they’d like politicians to be a 5 on that scale. And when asked what they thought was the most pressing issue in America today, the top response, with 24 percent, was ‘jobs and the economy.’”

For three years, Biden has been willing to hemorrhage moderate and Independent voters with outrageous gender ideology that erases girls’ sports, parental rights, privacy, and children’s health and safety in the hopes that his far-Left base will ride in and rescue him. That seems less and less likely, especially now, in a volatile political environment where his unpopularity is spilling over into the Democrats’ anti-Semitic protestors.

And while HRC estimates that there are 75 million “equality voters” who base their vote on LGBT rights, no one is quite sure how that’s possible. The topic didn’t even make Gallup’s 14 top voter concerns for 2024. In fact, “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights” weren’t even listed in March’s poll, which is a twist from previous election years when it perennially ranked dead last. Maybe Gallup didn’t want to expose what a political loser the issue is — or maybe there wasn’t enough concern for it to even register. Either way, it’s a revealing shift.

At the end of the day, experts say, HRC may not only be losing millions but also making things worse for Joe Biden. “This will not have the effect they think it will,” Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon told The Washington Stand. In fact, she said, “I hope groups like the Human Rights Campaign complain very loudly about how oppressed they are while the Biden administration does their bidding to force men into women’s sports, secretly transition kids at school behind parents’ backs, mandate pronoun usage, and pay for mutilating and sterilizing surgeries in the military and on children. That’s not going to go over well with the average voter,” she warns, “and may further alienate independent and minority voters.”

Saturating swing states with an LGBT message most voters have already rejected — and the affected 7% don’t seem to prioritize — isn’t going to help Biden’s chances. What it will do is remind the fence-sitters where the president has spent the majority of his time — and it isn’t on lowering inflation, prices, and crime; it isn’t on protecting us from China and Iran or even stopping the stampede across the border. No, his perverse fixation on LGBT extremism and punishing its critics exceeds anything this country has ever seen.

“This moment feels so important, not just for this election,” the HRC president said, “but really for what it means for the future of our community. We are seeing an incredible backlash in states across the country to the progress that we’ve made … that’s led by an opposition that doesn’t want us to have the rights we have today.” Robinson is right to worry that the pendulum is swinging away from her agenda, but it’s really no surprise considering the nightmare parents are finding themselves in at work, their children’s school, even their daughters’ swim meets.

As FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told TWS, “The Biden-Harris administration has prioritized left-wing sexual and gender ideology over basically everything else. Everything from foreign policy to public schools and national defense must include some LGBT-oriented policy in this administration. They even rebranded Resurrection Sunday as ‘Transgender Visibility Day.’”

After having this agenda rubbed in their faces for the last three years, Carpenter believes “parents are waking up to the reality that this ideology, promoted by the Biden-Harris administration and HRC, is being used as a wedge between them and their children. I think young people are waking up to the insanity of gender ideology, in sports and medicine specifically. And I think Americans are tired of everything needing to be rebranded along LGBT-lines, as we’ve seen recently with even woke corporations de-prioritizing LGBT-themes in their advertising and products.”

If HRC thinks they can win people over, good luck, Carpenter says. “They have their work cut out for them.”

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.

NATO Has Become the Military Wing of a Globalist Power Structure

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NATO promotes the self-destruction of all nations and a depopulated world.

One of NATO’s primary missions is to spread instability throughout the world, using the military-industrial complex to bully and intimidate countries non-compliant with a militant anti-family anti-God agenda flowing out of Western capitals and promoted by Western media.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg asserted on Friday the alliance’s commitment to defending the rights of LGBTQ individuals, aligning with numerous Western officials, institutions, and organizations in commemorating the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, and Transphobia.

Author Jose Nino summed it up nicely in a piece for Big League Politics:

“The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is committed to spreading degenerate values abroad.  With Russia seemingly making major gains against NATO-backed Ukrainian forces in Eastern Ukraine, NATO leaders have been engaging in bizarre virtue signaling to divert attention away from the abject failure of this proxy war against Russia.

“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 24, 2022, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg has been particularly vocal about NATO’s values and why it’s an institution that has to be trusted despite its long track record of causing instability abroad — from Serbia all the way to Libya.”

On Friday, May 17, Stoltenberg, reaffirmed NATO’s commitment to LGBTQ+ values by arrogantly proclaiming in a post to X the current Western value system and what it is based upon:

Nino reminds us of why NATO was founded in the first place, in the wake of World War II in 1949. It was to counter the Soviet Union’s influence on the European continent.

“However, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has worked to remake the world in America’s increasingly dysfunctional image. Its interventions in the Balkans all the way to Libya have brought nothing but harm and instability.”

NATO is no longer seen by most nations of the world as a defensive alliance.

NATO launched offensive wars against Yugoslavia in 1999 and Libya in 2011, as well as its protracted occupation of Afghanistan, leaving the country no freer and no better off in 2021 than when it was invaded 20 years prior, but rather much more dangerous with billions of U.S. and Western military weapons in the hands of the Taliban terrorists.

But even more destructive is the fact that NATO teams up with an army of neo-Marxist and Cultural Marxist nonprofits to promote values antithetical to those found in the Bible, including gay “marriage,” abortion on demand up to birth, and children being able to choose their own gender, along with the whole idea of gender as a social construct meant to “oppress” the sexual deviants and mentally confused. Why do they promote ideas so destructive of society? Because they know no nation can survive for long without moral restraints and some sort of devotion to a higher authority above that of carnal man.

Nino adds:

“In effect, any country that gets in bed with NATO catches the STD of multiculturalism, sexual degeneracy, and societal decay. More importantly, NATO is an entangling military alliance with a crusading ideology that is a threat to world peace.“

No nation can survive without strong men. Transgendered females (biological men who pretend to be women) running around in skirts do not tend to make good military officers, but that’s exactly the type of behavior that is now being promoted and encouraged by the military forces of the U.S., Europe, Australia, Canada and Israel. This group of nations will all suffer catastrophic defeats at the hands of Russia and China if they continue with their plans to poke the bear and create a World War III scenario while at the same time indulging the lowest form of human behavior.

At the heart of this Western globalist agenda lies a demonic attempt to depopulate the world in accordance with the principles laid out in the Georgia Guidestones and other globalist screeds. Because everyone knows that gay marriages don’t produce children. Emasculated, mutilated and transgendered young people don’t reproduce, either.

Any nation that is truly free and independent should immediately exit this military alliance and even non-members should totally free themselves from NATO’s Luciferian psychological clutches. Because NATO’s psychopathic leaders base their speech and their actions on moral alchemy, warmongering and a Satanic lust for power over the free minds of people everywhere.

©2024. Leo Hohmann. All rights reserved.

Target Retreats from LGBT Merch after Year-Long Profit Bloodbath

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This year’s Pride Month is shaping up to be a much more humble affair at Target. In an extremely gratifying twist, the company that bragged their transgender line is “great for our brand” has changed its mind after a year-long stock market bruising. It’s the latest evidence that the wildfire of consumer activism is not only spreading but forcing the kind of change most people never thought possible.

If you asked conservatives two years ago, stopping the woke at major brands would’ve been a victory. But reversing the woke? That’s a tectonic shift in the power structure of Big Business. For once, CEOs — who for years have thrown their radical agenda in the face of shoppers — are feeling enough pain in their profit margins to stop and ask if appeasing the far-Left is worth it.

Target’s CEO Brian Cornell, who flaunted the stores’ chest binders and tucking swimming suits for kids as “progress,” finally counted the cost of his social extremism late last summer. By the end of a dismal August, he didn’t apologize, but he did admit that it was time for some soul searching. As his first and second quarter earnings tanked, he hinted at changes ahead. “As we navigate an ever-changing operating and social environment, we’re applying what we’ve learned to ensure we’re staying close to our guests and their expectations of Target.”

What Cornell learned, Americans will be pleased to know, is that trans activism is the fastest road to financial insolvency. After thumbing his nose at Christmas shoppers with shelves full of LGBT pandering, the full weight of consumer outrage started to sink in. Like his counterparts at Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Disney, Planet Fitness, RipCurl, and Doritos, he sent shoppers running for the exits.

But the activism has obviously gotten to an unsustainable point for his business, forcing Target to announce what would have been unthinkable a year and a half ago: a significant reduction in Pride products. On its website Thursday, the company wanted people to know that this summer’s LGBT merchandise will not only be limited but designed with adults — not children — in mind.

“We’re offering a collection of products including adult apparel and home and food and beverage items, curated based on consumer feedback,” the notice read. “The collection will be available on Target.com and in select stores, based on historical sales performance.” Of the company’s 2,000 stores nationwide, only some will carry the items that landed them in hot water last year.

Naturally, the company’s course-correction didn’t thrill the corporate hostage-takers in the LGBT movement, who immediately blasted Target’s decision to put profitability first. Kelley Robinson, president of the extreme Human Rights Campaign, said Cornell’s move was a disappointing betrayal of their progressive values. “Pride merchandise means something,” she insisted. “LGBTQ+ people are in every zip code in this country, and we aren’t going anywhere.”

The company’s PR team rushed to reassure Robinson and other activists, saying in a statement, “Target is committed to supporting the LGBTQIA+ community during Pride Month and year-round,” headquarters wrote. “Most importantly, we want to create a welcoming and supportive environment for our LGBTQIA+ team members, which reflects our culture of care for the over 400,000 people who work at Target.”

So while Americans can (and should) celebrate the difference they’re making with their money, the work isn’t over. This muted approach to Pride is still an effort to play both sides. As Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told The Washington Stand, “CEO Brian Cornell is discovering that customers do ‘expect more’ now that many consumers are spending less at Target because of its LGBTQ fixation. By avoiding Target, consumers are getting the woke corporation’s attention, but not necessarily their behavior. They should continue spending elsewhere until their behavior meets consumers’ expectations.”

FRC’s Meg Kilgannon also chimed in, pointing out that Pride Month’s celebration of “unnatural lifestyles, proclivities, and identities has become more and more obnoxious over time.” The idea that Target is “setting a limit on Pride merchandising and marketing is remarkable for a corporate America too willing to bend the knee to HRC’s fake business scores,” she agreed. “As American shoppers endure rising prices and lower wages, retail stores suffer — not only from Bidenomics — but their own ridiculous investments in social justice and culture war issues that have nothing to do with profits and everything to do with virtue signaling to shape public opinion.”

“I haven’t shopped in Target recently and don’t plan to,” Kilgannon said. “But it is nice to think that the June rainbow radicals might be dialing things back. If people stop shopping in June, or at least stop spending money in stores and with businesses with rainbow logos and beyond, more retailers will get the message.”

Others, like expert Stephen Soukup, author of “The Dictatorship of Woke Capital,” urge people not to be duped by Target’s “half-measures.” “They seem unlikely to make anyone happy,” he told TWS, “while almost certainly frustrating observers and activists on all sides of the issue. Target says, for example, that it is carefully assessing which stores will have LGBTQ merchandise this year,” he pointed out. “That’s irrelevant in the digital age. Wherever the displays are, they will be videoed and uploaded to social media, causing every bit of outrage and frustration they have caused in previous years,” Soukup said.

“Likewise,” he explained, “it’s important to remember that Target took a hit on its Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index score last year, simply because it responded to customer anger at its displays. The company will almost certainly get nicked again this year for supposedly capitulating to anti-LGBTQ sentiment by limiting its Pride Month offerings.” Ultimately, Soukup predicted, “Both outcomes are likely to aggravate Target’s shareholders. It took several months last year for the company’s stock price to recover from its Pride Month-induced freefall, and a repeat of that disaster may well cause larger and more activist investors to question management’s competence and foresight.”

Regardless, there’s no denying that Americans are moving the needle on corporate extremism. As Perkins said on Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) “Truth Be Told” podcast before he was elected speaker, “This is not a gray area” for most people. Even non-believers understand the difference between males and females. “And I actually think this is why we’re seeing such significant pushback across the nation…” When Americans are silent, he warned, “we are playing right along with the deception that is destroying the lives of many young people.”

At the end of the day, he acknowledged, “What we have is not our own. … God has entrusted you with the resources to buy food, clothing, the necessities of life. Do you think He would really want you sending that to an entity that uses the profits … [to attack] the biblical truth that he expects us to live by? So it really comes down to a stewardship issue. It’s not about boycotting. [It’s about using money] in a way that would honor God. … And I’ll have to be very, very clear. I do not think being caught in a Target store is honoring God.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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