Tag Archive for: Sexual Orientation

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

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.

Republican Support for Same-Sex Marriage Drops to 5-Year Low

Support for same-sex marriage is on the decline among Republicans, while still trending high among the rest of the nation, according to a new survey. Gallup’s polling for May revealed that a majority (69%) of Americans support legalized same-sex marriage, but that support among Republicans has dropped sharply over the past two years. In 2021 and 2022, 55% of Republicans approved of legalized same-sex marriage, but that number fell to 49% in 2023 and has fallen even lower to 46% as of last month. Support for same-sex marriage is still high among Democrats (83%) and Independent voters (74%).

Meanwhile, the share of Republicans who see same-sex relations as “morally acceptable” has plummeted even further, from 56% in 2022 to a mere 40% as of last month. Over 80% of Democrats and nearly 70% of Independents reported that they view same-sex relations as “morally acceptable.” Between 2012 and 2022, Republicans’ support for same-sex marriage increased fairly steadily, rising from 22% and peaking at 55% in 2021 and 2022. However, Republicans’ endorsement of same-sex relations as “morally acceptable” did not cross the majority threshold until 2020. It fell from its 2022 peak to a low unrivaled since 2014.

As Gallup noted, barely a quarter (27%) of Americans supported legalized same-sex marriage when the organization began surveying the question in 1996, while over two-thirds (68%) of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. In 2011, support finally broke above 50% and, just a few years later, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision. Since 2016, general support has remained consistently above 60%, although 2024’s 69% represents a two-point drop even just since last year.

“There are a couple of important factors involved with the decline of GOP support for gay marriage. First, Americans broadly embrace the concept of American liberty, and they will usually push back whenever their freedoms are threatened,” said former congressman and Family Research Council Senior Vice President Jody Hice, in comments to The Washington Stand. Hice noted that the LGBT agenda has become increasingly militant, insinuating itself into classrooms, hospitals, and all over. He explained, “Instead of endearing people to the LGBT movement, this strategy has had the opposite effect. … This type of activity has resulted in many who now view the LGBT community as being harmful to existing families rather than a personal preference unto themselves.”

“Another reason for the decline of support is more deeply rooted and even more problematic for the Left. It is founded within the principles of a worldview, specifically a biblical worldview,” Hice stated. “Just as ‘freedom’ is cherished by many, even more so, deeply held religious beliefs will not be compromised by those who possess them.”

Joseph Backholm, FRC’s senior fellow for Biblical Worldview, also weighed in on that point. “Obviously the trend in recent decades has been in the wrong direction on this issue, but a correction is inevitable for a couple reasons. The whole premise of same-sex marriage is that there is no difference between men and women,” Backholm explained. “Most of the people didn’t quite see it this way, but since then we’ve seen how the logic of genderlessness is playing out in the rest of culture. At least a few are probably recognizing that the world is not better.”

“In addition to that, same-sex marriage was sold to the public as the tolerant choice, but what we’ve seen since then is that the political movement that brought us same-sex marriage is anything but tolerant,” Backholm continued. “It has brought us lawsuits against churches and small businesses, pronoun laws, cancel culture, and general intolerance of those who still claim children should have both a mother and father or deny men can get pregnant. Everything about the campaign for same-sex marriage was a lie and every day since has, in its own way, helped make that clear for anyone interested in seeing it.”

“This may or may not be the beginning of a long-term correction on how the public sees this issue, but it is inevitable,” he concluded. “Since there will always be a meaningful difference between men and women, the only possible, long-term outcome is lamenting the time in our lives we pretended there wasn’t.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

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


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

The Hidden Hurt behind Pride Month and Sexual Rebellion

While parents and everyday Americans scramble to put out the wildfire of LGBT activism that’s hurting our kids, what if the solution was right here, in plain sight? Yes, homeschooling, voting for good people, running for school board, and going to church matters, but so does what happens inside every family’s front door. Despite how desperately society has tried to convince us, the culture of “acceptable divorce” that exploded during Gen X isn’t okay. And neither are the children who lived through it.

Like a lot of adults her age, The Federalist’s Joy Pullman grew up as a child of separated parents. It’s an experience that she’s carried with her into her research and writing about the LGBT movement. In her new book, “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Means the End of America,” she talks about how this instability at home is creating entire generations of hurting kids. And it’s that family chaos and dysfunction, she insists, that makes it more likely that someone will identify as homosexual or transgender.

Rosaria Butterfield, who lived as a practicing lesbian for 10 years before finding Jesus, is adamant that most people who adopt this kind of lifestyle have been traumatized or abused in some way. That hidden hurt is exactly what Pullman zeroed in on when she talked with “Outstanding” podcast host Joseph Backholm.

“I think people don’t talk enough about the consequences that easy divorce [has] had on young people,” she said. “I think a lot of the move for people in this current generation — and generations going forward — away from marriage and family is partly because of family traumas that [they’ve] experienced and haven’t healed. [When you have family separation], when you have divorce … if that’s not addressed,” Joy warns, “if you don’t have a way of healing and reconciling that, then people are scared of being in those intimate relationships because they’ve been hurt in intimate relationships before.”

Sometimes that shows up in the millennial and Gen Z reluctance to marry and have families, she points out. “Many young people’s home lives have not been happy. … They’ve been a source of pain, alienation, and conflict. And so I think there’s a lot of unaddressed [anguish]. … And if people aren’t going to church as much anymore, they don’t have kind of a second institution there to help catch them and teach them what a family looks like when their own nuclear families fail.”

The reality, Pullman explains, is that “people who have unstable families where children are not growing up in the homes with their two biological married parents [are] much more likely to identify as queer. And then on the flip side,” she continues, that kind of family trauma can also express itself in “a lack of natural identity [that] God has given each of us as man and woman…” She goes on to say that these young people grow up to be much more likely to engage in “every sign of personal distress,” including crime, teen pregnancy, and LGBT identification.

So, the “sexual chaos that children are experiencing,” Joy says, is what she sees “as kind of a second-, third-generation consequence of our culture’s acceptance of feminism, no-fault divorce, and those other things. … And so all of these decisions that people are making absolutely affect each other.”

One of the most horrifying pieces of evidence that America has lost its sense of moral direction when it comes to the family is that very few people seem to prioritize it. In a shocking poll published this month by Pew Research, only 19% of Biden voters and 59% of Trump voters agreed with the statement that “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.”

While the number suggests a huge chasm between the two parties, Backholm was just as shocked by the “tragically [low]” number of conservatives who value the cornerstone of society. Every poll needs to be taken with “a grain of salt,” Pullman cautioned. But, she conceded, “It’s absolutely true that we have a decline in acknowledgment of the important and crucial role that family plays in a happy civic society. … You can’t even have a society if you don’t have children.” It’s in the difficult work of parenthood, she insists, that we really develop “productive and loving and self-sacrificing behavior.”

But of course in our culture, Joy shook her head, “a horrible culture that hates children, it’s cast as the opposite. Children are supposed to be somehow an obstacle to your self-improvement, when in truth, they are maybe the greatest catalyst that I’ve ever had in my whole entire life towards self-improvement.” Let’s face it, “spouses and children do not allow self-indulgence,” Pullman said bluntly. And “that is the reality of marriage and family. And you and I would both agree it’s totally worth it. But when you contrast that to the value system of the Sexual Revolution, which is live authentically, satisfy your urges as quickly as you can, and don’t ever deny what your heart is trying to do, those values are just not consistent [with raising a family].”

As for the gap between the value of children and marriage in Biden voters versus Trump voters, Joy thinks partisanship “is just the tip of the iceberg.” “What’s really under there are people’s … deepest beliefs about the world, their worldview, if you will. And the worldview manifests in people’s political affiliation.”

She believes a lot of people “turn to leftist politics as a substitute for religion, as a kind of psychotherapy.” But in the end, all that really does is encourage a victim mentality that never brings a person closer to healing in their life. “You have to be an overcomer. You have to decide to take responsibility for your life and make your own decisions about how to move ahead and get maturity — even if other people are at least partly at fault for the situation you find yourself in.”

Sure, people have pain and loneliness that “nobody really wants to talk about,” because of things in their past that may not be resolved or a dysfunctional childhood. And they need empathy, Joy agrees, “but not just the empathy that enables and says, ‘It’s okay for you to sit and wallow in your trauma’ but a compassionate ear that says, ‘You know, if you wanted to address that, I’ve got some solutions for you, starting with, for example, going to church, maybe repenting of your own sins and hearing the message [of positivity].”

And unfortunately, the church hasn’t always been the example the world needs of strong, lifelong marriages and healthy families. As Family Research Council’s David Closson pointed out, social conservatives have spent the last 20 years focused on issues that “a generation ago were unimaginable” — things like same-sex marriage and transgenderism. But none of these things originated in a vacuum, he insisted to The Washington Stand. They are the “natural progression of a moral revolution that started decades ago.” “In fact,” he told TWS, “we can trace some of the confusion about marriage back to 1969 when then-Governor Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law. Ever since then, the broader culture has increasingly seen marriage as a contract rather than a covenant. Over the last several decades, no-fault divorce has contributed to the weakening of America’s marriage culture, to the point where today the divorce rate in the church is approximately 30%.”

If American Christians “want to see a return of sanity and morality in our culture, rebuilding a marriage culture in our churches is an important place to begin,” Closson urged. “We need to regain a vision for what marriage is really about, namely, the bringing together of one man and one woman into a lifelong covenant that is open to any children their union produces. Before we can fix society at large, we must re-double our efforts in inculcating and discipling those in our churches to have a comprehensive biblical worldview.”

At the end of the day, Joy points out, “If you obey God,” staying married, for instance, and valuing children, “in the long run will be happy — whether it’s on life or in eternity. And that’s just a fact. [But for many people] it’s difficult for them to accept, because they want to be their own God. So I do think that that spiritual kind of struggle is underlying these cultural and political struggles that we’re talking about. And that’s really what’s underneath.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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


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

‘We’re Coming for Your Children’: LGBTQ Public School Agenda Should Concern Parents

Can you imagine not being able to opt your kindergartener out of wholly inappropriate LGBTQ propaganda at school? This is a reality in Maryland’s largest school district where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit decided parents have no say in whether their K-5-aged children must sit through classes and read books addressing LGBTQ sexuality and gender.

Public schools are often the breeding ground for this radical ideology to be forced on minors. Whether it be boys in girls’ sports, “drag queen story hour” in the library, or forcing sexual themes on minors in the classroom, a war is being waged on our children in the name of LGBTQ activism that won’t stop until every parent, child, and educator surrenders to its demands.

Annually in June, Pride Month brings a heightened onslaught of the LGBTQ agenda in the public square and reminds us of the No. 1 target of this perverse ideology: children.

Coming for Our Children?

Last June, LGBTQ activists chanted, “We’re here! We’re queer! We’re coming for your children!” in New York City’s annual drag march. And we’ll never forget when in 2021, the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir sang “We’re Coming for Your Children,” with the chilling lyrics: “You think that we’ll corrupt your kids if our agenda goes unchecked. Funny, just this once, you’re correct. We’ll convert your children.”

Though they claim these threats to come after our children are actually “tongue in cheek,” it is evident that impressionable, vulnerable children are the primary victims of radical LGBTQ ideology.

Look no further than the state of public schools, where children are paying the price of this gruesome social experiment that affirms lies to pander to the LGBTQ lobby.

The National Education Association, for example, helped draft and encouraged “sexual education standards” for teachers to discuss inappropriate topics like sexual orientation with children despite parental concerns.

In recent years, it’s been revealed that some school libraries offer sexually-charged and sometimes pornographic books on their shelves. And some schools have even socially “transitioned” students without their parents’ knowledge or consent. In Maryland’s largest public school district, internal data from 2022 showed a 582% increase in just two years in students who identify as “gender nonconforming.”

We are witnessing the carnage this pervasive ideology has had in radicalizing school policies to the detriment of students’ physical well-being. In 2021, for instance, we were struck by the news that a ninth-grade girl in Loudoun County, Virginia was sexually assaulted after a boy dressed in a skirt was allowed to enter the girls’ bathroom, which sparked national outrage.

With the Biden administration’s redefinition of “sex” in Title IX, which will be enacted in August unless the courts intervene, I fear these stories will become even more common as schools that receive federal funds will be subjected to “affirming” a student who identifies as the opposite gender. This opens the door to a plethora of safety, privacy, and ethical concerns and would allow boys in girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports.

When we were kids, our parents didn’t have to worry about radical indoctrination and dangerous policies in public schools. Sadly, that is no longer the case as public schools have attempted to co-opt the role of the parent and sabotage the foundation upon which a child’s worldview is established, attacking truth as basic as the definition of male and female.

On top of this, government-run schools are failing to provide a quality education, as evidenced by adult literacy rates and declining test scores, especially since COVID.

A Christian Solution

If anything, the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures revealed the cancer that has seeped into the classroom as parents witnessed the ideologies certain teacher “activists” were promulgating on their students. This is one of the reasons parents pulled their children out of public school in droves as public education numbers continue to fall.

With a new school year quickly approaching, I implore parents to pray about where their children are receiving instruction five days a week and become serious about the responsibility to “train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6), understanding what’s at stake in this post-Christian world.

The average child’s worldview is in place by age 13, based on research from George Barna. Who do you trust to help shape your child’s worldview in some of the most crucial years of development?

Christian parents should consider the importance of a private Christian or homeschool education with godly educators who acknowledge truth and believe parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education.

Parents need to understand that select alternatives to public school provide a quality education from a faith-based perspective and Christian worldview that won’t compromise on values.

Your child is being discipled one way or another; ensure they’re being discipled in Christ and not in the world. This can change the course of a generation and the trajectory of children’s lives and spiritual growth.

As Voddie Baucham said, “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

AUTHOR

Mat Staver

Mat Staver is founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, chairman of Liberty Counsel Action, an educator, and a former founding dean of a leading Christian law school.

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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.

United Methodists Embrace LGBT Ideology, Lose 1 Million Members in a Day

Many Christians lamented the United Methodist Church’s (UMC) decision to embrace LGBT ideology at their 2024 UMC General Conference last month. In effect, the church went from declaring homosexuality as “incompatible with Christian teaching,” a belief held since the 1970s, to claiming it is suddenly compatible. But as experts have pointed out, the UMC had been debating the topic for several years. And while the decision was reportedly disheartening, it would seem the backlash it has garnered has inspired orthodox Christians.

As UMC leaned toward the inclusion of LGBT ideology, the beginning of 2023 saw roughly 4,000 congregations leave the church. But far more notable was the May 28 vote from the United Methodist Church in the Ivory Coast to also depart from the UMC denomination. As The Christian Post noted, “this conference reportedly had over 1.2 million members” in 2022 and the “departure means over one tenth of United Methodism” is now gone. CP further highlighted that “the Korean Methodist Church — which has about 1.5 million members — is also considering leaving.”

An affiliate of the Korean Methodists said in a statement, “This is not an emotional issue but a matter of unchangeable truth. Homosexuality is clearly a sin. This is an issue concerning the sanctity of life that the church must teach correctly, without compromise.” Given these developments, it would seem, as President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Dr. Albert Mohler said, “The United Methodist Church … is not so united.”

Concerning the Ivorian Methodists’ decision to split, their declaration stated:

“Considering that the new United Methodist Church is now based on sociocultural and contextual values which have consumed its doctrinal and disciplinary integrity, considering that the new United Methodist Church has preferred to sacrifice its honorability and integrity to honor the LGBT, considering that the new United Methodist Church, which distances itself from the Holy Scriptures is no longer suitable for the annual conference of the Ivory Coast. The annual conference of the United Methodist Church in the Ivory Coast gathered in its extraordinary session at the Jubilee Temple of Concody for reasons of conscience before God and before His Word, supreme authority and matters of faith in life, decides to leave the United Methodist Church denomination.”

The UMC said in a statement that they “grieve Cote d’Ivoire Conference’s decision to separate” from them, but as CP suggested, “The quickness of the Ivorian exit may inspire other United Methodist regions in Africa to act likewise.” They added, “United Methodism in Africa is overwhelmingly conservative and displeased with United Methodism’s new direction set by the recent General Conference.” Additionally, David Closson, Family Research Council’s director of the Center for Biblical Worldview, said to The Washington Stand, “In light of how quickly the United Methodist Church has deviated from biblical orthodoxy,” the UMC in the Ivory Coast choosing to leave “is incredibly encouraging.”

He continued, “I think every Christian should pay attention carefully” to the fact that the Ivorian Methodists “are saying that the primary authority is Scripture.” This is important, Closson went on to say, because “when it comes to these contested matters of gender, marriage and sexuality, God’s Word is not neutral.” Rather, “There actually is a clear teaching.” And this is especially important when considering how “the American Methodist leaders … ignore and subvert clear teaching of Scripture,” Closson added. When that happens, he urged, “It’s time to leave the denomination.”

According to Closson, the decision from the Ivorian Methodists “is a major development that will go down in church history.” He went on to explain how, “looking across mainline Protestantism in the United States, it’s important to notice a crucial development.” Ultimately, “The United Methodist denomination, really, is the last mainline denomination to fall in line with the sexual and moral revolution.” Now, it appears “most mainline Protestant denominations are shells of their former selves.”

But what is encouraging about this, Closson emphasized, “is that when a church or a denomination gives up the Bible, they no longer have anything distinctive to offer to the culture. They no longer have anything distinctive to offer to God’s people. And in one sense,” he contended, “I think it’s really encouraging to see these churches dry up.” The way Closson put it, “I would rather see mainline denomination churches that are not teaching God’s Word close up and be turned into condos than to stay open and peddle a false gospel.”

Moving forward, the American church can see how “increasingly,” Closson noted, “these African and Asian bishops are looking at these liberal denominations and saying that forcing them to change their beliefs on same-sex marriage, gender, or issues related to the family is a form of cultural imperialism” — which is something they’re not willing to tolerate.

Closson concluded, “American Christians and theologically conservative denominations should look to our African and Asian brothers and sisters who are holding the line, even when it costs them something, as a source of great strength and encouragement.”

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Southern Baptists may vote to ban churches with women pastors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

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

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

Majority of Americans Disapprove of Disney’s LGBT Agenda

Once the go-to brand for children’s entertainment, Disney’s popularity is cratering as the House of Mouse continues promoting the LGBT agenda. According to the latest Rasmussen Reports national survey, 71% of American adults agree that Disney “should return to wholesome programming and allow parents to decide when their children are taught about sexuality.”

Rasmussen cited Disney executive Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, who bragged on a conference call in 2022 about being “a mother of two queer children … one transgender child and one pansexual child …” Burke also boasted that Disney has introduced “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories.” According to Rasmussen, over half (54%) of American adults believe such programming and content is “inappropriate” for children under the age of 12.

Additionally, the brand’s popularity is underwater. Only 46% of Americans polled hold a favorable view of Disney, while 45% do not. This is down from Disney’s 51% favorability rating late last year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of Disney’s support comes from Democrats. Almost two thirds (63%) of Democrats hold a favorable view of the media giant, compared to only 33% of Republicans and 36% of Independent voters.

Half of Democrats approve of programming featuring “many, many, many LGBTQIA characters” for children under the age of 12, compared to only 21% of Republicans and 24% of Independent voters. Rasmussen also noted, “More men (57%) than women (51%) believe stories featuring gay characters are not appropriate for children under 12, and men are also more likely than women to agree that Disney should go back to wholesome programming.”

Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, commented to The Washington Stand, “Teaching values in media isn’t a new idea. … The innovation Disney has made in recent years is to teach a new morality.” He continued, “Disney sincerely believes teaching children to love sensuality and embrace self-created identities rooted in our self-perceptions is a moral good that leads to happiness and human flourishing. The moral problem is that they are wrong. The business problem is that hundreds of millions of Americans disagree with them.”

Backholm added, “What Disney sees as foundational moral truths, many Americans see as deception and perversion. The pushback this survey reveals is not to the idea of moral lessons in movies, but to the specific moral lessons Disney has prioritized.”

Over the past several years, Disney has become increasingly political, throwing its weight behind the LGBT agenda. In 2022, top Disney executives voiced criticism of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, which would, among other things, prohibit teachers from discussing “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” with children in kindergarten through third grade. Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek originally maintained that the company would not publicly criticize the legislation but reversed course under pressure from LGBT lobbyists both within Disney and outside it. From there, LGBT content in Disney productions increased, including the first ever depiction of same-sex activity in a Pixar film.

In leaked video conferences Disney organized for employees during the Parental Rights in Education Act controversy, executives openly discussed promoting LGBT content to children. Executive Producer Latoya Raveneau expressed her gratitude that Disney’s leadership “has been so welcoming to like, my like, not-at-all secret gay agenda.” Referring to the Disney Channel show she produces, Raveneau added, “I don’t have to be afraid to — like, let’s have these two characters kiss in the background. Wherever I could, I was basically adding queerness to the show. If you see anything queer in the show — nobody would stop me and nobody was trying to stop me.”

Another executive, Diversity and Inclusion Manager Vivian Ware, boasted of eliminating “gendered” language from live shows at Disney theme parks, doing away with terms such as “ladies and gentlemen” or “boys and girls,” in order to create “that magical moment” for children who supposedly identify as transgender, non-binary, etc.

Last year, the Catholic League and Meath Television Media released a documentary entitled “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom,” exposing what Catholic League President Bill Donohue called the company’s program of “sexual engineering” of children. “They want to go after the little kids,” Donohue said. “As I pointed out in the movie, they just got off their tricycle. And now they’re trying to sexually engineer them.” The documentary, which features interviews with former Disney employees as well as individuals like neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, also addressed Disney’s increasingly vocal stances on political issues and its friendliness with the Chinese Communist Party.

Also last year, after increasing LGBT and progressive content in its productions, Disney faced a $5.5 billion budget cut, resulting in up to 4,000 jobs being eliminated. The company’s market capitalization dropped to a nine-year low and streaming service Disney+ fell nearly one million subscribers short of projected goals. In financial documents, Disney admitted that its LGBT promotion may cost the company money, but indicated no intention of changing its position. More recently, Disney’s stock has fallen by nearly 10% despite Disney+ making a profit for the first time since it was launched in late 2019.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

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


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

Jill Biden: Protecting Kids from Porn Is a Step Toward the Holocaust

As the nation nears Passover, the Biden administration has unveiled its latest scapegoat: people who want to protect children, especially Christians. In a speech that defied parody, First Lady Jill Biden linked those who oppose books that show minors transgender cartoonish porn to the Nazis.

“Doctor” Jill’s accusations came over the weekend during brief remarks to the so-called Human Rights Campaign (HRC). She was supposed to marry the Democratic Party’s campaign themes of castigating “Christian nationalism” with their all-encompassing campaign message that electing anyone more conservative than AOC poses “a threat to democracy.” In the Biden family’s typically solipsistic fashion, she spent about one-third of her nine-minute-long speech talking about herself. But when she finally served up the rainbow-colored meat, it hit its target: anyone who would try to slow down the Left’s agenda to indoctrinate and trans kids.

“We had to fend off more than 50 anti-gay amendments that Republicans tried to force into the government funding bill,” she said, then plunging unartfully into her evening’s talking points:

“These were extreme measures aimed directly at this community — measures that would have limited health care, eroded protections for same-sex couples, and more. And they served only one purpose: to spread hate and fear.

“History teaches us that democracies don’t disappear overnight. They disappear slowly, subtly, silently.

“A book ban. A court decision. A ‘don’t say gay’ law.

“Before World War II, I’m told, Berlin was the center of LGBTQ culture in Europe.

“One group of people loses their rights. And then another, and another. Until one morning you wake up — and you no longer live in a democracy.”

In her defense, Biden-era America does bear a striking resemblance to the Weimar Republic, both in its openness to sexual licentiousness (which carried over into the highest ranks of its successor Nazi regime) and hyperinflation. Otherwise, it’s a full-out assault on family values and common decency.

The “book ban” simply means removing books that feature cartoonish imagery of fellatio and celebrations of pedophilia from school libraries, or moving them from the children’s section to the adult section of other libraries. That’s “not Kristallnacht,” Bruce Friedman, a concerned citizen, told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” in 2022.

The “Don’t Say Gay” law does not say “Don’t Say Gay.” It merely prohibits teachers from deliberately introducing sexual themes into classroom discussions for children in kindergarten through third grade. That would make most elementary school teachers incipient Nazis, since 62% of primary grade teachers said “students should not learn” about transgenderism in school.

Not content to break Godwin’s Law, Jill Biden tried to blame her political opponents for the deaths of numerous LGBT-identifying Americans. The first lady expressed concern for Nex Benedict, clasping her hands in a mock prayer before pointing the finger at conservatives: “We have faced unspeakable tragedies before: an assassination in San Francisco, a barren field in Wyoming, a nightclub in Orlando.”

The “assassination in San Francisco” refers to Harvey Milk, a San Francisco Democrat who had sex with a 16-year-old runaway named Jack Galen McKinley who later committed suicide. Milk’s supportive biographer remembers Milk had an eye for teenage boys with drug problems — behavior many would call sexual exploitation.

The “barren field in Wyoming” refers to Matthew Shepard, who had been kidnapped and raped during a high school field trip to Morocco a few years before dying a brutal death as a 21-year-old college student. But his murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, used the “gay panic” defense to avoid the death penalty for a meth-fueled drug robbery gone wrong — and two witnesses confirm that McKinney and Shepard had a sexual relationship. These underreported facts proved so shattering to the Shepard martyrdom thesis that the LGBTQ website The Advocate asked, “What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard’s murder was wrong?” (It also confirmed the movement’s penchant for stretching the truth, stating, “There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”)

The “nightclub in Orlando” — The Pulse — found itself under fire from Omar Mateen, the American-born child of Afghan parents who professed his allegiance to ISIS during the shooting. Mateen was placed on, then removed from, the FBI’s terrorist watchlist by the Obama-Biden administration. President Biden has imported nearly 100,000 more Afghanis to the U.S. since the fall of Kabul, and an unknown number more potential terrorists through our open southern border.

The irony of Jill Biden accusing others of subverting democracy is underlined by the remarks’ location: She spoke at the so-called Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a $46 million LGBTQ pressure group, which opposes laws protecting minors from transgender procedures and has denounced laws regulating drag shows and “allowing misgendering.” HRC’s “Welcoming Schools” program creates gay- and transgender-themed lesson plans for teachers beginning in “pre-K,” such as reading the book, “They, She, He, Easy as ABC.” By third grade, HRC introduces the “Gender Snowperson” exercise to indoctrinate children that there are “differences between gender identity, sexual orientation and sex assigned at birth.”

Most parents, and teachers, want nothing to do with this. More than 10 times as many teachers say transgender lessons in schools “have had a negative impact on their ability to do their job,” according to the Pew Research Center.

majority of Americans (55%) say they find transgenderism immoral, according to a Gallup poll taken last June; 71% of Americans agreed with that “there are two genders, male and female,” according to a June 2023 Rasmussen poll; and 64% of Americans (including 62% of Democrats) support Florida’s Parents Rights in Education bill, which Mrs. Biden smeared as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

If somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of America do not believe the transgender agenda, who’s waging a “war on democracy”? For that matter, who’s waging a war on logic?

After years of quietly investigating traditional Catholics, prosecuting evangelical sidewalk counselors, and warning of an alleged nexus between Orthodox Christians and the Kremlin, the Biden administration has decided to crank up the anti-Christian, anti-Middle America rhetoric to 11. Americans can be grateful Jill Biden’s speech proved poorly executed. Even the portions intended to endear herself or appeal to the audience fell flat. For instance, after revealing that Joe Biden proposed to her five times, she said: “I’ll never forget what Joe said next. He said, ‘Jill, I promise you, your life will never change.’ Of course, this proved to be wildly untrue.” Thus, Jill Biden verified her husband either breaks his promises or makes inaccurate forecasts about the future.

She closed, “I love you,” reminiscent of the hapless president of the United States, based on then-Governor Jerry Brown and played by the late John Ritter, in the movie “Americathon.” The movie, released in 1979 at the height of the Carter-era malaise, is about an America so broke it must hold a national telethon to keep from going bankrupt.

Jill Biden’s speech proves the Left’s rhetoric has long been morally bankrupt. Yet facing ruin is precisely when some become most dangerous.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: What people have forgotten about the “transgender” battle: How the big push began in Massachusetts in 2007 – and how Mass­Resistance success­fully held it off for years.

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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.

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

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.

‘Dems Want to Give Up U.S. Sovereignty’ to ‘New World Order’: Senator on WHO Treaty

The Democratic Party in general, and the Biden administration in particular, are eager to hand global governance institutions more influence over U.S. health policy, said the prime opponent of a new pandemic agreement.

The Biden administration has signaled its intention to adopt the World Health Organization’s (WHO) new accord on responding to global health pandemics such as COVID-19 or “Disease X.” The WHO Pandemic Agreement demands the U.S. turn over one-fifth of all vaccines and protective health equipment to WHO for redistribution, adopts a controversial “One Health” policy that makes human health no more important than animals or the environment, and encourages national governments to combat “misinformation” online. The WHO originally described the agreement as a “legally binding treaty” in December 2022 but changed its formal title to an “agreement” after the Biden administration realized it could not win Senate ratification, as the Constitution requires for an international treaty.

The Biden administration’s willingness to sidestep Congress on the WHO agreement — as it has on student loan “forgiveness,” an eviction moratorium, and other issues — troubles Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who introduced the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act. But the bill is “not getting much traction here in Congress,” Johnson told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on January 25, because the international accord has become “a partisan issue.”

“Every Republican except for the bill’s sponsor voted for my amendment, which would have deemed” the WHO agreement, which would give WHO greater authority over all Americans during deadly outbreaks, “a treaty subject to ratification in the Senate. And every Democrat voted against it,” said Johnson. “So, Democrats apparently want to give up U.S. sovereignty.”

Pro-life and pro-family advocates should be most concerned about expanding the WHO’s reach, power, and prestige, as it moves to polarize global health policy in favor of abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism, say its opponents. At last month’s board meeting, WHO announced it may strike a partnership with the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), a well-funded pro-abortion lobbying group that pressures governments to enact lax abortion laws.

CRR is “one of the most nefarious, aggressively pro-abortion groups on the face of the Earth,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) told Perkins earlier in the same show. That stems, in part, from its secretary-general, Tedros Ghebreyesus, who won his post with China’s endorsement. “I’ve known him for 30 years. He used to tell me how pro-life he was. He is absolutely pro-abortion.”

Smith, the co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, and his wife have tracked the influence CRR and WHO have had on global abortion policy for decades. Two decades ago, Smith entered into the Congressional Record “a document put out by the World Health Organization, and it’s all about the model legislation that they want for every country,” he said. WHO wants “no gestational limits, just like Biden is doing,” establishing a right to “abortion until birth.” WHO and the Democrats also believe pro-life physicians, who object to participating in abortions due to religious or moral reasons, should have “no ability to say no, no right of conscience. They say that is a barrier to access to abortion.”

Democrats and global WHO bureaucrats also oppose mandatory waiting periods, which have been shown to reduce the abortion rate and increase the number of babies born alive. “Very often when there’s a parental notification, or a waiting period, or some other small-but-necessary protection, women rethink it and they come to a different conclusion,” Smith told Perkins. “They want none of that.”

WHO is also scheduled to roll out a global health guidance instructing physicians how to respond to adults who identify as transgender — and stacked the group writing the guideline with radical transgender activists, most of whom have no medical background. One proposed member of the Guideline Development Group (GDG) previously took part in a global LGBT health symposium that “emphasised the need to provide [an] uninterrupted supply of … medical [hormone therapy] and gender-affirmative surgeries for trans people.” The minority of GDG members who have medical backgrounds often carry out, and financially benefit from, transgender procedures, creating a blatant conflict of interest.

WHO’s emphasis on climate change, and its lowering human health to the level of ecosystems, should also give Americans pause, said Johnson. President Dwight D. “Eisenhower, in his farewell address, warned us about four things,” he noted. “The final thing he talked about [was how] we cannot let global society fall into a state of ‘dreadful fear and hate.’” But both have been inflamed by extreme COVID-19 lockdown advocates and Green activists who perpetually flog the threat of “catastrophic climate emergency” while demonizing their opponents, he said. “This is what tyrants do. They control people. They take away your freedom based on a state of fear.”

Johnson said the end game of those promoting the WHO Pandemic Agreement and other destructive policies is “the New World Order, total control, a borderless world. That’s part of the strategy behind an open border here in America.”

He quoted a video produced by the World Economic Forum, “‘You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.’ That’s basically their rallying cry. It’s sick. It’s frightening.”

“There are a lot of people,” warned Johnson, “in leadership positions who want to take your freedom away.”

He hoped other nations would recognize “that their national sovereignty, their health freedom may be taken away from them in this very dangerous negotiation.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

RELATED ARTICLE: RFK Jr.: WHO Pandemic Agreement ‘Should Be Dead in the Water’

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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.

Christian and Jewish Leaders Condemn ‘Political, Spiritual Persecution’ of Paivi Rasanen

An interfaith coalition has offered prayers of solidarity to two evangelical Christians facing their third trial for declaring that homosexuality violates the Bible, a position prosecutors call “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.”

Despite two unanimous acquittals, Finland’s state prosecutor has taken an elderly member of parliament and a Lutheran bishop before the Supreme Court to answer for their traditional Christian beliefs on sexuality. Dr. Päivi Räsänen, who has served in parliament for 29 years, and Bishop Juhana Pohjola of the Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland (ELMDF), are facing “spiritual persecution” for upholding the Scripture, said a letter signed by dozens of Christian and Jewish leaders.

“Once again you face unjust charges. For almost half a decade, you have confronted targeted legal harassment for simply living out your Christian faith, the direct result of not just political persecution but also spiritual persecution,” says the letter, which was led by Advancing American Freedom and released today. “Now, despite twice being unanimously declared not guilty at the Helsinki District Court and the Helsinki Court of Appeals, the prosecutor has filed another appeal, potentially forcing a third trial at Finland’s Supreme Court.”

Authorities have centered their legal case on a five-year-old social media post made by the MP, a member of the Christian Democrats Party, asking why her Lutheran church body would take part in an LGBT “Pride 2019” event. The post on Twitter, now X, included a photo of Romans 1:24-27, which clarifies that homosexual behavior is sinful.

Two years later, in April 2021, prosecutors charged Räsänen and Pohjola with “agitation against a minority” under the nation’s law against “War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.” Police arrested Räsänen and subjected her to 13 hours of police interrogation before her trial. Prosecutors dubbed the Bible verses in her tweet, a booklet the two wrote in 2004 expounding on biblical doctrine titled “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relations Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity,” as well as comments Räsänen made on the radio in December 2019 as “hate speech.”

Räsänen and Pohjola were first acquitted by the Helsinki District Court on March 30, 2022. The three-judge panel ruled that prosecutors had violated the Christians’ right to freedom of expression contained in Section 12 of the Finnish Constitution, as well as noting the thorny legal questions posed if secular judges begin ruling on matters of religious doctrine. “It is not for the district court to interpret biblical concepts,” the court declared.

But within days, then-Prosecutor General Raija Toiviainen appealed the charges. Räsänen then faced a two-day trial last August 31-September 1. The Court of Appeals unanimously acquitted MP Räsänen and Bishop Pohjola on November 14, 2023. Under the law, social media posts must be intended to offend, and “there must be an overriding social reason for interfering with and restricting freedom of expression,” they ruled. The judges ordered the state to pay both defendants’ legal fees.

Finland’s current state prosecutor appealed the dismissal once again earlier this month.

“It is shocking that the Finnish state prosecutor has decided to target MP Räsänen for a third time, because she politely expressed her religious beliefs in public,” Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council — and who signed the letter — told The Washington Stand. “So far, the Finnish courts have been clear in affirming Räsänen’s right to express her religious beliefs. However, the process of being dragged through court is often the punishment itself.”

The thirst to continually prosecute the grandmother of 10 exposes the government’s intolerance and malice toward traditional Christian viewpoints, said Paul Coleman, executive director of ADF International, which is supporting Räsänen’s legal defense. “Dragging people through the courts for years, subjecting them to hour-long police interrogations, and wasting taxpayer money to police people’s deeply held beliefs has no place in a democratic society,” said Coleman. “As is so often the case in ‘hate speech’ trials, the process has become the punishment.”

The U.S. letter offers “prayers and encouragement” to the embattled pair “on behalf of the millions of Americans who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

The letter assures that “you do not stand alone,” because “each one of us stands alongside you,” note its writers. “We are watching, and we are praying for you. The world is watching, and the world is praying for you.”

The signatories hope their fellow believers, and all those who value freedom of conscience and expression, will make that promise real as the West falls progressively under the sway of illiberal secular repression. “Christians around the world should continue to pray for and voice their support for MP Räsänen,” said Del Turco.

The faith leaders signing the letter include Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, former U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, former Ambassador Ken Blackwell, and Rabbi Yaakov Menken of the Coalition for Jewish Values, among many others.

The Lutheran pair’s case also attracted high-level support from Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who named Räsänen, detransitioner Chloe Cole, collegiate swimming record-holder Riley Gaines, and concerned parent Scott Smith his personal “heroes” at FRC’s 2023 Pray Vote Stand Summit. “She gives you hope,” said Roy. “She gives you a belief that we can stand up and stand athwart that kind of tyranny.”

Räsänen has reflected on the words of Jesus to rejoice in suffering, taking pride that each trial has allowed her to quote and explain the Bible’s teachings in depth.

“After my full exoneration in two courts, I’m not afraid of a hearing before the Supreme Court,” said Räsänen. An “acquittal from the Supreme Court would set an even stronger positive precedent for everyone’s right to free speech and religion. And if the court decided to overturn the lower courts’ acquittals, I am ready to defend freedom of speech and religion as far as the European Court of Human Rights.”

The letter reads in full:

To the Honorable Päivi Räsänen, M.D. and the Reverend Dr. Juhana Pohjola,

We have been following your case since 2019 and on behalf of the millions of Americans who support freedom of speech and freedom of religion, we write to show our support for you in these trying times and to offer our prayers and encouragement.

Once again you face unjust charges. For almost half a decade, you have confronted targeted legal harassment for simply living out your Christian faith, the direct result of not just political persecution but also spiritual persecution. Now, despite twice being unanimously declared not guilty at the Helsinki District Court and the Helsinki Court of Appeals, the prosecutor has filed another appeal, potentially forcing a third trial at Finland’s Supreme Court.

We are watching and we are praying for you. The world is watching, and the world is praying for you. As you once again prepare to stand trial for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, know that you do not stand alone. Rather, each one of us stands alongside you, praying and encouraging you along the way.

Sincerely,

Paul Teller, Executive Director, Advancing American Freedom
Frank Wolf, Former Member, U.S. Congress
Ambassador Sam Brownback, Co-Chair, International Religious Freedom Summit
Dr. Gregory P. Seltz, Executive Director, The Lutheran Center for Religious Liberty
Eric Patterson, Executive Director, Religious Freedom Institute
Tony Perkins, President and former Chair, Family Research Council and US CIRF
Ken Blackwell, Former U.S. Ambassador, United Nations Human Rights Commission
Maureen Blum, Executive Director, Catholics Count
Nina Shea, Senior Scholar and Director, Center for Religious Freedom, Hudson Institute
Douglas D. Punke, Senior Pastor, Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana
Bunni Pounds, President, Christians Engaged
Rabbi Yaakov Menken, Managing Director, Coalition for Jewish Values
McKenna Wendt, Advocacy Manager, International Christian
Arielle Del Turco, Director of the Center for Religious Liberty, Family Research Council
Charlie Gerow, CEO, Quantum Communications
Robert F. Schwarzwalder, Jr., Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Honors College, Regent University
Bethany Kozma, CEO, Keystone Policy
Robert K. Fisher, Meeting Coordinator, Conservatives of Faith
Kelly Monroe Kullberg, General Secretary, American Association of Evangelicals
C. Preston Noell III, President, Tradition, Family, Property, Inc.
David Kullberg, Co-Founder, Scandinavian American Gospel Alliance
Richard A. Vigurie, Chairman, FedUpPac.org
Jason Poblete, Esq., President, Global Liberty Alliance
Eunie Smith, President, Eagle Forum of Alabama
Melissa Ortiz, Founder, Capability Consulting
Dran Reese, President, Salt and Light Council
Saulius “Saul” Anuzis, President, 60 Plus Association
James L. Martin, Founder/Chairman, 60 Plus Association
John Suarez, Executive Director, Center for a Free Cuba
Nancy Schulze, National Strategic Director, Physicians for Reform

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.

Feminism Is the Mother of Transgenderism

All evidence over the past two centuries leads to the conclusion that feminism has been a tragic misstep and an ugly wound in the history of Western civilizational thought. One of the most destructive consequences of feminism has been the still-unfolding and exponentially-worsening transgenderism crisis. This horrific ideology — now plaguing numerous Western nations and destroying the lives of countless men, women, and children — is a direct descendant of feminism, and it is fueled and fed by the feminism pervading every aspect of society.

Feminism Nascent

It can truly be said that feminism is the “mother” of both the Sexual Revolution and the LGBT movement, which are intimately intertwined. Since its inception in the late 18th century, feminism has held the necessity of “sexual liberation” and “free love” as one of its core and even essential doctrines. The chief progenitor of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, advocated and practiced sexual promiscuity, as did her eventual husband William Godwin, a forefather of modern anarchist movements, who believed that monogamy and faithful marriage were devices meant to subjugate and oppress women. Wollstonecraft shared this view.

Wollstonecraft’s vision of feminism injected the atheistic, libertine, anti-hierarchical philosophy behind the French Revolution (which she lauded in her book “Vindication of The Rights of Men,” an antagonistic response to conservative Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on The Revolution in France”) into the most basic and fundamental building block of society — the family. Where the French revolutionaries beheaded the king, Wollstonecraft sought to spiritually behead the king of the family, the father. Where the French revolutionaries held that every man could be his own king, Wollstonecraft held that every woman could be her own man.

This philosophy was, after her death, adopted by Wollstonecraft’s son-in-law, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley, who had been expelled from Oxford for his 1811 tract “The Necessity of Atheism,” adapted and blended the thought of his parents-in-law — Godwin’s anarchistic atheism and Wollstonecraft’s Luciferian feminism — and infused the philosophy into his own poems. His writing inverted the traditional understanding of Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise for falling prey to the temptations of the Serpent. In Shelley’s imagination, the Fall was not a tragic plummet into disorder but rather a reordering of creation, with the animal (the Serpent) reigning supreme, woman dominating over man, and God completely left out of the picture. In another work, Shelley creates a character named Cynthna, who is described as “the earthly messenger of Satan the liberator.” In “Revolt of Islam,” Cynthna asks, “Can man be free if woman be a slave?” In service to her demonic master, she proceeds to “disenchant” women of all affection for marriage, motherhood, and family.

The inherently atheistic foundation of feminism laid by Wollstonecraft and Shelley, replete with the seeds of the Sexual Revolution, festered and percolated for over a century before finally surging to the forefront of culture at the dawn of the 20th century.

Feminism Ascendant

Although the term “culture wars” was first popularized by Pat Buchanan in 1992, the thing itself to which the name refers had been around for at least two centuries prior. As the First World War drew closer, the Western World was rocked by two closely-connected political movements: communism and women’s suffrage. Like its atheistic forebearer of French Revolutionary Republicanism, communism sought to abolish hierarchy — and go even further to destroy class distinctions and even the family. Particularly as the women’s suffrage movement united suffragettes from across a broad swath of classes, communism crept into the movement.

Women’s suffrage served as a political channel for the anti-family feminist ideology, fracturing the family politically, confirming the individual (and deposing the family) as the most basic unit of society, and spreading antagonism against what is today called “gender roles.” Up until then, it was largely understood that men were designed to serve as providers and protectors, while women were made to serve as mothers and nurturers. Through the women’s suffrage movement, feminism eroded these divinely-instituted ideals. Of course, some suffragettes simply fought for basic respect for women and their legal rights and protections, which had been gradually suppressed in some cases with the rise of democracy and the individualistic-focused society it formed. But feminism’s weaponization of the women’s suffrage movement had long-lasting effects on the Western world.

Over the succeeding decades, feminism and communism formed an even closer bond, especially in the wake of the First World War, when women had become prominent fixtures in the workforce while millions of men were fighting and dying in the near-global conflict. Communism encouraged feminism, recognizing its potential for keeping women in the workplace, serving the state’s economic interests, and creating even more jobs for the state to populate in the form of nurseries, daycares, and government schools. The first half of the 20th century saw Wollstonecraft’s and Shelley’s notion of men and women as equal coming to fruition.

This notion of equality must be carefully parsed from the notion of dignity: Christianity, of course, holds that all men and all women are created with equal dignity and are loved equally by God. However, Christians know — both through God’s word in Sacred Scripture and through the experience of God’s creation — that men and women are not created equal, as in “interchangeable” or “one and the same.” Their equality is in dignity and love, not in capability and biology. Feminism ignored and outright rejected the Christian understanding of equality in dignity, and instead declared, with diabolical hubris, that man and woman are actually interchangeable, one and the same. Anything a man can do, a woman can do. The “and vice versa” would come later.

Feminism Dominant

In the wake of Second World War, as both East and West became increasingly materialistic in their oddly-opposing ways, feminism became a more and more dominant ideology in civilization, reaching a watershed moment in the 1960s. The Sexual Revolution and the “free love” movement were direct results of feminism, enabled by the burgeoning contraceptive industry. For the first time, men and women of all classes and incomes could (in theory) have sex as promiscuously as they liked without having to accept the responsibility of a child. This was, from a diabolical point of view, feminism’s master-stroke. The family was finally defeated: the act which had, for millennia, brought about new life and sustained the human race — which had, for centuries, been held as sacred and bound by the covenant of marriage — was now completely divorced from its chief aim and result, cheapened and degraded from the source of new life to a mere communal pleasure.

Of course, where contraception failed, less delicate and even more barbaric methods were devised and promulgated to alleviate “free lovers” from the burden of a child. Abortion was erroneously declared a constitutional right in the U.S. just a few short years after the sexual revolution’s advent and has since been adopted and defended across the globe.

Having played its trump card and offering the masses animalistic sexual pleasure without the joys and duties of parenthood, feminism seemed somewhat irrelevant. In the 1970s and 80s, it adopted a nastier, more vicious façade to achieve its few remaining goals. It wasn’t enough to simply cut off the family at its source, the family extant had to be demolished, too. Women were encouraged into the workforce at rates previously unimaginable, told to focus on their careers to the detriment of their children.

In the 70s and 80s, feminism became that which it abhorred, a mother, giving birth to the LGBT movement. Of course, initially, it was mostly just the “G” movement, with a few “Ls” interspersed, and maybe the odd “B.” Homosexuality was nothing new to the world, the practice had been around for ages in various ways in various cultures. But now it had cultural standing: If men and women really were interchangeable and if sex was no longer primarily a procreative act but a pleasurable one, then what point was there in constraining sex to opposite-sex couples? Why couldn’t two men “have sex,” or two women?

A later development in the history of feminism was the perpetuation of the myth of “toxic masculinity.” That which is toxic is not masculinity, but an absence or rejection of authentic masculinity. But traditional masculinity, which had served as the backbone and engine of Western civilization since even before the birth of Christ, became a reviled social stigma. A natural and wholesome inclination became suppressed as a sort of psychological disease.

Transgenderism’s Lineage

Just as homosexuality relied on feminism’s ideological precedent and social cachet to gain a cultural foothold, so too did feminism’s younger son — or daughter — or whatever. If men and women were really one and the same, interchangeable in practically every regard, then why could a man not become a woman, or a woman become a man? If the only real difference between men and women was a matter of perceived personality, then why could the biological accidents of the body not be rearranged to correspond to the “reality” of feelings?

Transgenderism was birthed from the feminist philosophy, following her precedents to their natural conclusions. Many self-professed feminists protest against transgenderism’s onslaught, claiming that the ideology is erasing women, without realizing that the very movement that they espouse and propagate is based on erasing the distinctions between men and women. Given feminism’s premise that men and women are equal one to another in essence, bodily distinctions and biological differences become mere accidents to be subjected to and conquered by “science” at the whim of one’s feelings and emotional instability.

Moreover, feminism has bred the very discontent and societal rot which is fueling transgenderism’s alacrity. Young women are no longer content with their sex, having been told for generations now that they can be men, should be men, and can do whatever men do, yet consistently finding that they in fact cannot. Disappointed with this reality, young women seek to rectify this seeming wrong by “becoming” men. Young men have been told for generations that their sex is dangerous and “toxic,” that they need to be gentler, softer, and, in practically every respect, more like women. With such pressures placed upon them, trying to “be” women seems a reasonable escape for young men. And thus countless young women and young men are drugged, butchered, and mutilated, all based on a lie.

It is the lie of feminism that men and women are equal, one and the same, interchangeable. Its atheistic, Luciferian disregard for the order instituted by God — written in human biology, lived out in the form of the family, explicated in the sacrament of marriage — has led to rampant degeneracy — from the contraceptive Sexual Revolution to the “normalization” of homosexuality — and horrors prior generations could have never imagined — such as abortion and the surgical mutilation of children’s genitals, all under the fraudulent guise of “health care.” Feminism has decimated Western civilization.

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

RELATED ARTICLE: The Tooth Fairy and Gender Dysphoria

RELATED VIDEO: Son of World Famous Photographer Likens Trans Acceptance to Gun to Society’s Head

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


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

Airlines Prioritize Wokeness Over Safety: But at What Cost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

Sarah Holliday

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.

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


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

Top 10 Underreported Stories of 2023

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

1. The Nashville Shooter’s Manifesto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Who Leaked the Dobbs Decision?

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

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

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

4. Our Open Border Transforms America

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

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

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

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

5. The LGBT Agenda Is Losing Support

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

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

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

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

6. Biden Family Corruption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Churchgoers and Married People are Happier

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

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

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

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

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

9. COVID-19 Lockdowns Are Still Hurting America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

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

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


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