Election

Recreational Marijuana Measures Rejected by Voters

Americans in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota voted against legalizing recreational marijuana, reflecting research showing cannabis use causes physical and mental health problems.

Citizens in North and South Dakota rejected ballot measures legalizing recreational marijuana for people over 21 years old by 3- and 6-point margins, respectively.

Florida put a pro-marijuana amendment on its ballot, which would have enshrined the right to buy and use recreational marijuana in the state constitution. A majority of Floridians (55.9%) actually voted in favor of Amendment 3 — but citizens can’t change Florida’s constitution without a 60% supermajority.

Hopefully, these results indicate a growing awareness among citizens that marijuana is not nearly as safe as manufacturers make it seem.

The most recent U.S. Survey on Drug Use and Health found 18 million marijuana users, about a third of all users over 18-years-old, demonstrated symptoms of cannabis use disorder (CUD), or inability to control their use.

Addiction or dependence on high-potency cannabis increases users’ likelihood of developing cannabis-associated psychotic symptoms (CAPS) or triggering a chronic psychotic disorder. In 2019, The Lancet reported that people who smoked high-THC marijuana daily were five-times as likely to develop a psychotic disorder as those who didn’t smoke.

Reports of these dangerous side-effects have finally trickled into mainstream media reporting, but perceptions of marijuana as harmless don’t go away overnight.

Voters in Nebraska, for instance, overwhelmingly chose to legalize medical marijuana (70.7%), making them the 39th state to do so. Cannabis, especially products without THC, can offer some medical benefits. But using marijuana for medical purposes can also carry the same mental and physical risks as using it for fun.

One woman interviewed by the New York Times said she began using marijuana in 2019 when her doctor suggested it could help her migraines. The drug helped for a couple of months, she reported, before she started experiencing severe stomach pain. Doctors did not connect her symptoms to marijuana. A dispensary employee even advised her to up her dose.

She had begun experiencing debilitating nausea and vomiting when she learned she had cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome, a disease that affects long-term marijuana users. Left untreated, CHS can lead to dehydration, seizures, kidney failure and cardiac arrest. The Times claims the disease is on the rise — and most cannabis users don’t know about it.

Nebraska’s new medical marijuana law limits how much of the drug can be dispensed, which could help prevent some of these dangerous consequences. Another approved ballot establishing a medical cannabis commission could further regulate consumption to prevent further use. But, historically, the marijuana industry has managed to work around such limits.

Florida, North and South Dakota’s rejection of recreational marijuana is an encouraging sign that citizens are recognizing how dangerous marijuana can be for their families, neighbors, co-works and communities.

Nebraska’s support of medical marijuana suggests Americans aren’t ready to relinquish cannabis and its potential health benefits. It’s up to citizens and believers to continue warning others about the harms of this powerful drug.

Additional Articles and Resources

Parents — Time to Tackle Marijuana Myths

THC-Laced Snacks Marketed to Kids, Hemp to Blame

Marijuana Causing Psychosis in Young People, Legacy Media Late to Party

Talking With Tweens About Marijuana

Talking With Your Teens About Drugs and Alcohol

How the Marijuana Industry is Campaigning to Hook Your Kids on a Drug that Will Damage their Brain

The Surgeon General Announces New Advisory on the Dangers of Marijuana for Pregnant Women and Adolescents

Federal Legalization of Marijuana Gains Steam. Here are the Downsides to Legalization.

Focus on the Family Resources for Mental Health

Polling as a Profession, Like Journalism, is Lost

One question to ask on the day after this historic and unprecedented election is “how could pollsters continue to get it so wrong?”

Of course, some pollsters have strong partisan leanings, and that prejudice comes out pretty clearly in their polling. But even those trying to do fair, honest work are showing horrible records. Nearly every pollster got the run-up to this election totally wrong.

Even The Hollywood Reporter recently asserted that election pollsters are “increasingly useless” and asked “Can we get rid of them?”

Pollster Frank Luntz said very emphatically time and again that we would not know who won this election for many days, perhaps weeks. Nate Silver put the 2024 race as a “pure toss-up” and that “50-50 is the only responsible forecast.” To his almost singular credit, Silver did say, just prior to November 5, that Trump would likely win and that it could be a sweep.

Allan Lichtman, the “polling Nostradamus,” said his polling model predicted Harris as the winner. Ann Selzer’s now infamous Iowa poll last weekend showed Harris winning that state. FiveThirtyEight and The Economist both favored a Harris win as well.

Newsweek reported on election day, “Kamala Harris predicted to win by nearly every major forecaster.”

Others who refused to make a call one way or the other agreed the election would be “a squeaker” and a final determination on the actual winner would be unclear for longer than any of us are comfortable with.

Of course, none of this happened.

As Politico reported in the opening line of their story on the race this morning, “Donald Trump didn’t steal the 2024 election. He has won it — clearly and comprehensively.”

He won not only the electoral college, but the popular vote. Trump’s win was actually so convincing Politico confessed, “The Trump movement, no matter how much this appalls opponents, is a powerful expression of democracy.”

Almost no major pollster was in touch with yesterday’s powerful expression of democracy. That is a fact.

Political pollsters are not alone. Gallup reported this fall that trust of and confidence in the mass media has hit an all-time low among liberals, conservatives and independents.

It appears as if the polling industry is racing media professionals to the bottom of the trustworthiness polls.

The world is shifting in ways that pollsters have proven themselves unable to fully understand and even appreciate. The same failure is true of most journalists.

There is no question, it is long past time for these two influential professions to take a long hard, sober look at the way they practice their crafts.

There are few professionals who could stay employed with such dramatically consistent records of getting it so wrong. Their future is in their own hands and their work, like everyone else’s, deserves to be judged on its quality.

You must do better, or go do something else. But stop pretending you are delivering value to our Republic.

Harry Truman, Donald Trump and the Rise of the New Media

It’s an iconic photograph – a smiling President Harry Truman holding aloft a copy of the Chicago Tribune heralding a “fake news” headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

The picture was snapped by W. Eugene Smith two days after Truman’s election in November of 1948. On his way back to Washington, D.C., from Independence, Missouri, aboard the presidential train the Ferdinand Magellan, Truman had stopped in St. Louis. An aide was said to have found the newspaper under a seat in a car attached to the executive entourage.

As the 1948 presidential election approached, media elites were convinced New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey would easily defeat the incumbent Truman. The former senator-turned-vice-president had assumed the presidency following Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945.

After an initial honeymoon period as World War II wound down, the former haberdasher had struggled politically.

“He was considered to be a sure loser,” reflected his biographer David McCullough. A week before the election, The New York Times said Dewey’s election was “a foregone conclusion.”

Only Truman believed otherwise.

Sound familiar?

During the campaign President Truman had made the decision to barnstorm the country by train. His hundreds of “whistle-stops” brought him face-to-face with regular Americans. It gave him an opportunity to look them in the eye. Many of them were also seeing a president up close for the first time. A bond formed between the president and the people.

Few experts may have given Truman a chance, but knowing the huge crowds he was drawing, the president was so confident he was going to win that he went to bed at 9 PM on Election night at the Elms Hotel in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.

“Please wake me up if anything important happens,” the president told his Secret Service detail. At four in the morning, an agent roused Truman and told him he was winning based on radio reports of election returns.

“We’ve got ’em beat,” President Truman responded confidently.

President-elect Trump didn’t retire early on Tuesday night, but like Truman, he repeatedly expressed confidence in the election’s outcome based on massive crowds at his rallies.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, the former-now-future president took his message directly to the American people via social media and alternative news sources also known as “New Media.”

“New Media” is largely considered to be digital products, podcasts, and streaming services.

Last month, we highlighted podcaster Joe Rogan’s rising popularity.

Wildly popular and often profane as an interviewer and celebrity, Rogan’s conversation with Trump garnered 40 million views on Spotify and YouTube. With 32 million subscribers between the two sites, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance also appeared on Rogan’s show. Vice President Harris and her team were never able to agree on her terms.

Focus on the Family’s rise is directly attributable to “new media” of a sort. While radio as a medium dates to the 1920s, ministry founder Dr. James Dobson pioneered the Christian-help format beginning in 1977.

Not dependent upon books, newspapers, magazines and television to communicate, the ministry’s popularity skyrocketed thanks to the launch of our flagship radio program.

Whether communicating from the back of a train, from a podium, or on a podcast that reaches tens of millions of listeners and viewers, those with a powerful Christ-filled message will find a way to get the word out to those with willing ears to hear.

Image credit: W. Eugene Smith / LIFE Picture Collection, Fair Use and Honolulu Star Advertiser 

2024 Election Recap: Marrieds Vastly Helped Trump Win

The gender gap was supposed to have been the big driver in yesterday’s historic and groundbreaking election. One campaign even famously encouraged wives to be dishonest with their husbands about how they voted.

But CNN exit polling showed the marriage gap was just as powerful in determining how citizens voted as was gender. Brad Wilcox, noted University of Virginia sociologist, posted on X, saying:

Just as women were more likely than men to vote for the Harris ticket, marrieds were more likely support the Trump ticket over choosing Harris. Married voters supported Trump by an 11% margin over Harris, while unmarried voters supported Harris by a 14% margin over Trump.

In a post-election interview, professor Wilcox told Daily Citizen,

What we are seeing today is both that married Americans and married parents are more likely to vote Republican. In this election, married adults and married parents voted for Trump in stronger numbers, so we learn that marrieds are more likely to look to Republicans for what they feel is best for themselves and our nation.

He added, “Leaders like JD Vance and Marco Rubio have advanced smart, strong pro-family policies and Republicans and conservatives are more likely to prioritize these values than are progressives.”

Wilcox and two other scholars from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) recently addressed this question of which candidate and policies marrieds tend to favor. They asked,

Is the long-standing tie between the Republican Party and marriage fraying in an era when the party’s standard bearer has flouted so many of the institution’s values and virtues? Has the emergence of a post-religious right severed the affinity between marriage and the Republican party?

They answer their own question definitively. “No, the data suggest that the relationship between the Republican Party and marriage has largely persisted amidst the Trump era.”

IFS’ new research report, using data from the peerless General Social Survey (GSS), “finds that Republicans continue to be markedly more likely than Democrats to be married — and this is true for several subgroups in the population.”

They add, saying, “We also find that Republicans continue to enjoy significantly happier marriages and somewhat more stable families with children than Democrats.”

Marriage has emerged as a significant class divide in America for the last few decades with the college educated and upper-class far more likely to marry over less educated, working class citizens. This is something all pro-family advocates must be aware of. Wilcox and his co-researchers hold,

Our analyses of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the American Community Survey (ACS) also indicate that the institution of marriage’s hold on American men and women has weakened, especially among poor, working-class, younger, and Democratic adults. That is, each of these four groups are significantly less likely to be married today than they were at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

It is abundantly documented in mountains of leading social science and medical research that marriage substantially boosts all important measures of human and societal well-being for men, women and their common children. Promoting and advocating for the vital institution of marriage is a clear “love thy neighbor” issue.

It now appears that marriage is also a significant driver in the decisions citizens make in whom they choose to lead their country. This is an important truth that all pro-family advocates must appreciate as we consider how we can impact the public square for the good of all our fellow citizens.

Related articles and resources:

Don’t Believe the Modern Myth. Marriage Remains Good for Men.

Don’t Believe the Modern Myth. Marriage Remains Good for Women.

New Research Shows Married Families Matter More Than Ever

Mapping Declining US Marriage Rates

Mapping US Fertility and Married Parenting Rates

Mapping US Divorce Rates

Mapping US Unmarried Cohabitation Rates

Brad Wilcox’s Full-Court Press to Encourage the World to ‘Get Married’

Why Marriage Matters for Adults

Dr. Brad Wilcox Speaks About Happiness at Lighthouse Voices

Image from Shutterstock

Norman Rockwell’s Vision is on the Ballot

It was the legendary illustrator Norman Rockwell who once said, “I paint life as I would like it to be.”

That philosophy is what prompted the famed artist, inspired by a speech President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave on January 6, 1941, to sit down at his easel and begin painting what became known as “The Four Freedoms.”

Walking past prints of these paintings hanging in our foyer on this Election Day, it struck me how the more things change, the more they remain the same.

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” reflected President Roosevelt.

“The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.”

Roosevelt continued:

“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.”

It’s been more than 83 years since FDR delivered that address – and 81 years since the four paintings debuted on successive Saturday Evening Post covers in 1943.

“Freedom of Speech” was published on February 20, “Freedom of Worship” on February 27, “Freedom from Want” on March 6 and “Freedom from Fear” on March 13.

The magazine received millions of requests for reprints. Over 2.5 million sets were produced, and the allotment sold out. Postage stamps were also commissioned.

Americans cast their vote for all kinds of reasons – but many are doing so this year to protect and preserve these same four freedoms.

We recognize that our Founding Fathers and countless patriots have bled and died to protect our freedom of speech. We vote to preserve it.

We are grateful we can worship at will, not just within the walls of a church, but anywhere and everywhere. We vote to protect it.

We work and we save to put food on our tables and clothes on our backs. We agree with Milton Friedman who warned, “Inflation is taxation without legislation.”

And then there was Ronald Reagan who declared, “Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.” We vote to defeat it.

Finally, we are committed to defending the safety and security of our loved ones. We vote to strengthen it.

Life isn’t a painting – but Rockwell’s work resonated, because pictures and paintings are worth thousands of words.

We’re voting to preserve these four freedoms for future generations. Elections have consequences long beyond a president’s term of office. Appointments and decisions ripple across the nation and world.

Yes, the Lord is sovereign – but our faith doesn’t afford us the luxury of being blasé about electoral outcomes. Evil and wickedness are on the march – and we have an obligation and opportunity to serve as His hands and feet to bring relief and hope to the world.

Image credit: Norman Rockwell, Fair Use