Good Morning!
Character is evaluated on many levels, but a person’s trustworthiness is foundational.
“The strength of a man’s virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts,” wrote Blaise Pascal.
The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley rightly suggests Justice Clarence Thomas has demonstrated fine habits these many years:
1. The Hypocritical Attack on Justice Clarence Thomas
Jason Riley writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Justice Thomas’s critics don’t want to hold him to a higher standard so much as a different standard. Major cases involving abortion, gun control, affirmative action and religious liberty are on the high court’s docket this year. The left’s goal is to diminish his influence—and by extension the influence of the court’s conservative wing. And since the target is Justice Thomas, who has been driving his ideological opponents batty for the past 30 years, the thinking is that anything goes.
“The facts are clear here,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar told ABC News on Sunday. “You have the wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice advocating for an insurrection.” No, those aren’t the facts, unless the senator knows something that the rest of us don’t. There has been no evidence made public that Mrs. Thomas called for violence or had anything to do with the ransacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters. Lumping her in with those who did is a smear. All we know is that she urged Mr. Meadows to “stand firm” against what she believed was an election “heist.” If a case comes before the court that involves Mrs. Thomas or her activities, Justice Thomas can make a decision about recusal at that time.
Perhaps more disturbingly, Ms. Klobuchar, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sounded like she was threatening Chief Justice John Roberts to do the bidding of her fellow Democrats in Congress. “All I hear is silence from the Supreme Court right now, and that better change in the coming week,” she said. “Not only should [Justice Thomas] recuse himself, but this Supreme Court badly needs ethics rules.” The chief justice has made no secret that he cares deeply about the reputation of the court. One way to damage that reputation would be to bend to the politics and passions of the day in the way that people like Ms. Klobuchar are suggesting.
Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving member of the court and has been consistent in his jurisprudence over the decades. We trust judges to behave professionally and with integrity when it comes to recusal decisions, and Justice Thomas has earned our trust.
2. How the “Trans” and Gender Redefinition Issue Attacks the Family
From The Daily Citizen:
Family is the bedrock of all human civilization. Everything good that happens in society stems ultimately from family. And family is singularly created at the most intimate intersection of male and female. Literally.
But family and civilization are also sustained at the long, cooperative intersection of male and female. No society has ever found another way to successfully do this. Humanity cannot exist without the family, i.e., without the close, cooperative, uniquely productive union of male and female in marriage. Plato’s ancient idea of the family-less society has never been realized for any duration, anywhere. And it will not.
When You Question Male and Female, You Question the Family
Contrast this primary truth with the invasive “trans” politics and gender redefinition ideology that is increasingly haunting our children and the larger culture like a specter. It has a deeply spiritual aspect to it, to be sure.
This movement has one objective: to question and subvert the fundamental, biological reality of male and female. And when you subvert the fundamental meaning of male and female, you subvert the family. And in subverting the family, it subverts reality.
Dr. Colin M. Wright, an evolutionary biologist who has written widely on the damning scientific and logical problems with current gender ideology, explained in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, “We simply can’t ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes from society.” Because, Wright tells us, “the effort to resist gender ideology is reality’s last stand.” He is correct and as a scientist, Dr. Wright is not given to hyperbole.
This why no one can just hope this intentionally confusing gender issue will simply go away. It cannot be politely ignored by anyone who cares about the family. It must be countered with unapologetic truth. It must be confronted with reality. Our collective work for the sake of the family, the well-being of children, and a healthy future for humanity demands nothing less.
This revolution has been forced upon each of us with demands that we submit. It must be challenged and answered with a clear mind and voice by each of us who care deeply for the family and the future.
3. Despite Recent Win for Hyde Amendment, Taxpayer-Funded Abortions Back in FY 2023 Budget
From The Daily Citizen:
Just a couple weeks after Congress re-inserted the pro-life measure known as the Hyde Amendment back into the federal budget for fiscal year 2022, which ends in September, the Biden administration has proposed a budget for the next fiscal year that once again attempts to remove the Hyde Amendment, forcing American taxpayers to fund abortions here and abroad.
And the FY 2023 budget’s exclusion of Hyde is only one of many gifts to the abortion industry. According to an email from Andrew Guernsey, Executive Director of the Senate Pro-Life Caucus, the proposed budget also:
- Eliminates the Dornan Amendment which would allow the District of Columbia to fund abortions through its Medicaid program.
- Increases Title X funding by 40%. This program typically puts $60 million per year in the hands of Planned Parenthood alone under the guise of “family planning” services.
- Increases funding for teen pregnancy prevention from $101 million to $111 million. These funds help subsidize Planned Parenthood, one of its recipients.
- Increases funding for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) from $32.5 million to $56 million. The UNFPA promotes abortions around the world.
- Adds authority to “promote gender equality” overseas, including “protecting the rights of women and girls worldwide.” This would bypass a couple of pro-life provisions applicable to foreign policy and allow taxpayer funding for abortion or abortion lobbying overseas.
And the list of abortion-promoting budget items goes on. One group that is ecstatic over the FY 2023 budget proposal is, of course, Planned Parenthood.
- DeSantis says Disney ‘crossed the line’ with criticism of Fla. ‘Don’t Say Gay’ law
From the NY Post:
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lashed out at Disney executives on Tuesday — one day after the Mouse House condemned the governor’s signing of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Disney CEO Bob Chapek and other top executives have stepped up their criticism of GOP-backed legislation after outraged employees publicly condemned its initial response to the controversy.
“For Disney to come out and put a statement and say that the bill should have never passed and they are going to actively work to repeal it — I think, one, was fundamentally dishonest. But two, I think that crossed the line,” DeSantis said at a press conference.
“This state is governed by the interests of the people of the state of Florida. It is not based on the demands of California corporate executives. They do not run this state. They do not control this state,” the governor added.
RELATED:
Graphic ‘Gender Queer’ Sex Books Marketed to Kids.
From the National Pulse:
Gender queer” books are now being targeted towards children – and are being found on school bookshelves – with U.S. school district committees allowing the comics to remain in school libraries.
Despite the mature concepts it contains, the book “Gender Queer” by 32-year-old California-based author Maia Kobabe, who “uses e/em/eir pronouns,” has been distributed on the shelves of Ohio’s Hudson High School library.
The book tells the story of a child through adolescence to adulthood struggling with gender conformity and includes a handful of graphic illustrations of LGBT sexual experiences and has long caused controversy with parents in other school districts, such as Fairfax County Public Schools in 2021.
Amazon, which sells the book, describes it as a “useful and touching guide on gender identity.”
- Arizona Women’s Swim Team Alumni Write Letter to NCAA Defending Women’s Sports
From The Daily Citizen:
Thirty-eight alumni of the University of Arizona women’s swim team have written a letter to the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) collectively speaking out against men participating in their sport.
The letter was sparked by Lia Thomas’ recent first-place finish in the 500-yard freestyle at the NCAA Division I Women’s Swimming Championship competition. Thomas is a biological male who believes he is a woman.
Here are the most poignant sections of the letter, which is worth quoting at length:
Dear NCAA Board of Governors,
Do we have a voice?
It’s hard to express the anguish the women’s swim community has experienced this past week watching the 2022 NCAA Swim & Dive Championships. …
We feel we are witnessing irrevocable damage to a sport that has transformed our own identities for the better.
We have collected some of our own thoughts on paper to plead to swimming leadership at every level to take immediate action to protect our women athletes.
- California Legislation Would Decriminalize Killing Newborns
From The Daily Citizen:
Proposed legislation in California would “decriminalize killing newborns days or even weeks after birth,” reports the California Family Council (CFC), a Focus on the Family-allied organization.
CFC President Johnathan Keller stated, “For years, pro-life advocates have argued there is no moral difference between ending a child’s life days before birth or days after birth. California’s pro-abortion legislators now seemingly agree.”
Keller called Californians to fight the legislation, AB 2233, saying, “A political culture that justifies killing millions of children in the womb is now declaring open season on unwanted newborns. Every Californian must oppose this heinous bill.”
7. Washington University Accused of Running the ‘Amazon of Baby Body Parts’
From CBN:
A group of pro-life organizations announced they’ve discovered aborted human fetuses being kept in labeled paper bags and boxes in a walk-in freezer at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
Earlier this month, members of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU), Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust, Pro-Life San Francisco, and Rehumanize International found the freezer using invoices that had been made public by public records requests by Indiana Right to Life.
Photographs released on March 23 by PAAU reportedly show the fetuses stored in paper bags at the university’s Birth Defects Rsearch Laboratory in Seattle, Washington.
8. University drops baseless investigation into grad student who expressed religious views
From ADF:
Following a letter from Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has dropped its investigation into an art therapy graduate student after classmates said her expression of religious and political viewpoints constituted “harassment” and “microaggressions.”
The university issued three “No Contact” orders against Maggie DeJong demanding that she have no contact or even “indirect communication” with three of her classmates. University officials rescinded the no-contact orders within days of receiving the letter ADF attorneys sent the university in February but had claimed DeJong was under investigation. It was only after ADF attorneys demanded that the university produce “all correspondence” and “all documents” related to students’ complaints and any investigation into DeJong that the university dropped its investigation.
“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.
- Is Online Sports Betting Dangerous?
From the Wall Street Journal:
According to the National Center for Responsible Gaming, approximately 1% of adults in the U.S. has a severe gambling problem. This is low compared with the 6% to 9% of young people and young adults who experience problems related to gambling.
This addiction is growing among young people at an alarming rate. If we normalize gambling, we are only exposing the most vulnerable—those who don’t understand it is a problem—until it’s too late.
A college should be a safe space for students, not a place where they’re exposed to an activity that has been proven to be highly addictive. Television networks should restrict the times where they’re exposing young, impressionable audiences to gambling and make sure talk of it is eliminated during those times.
10. C.S. Lewis Was a Modern Man Who Breathed Medieval Air
From Christianity Today:
Like his friend Tolkien, C. S. Lewis was a man who loved all things medieval and who infused all that he wrote with a premodern ethos that hearkened back to an older, more traditional understanding of technology, books, wisdom, and morality. In his new book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, Dante scholar Jason Baxter unpacks the full extent of Lewis’s medievalism. Just as Michael Ward demonstrated in Planet Narnia that Lewis keyed each of his seven Narnia Chronicles to one of the medieval planets, so Baxter demonstrates that the medieval worldview colored not only Lewis’s apologetics and fiction but his scholarship as well.
It is this Lewis, Lewis the scholar, whom Baxter, associate professor of fine arts and humanities at Wyoming Catholic College, compares to Boethius, a thinker who bridged the classical and Middle Ages by synthesizing the best of pagan learning and harmonizing it with Christianity. By translating medieval thought into a vernacular that the modern man could understand, Baxter argues, “Lewis became a British Boethius, the philosopher whom he once described [in The Allegory of Love] as the ‘divine popularizer,’ who had helped to create ‘the very atmosphere in which the [medieval] world awoke.’”
Modern readers are often shocked by Lewis’s aversion to cars and newspapers. And yet, Baxter explains, behind Lewis’s “irascible, curmudgeonly lamentations about newspapers and cars stands a well-thought-out conviction that the whole world picture had changed, from the slow, contemplative, symphonic world … to the world of speed, bustle, and machine.” The rise of the machine may have freed us from laborious chores, but it had social, spiritual, and psychological repercussions that altered our very view of reality. Even as it enlightened certain areas of science, it brought darkness to our perceptions of the world, ourselves, and others.
