In A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge has a startling conversation with the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley. Jacob is damned in death for his misdeeds in life, and he appears to warn Scrooge that he is headed for the same fate. Scrooge resists the suggestion that Jacob’s life was damnable. Scrooge understands that if Jacob’s life is damnable, then so is his own. So this exchange ensues: “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. “Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing his hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my…
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Masculinity at the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California
? ABC News reports on female survivors of the mass shooting in Thousand Oaks, California. In the video above, you will see one woman describe what heroic young men did at the critical moment. She describes it this way: There were multiple men that got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back towards the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us. Abigail Shrier of The Wall Street Journal also writes about the men who helped others to safety during those terrifying and chaotic moments. She attributes their heroism to “masculinity.” She writes: This is the masculinity we so often…
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If you accept transgender, then why not trans-aged?
A 69-year-old man asks to be declared 49, claiming age is as fluid as gender https://t.co/H7LB0CzoZu — The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 8, 2018 The Washington Post reports that a man wishes to self-identify as twenty years younger than he actually is. Not only that, he wants the change reflected on his birth certificate. From the report: Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old who feels like he’s in his 40s… is asking a court in his hometown of Arnhem, southeast of Amsterdam, to change his birth certificate so that it says he took his first breath on March 11, 1969, rather than on March 11, 1949. The judges heard his case on…
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Fact-checking the paper of record on its fabulist claims about transgenderism
I have marveled this week at the level of distortion in straight news reporting about transgenderism. It all started with a report in The New York Times about the Trump administration’s plans to reverse an Obama-era directive. The distortion starts in the very first sentence of the report: The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. Let’s just fact-check this one sentence. How many claims are in error here? All of them.
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Transgender bathroom policy leads to sexual assault of 5-year old girl
? From WORLD magazine: The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced last month it was investigating a parental complaint alleging a Georgia school district’s transgender policy led to the sexual assault of a kindergartener. City Schools of Decatur parent Pascha Thomas claims her daughter, known by the initials N.T. in public documents, was sexually assaulted last year by a male classmate in an Oakhurst Elementary School girls’ restroom. Thomas said her 5-year-old daughter complained of vaginal pain the evening of Nov. 16, 2017. When Thomas asked more, the girl said she was leaving a restroom stall when a little boy in her class came in, pinned…
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Does guilt or innocence even matter anymore?
Yesterday I read a column by Ross Douthat that is perplexing. If I’m being truthful, it’s worse than perplexing. It is an absolute disappointment. Douthat makes the case that it doesn’t really matter whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh is guilty or innocent of the allegations against him. Even if Kavanaugh is innocent, he has been tainted by accusations made against him and on those grounds alone could be unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. Douthat writes: Even if Kavanaugh is innocent of the charge of a teenage sexual assault… to give such prominence and power to a man credibly accused would both leave an unnecessary taint on his future rulings…
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Girl learning she’s being adopted will bring tears to your eyes
Ivey Zezulka’s foster parents Paige and Daniel surprised her with the news that they had finalized plans to adopt Ivey and her biological siblings. This wonderful little video that has been making the rounds the last couple weeks, and it is worth your time to watch. Read more about it here.
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Mystic Patriotism
About a year ago, I read 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…
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Is there a constitutional right to life?
Mary Ziegler has an article in The Atlantic talking about the future of abortion jurisprudence in light of Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Supreme Court. Among other things, she speculates that overturning Roe is now a probability. Furthermore, she writes: It is even possible that abortion foes will ask the justices to go further, recognizing a constitutional right to life that would mean the criminalization of abortion nationwide. Certainly, abortion opponents have always wanted more than just the end of Roe. But even without Kennedy, the odds of such a ruling seem remote. The kind of strict-constructionist judge Trump promises is usually skeptical about the recognition of rights not spelled…
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Supreme Court vacates lower court’s verdict against florist
Good news about Washington florist Barronelle Stutzman, who was sued by the Attorney General of Washington State for refusing to create floral arrangements for a same-sex wedding. Here’s the report from the Alliance Defending Freedom: