“Attacks on parents are getting closer to home.”

As States Ban Parents From Resisting Their Kids Going Transgender, Will Congress Step Up?

BY: VIRGINIA FOXX at the Federalist:

JANUARY 02, 2023

Congress must pass legislation to stop state governments from trampling parents’ rights to protect their kids from radical sex theory.

VIRGINIA FOXX

Attacks on parents are getting closer to home. From a woke education establishment to increasingly activist child protection agencies, parents are losing the right to decide how to raise their children. My new legislation, the Parental Right to Protect Act, will ensure parents aren’t expelled from their child’s life because they disagree with the left’s radical ideas on sex.

More medical facilities are offering life-altering, non-reversible medical interventions for adolescents who believe they were born the wrong sex. Many parents are against these experimental surgeries and hormonal interventions because they know these treatments will cause irreparable physical and emotional harm to their children.

Take Chloe Cole, for example, who at age 13 began taking puberty blockers. At age 15, she had a double mastectomy. And at age 16, she made the decision to stop these interventions and instead affirm her sex. Earlier this year, Chloe launched an organization alongside others who regret having received so-called “gender-affirming care.” This organization now works to warn others about the harms caused by such medical interventions.

It’s no wonder countries such as the United Kingdom and Sweden have recently suspended their use of this experimental approach on children, recognizing its inherent risks. Too bad the Biden administration isn’t following suit.

In fact, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats are hell-bent on pushing a radical agenda in schools and in the home that is often squarely opposed to parents. Just this week, NBC news reported that the “Education Department has opened what appears to be the first-of-its-kind investigation into Granbury Independent School District after it pulled library books dealing with sexuality and gender.”

Parents Shut Out

Schools across the country are pushing children’s books and curricula in the classroom to normalize transgender ideology. When parents ask for access to school curricula many are stonewalled. One Rhode Island mom was billed $74,000 after filing a Freedom of Information Act request to gain access to her daughter’s school curriculum.

School boards nationwide have used various tactics for silencing parents, such as barring or restricting parents from participating in public meetings. One school board in Pennsylvania is now being sued for a pattern of trampling the First Amendment rights of parents, which includes cutting parents off in the middle of a sentence, yelling over them during their allocated time to speak, and deleting the remarks of parents it disagrees with from the official record and video recording.

Parents who do not support transgender medical interventions are sometimes kept in the dark by the education bureaucracy. An Ohio school district told teachers they did not have to inform parents if a student began transitioning at school, and one Florida school district kept “gender transition” counseling of a 12-year-old girl secret from her parents until she attempted suicide — twice.

CPS Going After Parents

If dealing with these issues at school wasn’t bad enough, now child protective services (CPS) are going after parents. In Indiana, a court recently upheld the removal of a child from parental custody after a CPS investigation alleged the parents were “verbally and emotionally abusing” the child when they would not use the child’s preferred pronouns or otherwise affirm the child’s desire to begin transgender medical interventions.

In California, Abigail Martinez lost custody of her daughter and a court permitted only one hour of visitation each week because Martinez did not want her daughter to begin transgender medical interventions. Tragically, her daughter took her own life after changing her name and taking cross-sex hormones. These parents are being separated from their minor children for simply protecting them from procedures known to be harmful.

CA Law Jeopardizes Parental Rights Nationwide

Things will likely get worse for parents. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 107 into law, jeopardizing the rights of parents in and out of California. SB 107 allows minors anywhere in the United States to run away from their parents to get transgender surgery in California — and their parents can be barred from intervening.

There is no doubt SB 107 will be used as a weapon against parents. This law robs parents of their rights and gives the state of California unprecedented power over a child’s health.

The utter disrespect for parental rights is becoming a tragic cultural norm in America. And it is harming children.

Legislation to Protect Parental Rights

That’s why I introduced the Parental Right to Protect Act. This bill defends parental rights by ensuring CPS does not penalize parents for protecting their children from transgender surgery and hormones.

Parents should be able to make medical decisions for their children without fear of the government taking their children away. Allowing California to become the nation’s arbiter of parental rights would be a fatal mistake. We must stand up to the radical left and allow parents to protect their children — whether that be at school or at home.

Rep. Virginia Foxx serves North Carolina’s 5th congressional district.

“Of the 97 judges confirmed by the Senate in the last two years, three quarters of them are women.”

January 1, 2023

The Biden administration is remaking the federal court in a very bad way

By Andrea Widburg at American Thinker:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 said that people cannot be discriminated against based on race, color, religion, sex (the binary type), and national origin. Over the years, sexual orientation and gender identity have been added to the list. The data, though, show that, when it comes to appointments to the federal court system, the Biden administration is discriminating like crazy—against White men. What will matter more in the long run, though, is that there’s significant ideological discrimination, too.

Bloomberg Law ran the numbers, and there’s nothing ambiguous about them. (Hat tip: Daniel Greenfield.) Not only has Biden been able to appoint many more judges than Trump could in his first two years (97 to 83), but he’s also been appointing almost entirely women, the majority of whom are minorities:

Of the 97 judges confirmed by the Senate in the last two years, three quarters of them are women, and nearly half of the appointees — including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — are women of color.

Ordinarily, this type of statistically provable discrimination in hiring would be actionable at law. But of course, those White men who were passed over have no claim: Biden has an absolute constitutional right to select whomever he wants because Congress cannot amend the Constitution by statute.

Image: Court gavel by Weiss & Paarz. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The real issue, though, is that Biden is appointing activists who believe that, despite being unelected, it’s a judge’s job to reconfigure American law and social values. Skin color diversity is what’s trumpeted in headlines (of course) but what really matters is ideological uniformity, and as to that, there is no diversity at all. Again, from Bloomberg Law:

About one-third of Biden’s confirmed judges have experience as public defenders and a dozen are former civil rights lawyers, according to the liberal group Alliance for Justice.

That means that there are more federal judges who have seen the challenges in the court system for people with low incomes or who have experienced civil-rights or voting-rights violations, said Lisa Cylar Barrett, director of policy at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

There you have it: As we’ve seen with Ketanji Brown Jackson, a pedophile-friendly Supreme Court justice, Biden is placing on the bench judges who base their decisions not on the law and the facts but on the relative positions of the prosecutor/plaintiff and the defendant. What will matter will be skin color, wealth, ideology, and victim status.

I say this with certainty because I saw exactly such a case when I was still litigating in San Francisco, a bastion of leftist judges. Under this new regime, to sight just one case on which I worked, if a dishonest minority sues a law-abiding bank, the bank will lose. The same extra-judicial rubric will apply to criminal law, with every federal court starting to look like Chicago or New York—law-and-order out; racial grievances in.

In Deuteronomy 1.13, the first thing that Moses, acting upon God’s instructions, did once the Jews fled Egypt was to appoint judges: “Pick from each of your tribes men who are wise, discerning, and experienced, I will appoint them as your heads.” Nowhere did he specify that any of those traits are tied to race (as in Sonia Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” boast). More importantly, at 1:17, Moses demanded of the magistrates that “You shall not be partial in judgment: hear out low and high alike.”

In his eminently readable The Rational Bible: Deuteronomy: God, Blessings, and Curses, Dennis Prager explains,

It…means that a judge may not give preferential treatment to a famous or wealthy person. The words translated “hear out low and high alike” literally read, “listen to the small person as you listen to the great person.” By definition, justice means equal justice for everyone and that all people have an equal right to be heard. Even the poorest and seemingly unimportant person must have access to the judicial system. The same holds true in the other direction: a judge may not favor a poor man, no matter how wealthy his litigation opponent happens to be (see Exodus 23:3 and Leviticus 19:15).

Nothing indicates, based on past performance, that the people Biden is placing on the federal bench care about justice or are wise and discerning. There’s every reason to believe that they will replicate and extend the profound damage activist courts, from the Supreme Court on down, have inflicted on America for decades. A Kritarchy (rule by unelected judges) has consistently been disastrous for America. Our nation is weakened when activist judges impose top-down solutions without the intermediary legislative process that involves persuading Americans rather than dictating to them.

“The most immediate issue dividing these states from Washington is illegal immigration.”

BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

THE COMING CRISIS OF FEDERALISM

I probably should have given up making predictions after 2016, when I called the presidential election correctly. I don’t think I have gotten one right since then.

But I do have one prediction for 2023 and years to come: I think the federalism issue—the relationship between the federal government and the states—will become the most vital question in our political life.

Currently, we have at least two large states, Texas and Florida, that enjoy strong, effective leadership, while our national government flounders. States like Texas and Florida are plenty big enough to go it on their own, and one wonders how long they will chafe under the yoke of an inept and destructive central government.

The most immediate issue dividing these states from Washington is illegal immigration. The Biden administration has not just failed to secure our southern border, it has repudiated any intention of carrying out its constitutional responsibility. In the presence of such a vacuum, the states have no choice but to act. And they can reasonably ask, why should they continue to owe allegiance to a national government that will not carry out its most basic duty of protecting them against invasion?

Another wedge issue is monetary policy. Both Texas and Florida are well-managed and fiscally sound. In contrast, Washington is a spendthrift mess. The federal government’s trillions in deficit spending have caused inflation that devastates citizens of Florida and Texas, along with the rest of us. And the national government levies onerous taxes to support its profligate spending. Residents of well-managed states like Texas and Florida—and also a number of smaller states, South Dakota is a paragon—will reasonably conclude that they aren’t getting their money’s worth. And Texas and Florida are populous enough to issue their own currency, either separately or jointly.

Then there is the issue of freedom. In recent years, the federal government has encroached on its citizens’ rights to an unprecedented degree, and in a way that is particularly hostile to residents of the well-run states. Why should citizens of Florida and Texas—and North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Tennessee, South Carolina, and so on—put up with a government that leans on social media companies to limit their freedom of speech? Why should Florida, for example, continue to recognize the authority of the FBI if it deems that agency to be hopelessly corrupt? And why should energy-rich states like Texas, North Dakota and Louisiana allow their economies to be suppressed by an unholy alliance of misguided environmentalists, greedy politicians, Big Wind and Big Solar?

I don’t think disunion will happen during my lifetime. But I do think that the potential for disunion will play an increasingly important role in our national debates. It would be relatively easy to establish a contiguous nation, based on our current Constitution, that reaches from North Dakota to Texas, then includes the entire Southeast as far as Florida, and extends north to include, at a minimum, Indiana and Ohio. Other states would no doubt choose to join. Such a nation would be vastly better governed than the current United States, it would contain our most important natural resources, and it would include most of the territory from which our armed forces are drawn.

There are strong reasons for the states to re-assert their sovereignty, and, given how poorly our national government is performing, that can only be a good thing. Perhaps the prospect of disunion will concentrate the minds of the political class in Washington. Or perhaps disunion will become a reality, maybe sooner than we can now imagine. Either way, I think the issue of federalism will come to dominate our political debate before long.

“No! You tried to eat us!” he yells.

January 1, 2023

New Video Explores How the Pandemic Unveiled the Worst Among Us

By Susan D. Harris at American Thinker:

“Someone said things aren’t getting worse.  The veil over society is being removed.”

So begins the narration on a recently uploaded YouTube video titled, “The Veil over Society Got Removed for a Moment.”  Currently pushing over 170,000 views in five days, it’s a stream-of-consciousness exploration of society during the pandemic.

The video begins, (without quoting Shakespeare), by proposing that, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  It then segues into a straightforward review of the Stanford Prison Experiment.  Funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research in 1971, it was a real social experiment in which some college students were assigned to play guards while others were to be prisoners.  It is most notable for the fact that although it was supposed to last two weeks, it had to be terminated after only six days because the “mistreatment of prisoners escalated so alarmingly.”

After acknowledging that the experiment was flawed and its conclusions controversial, the narrator begins comparing what happened during the experiment to what happened during the pandemic:

You have one group, the prisoners, that have been dehumanized, they’re stripped of their individual identity… and basically labeled as “bad people.” And then you have these other people who were given a costume of authority… and they kind of have this group identity going of “good guy,” acting in ways they perceive to be sanctioned as okay by the majority of society.  [This was] due to the power dynamic of perceived authority combined with the dehumanization of the so-called prisoners… And I feel personally like whether some people want to see it or not, this is something that many of us witnessed and experienced over the last two years in [our] society.

The narrator reviews how during the pandemic, many people mistakenly acted as though they were suddenly deputized police officers enforcing real laws.  Interspersed with personal experiences, the video forces you to remember your own.  In my case, it was the waif of a teenage girl behind the deli counter shouting, “I cannot serve you unless you put a mask on!”  (I didn’t go back for six months.)  Then there was the tour guide in Massachusetts who threatened to have our open-air bus, which was packed with tourists, completely stopped because my mask had fallen below my nose.  And of course, who can forget the young teens in the Adirondacks, who militaristically demanded I fill out my name and address before I could jump in the lake on a scorching hot day.  In each case, it seemed like their hardness came easily; that they even relished their new authoritarian roles.

I got a kick out of the video’s narrator saying that she realized what was happening early on, and made up her mind to avoid places that would force her to act a certain way.  “I’m going to minimize my participation in whatever this is!” she told herself.

The video then airs footage of those “six feet apart” footstep signs that magically appeared on commercial floors around the world.  (Something of which we surprisingly had no shortage.)  Then there were the arrows instructing us in one-way foot traffic.  If you want the limited science behind that, you can find it in Science Direct.  And if you think they are done with their social experiments like COVID foot traffic patterns, think again.  The abstract concludes saying:

While the case presented is limited, the modeled approaches are intended to provoke future research that can be extended and applied to larger populations to help provide decision makers with more rigorous tools to shape future policies regarding traffic flow within buildings.

Back to the video, where the narrator then observes: “Here we are now in the aftermath and I think more and more people are actually realizing that the cause did not ever justify the effects.”

According to YouTube, the video is posted by Truthstream Media, an entity created by Aaron and Melissa Dykes.  As a disclaimer, I am not familiar with their other work, but this video is definitely worthy of the views it’s receiving.

One of the best parts, in my humble opinion, is the way they incorporate a TikTok video by comedian Ross Bennet (TikTok @rossduhboss_2.0).  It’s Ross’s commentary on The Atlantic’s article, “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.”  Under the heading “Toxic Forgiveness”, Ross begins, “Look! They want everyone to forgive and forget everything that happened during the pandemic.”  He then likens what happened to everyone being kidnapped and put on an island where half of the people propose eating the other half to survive.  When everything settles down and both groups are safely on their way home, the half that were going to be eaten are supposed to just forget that it ever happened.  “No! You tried to eat us!” he yells.  He brings it home:

I didn’t kick you out of no stores.  I didn’t ruin your job.  I didn’t tell you that you couldn’t come to the family reunion.  I didn’t tell you that you had to drop dead of a heart attack because you didn’t get the jab so you’re not welcome at this hospital.  There ain’t nothing to forgive on my side Baby Boo! This is a you problem, and we’re still talking about it!

Ross’s original video (with some profanity) can be found here.

“The Veil Over Society” is a mostly secular commentary on what happens when you pull off the masks and expose the true identities of those around you; and then realize that there’s no going back.  I can totally relate as can most everyone reading this.  From my first “Trump” election sign in the fall of 2020 to the “Live free or die” sign that went up in my front yard during the mandates, I’ve realized who my friends, family, and neighbors truly are; and it’s been gut-wrenching.

The video is correct in saying that there’s no going back.  For those of us who have faith in God, however, it should only serve to make us stronger and more determined to save a generation so desperately lost and scared that they are capable of persecuting not only strangers, but even those they love.

Susan D. Harris can be reached at www.susandharris.com