I love G. K. Chesterton’s reflections on what it means to be a Christian patriot. If you have never read it, I encourage you to read “The Flag of the World” in his classic work Orthodoxy. Chesterton contends that love of one’s homeland is not like house-hunting—an experience in which you weigh the pros and cons of a place and choose accordingly. He writes: A man belongs to this world before he begins to ask if it is nice to belong to it. He has fought for the flag, and often won heroic victories for the flag long before he has ever enlisted. To put shortly what seems the essential…
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Farewell, Charlie Brown Christmas
“A Charlie Brown Christmas” was an annual fixture of my childhood. For me, this special and “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” were two highlights of the Christmas season. Those were the days when there were only three broadcast channels and before people had VCR’s. You couldn’t record it to watch at your leisure. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” came on once a year, and if you missed it, you’d have to wait an entire year for another opportunity to see it. You had to “check your local listings” to know when it would be on, and then you made an appointment to plant yourself in front of the television to watch the…
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Albert Mohler on Evangelicals and Christian Nationalism
Astead Herndon of The New York Times recently interviewed Dr. Albert Mohler about politics, American evangelicalism, and Christian Nationalism. The interview is a part of “The Guardrails” episode of “The Run-Up” podcast. The New York Times has made a transcript available, which I have excerpted below. This is a fascinating interview on a number of levels. The interviewer is adversarial, but in a polite way and allows Mohler to make his points. Mohler does a better job than just about anyone I’ve heard at parrying charges of Christian Nationalism. It’s fascinating that so many media personalities do not seem to understand that there is no such thing as Christian Nationalism…
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Destroying the Healthy Bodies of Minor Children
Matt Walsh has posted a thread on Twitter that is currently going viral. It features videos from the transgender clinic at Vanderbilt in Nashville. You need to watch these videos to understand just how disturbing the treatment of gender-confused children really is. The videos reveal that the doctors are performing gender “affirmation” surgeries on children because it’s a “big money maker.” According to Vanderbilt, surgeries removing children’s healthy sexual organs are lucrative because they require a lot of “follow ups.” Which is another way of saying that cutting off healthy organs often results in life-altering, long-term, painful complications. That’s why “follow-ups” are required. But it’s a big “money maker” for…
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Parents, Don’t Be Gaslighted by Biased News Reports
One of the hardest things to read today are biased news reports aimed at gaslighting parents who are concerned about LGBT indoctrination at public schools. Case in point: A headline in The Washington Post yesterday reads “Claim that sex ed ‘grooms’ kids jolted Nebraska politics a year before it swept the nation.” The story goes on to describe the efforts of parents in Nebraska to push back against the state’s efforts to introduce LGBT propaganda into their children’s public school curriculum. Lest you think this an unbiased report on a bellwether social issue in Nebraska, the subtitle reads: The unsubstantiated claim led to a backlash against sex ed that helped…
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Sexual Immorality Driving a World Health Emergency
Rod Dreher wrote yesterday about the hypocrisy of public health authorities in 2020 who mandated lockdowns for COVID but who made exceptions for Black Lives Matter protests. Our ruling class’s inconsistency during the summer of 2020 was obviously not being driven by hard science but by social concerns. If you belonged to a favored group (like a BLM protest), then you were allowed to gather. If you belonged to a disfavored group (like a church trying to gather for worship), you were not allowed to gather. While churches were being harassed by local governments for continuing to meet, enormous BLM protests continued apace. The entire spectacle demonstrated in spades that…
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The Illiberal Left and Abortion
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the consequences of the Supreme Court’s abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. The Democratic majority called three pro-abortion witnesses, and the Republican minority called two pro-life witnesses. I watched most of the hearing and listened to sworn testimony from all five witnesses. You would be hard-pressed to find a more stark expression of the division in our nation than what is on display in this testimony. Three witnesses lamented the overturning of Roe and argued in favor of new federal legislation to ensure abortion rights through all nine months of a woman’s pregnancy. They also argued that restricting abortion rights in…
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Doubling-down on Abortion Rights on Independence Day
This morning I received an e-mail from The New York Times advertising a new 8-minute documentary they have produced about what abortion in American looks like after Roe. It’s a first-person narrative of a 27-year old woman who puts herself through a “self-managed” abortion. The film is a how-to guide for anyone living in a state where abortion is illegal. It shows women how to order the drug mifepristone from out of state so that they can put their unborn child to death in the privacy of their own home. This is naked advocacy on the part of The New York Times. The Times is making no pretense to objectivity…
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The End of Roe in the Bright Light of June
On January 22, 1973, Roe v. Wade and its companion decision Doe v. Bolton effectively made abortion-on-demand a Constitutional right in the U.S. through all nine months of pregnancy. Since that time, the regime of Roe has presided over the legal killing of 63 million children. That is more than ten times the people killed in the Jewish holocaust. Roe formed the legal basis for what has become without question the greatest human rights crisis of our time—that a whole class of human beings have been excluded from the human community by our legal system. Today, all of that changed. The Supreme Court of the United States has spoken in…
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What Is a Woman?
I just finished viewing Matt Walsh’s wry and powerful documentary What Is a Woman? This is one of the most timely and compelling films that I have ever seen. The premise is simple. Transgender ideology has swept over the Western world. Given that it is becoming more and more common to see some men identity as women and some women identify as men, surely people who hold to this ideology can tell us what a woman is. It turns out that they can’t. In calm even tones, Walsh put the question to person after person, expert after expert, and activist after activist. And yet none of them can explain what…
