Daily Headlines | Friday April 29, 2022

Good Morning!

The writer George Saunders once suggested, “Irony is just honesty with the volume cranked up.”

Case in point – in our first story, we see the left is often guilty of what they accuse the right of doing:

1.Liberals, not conservatives, have truly melded church and state. 

From the American Conservative:

There’s a prominent Catholic parish in the Georgetown neighborhood of our nation’s capital that sends weekly email bulletins to its parishioners, many of whom are prominent members of the city’s elite political class. According to a friend who has been receiving those bulletins since 2018, the most common themes have to do with race, sexual or gender ideology, immigration, or the environment. In other words, the bulletin doesn’t sound all that different from Democratic Party talking points or the headlines and op-eds of the Washington Post.

Indeed, the church has prominently displayed a Black Lives Matter banner and a rainbow flag outside its building. It holds events to promote diversity, inclusion, and equity. At this parish, at least, contemporary liberal ideology, Democratic politics, and religion seamlessly overlap. The parish effectively operates as an extension of the same institutional left that controls mainstream media, academia, the entertainment industry, and the federal bureaucracy.

This phenomenon is not unique to the Georgetown church. Indeed, it can be found in many religious communities whose members and regular attendees lean left. Mainline, overwhelmingly Democrat-voting Protestant denominations voice their unqualified support for the LGBTQ+ community, Black Lives Matter, feminism, and open borders. Similarly, former editor of Commentary Norman Podhoretz called Reform Judaism “the Democratic party platform with holidays thrown in” and the services in a Reform temple “the Democratic Party at prayer.” The same is true of many Catholic parishes whose congregants are predominantly left-leaning and often endorse and proliferate teaching in flagrant opposition to Catholic doctrine. On the left, the collapse of religion and politics is ubiquitous.

2.Illinois School District to Teach Preschoolers About ‘Sexual Orientation’ and ‘Gender Identity’

From The Daily Citizen:

An Illinois school district will require schools to teach preschoolers about “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.”

The Evanston/Skokie School District 65 (D65) is providing specific curriculum to help indoctrinators (er … teachers) teach the equity lessons as a part of its LGBTQ+ Equity Month during the month of April.

The district also has a “Latinx Heritage Month” from September 15 to October 15 as well as “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action” during the month of February.

For preschoolers, D65’s curriculum states that they must learn about “the purpose of the flags and will learn about the Pride Flag.” Students are encouraged to participate in “Rainbow day” and wear the “color of the day.”

The lesson plan for preschoolers states that they must be able to “recognize the Rainbow flag and know who it represents” and understand the following vocabulary: “Flag, gay, lesbian, non-binary, queer, community.”

Teachers were provided a link to an online read aloud of the book, Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag.

Milk was the first openly gay-identified elected official in California, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The reading is produced by Brightly Storytime, a YouTube channel that was launched in partnership with Penguin Random House.

RELATED:  

Is Critical Race Theory Being Taught in Our Schools? Here Are the Facts

From The Daily Signal:

Parents were horrified during the COVID-19 pandemic as they discovered how left-wing activist teachers were indoctrinating their kids in the classroom.

Critical race theory, a Marxism-based ideology, burst onto the scene in a big way. The left claims that what’s being taught in classrooms isn’t critical race theory. But is that true?

Jonathan Butcher, an education expert at The Heritage Foundation, says critical race theory isn’t just now showing up in classrooms. He contends it’s been there for decades.

“[In the] 1980s, 1990s, you’re having teachers become trained in the idea that America is systemically racist, that we should be teaching students not so much about what they share as Americans, but about their identities, the things that separate them and make them different from each other,” Butcher explained.

3.Baylor University Charters LGBTQ Group 

From First Things:

The news that Baylor University has officially chartered Prism, an LGBT student organization on campus, marks an important moment in Christian higher education in the USA.

To be fair to Baylor, Christian colleges and universities have a very difficult task in the current climate. Institutions of higher education are meant to be places for free discussion and exchange of ideas. With sexual identity politics now a central component of wider public discourse, freedom of discussion inevitably means that sexual identity discourse will take place on campuses. But there is a difference between students discussing these issues in the context of, say, a debating society or a mainstream political club, and discussing these ideas in an official LGBT group. To receive an official charter is to receive a formal imprimatur.

The charter itself is interesting. It contains no reference to Christ or Christianity, an odd lacuna for a group at a Christian university. Especially for a group whose stated mission is to “help students gain deeper understanding of their own and others [sic] complex and intersectional identities, including gender and sexuality and faith and spirituality” and to “provide resources to navigate essential services including physical, mental, or spiritual well-being at Baylor and beyond.” We are all now familiar with spirituality Hollywood-style, which lacks objective content and represents little more than self-affirmation. It is unfortunate that a Christian school would endorse such language without requiring some explicit reference to the Christian faith.

4. ‘Johnny the Walrus’ Loved by Critics – But Makes Some Amazon Employees and Customers Really Sad

From The Daily Citizen:

As I’m writing this, Johnny the Walrus is the best-selling book on Amazon.

While critics have applauded the book, it enraged transgender activists and their allies so much that Amazon employees held a forum dealing with the “trauma” caused by this children’s book. Video from the meeting was released by Libs of TikTok the same day the book hit the number one spot.

Now, Amazon has told Walsh they will not allow the publisher, DW Books, to run ads for the board book.

What’s the kerfuffle about?

From Acclaimed Children’s Author Matt Walsh (well, that’s what he called himself on his Twitter feed until he transitioned into Best Selling Biologist Matt Walsh), the colorful board book tells the story of a boy with a powerful imagination.

“One day he’s a dog, the next day a crustacean,” the book says. But things begin to go south for young Johnny when he waddles downstairs as a walrus one morning.

5. Putin Really May Break the Nuclear Taboo in Ukraine 

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Why would Vladimir Putin use tactical nuclear weapons? Why would he make such a madman move?

To change the story. To shock and destabilize his adversaries. To scare the people of North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries so they’ll force their leaders to back away. To remind the world—and Russians—that he does have military power. To avoid a massive and public military defeat. To win.

Mr. Putin talks about nuclear weapons a lot. He did it again Wednesday: In a meeting with politicians in St. Petersburg, he said if anyone intervenes in Ukraine and “creates unacceptable threats for us that are strategic in nature,” the Russian response will be “lightning fast.” He said: “We have all the tools for this that no one else can boast of having. We won’t boast about it, we’ll use them, if needed.”

He’s talked like this since the invasion. It’s a tactic: He’s trying to scare everybody. That doesn’t mean the threat is empty.

People who have known Mr. Putin have told me I am wrong in my concern about his potential nuclear use in that he knows if he makes one move with such a weapon, Moscow will in turn be reduced to a smoking ruin. But I am reading Mr. Putin as someone who’s grown bored of that threat, who believes he can more than match it, who maybe doesn’t even believe it anymore. In any case the Americans would not respond disproportionately.

No one since 1945, in spite of all the wars, has used nuclear weapons. We are in the habit, no matter what we acknowledge as a hypothetical possibility, of thinking: It still won’t happen, history will proceed as it has in the past.

But maybe not. History is full of swerves, of impossibilities that become inevitabilities.

For the administration’s leaders this should be front of mind every day. They should return to the admirable terseness of the early days of the invasion. They should wake up every day thinking: What can we do to lower the odds?

Think more, talk less. And when you think, think dark.

6. An Echo of the Holodomor

From National Review:

The legislature of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region has voted to “expropriate the excess harvest” of farms in Russian-occupied Ukraine, reports Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal.

This is a policy that has some precedent.

The Ukrainian language has a word for carrying out political mass-murder by means of starvation: Holodomor. This word exists as a name for what the Russians did to the Ukrainians in 1932–33, when Ukraine was a not-entirely willing constituent of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Socialist central planning achieved in Soviet agriculture what it achieves everywhere — shortages caused by the misallocation of resources — resulting in a collapse of the grain and potato harvests in the early 1930s. The socialist rulers in Moscow saw both a potential threat to their regime and a political opportunity, and so food was taken away from Ukrainian-populated areas and redirected toward Russian cities. The Russian elites and urban populations were fed, and the man-made famine was used as a political weapon to crush independence-minded anti-Soviet movements in Ukraine.

Nobody knows how many millions of people died in that famine. Estimates run as high as 10 million.

7. ‘The Chosen’ Is Putting a Rumor to Rest: ‘We’re Not Produced by Mormons’

From CBN:

Critics of the viral TV series about the life of Jesus Christ titled The Chosen have been spreading rumors that the show is a Mormon production. Now the makers of The Chosen are putting that rumor to rest.

On April 26, the creators of the popular series addressed concerns in a Facebook post, making it clear that the series is not produced by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The post included a photo that has been making its way around social media with a message at the bottom saying, “This is not an anti-Christian show produced by Mormons. Be very careful about this show.”

8. Moderna Asks FDA to Clear Its Covid Vaccine for Kids Under 6

From The Wall Street Journal:

Moderna Inc. has asked U.S. health regulators to authorize the use of its Covid-19 vaccine in children ages 6 months to 5 years old.

The company said Thursday that it had submitted the request after a study showed the shot safely induced immune responses in the young age group.

If the regulators agree, one of the last remaining age groups still not eligible for Covid-19 vaccination in the U.S.—children under 5 years—could begin to receive the shots by summer.

9. The FDA is proposing a ban on menthol cigarettes

From NPR:

The Food and Drug Administration is proposing a ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes and all cigar flavorings, except for tobacco flavor, the agency said Thursday.

The agency says the proposal has the potential to significantly decrease disease and death from tobacco by “reducing youth experimentation and addiction.”

“The proposed rules would help prevent children from becoming the next generation of smokers and help adult smokers quit,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “Additionally, the proposed rules represent an important step to advance health equity by significantly reducing tobacco-related health disparities.”

10. Look Up from Your Phone – And Have a Real-Life Conversation with a Real Person

From The Daily Citizen:

If the world seems to be growing stranger by the day, maybe it’s because it is.

Tuesday’s New York Post featured the story of Akihiko Kondo – a 38-year-old man from Japan who describes himself as a “fictosexual” who’s been “married” to a hologram for the last four years.

While only a very small percentage of people around the world may share Akihiko Kondo’s tragic dysfunction, a far greater number of people are nevertheless living in a increasingly virtual world that’s void of personal contact.

If you’re not convinced, just go to any airport or mall or look at passengers on a train. The vast majority of them will have their heads down in their phones. They’re scrolling – and scrolling. And scrolling. The average cellphone user swipes or clicks their phone over 2000 times a day.

Since 2014, texting has replaced talking for the most frequent form of communication. In fact, texting has increased by 7,700% percent in the last ten years.

A fallen humanity is full of many complex problems – but this isn’t one of them. The answer is pretty straightforward and simple:

Resist the urge to retreat to the safe world of your phone and ask questions of people around you. Pay them a compliment. Smile. Or, instead of texting your friend, give them a call. The sound of a friend’s voice can soothe and encourage. Real laughter beats texting “lol” or sharing an emoji of a smiling circle.

God created us for face-to-face interaction. It was the writer of Hebrews who urged believers to not neglect meeting together – “as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near” (10:25).

That was good advice then – and it’s good advice now.