For many years people have insisted that the online world is not the “real world.” There are elements of truth to this —a screen avatar can never capture the fullness of who someone is and the filtered versions of ourselves that we present on the internet can often hide what is actually happening in our lives — but in the nearly two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us have found ourselves, at some point or another, living significant portions of our lives online. As we grapple with this brave new world it is important that we recognize how the shifting digital landscape affects children and teens and the ways that it can harm them.
A recent report from Thorn found that 14% of 9 to 12-year-olds had shared explicit images of themselves in 2020 and 21% said it was normal for kids their age to do so. Nearly one in five teens had shared sexually explicit images of themselves. Thorn’s report also found a rise in children using secondary accounts to avoid online supervision. In 2020, 25% of 9-12-year-olds surveyed said that they were using at least one secondary account and 73% said they would prefer not to say. This lack of supervision leaves kids vulnerable to online predators and exposure to explicit content.Of the minors who reported that they had shared sexually explicit images of themselves, half said that they had shared those images with someone they had never met in real life, and over 40% reported having shared the images with someone over the age of 18.
Earlier this year the New York Times reported that 27% of American adults are currently estranged from at least one family member. 12% of parents over the age of 65 are estranged from at least one adult child. In parent-child estrangement, the adult child is usually the one who has cut off contact. Value-based disagreements play a significant role in these estrangements, especially when the rift is between a parent and an adult child. Family therapists have pointed out that rising political tensions in the past half-decade have coincided with increased family rifts.
John Stonestreet has described the consequences of the “thinning out” of society — family breakdown and increased isolation leave people looking for a source of meaning and belonging, so they turn to politics and ideology. “To put it bluntly, our politics cannot handle the amount of weight we currently expect of it,” he writes.
Politics can never replace the family, but as the rise in family estrangement shows, far too many adults, especially younger adults, are attempting to do just that, to the point that they are willing to cut ties with family members with whom they have political and ideological disagreements. No family is perfect, but every family is valuable, and the ease with which young adults have begun cutting off family members over political and ideological disagreements is truly heartbreaking. Family is the bedrock of society, and family relationships are worth fighting for.
It was thrilling to be present at a pro-life rally on the steps of the Supreme Court of the United States this week while oral arguments for the Dobbs v. Jackson case were going on inside. I had a sense that our team and I were truly living through history. I hope to soon be able to tell my grandchildren, “I was outside when the Supreme Court charted a course for LIFE in this country.”
One thing that struck me was the contrast between the pro-life crowd on one side, and the pro-abortion crowd on the other, separated by a metal barricade erected by the Capitol police, although in reality there were many pro-lifers on the other side of the fence, because pro-lifers had a vast advantage in numbers.
But the difference went beyond the size of the two crowds. You could see it on their faces and hear it in their voices. Both sides saw the same thing coming - the approaching fall of the pro-abortion regime thrust on our nation by the Court’s abominable Roe v. Wade ruling nearly 49 years ago - but they reacted very differently to that prospect.
Looking at the pro-life side, there were smiles and looks of hopeful anticipation. Voices were cheerful and I even heard hymns sung. I saw signs asking for compassion for the unborn and for women.
For years, the abortion industry has denied, downplayed, and deflected on any link between abortion and depression. Abortion proponents have insisted that post-abortion syndrome is a “makey-uppy thing” and denied the reality of abortion regret.In doing so, they have consistently trivialized the real experiences of women who have been harmed by the abortion industry and have suffered throughabortion regret when faced with the realization that their abortion ended their child’s life. Now, a pro-abortion researcherhas come forward and saidthat the medical community resisted publishing his research pointing to a link between abortion and depression. Dr. David Fergusson’s 30-year longitudinal study was published in 2006. He recently told the New Zealand Heraldthat his study, which is frequently downplayed by the abortion industry, was rejected by three different medical journals, something that he said is very unusual, noting that his research team’s work is typically accepted the first time they submit it for publication. Although Fergusson himself is not pro-life, this study, which presents strong evidence against an abortion industry talking point, was stifled.
But no science is completely conclusive - it's cumulative. Our study is strongly suggestive of a link between abortion and developing mental illness. What people should be saying is, 'This is interesting ... we need to invest more to answer this important question'.
The so-called “Abortion Care Network” (ACN) recently reported that independent abortion facilities are closing at an “alarming rate.” In the past five years, 113 independent abortion facilities have closed, including 34 since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the past decade, the number of independent abortion facilities has declined by 30%. The rate at which these clinics are closing is not what is alarming. What is alarming is that they ever opened in the first place and that, far too often, we are numb to the daily massacre committed by the abortion industry.
It’s well past time for these clinics to close. Abortion is a grave injustice that has plagued the United States for too long, and the sooner these clinics close the doors, the better. Although Planned Parenthood continues to commit over a third of abortions in the United States, ACN reports that independent abortion facilities commit 58% of all abortions.
President Biden recently took to Twitter to complain that women are “locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or an elderly relative at home” and tout his “Build Back Better” plan so that women can “get back to work.” This sentiment is deeply anti-family and belittles women who choose to stay at home as mothers and caregivers.
What if our priority was not ensuring that as many parents as possible are away from their children for at least half of their waking hours, and if we instead focused on supporting families? Devaluing families and belittlingthose who stay at homeas caregiversis not “building back better.” It is profoundly disrespectful and shows a complete disregard for young and old alike.
A recent study released by George Barna found that 39% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 identify as LGBTQ and that 30% of adults under the age of 37 do. The study’s findings also point to a significant shift that is taking place in the worldview of younger Americans, especially when it comes to how they think about identity — the study reported that 75% of young adults are searching for a purpose and that, while over half describe themselves as religious, 74% believe that all faiths are equal.
While Barna’s numbers are significantly higher than those reported by Gallup earlier this year, both studies show that the number of young Americans who identify as LGBT has increased dramatically in recent years. Writers like Abigail Shrierhave pointed out that social contagion plays a significant role in the number of young people suddenly identifying as LGBT, and especially in the rise of transgenderism. As school curricula, the entertainment industry, woke corporations, and other champions of the LGBT movement insist on reducing male and female to rigid and cartoonish stereotypes, young people are encouraged “to look constantly for landmark feelings or impulses, anything that might point toward ‘genderfluid,’ ‘genderqueer,’ ‘asexual,’ or ‘non-binary.’”
Last week Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison joined 18 other attorneys in asking a federal court to remove religious freedom protections for colleges and universities. In an amicus brief filed with the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, the attorneys general urge the court to rule against Christian colleges and universities in the case Hunter v. U.S. Department of Education. The lawsuitis seeking to stripreligious colleges and universities of fundingfor holding to Biblical beliefs on marriage and sexuality.As Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, put it, this lawsuit “is a deliberate effort by a major means of coercion to bring an end to institutions of Christian conviction, that operate as colleges and universities and seminaries.”
Although the case focuses Christian colleges and universities,initially, the only defendant in the case was the Department of Education. By suing the Department of Education, the lawsuit would have been able to target religious institutions without giving them an opportunity to speak in their own defense. This was especially concerning given the federal government’s reluctance to come to the defense of religious freedom.
Earlier this week voters here in Minnesota and across the U.S. headed to the polls to vote in local elections. The results were encouraging and showed voters rejecting radical ideology and embracing pro-family candidates, instead! Leading up to the election, it became clear that many of these races, including Virginia’s gubernatorial race, were a referendum on radical education policies that have been gaining momentum around the country. The results are in and voters have made it clear — parents matter!
During his campaign, former Governor Terry McAuliffe insisted, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Virginian voters made it clear that they believe parents’ voices are important when they elected pro-life and pro-family candidate Glenn Youngkin instead. Joseph Backholm of Family Research Council commented,
Parents are an interest group now. It’s hard to overstate how good this news is. Candidates will now have to be prepared to answer questions about who should be in charge of curriculum, parents or bureaucrats…Ten years from now education could look very different than it does today. If that happens, we’ll look back to tonight as the moment it all started and we’ll all be better for it.
“I never expected to be the poster child for sterilization,” Rachel Daimond told Suzy Weiss in a recent article titled, “First Comes Love, Then Comes Sterilization” focusing on a troubling trend among American young adults. For several months, Diamond has been using social media, especially Tick Tock, to document her decision to undergo sterilization to guarantee that she would never have children. Diamond, like a growing number of young adults, is part of the “intentionally child free” or anti-natalist movement. Weiss notes that many of the young adults embracing this movement cite concerns about climate change, with one study finding that 39% of Generation Z does not want children because they are concerned about the environment. But as Weiss’s article shows, there is more to the story. Many young adults who are choosing not to have children and even sterilizing themselves to make sure they remain child-free also express a hostility toward the very idea of family.
One young woman, Isabel, told Weiss that she is planning a “sterilization celebration” at a local sushi joint, explaining that she believes it is morally wrong to bring children into the world because “no matter how good someone has it, they will suffer” and because she hopes to retire in her fifties or earlier.
In response the Dobbs v. Jackson,the upcoming Supreme Court case challenging Roe v. Wade, Dr. Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna is arguing that the case should serve as a catalyst for the pro-life movement to compromise with the abortion movement. Pointing to research that shows a large number of abortionists dislike and even refuse to practice late second-trimester and third trimester abortions when an unborn child “becomes more recognizably human,” along with the fact that most Americans support restrictions on later abortions, Shields argues that pro-lifers and abortion proponents should reach a compromise. “Since pro-choice and pro-life philosophers respect the reasonableness of their intellectual foes, perhaps they, too, have rational grounds to accept a liberal compromise on abortion,” he concludes.
What Shields fails to grasp is that there is no room for a “compromise” in which pro-lifers are expected to be fine with baby-killing. This is not a question of “reasonableness.” Abortion, at any stage, is radical by its very nature because abortion takes an innocent human life—there is nothing “reasonable” about advocating for or accepting this practice.
The compromise that Shields proposes could be described as the Abortion Doctor Compromise — as Shields relates, most abortion doctors positively refuse to perform late-term abortions because they personally find them horrific, but will end the lives of 12-week-old babies all day every day. So in Shields’s compromise, the slightly less radical wing of the abortion lobby will accept restrictions on the forms of abortion that they already find too horrific to practice and defend while asking that pro-lifers accept these restrictions and absolutely nothing more. Those advocating for this so-called “compromise” would not change their position at all, they would simply demand that pro-lifers accept their terms. Doesn’t sound like much of a compromise.
In many ways, the decision to terminate a pregnancy is not unlike the decision to go through transition: It is a fundamentally private choice that can be made only by the individual in question — a person who alone knows the truth of their heart, who alone can understand what the consequences of their choices will be in the years to come.
While Boylan is incorrect in how the two movements are two sides of the same coin, it is true that abortion and transgenderism are rooted in the same set of ideas. Both rest on the assumption that one’s “true self” or personhood can be separated from biological realities and both have a distorted understanding of the purpose of medicine.
Just as the abortion movement insists that an unborn child is not a person even though science has proven that life begins at conception,the transgender movement insists that a person’s “true self” can be separate from his or her physical body. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Justice Anthony Kennedy infamouslystated, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." In that statement, he captures the mindsetthat is behind both abortion and transgenderism — the idea that each of us has the “right” to define our own concept of existence.
Ahead of last weekend’sWomen’s March in Washington, D.C., marchers were offered a reminder of what to bring and what not to bring. On the “to bring” list was “Your feminist spirit, bring your defiance to injustice bring your demands for abortion justice.” The “don’t bring” list included weapons and illegal substances, as well as a note reminding abortion activistsnot to use “coat-hanger imagery” saying, “We do not want to accidentally reinforce the right wing talking points that self-managed abortions are dangerous, scary and harmful.”
Abortion is never safe. Over the years, whether or not the abortion industry is willing to acknowledge the danger of abortion has depended entirely on what is most convenient for them at any given time. Only a few years ago,abortion activists used coat-hangers as a symbol of their claim that the abortion movement used coat-hangers as part of a narrative claiming that banning abortion will lead to a dangerous, dystopian future full of “back alley” abortions and to insist that banning abortion will not end abortion, it will only make it less safe, even though the evidence shows that abortion bans really do save lives by decreasing abortion rates.
This week is Banned Books Week,a week that the American Library Association claims “brings together the entire book community — librarians, booksellers, publishers, journalists, teachers, and readers of all types — in shared support of the freedom to seek and to express ideas, even those some consider unorthodox or unpopular.” However, in a year that saw major corporations engaging in viewpoint discrimination, two books that faced bans this year for daring to question the transgender agenda, When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson and Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier, were notably absent from this year’s “Challenged book list.” As Thomas Spence, President of Regnery Publishing noted, Banned Books Week is proving itself to be nothing more than a “gimmicky promotion [that] caters primarily to those who believe that schoolchildren should have access to anything bound between two covers without the interference of those busybodies we call parents.”
Earlier this year, Amazon removed Anderson’s book on transgenderism without any warning or explanation. When they finally broke their silence, they doubled down, insisting that When Harry Became Sally, which had been listed on their website for three years without any issues, violated their standards.
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.
Adams frets that today’s youngsters are “barren of the behavior, values and hopes from which human beings have traditionally found higher meaning … or even simple contentment.” Adams calls them “hollowed out,” a generation living solitary lives, hyperconnected to technology but unattached from their families, churches or communities. He cites statistics showing teen depression rose 63 percent from 2007 to 2017 while teen suicide grew 56 percent. Tragically, he writes, suicide has become the second leading cause of death for the young.
