An update from the frontlines of the culture wars:
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Some states are moving to respond to the Trump Administration by passing policies of their own. From the Colorado Sun:
The federal government in recent months has banned transgender people from joining the military and made plans to roll back protections that could lead to insurance companies and doctors refusing to provide them health care. Colorado, meanwhile, is heading the opposite direction.
Plus, the state Division of Insurance added a new regulation to the books that makes it against the law for an insurance company in Colorado to deny coverage for transgender care deemed medically necessary by a doctor, including hormones and surgeries. The requirement, put in place by the insurance division last month with little public attention, is the exact opposite of plans in the works by the Trump administration.
Colorado was once one of the most conservative states (and Colorado Springs is still considered to be the Mecca of evangelicalism), but in recent years it is veered sharply off to the Left. It now appears that they are all in for the transgender experiment.
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Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party is already beginning to cancel the NDP’s social engineering pilot projects, beginning with their plan to ban “conversion therapy.” The phrasing is Orwellian—by “conversion therapy” they are also referring to much-needed care for young people suffering from gender dysphoria that will assist them in being comfortable in their own bodies, which is precisely the opposite of “conversion therapy” but has been smeared as such by trans activists who wish to push their agenda. From the Edmonton Journal:
The UCP has cancelled a working group tasked with banning gay conversion therapy in Alberta. Former NDP health minister Sarah Hoffman established the working group in February. It had five months to work out how to follow the lead of Ontario and Manitoba, which have both outlawed the practice.
Conversion therapy is based on the unfounded idea that psychological or spiritual intervention can change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The working group comprised of academics, advocates, faith leaders and members of the LGBTQ2S+ community.
It was co-chaired by NDP MLA Nicole Goehring and advocate Glynnis Lieb, who heads the University of Alberta’s Institute of Sexual Minority Studies and Services. Health Minister Tyler Shandro told Postmedia his party is “of course” opposed to conversion therapy.
“Our priority is always to make sure nobody is forced to do anything, especially children. Children deserve to be living in a caring environment,” he said. Shandro’s press secretary Steve Buick said in a follow-up email the working group was disbanded with the change in government.
Former premier Rachel Notley is already fulminating about this move on Twitter and social justice warriors are melting down, but the no-nonsense approach of the UCP is precisely the way to go here: Do not feed into the outrage, simply cancel the project and move on.
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California is lamely attempting to pressure Alabama to abandon its pro-life legislation by imperiously sanctioning certain travel to their state:
Los Angeles County has instituted a one-year travel restriction to Alabama in response to the state’s new restrictive abortion law.
HB 314 makes it a felony for doctors in Alabama to perform or attempt to perform an abortion. Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis, author of the travel measure, said the bill is nothing more than an “attack on reproductive rights and economic justice.”
“We must stand in solidarity and in opposition against extremist and unconstitutional laws that put the health and wellbeing of families at risk,” Solis said. “The constitutional and human right to a safe and legal abortion is part of the very fabric of the United States. As such, Los Angeles County will stand against all attempts to dismantle the protections afforded by Roe v. Wade and the U.S. Constitution.”
The ban covers all LA County employees traveling to Alabama for official business, with exceptions for emergency response training or other legally-required trips.
In other words, this is an entirely symbolic gesture that impacts almost nobody but is some weapons-grade virtue-signalling. How nice.
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Just over a week ago, the Equality Act passed Congress, dramatically raising the stakes of the 2020 presidential race for Christians. If implemented at the federal level, it could deny parents any role in the healthcare of their children—and by “healthcare,” trans activists mean sex change surgeries and hormone regimens. This bill would fundamentally change the face of religious freedom in the United States. From the National Review:
The Equality Act (H.R. 5) passed the House on Friday. The sweeping legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected characteristics. But it goes further than that. Under the guise of anti-discrimination protections, the bill redefines sex to include gender identity, undermines religious freedom, gives males who identify as females the right to women’s spaces, and sets a dangerous political precedent for the medicalization of gender-confused youth.
“The Trump administration absolutely opposes discrimination of any kind and supports the equal treatment of all; however, this bill in its current form is filled with poison pills that threaten to undermine parental and conscience rights,” an administration official told the Washington Examiner last week.
The Left is determined to obliterate religious freedom in the United States of America. It is essential that we collectively work to stop them.
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As the abortion debate escalates and the Left doubles down, even adoption is coming under fire. In a long-form column last week, The Atlanticexplained that many women seeking abortion reject adoption because they believe it would be more emotionally painful:
But even among American women for whom carrying a child to term would be safe, adoption is a remarkably unpopular course of action. Though exact estimates for all women are hard to come by, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that among never-married women, about 9 percent chose adoption before 1973, when Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. (The figure was higher for white women: 19 percent.) By the mid-1980s, the figure had dropped to 2 percent, and it was just 1 percent by 2002, the last year the CDC data captured. In 2014, only 18,000 children under the age of 2 were placed with adoption agencies. By comparison, there are about 1 million abortionseach year.
The available research on adoption’s relative unpopularity is still limited. But the sociological studies that exist suggest that some women who are deciding between adoption and abortion find adoption to be more emotionally painful than abortion.
In short, many women are not willing to give their child a chance at life because parting will be painful. The simple truth is that in today’s America, there is no such thing as an unwanted baby. The baby is desperately wanted by someone—it is just that most pregnant women who do not wish to have a child are choosing to have them aborted rather than delivering them safely into the arms of parents who in many cases have been longing for a child for years. It is a mark of the cruelty of our times that mainstream publications accept this lethal selfishness as a valid reason for having a child killed by an abortionist.
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For anyone interested, my book on The Culture War, which analyzes the journey our culture has taken from the way it was to the way it is and examines the Sexual Revolution, hook-up culture, the rise of the porn plague, abortion, commodity culture, euthanasia, and the gay rights movement, is available for sale here.
