Alan Levinovitz is a professor at James Madison University, and he argues in The Atlantic that “trigger warnings” in university syllabi have the effect of shutting out Christian viewpoints. He explains: According to anonymous in-class surveys, about one-third of my students believe in the exclusive salvific truth of Christianity. But rarely do these students defend their beliefs in class. In private, they have told me that they believe doing so could be construed as hateful, hostile, intolerant, and disrespectful; after all, they’re saying that if others don’t believe what they do, they’ll go to hell… The unpleasant truth is that historically marginalized groups, including racial minorities and members of the…
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A sober warning about “The Transgender Contagion”
If you haven’t read David French’s article “The Transgender Contagion” yet, let me encourage you to do so. One paragraph in particular is worth highlighting. French writes, We’re not far from the day when a child will be taken from a loving home simply because the parents refuse to believe that their little girl is actually a little boy. We’re already living in the days when telling your girl child that she shouldn’t undergo treatments that will render her infertile and painfully mutilated is deemed to be intolerant. And we refuse to believe that such behaviors are at all influenced by peer groups or social trends. Instead, your daughter is…
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If pedophilia is a sexual orientation, now what?
I have written in this space before about the idea that pedophilia is a sexual orientation, that it’s just another element of human sexual diversity not to be condemned but understood and sympathized with. We are now at the next stage of normalization. Indeed, the DSM-V already recognizes pedophilia as a sexual orientation (p. 698). But now we have a full-length academic book arguing the same: Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis, by Stephen Kershnar. In this book, Kershnar questions whether pedophilia should be considered a mental disorder and/or morally wrong. His argument is that it can only be considered a mental disorder if and only if two conditions…
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When free men shall stand…
It is hard to imagine that July 4, 1776 was anything but bittersweet for the men who signed the Declaration. They knew the principles they were standing for, and they knew what it would cost them to stand: “With a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” It would cost them all of that and more. On July 4, 2016, two-hundred and forty years hence, we find ourselves at another bittersweet moment. Our nation desperately needs leaders and statesmen to stand for principle and to be willing to do so at great personal cost. Where…
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Supreme Court refuses to defend religious liberty for pharmacists
Last week, I was at a meeting hosted by The Alliance Defending Freedom. There I was introduced to a Christian family who was ordered by the State of Washington to sell abortion-inducing drugs in their family-owned pharmacy (see their story above). This family and two other pharmacists believe that killing unborn children is wrong, and so they sued the state for relief. In 2012, a federal court ruled that the law violated the free exercise clause of the first amendment and that the law was “riddled with exemptions for secular conduct, but contain no such exemptions for identical religiously-motivated conduct.” In 2015, however, a federal appeals court overruled and said…
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Blaine Adamson’s Conscience: Convictions in the Workplace
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Memorial Day in the twilight of a great republic
Four months after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, President Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery where many of the fallen Union soldiers were buried. At the dedication, Lincoln gave a speech for the ages, the one we now know as the Gettysburg Address. The speech is short, but the conclusion is one worth revisiting this Memorial Day weekend:
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A one-legged man trapped inside a two-legged man’s body. Amputate?
At the heart of the transgender revolution is the notion that psychological identity trumps bodily identity. In this way of thinking, a person is whatever they think themselves to be. If a girl perceives herself to be a boy, then she is one even if her biology says otherwise. If a boy perceives himself to be a girl, then he is one even if his biology says otherwise. Gender is self-determined, not determined by the sexual differences that the Creator has embedded into every cell of our bodies. Have Americans thought through the implications of believing that one’s psychological identity should trump one’s biological identity when the two seem to…
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President Obama: Accept Transgenderism or Else
By the time you read this, the news will be all over the country. The New York Times reports that President Obama has released a letter directing every public school in the country to recognize and accept transgender identities. In particular, the directive has to do with bathroom and locker room use. Here’s the relevant excerpt from the report: The Obama administration is planning to issue a sweeping directive telling every public school district in the country to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms that match their gender identity.
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Is there a difference between male and female?
This is not intended to be funny. It’s intended to reveal that as a culture we have become completely unmoored from reality. These college students are not outliers. Many young men and women have been weaned on the idea that there is no difference between men and women.Yes, there may be biological differences, but those biological differences have no necessary relationship to one’s identity. These students have drunk deeply from the well of propaganda flowing from the gender studies department. As a result, they don’ t know the difference between male and female, and they don’t seem too concerned about it. This is the unraveling of a civilization. The downstream…