The Supreme Court has set a date for oral arguments in the potentially ground-shaking Dobbs v. Jackson case, which could throw out the Roe v. Wade standard that states cannot restrict abortion before fetal viability.
The court will hear oral arguments in the case starting December 1, with a decision expected early next summer.
That means it’s a great time to read the great brief submitted by our own Renee Carlson of True North Legal, along with Professor Teresa Collett of the University of St. Thomas, and Vice President Mike Pence’s organization Advancing American Freedom.
“Until I’m told otherwise, I prefer to call you ‘they,’” wrote a Yale Law School professor in a Washington Post op-ed this week. Professor Ian Ayres explains that his new “default rule” of using gender-neutral pronouns until told otherwise keeps him from “misgendering” students. “I would never intentionally misidentify someone else’s gender — but I unfortunately risk doing so until I learn that person’s pronouns. That’s why, as I begin a new school year, I am trying to initially refer to everyone as ‘they,’” he explains. He goes on to encourage readers whose “preferred pronouns” are either he or she to adopt “he/they” or “she/they” instead “because it would give others the freedom not to specify your gender when referring to you.”
In other words, at one of the top universities in the world,a law professor would like all of his students, and for that matter, the population at large, to join him in a daily denial of the reality of male and female. To refer to someone as “they” until you have learned his or her “gender identity” is to pretend that humans are fundamentally gender-neutral. This denies an essential reality of what it is to be human. As Carl Trueman recently remarked in First Things, “when we decry pronouns that assume the reality of bodily sex, we are coming close to denying the universal truth that all humans are embodied beings.” To be human is to be embodied, and to be embodied means that we are either male or female — “he” or “she,” not “they.”
A recent Wall Street Journal investigation offered a glimpse into the world that a minor when scrolling through Tik Tok, the most popular social media platform among America’s teenagers. It wasn’t pretty. The journalists set up 31 fake Tik Tok accounts posing as 13–15-year-old users and discovered that the algorithm very quickly started showing them sexually explicit content, sexual violence, and links to OnlyFans. The fact that the age set on each of the 31 accounts was set at 15 or younger made no difference as pornographic content and links made their way into each account’s feed.
It’s not just Tick Tock — in their book Treading Boldly Through a Pornographic World, Daniel Weiss and Joshua Glaser report that, while 18% of 13–17-year-olds report that they seek out pornographic content on a weekly basis, over 20% say that they come across it unintentionally on a weekly basis. We live in a pornified culture, and parents today are presented with the challenge of navigating a world in which most children will have been exposed to pornography by the time they turn 13 and a growing number of children are addicted to pornography. In light of this sobering reality, it is imperative that families and churches gain a clear understanding of this issue and respond wisely as we embrace beauty of God’s design for sexuality and reject the distortions that our culture offers.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his “husband” Chasten recently created a stir by announcing that they had adoptednewborns Penelope Roseand Joseph August.In a rather uncomfortable photo-op, the two men are pictured in a hospital bed as if one of them had just given birth,despite the glaringly obvious fact that neither of them ever have or ever will. Not pictured, somewhere, out of frame, Penelope and Joseph have a mother who recently brought them into the world. And they will grow up without her.
But what is the response coming from mainstream media and fawning twitter followers? “Beautiful!” “Wonderful” “Hope for the future!” If the future is children being raised without a mother (or without a father) in order to fulfill adults’ desires,then the future is not as rosy as people claim.
Placing the desires of adults over the needs of children should not be normalized and it certainly should not be celebrated. These two little ones will grow up with anything money can offer, but what they will be missing is something that money can never buy: a mother.
Even before the Pfizer vaccine received full FDA approval, public and private employers across the United States began to announce vaccine mandates for their employees. With the COVID-19 vaccine’s FDA approval, we will only see more of them. For many Christians, these mandates spark concerns about religious freedom as multiplestates have moved toward minimizing religious exemptions for vaccination requirements, and a growing number of employers, including here in Minnesota, have begun mandating COVID-19 vaccinations.
Vaccine mandates are a bad idea
Recently, one Minnesota employer expressed optimism that mandating vaccines would “help” any employees who were on the fence about the vaccine to change their minds. But coercion is not how “persuasion” works. Vaccine mandates show a deep disrespect for people’s ability to make rational decisions for themselves, and because of this, they remove the possibility of meaningful and respectful conversations about the vaccine. This kind of disrespect is on display in New York City right now, where anyone who wishes to dine indoors must present proof of vaccination. Recently, New York Mayor Bill de Blasioannounced that people may dine indoors immediately after receiving the first dose of the vaccine. Since immunity does not begin immediately upon receiving the first dose of the vaccine, there is good reason to suspect that this mandate has far less to do with preventing the spread of COVID-19 than it has to do with punishing those who choose not to get vaccinated.
