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Here Are Donald Trump’s ‘Promises Made’ on Transgenderism and Abortion

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As once-and-future President Donald J. Trump strode to the podium to deliver his victory speech after winning the 2024 presidential election, he made his exuberant followers a solemn vow: “I will govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.” President Trump, who made greater efforts to keep his campaign pledges as the 45th president than perhaps any modern president in decades, has vowed to protect children from irreversible surgeries, uproot extreme transgender ideology from government, enshrine parental rights, and end the weaponization of government against Christians and pro-life advocates.

Here are some of President-Elect Donald Trump’s most important 2024 campaign promises on transgender issues, abortion, and education.

President Donald Trump’s 2024 Promises on Transgender Ideology

The Biden-Harris administration’s advocacy of extreme transgender ideology did more to return the 45th president to office than any other issue. The Democratic polling firm Blueprint found that swing voters said the top reason they voted against the Democratic candidate in 2024 is that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” And Republicans spent $65 million on ads highlighting the Democratic Party’s transgender extremism in three months.

But long before the election, President Trump had vowed to reel in the radicalism of the Obama-Biden-Harris administrations.

“Probably number one on my list … I will sign a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation — think of it, sexual mutilation — in all 50 states,” President Trump promised during his speech to the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit. He denounced governors like Minnesota’s Tim Walz (D) and California’s Gavin Newsom (D) for signing “depraved new laws that strip parents of parental rights and that encourage minors to be transported across state lines for sexual mutilation. … We will prosecute those involved in this sick California scheme for violating federal laws against kidnapping, sex trafficking, child abuse, and the deprivation of their civil rights.”

President Trump has long recognized the overreach, and political value, of extreme gender ideology. No later than February 2023, President Trump included a robust, 11-point plan to end gender “madness” in his “Agenda47” blueprint for his next administration. Trump posted these pledges on the Trump-Vance campaign website and articulated these points in a video posted on Rumble on February 1, 2023.

“Here’s my plan to stop the chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our children,” said the president.

  1. “On day one, I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called ‘gender-affirming care,” which Trump called “ridiculous.” As he did at the Pray Vote Stand Summit, he promised to oppose “a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance, and ultimately performing surgery on minor children.”
  1. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” he said.
  1. “I will then ask Congress to permanently stop federal taxpayer dollars from being used to promote or pay for these procedures and pass a law prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states,” he said, forecasting, “It’ll go very quickly.”
  1. ”I will declare that any hospital or health care provider that participates in the chemical or physical mutilation of minor youth will no longer meet federal health and safety standards for Medicaid and Medicare and will be terminated from the program immediately.” For instance, Boston Children’s Hospital received $1.4 million from the Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts for inflicting “gender transition services” between January 2015 and May 2023. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) also awardeda $3.3 million grant to build a website targeting young people in other states who identify as transgender.
  1. “Furthermore, I will support the creation of a private right of action for victims to sue doctors who have unforgivably performed these procedures on minor children,” said Trump. Within one week, two former victims of the transgender industry — Chloe Cole and Camille Kiefel — sued the doctors who misdiagnosed their mental illness as gender dysphoria and recommended surgical amputations.
  1. “The Department of Justice will investigate Big Pharma and the big hospital networks to determine whether they have deliberately covered up horrific long-term side effects of sex transitions in order to get rich at the expense of vulnerable patients — in this case, very vulnerable,” promised the 45th president. Economic considerations undeniably play a role in Dr. Shayne Taylor convinced Nashville’s Vanderbilt University to begin carrying out transgender surgeries, because “they require a lot of follow-ups. They require a lot of time, and they make money —they make money for the hospital.”
  1. ”We will also investigate whether Big Pharma or others have illegally marketed hormones and puberty blockers, which are in no way licensed or approved for this use,” said Trump about the off-label, experimental uses of drugs intended to temporarily suspend precocious puberty only until it could safely begin.
  1. “My Department of Education will inform states and school districts that if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences, including potential civil rights violations for sex discrimination and the elimination of federal funding,” he said.
  1. “As part of our new credentialing body for teachers, we will promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique,” said President Trump.
  1. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth. The bill will also make clear that Title IX prohibits men from participating in women’s sports,” said the president-elect. The injustice of having female athletes like Riley Gaines lose scholarships, prizes, or other opportunities to middling male athletes drove voters toward the Trump-Vance ticket, polls show.
  1. “And we will protect the rights of parents from being forced to allow their minor child to assume a gender which is new and an identity without the parent’s consent,” Trump vowed. When one mother’s former lesbian partner began to teach her four-year-old son about extreme gender ideology, she said the boy’s preschool sent her “edicts by email,” with no consideration that he, or she, may not be fully committed to his social transition.

“No serious country should be telling its children that they were born in the wrong gender,” said President Trump.” Under my leadership, this madness will end.”

President Donald Trump’s 2024 Promises on Abortion

Although the Trump 2024 presidential campaign retreated to a less committed policy on protecting the unborn, the Trump-Vance ticket promised to end the weaponization of the federal government against pro-life advocates and left the door open to some additional pro-life measures.

After the 2022 Dobbs decision, the Biden-Harris administration stood by as Jane’s Revenge attacked pro-life women’s resource centers and churches. It then established a federal task force to prosecute peaceful — often elderly — pro-life sidewalk counselors on flimsy charges that they violated the 1994 Federal Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act.

“To reverse these cruel travesties of justice, tonight I’m announcing that the moment I win the election, I will appoint a special task force to rapidly review the cases of every political prisoner who’s been unjustly persecuted by the Biden administration … so that I can study the situation very quickly and sign their pardons or commutations on day one,” President Trump told the 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit. “Never again will the federal government be used to target religious believers.”

As president in 2017, President Trump strengthened pro-life policies that protected U.S. taxpayer funds from underwriting abortion around the world. He later enacted regulations preventing those who receive Title X funding from advocating abortion — which led Planned Parenthood to withdraw from the federal family planning program rather than give up abortion advocacy. The administration appears amenable to reenacting these measures. “On the question of defunding Planned Parenthood, look, I mean, our view is we don’t think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions. That has been a consistent view of the Trump campaign the first time around. It will remain a consistent view,” said Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance last month.

Vance also personally distinguished between a “national abortion ban” and a “minimum national standard,” such as a bill to protect unborn babies from abortion after 15 weeks — although Trump has not registered his support for the measure.

President Trump kept his promise after he became the first candidate to release a list of potential Supreme Court justices’ names during the 2016 election. After seeing the hand of God deliver him from two assassination attempts, President Trump has found a divine purpose in carrying out his campaign promises. If he keeps these promises, which won the Republican Party eight out of 10 white evangelical voters and more than nine out of 10 pro-life votes, he will go far toward his goal to make America great again.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson 

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Why Young Voters Shifted Towards Trump

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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.

LGBT Group Walz Founded Wants to Trans Kids, Defund Police, and Abolish Borders

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Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz has boasted of founding the local chapter of an organization that demands the “abolition of the police, abolition of borders,” “reparations for all indigenous and black peoples,” placing males in female correctional institutions, and transgender procedures for minors without parental consent — all while concealing children’s transgender identity from their parents. An LGBTQ website has said Walz’s behavior toward his students would get him labeled a “groomer” today. Walz’s wife, Gwen, is equally supportive of indoctrinating children in this group’s agenda, because she considers it part of her religious faith that “God created … some people gay.”

Tim Walz founded the local chapter of the GSA Network at Mankato West High School in the late 1990s. Numerous delegates highlighted Walz’s connection to the organization as he prepared to speak on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“I want to hear from the man who stepped up to create the Gay-Straight Alliance in the late ‘90s — the coach who stood up for the kids who needed him,” a teary-eyed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid early Wednesday evening. In a video that night, the Minnesota governor’s wife, Gwen Walz boasted, “When one of our students started the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, Tim agreed to serve as faculty adviser, because he knew how impactful it would be to have a football coach involved.”

Both called the group by its former name, the “Gay-Straight Alliance.” But the organization renamed itself the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network (GSA Network) in 2015 to prove that its 4,000 affiliates “have moved beyond the labels of gay and straight, and the limits of a binary gender system.” (The Mankato West chapter has also changed its name.)

The GSA Network codified its political beliefs in a document on its resources page titled “Truth Nine Point Platform.” The platform calls for “the Abolition of the Police,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), “Borders and the Judicial System”; “an End of the Cisgender Heterosexual Patriarchy”; “Reparations for all Indigenous and Black Peoples,” including “Indigenous reclamation of stolen lands”; and “free and non-compulsory education for all ages.”

“We demand abolition! Abolition of the police, abolition of borders and ICE, abolition of the current punishment-based justice system. [sic.] We demand for our communities to be empowered to take care of themselves, for no borders, for rehabilitation and healing justice,” the manifesto declares.

The diminutive revolutionary screed claims that it “builds upon the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program,” although the FBI has confirmed that the Black Panther Party “advocated the use of violence and guerilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”

“We are in a moment which calls for us to bravely and ferociously fight for our communal liberation,” which will be launched “in the name of our transgender and gender nonconforming ancestors who struggled before us,” proclaims the GSA Network’s document. “The revolution is a relationship.”

The Walz family signaled its solidarity with the George Floyd/BLM riots, which touched off in Minnesota in May 2020. Gwen Walz said she inhaled the smell of burning tires through her open window in order to feel close to the revolutionary BLM movement. Whistleblowers say Tim Walz ordered police to abandon the third precinct to arsonists, whom Kamala Harris urged her followers to bail out of jail.

The organization’s revolutionary platform, adopted in 2018, is anything but a dead letter: The GSA Network referred to “our TRUTH Nine-Point Platform” last November (specifically, its call for reparations) and quoted the manifesto in its most recent press release in March. (The November press release also demanded U.S. taxpayers furnish “aid to Gaza” and decries “the ongoing colonization and cultural genocide of black and brown peoples.”)

The GSA Network’s Extreme Transgender Agenda

The GSA Network believes in promoting transgender ideology and facilitating children’s transgender “transitions” with or without parental consent. “Know the laws in your state around students’ privacy rights and what you do and don’t have to tell parents/ guardians/families. This is important so you don’t inadvertently out a student as a member of the GSA,” states the GSA Advisor Handbook, aimed at public school teachers like Walz. “When calling youth, it may not be safe to mention ‘GSA club’ or another trans or queer reference.”

The Nine-Point Platform also states “trans youth” should have “self-determination” over “all aspects of our lives.” The GSA Network slammed state laws that protect children from the predatory transgender industry. Laws against “providing gender-affirming healthcare to trans youth … effectively deny trans youth basic human rights and dignity,” claimed GSA in 2020.

At the local level, Mankato West High School’s GSA chapter walked out of class in April 2022 to protest Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which says teachers should not “encourage classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” before the fourth grade.

The GSA Network also believes in placing teenage boys who say they identify as transgender in female juvenile detention facilities. In a 2017 report co-authored by the Soros-funded Center for American Progress, the GSA Network complained, “LGBTQ youth are frequently placed in facilities according to the sex on their birth certificate or based on their genitalia. … [T]ransgender youth should be housed based on the gender identity they express rather than based on anatomical sex or the sex on their birth certificate.”

Tim Walz has put many of the GSA Network’s political priorities into action as governor of Minnesota. He signed a bill (House File 146) that would take minors into state emergency custody if the child has been “unable to obtain gender-affirming health care” because his parents objected, as well as banning compassionate therapeutic care for people suffering from unwanted transgender feelings. The roots of these policies date back to Walz’s days as a teacher.

Walz’s Action Would Get You Called a ‘Groomer’: LGBT Website

Walz has said publicly that Mankato students came to him about founding a GSA chapter — but his advocacy of the LGBT agenda predates his time at Mankato West High School. While teaching at a high school in Nebraska in the early 1990s, Tim and Gwen Walz took a student who identified as homosexual to a concert by the Indigo Girls, an openly lesbian folk rock group.

The LGBTQ website Them stated that, today, the Walzes’ behavior would be “liable to get you called a ‘groomer.’”

In 1997, two years before the founder of Mankato West’s GSA chapter ever thought of the idea, Gwen Walz announced “out of the blue” on the first day of her 10th grade English class that it would be “a safe space for gay and lesbian students,” according to former student Jacob Reitan. He reportedly told Mrs. Walz about his sexual preference before he told his own parents.

Tim Walz also encouraged children to have frank discussions about adult subject matter at school. One of Walz’s former students, 2004 graduate Seth Elliot Meyer, remembered that Walz “wanted me to be OK with who I was” by embracing a bisexual identity as an impressionable teenager. Another of Walz’s former pupils — Micah Kronlokken, who described himself as “a young, closeted, queer kid” when Walz coached him in the seventh grade — said Tim Walz believed that teenagers should be “treated a little more like adults and trusted to have tricky conversations, and that high school is a microcosm for our world at large.”

Walz later confessed, “To create a culture in a school that was welcoming, open, and understanding” of the LGBTQ movement and its aims “was something that Gwen and I always strove for.”

“Both Tim and Gwen were incredibly supportive of their gay students,” said Reitan, who is now a lawyer and LGBTQ activist. Walz “showed the bully a better path forward, and I can think of no one better than Tim Walz to show that better path forward for America.”

Walz did not defend these policies during his debut on the national stage Wednesday night. Instead, the Harris-Walz campaign appears to be relying on media tropes that brand their political enemies as intolerant hatemongers. In the DNC video, Walz’s former student Noah Hobbs said Walz “stands up to bullies,” repeating the common LGBTQ activist tactic of bullying people of faith, who do not celebrate extreme transgender ideology or sinful sexual relationships, as “bullies.”

Walz has used the same language throughout his political career. While running for governor, Walz asserted that he — as “an older, white, straight, married football coach” — could assure “that there’s no bullying.” During his 2023 his State of the State address, Walz alleged that Republicans “want to put bullies in charge of your health care,” while he would “put bullies in their place. And that’s why we protected access to gender-affirming health care.”

Walz, who has been accused of opportunism, may believe his association with the GSA Network boosts his standing with the Democratic Party’s left-wing base. In a 2018 campaign ad for governor, Walz cited his founding of his school’s GSA chapter as proof that he “can actually deliver on those progressive promises,” because he had “done it in the past.”

Walz’s ties to GSA would send a more concerning signal to the parents of children suffering from Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). Yaeli Martinez first encountered transgender ideology at an LGBTQ high school club. In time, she began to identify as a boy named “Andrew” and ran away from home. Upon learning that her mother, Abigail Martinez, did not support her gender transition, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services put the underage Yaeli into a group home. In 2019, Yaeli committed suicide by stepping in front of a moving train. (Her heartbreaking story is illustrated in the movie “Gender Transformations: The Untold Realities,” an original production of The Epoch Times.)

The Walz Family: ‘God Creates People … Gay or Straight’

Stories such as these, or those of other detransitioners left with the scars of poor adolescent decisions facilitated by adults, seem unlikely to sway Tim Walz and his wife, who appear to have a religious devotion to LGBT ideology.

“For Ms. Walz, being an ally for gay students was a matter of living up to the tenets of her Christian faith,” reported The New York Times. A spokeswoman for Gwen Walz, Claire Lancaster, told the newspaper that Mrs. Walz holds a “strong belief that God creates people in the way they are supposed to be, whether that is gay or straight.” President Joe Biden has expressed similar sentiments.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has described Tim Walz as “steeped in the Catholic social justice traditions of his parents.” However, the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that sodomy is a grave sin that can never be approved:

“Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

If Tim Walz rejects the Roman Catholic Church’s binding doctrine on faith and morals, he is also out of step with U.S. voters. Earlier this month, former President Donald Trump contrasted Walz’s extreme views with the mainstream of the American electorate. “This is a ticket that would want this country to go communist immediately, if not sooner,” said Trump. “He’s very heavy into transgender — anything transgender he thinks is great.”

“He’s not where the country is on anything,” Trump concluded.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Tim Walz Doubles Down on Pornographic Books in School at DNC

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Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz sided with radical LGBTQ activists and public school administrators in their bid to make pornographic books available to minors during his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Wednesday night.

Walz, the governor of Minnesota, told the assembled DNC delegates he happily opposed parents’ wishes to protect their children’s innocence. “While other states were banning books from their schools, we were banishing hunger from ours,” said Walz.

The book “Gender Queer” by Maia Kobabe, which is consistently reported as the book parents object to the most, contains multiple graphic images illustrating homosexual sex, sometimes between adolescents.

Another controversial book, “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, features a character who casually reveals that, as a child, he performed fellatio on a grown man. “I was in fourth grade. It was no big deal,” the character said. “It wasn’t terrible.”

Concerned parents would like to see these books, which are often available to minors of any age, moved to an age-restricted area of the library, where they would be available to minors only with their parents’ permission. But Democrats have repeatedly accused them of censorship and voted to keep the books on school shelves.

“This is a big part of what this election is about: freedom,” said Walz in a 17-minute address. “When Republicans use the word freedom, they mean the government should be free to invade your doctor’s office.” It was not clear if Walz’s comments referred to transgender procedures for minors or abortion-on-demand until the moment of birth, both of which he favors.

Accusing parents who refuse to furnish pornography to their children of supporting “book bans” has been a leitmotif of the 2024 Democratic convention, with former First Lady Michelle Obama sounding similar themes on Tuesday. Just before Walz took the stage, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) — whom Harris ruled out as a potential running mate to avoid offending anti-Israeli protesters — defined children’s ability to override their parents’ wishes vis-à-vis reading sexually explicit material as an essential component of freedom.

“It’s not freedom to tell our children what books they’re allowed to read. No, it’s not!” said Shapiro. “And it’s not freedom to tell women what they can do with their body.”

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg concluded his speech Wednesday night by shouting that Democrats “embrace the leaders who are out there building bridges and reject the ones who are out there banning books!”

Longstanding talk show host and New Age practitioner Oprah Winfrey made her first appearance at a Democratic convention Wednesday night and joined in on the “book ban” bandwagon, decrying “people who want to scare you, who want to rule you, people who would have you believe that books are dangerous.” She also warned about “tricks and tropes meant to distract us from what really matters.” Democrats often define GOP opposition to left-wing culture wars as a “distraction.”

Walz and his fellow Democrats went on to include the ability to take unborn life as an unalienable aspect of “freedom.” Walz boasted, “We also protected reproductive freedom” in Minnesota, where he signed a bill essentially codifying abortion until birth, with no protections for the unborn child at any stage of development.

“We are the party of real freedom,” Shapiro declared to his fellow Democrats. “Real freedom comes when [an American] can join a union, marry who she loves, start a family on her own terms,” a euphemism for abortion-on-demand. In a video aired at the DNC on Wednesday evening, a man said he defined freedom as being able to love his “husband.”

Winfrey tied the availability of abortion to the American dream. “If you do not have autonomy over this,” she said, gesturing to her midsection, “if you cannot control — women — how you choose to bring your children into this world and how they are raised and supported, there is no American dream.”

Walz and others went further, comingling their support for the taking of unborn life (and, at times, for sodomy) with the Golden Rule and other biblical themes. “We respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make — even if we wouldn’t make these same choices for ourselves. We’ve got a Golden Rule: Mind your own damned business,” said Walz, misquoting the Golden Rule laid down by Jesus to love all human life.

Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who acted as emcee for the evening, also invented Bible verses as he vowed Kamala Harris would support “LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, the right to marry who you love, the right to be free.”

“We’re not going to lose our faith,” Booker said. “I believe in America, because our elders told us, as the Gospel says, ‘We shall overcome.’” The Bible does not say, “We shall overcome,” which is the title of a Gospel song that became associated with the 1960s civil rights movement.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), who would be the next Speaker of the House if Democrats take control of the lower chamber, alternately quoted Taylor Swift and the Book of Psalms as he promised to “protect our DREAMers, and always protect a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions.”

“We are one nation under God,” said Jeffries just moments later. “In the Old Testament, Book of Psalms, the Scripture tells us that weeping may endure during the long night, but joy will come in the morning.”

His predecessor, Speaker of the House Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) saluted Kamala Harris as “a person of deep faith,” a trait for which Harris has not been known. “She is a leader of strength and wisdom and eloquence on policy, most recently demonstrated fighting for a woman’s right to choose” abortion on demand. Pelosi also saluted Harris for “quickly securing the nomination.”

In a speech MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called “weird and meander-y,” 78-year-old former President Bill Clinton put the fight for abortion and sexual liberation in a different worldview. “We know that we’re being asked to fight the same fight that the forces of progress have had to fight for the last 250 years,” he insisted.

Buttigieg, who often accused his opponents of using “faith as a cudgel” during the 2020 primaries, said Wednesday night that his Republican foes support “darkness — darkness is what they are selling.”

“I believe in a better politics,” he said, citing his Episcopalian church background. Proof of a brighter future, to him, came in the nation’s rapid about-face on redefining marriage. The legal recognition of same-sex marriage “was literally impossible” 25 years ago, he noted. “This kind of life went from impossible to possible … in less than half a lifetime.”

Buttigieg also claimed same-sex marriage triumphed through “persuasion” and “politics.” In fact, voters in 31 states (including California) protected natural marriage, only to have their elections overturned by judicial activists on the Supreme Court in 2015’s Obergefell opinion.

Kamala Harris will deliver her acceptance speech on Thursday night.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Michelle Obama Endorses Porn in Schools and Transing Kids on DNC Day 2

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated “children” identifying as transgender, vilified concerned parents’ efforts to remove pornographic books from children’s sections of school libraries, and embraced life-destroying fertility methods during the most celebrated speech of the Democratic National Convention to date Tuesday night. Her husband, former president Barack Obama, promised a Harris-Walz administration would sign a bill extending abortion to all 50 states. Kamala Harris made a virtual appearance to accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

Here are the most notable events of the second day of the Democratic National Convention.

Michelle Obama Supports Transing Kids, Porn in Schools, Abortion, Bible Verses

Democratic delegates gave the warmest welcome of the evening to former First Lady Michelle Obama, who supported transgenderism for children and derided parental efforts to safeguard underage children from exposure to pornography — often LGBTQ porn — in graphic novels aimed at pre-teens and adolescents as “banning our books.”

“Demonizing our children for being who they are and loving who they love, look, that doesn’t make anybody’s life better,” she declared, using euphemisms to endorse child transgender confusion. The vast majority of Americans believe children should not be subjected to the experimental products of the predatory transgender industry — including potentially-sterilizing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormone injections, and life-altering surgeries.

“Shutting down the Department of Education, banning our books — none of that will prepare our kids for the future,” Michelle declared as an audience of Democratic VIPs roared in approval. Nationwide, parents have objected that minors should be able to check out books like “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe — which features “detailed illustrations of a man having sex with a boy,” as well as “fellatio, sex toys, masturbation, and violent nudity” — and “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison, which “describes a fourth-grade boy performing oral sex on an adult male” and remembering the experience fondly.

Parents have asked public school administrators to return these books to an age-restricted part of the library, where minors cannot be exposed to them without parental permission. Yet in recent years liberals have so objected to protecting children’s innocence that beleaguered parents have felt forced to defend themselves.

“I’m not looking to ban books or burn books,” one such parent, Bruce Friedman, told “Washington Watch” host Tony Perkins. “It’s not Kristallnacht.”

On Tuesday, Michelle Obama also made one of her first public statements that she conceived one or more of her children through in vitro fertilization. “Cutting our health care, taking away our freedom to control our bodies, the freedom to become a mother through IVF, like I did — those things are not going to improve the health outcomes of our wives, mothers and daughters,” said the former first lady.

She was one of several Democratic speakers who attacked a non-existent “ban” on IVF. “If they win, Republicans won’t stop at banning abortion. They’ll come for IVF next,” averred Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) earlier in the evening. “They’ll prosecute doctors. They’ll shame and spy on women. If you think that’s far-fetched, just look up what happened in Alabama this year.” In reality, the Alabama Supreme Court did not ban IVF. Its 8-1 ruling allowed grieving parents to file a civil lawsuit against an IVF clinic where unauthorized personnel killed the frozen embryos of wanted children the parents had stored in the facility under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.

Most children conceived by IVF are abandoned or destroyed in time. Statistics show “93% of the embryos created through IVF never result in a live birth,” noted Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council.

Michelle Obama’s abortion-affirming comments came moments after she praised late mother, Marian Shields Robinson, who taught her “that all children, all people have value,” as well as to “do unto others” as you would have them do unto you and to “love thy neighbor.” The Obamas and others also supported sexual liberation. “We believe the government should help you prosper, not police who you’re sleeping with,” declared Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

As the crowd hooted its approval, conservative critics bristled at her remarks. “Michelle Obama is a gifted orator. But she’s fanning the flames of race and class conflict, and hurling some really unfair accusations,” assessed Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). “She’s railing on those who ‘go small’ and ‘hit low,’ but that’s exactly what she’s doing. She’s doing everything she purports to oppose.” Brigitte Gabriel, a former host of Pat Robertson’s “World News,” called Michelle Obama “[t]he most divisive and hateful First Lady in U.S. history.”

Barack Obama: Harris Will Sign a National Abortion Expansion Bill

Michelle Obama concluded her speech by introducing her husband, former President Barack Obama, who promised that, if elected, Kamala Harris will sign a bill expanding abortion-on-demand to all 50 states.

Barack Obama said Kamala Harris, whom Michelle Obama called “my girl,” is “running for president with real plans” beginning on day one. She will “sign a law to guarantee every woman’s right to make her own health care decisions,” the Democratic Party’s preferred euphemism for abortion. Harris has not endorsed any protection for unborn children at any moment until birth. Barack Obama called this a sign of “freedom.”

“We believe that true freedom gives each of us the right to make decisions about our own life — how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have, who we marry,” he thundered. “And we believe that freedom requires us to recognize that other people have the freedom to make choices that are different than ours.” Obama later opined that former President Donald Trump “doesn’t seem to care if more women lose their reproductive freedoms since it won’t affect his life.”

Abortion, under the term “reproductive rights,” recurred throughout day two of the DNC. “Do we want a Republican Senate that assaults reproductive freedoms?” asked Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Schumer attempted to deflect allegations that the Democratic Party has a problem with Jewish voters, pointing to a tiny blue patch pinned to his blue suit. “Donald Trump, this is a guy who peddles anti-Semitic stereotypes,” insisted Schumer about Trump, whose daughter, Ivanka, converted to Judaism before marrying Jared Kushner and giving their three children a Jewish upbringing.

Obama, who retains an oversized impact on the administration’s policy, apparently filled in part of the Harris-Walz foreign policy agenda. “We shouldn’t be the world’s policemen,” said Obama, who sent U.S. troops to fight in Libya without congressional authorization, an operation that resulted in Muammar Qaddafi being replaced by terrorists affiliated with ISIS. The issues tab of Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential election website remains empty.

Shortly before slamming politicians who “scold and shame and out yell the other side,” Obama made a hand gesture apparently intending to minimize the size of President Donald Trump’s genitalia.

DNC Abortion Toll Reportedly Climbs to 25: ‘Satan Is Pleased’

These events transpired as the death toll at Planned Parenthood’s mobile unit outside the Democratic National Convention reportedly climbed to 25. Multiple sources on the ground said Planned Parenthood officials told them the number of free abortions they carried out had risen by 15 on Tuesday.

“CONFIRMED: 25 babies have been killed by Planned Parenthood at the DNC,” reported Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life of America at 7:38 p.m. EST Tuesday evening.

Riley Gaines mourned the loss of the first day, posting, “10 child sacrifices on day 1 of DNC. Satan is pleased.” Author David Limbaugh posted the words of Romans 1:18-25, which begins by declaring, “the wrath of God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.”

“Planned Parenthood is at the DNC, handing out chemical abortions that kill a baby by starving the developing child of nutrients. Share the Abortion Pill Reversal hotline 877-558-0333 and help save a life!” implored Lila Rose, founder of Live Action.

Harris Appears to Accept Presidential Nomination, Skips Husband’s Speech

Even though Democratic delegates formally nominated Kamala Harris for president with a virtual vote last month, the second evening of the DNC featured delegates going through a roll call vote, complete with a DJ soundtrack.

One of the New Jersey delegates — a man dressed in drag who announced he uses “pronouns she/her/hers” as he took the mic — stated, “I’m proud to stand with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, because they stand with the LGBTQ community!” California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), thought to be a leading rival to Harris had the Democrats held an open primary instead of allowing President Joe Biden to coronate Harris last month, declared California “the great state of Nancy Pelosi.” He went on to insist that “Kamala Harris has always done the right thing,” including advancing “LGBTQ rights, the rights of women and girls” before casting his state’s votes for Harris.

Harris, who made a brief in-person appearance at the first day of the DNC, made a virtual appearance from Milwaukee on day two to accept the redundant nomination.

Harris did not show up at all for the speech of her husband, Doug Emhoff, skipping his fawning, family-focused address. Emhoff praised his blended family and acknowledged his divorce, although he did not mention the baby he conceived with his children’s nanny, who apparently either aborted Emhoff’s child or placed the child in adoption. Kamala Harris “connected me more deeply with my faith, even though it’s different from hers,” said Emhoff, who is Jewish.

Former President Bill Clinton and presumptive vice presidential candidate Tim Walz are scheduled to speak Wednesday.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

The Man and the Motive: Behind Musk’s War on the ‘Woke Mind Virus’

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When California enacted a school secrecy pact last week, businessman Elon Musk responded with surprising intensity. The law, which would require school personnel to lie to parents about their child’s gender identity, as The Washington Stand reported, was “the final straw” for Musk, who announced plans to relocate his businesses’ headquarters to Texas (Tesla’s headquarters relocated to Texas in 2021, but now SpaceX and X are set to follow).

Those were the facts as reported last week, but they lacked a satisfactory explanation — they didn’t seem to fit Musk’s character. The sudden declaration would be expected from a conservative culture warrior — a Pat Buchanan acolyte perhaps, or an explicitly strident investment firm like Strive Asset Management. By contrast, Musk made his fortune pioneering electric vehicles, before turning to private spaceship construction, and eventually acquiring a social media giant — not the standard portfolio for a conservative culture warrior. Beyond all that, one does not become the world’s richest man by making dramatic, seemingly impulsive business decisions without an apparent profit motive.

The facts were there, but the question remained: How does a liberal businessman from Silicon Valley transform into a culture warrior against transgender ideology?

Musk supplied the answer in an interview with Jordan Peterson published yesterday.

When asked why he is willing to make an issue of gender ideology, Musk replied, “It happened to one of my older boys.” During the COVID confusion, he explained, “I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier,” to obtain puberty blockers. “This is before I had any understanding of what was going on,” he added, “and I was told Xavier might commit suicide if he doesn’t.” Musk added, “It wasn’t explained to me that puberty blockers are essentially sterilization drugs.”

Musk’s oldest surviving child — one of his twins conceived through IVF — officially changed his name to a feminine one the day after turning 18. He also took his mother’s last name to avoid being associated with Musk.

“So, I lost my son, essentially,” mused Musk. “They call it ‘deadnaming’ for a reason. The reason they call it that is that your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus. … So I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.”

Musk clearly loves his children, 11 of whom survived infancy. And it seems losing one of his children to a destructive ideology turned an otherwise neutral businessman into a combatant.

This is the story of countless parents who lack the fame, fortune, or platform of Elon Musk. “There’s lots of people in that situation now,” Peterson responded. “It’s not pretty. And lots of demolished kids.”

Ending the provision of harmful gender transition procedures to minors is a popular, commonsense position with growing momentum. The number grows daily of parents and detransitioners who experience Musk’s revulsion against these horrors and are mobilized against them. Protecting children in this way is a good, moral, and just hill to die on, although the growing support indicates stalwart defenders of this hill may not die there after all. While the 2024 Republican platform unfortunately omits this issue, it is consistent with other policy priorities and worth the fight.

While a loving father and an ally to conservative Christians on the issue of gender transition procedures to minors, readers should be under no illusion that Musk’s political journey has been accompanied by a religious conversion, nor that he is socially conservative across the board. In the same interview, Musk called himself a “cultural Christian” like Richard Dawkins. He said that “the teachings of Jesus are good and wise” and called forgiveness “essential,” but he also put caveats around the teaching of Scripture and said he is “not a particularly religious person.”

But Jesus did not allow people to think of him merely as a good and wise teacher. Jesus claimed to be God. If Jesus’s claim was true, then he must be worshiped as Lord. If it was false, then Jesus ought to be considered a liar and a charlatan, no proper source of ethical wisdom.

Essentially, Musk admires Christian teaching, but he has not received it for himself. In his personal life, Musk is unconstrained by a biblical worldview of human sexuality; he has divorced two women three times and has children by at least four different women. He remains on the outside looking in, unable to access the great benefits of Christianity, including eternal life, which are only available through faith in Jesus Christ and submission to him as Lord.

In the unlikely event that Mr. Musk ever reads this, I would urge him to continue thinking about the theme of forgiveness. In particular, I would urge him to consider his own need for forgiveness, not from any other human being, but from a holy creator God. I would urge him to reflect on his inability to earn that forgiveness, but also on the freedom with which it is offered in Christ.

In other words, I would urge Musk to believe in Christ, and I hope and pray that the only true God works to that effect in his heart. Socially conservative Christians are grateful for Musk’s aid in prosecuting a culture war against gender ideology, but we want something more for him — for his own good. We seek his eternal happiness and salvation, and we “have believed, and have come to know” (John 6:69) that such happiness and salvation can only be found through repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. This is true for Musk, for every victim of gender ideology, and for every Christian too.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Tenn. Appeals Court Upholds Law Protecting Minors from ‘Obscene’ Material

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teachers’ Unions Out of Touch with Students, Poll Shows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Meta Will Censor Adult Detransitioners but Not Pornographic Content for Minors

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In September, detransitioner Chloe Cole, widely known for her testimony about the dangers of transgender operations, was censored on Instagram so that her content would not appear to non-followers in any capacity. As the warning she received stated, “Your account and content won’t appear in places like Explore, Search, Suggested Users, Reels, and Feed Recommendations.”

For several years, conservatives have been skeptical of censorship from social media platforms, of which Cole is the most recent victim. In a 2020 Pew Research poll, results showed most Americans share this concern. Out of 4,708 U.S. adults, the survey stated “roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults say it is very (37%) or somewhat (36%) likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable. Just 25% believe this is not likely the case.”

While Republicans remain the most skeptical about social media censorship, other concerns are making their way to court. Investigators in New Mexico filed a lawsuit after they created minor profiles on Facebook and Instagram that were, as the suit stated, “exposed to nudity, pornographic videos, and sexually suggestive images of young girls.” Additionally, as The Epoch Times reported, when the investigators used the fake profiles to report pornographic videos sent to it, Meta “said it investigated and found no violation of its community standards.”

Additionally, “Meta also offered the profile a professional account, which would enable her to make money. Meta would provide information on her audience, which was largely male and adult.” Although, its not just the New Mexico investigators that are showing concern.

A bipartisan letter addressed to Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Meta, from the United States Senate disclosed “deep concerns about Meta’s apparent failure to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), as alleged in a recently unsealed complaint filed by 33 states against [the] company.” The letter detailed the ways in which “Meta has not even tried to obtain informed parental consent to continue collecting data on those kids — in direct violation of COPPA.”

COPPA is the only online federal privacy law for children, and the states’ complaints emphasized in the letter are based on substantial evidence that Meta has and continues to violate it. The letter concluded, “Meta’s goal here is clear: To do everything in its power to avoid gaining actual knowledge — or, at least, create the perception that it never gained actual knowledge — that a user is a child. In so doing, Meta sought both to continue monetizing that child’s account and establish a lucrative, long-term relationship with them.”

Chris Gacek, senior fellow for Regulatory Affairs at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “It’s almost beyond imagining that” Meta is not aware of the exploitation of minors occurring on its platforms. He explained how, in the last couple years, Elon Musk has managed to take control of Twitter (now X) and clean up a fair amount of the obscenity that was on the app. As far as Gacek is concerned, if Musk is accomplishing this, Meta could do the same. “They can clean this up if they want to,” he said. “So if it’s there, they want it to be there.”

Gacek noted that part of Meta’s indifference about these accounts and the explicit content is because it’s a “mechanism by which they’re making money.” But there is also “this sort of an ideological contour map,” he added, that can contribute even more to the equation. As Gacek put it, what this investigation seems to navigate is that “Chloe Cole can’t be seen, but the pervs can.”

He concluded, “There [could be] hundreds of millions of people watching” or coming across “this stuff, right? I can’t believe there aren’t more people reporting these things.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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

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

Dem School Board President Sworn in on Sexually Explicit Books

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The new president of one of Pennsylvania’s largest school districts was sworn into office with her hand on sexually-explicit LGBT propaganda and “banned” books. Democrat Karen Smith took up her new position Monday night as the head of the Central Bucks School District (CBSD) and immediately moved to undo Republican-led, pro-parent, and pro-family policies. For the swearing-in ceremony, Smith chose to place her hand not on a Bible but on a stack of frequently-banned books, including “Flamer,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Beyond Magenta,” “Lily and Dunkin,” and “The Bluest Eye.”

“I’m not particularly religious,” Smith explained. “The Bible doesn’t hold significant meaning for me, and given everything that has occurred in the last couple of years, the banned books, they do mean something to me at this point.” Both “Flamer” and “All Boys Aren’t Blue” feature explicit depictions of homosexual activity, with the graphic novel “Flamer” including illustrations of nude teenage boys showering and masturbating. “Flamer” is centered on an overweight teenage boy who identifies as homosexual navigating puberty during a Boy Scouts summer camp, while “All Boys Aren’t Blue” is about a young black man who identifies as homosexual growing up in New Jersey and Virginia.

“Beyond Magenta” is built around a series of interviews with teenagers who identify as transgender. “Lily and Dunkin” tells the story of “Lily Jo,” born as Timothy, an eighth-grade biological boy who identifies as a girl. “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison features a passage in which a nine-year-old girl is raped and impregnated by her father, prompting a number of schools and libraries across the nation to bar the books from being accessed by children. In fact, all of the books Smith used for her swearing-in ceremony (with the exception of Elie Wiesel’s testimonial Holocaust novel “Night”) have been subjects of recent controversy and many have been banned from classrooms or libraries for their sexually-explicit and ideologically-charged content.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “People and political forces who would use children to advance their evil ideologies may have momentary successes or seem to win the day, but in the end we know that God wins.”

She continued, “The effort to reform American education is going to require the same kind of ‘long march’ through the institutions that got us here in the first place. We will have victories and setbacks, but the most important requirement is that we not give up. There are children’s souls and futures on the line, along with our nation.”

Under Republican leadership, the Central Bucks school board had successfully banned the controversial books “Gender Queer” and “This Book Is Gay” and about 60 other books — including many of those Smith brought to her swearing-in ceremony — were being reviewed for removal from classrooms and school libraries. The Republican board also previously blocked teachers from displaying politically- or sexually-charged imagery, such as rainbow Pride flags, in classrooms and mandated parental notification policies, requiring teachers to inform parents of students’ social gender transition attempts or requests. Additionally, Republicans on the board approved a policy barring biological boys identifying as transgender from competing in girls’ sports.

Voters flipped the board’s political makeup last month, handing Democrats a 6-3 majority. Led by Smith, Democrats instantly began undoing pro-parent policies. First, the new board suspended the ban on sexually explicit books. Although “Gender Queer” and “This Book Is Gay” were already removed, Smith said that the other 60 books or so flagged for sexually explicit content are “definitely not going to be reviewed at this point.” Next, the new board undid the policies barring biological boys from participating in girls’ sports and forbidding teachers from flying LGBT Pride flags in classrooms.

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. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

Ohio’s Issue 1 Erases Parenthood

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If Issue 1 passes in Ohio, it will effectively deny parents the ability to protect their minor daughters from predatory neighbors, family members, or industries favored by the Democratic Party. But perhaps its greatest offense comes in its attempt to legally dismantle parents’ rights to direct, guide, or even be aware of the most consequential decisions in their children’s lives.

Issue 1 would establish the right of an “individual” of any age to make “reproductive decisions,” including “but not limited to” abortion. Its sponsors tacitly acknowledge the real battleground in Ohio is the way the amendment affects parental consent. Their latest ad turns the concept on its head, irrationally claiming the amendment somehow protects young girls from child molesters.

In reality, Issue 1 empowers predators to victimize young girls twice, sexually exploiting them and then using abortion to dispose of the evidence. Sadly, Ohio has already proven this.

In 2003, John Haller, a 21-year-old soccer coach, began abusing a 13-year-old eighth grader, getting her pregnant shortly after she turned 14. He took her to a southwest Ohio Planned Parenthood for an abortion, posing as her father to authorize the abortion. Issue 1 would save him the trouble; Planned Parenthood, which has a history of covering up sexual abuse and human trafficking, would not have to go through the motions of asking about parental consent. Issue 1 transforms the child’s rapist into a crusading hero helping the girl exercise her “reproductive freedom” (which her parents might seek to deny). If Issue 1 passes, the Ohio-based pro-life group Created Equal accurately notes, “A sexual abuser could drive your daughter to an abortion, and you’d be left in the dark.”

But a cynic would be tempted to believe the abortion industry (which constitutes the heart of the coalition sponsoring the amendment) specifically designed Issue 1’s sloppily-worded amendment to stave off future legal issues. How did the abortionist react when they learned of their role in covering up the sexual molestation of a young teenage girl? Planned Parenthood sued all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court to deny her parents the right to see full medical records that could establish whether the facility engaged in a pattern of concealing minors’ sexual assaults. Issue 1 would allow the abuse-facilitating abortion industry to say parents have no standing to interfere in their children’s “reproductive decisions” and wash their hands clean of it.

Indeed, one of the sponsors’ ads says the quiet part out loud: Voting yes on Issue 1 “gets government out of the way” and gives the abortion industry free rein when it comes to your daughter.

Even when an underage pregnancy does not result from rape, Issue 1 renders loving parents incapable of shielding their daughters from the harmful mental and emotional impacts of abortion. A 2011 meta-analysis from Bowling Green State University’s Priscilla Coleman found “a moderate to highly increased risk of mental health problems after abortion.” (The evidence of abortion’s harms is far from restricted to Coleman’s work.)

“There are physiological, psychological, emotional consequences of abortion, and the pro-abortion side doesn’t ever want to talk about that,” said Ryan Bomberger, founder of the Radiance Foundation, on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday. “That’s why when they say things like, ‘It’s no different than having a tooth pulled,’ well, there aren’t support groups for people who have their teeth pulled, but there are many hundreds, if not thousands of support groups across the United States for those who are post-abortive.”

That is why the abortion industry refers to its product only in “euphemistic” phrases “about ‘reproductive health and freedom’” — or, in the case of Issue 1, “reproductive decisions,” he said. “When they minimize this and they trivialize the impact of the violence of abortion, it shows which side actually cares about women, which side actually cares about the dignity of human life,” Bomberger insists.

One final point worth pondering: Each state legislates the age of statutory rape. Honest question: If Issue 1 establishes a constitutional right for “individuals” of all ages to make “reproductive decisions,” how would that affect Ohio’s age of consent laws? Isn’t having sex the ultimate “reproductive decision”? Even when statutory rape is illegal, left-leaning legal authorities often forbid parents from protecting their minor daughters on a mass scale. A human trafficking ring victimized more than 1,400 young girls under the nose of British authorities; records show police and social workers often told parents to accept that their 12-year-old daughters were “growing up.” The London Telegraph reported about “two separate cases where fathers who had tracked their daughters down and were trying to remove them from houses where they were being abused, were themselves arrested.” They watched helplessly as their daughters were abused, threatened, and trafficked around the United Kingdom, unable to defend them.

Issue 1 creates the legal environment in which all of this could occur. Every parent has a duty to vote no.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Virginia School District Removes Sexually Explicit Books to Keep Focus on Literacy

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A public school superintendent in Virginia is making it clear that his school district will be focusing on improving the literacy of its students while also protecting them from being exposed to sexually explicit material while in school.

As parents and observers began noticing a rise in gender ideology, critical race theory, and pornographic material present in curriculums and school library books in recent years, many worried that the focus on ideologies was eating up valuable class time that could be spent on developing basic competencies in reading, writing, and math. News came in 2022 and in June of this year that math and reading scores had plummeted to the lowest levels in decades.

Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) rode a wave of energy surrounding the burgeoning parental rights movement to a surprise gubernatorial victory in 2021, and his administration has made education policy a focal point. In 2022, Youngkin signed into law the Virginia Literacy Act, which focused on improving the reading skills of Virginia’s students by providing special training to teachers, sharing instruction results with parents, and partnering with parents to create individualized plans for students who are showing a deficiency in reading.

“There’s a lot of talk in public education right now about implementing Virginia’s Literacy Act, about wanting to improve standards of learning and standardized test scores,” said Mark Taylor, superintendent of Spotsylvania County Public Schools in Fredericksburg, Va., during Monday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” “And we’re doing that in Spotsylvania County. But also among those priorities is a debate, really, about parental rights and parental involvement in public education. In Spotsylvania, we are following the directives of Governor Glenn Youngkin, and we are working hard to maximize parental engagement and parental involvement.”

Taylor also noted that he is continuing efforts his school district started in March to remove sexually explicit material from the shelves of school libraries.

“We provide an avenue for parents to opt in or opt out of the availability of sexually explicit materials for their children, and we’re actively reviewing challenges of instructional materials, including library books,” he explained. “I’ve recently removed 23 more books now, for a total of 37 books removed from our public school libraries. Now, we have 390,000 volumes, so there are plenty of books to be read.”

Taylor went on to point out the extreme nature of some of the sexually explicit material that he removed. “[It’s] essentially pornography and doesn’t need to be a part of [school libraries]. In fact, some of it is shocking scenes of violent rape or descriptions of forced bestiality, sex with animals.”

In response to accusations of “book banning” from legacy media and left-wing critics, Taylor emphasized that any books that have been removed from school library shelves are widely available elsewhere.

“The books that I’ve removed, to the best of my knowledge, are all still available in the public libraries, so this is in no way a ban. The books are available in the community, they’re available online, they’re available from a variety of sources. We’re simply trying to, number one, follow the governor’s directives in implementing policy for our school division. And number two, to create what I hope will be a safe space for children to learn the basics of English and literacy and mathematics and other subjects that are essential to their preparation for a positive and beautiful future that we want them to have.”

In April 2022, Youngkin signed into law a measure that requires Virginia schools to notify parents if their child is assigned books or other materials that contain sexually explicit content.

Taylor also shared his thoughts as to why some public school administrations have appeared to show hostility to the concerns of parents.

“I think that what has been enculturated over many years is the notion that the professional educators are specialists in the field with exemplary competencies, and they are best positioned to help the students forward,” he observed. “Professional educators are certainly highly trained and very talented people, but at the end of the day, I think it’s also true that no one knows the child like the parent knows the child. And for public education to be successful, there really needs to be an effective collaboration, a solid partnership, close connection between parents and public school educators working together to prepare students for their very best future. … Let’s work together instead of pulling in opposite directions.”

Taylor concluded by urging for prayer and a strong turnout in the upcoming election.

“Pray for the upcoming election,” he entreated. “Virginia is a purple state next week. Local seats are up, including seats on our Board of Supervisors that appropriates money to the school division and seats on our school board. And this purple state is going to become more blue, or it’s going to become more red. These issues will continue to be debated, and our success or failure depends in part on support from the community and from the voters.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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

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

Chloe Cole: Anyone Trying to Hide Kids’ Gender Identity Is ‘Plain Perverted’

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There aren’t a lot of 19-year-olds who give up their birthdays to go to Congress and plead for kids’ lives. But Chloe Cole isn’t your average teenager. The face of the detransitioner movement has come into her own by walking a painful path she prays no one else follows. Now, after years of suffering, self-doubt, and irreversible surgery, Chloe is a living warning to parents that the scars of trying to be someone else never fully heal.

“I look in the mirror sometimes, and I feel like a monster,” she told the roomful of elected leaders last month. Chloe talked emotionally about the double mastectomy that doctors encouraged at just 15. “After my breasts were taken away from me, the tissue was incinerated — before I was able to legally drive.” It was the loss of that piece of herself that drove the nightmare home. “Every single night after every bath, after every shower, I would have to look down at these huge wounds that were on my chest,” she remembered. Even the skin grafts that they “took of my nipples” haunted her. The masculine replacements that doctors made “are weeping fluid today,” she admitted to the hushed room of leaders.

These are the horrors that Chloe travels the world to share. Now, with the shock that the number of U.S. gender reassignment surgeries has tripled, her cause is even more urgent. She wants people to know that she was never suicidal before her transition. That changed almost instantly. “After my surgery, I did become suicidal,” Cole admits. “I’m doing better now, but my parents almost got the dead daughter promised to them by my doctors.”

She was referring to the intimidation tactics used by a shocking number of clinics on moms and dads who are concerned about letting their children move forward with cross-sex hormones and mutilation. “I mean, really, they were just giving me what I, as the child, wanted rather than stopping [me] and letting me be a kid and thinking about what it might have been that I actually needed — which was psychotherapy and just being given a chance to just grow up,” Chloe told former Congressman Jody Hice on Friday’s “Washington Watch.”

And the doctors “expected my parents to go along with all of this. They told them that it was going to be life or death for me, that I would become suicidal if I were not on these interventions. And really, what it came down to was they said that to manipulate my parents.”

But as Chloe explains it, she was just a small-town girl in rural California who was on the verge of puberty and uncomfortable with what was happening to her body. “And when I told my parents that I felt like a boy, in retrospect, all I meant was that I hated puberty, that I wanted this newfound sexual tension to go away.” She started reading things online that if she didn’t feel like a girl, she probably wasn’t. In a letter that she left on the dining room table, she told her parents that she wanted to be a boy. “They had no idea what to do,” she recalls in a lengthy profile piece for The Telegraph.

At therapy, the “experts” — like so many of her teachers — ignored years of evidence that Chloe was most likely autistic. She says she never felt “super close” to her parents, and “I must have had some sort of attachment issue. I started at five or six to reject physical affection.” Despite those underlying issues, doctors urged Chloe’s mom and dad to consent to puberty blockers at just 13.

“They told them that blood was going to be on their hands … and that they only had those two choices. No other choices were presented to us. They never told them about the possibility that I would resist or detransition or of me regretting these procedures. They said that it was more likely that I that I would regret going through puberty than I ever would being on these interventions,” Cole explained to Hice.

Two years later, at the tender age of 15, Chloe made the decision that she has regretted ever since: “I had a double mastectomy, meaning that my breasts had been removed permanently.” After months of physical pain and trauma, she realized she “regretted all of these interventions, that I was too young to be making decisions like this, and that by doing all of this, I was losing parts of my adulthood before I could even call myself a woman, and that one day I wanted to be able to have kids of my own.”

Sitting in a psychology class about parenting and family barely a year later, Cole had what she now considers “a huge wake-up call.” “As I listened, I reali[zed] that I had a maternal instinct, that one day I’d like to have kids of my own, but that the effects of being prescribed puberty blockers and testosterone during my transition might mean I couldn’t.”

But these weren’t things she was thinking of at 15 when she had her body irreversibly altered. “But sitting in that class, it hurt me really deeply to reali[ze] how a part of me had been taken away. … It shattered my heart into a million pieces.” She talks about spending a lot of time in bed, “unable to get up, crying silently. I didn’t know what life would look like from there and who I would be, but I just knew I couldn’t take any more testosterone shots.”

What came next was a long and difficult chapter marked by indifferent doctors and the open betrayal of the same LGBT movement that had pushed her toward this mess. “I actually got a really aggressive response from the transgender community and the people who had celebrated me the most through my transition,” Chloe told Hice, “[They] … were now turning their back on me, and they were saying the cruelest things to me. And even my doctors — I wasn’t getting any support from them. I wasn’t getting any help as to how to go off of the hormones or any of the complications that I was having from these procedures. It was an incredibly lonely experience, so much more difficult than transitioning in the first place.”

Trying to figure it “all out on my own,” Chloe started stumbling on other people with similar horror stories — people who felt damaged and regretted it. “And while on one hand, it was kind of comforting knowing that I wasn’t the only one going through this,” it was also, she explained, “incredibly painful and terrifying that I’m not the only one who has been hurt by this, that there are many people out there — the amount of which we’ll never know. … And I wanted to be able to advocate for other people, especially the other kids who have been in this situation — and to prevent it from happening ever again.”

When Hice characterizes what happened to Chloe as abuse, she embraces the term. “That’s absolutely what it is at every single level. I was failed by these adults — these people who call themselves doctors, who are supposed to help my parents in raising me and getting me care.”

That’s why she’s adamant that parents do more digging about what’s really going on. “… [A] good percentage of these people — if not all of them — have had some sort of co-morbidity issue, whether it be like a learning disorder, such as ADHD or autism, or like a cluster B personality disorder, depression, social anxiety. Or, overwhelmingly, many of them have a history of trauma, whether it be of sexual abuse or assault or rape or a parental or family trauma. And it’s hard to know how that might play into the way that a person sees themselves in relation to their sex.”

The idea that schools want to hide these issues or keep a child’s gender identity a secret is, in her opinion, “plain perverted.” “ …[I]t’s incredibly concerning that these schools think that they can control what the child is exposed to more than the parent. I mean, back when I was in school, when I was in middle and high school, we had like waivers for parents to sign off for sex ed. But they don’t get a choice on this?”

So where should parents start? What would have helped Chloe when she was struggling?

“The best thing to do is to … not go the path of having these children go on permanent interventions that will affect them for the rest of their lives,” she insisted. “It’s important to speak to them directly and openly about where these feelings are coming from. What is it that makes them feel like they’re not enough as their own sex? What is influencing them to think that they can just opt out of either being a boy or a girl and go the other path? And to remember to be compassionate to them, to let them know that they are loved. That they are perfect as they are. That the issue is not their body or the way that they look or were born, but the way that they see it.”

As frightening as the idea may be to parents, moms and dads are the ones best equipped to guide their children through this. That means taking control over the negative voices that are corrupting their view of themselves. As Chloe concluded:

“[T]ry to remove the influence that is making them think otherwise—whether it be from school, whether they’re learning it in class from their peers, or from the internet, and to respond accordingly. Like … in the case of it being from social media or the internet, you might have to take away their devices and to replace it with something else like a sport or encouraging them to go out and develop a hobby. Or if it’s coming from school, then you’ll have to be more involved in your child’s education to see what is going on in the classroom, to look at the curriculum. And you may have to move schools, you may have to end up homeschooling them, which is not an option for every parent.

“It is incredibly difficult. But I think in the very end it’s worth it, because that gives you full control over what your child is being exposed to and what they’re taught.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

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

Over 1,000 School Districts Hiding Students’ Gender Identities from Parents

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A new report is sounding the alarm on the growing number of schools embracing transgender ideology and keeping parents in the dark. According to Parents Defending Education, at least 1,040 U.S. school districts have adopted policies instructing or encouraging faculty and staff to keep students’ gender identities a secret from parents. Those districts include over 18,000 schools responsible for nearly 11 million students. The vast majority of those school districts (593) are in California.

Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand, “I am grateful to Parents Defending Education for their attempt to quantify this problem. It is important to support with evidence what many parents know by instinct or experience: our educational system that is supposed to work with parents will often work around parents instead.” She added, “At this point, parents need to assume they will be deceived by their school if their child makes a gender identity declaration to a teacher or counselor at school.”

Commonly called “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies,” such dictums have been the subject of controversy and even protest across the nation, with parental rights organizations such as Moms for Liberty and Mama Grizzly forming to combat the policies and others like them. Speaking on the role of parental rights organizations, Kilgannon commented, “[I]f we have the ability to do so, we must engage with people and systems that view this parental deception as good for children. Obviously, something is very wrong if some people can believe the answer is government first, parents second or never.”

A recent example of the ongoing controversy may be found in New Jersey, where a state judge last week blocked a trio of school districts from enforcing a policy requiring faculty and staff to inform parents of students’ gender identities at school, effectively forcing the school districts to keep parents in the dark. The judge wrote that the policies, “if implemented, will have a disparate impact on transgender, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary youth.” Those policies would require teachers, coaches, and other staff to inform a student’s parents if that student used a bathroom that didn’t correspond to their biological sex, requested different pronouns be used in addressing them, or asking to play on a sports team that didn’t correspond to their biological sex.

The controversy over “Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Policies” comes as debate continues on why an increasing number of children are identifying as transgender or non-binary. One study from earlier this year, for example, classified the increase as part of “a socially contagious syndrome,” stating that it’s likely that “common cultural beliefs, values, and preoccupations cause some adolescents (especially female adolescents) to attribute their social problems, feelings, and mental health issues to gender dysphoria. That is, youth[s] … falsely believe that they are transgender…”

While some theorize that standard peer pressure, coupled with the social popularity of transgenderism, is largely responsible for the increase in children identifying as transgender, others — like Mama Grizzly founder Stacy Langton — allege it’s largely rooted in the sexual grooming of children by teachers.

Kilgannon commented, “[T]his is where our own action as parents are so important. We must be present to our children, engaged with them, being the most important person in their lives. … [L]ike everything in life, it starts with ourselves and our relationships to the people God has put in our lives, especially the children we are blessed with and responsible for.”

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. ©2023 Family Research Council.

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

The 5 Worst Lies of the Biden Administration

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For the Biden administration, pushing abortion and transgender ideology is a top priority at all levels of government. Sometimes, this priority even overshadows their commitment to the truth. And the Biden administration has told some real whoppers. But don’t take my word for it; consider the facts for yourself. Here are the top five lies of the Biden administration regarding abortion and transgender ideology.

1) Weakened safety standards for the abortion pill regimen does not pose a threat to women.

On January 3, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permanently removed a “requirement that mifepristone be dispensed only in certain health care settings, specifically clinics, medical offices, and hospitals (referred to as the ‘in-person dispensing requirement’).” At the same time, it created a new program under which pharmacies such as Walgreens and CVS can become licensed to distribute mifepristone.

Mifepristone is the first of two drugs taken to induce a chemical abortion. FDA in 2011 placed mifepristone under the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation System (REMS) due to reports of adverse events up to and including death. REMS is reserved “for certain medications with serious safety concerns.” By removing the in-person dispensing requirement from the REMS governing the use of mifepristone, FDA enabled abortion pill dispensaries to ship the pills to women without any oversight from a health care practitioner.

On December 16, 2021, the FDA had “determined that the data support modification of the REMS to reduce burden on patient access and the health care delivery system and to ensure the benefits of the product outweigh the risks.”

On January 22, 2023, President Biden issued a memorandum endorsing FDA’s action, saying that it was “evidence-based” and taken “after an independent and comprehensive review of the risks and benefits.” He directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to work together to further advance distribution of the abortion pill regimen. In compliance with this directive, Attorney General Merrick Garland and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra both denounced an April court decision blocking the distribution of mifepristone (the decision is currently on hold).

In reality, the best available evidence shows that “chemical abortion has led to a surge in emergency room visits and higher rates of complications,” according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI). According to a peer-reviewed, 17-year longitudinal study of Medicaid claims data, in the 30 days following a chemical abortion, women have a 22% greater risk of visiting the emergency room for any reason, and a 53% greater risk of visiting the emergency room for an abortion-related reason, when compared with a surgical abortion.

Peer-reviewed studies of comprehensive datasets in Finland, Sweden, and California also show higher complication rates from chemical abortion. In Finland, a study of 42,619 abortions found that one fifth of all chemical abortions resulted in complications, a rate four times greater than for surgical abortions. In California, a study found the major complication rate for chemical abortions was four times greater than for surgical abortions. In Sweden, a study found complications of chemical abortions “increased significantly during 2008-2015 without any evident cause.”

Although President Biden called the FDA review “comprehensive” and “evidence-based,” the data they reviewed was far less robust than these peer-reviewed studies. “Starting in 2016, the FDA chose to only require reports of death associated with the abortion pill, making their dataset woefully incomplete,” said Dr. James Studnicki, CLI’s vice president of Data Analytics. The FDA review ignored this substantial evidence of high complication rates when it freed the distribution of chemical abortion pills from professional oversight.

2) Military readiness requires taxpayers to cover abortion-related expenses for servicemembers.

On October 20, 2022, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memorandum titled, “Ensuring Access to Reproductive Health Care,” which directed the Department of Defense (DOD) “to ensure that our Service members and their families can access reproductive health care.” On February 16, 2023, the DOD finalized the policy, granting up to 21 days of “administrative absence to non-covered reproductive health care,” subsidizing “travel for non-covered reproductive health care services,” and loosening “command notification of pregnancy” to benefit abortion.

DOD has claimed the policy will “increase readiness.” After Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) announced he would block senior-level military promotions until DOD ended the policy, President Biden accused Tuberville of “jeopardizing our national security over domestic social issues. Pentagon Spokesman John Kirby was asked last month, “Why is the new DOD policy on abortion critical to military readiness?” He responded that paying for abortion-related travel was a “foundational, sacred obligation of military leaders.”

In reality, federal law prohibits the DOD from using taxpayer funds to promote abortion. Under 10 U.S. Code § 1093, DOD funds and facilities “may not be used to perform abortions except where the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term or in a case in which the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.” On December 15, 2022, 66 members of Congress wrote to Secretary Austin notifying him that “funding travel and transportation to obtain non-covered, elective abortions through the DOD would, in and of itself violate federal law. It also contradicts DOD’s past recognition, interpretation, and implementation of this law.”

3) Self-perceived gender identity always overrides biological distinctions between the sexes.

On January 20, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret all “laws that prohibit sex discrimination” to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation,” extending the Supreme Court’s Title VII-specific reasoning in Bostock v. Clayton County to every federal law. A separate executive order on this date ordered the president’s Domestic Policy Council to “coordinate efforts to embed equity principles [including with ‘respect to … gender identity’], policies, and approaches across the Federal Government.”

In the months that followed, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Education, the DOJ, HHS, and other agencies have faithfully implemented this directive to expand the presence of biological males in women’s shelters, women’s locker rooms, and women’s sports, reinterpreting the Fair Housing Act, Title IX, and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act. FRC Action has compiled a full accounting of the dozens of actions taken by Biden administration in pursuit of this goal.

In reality, physical differences between men and women are too important to ignore. Biological males are, on average, taller, heavier, and stronger than females, which gives them an upper hand in many types of sports — not to mention a predatory advantage when they win admission into women’s-only spaces. Males have won over 30 championships in women’s-only sporting events dating back to 2003. These distinctions are so obvious that even pro-LGBT Democrats cannot entirely ignore them. Last month, a Democratic congressman suggested erecting “barriers” in women’s locker rooms to protect women who felt uncomfortable changing next to a biological male with fully intact anatomy. And a Democratic senator tweeted, “We cannot avoid the biological/evolutionary differences between men and women.”

4) Civically engaged American citizens are violent domestic terrorists.

On October 4, 2021, Garland directed the FBI to investigate a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” That directive came five days after the National School Boards Association asked President Biden to investigate parents who spoke out at school board meetings for “domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” in a letter prompted by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona. Earlier this year, the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government determined that the FBI had, in fact, used counterterrorism resources to investigate parents. Needless to say, the “spike” in violence was entirely fabricated.

On September 23, 2022, 25 heavily armed federal agents conducted a pre-dawn raid on the home of pro-life activist Mark Houck to arrest him in front of his wife and seven children. The DOJ indicted Houck under the FACE Act, alleging that two years ago he violently pushed an abortion facility escort to the ground, when he was only defending his 12-year-old son from an aggressive, profanity-laced tirade. Houck had offered to voluntarily surrender months earlier, but apparently the DOJ’s resources were better spent on a SWAT-style raid. This January, a jury acquitted Houck of the charges brought against him.

In February 2023, a leaked memo from the FBI field office in Richmond, Va. revealed the bureau was spying on “radical traditionalist” Catholic communities. After months of FBI stonewalling, the Weaponization Subcommittee finally obtained documents proving that the Richmond field office coordinated with at least two other field offices, and that the investigation had gone as far as seeking to embed undercover sources.

In reality, each of these episodes simply involved ordinary citizens peacefully living their lives, practicing their faith, and properly engaging in the democratic process. In contrast with the previous lies, once caught, the Biden administration could muster no defense against the obvious impropriety of their behavior except pretending it never happened, Nevertheless, the fact remains that the Biden administration has weaponized federal law enforcement resources to investigate private citizens for nothing more than being civically engaged.

5) Protecting minors from harmful, irreversible gender reassignment procedures is illegal discrimination and potentially fatal.

On July 25, 2022, HHS announced a proposed rule under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, which would force health insurers to cover gender reassignment procedures for minors and could financially coerce doctors to perform them.

Far from an isolated affair, promoting gender reassignment procedures is official Biden administration policy — although the federal role is less direct than states. The DOJ has intervened in lawsuits to block laws protecting minors from gender reassignment procedures in Alabama and Tennessee. The DOJ also tried to force two Catholic hospital associations to provide and insure gender reassignment procedures, in violation of their religious beliefs.

State actions to protect minors from gender reassignment procedures “callously threaten to harm children and their families just to score political points,” alleged President Biden in a March 2022 statement. He appealed to the political conclusions of “respected medical organizations” to argue that “access to gender-affirming care for transgender children can benefit mental health, lower suicide rates, and improve other health outcomes.”

HHS Secretary Becerra agreed in a June 2022 press release, “This year, we have unfortunately seen an alarming rise in state laws and other actions that discriminate against our LGBTQI+ children and youth. … We as a Department recommit to ensuring every American can access health care — including gender-affirming care.” This remained the official White House position as of April 2023, when Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said gender reassignment procedures for minors is “something for a child and their parents to decide” and certainly “not something we believe should be decided by legislators.”

In reality, confused children are often “given no choice” about pursuing gender reassignment procedures, according to detransitioner Prisha Mosley. “They said it was transition or suicide. … I was told, ‘You will kill yourself if you don’t go through with these treatments.’” A whistleblower account from one transgender center said the providers even disregarded the refusal of the custodial parent and proceeded with gender reassignment procedures anyways.

The physical reality of gender transitioning is even more brutal. One young detransitioner said the reassignment procedures performed on him did not make him a woman, but they did make him a “patient for life.” Young people who begin puberty blockers almost universally proceed to cross-sex hormones and often mutilating surgery. Cross-sex hormones can cause “irreversible infertility, while surgeries cause irreversible loss of healthy, functioning organs. Yet Biden said those opposing these gruesome procedures are the ones harming children.

On each of these five points, the Biden administration is driven more by ideology than by the truth. Abortion-by-mail is not safe for women. Taxpayer-funded abortion travel is not necessary for military readiness. Biological sex does matter more than gender identity in many contexts. Citizens aren’t domestic extremists just because they advocate policies the Biden administration doesn’t like. And gender reassignment procedures are good for nobody, especially not minors. With the constant drumbeat of fiction to the contrary, we must keep telling the truth — and saying it loud.

AUTHOR

Joshua Arnold

Joshua Arnold is a staff writer at The Washington Stand.

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

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

Radicals Threaten to Kill, Dismember School Board President for Adopting Parental Rights Policy

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A local school board president has been inundated with threats that left-wing activists will dismember her, murder her children, and slaughter her pets. Her crime? Saying that teachers should not keep parents in the dark if their children begin to identify as transgender.

The new Chino Valley (California) Unified School District Board of Education policy states that school officials will notify parents in writing within three days if a child seeks to identify as a gender “other than the student’s biological sex,” use different pronouns, adopt a different name, use the restroom, or join a sports team of the opposite sex. The board adopted the resolution last Thursday, July 20, by a 4-1 vote, with member Donald Bridge casting the lone dissenting vote.

“The next morning, our district got a phone call” from an anonymous caller threatening “to kill me, and they said that they were going to dismember” school board president Sonja Shaw, the official revealed on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Monday. Police alerted Shaw to the threat shortly before a previous interview on the show, last Friday.

Then Shaw looked at her district email account, where she said she saw messages stating, “You’re going to die,” with a series of profane epithets. “Your children are going to die and your animals are going to die.” For a “point of reference, they would name what kind of animals I had,” Shaw added.

“I also got notification that people who identify as being in the terrorist organization Antifa posted on their website, ‘We declare war on Sonja Shaw,’” Shaw told Perkins, adding that the group posted her address. “They said, ‘We know where you sleep,’” the same message an angry mob screamed outside the home of Tucker Carlson in 2018. “They said things like, ‘Use all force possible to stop her.’”

“I’m not going to lie. I was shaking,” Shaw confided on Monday. Police had beefed up patrols around her home to ensure security, she said.

While she had been “hesitant” to share the details of her ordeal, “God reminded me that these are the people that are after our children.”

“Sacramento has waged a war on parental rights, and a lot of it has to do with the perversion of our children,” Shaw told “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, a former Georgia congressman, on Friday.

“We have to put up safeguards. That’s why I was put here,” Shaw told the school board meeting on Thursday.

After being alarmed by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom’s top-down imposition of radical education policy as a parent, Shaw ran for school board, and “God opened the doors” to implement the new policy, she told Hice. When the Newsom administration learned of the impending policy, State Superintendent Tony Thurmond arrived at the district meeting Thursday night.

“It was a political stunt. He was trying to scare us,” assessed Shaw.

Thurmond requested a private meeting with Shaw prior to the meeting but declined to follow through when he learned she would not withdraw the policy, Shaw has said. He instead addressed the board meeting, speaking as the first of 83 citizens to make their voices heard. Video footage shows the attendees booed when Thurmond concluded, as Shaw asked everyone to “be respectful” toward the official. Thurmond exceeded his one-minute speaking slot, then returned to the podium demanding a “point of order,” although he is not a board member. Police eventually escorted him out of the building.

Thurmond later claimed he “stayed within the one-minute limit,” and tweeted, “When done speaking, the board president verbally attacked me an [sic] instructed police to remove me.” State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who authored a bill allowing out-of-state children who identify as transgender to flee to California and be injected with cross-sex hormones against their parents’ wishes, alleged, “The QAnon school board president cut him off.” But his former colleague, State Senator Melissa Melendez (R-67), pointed out that “Thurmond militantly enforced the rules for speakers when he was in the legislature.”

The district’s newly enacted policy has won the support of parental rights advocates and education experts nationwide. “The school board in Chino Valley is making parental involvement and inclusion a priority. State level officials interested in a healthy school system should follow their lead,” Meg Kilgannon, senior fellow for Education Studies at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.

But the policy drew instant backlash from the California Legislative LGBTQ Caucus, which announced its members are already “actively working on new approaches” to override the democratically enacted resolution. The liberal caucus added that parents who represented the near-unanimous consensus of the Chino Valley school board “will not stop us.”

“It appears some state legislators are scheming to make the newly passed CVUSD policy illegal with a future bill,” said Jonathan Zachreson, a member of the Roseville City School District school board and the founder of Reopen California Schools.

Parents in the district have expressed enthusiastic approval. “I think it’s crucial that we keep parents in this conversation. I think that the worst thing you can do to a child is to ostracize their parents from such an important conversation,” Amy Davlin, a parent in the district, told Newsmax on Tuesday morning.

“Groomers and pedophiles are the ones who attempt to gain the trust of children and encourage them to keep secrets” from their parents, said Davlin. A school district should “not encourage children to deceive and lie to their parents.”

More than two-thirds (68%) of Californians agree that parents should be notified if their minor children change their gender identity, according to a poll taken by Protect Kids California.

“I believe there is an all-out agenda against our children,” said Davlin, who said the new policy sends a message to activists who have weaponized education against parents: “You have crossed a red line. The red line is our children.”

Democrats have indicated a legal fight will ensue. California State Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) threatened that the pro-parental rights policy “may violate California’s antidiscrimination law” in a letter to the Chino Valley school board seeking to sway Thursday’s vote. Disclosing a child’s transgender identification to his or her parents “is very likely to result in significant emotional, mental, and even physical harm,” Bonta asserted.

Parents and board members reject that talking point. “Why are you assuming that parents are dangerous?” asked Shaw.

“If you want a lower suicide rate, bring the parents into the conversation,” said Davlin. “We are the ones who love the kids the most. We are the ones who have their best interests at heart, not their teacher who is with them a few hours a day.”

As Newsom and Thurmond focus on social issues, California students fall further behind. California ranks 38th nationwide in K-12 education, according to U.S. News and World Report — behind such Republican strongholds as Florida (14), Virginia (13), Indiana (7), Utah (9), Nebraska (11), and South Dakota (24). Education levels may improve if teachers focused on fundamentals rather than indoctrination, said Kilgannon. “We’re just trying to get the crazy out: To not have children taught wrong history, not have children taught that they could be born in the wrong body, not have children shown sexually explicit images,” she told Perkins on Monday.

Shaw’s leadership could show the Republicans how to recapture the White House in 2024, one political commentator believes. “We need to have more Sonjas running the school boards around the country,” said Newsmax contributor Tom Borelli on Monday morning. “Republicans can make this a great issue going forward, that we’re the party that represents parental rights. How dare a school district try to deny a parent knowledge about their own child?! That’s just plain outrageous.”

Meanwhile a potential 2024 Democratic presidential hopeful, Gavin Newsom, “plays the biggest part” in fueling the vitriol, hatred, and potential violence directed toward the Chino Valley school board, said Shaw. “But I’m glad that they’re exposing themselves,” Shaw continued.

“My daily prayer is for those to be revealed, exposed, and removed that don’t have the best intentions and that have ill intent for children,” Shaw told Perkins. Thanks to their voluble radicalism, “More people are starting to realize what we’re up against.”

“They’re literally driving a wedge between parent and child,” said Perkins on Monday. “This is evil. It’s just pure evil.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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

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

Newsom Imposes $1.5M Fine on California School District for Rejecting Textbook Discussing LGBT Activism

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On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that he would be levying a $1.5 million fine on the Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) over the school board’s recent decision to reject a state-endorsed textbook intended for elementary schoolchildren that discusses the infamous gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

“We’re going to purchase the book for these students — the same one that hundreds of thousands of kids are already using,” Newsom said. “If these extremist school board members won’t do their job, we will — and fine them for their incompetence.”

Joseph Komrosky, the president of the TVUSD Board of Education, has emphasized that the board’s rejection of the textbook is centered around the pedophilia that Milk, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors who passed away in 1978, engaged in during his life. “My word choice [of calling Milk a ‘pedophile’] is based upon facts represented by Mr. Milk, and I don’t believe those facts are a good example for our children to learn about in elementary school,” Komrosky said in a tweet in response to Newsom’s claim that Komrosky’s tweet was “An offensive statement from an ignorant person.”

The pedophilic actions of Milk have been extensively documented. As noted by The Washington Stand’s Ben Johnson:

“Milk … had a sexual relationship with Jack Galen McKinley, a 16-year-old runaway who committed suicide after their encounter. Milk was attracted to ‘boyish-looking men in their late teens and early 20s,’ wrote LGBT activist Randy Shilts in his biography of Milk, his friend. ‘Harvey always had a penchant for young waifs with substance-abuse problems.’”

The decision by the TVUSD Board of Education is the latest in a growing movement of public school systems taking action to remove pornographic books from school curriculums and libraries in response to a nationwide outcry from parents. In February, Broward County Public Schools in Florida announced they would be removing “Flamer,” a pornographic novel, and would be reviewing other books in their schools’ library catalogues for sexually explicit content. In June, the Hanover County School Board in Virginia announced a new policy that would allow parents to file challenges to remove explicit books from school libraries.

These actions followed the enaction of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s (R) March 2022 bill that requires all school districts in the state to have their instructional and library reading materials reviewed to make sure they are free from sexually explicit content.

Meanwhile, Newsom’s unusually strong public rebuke and large monetary fine of a school district’s decision to reflect the values of the local voters may be an indication of his plans for a future Democratic presidential run.

“Gavin Newsom desperately wants to be president of the United States,” said podcast host and Family Research Council Senior Fellow Joseph Backholm on a recent episode of “Outstanding.” “California is like a glimpse into the window of the future of what happens when progressives get everything they want.”

“I think he’s absolutely running,” Jonathan Keller, president of the California Family Council, concurred. “The question is, is he running in 2024 or 2028? And I think that we will not know that for a while. We may not honestly know that until the Democratic National Convention next year.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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

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