Good Morning!
The United Nations recently described North Korea’s cruelty as “unparalleled in the modern world.” Human rights groups have warned about China’s “crimes against humanity.”
If it’s true we’re the essence of the company we keep, what does it say about America that it’s one of the few countries (inclusive of North Korea and China) that permit unfettered access to abortion after twenty weeks?
- Abortion Laws across the Globe and at Home
From Public Discourse:
During oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Chief Justice John Roberts observed that Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban mirrored restrictions that are common in all but a handful of other countries, such as China and North Korea. While Center for Reproductive Rights attorney Julie Rikelman tried to deny the comparison and downplay its significance, it remains striking and instructive.
Only the United States and Canada—along with China, North Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, and the Netherlands—allow elective abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The Supreme Court’s abortion jurisprudence, beginning with Roe v. Wade (1973), drives this anomaly. When the Roe court struck down Texas’s abortion regulations—and, in effect, those of nearly every other state as well—it declared abortion to be a fundamental constitutional right. Roe and its progeny, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), effectively barred any meaningful restrictions on abortion, and as such departed dramatically not only from American practice but also from most other nations’ approaches.
Difficult questions about unborn persons’ human rights and their status in law and policy are at the heart of the abortion debate. The current Supreme Court of the United States seems poised to repent of its power grab in Roe and to return questions of abortion regulation and the legal protection of unborn persons to democratic decision-making. Legislators, government officials, and citizens of all stripes should be prepared to understand the decision in order to strengthen the rule of law and the protection of human rights—including those of the unborn. Learning about other nations’ abortion laws can instruct our view of the justice or injustice of our own laws.
- Justice Thomas Shouldn’t Recuse From Elections Cases
From the Wall Street Journal:
The point of the pile-on is to hurt the reputation of the Justice as part of the larger effort to delegitimize the current Supreme Court. The Justices are considering cases on abortion, gun rights, racial preferences, and the administrative state that Democrats fear will go against their policy preferences.
If you doubt the Court itself is a target, note this headline in the Washington Post: “ John Roberts must be at his limit.” Or this from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Justice Thomas’ bias on Trump destroys Supreme Court integrity. He must recuse.”
The right answer is that Ginni Thomas is no threat to the Court, no matter how bizarre her views about the 2020 election. She doesn’t sit on the Court, and there is no reason to believe her personal political views influence the judicial impartiality of Justice Thomas.
Moreover, any decision about recusal is entirely Justice Thomas’s to make. Our own view is that the Justice has what our friends at the New York Sun call the “duty to sit” on these cases, and that recusal would be an abdication of that duty.
Very few cases that come before the Court aren’t political in some sense. If a spouse’s political views are grounds for recusal—say, on abortion—the Court might never have a full complement of nine. That result may be precisely the result that Democratic and media critics of Ginni and Justice Thomas want to achieve with their recusal demands.
- Biden’s ‘Equity’ Budget Mentions Term Over 100 Times
From the Washington Free Beacon:
President Joe Biden’s budget allocates billions of dollars toward advancing “equity” in dozens of government agencies, even as his administration attempts to sell it as a moderate proposal.
Biden’s spending plan mentions “equity” and its derivatives more than 100 times, including in a $48 million allocation for an “equitable National Park System.” With this money, the Department of the Interior “would expand operations at parks that preserve and tell the story of historically underrepresented and marginalized groups.” The State Department will receive $2.6 billion under the plan to “advance gender equity.” The Environmental Protection Agency will receive more than $1.5 billion to “advance racial equity and secure environmental justice for communities.”
With a price tag of $5.8 trillion, the budget displays a commitment to the nebulous left-wing concept of “equity,” which often includes “antiracism” training, explicitly favoring minority job applicants when hiring or direct cash handouts to aggrieved groups.
“Persistent systemic inequities and barriers to opportunity have denied this promise for so many,” the introduction to Biden’s budget reads. “That is why the president has taken historic steps to put equity at the center of his agenda—and why the president assembled the most diverse cabinet in American history to deliver on this government-wide effort.”
4. The Sad Collapse and Corruption of Disney’s (Woke) World
From The Daily Citizen:
Few companies have fallen as far as the once wonderful world of Disney – which is anything but wonderful today.
Footage of a leaked company-wide Zoom call confirms Disney’s desire to embrace an agenda that deliberately and blatantly rejects a Christian worldview of the family, as well as God’s view of human sexuality.
The meeting was held in response to the Florida legislature’s passage and Governor Ron DeSantis’ signing of HB 1557 – a bill that prohibits state teachers from introducing or pushing LGBT topics on children in kindergarten through the third grade. Critics of the legislation, along with willing accomplices in the press, have erroneously and deceptively and deceitfully labeled it as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
In reality, it’s common-sense legislation that recognizes parents reserve the absolute right to decide when and what their children are to be taught about such sensitive issues.
But Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, feels strongly that if children aren’t going to be propagandized in school, they should be brainwashed and confused via Disney entertainment.
“I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually,” Burke told employees. “One transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader.”
“Disneyland will never be completed as long as there is imagination left in the world,” Walt Disney once said.
Tragically, God’s gift of “imagination” has been deeply corrupted in this case, bringing to mind the words and warning of the apostle Paul to believers in Rome:
“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God,” he wrote, “God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (1:28).
- The Daily Wire Announces ‘Daily Wire Kids,’ Minimum $100 Million Launch Into Kids Entertainment Over Next Three Years
From the Daily Wire:
On Wednesday evening, The Daily Wire’s co-CEO and “god-king” Jeremy Boreing announced at The Daily Wire Company Townhall that the company will “invest a minimum of $100 million over the next three years into a line of live-action and animated children’s entertainment on its streaming platform.” The content will be available to Daily Wire subscribers starting in the Spring of 2023.
“Americans are tired of giving their money to woke corporations who hate them,” said Boreing. “They’re tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory. But they want to do more than just cancel them. They want alternatives. The Daily Wire is giving them those alternatives.”
The Daily Wire’s plan to produce children’s content has been in the works for months. Boreing has brought on Eric Branscum and Ethan Nicolle of “VeggieTales” and the Babylon Bee to head up kids content development.
The original announcement of The Daily Wire’s kids content was slated for November 2022, however, The Daily Wire decided to move up the announcement to Wednesday because of reporting from Christopher Rufo, who revealed on Tuesday that Disney recently held a company meeting in response to Florida’s Parental Rights In Education Bill. In Rufo’s footage, employees like Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer for Disney, bragged about increasing “queerness” in their Disney content during the private, all-hands meeting. She also admitted to having a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.” Vivian Ware, Disney’s diversity and inclusion manager, at the same meeting said that the company has been altering gendered language in its theme parks to come up with more gender-neutral terms.
- University Backs Off from ‘No Contact’ Order Given to Christian Student Whose Views Triggered Liberal Classmates
From The Daily Citizen:
There’s a happy ending to a recent story of Southern Illinois University (SIU) graduate student Maggie DeJong who was ordered, without any prior notice or chance to defend herself, to have “no contact” with three of her classmates who found her religious views objectionable.
The school has dropped its investigation of Maggie, thanks to a strongly worded letter from her attorneys with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).
“The university was right to drop its baseless investigation into Maggie, but unfortunately, there should not have been an investigation in the first place,” said ADF Senior Counsel Tyson Langhofer, director of the ADF Center for Academic Freedom, in a press release. “University officials should welcome dialogue from a wide range of religious and ideological viewpoints, modeling for students an environment where freedom of speech and religious expression can flourish.
“Yet Southern Illinois University Edwardsville officials stifled Maggie’s ability to meaningfully engage and participate in her academic program because she sometimes spoke from a religious point of view. The university must revise its policies to adequately safeguard the constitutionally protected freedoms of Maggie and every other student and ensure that no other students are subjected to baseless investigations for expressing their religious views.”
- Oklahoma Governor Signs ‘Save Girls Sports’ Bill into Law
From The Daily Citizen:
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt has signed a bill into law saving girls and women’s sports in the Sooner State.
Oklahoma Senate Bill 2 (SB 2) is titled the “Save Women’s Sports Act” and stipulates that school athletic teams must be designated as one of the following based on biological sex:
Males, men or boys.
Females, women or girls.
Coed or mixed.
“Athletic teams designated for ‘females,’ ‘women’ or ‘girls’ shall not be open to students of the male sex,” the bill states.
Signing SB 2 into law on Wednesday, Governor Stitt rightly called the legislation “common sense.”
“When it comes to sports and athletics, girls should compete against girls. Boys should compete against boys. And let’s be very clear: That’s all this bill says,” Gov. Stitt stated.
- Pennsylvania judge rules in favor of parents, removes five board members over mandatory masks in schools
From the Post Millennial:
A Pennsylvania judge ordered the removal of five school board members in West Chester on Tuesday after a parent petitioned the curts to remove board members that voted to make masks mandatory in schools.
Judge William P. Mahon ruled that all five Democratic West Chester Area School District board members need to be “removed fromoffice.” Those members are board president Sue Tiernan, and directors Joyce Chester, Kate Shaw, Karen Herrmann, and Daryl Durnell.
Judge Mahon wrote that his decision came after there was “no response” to the petition by the school district or its counsel, according to court documents.
- The Exodus From US Cities Is Gaining Speed, New Census Data Show
From Fee:
America’s largest metro areas saw massive declines in population, new US Census Bureau data show.
Three of the top five metros that saw sharp declines between July 1, 2020, and July 1, 2021 were in California. Leading the way was the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area, which lost 176,000 residents, a 1.3 percent drop. Next was the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro, which saw a decline of 116,000 residents (2.5 percent decline), followed by San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, which shed some 43,000 residents (2.2 percent drop).
“We are in this new demographic era for California of very slow or maybe even negative growth,” Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Los Angeles Times. “And it does have implications for everything in our state — from how we live our lives to which schools are getting closed down to how much capacity we might need for transportation networks, and eventually to housing.”
California metros had company, however.
The New York-Newark-New Jersey metropolitan area saw a decline of 328,000 residents, the highest in the nation in raw numbers. The Chicago area, meanwhile, saw a decline of some 92,000 residents.
10.A Woman Worth Emulating
From The Daily Citizen:
March has been Women’s History Month, and this year I’ve been reflecting on what it is about some women that make their lives so extraordinary.
As a Christian, I am especially drawn to women of faith who have lived out their God-given callings in ways that transformed communities.
One such woman was Corrie ten Boom.
Truth be told, I think it’s ironic that we still get to celebrate “women’s” history month when the woke culture of our day is trying to eliminate the word “woman” from our vocabulary.
But try as they may to strike the word from modern language, there is still something undeniably unique about how God designed and gifted women – and that should be recognized and celebrated.
Indeed, I think it’s precisely those unique feminine propensities and qualities that are a woman’s strength and set her apart.
