Parents sue school after their six-year-old daughter was told “girls don’t exist,” conscience legislation passes in Alberta (and other stories)

By Jonathon Van Maren

A round-up of important culture war news:

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A pro-life hero most people have never heard of passed away recently. As The College Fix put it:

Michael Uhlmann, who passed away last month, may be the most consequential government official you’ve never heard of. His doctoral dissertation helped save the Electoral College, and he drafted the first Human Life Amendment as counsel to Senator James Buckley, brother of the conservative icon William F. Buckley, as touted in Uhlmann’s New York Times obituary.

Interestingly, former Senator James Buckley, now a very elderly man, surfaced at the National Conservatism Conference I attended this summer in Washington, D.C, one of the icons of a bygone age and a different era in conservatism. The original giants of the American Right are taking their leave, one by one.

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The United Kingdom continues to spiral down the transgender rabbit hole, with the Daily Mail reporting that the feminist campaigner Jean Hatchet is demanding that the store Marks and Spencer clarify its changing room policies after a man entered the women’s change cubicle area at a Yorkshire store while a teenage girl was engaged in a bra fitting. Hatchet tweeted that “Men should not have access to any of these female spaces alongside women,” and M&S promptly replied through an official spokesperson, stating that: “As a business, we strive to be inclusive and therefore, we allow customers the choice of which fitting room they feel comfortable to use, in respect of how they identify themselves.”

M&S went on to promise that if any inappropriate behavior was to surface, “necessary action would be taken.” Once upon a time, of course, a male entering the female changing area would have been considered inappropriate behavior, but that now seems like a very long time ago.

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Canada’s assisted suicide regime is already beginning to bear bitter fruits. CTV reported that a Montreal couple is calling for disciplinary measures against a psychologist that counselled Serge Simard to kill his terminally ill partner Miranda Edwards, who has an aggressive form of cancer. Simard sought a psychologist to help him deal with the stress of coping with his wife’s illness, and recorded the psychologist suggesting that he overdose Edwards with morphine, telling Simard that “at one point it will be a dose too much and she just won’t wake up. It’s the best thing that could happen, really. She won’t be suffering anymore, she’ll be in a better place.”

Simard and his wife were horrified, and one physician noted that these scenarios became more likely with Canada’s legalization of assisted suicide. Despite Simard’s recorded evidence, police declined to charge the psychologist. When killing becomes healthcare, morality becomes muddled. What is murder these days, anyway?

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Progressive hacks like radio host Charles Adler and left-wing Red Tories like Michelle Rempel have been angrily fulminating against provincial legislation put forward in Alberta by United Conservative Party MLA Dan Williams to strengthen conscience protections for physicians. The legislation, which would ensure that the right of medical professionals not to violate their consciences by having to participate in or refer for practices like abortion and euthanasia, has exposed just how totalitarian the progressives in Canada actually are, as abortion activists desperately try to cast a law that protects the rights of physicians as somehow “limiting abortion.” Apparently, some people would prefer to have medical professionals who ignore their own consciences and simply take orders, despite the dubious history of that sort of behavior. Edmonton MP Garnett Genuis has done a particularly good job of responding to the stupid fearmongering of politicians like Rempel (who, incidentally, is one of the only MPs in Parliament with a 0% pro-life voting record. More on that some other time.)

The conscience protection legislation passed first reading this week.

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In Europe, some nations continue moving towards treating the Scriptures as hate speech with great galloping strides. Päivi Räsänen, a Finnish MP from the Christian Democratic Party and a practicing Lutheran, recently found herself facing a hate speech investigation from the police after she publicly disagreed with the decision of Lutheran leaders to support LGBT pride, in addition to another police investigation into a 2004 pamphlet she authored defending the Lutheran Church’s position on traditional marriage. She was investigated for this pamphlet once before (it was written prior to LGBTQ being added to Finnish hate crime laws), but once was apparently not enough. Her interview with Rod Dreher on her ongoing ordeal makes for chilling reading. Canada will be facing this sort of thing very, very soon–after all, Andrew Scheer is already getting grilled about his personal views on sin.

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Trans activists constantly push “transition”—sex change surgery—at increasingly younger and younger ages by claiming that these surgeries and so-called “treatments” are essential to improving the mental health of trans children and teens. Conversely, they accuse those who believe that we are performing a massive and incredibly dangerous social experiment on thousands upon thousands of children of contributing to the trans suicide rate. But now, Public Discourse is reporting, data “from a new study show that the beneficial effect of surgery for transgender people is so small that a clinic may have to perform as many as 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health treatment.”

Of course, the authors of the study carefully concealed that fact—but yet, there it is.

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Ontario parents enraged that their 6-year-old daughter was taught that “there’s no such thing as boys and girls” at school are now filing a lawsuit against the board, teacher, and principal who caused their daughter such confusion. The little girl was shown a YouTube video in first grade at Devonshire Community Public School titled “He, She, and They?!?—Gender: Queer Kid Stuff #2,” a video that was actually part of the lesson plan for first graders. The video caused their daughter to worry that she might not be a girl, after all. These types of lessons are now standard in Canada, and so it will be interesting to see how this case is decided. If the parents lose, it will be another key victory for LGBT activists in their ongoing colonization of the schools.