Good Morning!
Katy Faust is the founder of “Them Before Us” – a non-profit organization “dedicated to putting the rights of children over the desires of adults.”
“We need a conservative movement affirming the reality of male and female,” she recently tweeted. “And that those two individuals make babies; those babies have a right to their mother and father; all decisions about marriage and family should flow from that reality.”
We begin with a look at Katy Faust’s appearance this past week at Focus on the Family’s Holland, MI, bookstore to discuss this very thing:
1. Children Have a Fundamental Right to Their Mother and Father
From The Daily Citizen:
Katy Faust is an angry, fired up Seattle mother of four, and a pastor’s wife. She wasn’t always this way. For the most part, she was a shy woman who kept to herself. But then something set her off. Big time. She says she “straight up snapped.”
What set her off started a women-led, influential, international movement on how we view the family. Here is the story.
Katy’s mother and father divorced when she was 10 years old. It was difficult on her, even though she maintained a very close relationship with both her parents. Her dad remarried and her mother moved in with her female lover, who was not the cause of the divorce. She continued to love her mother and counted her partner as a close friend. But if Katy could have waved a magic wand, that young girl would have had her parents’ marriage mended. These new families left a deep wound in Katy’s heart. She is not alone in this.
Forward to an average day in 2012 and what made Katy really snap. It had to do with the cultural evolution of language over the make-up of family. She explains that right around the time President Obama mysteriously “evolved” on the subject of same-sex marriage – he was against it until he was for it, one evening after talking to his school-age daughter at bedtime – the nasty word “bigot” became attached to anyone who believed what humanity had always believed: Children need the love of a married mother and father.
Instead, activists were saying children only needed two parents, any two parents.
She knew this was a lie. She knew it first-hand. And she knew the lie was created for political and ideological purposes. She, her husband and their many friends in uber-liberal Seattle simultaneously held that it is a tragedy when any child loses access to their mother and father while also deeply loving their same-sex attracted family members, friends, neighbors and co-workers.
Katy was deeply offended at the cheap and baseless accusation that people who believe children need a married mom and dad are bigots. All to push an anti-child agenda.
2. Is Anyone Actually Fooled by Lia Thomas?
From National Review:
From the Times:
ATLANTA — Lia Thomas, the transgender woman whose record-threatening times on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team made her a star of college athletics and a symbol of the debate over sports and gender identity, won an N.C.A.A. championship in the 500-yard freestyle on Thursday.
Thomas, a fifth-year senior who arrived for the swimming championships in Atlanta as the top seed in the 500 and 200 freestyle races, completed the race in 4 minutes, 33.24 seconds, more than a second ahead of the runner-up.
I would like to know who is fooled by this. My suspicion is that almost nobody is fooled by this, but that almost everybody is scared to admit that in public.
However “Lia Thomas” might self-identify, he has the body of a man. This matters, because he is competing in a women’s sports league, and because there are profound biological differences between men and women in that sport, as in almost every other. The Times reports that Thomas “that left opponents far behind and put some collegiate records under new pressure.” Well, yeah. This is because Thomas is a man, and because Thomas’s “opponents” — two of whom were Olympians — are not.
The Times adds that:
As some insist that no amount of testosterone suppression can undo the physiological changes linked to male puberty, like taller height and larger hands and feet, others dispute that transgender women have a built-in advantage and have argued that inclusion should outweigh competition.
Again: Who is fooled by this “others dispute that . . .” stuff? It’s nonsense, and we all know it. As for the idea that “inclusion should outweigh competition”? That is an obvious transparent post-rationalization. By definition, N.C.A.A. swimming is a “competitive” sport, and the only reason that anyone involved would think of suggesting otherwise is to justify including a man in the participants’ ranks.
- Millionaires, LGBT-Identified Folks, Vegans, Lefties, Atheists – Americans Greatly Overestimate Minority Groups in the Population
From The Daily Citizen:
Polling demonstrates that Americans tend to greatly overestimate the populations of subgroups within our general population. This includes estimates for religious minorities – such as Jews, Catholics or Muslims; racial and ethnic groups, such as Asian, Native, and black Americans; and income – those with household incomes over $500,000 and $1 million.
The overestimates include where people live, such as Texas, California and New York City, as well as the percentage of the population who identify as transgender, bisexual, or gay or lesbian.
On the flip side, people tend to underestimate the percentage in majority groups, such as Christians, whites, homeowners and those who have read a book in the past year.
The polling comes from YouGovAmerica, part of the British international market research and data analytics firm YouGov, headquartered in London.
- Tyrants Like Putin Can’t Tolerate Truth
From the Wall Street Journal:
A friend once posed an intriguing hypothetical to Pope John Paul II. Suppose the entire Bible were destroyed. What one sentence or phrase would you want preserved for humanity’s future? He didn’t hesitate: “. . . the truth will make you free” (John 8:32).
The same conviction about the liberating power of seeing things as they are—and describing them honestly—inspired Václav Havel and other human-rights activists to promote “living in the truth” as a powerful antidote to the communist culture of lies during the Cold War.
Tyrants cannot tolerate the truth. That is why Mr. Putin’s Russia floods the global information space with lies about his invasion of Ukraine. And that makes the 50th anniversary of the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania an apt time to reflect on the liberating power of truth-telling, whatever the cost.
RELATED:
On Ukraine, History Is Listening
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal:
I’m thinking of the astounding events of the past three weeks—how history throws its curves and you watch stunning new factors emerge and at some point you feel grateful to feel humble. This ol’ world can still surprise. It can confound every expectation.
One surprise, the central one. No one knew the people of Ukraine would fight so bravely and effectively. Maybe they didn’t know. The past week I realized they will never stop. They are not going to give up. If Russia knocks down, blows up and occupies the entire country they will continue to resist. Ukrainians are proving each day that there is a country called Ukraine, and it isn’t Russia. It shares much with Russia, including blood lines and languages, but it is another place, an independent country with a proud people.
Vladimir Putin went in saying Ukraine wasn’t a nation. He made it a nation. He gave it the conditions by which it would reveal itself to itself.
I am struck again by what a disaster this is for Mr. Putin however it turns out, even if he “wins.” He too is revealed. His army doesn’t work, he is an anathema. His nation is economically injured, its standing in the world sullied, and its great new ally China is realizing it isn’t on the side, as it had thought, of deadly competence. This week Beijing felt forced to defend itself in the Washington Post.
- The CDC Quietly Updates Data on Child COVID Deaths
From Townhall:
The Centers for Disease Control has quietly changed it’s data representing the number of children who died from Wuhan coronavirus.
Last fall, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced the government agency would reevaluate how virus deaths are counted and differentiate between individuals who died from the disease vs. those who died with the disease.
This week @CDCgov removed a total of 30,000 Covid deaths from the dashboard, reducing pediatric deaths by 24%. In small print at the bottom they cited a “coding error” as the reason for the incorrectly inflated numbers.
Last fall, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced the government agency would reevaluate how virus deaths are counted and differentiate between individuals who died from the disease vs. those who died with the disease.
- Weddings Will Hit a 40-Year High This Year
From Bloomberg:
“Weddings are back,” Signet Jewelers Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Gina Drosos told analysts during an earnings call Thursday. The company bases its matrimonial outlook on internal research and data on bookings at venues. Signet has an estimated 30% of the bridal jewelry market in the U.S. Drosos said later in an interview that Signet doesn’t foresee trouble sourcing diamonds to meet the growing demand, despite the company’s ban on buying stones mined in Russia.
7. Queen Elizabeth Found Her Children’s Divorces ‘Deeply Upsetting,’ Royal Biographer Claims
From the Daily Wire:
If there’s one thing Queen Elizabeth can’t stand, it’s unnecessary drama. The long-reigning monarch has made a career out of perfecting her stiff upper lip and staying calm even in the face of extreme trouble. That’s why the revelation that the queen was distraught by her children’s divorces is so intriguing.
The report comes courtesy of an upcoming biography about Her Majesty called “Queen of Our Times: The Life of Queen Elizabeth II.” Author Robert Hardman delved into the distress the queen felt upon learning that the marriages of three out of her four children would end in divorce.
“Outwardly stoical, as ever, the Queen was finding the divorce talks deeply upsetting,” Hardman says in the book, according to People. The biography will be released April 5.
“Another former member of the Household recalls that, every now and then, there would be a glimpse of her despair.”
- New Show ‘The Garden’ Aims to Teach Children About Jesus Through Comedy and Adventure
From The Daily Citizen:
How do you tell your children about the love that Christ has for them, and that they were made to know, love, and serve God?
Each day, Christian parents all around the world struggle with that question, wrestling with the best way to share their faith with their kids.
Over the past few decades, great advances in technology have opened numerous new avenues for children to learn about God’s love for them.
One way is through “The Garden,” a new animated show for children ages 3-8 that is “centered around the Christian teachings of Jesus Christ.”
- Excessive napping could be a sign of dementia, study finds
From CNN:
Frequent napping or regularly napping for extended periods during the day may be a sign of early dementia in older adults, a new study revealed.
Elderly adults who napped at least once a day or more than an hour a day were 40% more likely to develop Alzheimer’s than those who did not nap daily or napped less than an hour a day, according to the study published Thursday in Alzheimer’s and Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
“We found the association between excessive daytime napping and dementia remained after adjusting for nighttime quantity and quality of sleep,” said co-senior author Dr. Yue Leng, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, in a statement.
The results echo the findings of a previous study by Leng that found napping two hours a day raised the risk of cognitive impairment compared with napping less than 30 minutes a day.
10.Aurora woman supports deaf Coloradans during pandemic with sign language Bible
From ABC7:
One Colorado woman spent her days connecting with people who are deaf through video chat.
Nevelyn Benjamin, of Aurora, helped them study scriptures with the help of what’s being called the first complete American Sign Language Bible.
“Love means action,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin, a sign language interpreter, has been sharing the love through video chat all pandemic long.
“We don’t just say, ‘I love you,’” she said. “There’s more to it when it comes to truly showing affection for others. There’s actions involved.”
She has taught the Bible to deaf people of all denominations.
“The Bible’s message offers something positive, uplifting, and right now it’s so crucial because of all the things going on in the world that can really bring us down,” she said.
