Good Morning!
How you ask a question often dictates the quality of the answer you receive.
“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question,” wrote the poet and playwright, E.E. Cummings.
But sometimes questions are asked to deliberately mislead and produce a very specific answer:
- Support for religious liberty isn’t opposition to LGBTQ people
From World Magazine:
New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute documents Americans’ views on “LGBTQ rights” policies. The survey focused on three key pieces of legislation, including same-sex marriage, anti-discrimination protections in housing and workplace scenarios, and religious liberty for small business owners.
The survey report features an extensive analysis of white evangelical views—deemed one of the “least supportive of LGBTQ rights.” PRRI doesn’t seem to find this demographic’s results acceptable, but how it phrased the poll’s questions contributed to this outcome.
Intentionally using terms like “protection” frames some policies as inherently good and others as dangerous. Notably, the survey identifies “nondiscrimination protections” when referring to housing and jobs legislation. However, when it comes to small business owners, it doesn’t say “religious liberty protections,” which would make sense. Instead, it’s oddly worded as “religiously based service refusals.” A little consistency would go a long way, but that wouldn’t have fit the intended narrative.
According to PRRI, 62 percent of white evangelicals support “religious-based service refusals” while only 34 percent of the general public does. But changing the wording of a poll makes a world of difference. When the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty polled people on religious freedom, it found support from 92 percent of self-identified people of faith and 81 percent of the secular public, with 18 percent of secular individuals saying it is “protected too little.”
“Religious-based service refusals” are religious freedom, which allows people to live and work in ways that don’t violate their conscience or compel them to conform to government or culture. They’re also exceedingly rare.
- Seattle Museum Plans ‘Drag-tastic Summer Camp’ To Teach Kids ‘Art Of The Drag’
From the Federalist:
A Seattle museum is hosting a week-long summer camp for teens aged 12-18 where students who enroll will “investigate drag history” and find their own “drag personas.”
“Calling all current and future kings and queens!” reads the descriptor of the program sponsored by the Seattle Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP). “Explore self-expression in MoPOP’s week-long, drag-tastic summer camp! … You’ll choose your name, explore hair and makeup techniques, and develop your character’s stage presence.”
The five-day workshop, which teaches kids how to cross-dress and is led by local drag performer Joshua Hancock, will finish with a “private showcase” to allow adolescents to “celebrate your new drag personas.”
The seminar comes as childhood exposure to a radical gender agenda takes center stage in the culture wars, most recently with Disney announcing efforts to indoctrinate the minds of its young impressionable consumers with an array of trans and asexual characters.
3. We Don’t Need Moderates. We Need Truth Tellers.
From The Daily Citizen:
As Christians, we must speak clearly and fearlessly on matters about which God’s position is evident.
Katy Faust is an author and the founder of “Them Before Us” – a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting and championing the rights of children. She was a recent guest lecturer at Focus on the Family’s Lighthouse Lecture series in Holland, MI.
Just yesterday, she tweeted:
“I don’t think the Left knows what it’s done. 10 yrs ago I was a nonconfrontational pastor’s wife. Today I’m willing to speak up, lose ‘friends’ and spend hours researching and writing to fight progressive extremism. The Left radicalized me.”
By “radicalized,” Katy is not referring to the definition popularized by violent terrorists. She’s talking about being compelled to action. There is too much on the line and too little time left to do something about it to be passive.
In the current age, we need Christians to stand firm in their faith – and rise up against a runaway culture.
Jesus was loving and compassionate – but He also pulled no punches. He was not shy when it came to sharing truth or calling out evil and wickedness. In fact, Jesus once compared certain people to weeds. He said He would send His angels to “throw them into the fiery furnace.” He said people who didn’t do His will would be cursed and sent to eternal fire.
Jesus was kind – but the kindest thing you can do is tell the truth with grace and love.
- Elon Musk Becomes Twitter’s Largest Shareholder, Vows Changes
From The Daily Citizen:
One of Big Tech’s most troubling platforms for suppressing conservative viewpoints may have just received a big free speech shot in the arm, as billionaire Elon Musk has purchased 9.2% of Twitter’s stock for a cool $3 billion, making him the largest stockholder in the company. Musk has also been given a seat on the company’s board and is already vowing changes to the social media giant.
“Looking forward to working with Parag & Twitter board to make significant improvements to Twitter in coming months!” Musk tweeted early on April 5.”
“Parag” in Musk’s tweet is Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, who tweeted his own welcome message to Musk.
“He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!” Agrawal tweeted.
- The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget
From Substack:
Lily May Holland, 16, remembers the long, lonely days during lockdown when her parents, both doctors, were at work. She’d watch “Gilmore Girls” and “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy” over and over. She stopped eating and started doing Chloe Ting workouts. “I’d have gum and a smoothie all day,” she said. They lived in the sticks north of Charlottesville, Virginia, on a dirt road between farms and trailer parks and the occasional Baptist church, and she didn’t have a license, so she couldn’t go anywhere or meet any friends. Teachers would post assignments online, but it was like—who cared? Everything happened in isolation, like they were atoms. “I would’ve gone to parties, and me and my friends were planning to go to concerts, and homecoming,” Lily said. “I had crushes freshman year. But all that fell away.”
Teenagers need a social life. Every single study and report and piece of data tells us so. But we don’t need studies to tell us what we all already know. Ask yourself: What would it have been like if you had spent your thirteenth year in solitude?
It was more than a year, actually. Millions of American kids had gone a year-and-a-half mostly alone. And every single girl I spoke to said the same thing about the experience: They felt like they were sinking, or being swallowed up.
So it almost seemed like an understatement when, in December 2021, the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said the effect of the lockdowns had been “devastating” for young people’s mental health.
- It’s ‘Arbitrary’ and ‘Capricious’ for NYC to Continue to Mask Children Under Five
From The Daily Citizen:
In most areas of the country, COVID-19 mandates and requirements have gone the way of the woolly mammoth. The government-imposed restrictions that almost instantaneously became such a large presence in all our lives in 2020 have disappeared just as quickly.
But that’s not the case for young children in New York City.
On April 1, 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Dr. Ashwin Vasan, Health Commission for the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, held a briefing on COVID-19.
Mayor Adams spoke first, asserting, “I’ve also said all along, we will continue to follow the science.”
However, even though New York City currently mandates young children ages two to four wear masks in school and daycare settings, there is no such mandate in place for older New York City dwellers who are at a greater risk from COVID-19 than young children are.
- MIT Leads the Way in Reinstating the SAT
From the Wall Street Journal:
Last week, the highly selective Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced with a similar dilemma, apparently chose to maintain its high standards. It became the first prominent school to reinstate the requirement that applicants submit SAT or ACT scores, a practice that MIT and many other colleges had abandoned during the pandemic.
MIT explained the reversal in a blog post. “Our research shows standardized tests help us better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants, and also help us identify socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lack access to advanced coursework or other enrichment opportunities that would otherwise demonstrate their readiness for MIT,” wrote Stu Schmill, the dean of admissions. “Our ability to accurately predict student academic success at MITis significantly improved by considering standardized testing—especially in mathematics,” he added. Thus, “not having SATs/ACT scores to consider tends to raise socioeconomic barriers to demonstrating readiness for our education.”
8. How China Is Taking Over Hollywood
From Public Discourse:
In the 2010s, the Chinese company Wanda bought AMC for $2.6 billion and Legendary Entertainment for $3.5 billion. In 2017, the number of movie screens in China (50,766) surpassed that of the U.S. In 2020, Chinese ticket sales exceeded ticket sales in the United States, making China the number one box-office market in the world. This huge market share means that Hollywood has begun tailoring its casting, story lines, and dialogue to fit Chinese—not American—audiences.
Over the past twenty years, China has translated its economic leverage into political leverage. Chinese censors routinely ask studios in Hollywood to scrub scripts and finished movies of scenes that might somehow damage China’s Communist system. China’s de facto veto power over Hollywood’s films means that most portrayals of China are, in effect, state-sanctioned propaganda. Producers and directors must showcase “a China of sparkling new cities, where young and old live together in harmony and prosperity,” Schwartzel observes.
In the 1990s, American filmmakers learned that China would punish political missteps with economic sanctions.
By the turn of the century, Hollywood directors and producers had learned not to broach subjects (Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tiananmen) that offend the Communist Chinese. They had also standardized a lobbying process to get China’s approval for its films. Early in the movie’s life cycle, international distributors meet with Chinese film bureau officials. American studios have to satisfy layers of Chinese bureaucrats before a movie hits the market.
- New Poll Reveals The Only News Outlet A Majority Of Americans Trust
From the Daily Wire:
It’s no secret that Americans are deeply divided over which media outlets they find to be accurate. But a new poll reveals that only one news source earns the trust of a majority of Americans.
It’s the Weather Channel. A slim majority (52%) of Americans trust the one network pollsters included that almost never covers political issues, according to a poll released Tuesday.
No other outlet comes close in YouGov’s survey of American news consumers — but one network polarizes Americans along partisan lines more than any other: CNN.
In all, 66% of Democrats trust the 42-year-old cable news network, which transformed into an open, inveterate foe of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party under the leadership of former CNN President Jeffrey Zucker. Only 11% of Republicans say they believe CNN’s reporting, creating a gaping 55-point gap in viewer trust between the parties.
10.Twitter Workers Worried Elon Musk Will Turn Their Free Speech Platform Into Platform That Allows Free Speech
From the Babylon Bee:
With Elon Musk becoming Twitter’s largest stakeholder and a new member of the board of directors, many within the company are worried he may turn their free speech platform into a platform that actually allows free speech.
“This could destroy us,” said Yinny Xendapoo, Twitter’s director of content moderation. “When we say we’re a free speech platform, we never intended to actually allow free speech! If we allowed free speech, people might say things we don’t like and that’s NOT ok.”
