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DOJ Report Reveals Biden Admin.’s Expansive Religious Liberty Violations and Hostility to American Christians

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The presidency of Joe Biden was a dark, though relatively brief, chapter in American history, replete with widespread prosecution and persecution of American Christians. President Donald Trump repeatedly pledged on the campaign trail to establish a federal task force to investigate and eradicate the anti-Christian bias evinced and enacted by the Biden administration, and has delivered on that promise. On Thursday morning, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published a 209-page report entitled, “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias within the Federal Government,” detailing not only the numerous abuses of the Biden administration but also the remedies put in place by the Trump administration.

“Our Nation’s origin and system of government bear the imprint of a Christian worldview and ethic, even as its laws protect religious pluralism. Christian beliefs, in conjunction with contemporary political thought and economic realities, influenced colonial settlers in their decision to overthrow tyranny and pursue independence,” the report’s introduction states. “After the Revolutionary War, Christians then informed the structure and contents of the United States Constitution, its amendments, and contemporaneous state constitutions.”

“But, when Christian beliefs about morality and human nature conflicted with the Biden Administration’s views, religious rights often suffered,” the report’s introduction continues. “The Biden Administration generally tolerated religious beliefs that were privately held but zealously pursued actions to limit Christians’ ability to act in accordance with their faith. This affected matters of deep personal importance to nearly every American: life, family, marriage, and self-identity,” it continues. “The Biden Administration’s policies regularly clashed with a Christian worldview and burdened traditional religious practices. These conflicts frequently arose over abortion, gender ideology, and sexual orientation. Ultimately, the Biden Administration penalized Christians who lived in accordance with their beliefs.”

The report details 14 “key findings” regarding the Biden administration’s abuse of power and violation of religious liberties, ranging from a two-tiered justice system and aggressive prosecution of pro-life activists to the coercive violation of conscience rights and the rabid promotion of LGBT ideology. The taskforce also identifies several “remedies” that the Trump administration has enacted to ensure that the federal government is not weaponized against American Christians.

“No American should live in fear that the federal government will punish them for their faith,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, chair of the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, in a statement. He said that the Biden administration’s actions “devastated the lives of many Christian Americans,” adding, “That devastation ended with President Trump. The Department of Justice will continue to expose bad actors who targeted Christians and work tirelessly to restore religious liberty for all Americans of faith.”

During an appearance on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” Thursday, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Camille Varone further emphasized that the report was “a whole of government effort,” noting that “the task force has 17 cabinet level members and other agency heads. But there were other agencies who were hearing about the work we were doing and were excited to participate. And so the report has findings from far more than just the task force members.”

Below are the report’s key findings and the Trump administration’s proposed actions to eradicate anti-Christian bias from the federal government.

FACE Act Weaponization

The DOJ previously published a report tracking how the Biden administration used the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to aggressively target pro-life Americans, while largely ignoring the law’s provisions protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers and houses of worship. The new report characterizes the Biden administration’s DOJ as “an enforcement arm” for the abortion industry.

Over the course of Biden’s tenure in the White House, his DOJ “routinely” collaborated with pro-abortion non-governmental organizations (NGOs) — chiefly the National Abortion Federation, Planned Parenthood, and the Feminist Majority Foundation — to prosecute pro-life Americans. The Biden DOJ would regularly request information from the abortion agencies relating to pro-life protests, prayer vigils, and other pro-life activities. In several cases, the Biden DOJ would even launch prosecutions at the request of pro-abortion NGOs, all while “mostly disregard[ing] pro-life groups.”

Varone also observed that “non-governmental organizations could poke around on the internet in ways that the department couldn’t. There were so many different documents that we found from the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood compiling dossiers where they were monitoring pro-life Americans — collecting information about their travel, their whereabouts, their social media posts, including posting of Bible verses. There were even information about the cars that they drove and photos of some of their children. And they compiled all of this to give it to the Department of Justice, to the people who were charged with prosecuting under the FACE Act in case something might happen [that the DOJ] may view as a potential crime.”

The Biden DOJ also withheld evidence requested by defense attorneys for pro-lifers and regularly pursued harsher penalties for pro-lifers than for pro-abortion activists. “The Biden DOJ pursued significantly higher sentences (near the top range of sentencing guidelines) for pro-life defendants, while pursuing more lenient sentences against the handful of pro-abortion defendants that it charged,” the report notes. On average, the Biden DOJ requested an average sentence of 26.8 months for the 21 pro-life defendants it successfully prosecuted, while requesting an average sentence of only 12.3 months for the six pro-abortion defendants it prosecuted. The most stringent sentence was handed to Lauren Handy, who was sentenced to 58 months (nearly five years) in prison. The Biden DOJ originally requested that she be sentenced to 78 months (six-and-a-half years).

Upon taking office last year, Trump pardoned the pro-life activists targeted by the Biden administration and directed his DOJ to dismiss “with prejudice” three civil lawsuits against pro-life defendants. The Trump DOJ also issued a directive ordering that prosecutors “may only bring FACE Act civil actions and prosecutions in extraordinary circumstances or in cases presenting significant aggravating factors.”

Targeting Traditionalist Catholics

In 2023, it was revealed that the Biden administration’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) illegally targeted American Catholics devoted to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, the liturgy celebrated prior to the Second Vatican Council, and even spied on traditionalist Catholic parishes. The FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office drafted a memo labeling “radical traditionalist Catholics” as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and detailing plans to infiltrate and spy on traditionalist Catholic parishes. While the Trump DOJ notes that the FBI’s Weaponization Working Group will release a more in-depth report “detailing the day-to-day weaponization of the Richmond Field Office against conservative, practicing Catholics on the basis of guilt-by-association because one career criminal attended a local Catholic church,” the DOJ’s report provides an “overview” of the discrimination.

Citing the recently-indicted Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the Richmond field office labeled traditionalist Catholics as potential “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and began crafting its memo, which was originally intended to be circulated nationwide across the agency. The arrest of career criminal Xavier Louis Lopez for possession of weapons including Molotov cocktails, improvised napalm, and hollow-point bullets provided an opportunity for the Richmond FBI to target a Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) parish with which Lopez was affiliated. Although Our Lady of Fatima parish in Richmond “played no role whatsoever in Lopez’s acquisition or possession of the destructive devices,” the FBI interviewed the pastor, Father James Hewko, who asked to speak with the parish’s legal representation before speaking to the FBI about Lopez. The FBI subsequently monitored both Hewko and his uncle, in addition to interviewing and monitoring others associated with the parish.

Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, has vowed that this “weaponization and politicization of law enforcement” will never be “allowed to happen again.” The FBI’s Weaponization Working Group will disclose further details.

Targeting Concerned Parents

In 2021, as parents across the country were voicing their discontent with radical LGBT policies at local school board meetings, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, issued a DOJ-wide memo alleging that parents who protest at local school board meetings should be treated as potentially violent domestic extremists. Garland recommended forming a DOJ task force to explore the use of domestic terrorism statutes against parents and “recommended that United States Attorney’s Offices and FBI Field Offices coordinate with local law enforcement and school districts, and that the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center assist by directing credible threats to appropriate law enforcement partners.”

Although some within the DOJ warned that the actions of parents at school board meetings were almost certainly protected under the First Amendment and, even when parents did take action that constituted crimes, those crimes were often not federal offenses. “Those concerns did not win the day,” the Trump DOJ’s report notes. Garland revised his memo, but still urged the Biden DOJ to target concerned parents, who were characterized as “threats” to school boards. The Biden DOJ “quickly acted to follow through.” While the Biden DOJ’s criminal division was “skeptical,” Garland and his team forged ahead with plans to prosecute parents who protested at school board meetings via “possible application of color of law provisions that criminalize conduct that interfere with those participating in programs receiving federal financial assistance.”

Investigation of Christian Charities

Under Biden, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) weaponized the Johnson Amendment against Christian nonprofit organizations. The Johnson Amendment is a U.S. tax code provision prohibiting most nonprofit organizations from endorsing or explicitly opposing political candidates. Biden’s IRS, the Trump DOJ’s report explains, used the Johnson Amendment to target “Christian churches and non-profit institutions, particularly those who espoused traditional Christian views that could be construed with a political valence, scrutinizing their statements for violations.”

The Biden IRS seemingly singled out churches and nonprofit organizations that were characterized as supportive of Republican candidates and conservative issues, while failing to apply the Johnson Amendment to churches and nonprofit organizations aligned or affiliated with Democrats, even those that explicitly supported Democratic candidates or politicians. The investigations were not limited to the speech of pastors, but sought wide-ranging information on the finances and operations of targeted churches and nonprofit organizations. “The Biden IRS’s pattern of enforcement,” the Trump DOJ’s report says, “raised serious concerns about the IRS attempting to regulate what certain pastors could say from the pulpit and chilled the speech of many other clergy.”

The Trump administration’s Treasury Department has subsequently revised its standards for application of the Johnson Amendment, clarifying that houses of worship can communicate to their congregations regarding moral and political matters in accord with their respective teachings without falling afoul of the Johnson Amendment. “Bona fide communications internal to a house of worship, between the house of worship and its congregation, in connection with religious services,” neither “participate” nor “intervene” in political campaigns, “any more than does a family discussion concerning candidates.”

Fining Christian Universities

The Biden administration’s Department of Education levied hefty fines against Christian colleges and universities, while largely failing to pursue similar penalties against secular, non-religious institutions for similar regulatory violations. According to the Trump DOJ’s report, the “average fine against a Christian school was $815,000, compared to $228,571 against public and private institutions.” The two largest fines levied against Christian universities were against Grand Canyon University ($37.7 million) and Liberty university ($14 million).

The fines against Liberty University were for supposed violations of the Clery Act, which provides the public with information regarding a university’s safety. The Trump DOJ’s report notes that the fines against Grand Canyon University and Liberty University “dwarfed the fines levied against Pennsylvania State University ($2.4 million) for 11 Clery Act violations involving the school’s failure to report sex offenses relating to its assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s serial child molestation, and against Michigan State University ($4.5 million) for its failure to disclose sex offenses committed by Larry Nassar, a team physician who sexually assaulted hundreds of athletes.”

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Education has not only dismissed its case against Grand Canyon University, but rescinded its fine and has “also committed to no longer disproportionately targeting Christian colleges and universities and to affirming the rights of Christian colleges and universities to act in accordance with their faith-based identity.”

Conscience Violations

In numerous cases, the Biden administration also failed or refused to prosecute federal conscience violation cases, allowing institutions to coerce Christians into violating their sincerely held religious beliefs or penalizing them for adhering to their Christian morals. In one example, the Biden DOJ dropped a lawsuit against the University of Vermont Medical Center for compelling Christian employees to participate in committing abortions.

“This case is emblematic of the Biden Administration’s approach to conscience enforcement: When the scope of federal protections was legally contested, the Administration generally chose the interpretation least protective of religious objectors and resolved active enforcement matters through administrative means, if possible, rather than litigation,” the Trump DOJ’s report comments. “Government inaction of this kind is an especially damaging source of anti-Christian bias precisely because it is difficult to see and harder to remedy.”

Anti-Christian Policy

The Biden administration’s anti-Christian bias was not relegated to enforcement actions, but also to policy choices. The administration supported the “Equality Act,” which would have “fully eliminate[d] statutory religious protections for Christians and other religions that hold traditional social values” by barring, without exemption, “discrimination” on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity in areas such as public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit, and the jury system. Although numerous academics and religious leaders warned that the legislation would amount to a significant infringement on First Amendment rights, the Biden administration forcefully supported the legislation in Congress.

“Although the Biden Administration was ultimately unsuccessful in its push to enact the Equality Act, it sought to implement the same policy goals wherever possible through executive actions, guidance memoranda, and rulemakings,” the Trump DOJ’s report announced. The administration’s “overbroad” application of the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock v. Clayton County targeted Christians and Christian organizations for their biblical worldview on biological sex and human sexuality, while Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) worked overtime to entrench transgender ideology in the federal bureaucracy and classify gender transition procedures as necessary and life-saving medicine.

Biden’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) “dismissed sincerely held religious beliefs regarding sexual orientation and gender identity as ‘discrimination in hiring … cloaked as religious practice,’” while the Department of Education likewise shifted its non-discrimination policies to promote and hide gender transition procedures for children. The Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Labor, and Agriculture all similarly revised their guidance on key statutes and legal precedents, such as Bostock and Titles VII, IX, and X of the Civil Rights Act, to shield progressive agenda items.

In many cases, when Christians and other professionals or professional organizations suggested, based on empirical evidence and research, that gender transition procedures (especially for children) may not be harmless or beneficial, the Biden administration and its agencies often sidelined or outright silenced those voices, or ignored them. For example, when the British government published the extensive Cass Review, detailing the significant dangers posed by exposing minors to gender transition procedures and ultimately terminating the British government’s support for the practice, the Biden administration “maintained that the report did not alter their support for minors’ access to sex-rejecting procedures and medical intervention.”

The Biden administration’s policy decisions also encouraged state and local governments to bar Christian couples from participating in foster programs, claiming that the couples’ sincerely held religious beliefs on biological sex or human sexuality would pose a threat to children who identify as transgender or homosexual. Other actions targeted talk-based Christian therapy designed to assist those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction and even attempted to bar Christians from practicing therapy in many areas.

Numerous executive actions were also taken by the Biden administration to proliferate the practice of abortion, even after the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Biden administration actions attempted to skirt federal statutes barring taxpayer funding from being used for abortions and directly used federal agencies to facilitate abortions. The Biden administration regularly replaced departmental faith offices with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and repeatedly sidelined Christians and Christian organizations.

Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for example, hosted 59 meetings and roundtables with non-Christian faith-based organizations to discuss potential terrorist threats and safety. The Biden DHS hosted only two such meetings with Christian organizations. The Trump DOJ referred to Family Research Council’s report on increasing hostility against Christians to note that the “disparity is notable given that Christians comprise an estimated 62 percent of the U.S. population and have faced increased hostility and violence in recent years.”

Other Biden administration actions that targeted Christians included adverse employment actions, such as eliminating religious discrimination safeguards in the EEOC and issuing blanket denials of religious exemption requests, particularly those related to COVID-19 restrictions and mandates. According to a survey of federal employees, nearly one third (30.1%) were denied pay based on their religious objections to COVID-19 mandates, while others were denied travel, reassigned, lost their security clearances, or were formally reprimanded. Nearly one fifth (18.3%) reported having been removed from their posts and nearly 12% said that they were fired.

What’s Next?

While the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias will continue its work through 2027, it has already begun working to eradicate anti-Christian bias from the federal government. Pursuant to the taskforce’s recommendations, most federal agencies have opened and operate faith offices, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has issued memos reinforcing religious liberties, and the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued guidance on religious liberty protections afforded by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, in addition to other actions taken by federal agencies. The task force will publish further remedial actions taken in its 2027 report.

Religious liberty advocates have thanked the Trump administration for its efforts to tackle the issue of anti-Christian bias and the weaponization of the federal government against Americans of faith, but have warned that there is still much work to be done. “This is a very good report on the pervasive anti-Christian bias under the Biden administration; capturing many of the domestic religious liberty concerns we have noticed in recent years, especially on marriage, family, sexuality, and life issues — as well as hostility against Christianity in general,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins in a statement. He noted that hostility towards Christians skyrocketed under Biden’s tenure, including violent attacks on pro-life pregnancy resource centers and Christian churches. “Yet, as this DOJ report shows, the Biden administration did very little in response and instead weaponized its resources to target Christians including imprisoning grandmothers praying outside of abortion centers.”

“This report does raise questions about what comes next. And what happens the next time a radical progressive like President Biden comes to power? We must ensure this targeting never happens again under any future administration,” Perkins asserted. “We must ensure that the bedrock of American society and culture is placed on a firm footing in which freedom is respected for everyone. What better time to do this than our nation’s 250th birthday? Religious freedom is seldom handed to the passive; it is claimed by those who exercise it even when a hostile culture says they may not.”

“Now is the time to take this insight and put in safeguards at the federal, state, and local levels that will prevent future Democrat administrations from hollowing out the First Amendment, making it difficult for them to pervert America,” Perkins continued. “Ultimately, the preventative prescription to anti-Christian bias from our own government is Christians sharing the gospel and living out their faith in a God honoring way. While we should press on the government to act justly, it’s up to the church to change the culture that has given rise to this anti-Christian bias.”

During “Washington Watch” Thursday, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Varone indicated that the DOJ is currently investigating whether leftist NGOs violated the law in their dealings with the Biden administration. “At minimum, it would violate best practices,” she noted. “And so we’d start with that. There are concerns that some of the conduct here may have gone further. I can’t get into specifics because DOJ handles all of its internal personnel and investigations privately. But as the report mentions, appropriate referrals have been made.”

Travis Weber, vice president for Policy and Government Affairs at FRC, said in comments to The Washington Stand, “With this report, President Trump and his administration have issued an important corrective to the anti-Christian bias that was tolerated, advanced, and/or enabled for too long by the Biden administration. Yet we must not stop here, but rather must determine next steps and consider how this hostility manifests in our culture and the local communities on which our country is knit together.” He added, “For America to flourish in the long-term, we must move beyond the political ‘see-saw’ we are currently on and regain that ‘common ground’ of national consensus on which freedom rests.”

“We must remember that what the Trump administration is responding to politically is — more deeply — a cultural and spiritual issue,” Weber observed. “We are often ‘responding’ to bias and hostility. Instead, we need to think proactively about how to shift our culture back toward a respect for freedom and faith — and the role that both play in society, for the benefit of ALL members of society. As the Trump administration considers what to do with the findings detailed in this report, Christians in America also need to be asking ourselves the same question: ‘What’s our next step?’”

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. ©2026 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.

Fewer Americans Believe ‘Changing Gender’ Is ‘Morally Acceptable’: Poll

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A new Gallup poll shows the LGBT agenda continues to lose support, as fewer Americans believe attempting to change one’s gender is “morally acceptable” than felt that way in 2021.

“The current 40% of U.S. adults who believe that changing genders is morally acceptable is down six points from 2021, while the latest 54% who think it is morally wrong is similar to prior readings,” stated the poll, released this week. “Partisans’ opinions differ significantly, with 71% of Democrats, 45% of independents and 9% of Republicans saying that changing one’s gender is morally acceptable. Republicans’ opinions have changed the most since 2021, falling by 13 points.”

While the number of Democrats who support transgenderism has risen since 2021, the support among registered Independents has fallen by three percentage points and six points among all American adults during the same time. Gallup similarly found Republican support for same-sex marriage crumbling.

The poll is one of many showing the LGBT agenda losing support in recent years. The percentage of Americans who believe same-sexual relationships are “morally acceptable” fell by 7% last year, the largest decrease of any of the moral issues posed by Gallup pollsters in their annual Values and Beliefs poll, released last June. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll released last Friday found that 82% of parents favor “legislation that would strengthen parental rights over their children”; 77% oppose transgender injections or surgeries for minors (including 67% of Democrats and 77% of Independents); and 70% say schools should not teach children their gender is a choice (including 54% of Democrats).

Another poll found, since 2022, the American people have become:

  • 10 points more likely to say the transgender industry should not be able to prey on minors
  • 8 points more likely to support laws protecting sex-specific spaces such as restrooms
  • 8 points more likely to oppose allowing transgender-identified athletes to compete against athletes of the opposite sex
  • 6 points more likely to say public education should not smuggle transgender ideology into the classroom

“First, the mood of the country has changed, so people probably feel more free to say what they actually believe,” Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “Cancel culture has lost much of its power so people don’t perceive the same risk from saying there are only two sexes and they can’t be changed.”

“Second,” he continued, “people understand its not just a matter of personal choice. There are consequences for what we believe, and pretending we can be anything we want is creating cultural chaos.”

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. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

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.

Meet the Companies Helping to Trans Kids and Hide It from Parents

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It’s been a while since Americans could actually sit back and enjoy June. Now, instead of bumping into rainbows in every aisle and choking on the colored logos of every conceivable brand, there’s some freedom from the suffocating fumes of Pride Month. In these last two years, the march to pull companies back to neutral has outperformed everyone’s expectations. But in this process of rolling back decades of corporate wokeism, one thing is clear: this isn’t over. No matter how much success conservatives have, not everyone will go quietly. When it comes to LGBT activism, some businesses are playing for keeps.

While most of this week’s coverage seems to be about who isn’t joining the parade, there’s a proud contingent of CEOs who have no intentions of backing off their radicalism. To those who would shrug and say, “It’s just a few splashy logos. What’s the big deal?” the reality is much more sinister. This isn’t about slapping a few Progress flags outside headquarters or queering the Sesame Street puppets. It’s about financing a dangerous enterprise to keep children in bondage and parents in the dark.

The corporate darling of this year’s celebration, The Trevor Group, isn’t just another rah-rah LGBT crusader. Billed as a youth suicide prevention organization, one look under the hood shows that this group is anything but uncontroversial. And yet, sponsors are lining up to finance the group — to the tune of millions of dollars. The heavy-hitters, who are giving upwards of six-figure donations, are mostly familiar names: Macy’s, Petco, Abercrombie & Fitch, Pure Vida, Guess Watches, Kohl’s, Lululemon, MAC Cosmetics, and a collection of lesser-known brands.

A lot of these businesses will ring a bell, simply because they’ve been stubbornly clinging to their LGBT alliances through months of nationwide backlash (along with headstrong lefties at Levi’s, Converse, and Nike). Interestingly, the brands that are listed as year-round Trevor Project partners also happen to rank the highest on the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index. With a few exceptions, almost every company that submitted their information to HRC earned a perfect score — meaning they’re completely on board with transgender insurance coverage and benefits, gender-neutral restrooms and dress codes, and preferred pronoun usage, as well as LGBTQ hiring quotas, non-discrimination standards, sensitivity trainings, recruitment efforts, community outreach, philanthropic support, and lobbying on local, state, and federal issues. In other words, the hardest of the hard core:

  • $1 million: Abercrombie (100%), Lululemon, Macy’s (100%)
  • $500,000: AT&T (100%), Deloitte (100%)
  • $250,000: Coca-Cola (100%), GenDigital (100%), Gilead (100%), Harry’s, Hot Topic Foundation, Jingle Jam, Sephora (100%), MAC Cosmetics, Procter & Gamble, Rare Beauty, The Game Company
  • $100,000: David Yurman, Delta Airlines, Delta Dental, Dolce Vita, FedEx (85%), Forever 21, H&M, Humble Bundle, Kate Spade, Kohl’s (100%), Lemonade, Makeship, Maybelline, National Education Association (NEA), Native, NFL, OPI, Pair of Thieves, Petco (95%), Saks Fifth Avenue, United Airlines (100%), Wells Fargo (100%), Williams-Sonoma (90%), XBox

And while The Trevor Project claims to be harmlessly dedicated to “advocacy, education, and crisis support for LGBTQ+ young people,” it’s the nature of that advocacy and education that should disturb Americans. For starters, this is a group that, just three years ago, was exposed for stealthily grooming children online. A suspicious mom, whose daughter struggled with gender dysphoria, logged onto the organization’s TrevorSpace chat room to see what kind of advice she was getting — and was horrified at the graphic and disturbing nature of the site.

She sent the screenshots to National Review, a “Pandora’s box” of “sexually perverse content, aggressive gender re-assignment referrals, adults encouraging minors to hide their transitions from their parents, and many troubled kids in need of psychological counseling. Like most moms, she said she’d turned to The Trevor Project in “desperation.” “‘I thought my child was going to kill herself,’” she admitted. “In TrevorSpace,” NRO explains, “she got a bird’s-eye view of the progressive non-profit giant that is claiming to save young lives but is really driving them further into existential rabbit holes, depravity, and potential danger.”

At one point, “Rachel then dove into an abyss of concerning sexual conversation. Some transgender-identifying adults confessed in detail their [fantasies and deviances].” In some cases, “users under 18 spoke with adult users about their sexual preferences, including BDSM, polyamory, and others.”

Equally as disturbing, The Trevor Project has its hooks in countless K-12 classrooms across the country with its so-called “resources for educators and school officials, including the Is Your School LGBTQ-Affirming? checklist and Creating Safer Spaces in Schools for LGBTQ Young People, which can help determine whether a school is adequately supporting LGBTQ+ students.” The website “also offers several educational guides for adults working with LGBTQ+ young people, including the Guide to Being an Ally to Transgender and Nonbinary Youth, How to Support Bisexual Youth, and Preventing Suicide.”

“We’ve increased our efforts in public education,” the project’s website brags — and that’s exactly what parents should be afraid of. The group’s resources include a Model School Policy Booklet that it distributes to “ally” teachers, counselors, and volunteers across the country. Among other things, it urges educators to hide information about students’ sexual orientation or gender identity from parents:

  • “Information about a student’s sexual orientation or gender identity should be treated as confidential and not disclosed to parents, guardians, or third parties without the student’s permission. In the case of parents who have exhibited rejecting behaviors, great sensitivity needs to be taken in what information is communicated with parents.”
  • “While parents and guardians need to be informed and actively involved in decisions regarding the student’s welfare, the school mental health professional should ensure that the parents’ actions are in the best interest of the student (e.g., when a student is LGBTQ and living in an unaffirming household).”
  • “In the case of parents who have exhibited rejecting behaviors, great sensitivity needs to be taken in what information is communicated with parents. Additionally, when referring students to out-of-school resources, it is important to connect LGBTQ students with LGBTQ-affirming local health and mental health service providers. Affirming service providers are those that adhere to best practices guidelines regarding working with LGBTQ clients as specified by their professional association (e.g., apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/guidelines.aspx).”

These are the kind of anti-parent zealots Macy’s, Abercrombie, Petco, and others are donating your June dollars to. Sometimes it’s 10% of the purchase price. Other times it’s the change you round up. But whatever the amount, it’s fueling a team of ideologues intent on destroying America’s children — and keeping it a secret while they do.

Don’t get me wrong. This country should be jubilant about all it’s accomplished. Robby Starbuck and other activists who’ve been fighting this war before most people knew we were in one deserve medals. But the biggest mistake any of us can make is believing we’ve won. Because a single dollar in the wrong hands is a weapon. And the pain, thousands of parents and their young patients will tell you, lasts a lifetime.

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

Like what you’re reading? Donate to The Washington Stand! From now until June 30, your gift will be doubled to fuel bold, biblically-based reporting.

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.

EXCLUSIVE: School District Piped Taxpayer Cash Into Clandestine Clubs Turning Kids Into LGBT Activists

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A California school district took federal funds from a disease prevention grant and funneled them into student LGBT clubs focused on gender ideology and queer activism, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The Genders & Sexualities Alliance (GSA) Network — which backs over 4,000 LGBT student groups in the U.S. — uses the clubs to engage kids on topics such as transgenderism, sexuality and queer activism, all while leaving parents in the dark, documents show. The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) burned nearly $60,000 in HIV prevention grant funds from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the GSA clubs.

The CDC grant funds Healthy Oakland Teens, a school-based program with the goal of reducing HIV and STD’s among the district’s middle and high school student population.

OUSD’s 2018 grant application revealed it used part of the Healthy Oakland Teens funding to pay school staff members, called “LGBTQ Liasons,” to oversee middle and high school GSA clubs and help create a school climate that “affirms” LGBT students. A July 2023 award letter shows an additional $50,000 of grant funding paid elementary school staff to run similar LGBT programs for younger students.

OUSD describes its GSA clubs, which are student-led under the supervision of an adult staff member, as a place where students who identify as “LGBTQ+, Non-Binary, or as an ally” can meet weekly to “do activism.”

It’s unclear how funding school GSA clubs prevents HIV and STDs. The OUSD did not respond to requests for comment.

A slide describing GSA clubs from an Oakland Unified School District resource about gender identity and expression.

Across the county, GSA clubs serve as a student hub of gender ideology and queer activism.

OUSD’s 2018 application for the HIV and STD prevention grant lists decreasing LGBT bullying as a primary goal. Of the thousands the district carved out for LGBT programming, $20,000 went to hire an LGBT consultant to “help OUSD host its annual GSA day for all middle and high schools” and develop “materials and training to help teachers create welcoming classrooms for LGBTQ students.” More than $10,000 of grant funding was earmarked to cover the costs of GSA day, a full-day event with “workshops, student-led advocacy, and celebration” for LGBTQ students, according to the grant application.

From 2018 to 2023, OUSD received more than $3 million as part of the “Healthy Oakland Teens: Promoting Adolescent Sexual Health in Full Service Community Schools” grant from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) grant database.

HHS and CDC didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Pages from the Oakland Unified School District gender support plan document used by school staff, which was obtained by the DCNF through a public records request.

‘Choose A More Accepting Family Member’

Through a public record request the DCNF obtained OUSD’s “gender support plan,” a document outlining how staff can “support” a student’s new gender identity by socially transitioning them to another sex at school, without notifying their parents.

The document directs staff to ask students to rate their parents’ support and list “go to adults” on campus they can contact. The gender support plan also recommends students be connected to their school GSA club and “LGBTQ Liason.”

Students are asked to list the name and pronouns they’d like to be called at school and which they’d like staff to use when contacting their parents or guardians. A disclaimer at the top of the form states that if parents do not affirm their child’s chosen identity, in order to “maintain privacy” the gender support plan should not be placed in the student’s file.

OUSD’s “behavioral health unit” offers a resource for “transgender” and “questioning students” which recommends students seek out “accepting adults” at school, particularly if their family is not supportive of their new identity.

“Get a sense of how your family feels about LGBTQNB people. Choose a more accepting family member to connect with first,” states the OUSD resource.

“If you think you won’t be safe if you tell your family, it is best to wait. Find accepting adults at schools and family members who are the most accepting to start with.”

Genders & Sexualities Alliance

The Gay-Straight Alliance Network, which originated in San Francisco in 1998 to provide peer support for gay teenagers, changed its name in 2016 to Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network as part of an effort to move beyond “the limits of a binary gender system,” according to its website. The organization, which includes more than 4,000 GSA clubs and 40 statewide organizations, now has a focus on mobilizing students for queer activism.

“GSAs have evolved beyond their traditional role to serve as safe spaces for LGBTQ+ youth in middle schools and high schools,” states the GSA Network website.

“GSA Network is a next-generation LGBTQ racial and gender justice organization that empowers and trains queer, trans and allied youth leaders to advocate, organize, and mobilize an intersectional movement for safer schools and healthier communities,” its website states.

The GSA Network did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.

The GSA Network advisor handbook, a guidebook for GSA advisors, tells adult leaders to anticipate “possible resistance” from parents and to “be discreet” when contacting students noting “it might not be safe” to use the term “GSA Club.”

“When calling youth, it may not be safe to mention ‘GSA club’ or another trans or queer reference. Alternatively, club leaders can say they are from a student leadership program at (insert school name),” the GSA advisor handbook states.

The GSA clubs have not gone unnoticed among parents.

Erin Lee, executive director of Protect Kids Colorado, told the DCNF a teacher invited her middle school daughter to a GSA club disguised as an after-school art club, where she was taught about puberty blockers, transgenderism and LGBTQ identities, without parental consent.

“My child was lured into a confidential GSA club disguised as an Art Club in her 6th grade classroom. She was deceived by her ‘trusted adult’ teacher about what the club entailed, and parents were completely kept in the dark about what the club really was,” Lee said. “We were not prepared in any way for our little girl to be attending a secret gender and sexuality club.”

“They talked about sexual attraction, how being uncomfortable in your body actually means you are ‘trans,’ puberty blockers, polyamory, unsupportive parents, and suicide,” Lee told the DCNF.

After attending the GSA meeting, Lee’s daughter began identifying as transgender and wanted to transition to another sex. Her involvement with the GSA club “led to a months-long emotional decline of gender and sexuality confusion that required counseling and included suicidal thoughts,” according to a lawsuit the Lee’s filed against the Poudre School District, where her daughter attended school, in March 2023.

“They planted seeds of distrust towards parents; they manipulated her feelings; they violated her innocence; they lied to her. And they lied to us. They tried to keep it all a secret and persuade her to keep the secret, too,” Lee told the DCNF.

The district told the DCNF the lawsuit filed by the Lees was dismissed in a federal district court, and that decision was affirmed by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

AUTHOR

Megan Brock

Contributor.

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Conservatives Urge Trump to Bypass Blue States, Empower Local Schools and Parents with School Choice

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As education advocates from the national to local level praise President Donald Trump’s commitment to deliver the four-decade-old conservative policy goal of abolishing the Department of Education, they warn that Democrat-controlled states could implement worse curricula than the federal DOE and ask the president to consider directly funding local school districts or parents through school vouchers.

President Trump campaigned on shuttering the 45-year-old federal department in 2024, and shortly after taking office, he moved swiftly to keep his promise. “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely,” stated President Trump’s executive order, issued last Thursday, March 20. He also cut the number of federal employees working in the DOE by approximately half.

President Trump has largely signaled he will allow states to set their own education policies — something that concerns parental rights advocates living in liberal states such as California.

“If it does come down to the states, I would be a big advocate,” Sonja Shaw, president of the Chino Valley (California) Unified School District Board of Education, told “Washington Watch” last Friday. But “if you give back to local control, in states like California, that could be kind of nerve-wracking for a lot of us here fighting the good fight.” Democrat-controlled states determined to promote such controversial programs as anti-American history curricula, critical race theory, or the history of the LGBTQ movement “can make it very, very difficult for districts like ours that are actually trying to educate and not indoctrinate” students.

Shaw faced death threats and official investigations from California officials for adopting a parental notification policy that requires teachers to tell parents if children begin to identify as another gender at school.

Instead, she favors the federal government awarding education dollars “directly to the districts based on merit,” said Shaw. “Give it to the counties. Local control is the best, right? And if you give it to the counties, they know exactly what is needed and where it’s needed, and they can disperse the money.” The awarding of federal education grants “needs to be merit-based,” determined by test score improvements, “because a lot of states are like California. We have some great [states], but we also have some horrific ones that have weaponized the Department of Education towards districts like ours that are trying to actually educate kids.”

Two former secretaries of education hope the president will go one step further: Bypass educational bureaucrats at the state and local level and simply give federal education funds directly to parents through school vouchers.

“A better approach is to simply give Title I money to poor parents and let them pick their schools. That is exactly what Trump’s order intends to do. Putting funding in students’ backpacks would eliminate the bureaucracy that reduces its impact when administered federally,” wrote Reagan administration Secretary of Education William J. Bennett in a Newsweek op-ed this week. “According to Gloria Romero, cofounder of the charter school Explore Academy, local and state education agencies employ approximately 50,000 people mainly to comply with burdensome (and often woke) requirements imposed by the then-4,400 Education Department employees.”

Bennett echoed his own call to treat federal public school dollars akin to Pell Grants as he co-authored a second op-ed with President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of education and 1996 Republican presidential hopeful, Lamar Alexander. Unlike local school funding based on “creaky formulas that distribute funds to schools in ways that may never reach the youngsters meant to benefit from them,” in college “we give Pell Grants to needy college students that accompany them to the colleges they actually attend. If such vouchers — which is what Pell Grants are — helped to create the best colleges, why not use them to create the best schools?” asked the secretaries. “That would eliminate layers of bureaucracy, inject needed competition into the education system, and shove Uncle Sam out of the way of state decision-makers and, especially, of parents making the best school choices for their children.”

For instance, Bennett noted in an interview with Fox News, classical academies have higher academic standards and “teach character.”

“Federal control of education has become a jobs program for bureaucrats, and it puts students last,” wrote Bennett.

Their successor, Trump-47 Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, has promised her deep personnel cuts will shear off “bureaucratic bloat” that has attended public schools due to decades of top-down federal policies.

Bennett concluded that “history and common sense show the solution is boosting education freedom, not preserving the failed Washington status quo.”

California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has starkly criticized the actions Trump has already taken to rein in the federal education bureaucracy. “This overreach needs to be rejected immediately by a co-equal branch of government. Or was Congress eliminated by this executive order, too?” he asked.

That left Shaw bemused. “Let’s just lay out the facts,” she said. “Newsom put his kids in private school when he shut down schools here in California for the majority of the children. He also sued our district and other districts for just wanting parental involvement. So, of course, he’s going to be opposed to something that’s going to benefit our children, because he’s never been successful at helping our educational system here in California,” she noted.

“They have mismanaged and funneled monies through to the lobbyists, the special interests through these departments, all while failing kids at reading, writing, and math,” Shaw told the program. “Every time he speaks, he just exposes himself.”

Yet Newsom has legal backup. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) filed suit against the Trump administration in Massachusetts, while the National Education Association (NEA) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued the administration in Democratic Maryland.

Legal experts find the lawsuits ironic, because the Department of Education’s existence violates the Constitution. “The vast majority of functions carried out by the Department of Education are not authorized by the Constitution. That is because the Constitution grants the federal government only limited, enumerated powers, none of which encompass education policy,” wrote Thomas A. Berry at the Cato Institute. The enumerated powers, which states delegated to the federal government, may be found in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. All other powers are reserved to the states “or the people” under the Tenth Amendment. “The president and education secretary should make a clear case for why their oaths to defend the Constitution require this executive action. If they do so, this action could be an important step toward restoring the federal government to its proper role.”

Since the department was established by Congress, Congress must act to formally abolish it. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) reintroduced a bill to abolish the Department of Education for good (H.R. 899). The one-sentence bill reads in its entirety, “The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.”

“When this department was put in place, it was pretty much a giveaway from [President Jimmy] Carter to the unions. And since then, the Department of Ed has not closed one achievement gap. Kids are still failing at reading, writing, and math,” noted Shaw. “Since this department was put in place, it just funnels money through to the special interest groups, which does not benefit our children.”

“We were doing fine educationally prior to the Department of Education being created on the federal level, and we’ll be okay afterwards,” said former Congressman Jody Hice, who hosts “Washington Watch” on Fridays.

“You have been really on the tip of the spear on this issue and so many other issues that the education in California is specifically dealing with, from LGBT indoctrination and [more],” Hice told Shaw. “I just want to say thank you. God bless you. Godspeed to you and others who are stepping up.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: Court: NJ School Districts Can Scrap Secretive Trans Student Policy that Excluded Parents

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 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.

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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President Donald J. Trump Pledges Educational Gamechanger By Creating The American Academy

President Trump: ‘Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country’

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.

RELATED VIDEO: Pornhub Reportedly Pushes Gay/Trans Content to Shape Sexualities of Minors | TIPPING POINT

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.