Good Morning!
American culture is full of irony. An essay in yesterday’s New York Times suggested, “How we treat farm animals is a defining moral failure of our age.”
Never mind that nearly one million babies are being slaughtered each year in every direction of those farms.
Speaking of irony, we begin with sad news about an agency charged with protecting the health of humans authorizing a pill to kill them:
- F.D.A. Will Permanently Allow Abortion Pills by Mail
Focus on the Family president Jim Daly reacted:
“The FDA’s authorization of abortion pills by mail is a heartbreaking turn for an agency originally created in order to protect the health and safety of Americans. In announcing this decision, the agency is blatantly derelict in its duty and overseeing the destruction and not the preservation of innocent human life.”
RELATED:
From The New York Times:
The federal government on Thursday permanently lifted a major restriction on access to abortion pills. It will allow patients to receive the medication by mail instead of requiring them to obtain the pills in person from specially certified health providers.
The decision, by the Food and Drug Administration, comes as the Supreme Court is considering whether to roll back abortion rights or even overturn its landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal nationwide.
The F.D.A.’s action means that medication abortion, an increasingly common method authorized in the United States for pregnancies up to 10 weeks’ gestation, will become more available to women who find it difficult to travel to an abortion provider or prefer to terminate a pregnancy in the privacy of their homes. It allows patients to have a telemedicine appointment with a provider who can prescribe abortion pills and send them to the patient by mail.
Earlier this year, for the duration of the pandemic, the F.D.A. temporarily lifted the in-person requirement on mifepristone, the first of two drugs used to end a pregnancy. The decision to make this change permanent is likely to deepen the already polarizing divisions between conservative and liberal states on abortion. In 19 states, mostly in the South and the Midwest, telemedicine visits for medication abortion are banned, and these and other conservative states can be expected to pass other laws to further curtail access to abortion pills.
- Supreme Court Sends Texas Abortion Case To More Conservative Court, Against Wishes Of Abortion Providers
From the Daily Wire:
On Thursday, the Supreme Court sent a case regarding Texas’s abortion law back to an appeals court, receiving some pushback from pro-abortion advocates in the process.
As The Washington Post reported, the case was sent back to a federal appeals court, but it was reportedly not given to the court preferred by abortion advocates. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit is considered to be more conservative.
Attorneys for the abortion providers had asked for certain stipulations concerning the case earlier this week, including that Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the opinion in the case, go around the typical 25-day time period in order to move faster and send the necessary documents to a judge in a district court.
They also requested that he give the case to a district court judge who had previously said the Texas legislation was unconstitutional.
3. Religious Americans Less Likely to Divorce
Dr. Brad Wilcox writes in Christianity Today:
According to the US Census, the average American couple gets married around the age of 30. Many young adults believe that forming unions closer to that age reduces their risk of divorce, and, indeed, there is research consistent with that belief. But we also have evidence suggesting that religious Americans are less likely to divorce, even as they are more likely to marry younger than 30.
This paradoxical pattern raises two questions worth exploring: Is the way religious Americans form their marriages different than the way their more secular peers do? And do religious unions formed by 20-somethings face different divorce odds than those formed by secular Americans in the same age group?
The answer to that last question is complicated by the role of cohabitation in contemporary family formation. Today, more than 70 percent of marriages are preceded by cohabitation, as Figure 1 indicates. Increased cohabitation is both a cause and a consequence of the rise in the average age of first marriage. But what most young adults do not know is that cohabiting before marriage, especially with someone other than your future spouse, is also associated with an increased risk of divorce, as a recent Stanford study reports.
One reason that religious marriages in America may be more stable is that they reduce young adults’ odds of cohabiting prior to marriage, even though they increase their likelihood of marrying at a relatively young age. With that in mind, we’ve explored the relationships between religion, cohabitation, age at marriage, and divorce by looking at data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG).
Does religion influence marriage and cohabitation?
To address this question and others, we merged data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) from 1995 to 2019, using responses from over 53,000 women ages 15–49. After controlling for a variety of background factors, women who grew up religious are about 20 percent less likely to begin a cohabiting union in any given year than their nonreligious peers. By age 35, about 65 percent of women with a nonreligious upbringing had cohabited at least once, versus under 50 percent of women with a religious upbringing.
4. Sue Them, Parents. Sue Them Into The Ground
Rod Dreher writes:
Nothing sets me on fire like child abuse — and that’s exactly what this is. Parents, get together, hire a lawyer, and sue this school system and those teachers until their teeth rattle. Make every school administrator and every teacher in the state scared to death to mess with your kids.
If it’s happening in California, this secret indoctrination, is it happening in your kids’ school system wherever you are? Are you sure? Don’t count on the local news media to search for the answer. You’re going to have to find out for yourself. If any readers of this blog have resources to help parents get to the bottom of what may be going on in their own children’s school, please put it in the comments.
If you watch only one of the videos above, make it the first one, with the angry mom, Jessica Konen. She could be you. What if those teachers did that to your daughter? What if they called CPS on you?
We cannot let this happen in our country. We cannot. These child-stealing monsters have the President of the United States on their side, and the news and entertainment media, and the educational establishment, as well as corporate America. They’re all lined up against moms and dads. It is time to release the Mama Kraken and the Lawyer Kraken on these woke pervs.
- Poll Finds Shrinking Number of U.S. Christians. Here’s the Real Reason Behind the Decline.
From The Daily Citizen:
A new poll has found that the share of Americans who self-identify as Christians is continuing to shrink – and that the “nones,” or those who identify with no religion, are the fastest growing “religious” group in the nation.
The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that self-identified Christians now make up 63% of the adult population in the United States – 12 points lower it was just one decade ago in 2011.
Pew includes Protestants, Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Orthodox Christians as “self-identified Christians.”
Those who call themselves “nones” – described by Pew as atheists, agnostics or those who believe “nothing in particular” in terms of religion have increased by 10 points in a decade, from 19% in 2011 to 29% today.
6. For teenage girls, pressure to be perfect carries heavy mental health toll
From Study Finds:
The research finds that older teenage girls are more likely to develop mental health issues than boys of the same age. Most studied data indicates that many of these mental health concerns are sparked by high school and grade-related stress.
All of the pressure placed on young women to simultaneously excel academically, flourish socially, and maintain an active extracurricular schedule shapes how they perceive and understand the very notion of “success and achievement.” Countless young women are being conditioned to believe that if they don’t reach a specific set of goals and conditions they’ve already failed in life.
7. As a Woman, I Think Porn Is a Disgrace’: Billie Eilish Says She Started Watching Porn at 11, Admits It ‘Destroyed’ Her Brain
From CBN:
Pop singer Billie Eilish is condemning pornography as a scourge on society.
The 19-year-old “Ocean Eyes” singer said during an interview with provocative shock jock Howard Stern: “As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace, and I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest.”
“I started watching porn when I was 11,” she explained to Stern, who is known for his frequent objectification of women. “I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing. I thought that’s how you learn how to have sex.”
Eilish went on to reveal the myriad ways pornography harmed her:
I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. I think that I had sleep paralysis, and these almost like night terrors, just nightmares. I think that’s how they started, because I would just watch abusive [pornography] and that’s what I thought was attractive, and it got to a point where I couldn’t watch anything unless it was violent, and I didn’t think it was attractive.
- Los Angeles school hosts LGBTQ clubs for kids as young as 4 years old to teach transgender mutilation, ‘two-spirit’ sexuality
From TheBlaze:
The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Office of Human Relations, Equity, and Diversity hosted a 10-week online club for LGBTQ elementary school students, according to a Wednesday report from the Federalist.
The group — dubbed the “Rainbow Club” — promoted “two-spirit” sexuality and taught the intricate details of gender reassignment surgery.
The group hosted online meetings over a period of 10 weeks.
According to the report, the virtual club was geared toward “LGBTQ+ elementary school students, their friends, and their grown-ups.”
The outlet reported that the District Office of Human Relations, Equity, and Diversity created a variety of “short, student-facing Push & Play lessons for educators to utilize in their advisory classes.”
9. 12 remaining missionaries kidnapped in Haiti are now free
From the Christian Post:
The Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries thanked God Thursday morning as it announced that the 12 remaining missionaries who were among 17 kidnapped by the notorious 400 Mawozo gang in Haiti have now all been released.
“We glorify God for answered prayer — the remaining 12 hostages are FREE! Join us in praising God that all 17 of our loved ones are now safe. Thank you for your fervent prayers throughout the past two months. We hope to provide more information as we are able,” the international aid ministry said in a statement to The Christian Post, which also quoted a portion of Exodus 15:1
“I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously,” the verse says.
- The Decline of the Movie Theater
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:
You lose something when the whole town isn’t there anymore. It’s better when the whole town is gathered. The move to streaming strikes me as yet another huge cultural change, and I don’t know the answer or remedy to this change and others will have to find it. Because not all movies can be superhero movies, and not all movies should be.
I never thought movie theaters would go out of style, but I see that in the past few months, since New York has loosened up and things are open, I have gone to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows five times and to a movie not at all, except this week for this column. Like all Americans, I really love movies. But I can watch them at home.
The old world of America at the movies, of gathering at the local temple of culture, the multiplex, is over. People won’t rush out to see a movie they heard was great but that’s confined to theatrical release; they’ll stay home knowing it will be streaming soon.
Movie theaters won’t completely go out of business; a good number will survive because people will fill them to go to superhero movies and big fantastical action films. People will want to see those on the screen together and hoot and holler. But it will never again be as it was, different generations, different people, coming together on Saturday night at the bijou. The bijou is at home now, on the couch or bed, streaming in ultrahigh definition.
