One Feminist’s Perspective On How The Transgender Agenda Harms Women & Girls thumbnail

One Feminist’s Perspective On How The Transgender Agenda Harms Women & Girls

By Beverly Hallberg & Kara Dansky

The following is the transcript for the She Thinks podcast:

And welcome to She Thinks, a podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg. And I’m so excited about today’s guest. Kara Dansky joins us to share why she is furious with her party, the Democrat party, for pushing gender identity or what she refers to as gender insanity. Her premise is that the redefining of the meaning of the word sex and gender victimizes women and children. In our conversation, we’ll discuss things that often aren’t allowed to be said in mainstream media. We’ll get into how gender identity has seeped into our laws and the resulting implications, how parental rights are being ignored, and what it has meant for her to speak out on such a controversial issue.

Now to Kara Dansky. Kara Dansky is a feminist, attorney, Democrat, and public speaker. She serves as the chair of the committee on law and legislation for the global human rights campaign, the WHRC, and is president of the WHRC’s U.S. chapter. She has a 21-year background in criminal law and criminal justice policy. Having worked at the mayor’s office of criminal justice in New York, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School and the Society of Council Representing Accused Persons in Seattle. She’s also the author of the new book, “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” Kara, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks.

Kara Dansky:

Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Beverly Hallberg:

There’s so much I want to get into on this topic, but I’d first like to start with why you decided to spend your days fighting for women in an area that is so controversial? Many people don’t dare to touch it. What made you brave enough to not just deal with this issue but put yourself out there in the spotlight?

Kara Dansky:

Thanks for the question. It doesn’t really feel like bravery to me to just stand up and say that women are female and men are male. But the answer to the question is that in 2014, I was talking with a friend and I’ll say, I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist. And as you mentioned in my bio, my career trajectory took a little bit of a different turn. I went into criminal justice, but I still considered myself a feminist. And in 2014, a very good friend of mine brought my attention to the danger of the so-called transgender agenda or gender identity, as we like to say, and I started paying attention and I looked into it and in 2015, I joined the organization Women’s Liberation Front. And in 2016, I joined the board of that organization. That year, Women’s Liberation Front or WLF sued the Obama Administration over a policy memo that the administration had put out. And I’ve been doing the work ever since.

Beverly Hallberg:

Now you talk a lot about how the redefining of the words sex and gender makes victims of women and girls. First of all, explain to us why the words matter so much and what the implications have been?

Kara Dansky:

So the words are absolutely critical. And so I will never use the word transgender without putting it in quotes. And I make the case in my book or at least I try to make the case. I don’t know how well I do it but I make the case that the word transgender was simply invented. And the reason it was invented is that it comes from so-called queer theory, which is an academic theory that essentially obscures the meanings of words that point to material reality. But if the queer theorists had tried to sell Americans on the idea that sex isn’t real, it wouldn’t have worked. Americans know how babies are made. We all know the basic facts of biology. And so they had to make up a word. And the word that they made up is transgender.

Feminist Janice Raymond wrote a book in 1979 called “The Transsexual Empire,” which predicted all of this. And she re-produced it in 1994 with an introduction that talks about the invention of the word transgender and how it’s going to harm women and girls in particular, though we need to be clear, it harms everybody. The abolition of sex harms everybody. We can talk a little bit about that. But I just refuse to use the language of the opposition. And I think it’s really important that feminists and conservatives who are in this battle for material reality and of the right to privacy and safety of women and girls to not use the language of the opposition ever, I think that’s absolutely critical.

Beverly Hallberg:

And so let’s talk about what these words, where they have seeped into. So we may say, it’s fine if people want to use these words on their own, but we are talking about word choice. You were mentioning the Obama administration that has seeped into executive orders, how government agencies work, government departments, that is in pieces of legislation, especially under the Biden administration. Is there a concerted effort to try to change the meaning of words within legislation and bills that come to Capitol Hill?

Kara Dansky:

Literally yes. So, a little bit of history on this, in 2004, the United Kingdom enacted a new law called the Gender Recognition Act. And what that did was provide a legal mechanism for people who underwent a certain amount of hormone change and surgical change to get what in the UK is called a gender recognition certificate. Fast forward to today and we have the United States Congress inserting new language to literally redefine the word sex. So for example, in the Violence Against Women Act, I think it was 2013, Congress redefined the word sex to include the words “gender identity,” which are essentially just made-up words that have no coherent definition. They did it again this year in the Infrastructure Bill and they are seeking to do it in the so-called Equality Act, which would literally redefine the word sex in civil rights law to include things like gender identity, even though the definition of gender identity in the Equality Act is completely vague and incomprehensible.

So that’s what’s happening in Congress. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration for the first six months or so of this year, literally ordered federal agencies to redefine sex to include gender identity throughout federal administrative law. Those orders are the subject of a lawsuit that was filed by 20 states and in which my organization, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign’s U.S. chapter, has filed a brief arguing that in fact, the complete redefinition of the word sex to include gender identity violates numerous provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law and several provisions of state law.

Beverly Hallberg:

And what has really surprised me when I think about the women’s movement, feminism, often people think about the decades-long work to try to get women thought of as equal in the workplace. There are a lot of things that we could think of. I even know today, myself as a small business owner, I’m thankful for the strides that women made before me, so that I could be where I am today. And then when we see where it’s gone, it’s now to the point where people are saying somebody who is a biological man, that if he identifies as a woman, then he can break the glass ceiling for women. It’s really just shocking whether it’s in sports or in careers, how they lift up biological men as women and say that this is shattering the glass ceiling. I find that offensive, do most women find that offensive?

Kara Dansky:

I think so, certainly, feminists do. Literally, yesterday was the anniversary of a massacre of 14 women at a school in Montreal and a Canadian news program decided to acknowledge the anniversary of that massacre. And we need to be clear a man murdered 15 young women because they were women, several decades ago. And yesterday was the anniversary and a Canadian broadcasting corporation decided to acknowledge that anniversary by having a man who identifies as a woman speak on their behalf. And it’s just grotesque.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, you talk about the abolition of sex, it’s the name of your book. When we hear people want to use the terminology “gender identity,” it’s usually under the auspices that they’re trying to prevent discrimination, that we don’t want to discriminate, we want everybody to feel welcome and we want to be inclusive. Tell us how dangerous it is to abolish sex.

Kara Dansky:

Well, part of the problem here is that really across the political aisle, it seems to have been generally accepted that the phrase “transgender people” or “transgender athletes” or “transgender students,” that all of these words describe a coherent category of people for whom sex is irrelevant. That’s not true. And if we’re going to win the battle to fight for the right to privacy and safety of women and girls, we have to be very clear about that. So one implication that I think is not well understood is the phenomenon that we are literally seeing playing out today in prisons in the United States is that convicted rapists and murderers who are men are being housed in women’s prisons. A lot of people know that this is happening in California thanks to the Women’s Liberation Front for filing a lawsuit, challenging the law that allows that, mandates that. It’s also happening in Washington State but it’s also happening across the country.

And most Americans are kept in the dark about this because the media will not talk about it. So again, thank you for allowing me to talk about it here. Something else that I think most Americans just don’t understand because they don’t have a way to know this, is that the FBI tracks crime statistics by sex. And to the best of my knowledge the latest data available is from 2020, and it tracks crime according to male and female. And of course, as we all know, the overwhelming majority of violent and sex crime is committed by men against women. If we’re not allowed to acknowledge the reality of biological sex, we can’t talk honestly about the phenomenon of male violence against women. And that’s really, really dangerous.

Beverly Hallberg:

What do you say then — let’s take a specific example or a hypothetical example about a young biological boy, let’s say 13, 14 years old, feels that he is a woman, is bullied in the men’s locker room and wants to be able to use the females’ locker room because that is how he identifies. What do you do with these individual cases where somebody does feel bullied? Because these are the stories we often hear as the reason we need to change. Even the way locker rooms and schools deal with their policies.

Kara Dansky:

This is not a girls’ problem. If boys are bullying stereotypically effeminate men, young men, if boys are bullying gay boys, if boys are bullying other boys who like to wear stereotypically feminine clothing, then that’s a problem for the boys to solve. They need to stop doing that. They need to stop bullying young homosexual boys. They need to stop bullying boys who adopt stereotypically feminine characteristics and just accept these boys for who they are. But the solution is not to subject girls to having boys in intimate spaces. We know, for example, in Loudoun County, Virginia, the school district adopted a policy of allowing young boys into girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms.

And a young girl was sexually assaulted in a bathroom in a high school in Loudoun County, Virginia. And there seems to have been a concerted effort on the part of the school district to cover that up in order to justify its policy of allowing boys, in this particular instance, the boy wore a skirt, and he was allowed access to the girls’ bathroom on that basis. And he has been convicted of sexually assaulting a girl. The answer is not to allow these young men into girls’ spaces. The answer is to persuade boys to stop bullying them.

Beverly Hallberg:

And when it comes to young people and we think about education, it’s also what they’re being taught, the curriculum, trying to encourage teachers. There have been reports of teachers or counselors at schools trying to encourage young people to embrace a gender identity that is different from their biological sex. And also leaving parents out. The parental rights are not part of even having this discussion with their children. There’s also the cult, as we have seen. Abigail Shrier has written about this, about young girls wanting to or identifying as the opposite sex. So there seems to be almost a way for young girls to become popular if they talk about themselves as being a boy versus their biological sex. So do you see that there is an agenda at schools within the schooling system, education system, to try to encourage young people to identify as something else?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely. And it’s deliberate. And we know this because there’s documentation of the deliberate nature of this industry, as I describe in the book, to indoctrinate children, to confuse them into thinking that there’s some kind of identity that is unrelated to their actual sex. We need to understand that there is a tremendous amount of money behind this movement to persuade young people to disassociate from their bodies. This is all documented for example, in Jennifer Bilek’s blog, the 11th Hour Blog, she tracks the industry. She has done an incredible job of investigative journalism in understanding the power and the money behind this movement.

I want to get to your question about Abigail Shrier’s book but first I just want to make very clear, as you alluded to earlier, there seems to be an assumption that the movement to abolish sex is a bottom-up, grassroots movement to secure civil rights for a defined category of people. That is not what’s going on here. This is a very top down, top heavy, heavily funded industry that is pushing this into our schools, into our boardrooms, into our living rooms. It is capturing almost all aspects of American society. It’s extreme-

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah, it’s damaging young people in the process. I just wanted to ask you this question about the fallout of this, there is a woman, 23 years old, who’s been very brave in talking about her story of taking hormone treatments, testosterone in her teens. It was encouraged by people in her school. And she’s now talking about the harms of that. Are we hearing more stories from young women talking about what the harms have been, whether it has been through different pills, medicines they took, or even those who did go as far as to have surgery?

Kara Dansky:

Just curious, are we talking about Keira Bell?

Beverly Hallberg:

We are not. It’s someone else, I’m trying to remember her name offhand, but she started to become outspoken on this.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, we are definitely hearing more and more. To its credit, I want to give 60 Minutes credit for having a segment that did cover some stories of young people who did go through hormonal and surgical procedures and came to regret it. We’re hearing more and more stories about this. I have personally spoken with a young woman who contacted me for help because she was having trouble at her place of employment. And she had thought she was a boy. She had a double mastectomy and she regretted it. And we need to talk about how heartbreaking this is, especially for girls, and all credit to Abigail Shrier for writing about the phenomenon. It’s very difficult in many ways to be a teenage girl, to start developing, to feel the physical discomfort that comes with that, to feel the discomfort of all of a sudden men starting to pay more attention to our bodies.

It can be a very difficult adjustment and it’s especially hard now because it was hard when I was growing up but today with the total onslaught of pornography, we’re seeing boys watching pornography at younger and younger ages. Of course, it’s hard to be a girl. Of course it’s easier in many ways to be a boy. And it’s understandable why some young women would want to find their way out of being hypersexualized in a society that hypersexualizes young women. But we have to also understand that all of these children, girls and boys both, are receiving hormones that are highly likely to result in permanent sterilization and potential lethality. These are very dangerous drugs that children are being permitted to take and young people, there’s a reason that we don’t allow young people to buy cigarettes or alcohol or vote or drive.

And even though in our society, reasonable people can disagree about what age it’s appropriate to allow children to buy cigarettes or drive, we can have those policy conversations, but if we’re going to limit the choices that young people can make, why on earth would we allow children to make the decision to permanently sterilize themselves? It’s horrible. And yes, the answer to your question is more and more young people are coming to regret their decision. They are also coming to understand, the vast majority of them understand, that what they were dealing with was sexuality and that they were same-sex attracted. And they were struggling with realizing that they were same-sex attracted. And so they made decisions to identify out of their actual sex.

Beverly Hallberg:

I think so much as we start to uncover more and more, as you were saying, the money, the power behind this, the agenda behind this, we find that so much about this is to cover up what they’re really trying to do. So the less that people know, the better it is for them to be able to move forward with their agenda. One area where I think it’s been hard for the transgender movement to gain traction, or at least there has been pushback, has been in the area of women’s sports. For example, there is a recent story that was widely circulated this past week, where a biological boy who identifies as female, name is Lia Thomas, 22-year-old transgender swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania, has been shattering women’s records, no surprise, because Lia is a biological man. Do you find in the area of women’s sports that this is where people can really look at what the agenda is and say, “Hey, this isn’t fair. This is absolutely not fair.” Do you find traction in this area for those who view this as we do?

Kara Dansky:

Yes, and shoutout to my friend Beth Stelzer at an organization that she founded called Save Women’s Sports. She’s done a tremendous amount of work in helping lawmakers, especially at the state level, but also at the federal level, succeed in getting legislation passed to protect women’s sports for women. I just want to pause for a second and ask what you mean in your question, you used the phrase, “transgender swimmer,” that’s the kind of language I’m trying to get away from.

Beverly Hallberg:

No, teach me, teach all of us. That’s helpful.

Kara Dansky:

Yeah, I really… So, as you said in the introduction, I’m a feminist, I’m a lifelong Democrat. And I have been spending a lot of time, or the past couple years, working across the political aisle because I think this is very important. I think that this should not be a partisan issue and the media has done a tremendous job of framing it as a partisan issue. And I’m very frustrated with most media outlets for doing that. But one of my frustrations is that the Republicans, that I am very happy to work with, often use phrases like transgender athletes or transgender swimmer or transgender students. That’s hurting us. It’s hurting the movement to push back against gender identity, using their language makes it much more difficult for us to gain ground in the movement to push back against the enshrinement of gender identity in the law. So I appreciate you letting me say that.

Beverly Hallberg:

Yeah. So out of curiosity then, is the correct thing that you would always encourage people to say in that specific example would be biological boy, just say a boy?

Kara Dansky:

Boy. Yeah.

Beverly Hallberg:

That makes sense. That makes sense. And so I’m glad you brought up the media. I wanted to ask you just a little bit about what it has been like for you as a Democrat, talking about these issues. I read your piece that you had published in the Federalist, it was entitled “Democrats Like Me are Furious with Our Party for Pushing Gender Insanity.” So first of all, can I ask you why as a Democrat, you chose to submit your piece to a conservative outlet, would more left-leaning outlets not publish your opinion?

Kara Dansky:

Absolutely not. So I mentioned the 2016 lawsuit that WLF filed against the Obama Administration, Tucker Carlson invited WLF to appear on his show. And I was happy to do it. That happened in early 2017. I’ve been on the show several times since. I was very grateful to the Federalist for publishing that piece. I was very grateful to the New York Post recently for publishing another piece. Feminists like me, who publish in conservative media, get a lot of pushback for it. We get in trouble with a lot of radical feminists who don’t think we ought to be doing that, but we have a story to tell.

And we’re grateful to the outlets such as yourself, who are willing to give us a platform to tell our story. What a lot of Republicans, I think, do not know because there’s no way for you to know this, is there are countless Democrats, rank and file Democrats all over the country who are furious at our party leadership for what they’re doing. You have a lot of allies in a lot of rank-and-file Democratic communities, but the reason you don’t know that is because the media won’t say it.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question I have for you before, well, actually our final, final question will be about your book but the final question I have for you before we get to that, is something that we often hear. And this goes back to the language and the words that we use, we often hear people using different pronouns than the biological sex of a person. So if you, let’s take that athlete, the male athlete competing against women, do you ever use the pronoun “she” for a biological boy or even if one, let’s say, you could take Caitlyn Jenner, do you refer to Caitlyn Jenner as a he or a she?

Kara Dansky:

“He,” of course, because he is. But we should say there are efforts around the world to actually criminalize the use of accurate sex pronouns. And it’ll be very interesting to see whether our first amendment protects us in a way, for example, that Canadian law does not protect Canadians. There’s an effort right now to make the use of accurate sex pronouns a hate crime. And it’s also happening in the UK. It’s happening in Scotland. It’s happening in a lot of places. It may not happen here. Our first amendment may protect us from that but we’ll see. The district attorney of San Francisco has recently issued an order, all of the staff in his office are now required to use so-called preferred pronouns in court, which could potentially mean that a rape victim might be required to refer to a male alleged rapist as “she” on the witness stand, which I would argue would constitute perjury.

But we haven’t seen any of this play out quite yet in the legal system, but it’ll be very interesting to watch. There is one case in the Sixth Circuit coming out of Ohio, where a professor refused to use so-called preferred pronouns. He was disciplined by the public university, his employer, but he was vindicated in court at the appellate level. So that’s a good sign that our first amendment might protect us in a way that, for example, Canadians aren’t protected.

Beverly Hallberg:

Final question for you. You tell us about your book. I know we’ve talked about it here but who is the book for? What can people expect if they read it?

Kara Dansky:

So the book is called “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” And I wrote it really for average rank and file, across-the-political-aisle Americans who either might be very confused about what is going on here. And it’s completely legitimate to be confused about what is going on, on topics of sex and gender because there’s a deliberate effort to confuse us or Americans who see what’s going on and want to speak out about it but may not quite feel comfortable doing so for the reasons you laid out in your introduction. These topics can be hard to talk about but it’s not impossible. And I really want Americans to have the tools to talk with one another. If you’re a Republican talk with other Republicans, embolden other Republicans to speak out about this using accurate language. If you’re a Democrat and you agree with me but you’re scared to speak out, I understand that, that’s very understandable but we’ve got to do it if we’re going to make headway here.

Beverly Hallberg:

Well, we thank you for your bravery. Kara Dansky, author of “The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls.” We so appreciate you joining us on She Thinks today.

Kara Dansky:

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

*****

This interview was conducted on December 10, 2021, and the transcript was reproduced with permission from  The Independent Women’s Forum.

Dobbs V. Jackson: An Easy Opinion thumbnail

Dobbs V. Jackson: An Easy Opinion

By George Liebmann

The rejection of a “compelling state interest” test will remove abortion from national politics.

A simple Baltimore lawyer here tenders a short opinion to dispose of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the abortion case from Mississippi in oral arguments before the Supreme Court today.

This case presents the question: “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” It involves a limitation of abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Similar limitations are found rational in many nations including France and Germany with their 12-week cutoff point. In Roe v. Wade, we said that states could limit second-trimester abortions if there was a rational basis to do so, but in the companion case of Doe v. Bolton, decided on the same day, we effectively applied a “compelling state interest” test.

We can dispose of this case by overruling Doe v. Bolton and Casey, but the avoidance of further controversy and confusion makes it desirable that we dispose of Roe also, thus withdrawing the Court from an area of public policy that we should not have entered in the first place and allowing further discussion to be divorced from claims of absolute right not inducing tolerance.

Five tests are conventionally used to justify overrulings: quality of reasoning (ever-shifting in this case); workability (belied by the constant flow of litigation over the “undue burden” test); inconsistency with prior law (patent in light of state legislation as of 1973); reliance (scarcely present, despite Casey, in view of Casey’s concession that “reproductive planning could take almost immediate account of any sudden restoration of state authority to ban abortions,” a conclusion reinforced by the two-thirds drop in births to teenagers following the withdrawal of 18 years of guaranteed AFDC payments by the Welfare Reform Act of 1996); and finally, and most importantly, as stated in Casey, “whether Roe’s premises of fact have so far changed to render its central holding irrelevant or unjustifiable” and whether an overruling decision would provide “a response to facts that the country would understand but which the court of an earlier day as its own declarations disclosed had not been able to perceive.”

These standards for overruling are now more than fully met. The Roe court did not even consider the potential effect of abortion-on-demand on sexual mores, unwanted pregnancies, and births out of wedlock. It recognized that anti-abortion statute might be the “product of a Victorian social concern to discourage illicit sexual conduct” but declared “Texas does not advance this justification in the present cases and it appears that no court or commentator has taken the argument seriously. The appellants and amici contend moreover that this is not a proper state purpose at all.” So much for the mostly religious lawgivers memorialized in the frieze at the top of the Supreme Court building and Justice Holmes’ observation that “the law is the external deposit of our moral life.”

It is nonetheless the duty of the Court to consider not only the state’s actual arguments but those it might have made, lest the inadequacies of a single lawyer deform the Constitution. As stated in Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S.603 (1960): “we cannot with confidence reject all those alternatives which imaginativeness might bring to mind save that one which might require invalidation of the statute.”

Instead, the Roe court, excluding the possible effect of its decision on promiscuous sexual behavior and increased pregnancies and births out of wedlock, made opposite assumptions. It alluded to “concerns about population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones.” The Second Circuit, invalidating a Connecticut statute, postulated that “population growth must be restricted not enhanced and thus the state interest in a pro-natalist statute such as this is limited,” citing the Rockefeller Commission report on “Population Growth and the American Future” (1971).

Subsequent research by the present secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, and her Nobel-prize-winning economist husband, George Akerlof, which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Brookings Review in 1996, made clear that Roe had dynamic effects on American society, legitimating free love and the hookup culture by providing what looked like an assured back-up to birth control pills.

Thus the percentage of births to unwed mothers increased from 5.7 percent in 1970, when birth control pills were already in wide use, to 29 percent in 2018. Among black Americans, whose out of wedlock births were of great concern to “birth controllers,” the percentage of births out of wedlock increased from 38 percent in 1970 to 71 percent in 2018. Similarly, the “deal with it” syndrome that abortion-on-demand produced among consorts caused the percentages of marriages to those pregnant out of wedlock (“shotgun weddings”) to fall from 43 percent in 1970 to 9 percent in 2018.

“Inability to provide for the nurture and care of the infant is a cruelty to the child and an anguish to the parent,” the well-intentioned Justice Harlan stated in concurring in Roe. But after 50 years, there is much more such cruelty and anguish.

This Court, like the president and Congress, is subject to checks and balances. The confirmation process is one of these and can be given effect after 48 years. Several decisions have been overruled after long periods, including Lochner v. New York (work hours) after 50 years; Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (minimum wage) after 14 years; Plessy v. Ferguson (segregation) after 58 years; Bowers v. Hardwick (sodomy) after 18 years; Baker v. Nelson (homosexual marriage) after 43 years; and Korematsu v. United States (racial distinctions) after 74 years.

The public will now understand what the Court did not in Casey when it, echoing Justice Wayne’s concurring opinion in Dred Scott, called “the contending sides to end their division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Dred Scott failed because the fugitive slave provisions of the Constitution and the Compromise of 1850 rendered Northern states complicit in the permissiveness of the South. Casey failed for the same reason, by imposing coastal rules on “flyover” country.

Our decision reversing the Fifth Circuit judgment is of little direct consequence. Some four percent of abortions per year are performed after the 15th week, many in states that will continue to have liberal abortion laws. But our decision will send a powerful message to young women and their consorts that abortion is no longer a sure thing and that they should choose sexual partners more carefully than at present. The rejection of a “compelling state interest” test will remove abortion from national politics as in Western Europe and will restore the American judiciary to what Aristotle and Aquinas regarded as judges’ proper function: “corrective justice” vindicating agreed settlements, not “distributive justice” changing agreed rules, which is the prerogative of the ruler in authoritarian states and the legislatures in democratic ones.

In Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726 (1963), Mr. Justice Black stated for a unanimous court: “We emphatically refuse to go back to the time when courts used the Due Process clause ‘to strike down state laws, regulatory of business and industrial conditions, because they may be unwise, improvident, or out of harmony with a particular school of thought.’” To “business and industrial” we add “social,” thus definitively repudiating Dred Scott, the first adventure in substantive due process. We justify this overruling decision not merely by the prolix five tests of the legal academy, but in the words of Fiorello La Guardia: “When we make a mistake, it’s a beaut.”

The judgment is reversed.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

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Dispelling 3 Common Myths About Abortion

By Melanie Israel

With the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case before the Supreme Court and the ongoing litigation over the Texas heartbeat law, the issue of abortion looms large in our national discourse.

Too often, pro-abortion actors make claims that are simply not true, and those claims are repeated without challenge in the media. Therefore, it’s vital that the American public be made aware of facts that challenge the pro-abortion narrative.

Here’s the truth you need to know about three core claims of abortion activists:

Myth 1: Abortions Are Safer Than Childbirth

Abortion activists claim that abortions are safer than childbirth. But that’s the exact inverse of reality—and for a number of reasons.

First, this framing of the debate denies the humanity of the unborn child from the outset. Because every fetus is a human possessing fundamental dignity, their health and safety must also be taken into consideration.

No procedure that destroys life can be considered safe. By definition, abortion is always fatal for at least one party involved; namely, the unborn child. Therefore, by definition, abortion is never “safe.”

Second, besides the fact that abortions necessarily involve the killing of unborn children, abortion is not necessarily the safer option for women.

After getting an abortion, women have approximately an 80% higher risk of experiencing mental health issues, including suicidal tendencies and substance abuse.

According to Dr. Ingrid Skop, an obstetrician-gynecologist, potentially fatal complications from abortions include “vaginal or intra-abdominal hemorrhage … infection … incomplete removal of the remains of the aborted baby, damage to the cervix, uterus, or other pelvic or abdominal organs … anesthetic reactions or overdoses, amniotic fluid, septic, or thrombotic embolisms, cardiac, or cardiovascular events.”

Such complications hardly render abortion safe for women.

Third, the assumption that abortion is the safer option for women ultimately rests on incomplete data.

The federal government as well as 22 states do not require abortion providers to report critical data on postabortion complications. This inevitably skews abortion activists’ numbers, especially when a state like California, one of the states that doesn’t require abortion providers to report data, is estimated to have over a quarter of all abortions performed in the U.S.

Likewise, according to data collected in  2019, there were no states that required doctors, coroners, or emergency rooms that don’t provide abortions to report abortion-related deaths. So, if a woman goes to an emergency room with abortion-related complications and dies, the hospital is not required to report it as an abortion-related death. That skews abortion-related mortality rates.

Therefore, abortions aren’t safe for unborn children, and they aren’t always safe for women.

Myth 2: Abortion Is a Woman’s Only Practical Option

Studies show that most abortions are chosen for reasons related to factors such as finances or personal relationships.

According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, 74% of abortions are chosen out of a fear that the baby would interfere with education or work, or that the baby would make it difficult to take care of dependents.

An overlapping 73% claimed they could not afford a child, and nearly 50% had relationship issues or did not want to become a single mother.

Even among third-trimester abortions, as reported by Dr. James Studnicki, “most late-term abortions are elective, done on healthy women with healthy fetuses.”

It’s clear from these numbers that medical emergencies do not motivate most abortions.

In contrast, the pro-life movement stresses providing the resources women need to give birth and raise their children.

Pregnancy resource centers help pregnant women and their families navigate challenges such as the pregnancy itself, financial management and needs, threats to job security, unsupportive partners and family members, and more.

According to one study, in 2019, pregnancy centers performed ultrasounds for 486,213 mothers-to-be free of charge and provided mothers and families with material resources such as diapers, baby clothes, and the like.

In total, they provided $266,764,916 worth of services, and 9 out of 10 people working at pregnancy resource centers do so on a voluntary basis.

Despite activists’ claims, abortion doesn’t solve any of those problems. By reducing “care” for women to the elimination of the unborn life, the mother is not helped.

Myth 3: Most Americans Support Abortion

The claim that most Americans support abortion is misleading when checked against data from a 2021 Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll.

Despite a slight majority (53%) of Americans identifying as “pro-choice,” 55% of pro-choice individuals are in favor of abortion restrictions.

According to the poll, 76% Americans support significant restrictions on abortion, with 70% of Americans in favor of restricting abortions after the first trimester—which would bring U.S. law in alignment with the rest of the world, including 47 out of 50 European countries.

Likewise, when asked if they support abortion based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome, 70% of participants opposed such an abortion. Additionally, 58% opposed taxpayer money going to abortions.

Ultimately, these numbers reflect a nation that wants to do more to protect unborn children and is not remotely aligned with the abortion lobby’s position of abortion on-demand, for any reason, through all nine months of pregnancy.

Sadly, that hasn’t kept Democrats from calling for the elimination of the Hyde Amendment, which would clear the way for taxpayer-funded abortions.

Conclusion

The facts indicate that abortions are not safe for unborn children and carry significant risks for the mothers who receive them.

Most abortions are not done for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. Lastly, most Americans do not support radically permissive abortion policies. In fact, most Americans support policies that further protect unborn children than what is currently permitted under Roe v. Wade, which allows for elective abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.

We are being presented with the greatest opportunity of our lifetime to turn the tide for life. We must tell the truth about abortion and not allow pro-abortion arguments to rule the day unopposed.

*****

This article was published on December 1, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

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Horrific Waukesha Deaths Preventable Result of Ill-Considered Bail Policies

By Amy Swearer

After a summer of wildly destructive civil unrest followed by the looming shadow of the high-profile trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, residents of Wisconsin suffered another blow in the form of unspeakable tragedy.

Five people were killed and more than 40 injured when a driver plowed through participants of an annual holiday parade, appearing to intentionally speed up and swerve into lines of marchers, before speeding off.

Hours later, police arrested 39-year-old Darrell Brooks as the suspected driver of the vehicle. He is charged with five counts of homicide.

Investigators are still looking into possible motives, including, according to some reports, the possibility that Brooks did not necessarily target the parade but was instead attempting to flee from a knife fight.

Whether the act was intentional or merely reckless and without regard to others, one thing is already clear—what happened in Waukesha was entirely preventable.

Darrell Brooks should have been in jail several times over. The devastation he wrought happened only because grossly reckless bail policies touted by local officials enabled the release of an unrepentantly violent man whose actions routinely placed members of the community in serious danger.

Brooks is a career criminal with a long rap sheet. His history of violence—including violence toward women—is well documented, and wide-ranging.

In 1999, Brooks pled guilty to felony battery with intent to cause bodily harm, and was sentenced to six months in jail and three years’ probation. Over the next seven years, Brooks had a series of short stints in jail for various drug and obstruction charges.

In 2006, he was convicted of felony statutory sexual seduction for impregnating a 15-year-old girl. Brooks was 24 years old at the time. He was sentenced to probation and required to register as a sex offender.

In 2010, Brooks pled no contest to felony strangulation and suffocation charges, as well as to violating the terms of his probation. He was sentenced to 11 months in jail and three more years of probation.

Brooks spent much of 2011 and 2012 in jail, serving two separate 180-day sentences for charges of drug possession and bail jumping, and a 37-day sentence for misdemeanor resisting arrest.

In 2016, Brooks was arrested and charged with failing to obey Nevada’s sex offender registration laws. He posted bail, then fled the state and never returned to court. He still has an active warrant out for his arrest in Nevada.

In July 2020, Brooks was again arrested after allegedly getting into a fist fight with his nephew over a cellphone and then firing a gun at the nephew’s car as the nephew drove away. Arresting officers found Brooks still in possession of the firearm as well as a small amount of meth. He was charged with a slew of serious felonies, including possession of a firearm as a firearm and two counts of second-degree recklessly endangering public safety with the use of a firearm.

Brooks’ bond was initially set at $10,000 but was quickly lowered to $7,500. He remained in custody until his Feb. 9 trial was postponed. His attorney then successfully argued for Brooks’ bail to be dropped even lower, and on Feb. 21, Brooks posted $500 bond and was released.

On Nov. 5, with his 2020 charges still pending, Brooks was again arrested and charged with several serious felony offenses after a woman—reportedly the mother of Brooks’ children—told police that he purposefully ran her over with a vehicle after an argument. According to reports, the vehicular assault left tire marks on the woman’s pants and injured her so severely that she was hospitalized.

Incredibly, despite two decades of violent behavior, an open felony warrant in Nevada, routine failures to abide by his probation or bond conditions, and an active case involving the violent use of a weapon, Brooks was allowed to post $1,000 cash bail. By Nov. 11, he was back in the community.

When all relevant information comes to light about possible motive or premeditation, it seems incredible that no one could have reasonably foreseen that Brooks would commit this specific type of violence and leave this amount of carnage in his wake.

Brooks’ propensity for violence and his lifetime spent disregarding the safety of others made a violent tragedy anything but unforeseeable.

It also could have been foreseen that this kind of tragedy would inevitably occur as a result of the well-intentioned but ill-thought-out and poorly executed bail reform policies that progressives are putting into effect across the country.

In fact, John Chisholm, the rogue George Soros-backed prosecutor in Milwaukee County who released Brooks when he should have sought no bail, issued a prophetic statement in 2007. He said: “Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? … You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen.” He went on to argue, though, that “does not invalidate the overall approach.”

We disagree. And now that the dire consequences of these rogue prosecutors’ policies are sparking public backlash, Chisholm has called for an investigation into Brooks’ “inappropriately low” bond.

Unfortunately, this is emblematic of the rogue prosecutor movement more generally. They take a criminal-first, victim-last, passing-the-blame approach.

And while the consequences here were undoubtedly tragic, it’s far from the only example of rogue prosecutors’ lax bond policies wreaking havoc on their communities.

In Philadelphia, for example, rogue District Attorney Larry Krasner’s policies led to the murder of Philadelphia Police Cpl. James O’Connor by an individual whom Krasner released through his lenient policies. Former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain said, “The murder was the direct result of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s pro-violent defendant policies.”

In Chicago, police have pointed to the “skyrocketing use of electronic monitoring as a key factor in the city’s shocking 50% rise in killings” last year.

And no wonder. In Kim Foxx’s Chicago, there are apparently no consequences for violating bail terms. According to the Chicago Tribune, “About 400 people are charged every year with felony escape. During [her predecessor’s] last three years in office, she dropped a total of 55 such cases, compared with 420 for Foxx.”

And then there’s San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. As two of us (Cully and Zack) have previously written, “Since taking office, Boudin has also been criticized for releasing suspects with long criminal records who have gone on—surprise, surprise—to commit other crimes.”

The events in Wisconsin were tragic. But the nightmare was a completely avoidable consequence of a criminal justice system run by Soros’ rogue prosecutors.

*****

This article was published on November 23, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

If Kavanaugh And Barrett Betray Pro-Lifers, We Must Blow Up The Conservative Legal Movement thumbnail

If Kavanaugh And Barrett Betray Pro-Lifers, We Must Blow Up The Conservative Legal Movement

By Rachel Bovard

Editors’ Note:  We share the concern of the author. One of the great failures of the Trump Administration was the reliance on executive orders, largely because he lacked clear majorities in the House and Senate and was also opposed by many Republicans. The latter may have been a product of his successful but bruising tactics during the primaries leading to his nomination. These executive orders were quickly reversed by the incoming President Biden, showing the weakness in relying on executive orders. His other failures had to do with personnel choices for many executive positions. There was an uncommon amount of turnover among cabinet positions and those that remained were often ineffective. It is in the area of judicial appointees that it was hoped for a long-lasting reversal of liberal policies. Now coming before the Supreme Court are major decisions about abortion, the Second Amendment, immigration, and the overreach of the administrative state with policies relating to the Covid crisis. The court has already shown significant cowardice on issues of election integrity and religious liberty. It is not saying too much to suggest coming Supreme Court decisions will determine whether history will judge the Trump Administration as a successful  Presidency or merely a spectacular reality show that failed to deliver a significant shift in the historical trend. The reliance on a particular organization, The Federalist Society, to vet judges, may prove to be his most consequential decision.

If we don’t have justices who are comfortable overturning outrageously unconstitutional abortion rulings, it will be proof of the conservative legal movement’s utter failure.

Less than a handful of years after their hard-won elevation to the Supreme Court, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are sending a chill down the spines of conservatives with a string of bad signals from their seats on the court.

In July, Kavanaugh and Barrett joined the court’s leftist majority in declining to hear Arlene’s Flowers v. Washington, a critical religious liberty case. They again sided with the court’s left in a similar decision to turn away a religious exemption challenge to Maine’s vaccine mandate — which Justices Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, and Clarence Thomas took pains to note was staggering in its hypocrisy.

“A State may not assume ‘the best of individuals engaged in their secular lives while assuming ‘the worst’ about the habits of religious persons,” the trio wrote.

Just this week, Barrett and Kavanaugh embraced a theory of judicial supremacy out of step with a more conservative tradition when they both appeared openly skeptical of the construction of the Texas abortion law, which bans the practice after six weeks of pregnancy.

All of this should make the guts of conservatives churn in the leadup to next month’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the biggest abortion case the court has heard in decades. I’ve written about the importance of this case before:

While abortion cases post-Roe have trickled up to the Supreme Court on rare occasions, none have presented the clear and fundamental question that Dobbs now brings: whether or not bans on pre-viability elective abortions violate the Constitution.

In ruling on this case, the Court will have the opportunity to overturn both Roe and Casey, which together form the architecture for a constitutional entitlement to abortion.

It is not an understatement to say this is the case pro-life conservatives have been waiting for. It’s why many in our movement willingly shed blood in the vicious fight for the confirmations of Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Gorsuch. The prospect of a majority conservative court was a key reason millions of Republicans turned out to vote for Donald Trump.

So the trepidation conservatives now feel about where Kavanaugh and Barrett may end up on Dobbs is both unexpected and unwelcome. There is a distinct possibility that Barrett, Kavanaugh, and possibly the George W. Bush-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts will find a way to hedge; to “both sides” their way into a narrow and distorted opinion in a case that, as Mississippi’s Attorney General Lynn Fitch has laid out, demands a clear imperative with regard to the dubious constitutional standing of Roe and Casey.

To be clear, with a 6-3 allegedly conservative court, anything less than a decision ringing with clarity on the dismissal of Roe and Casey should be viewed as a failure. Despite the goal-post-shifting going on in establishment Republican legal circles, there is no “long game” here. Although some will argue that any ruling that chips away at Casey is good enough, Roe is the case that created the constitutional entitlement. It is the architecture upon which the legal abortion structure is built. Both Roe and Casey must go.

As Notre Dame law professor Sherif Girgis argued recently, “Upholding the Mississippi law without overruling the court’s previous abortion cases would lack support in any legal source, send even more abortion cases to the court and curb the justices’ ability to overrule Roe down the road.”

We have played the long game for the last 50 years. And we have finally arrived at the decision point, with a case that demands a clear accounting of rulings that Justice Thomas has criticized as “creat[ing] the right to abortion out of whole cloth.” Here to litigate it is a Supreme Court that doesn’t again require “just one more justice,” but is finally positioned to address the question.

If the outcome of Dobbs is indeed a hedge that splits the court’s conservatives — or, to put it more bluntly, if the conservative legal movement has failed to produce Supreme Court justices who are comfortable overturning two outrageously constitutionally defective rulings on abortion — we will be left to justifiably wonder what the whole project has been for.

The Judges Are Our Politicians Now

That we are even in the position to openly speculate where Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts might end up on such a foundational conservative legal question should itself prompt reflection, not only about the expanded role the court now plays in our self-government but also about how we select our judicial masters.

The court has become an extension of our politics, and that is just as much a choice from Republicans as it has been from Democrats. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The American founders envisioned a judiciary that was largely subject to a muscular legislature, not the branch that ruled it. But this inversion is what the modern Congress has come to prefer.

The profound questions of our social order — immigration policy, questions of human dignity and the sanctity of life, of marriage, religious liberty, and civil rights — are no longer determined by the legislature, but by unelected and thus unaccountable jurists.

As a case study in congressional preference for judicial decisionmaking, view the collective shrug that resounded from Republicans in Congress when Gorsuch tossed sex and gender identity into the 1965 Civil Rights Act in 2020. Or consider the lack of comprehensive effort among congressional Republicans to challenge President Joe Biden’s sweeping and unprecedented vaccine mandate, now that the Supreme Court has repeatedly sidestepped it.

Also consider the limp non-response from congressional Republicans to the court upholding President Obama’s clear abuse of rulemaking in creating the illegal amnesty program known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Add the one pro-life vote Republican majorities allow each year in lieu of an energized campaign to persuade, expose, defund, and actively legislate on one of their key platform issues.

Republicans in the Senate, in particular, will huff about not having 60 votes as a reason none of these policies would be possible. But such a position ignores the actual work of lawmaking: using a majority to vote relentlessly on priority issues, messaging constantly toward a specific policy end, and creating a voting record unfavorable to the opposition.

The last legislative pro-life victory, the ban on partial-birth abortion in 2003, invoked nearly all of these methods. Today, it’s a rarity for the Senate, regardless of party control, to show up for work more than 2.5 days a week.

A New System of Judicial Vetting

In 2018, this largely implicit preference to outsource policy-making to the courts became explicit when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to forgo using the Senate GOP majority to try and legislate, but rather to confirm as many judges as possible.

There were pros and cons to this choice, but the clear upshot of asking judges to make every consequential determination about how the country will be ruled is that judges become, effectively, our politicians — unelected politicians with lifetime appointments, but politicians nonetheless. Yet on the right, we do not vet them as such. Not even close.

I’ve addressed the contradictory and self-defeating aspects of this position before:

…expecting judges to rule on matters of policy and politics while simultaneously refusing to vet them for their beliefs in those matters is both contradictory and unsustainable. A party cannot on one hand expect judges to issue the correct policy decrees while on the other hand studiously fail to take any steps to guarantee that outcome.

While the left has not been shy about their practice of nominating stone-cold activists, the right has always held to the norm that judges should be interpreters of the text in front of them rather than ideologues who use the bench to invent new values-driven legal theories that impose their own views on the country.

This is, of course, the prudent and correct standard of judging and of judicial interpretation, writ large. But it fails to account for the intentional shift of expectations that have taken place from the “judge-as-textualist-interpreter” to our current conception of the “judge-as-legislator.” In many ways, the right’s ideological position of applying the normative standard of restrained judicial vetting seems out of step with the current post-normative reality of how the country is actually ruled.

The left accounted for this shift long ago, and it is why they never suffer a surprise decision from their nominees. They already know exactly where their judges stand on every issue, minuscule to monumental. But since the right is now a regular and active participant in placing the burden of self-government onto the judiciary, it would seem as though we should do more to ensure that the people we place in those positions will actually uphold our interests.

For starters, this should mean that the imprimatur of the Federalist Society requires more questions, not less. We should applaud, not condemn, Republican senators who do their jobs and vigorously question the nominees of both the right and the left, and who hold exacting standards for nominees on constitutional questions. Also, the conservative movement as a whole, not just a select few, should be welcome to offer input into the selection process for nominations to key judicial positions.

If Congress is going to continue passing off the questions of self-government to the court — that is, if they are going to force judges into making choices that are inherently political — then perhaps the cleanest response is to simply put the politicians on the court.

Among Republicans in the Senate, there are three former Supreme Court clerks: Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. If another vacancy presents itself under a Republican administration, perhaps it’s time we skip the backroom Federalist Society coronation of some pre-selected circuit court judge and simply elevate a senator to the Supreme Court.

At least senators have a record of votes we can examine. Unlike Kavanaugh, Barrett, and even Gorsuch on transgender issues, there will be mercifully few surprises about where they actually stand. The conservative movement cannot afford bitter surprises, at least not when the Supreme Court has taken for itself, with the willing encouragement of the legislature, a dual role of interpreting the law as well as making it.

*****

This article was published on November 6, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

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Fossil Fuels Form The Basis Of Our Medical And Food Supply Chains

By Ronald Stein

Under Biden’s plan to rid America of fossil fuels, such a plan would eliminate the medical industry that is totally reliant on the products made from petroleum derivatives, and eliminate oil-based fertilizers to grow the crops that feed the 8 billion on planet earth. Surprisingly, Biden must be oblivious to the consequences of his plan as efforts to cease the use of oil could be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change.

Biden supports the end of fracking, oil exploration, and oil importing which cuts off the supply chain of crude oil to refineries. Without any crude oil to manufacture, the elimination of the supply chain to the 131 operating refineries in the U.S. would eliminate that manufacturing sector.

Without refineries, there will be none of the oil derivatives that are manufactured from crude oil that are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our economy and lifestyles.

Without the supply chain of crude oil, not only is the refining industry history, but the domino effects are the destructive impacts on the medical, food supply, electronics, and communications industries as they are all totally dependent on the products made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Any grade school-educated kid can understand that breezes and sunshine, can only make weather-dependent intermittent electricity.

The medical industry is reliant on the products derived from the derivatives manufactured from oil that produce all the critical medical equipment like ultrasound systems, defibrillators, exhalation valves, inhalation valves, CT systems, X-ray, medicines, masks, gloves, soap and hand sanitizers for hospitals, and protective gowns, gloves and face shields gear for doctors and nurses.

Is Biden oblivious to the fact that all those medical products begin from crude oil, or as the Wall Street Journal states – Big Oil to the Coronavirus Rescue? Vaccines need refrigeration, and refrigeration need electricity, especially in the hospital sector where redundant generation capacity for continuous uninterruptable electricity is a mandate.

While Biden attempts to lower emissions at any cost, in favor of some weather-dependent electricity from breezes and sunshine that can only survive with massive subsidies, coal imports and exports continue to increase internationally to meet the electricity generation needs of developing countries as reflected in the Merrill Lynch Global Energy Weekly report.

At least 80 percent of humanity, or more than 6 billion in this world cannot subsidize themselves out of a paper bag as they are living on less than $10 a day. To reduce emissions in the developing countries that control most emissions, the wealthy countries would need to step up and subsidize electricity generation from breezes and sunshine, to replace more than 3,000 coal fired power plants in developing countries like China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Africa, and Vietnam with billions of people seeking affordable electricity.

The oil that reduced infant mortality, extended longevity to more than 80+ and allowed the world to populate to from 1 to 8 billion in less than 200 short years, is now required to provide the food, medical, communications, and transportation infrastructures to maintain and grow that population.

A key question for President Biden before America attends the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Conference in Glasgow, Scotland in November:

How dare pro-humanity individuals and governments support the banishment of fossil fuels, when their banishment would be the greatest threat to civilization resulting in billions dying from starvation, diseases, and weather-related deaths?

Getting off fossil fuels would reverse most of the progress humanity has made over the last few centuries. The inventions of the automobile, airplane, and the use of petroleum in the early 1900’s led us into the Industrial Revolution and victories in World Wars I and II. The healthier and wealthier countries of today now have more than 6,000 products that did not exist a few hundred years ago, all manufactured from fossil fuels, the same fossil fuels that Biden wants to eliminate.

Under Biden’s plan to rid American lifestyles and economies of fossil fuels, such a plan would ground the military, space program, and Air Force 1. It would also mothball the huge energy demands of airlines, cruise ships and merchant ships, as well as eliminate the medical industry, electronics industry, and the communications industry that are totally reliant on the 6,000 products made from petroleum derivatives.

The first use of oil-based fertilizers took place in 1946, and today our food supply is dependent on hydrocarbons. The world’s population of 8 billion souls depends on oil-based fertilizers to grow the crops and feed the animals that are consumed each year. Any cessation of hydrocarbons will immediately result in the annihilation of billions of souls, returning the globe to a 1950 population count of approximately 2.5 billion souls.

How can a pro-humanity President Biden support COVID injections to save thousands of lives, and simultaneously support ridding the world of fossil fuels that would be the greatest threat to civilization resulting in billions dying from starvation, diseases, and weather-related deaths?

*****

This article was published on October 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from CFACT, Committee for A Constructive Tomorrow.

More Radical Than Roe: House Abortion Bill Would Repeal Existing Laws, Prohibit Future Pro-Life Laws

In response to pro-life policy victories like the Texas Heartbeat Act and an upcoming Supreme Court case asking the justices to provide a constitutional course correction to America’s arbitrary and unworkable abortion jurisprudence, pro-abortion legislators in Congress are advancing a deceptively named piece of legislation called the Women’s Health Protection Act. The radical, far-reaching proposal would entrench unfettered access to abortion in federal law.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her congressional allies—as well as the media —have characterized the Women’s Health Protection Act as simply “codifying Roe v. Wade.”

That’s an egregious mischaracterization that understates just how radical the proposal actually is. The Act goes far beyond the already permissive regime permitted under America’s existing abortion jurisprudence.

If enacted, the Women’s Health Protection Act would endanger essentially all state-level abortion restrictions, existing state and federal conscience protection laws, and various provisions limiting taxpayer funding for abortions. Congress should reject this radical proposal.

More Radical Than Roe

The Women’s Health Protection Act would expressly prohibit existing laws that regulate abortion and the abortion industry. The bill bans informed consent requirements, reflection periods, and provisions that give women the opportunity to view an image of their unborn child or listen to the child’s heartbeat.

The proposed federal policy would also preempt policies like the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which currently protects women and their unborn children in more than a dozen states from inhumane late-term abortions performed after 20 weeks. The scientific evidence suggests that a baby can feel excruciating pain during an abortion procedure performed after 20 weeks.

Bill Ignores Pro-Life Policy Consensus

The Women’s Health Protection Act would imperil policies like the Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer dollars from paying for elective abortion in federal programs like Medicaid. Over the past four decades, the Hyde Amendment has saved more than 2.4 million lives.

It would also jeopardize longstanding policies that protect conscience and religious freedom, ignoring America’s proud tradition of respecting individuals and entities’ right to not participate in abortion.

These pro-life policies enjoy broad support across the political spectrum. A majority of Americans oppose using taxpayer dollars to fund elective abortions, including 65% of independents and 31% of Democrats, according to a January Marist poll commissioned by the Catholic organization Knights of Columbus. Likewise, a majority of Americans support conscience rights for individuals and entities that object to abortion.

States have enacted more than 500 life-protecting policies in the last decade. Congress would do well to remember that such policies are in in place precisely because elected representatives did what their constituents asked them to do: protect unborn human life and women’s health and safety.

Congress Must Reject Pro-Abortion Extremism

Americans broadly support policies that the sweeping Women’s Health Protection Act would disallow. Rather than prohibit pro-life policies where they exist, Congress should pursue policies that protect innocent unborn human lives—including those not yet born—and society should support women who face challenging or unplanned pregnancies.

*****

This article was published on September 19, 2021, and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Refuses To Block Texas Heartbeat Law Which Virtually Bans Killing Babies

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Texas law that protects babies who have a detectable heartbeat from being aborted in the Lone Star State.

In a 5-4 decision, the highest court in the nation declined to block Texas’ newest abortion law despite protests from Planned Parenthood, other abortion activists, and even journalists.

Radical pro-abortion facilities and activists first brought an emergency petition to the Supreme Court with the hopes that the justices would at least temporarily block the law from going into effect on Sept. 1. The court passed on acting on the petition on Aug. 31, meaning the law, which gives private citizens the power to file civil suits against anyone who performs abortions after six weeks or assists a woman in obtaining an abortion, went into effect on Wednesday. Violators of the law could be forced to pay $10,000 to the plaintiff.

Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three leftist justices, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, each wrote a dissent lamenting the final decision to oppose a block on the law.

“Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court’s failure to act rewards tactics designed to avoid judicial review and inflicts significant harm on the applicants and on women seeking abortions in Texas.”

In the majority opinion, the rest of the court argued that the request for a temporary stay did not meet the qualifications necessary to get judicial relief.

“The applicants … have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden,” the opinion stated. “In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit.”

*****

This article appeared on September 2, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

Mississippi Abortion Law Gives Supreme Court Opening to Overturn Roe v. Wade

At least one case slated to be heard in the Supreme Court’s next term promises to be very controversial: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court must answer a question it has never addressed; namely, whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional. And Mississippi has just submitted its first arguments to the court on why the answer should be “no.”

At issue is Mississippi’s 2018 Gestational Age Act, which prohibits abortions after 15 weeks with exceptions for a medical emergency or a severe fetal abnormality.

The state’s argument is straightforward. Contrary to the court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, nothing in the Constitution’s text, structure, history, or tradition supports a constitutional right to abortion. As a result, Mississippi has just as much authority to legislate on abortion as other subjects, and the prohibition of abortion after 15 weeks ought to stand.

Here is how this case challenges Roe. In Roe, the Supreme Court established the “viability rule,” that a state may prohibit abortion only after a child can survive outside the womb. In 1992, Planned Parenthood v. Casey affirmed that this is Roe’s “essential holding,” adding that a state may not impose an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion.

Even liberal constitutional scholars who support abortion rights have conceded that Roe has always been on shaky constitutional ground for many reasons. Its defects include choosing viability as the critical line without any analysis or justification. Until now, however, the court has never reexamined the viability rule on its merits.

According to the brief Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed with the Supreme Court, that rule is fundamentally unworkable. While often placed at approximately 24 weeks, viability is inherently subjective and depends on many variables. Medical advances have made stories like that of preemie Micah Pickering — born at 22 weeks and thriving today — possible in ways that the justices of 1973 could not have imagined.

By replacing Roe’s three-trimester, strict-scrutiny standard with a new “undue burden” standard, Casey may have appeared to modernize Roe, when in reality, it actually created just another subjective, unworkable standard that ignores important state interests rather than accounting for them. As Fitch points out, there “is no objective way to decide whether a burden is ‘undue’” and in case after case, the court has been deeply divided “not just over what result Casey requires … but also over what Casey even means.”

In Roe, the court emphasized the “detriment” prohibiting abortion would “impose upon the pregnant woman.” Mississippi’s brief shows how this has changed. From the rise of independent and flexible work opportunities, laws preventing pregnancy discrimination, sick and family-leave time, access to child care, accessible and affordable contraception, and “safe haven” laws, modern women can avoid the detriment more than ever. Indeed, as the state reminds the court, women have reached “the highest echelons of economic and social life independent of the right bestowed on them by seven men in Roe.”

Mississippi also reminds the court how the law protects unborn children, women, and the medical profession. By nine weeks, all of a baby’s physiological functions are present. By 10 to 12 weeks, a baby has developed neural circuitry to detect and respond to pain. By 12 weeks, a baby can sense stimuli from outside the womb. A pregnant woman’s risk of death from an abortion procedure at 16 to 20 weeks’ gestation is 35 times higher than at eight weeks. For each additional week of pregnancy, the mortality risk increases by 38%.

Abortions performed after 15 weeks’ gestation are gruesome procedures that demean the medical profession charged with doing no harm. These procedures put women at risk of pelvic infection, blood clots, hemorrhage, injuries to internal organs, depression, anxiety, and other psychological problems.

The United States is out of step with 75% of other nations prohibiting most abortions after 12 weeks. While some polls show that many Americans oppose abandoning Roe v. Wade, others show that more Americans think that abortion should be significantly restricted after the first trimester, suggesting that Americans misunderstand the breadth of the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.

Additionally, most Americans say that abortion should not be permitted in certain circumstances, such as sex selection or a Down syndrome diagnosis. In other words, most Americans don’t support the radically permissive abortion scheme that Roe and its progeny permit.

The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence has distorted our Constitution, done nothing to settle the abortion debate in our country, and poisoned our laws, courts, and culture. The courts have articulated vague and unworkable standards that do not account for advances in science, public sentiment, and the status and independence of women.

Mississippi’s arguments are compelling. The Supreme Court should avail itself of this opportunity to make a long-overdue course correction on abortion.

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This article was published on August 10, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Daily Signal.

Medical Professionals And School Districts Are Denying Girls Access To Mental Health Services

Social media floods our culture with tales of celebrities’ personal struggles. “I suffer from binge-eating disorder, a disease in which I’m not only addicted to food, but I eat it in large quantities,” transgender activist Jazz Jennings shared in June. Singer Demi Lovato, who recently announced a non-binary identity, continues to battle a years-long struggle with bulimia. She wrote about her obsessive thoughts in May, “I still struggle. Daily. There are periods of time where I forget about my food struggles and other times it’s all I think about. Still.”

Unfortunately, Jazz and Demi aren’t alone. The American Academy of Pediatrics reports that the isolation, heightened anxiety and school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic led to an increase in eating disorders among adolescents. Doctors acknowledge that social media, absence of activities, and loneliness exacerbated the growing number of disorders. Stephenie B. Wallace, M.D., observed, “we’re seeing a lot of young people who are facing all kinds of mental health disorders that are on the rise, as our young people have been in the COVID-19 pandemic for over a year, and eating disorders are included.”

Eating disorders and body dysmorphia are fueled by an obsessive preoccupation with body image and an overwhelming feeling of a lack of control. Similarly, the growing number of adolescents, predominantly girls, captivated by gender dysphoria experience anxiety and obsessive thoughts about their bodies. Their body image preoccupation manifests as obsessive ruminations about their gender.

A 2020 study, Gender Dysphoria, Eating Disorders and Body Image: An Overview, found on the National Institute for Health’s (NIH) National Library of Medicine, concluded that, “gender dysphoria and eating disorders are characterized by a serious discomfort to the body and the body suffers in both conditions.” The research found that, “rates of pathological eating behaviors and symptoms related to a disordered diet are high in patients with gender dysphoria.” The NIH website includes numerous additional studies documenting the link between gender dysphoria, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating.

During the eating disorder recovery process, parents are empowered by medical and mental health professionals to take control of their child’s eating routines. To help the child recover, parents are instructed to oversee how much the child eats and when. School counselors support this parental oversight by having the children, predominantly girls, eat lunch in the counseling office. The counselor emails the parent a daily food consumption report.

And yet, parents with daughters who have historically struggled with anxiety, body image, obsessive thoughts, and eating disorders are being told that any expression of gender dysphoria, commonly known as a transgender identity, must be affirmed and validated. Rather than partner with parents, doctors, mental health professionals, and public school staff ignore the child’s mental health anguish, and focus only on validating their gender confusion.

A growing number of detransitioners—people who have stopped affirming a transgender identity—are sharing how desperately they wish they had received help for their mental health issues. Helena Kerschner, who has detransitioned, explains:

“There’s a lot of comorbid mental health issues. There’s a lot of depression, anxiety, self-harm, OCD, eating disorders. I think that we should treat these young people the same way we would treat any other young person who’s struggling with mental health issues. We should be caring and loving to them. And we should get them help, and we [should] pay attention to the root causes of why they’re feeling the way that they’re feeling.”

In stark contrast to the partnership formed during an eating disorder, Virginia’s state-recommended transgender policies do not require school staff to notify a parent when a child requests affirmation of their gender identity. In situations “when their families are not affirming,” schools are encouraged to report concerns to Child Protective Services. By keeping the child’s gender dysphoria from parents and focusing on gender affirmation, rather than the mental health issues that may be fueling their feelings, schools are blocking the child’s access to vital mental health services.

An alarming number of adolescents, especially girls, are emerging from the pandemic unhappy and unhealthy, with mental health issues that could quickly metastasize into dangerous eating disorders and obsessive gender dysphoria. With activities still restricted due to COVID concerns, girls are not getting the exercise, skill acquisition, and social interaction vital for healthy development. Even before the pandemic, their rates of depression and anxiety had spiked due to social media and the isolating impact of a life spent predominantly on screens.

These vulnerable girls deserve society’s full attention, and the recognition that the mental health issues related to their eating disorders and gender dysphoria must be diagnosed and treated. Doctors, mental health providers, and schools must partner with parents to help these vulnerable girls get stronger and overcome the deceit of their obsessive thoughts—not make them a permanent fixture in their lives.

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This article was published on July 20, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from Independent Women’s Forum.

Senate Candidate Blasts ‘Childless Left’ Who Have ‘No Physical Commitment To The Future Of This Country’

J.D. Vance, a U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio, called out the “childless left” whom he said have “no physical commitment to the future of this country” in a fiery speech given to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s conference on the Future of American Political Economy.

Senate candidate, former Marine, and author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance specifically named Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (three of whom are failed presidential candidates), citing them as the childless future leaders of the Democrat Party. “Why is this just a normal fact of … life, for the leaders of our country to be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring?”

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” Vance noted. “Let’s do this instead. Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.” He continued, asking, “Doesn’t this mean that nonparents don’t have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions?” He answered with a simple “yes” after saying “the Atlantic and the Washington Post and all the usual suspects” would criticize him.

“We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed,” the candidate said, highlighting the severity of America’s ongoing fertility crisis and calling it a “civilizational crisis.”

Vance spoke fondly of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s pro-natal policies, explaining that “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids.”

“Why can’t we do that here?” Vance asked. “Why can’t we actually promote family formation?”

Vance also articulated his vision of the American Dream, saying most Americans simply want to be able to “support a middle-class family on a single wage” if they “work hard and play by the rules.” He contrasted this vision with the version of the American Dream promoted by establishment Republicans that consists of “private jets” and “fancy businesses.”

While Vance’s rhetoric and policy prescriptions are emblematic of the right following Donald Trump’s presidency, some have expressed concern that this groundswell of grassroots, populist energy will be hijacked by entrenched establishment interests.

When asked, “How do we make sure that the populist movement that is emerging right now doesn’t get co-opted by the donor class?” Vance told The Federalist we must “only elect people who have at least some ability to raise money from the non-donor class,” adding that “we actually live in an exciting moment where you can go on Fox News and raise a ton of money from middle-class people.”

“We don’t even need to elect 50 good senators,” Vance said. “If we elect 10 good senators, it will totally transform our movement.”

*****

This article was published on July 24, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The Federalist.

The Boy Scouts: A Case Study in Compromise

After 100 years of teaching future presidents, explorers, and civil rights leaders to follow their moral compass, it’s been sobering to watch the Boy Scouts lose their own bearings. And yet, the unhappy ending for one of America’s proudest traditions was easy to predict once the organization started chasing the approval of critics it could never win. Now, eight years into this experiment in moral compromise, the country is watching one of the saddest “I-told-you-so” moments of a generation. Disgraced, bankrupt, unpopular, and on the edge of extinction, the Scouts’ leadership is showing the world where cowardly conformity leads — and it isn’t where the culture promised.

For those who knew the Scouts in their heyday, the demise has been quick and painful. Since 2013, when the organization waved its first white flag on sexual orientation, the group that counted Martin Luther King, Jr., Buzz Aldrin, and George W. Bush as members has become barely recognizable. Ravaged by sexual abuse lawsuits and bleeding members, the road of moral surrender has not been kind to the 1910 institution. After years of successfully fighting to live by its moral code, BSA leaders gave into the lie that compromise would be their salvation. Nearly a decade later, the sad truth is: there’s almost nothing left to save.

“It’s a shell of what it once was,” Regent University professor Rob Schwarzwalder said mournfully. “At its peak, scouting in the United States had more than seven million members. Today, it’s about a tenth of that.” It’s a dramatic decline, the former FRC senior vice president admitted on “Washington Watch,” but a predictable one. Once the scouts walked away from 100 years of values, it was only a matter of time until the capitulation caught up with them. “They no longer are even able to define what they mean by things like honor and morality,” Rob pointed out. Once headquarters opened the tent flap to LGBT members and scout leaders, their fate was sealed. Now, after affirming everything from transgenderism to girl members, they’re having trouble even defining what a man is — let alone what character and honor are. “Scouting has pretty much been reduced to, ‘Let’s have fun outdoors, and let’s all embrace everybody’s philosophies,'” Rob lamented. “It’s moral incoherence.”

Gone is the Judeo-Christian ethic that guided scouts back in Teddy Roosevelt’s day. Now, it’s moral free-for-all that’s been reduced to: believe whatever you want — just be nice to people. Back when the BSA made their first concessions, the organization’s leaders promised to stay true to their mission. But, as Rob pointed out, every scout pledges, “‘On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to my country.’ What kind of honor is there in an organization that for decades has refused to address pedophilia and sexual abuse in its ranks? And what kind of honor is left when you have compromised your basic mission of defining what good manhood is, what leadership is, does character matter? These are things that have been abandoned.”

When the pressure started coming for the scouts to walk away from their biblical roots, the organization lost the courage it spent a century teaching. If they’d have abided by their own oath, they would have told the bullies in corporations and on the Left, “We’re going to stand for what’s right. And if we lose, we’ll go down fighting because we’re men of principle. And principles don’t change”…..

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Continue reading this article, published July 12, 2021 at FRC, Family Research Council

Modern-Day Martyr: Meet The Self-Made Billionaire Who Is Sacrificing It All For God

In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Jimmy Lai’s is not.

 

In Hong Kong right now, Jimmy Lai is sacrificing all — his fortune and possibly his life — for his God, his fellow man, and for freedom.

Lai is a billionaire, although he wasn’t always one. Born two years before the Communists defeated the nationalists in China’s civil war, his father fled and his mother was sent to a labor camp when he was a young child. Carrying bags for train passengers and getting by as a street vendor, he first tasted freedom when a man from British Hong Kong gave him a bar of chocolate.

Lai is a British citizen, although he wasn’t always one. Having seen a glimpse of prosperity and freedom, he chased it to the then-free British island colony, stowing away aboard a ship when he was just 12 years old and working on the floor of a clothing factory.

Lai is a Catholic, although he wasn’t always one. He met the faith through his wife, a pious woman he accompanied to church, where he heard the homilies of Cardinal Joseph Zen and in 1997 was baptized into the church by the same great man.

Today Lai is in a prison cell in Hong Kong, and the Communist dictatorship has once again seized one of his life’s works, shutting down his newspaper. But of all that has changed since he was a young boy, persecution by the communists has remained a constant. If you stand by your faith, in China there’s no way around it. “I have a soul,” he said in early 2019, and so the truth lives in him.

“No one can say we didn’t fight… Prison life is the pinnacle of my life. I am completely at peace.”

Lai’s path to success in Hong Kong began on the floor of a garment factory. He rose quickly, eventually joining management. He saved his money, invested in the stock market, and used the profits to buy a factory and start making clothing for middle-class consumers.

After the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square massacre, where peaceful pro-democracy protesters were trapped, shrouded in darkness, and run over and gunned down by tanks, Lai sacrificed his stake in his mainland business by printing and selling pro-democracy shirts and starting a tabloid magazine that covered scandal and corruption in the party.

Undeterred by his loss, and still a very wealthy man, Lai channeled his time and fortune toward fighting their evil, enduring arrest, persecution, fire bombings, car attacks, and intimidation for it. Last week he was arrested again, and his and his company’s finances seized under the auspices of China’s new “national security law.”

Stories of his self-made riches and pro-democracy bravery dot corporate media, but unless you dig into the columns of those who’d met him, or read Christian news sources, you might miss what actually drives and fortifies him in the face of a vast and relentless enemy. You’d miss why a serial entrepreneur who has spent his life building and creating is willing to give it all, and you’d miss the truth behind why.

“The Communists,” he told Economic Strategy Institute President Clyde Berkowitz, “think they can buy and or intimidate everyone off, create their own reality, and write their own history. Effectively, they assume the role of God. They are kind of a religion or an anti-religion.”

‘They have initiation into the party as a kind of baptism. They have self-criticism as a kind of confession of sins, re-education as a kind of penance, and elevation to hero of the party as a kind of sainthood. And, of course, at least Mao [Zedong] has a kind of everlasting life as a photo smiling down on Tiananmen Square and as an embalmed corpse in a casket in the square.’

‘But the party and its members do not have souls. In fact, they are dead men walking, because the truth is not in them.’

“Life,” he told the Catholic Napa Institute in an October interview, “is more than just bread; life has a greater meaning.”

He’s right, and a lot of Christians understand this on its face, but what makes Lai different from a lot of us is while it’s easy to nod and to agree, it’s entirely another to act. We read Christ’s command to sell all of our possessions and follow him, and a lot of us give of our time and our money, some very generously, but how many give it all?

We know that the martyrs and saints suffered and for their courage on earth are saved. We might hope and pray to have their courage if ever put to the test, but until we are we never truly know if we will — so many don’t. We know that suffering has a purpose, that it sharpens and tests our characters, and that it should be offered up to God, but have you ever tried? It can be done, but it is very, very difficult to lift up your heart while your body and mind drag you back down to the temporal things torturing them.

“Here is my body, take it!” the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen preached on Good Friday, 1979. “Here is my soul, my will, my energy, my strength, my poverty, my wealth — all that I have. It is yours, take it! Consecrate it! Offer it! Offer it to the Heavenly Father with yourself, in order that he, looking down on this great sacrifice, may see only you, his beloved Son, in whom he is well pleased. Transmute the poor bread of my life into your life; thrill the wine of my wasted life into your divine Spirit; unite my broken heart with your Heart; change my cross into a crucifix.”

“If you believe in the Lord,” Lai told the Napa Institute, “if you believe that all suffering has a reason, and the Lord is suffering with me, it will definitely define the person I am becoming so I am at peace with it.”

“I am what I am. I am what I believe. I cannot change it. And if I can’t change it, I have to accept my fate with praise.”

But how many actually do? How many American leaders, how many corporate businessmen, do just that? How many executives at Disney and Nike, the NBA and Blizzard Entertainment, in Apple and Hollywood do just that? Maybe no other alive.

Instead, how many of them bow before a thieving, lying, murderous godless slave state in exchange for access to growing markets? How many colleges and universities bow to that state’s every wish and every spy in exchange for paying full tuition into their already bloated coffers? How much do they make? “What is and should be,” Prestowitz asks, “the price of these souls?”

In Western universities and board rooms, souls are cheap. But Lai’s is not. “What separates Jimmy Lai,” a friend in corporate consulting wrote me, “from many of this era’s modern-day princes is that he deeply cares about something beyond his own money, power and status.”

“This is just living my life,” he told the BBC this spring, sitting in his mansion in northern Hong Kong. “But if I’m in jail I’m living my life meaningfully.”

“But you must fear some things,” reporter Danny Vincent asked. “For your family, for Hong Kong, for your loved ones.”

“Yes,” he replied, shuddering, his lip quivering and tears suddenly in his eyes. “You’re right. I do have fear.”

As with courage, sacrifice, and pain, it’s easy to say we have what it will take. Going to church on Sunday or giving what amounts to a rounding error to some social justice cause is fine, but is it enough? Is it remotely enough? How many of our Western elites know in their hearts that if they died in their sleep tonight, no one could say they gave it all for God?

So a lot of media accounts weren’t wrong, they just got it half right. Jimmy Lai, a man born in poverty, who became a billionaire, who became a Christian, who became a Catholic, who became a freedom fighter, might die this time, next time, or the time after that, imprisoned and penniless. But when he is weighed and measured, he will not be found wanting. And for that, when Jimmy Lai dies he will die a very wealthy man indeed.

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This article was published on July 1, 2021 and is reprinted with permission from The Federalist.

Religious Freedom Victory

Supreme Court Upholds First Amendment Right of Catholic Church To Participate in Children’s Foster Care Program

In a victory for religious freedom, the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the First Amendment right of a Catholic ministry to participate in a city-run children’s foster care program. In Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a unanimous Supreme Court found the City of Philadelphia’s attempts to forbid the Catholic Church from participating in foster care programs because of the church’s refusal to certify same-sex or unmarried couples as foster families, based on its religious beliefs, to be unconstitutional. In issuing the decision, the justices found that the city did not have a compelling interest in preventing the church from caring for orphaned and abused children. The Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief in defense of the church’s right to not be penalized for its religious beliefs.

Affiliate attorneys Michael J. Lockerby, Michael A. Donadio, and Adam J. Kleinfeld of Foley & Lardner LLP assisted in advancing the arguments in Fulton.

“Religious freedom and freedom of conscience are among the most basic and fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood quite clearly that religious freedom is one of the most fundamental human rights,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “Under the First Amendment, the government may not discriminate against religious institutions or individuals on the basis of their religious beliefs or deny them the right to freely exercise their religion.”

For over 200 years, the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia has been providing care for orphans as part of its religious mission. Long before the City of Philadelphia began providing services to orphans and abused children, the Catholic Church worked to care for and find foster homes for orphans and abused and neglected children as part of its Catholic Social Services (CSS). Although state law gave authority to determine the care and custody of orphans and abused children to public entities such as the City of Philadelphia during the 20th century, it also allowed state-licensed foster-care agencies, including CSS, to conduct home studies and certify foster families to receive and care for orphans and abused children. Philadelphia and CSS entered into a contract under which CSS would certify foster families and recommend them for foster child placements. However, CSS does not certify same-sex or unmarried couples as foster families because of its religious beliefs.  In 2018, the city determined that CSS was in violation of a provision of its contract not to engage in sexual orientation discrimination.  As a result, it barred CSS from further participation in the foster care program. CSS sued Philadelphia, alleging that its removal from the foster care program violated its First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. Both the trial and appeals courts ruled that the contract provision barring sexual orientation discrimination is a neutral and generally applicable rule.  On further review, however, the U.S. Supreme Court found that the city’s non-discrimination ordinance did not apply to CSS and the contract provision was not generally applicable because certain city officials were given discretion to make exceptions to it.  Therefore, the city was required to demonstrate a compelling interest in denying CSS an exception to the nondiscrimination provision, which it could not do.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, provides legal assistance at no charge to individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

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This article was published on June 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

Why Every American Should Own a Gun…And Know How to Use It

The issue seems to perfectly match the discordance of our times. As the media and political elites lecture us about “gun violence” and attempt to take our rights away, average Americans are buying guns and ammunition at a record pace.

Some 40% of first-time buyers are women.

What do average Americans know that the elites do not?

Most Americans know that even before the recent Biden crime wave, police response time for a 911 call in major metropolitan areas averaged around 11 minutes. Now like all averages, some responses were quicker and some were longer. In rural areas, it can be much longer. But since the average armed encounter lasts about three to four seconds, it is a distinction without much of a difference.

The simple fact that is understood by most sensible people, is that when it comes to self-protection, you are the first responder. Police will most likely arrive in time to put you in a plastic bag and issue a report. That is if they have not been defunded or distracted by mass riots that paralyze their ability to respond.

I think people likely know, that competency with a firearm can be obtained through training and that physical size and strength don’t play a large role in the process. Martial arts are great but it takes years, upwards of a decade to be truly competent. And, no matter how good you are, you can’t cheat father time. Your speed, power, and dexterity will decline. Besides, in about 40% of attacks today, you must deal with more than one assailant. To rely on your physical skills is a low probability bet.

Many of my shooting acquaintances are very competent, well into their 70s and 80s. That includes women as well.

In as little as a week, a decent civilian shooter can emerge from training schools like the famed Gunsite Academy in Paulden, Arizona. Good local training can also be found, including shooting clubs at the Ben Avery Shooting Facility just off the I-17 and Carefree Highway. With some 1600 acres of shooting facilities, it is the largest complex like this in the nation.

It is one of the “hidden gems” of Arizona, not likely to make it as a feature by the Arizona Republic, even though it is named for one of their famed journalists.

There is the Scottsdale Gun Club and C2 Tactical, Rio Salado, Shooter’s World, plus a variety of private trainers.

But the need for training and the facilities for training were known before things took a real turn for the worse, with the emergence of Progressive radicalism. Now, there is even greater urgency.

In many cities today, the local district attorneys are choosing not to enforce the law.  Bail has been all but eliminated in some places, and the idea of incarceration itself is now challenged. No one it seems has moral agency and is responsible for their bad behavior.  Crime is caused by poverty, white privilege, and white supremacy.  Social peace can only be had by taking your guns, your means of protection, away from you.

The Progressive idea, now largely adopted by the Democrat Party, of protecting you is to release criminals from prison, allow completely open borders, forcibly move drug-addled strangers into your neighborhood, defund the police, reduce or eliminate prison terms, and not prosecute criminals. And of course, allow people to taunt and humiliate the police, hogtie discipline in the school system, and argue that fathers are not necessary to raise a family.

In some jurisdictions, such as Portland, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, a constant state of rioting is permitted if not outwardly encouraged.

Progressives have also done a good job of breaking down the social control functions of religion and family, and have been responsible for a terrible coarsening of the culture.

While great at tearing down institutions, the Progressive seem unable to come up with better ones.  The result is social vacuum chaos and a high degree of instability. One wonders what the US would look like if we had to re-live a social trauma like the Great Depression.

A stable society is largely one that can control itself, by raising good people who can control themselves and take responsibility for their own actions. Building character is what church, school, and family were supposed to do, and were largely united in the effort. While not always successful, it is not a myth that some years ago, one could really leave the front door unlocked at night.

Now character is considered a “white trait”, and a means to hold people down.

Ever notice that Conservatives largely want individuals to reform themselves, while Progressive Democrats want to reform the world? Conservatives believe the human condition is improved by working moral character from the inside out, while Progressives feel it is improved by working on the outside environment inward.

Today, the media and the schools now seem more a purveyor of social nihilism that demands no personal responsibility. It is all the fault of capitalism, or patriarchy, or white supremacy. Not surprisingly, people who truly believe they are victims, held down by “the system”, tend to be unhappy and casual about violence.

In short, most people know they are being subjected to a cruel, and at times a truly silly social experiment by people who think three-quarters of a degree change in temperature in the next hundred years is the greatest threat to the social order.

Police? We don’t need no stinking police! Let’s just “reimagine” a world without authority. They love that word. They want us to be part of their Jacobin experiment.

People spend a lot of time on social media. They see the video camera footage of elderly Asian women having their heads stomped into the pavement, people being sucker-punched on the street, Amazon delivery people attacking clients, and frequent brawls in airports.

One gets the feeling that the wheels are starting to come off of our civilization. That is only partially true.  It appears more likely the wheels are being purposefully removed.

It is not clear how we will come out of this. A counter-reaction seems to be brewing as parents begin to understand their local school has been taken over by space aliens from Berkeley and that some district attorneys want to impose their Jacobin experiments on your community.

So, it is only logical it would seem, to assume personal responsibility for your own protection.  Or as Charles Barkley put it concerning defunding the police, “who you gonna call, Ghost Busters?

The government is doing too many other things to be concerned with its basic responsibilities. It is too busy attempting to change human nature and control the environment.

Get a gun.  Learn the law.  Get good training.  You are on your own, kiddo.

Don’t Be Fooled: Gender Identity Policies Don’t Follow the Science

During the past presidential election, you may remember seeing black yard signs with lists of creed-like statements written in rainbow text. The creeds included claims like “science is real.” All Americans should agree with this statement.

And yet, contrary to this pithy creed, any law that classifies gender identity as a protected class under civil rights law denies science. The Equality Act and the Fairness for All Act turn the scientific reality that there are only two sexes into the legal equivalent of racism.

The Equality Act has turned civil rights law from a shield intended to protect racial minorities from discrimination into a sword that compels conformity to subjective viewpoints on sexual orientation and gender identity.

These state- and local-level policies allow male athletes to compete against females in sports, even though studies show biological males retain a competitive advantage over females even after two years of taking estrogen.

The Fairness for All Act drafters touted it as a reasonable compromise meant to mitigate the harms of the Equality Act. It includes religious exemptions and preserves the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the Equality Act would nullify.

However, this approach did not protect religious freedom in Utah, where legislators passed a similar compromise bill.

Unsatisfied with the compromise, gender identity activists helped pass a ban on counseling that would have helped children struggling with gender dysphoria.

The rule discriminates against counselors who seek to help patients reconcile with their biological sex and allows only gender-affirming counseling that supports chemical and surgical transition.

These methods overlook the fact that 88% to 98% of those struggling with gender dysphoria will accept their biological sex after going through puberty, according to the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.”

Enshrining the fundamentally flawed and radical idea that a person can change sex—at any age—as a civil right threatens the safety and freedom of all Americans, religious or not.

The notion that a person can change his or her sex rejects science. This was on full display in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the Equality Act. During the hearing, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, “Are there more than two sexes, in your opinion?” David replied, “It’s not limited to two.”

While David’s answer sent shockwaves through social media, it should not have come as a surprise. Gender identity advocates regularly insist that those who believe that there are only two sexes—male and female—overlook the science of intersex conditions. But David and other activists’ references to intersex people do not debunk the sexual binary.

“Intersex conditions” or disorders in sexual development are statistical rarities occurring in approximately 1 out of every 5,000 births, according to Ryan Anderson’s research.

Anderson’s Amazon-banned book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Movement,” states the medical community considers these atypical expressions of the sexual binary, not a third sex or the result of a third gonad.

Because gender ideology flatly rejects science, enshrining it into federal law means no amount of religious liberty exemptions will prevent the damage caused by such policies like the Equality Act.

Women and children—religious or not—will lose privacy, safety, and fairness in public and federally funded single-sex facilities and programs, which exist because of biological differences between men and women.

Medical professionals—religious or not—who treat individuals struggling with gender dysphoria will lose the freedom to treat patients according to the best medical and scientific evidence.

Normally, doctors and counselors correct a patient’s disordered perception of her body. Medical professionals also treat other body dysmorphias, like anorexia. Yet, the “gender affirmative” approach requires that they support a patient’s disordered perception of her body and even physically change its appearance to conform to the disorder.

Laws that threaten the freedom of doctors and counselors harm struggling individuals. By reducing their options for care, these laws minimize patients’ chances to flourish in mind and body.

Denying reality in the name of “gender-affirming care” causes harm, not healing. While the Fairness for All Act may protect doctors and counselors inside religious institutions, it will expose those in secular institutions to punishment.

People may be free to adopt radical new ideas about gender for themselves, but if activists have their way and the Senate passes the Equality Act, the federal government will have power to pressure Americans into denying science under threat of punishment.

Even good-faith compromises like the Fairness for All Act suppress the freedoms of all gender identity dissenters outside of religious institutions. That is hardly fair at all.

America is at its best when all citizens can seek and live according to the truth. Disagreements between gender identity advocates and Americans who know there are only two sexes will continue. Congress should allow them to, by rejecting the Equality Act and the Fairness for All Act that shut down any conversation.

Most importantly, Congress should affirm that “science is real.”

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This article was published on June 14, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from Daily Signal.

Armed Teacher Thwarts Kidnapping of 11-Year-Old Student at Utah School: Police

A Utah teacher is being hailed a hero after police say he pulled his concealed firearm on a man who tried to kidnap an 11-year-old student.

Ogden police said officers were called to Lincoln Elementary School on Tuesday when Ira Cox-Berry, 41, walked up to an 11-year-old girl playing on the playground and tried to grab her.

Lt. Brian Eynon said a teacher who witnessed the situation from inside ran out and confronted the suspect and the girl was able to break free, ABC4 reported. The teacher was then able to get all 20 students off the playground and into the school, police said at that point, Mr. Cox-Berry reportedly approached the school building and was trying to force his way inside when the teacher, a licensed concealed gun carrier who was not named by police, pulled his firearm and held the suspect until police arrived.

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Continue reading this article at Washington Times.

Arizona Lawmakers, Governor Move Toward Harm Reduction

Arizona’s Governor and lawmakers are displaying an enlightened shift in strategy addressing the overdose crisis. After the state experienced an estimated 48 percent jump in overdose deaths during the first eight months of 2020 (a 32 percent increase in most populous Maricopa County in all of 2020), they decided to embrace harm reduction.

On May 14 the Arizona House voted 48–11 to pass SB 1486, which removed fentanyl test strips from the list of legally prohibited drug paraphernalia, after the Arizona Senate voted unanimously in favor of the bill. On May 19, Governor Ducey (R) signed it into law.

Fentanyl test strips, made by a Canadian biotechnology company, were designed for urine drug screening. The tests strips are not approved for sale in U.S. drugstores or other outlets by the Food and Drug Administration, but harm reduction organizations—including “needle exchange” programs— have been buying them and handing them out to IV drug users who use them “off‐​label” to test heroin, cocaine, and other drugs for the presence of fentanyl. Researchers claim the tests strips are highly accurate and can detect up to 10 analogs of fentanyl. They also find they save lives by causing drug users to use smaller amounts and/​or take a drug more slowly when they detect it contains fentanyl.

When signing the bill into law, Governor Ducey said:

We want everyone who is using drugs to seek professional treatment. But until someone is ready to get help, we need to make sure they have the tools necessary to prevent a lethal overdose.

Speaking of “needle exchange” programs, syringe services programs (SSPs), the term public health professionals use for “needle exchange” programs, are endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and the American Medical Association. In January 2020, then‐​Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams and Professor Ricky D. Bluthenthal of the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine spoke at the Cato Institute on the benefits of syringe services programs. They are proven to reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other infectious diseases. They also serve to reduce overdose deaths because one of their services is to distribute the overdose antidote naloxone as well as fentanyl test strips and other drug‐​testing materials. Dr. Adams pointed out SSPs offer the added benefits of screening IV drug users for hepatitis and HIV so they can get treatment, and bringing many of them into rehab programs……

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Continue reading this article at Cato Institute.

A Braver, Newer World Of Mail-Order Abortion

In the U.K. and U.S., COVID-19 has provided an excuse for even more accessible abortion. In America at least, it seems the Catholic Church might fight back.

The reshaping of society by COVID-19 has generated plenty of discussion, but not much of that chatter has included the ushering in of mail-order abortion.

In April last year, the Biden administration waived, on the basis of the unfolding pandemic, the requirement for women wanting an abortion to visit a doctor’s office or clinic, thereby facilitating abortion pills via telemedicine and mail delivery.

In the U.K., a similar thing had already happened in March through the most significant change to abortion legislation since the 1967 Abortion Act. The U.K. Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) published legislation that would allow a woman to have an abortion at home without medical supervision.

With media attention in both countries focused on the start of lockdown measures—not that most mainstream media are particularly keen to engage with abortion beyond fixed narratives of its inalienable rightness and necessity—both changes slipped through under the radar, going largely unnoticed and uncommented on.

In April, the Biden administration also lifted restrictions on federal funding for research involving human fetal tissue and rescinded a Trump administration policy barring organizations such as Planned Parenthood from receiving federal family planning grants if they refer women for abortions.

Biden’s abortion advocacy is striking given he is the first Catholic president in office since John F. Kennedy 60 years ago, and he is not shy about wielding his Catholic credentials, despite being very much at odds with the Catholic Church’s strict anti-abortion stance.

From the very start of his presidency, Biden hasn’t held back, as indicated shortly after his inauguration by one of his first tweets as president on 22 January: “As we mark the 48th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the work ahead. From codifying Roe to eliminating maternal and infant health disparities, our Administration is committed to ensuring everyone has access to the health care they need.”

That urge to codify has not gone unnoticed by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). Last November, Archbishop José Gomez of Los Angeles, the USCCB’s president, decided to form a working group to address the “complex and difficult situation” posed by Biden’s stances on abortion and other issues—such as marriage, gender and sexual ethics—that clash with official Church teaching.

The group proposed drafting a document—assigning the task to the USCCB’s Committee on Doctrine—to clarify the Church’s stance on whether you can receive Holy Communion if you persist in publicly advocating for abortion. It’s been a conundrum for Church authorities for decades in the face of modern society’s strident pro-abortion stance—there have been an estimated 60 million abortions in the U.S. since Roe v. Wade in 1973—and now has been brought to a head through Biden’s ascension to the land’s highest political office.

“Because President Biden is Catholic, it presents a unique problem for us,” Archbishop Joseph Naumann, chair of the USCCB’s Committee on Pro-Life Activities, recently told the Associated Press. A permissive stance on abortion from any public figure constitutes “a grave moral evil,” Naumann explained, hence it is necessary to publicly rebuke Biden on the issue. “It can create confusion,” Naumann added. “How can he say he’s a devout Catholic and he’s doing these things that are contrary to the Church’s teaching?”

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman in U.S. history to serve as speaker of the United States House of Representatives, could also be affected by any injunction on receiving Communion. She is vocal about the importance of her Catholic faith while roundly criticized by many American Catholics for not speaking out against abortion.

While Church teaching clearly maintains that Catholic politicians should not “check their faith at the door,” says David Cloutier, a theology professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., there isn’t a corresponding expectation that they somehow impose Catholic doctrine or teaching in an absolute manner.

Saint Thomas Aquinas accepted that civil laws cannot perfectly be framed to reject all evils, but only the most damaging evils, Cloutier points out. This tradition, he explains, has developed an understanding of acceptable forms of “cooperation with evil” that can be tolerated for proportionately good reasons.

“What the Catholic politician must avoid is what is termed ‘formal cooperation with evil,’ wherein one’s action shares the sinful intent of others, or does not make sufficiently clear that one is tolerating an evil rather than endorsing a good,” Cloutier says. “Moreover, even apart from formal cooperation, one must consider how socially damaging a particular permissive law might be.”

To take on the American president is a bold move by the bishops, to say the least, especially with U.S. Catholic Church authorities being up to their necks in the scandal of historical sex abuse. But it appears U.S. bishops have every intention of doing just that. It’s in stark contrast to religious leaders in the U.K.—both those of the Catholic and Anglican churches—who rolled over during COVID-19 and lockdowns, capitulating to every whim of draconian governmental policy. They didn’t say much about the U.K.’s new abortion policy either.

“It seems to me that many of the church leaders believe that if we, as a Church, be nice and avoid all these areas that go against the cultural or political orthodoxies of the day…somehow people will flock to us and the churches will be full,” Paul Coleman, executive director of free-speech legal advocates ADF International, said in a recent episode of the Spectator magazine’s “Holy Smoke” podcast, which focuses on important and controversial topics in world religion.

This “prevailing view we are getting from the church leadership” that doesn’t appear at all dissuaded by all the evidence that it isn’t working, in turn “makes it harder for the people sitting in the pews,” Coleman explains. “Because if they are not seeing an example, it’s so much harder for them to have the courage to speak out in whatever context they are in, whether it’s business or the school they teach at, or what have you.”

The move to mail-order abortion in the British context feels like something from the mind of Aldous Huxley. In the British writer’s famous 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, Huxley offered a genetically engineered future in which life is pain-free but meaningless. It was a warning of the dangers of giving the state control over new and powerful technologies. One illustration of this theme is the rigid control of reproduction through technological and medical intervention, including the surgical removal of ovaries and use of cloning. But it was all fiction, so what was the worry?

By 1957, Huxley wrote Brave New World Revisited, in which he compares the modernizing world of the time with his prophetic fantasy and also with that offered in 1949 by George Orwell through his more brutal dystopian depiction in 1984, which can be seen as a reply and an update, as Orwell saw it, to Huxley’s earlier warnings. Coming after the slaughter of World War II, it wasn’t surprising that Orwell saw totalitarianism having a much more violent face. But in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley argues convincingly based on the accompanying evidence that it appears the world is moving more toward his type of soporific scientific dictatorship in which a passive population is subdued through scientific and psychological engineering.

“Pressure had been mounting on the [U.K.] government on this issue for years until March 2020 when the abortion lobby saw the opportunity it had long been waiting for,” Andrea Williams, director of Christian Concern and the Christian Legal Centre, wrote in a recent article for the Critic magazine titled “One year on from home abortions.” She notes how, following the move by the DHSC, her organization immediately began to pursue a judicial review of the U.K. government’s decision and that evidence soon emerged that the new service was “unchecked and women were being put at risk.”

“Disclosed documents in our legal case have revealed the direct access key players in the abortion industry have to senior civil servants at the heart of the DHSC,” Williams says. “They wield significant influence, do not take no for an answer, and have repeatedly applied pressure on the government to allow DIY home abortion telemedicine service.”

The USCCB hold their next national meeting in June, during which bishops will vote on whether the Committee on Doctrine should continue working on the Communion-related document, with a two-thirds majority needed, to facilitate an eventual public release. That looks more than likely, according to the Associated Press, as even bishops critical of the initiative—worried the USCCB’s emphasis on abortion undermines its ability to find common ground with Biden on issues Pope Francis has highlighted such as climate change, immigration, and inequality—are predicted to give overwhelming approval for the move. Whether that then leads to public debate and any form of reckoning over such a dramatic shift in the U.S. abortion landscape remains to be seen. It doesn’t seem to be happening in the U.K. yet.

“From the beginning this has been about exploiting the biggest crisis this country has faced since the Second World War,” Williams says. “It was an opportunity to achieve the abortion industry’s long-term goal of abortion-on-demand.”

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This article was published on May 18, 2021 and is reproduced with permission from The American Conservative.

 

Life Wins! Governor Signs SB 1457!

A Statement from Center for Arizona Policy President Cathi Herrod, Esq

Today, Arizonans win. Arizona children diagnosed with disabilities prior to birth will no longer be discriminated against. Arizona women will be ensured commonsense safeguards if they choose the abortion pill. Arizona taxpayers will not be forced to support abortions at public colleges and universities, and the laws of Arizona will be interpreted to value all human life.

Governor Doug Ducey signed one of the most significant pro-life bills in recent history today. Preborn babies will be saved the day SB 1457 goes into effect.

The Governor and Arizona pro-life lawmakers, led by sponsor Senator Nancy Barto, stood up for the lives of the vulnerable in the face of heavy, misleading opposition. Their dedication to the value of life is evident in the tenacity that brought back SB 1457 from what appeared to be the end of the bill on the Senate floor.

You may remember SB 1457 failed to pass a few weeks ago based on minor language concerns. With those concerns addressed last week, every Republican lawmaker voted in favor and every Democrat voted against this life-affirming bill. The slim victory was enough to send SB 1457 to the Governor, who wasted no time signing it into law today.

Arizonans can be proud of a state that leads the way in protecting the preborn and caring for women facing unplanned pregnancies.

Today’s victory serves as a reminder that elections matter. Last November, Arizonans elected a pro-life majority to serve at the State Capitol. Though the margin is a slim, one-vote majority in each chamber, it was enough to make the difference for life!

Please contact Governor Ducey and thank him for his commitment to signing pro-life legislation in Arizona.  Call him at (602) 542-4331 or email him a quick “thank you.”

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This statement was published on April 27, 2021 by the Center for Arizona Policy

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