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In a culture unhinged and detached from reality, it becomes beholden upon the responsible to protect and preserve common sense – and girls’ sports.
“For too long, those who hold to the biblical pattern of gender distinctions have allowed themselves to be silenced, marginalized, and embarrassed when confronted by new gender theorists,” said Dr. Al Mohler.
“Now is the time to recapture the momentum, force the questions, and show this generation God’s design in the biblical concept of manhood and womanhood. God’s glory is shown to the world in the complementarity of men and women. This crucial challenge is a summons to Christian boldness in the present hour.”
- Iowa Becomes 11th State to Pass Legislation to ‘Save Girls Sports’
From The Daily Citizen:
Over the past several years, there have been more and more instances of biological males, who identify as females, competing in girls and women’s sports.
In response, several states have taken action to ensure that only girls and women can compete in female athletics.
According to the Save Women’s Sports organization, nine states so far have passed legislation to protect female athletics from biological males wishing to join.
But now, Iowa has become the 11th.
Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds has signed a bill into law ensuring that only biological females can compete in female athletics.
- Christian Foster Parents Who Lost License over Biblical Beliefs May Sue, Federal Court Rules
From The Daily Citizen:
The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court decision dismissing a New Jersey couple’s lawsuit against the state after it removed their foster child and suspended their license to foster parent. The decision relies on recent U.S. Supreme Court cases favoring religious freedom and paves the way for Christians in the Garden State to push back against government hostility toward biblical values.
Licensed foster parents Michael and Jennifer Lasche could only watch helplessly in 2018 as their foster daughter – whom they wanted to adopt – was removed from their home by government officials. Employees of the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency (DCPP) decided the Lasches’ religious beliefs about the sinfulness of homosexual conduct and same-sex “marriage” justified the child’s removal.
But then the state went even further in making its point by suspending the Lasches’ license to foster any child. When the couple sued the state for violating their constitutional rights, a federal district court dismissed the lawsuit.
However, the 3rd Circuit reinstated the lawsuit and sent it back down to the lower court for further proceedings.
3. Justices let Republican argue abortion case
From World Magazine:
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron can continue to fight to protect babies in his state from dismemberment abortion, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. After the law passed in 2018, Kentucky’s only abortion facility sued. When Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration took office, it stopped defending the case in court. But in 2019, Cameron, a Republican, stepped in to argue the case. A lower court ruled that he wasn’t allowed to intervene so late in the process, but the Supreme Court disagreed.
What happens next? The 8-1 Supreme Court ruling means Cameron can ask the appeals court to rehear the case. If it says no, he may end up back before the justices—this time arguing the merits of the law, rather than his right to defend it. Dismemberment is the most common method of second-trimester abortions.
4. Student faces attacks for reading Bible in Florida school, science teacher called him ‘ignorant’: lawsuit
From the Christian Post:
A 14-year-old Christian student in Florida, who was allegedly told to stop taking his Bible to school after he was repeatedly attacked and bullied by students and teachers alike for his faith, has filed a lawsuit “seeking significant damages because the school has destroyed his educational experience.”
The Dhillon Law Group filed the 206-page lawsuit against Mater Academy, a public charter school in Hialeah Gardens, on behalf of Nicolas Ortiz through his parents, Rafael and Lourdes Ortiz, on Monday.
“Mr. Ortiz is experiencing something that no American should ever have to experience,” Dhillon Law Group managing partner, Harmeet K. Dhillon, said in a statement.
“It’s bad enough that the school has done nothing to stop the bullying from his peers, but have gone as far as joining in on targeting Mr. Ortiz for simply practicing his faith. This blatant violation of his first amendment rights is another example of how extreme so many in our education system have become, and why Dhillon Law Group is coming to Mr. Ortiz’s defense.”
- Ukraine’s Believers and the ‘Christian’ Putin
From the Wall Street Journal:
Protestant churches have proliferated by the hundreds since Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In recent years, however, Moscow operatives have steadily increased their harassment and intimidation tactics against these congregations. The results: church properties seized, clergy tortured and killed.
They have a new and unlikely advocate in Natalie Jaresko, the former finance minister who steered Ukraine’s $15 billion debt restructuring in 2015. Ms. Jaresko, 56, is Orthodox, born on Chicago’s West Side to Ukrainians who survived Nazi death camps. She returned to her family’s homeland months after independence.
Ms. Jaresko notes a tendency among some religious conservatives in the U.S. to think Mr. Putin is upholding Christian values because he takes traditionalist views on social issues. These Americans, she says, ignore the dictator’s attacks on their fellow believers. “Ukraine is a tolerant society with deep Christian roots,” she says, “but that is what Putin cannot stand. He cannot stand a Slavic nation on his border that has a successful democracy, albeit messy. He cannot abide an example of democratic success next door while he remains an example of oppression.”
Lured over many years by statements suggesting Mr. Putin is pro-church, antiabortion and anti-same-sex-marriage, some religious conservatives have been reluctant to acknowledge the Russian leader’s expansionist aims. Ms. Jaresko believes that’s a mistake. “It’s a misunderstanding that Putin’s antiliberalism is aligned with Christian beliefs. His Christianity is a mythology and flawed in substance.” With Mr. Putin’s attack on a country that’s nearly 80% Christian, the Ukrainians’ grim determination to fight isn’t only patriotic. It’s a battle for their beliefs.
Ukraine’s Christians vow to engage the fight. Two days into the Russian assault, 10 evangelical seminaries in the region, including five in Ukraine and two in Russia, published a joint statement condemning Mr. Putin for “open and unjustified aggression” and “blatant lies.” Their declaration, if Mr. Putin succeeds in Ukraine, could turn into evidence against them.
“This was always our reality, and we knew that as Christian believers we would form a resistance,” says Mr. Perkhalskiy. “Now we are a whole nation of resisters.”
- Young Ukrainian couple married early when Russia invaded; now, they’re fighting for freedom
From Fox News:
A young Ukrainian couple has become a symbol of love and strength for the country after they decided to get married three months before their planned wedding in May when Russia began invading their homeland.
Yaryna Arieva, a 21-year-old woman wise beyond her years, told Fox News Digital that she and her 24-year-old husband, Sviatoslav Fursin, discussed getting “married in the first days of the war” if Putin invaded, but they didn’t “really believe” it would happen.
When the attacks began, her mother called around to the priests she knew in the area and got one to marry the couple without an official marriage certificate, which is very unusual in Ukraine, but the priest agreed due to unforeseen circumstances.
“The hardest two days of my life [were in] the beginning of the war,” Arieva told Fox News Digital, but since then, she and other Ukrainians have grown more accustomed to the sounds of explosions and news of attacks on TV.
7. From Masks to Gender Ideology: The Political Power of Parental Pushback
From Public Discourse:
In this latest installment of Public Discourse’s interview series, Editor-at-Large Serena Sigillito interviews Bethany Mandel, homeschooling mother of five, an editor at the children’s book company Heroes of Liberty, and a contributing writer for Deseret News. They discuss parents’ frustrations over masking children and transgender policies in schools—and what parents’ breaking point might be.
Serena Sigillito: You have been very involved in debates about masking in schools. Can you tell me some of your reasons for opposing masking? I know you also spoke out in favor of in-person schooling early on. So I wonder: did your views on masking evolve over time, or were you pro–in-person, maskless education from very early on in the pandemic?
Bethany Mandel: I was mostly in favor of it from very early on, when it became clear that kids were not effective spreaders. I mean, I was okay with it as a very short-term solution to get kids back in 2020. But as soon as vaccines became available to the high-risk, I was like, “Game’s over. Leave kids alone now.”
In May of 2020, my kids were doing in-person classes at The Little Gym, all day long. They were doing all-day camps. My friend owned The Little Gym. And she was trying to put bodies in the gym to show that kids are safe. She was trying to save her business, which she was ultimately not able to do, and they closed. But she asked me, “You have kids, you have a lot of them. Will you send them to show people that there are kids here, everyone is safe, and there are parents who trust us? We really need to send that message to other parents so that we can hopefully get people back in the gym.” And so I said, “Sure.” And it was a win-win for both of us, because I got free childcare, and she got bodies in the gym.
So my kids were there, maskless, starting in May of 2020, all the way until they closed thirteen months later. They were there inside, no masks, sometimes tons of kids, never the same kids . . . it was really a beautiful respite for my kids of normalcy. And I’m eternally grateful that they had that. And we didn’t get COVID. In fact, there was never a case of COVID tied to the gym the whole time that they were there. And we had massive—I’m talking twenty-five kids—birthday parties there. Every time we had one—we had like five birthday parties there over the course of it—I would count down for two weeks. I knew everyone who was at the birthday parties, and nobody got COVID the whole time. During the spikes, during all of it, there was never a case of COVID tied to the gym, either our family or anyone else. And they were doing contact tracing. They knew where people were getting it.
So it became clear to me that everything that we were doing to kids was completely unnecessary. And I saw, frankly, how well my kids were doing, having this normalcy, and I was seeing how just terribly every other kid in this county was doing because they were denied so much in-person interaction and so much in-person learning.
I homeschool my kids, and so I don’t have a dog in a fight. And I’m very glad to not have a dog in the fight. But I have the privilege of not having a dog in the fight. And I grew up in a household where, if this had been me when I was a kid, I don’t know what would have happened to me. I had a single mother. And if this had happened as a kid, I would have hated school. I would have associated school with resentment and feeling suffocated. And that’s the association that a lot of kids are having.
- U.S. Rep. Van Taylor drops his Texas reelection bid and admits to an affair
From NPR:
U.S. Rep. Van Taylor of Texas said Wednesday that he was ending his reelection campaign and admitted having an affair following reports that he had been in a relationship with the widow of an American-born recruiter for the Islamic State group.
The North Texas congressman’s announcement came the day after former Collin County Judge Keith Self forced Taylor into a runoff for the Republican nomination.
Several days before Tuesday’s primary election, some right-wing websites reported on an interview with Tania Joya, who said she had an affair with Taylor that lasted from October 2020 to June 2021. Joya, of the Dallas suburb of Plano, told The Dallas Morning News on Monday night that she had met the congressman through her work as an ex-jihadist helping to reprogram extremists.
Taylor apologized for the affair in a statement shared with supporters Wednesday. It didn’t mention Joya by name or reference her late husband, the Islamic State group recruiter.
- Over 60 Police Officers Shot Only Two Months Into the New Year
From Townhall:
Over 60 police officers in the United States have been shot while on duty in the first two months of 2022, according to the National Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), as violent crime continues to plague many cities across the country.
The FOP reports 67 officers were shot in the line of duty so far in 2022, a 40 percent increase from 2021 year-to-date; and a 76 percent increase from 2020 year-to-date. Of the 67 officers who were shot, 9 of them were killed by gunfire.
There have been 13 ambush-style attacks on law enforcement officers this year, resulting in 24 officers shot, with 4 being killed.
“Our law enforcement officers continue to be the targets of cowardly individuals whose sole motivation is to injure or kill a law enforcement officer. Law enforcement officers are being shot while serving the communities they love simply because of the uniform they wear. This violence is completely unacceptable, and it must end. It is incumbent upon our elected officials and community leaders to stand up and condemn the violence against law enforcement officers. Our elected officials at every level of government must swiftly act to address this surging increase of violence against police officers. Enough is enough!”
10.Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces that his wife ‘is now considered cancer free’
From TheBlaze:
Several months ago Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that his wife Casey had been diagnosed with breast cancer, but the Republican politician announced on Thursday that Florida’s first lady is now cancer free.
In a video message, DeSantis declared that, “After going through both treatment and surgery for breast cancer,” his wife “is now considered cancer free.”
While the governor said that there is more for his wife to do, he noted that he is “confident” that she will “make a full recovery.”
“There are no words to express how truly blessed, grateful and humbled I am to hear the words cancer free,” Casey DeSantis said in a statement. “To those who are in the fight, know there is hope. Have faith and stay strong.”
