A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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My friend Dr. Michael New has a good piece over at National Reviewtaking a brief look at both the opportunities and the challenges of a potentially post-Roe America.
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Mary Harrington is one of the most interesting writers around these days, and her column on “why trad wives aren’t trad enough” is very interesting.
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A feminist writer has slammed the use of surrogates by celebrities, calling it the practice of producing “ready-made babies.” I agree with her.
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Charles Cooke lays out why it is so dangerous for the BBC to being quietly censoring its own archives to better reflect the values of our current moment. He’s right.
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French President Emmanuel Macron is calling for abortion to be enshrined in the EU rights charter. “Twenty years after the proclamation of our Charter of Fundamental Rights, which notably enshrined the abolition of the death penalty throughout the Union, I hope that we can update this charter, notably to be more explicit on environmental protection or the recognition of the right to abortion,” he stated. To enshrine the death penalty for unborn children and to use the abolishing of the death penalty for criminals as a justification is tragically ironic.
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The sad saga of Aaron and Melissa Klein continues. From Fox News:
Two Christian bakers in Oregon who faced a $135,000 fine for refusing to bake a cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding in 2011 received a partial victory in court Wednesday.
While the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the ruling that Aaron and Melissa Klein, erstwhile owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, had violated the law by refusing to create an artistic cake to celebrate the nuptials of Rachel Cryer and Laurel Bowman, it also ruled that the state’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) had violated the First Amendment’s “requirement of strict neutrality toward religion” in determining the damages the Kleins must pay. The court returned the case to BOLI to determine the correct damages.
First Liberty, the law firm representing the Kleins, cried foul and told Fox News Digital that the bakers plan to appeal the decision to the state’s supreme court. “Oregon is trying to have its cake and eat it, too,” Stephanie Taub, senior counsel for First Liberty, said in a statement. “The Court admits the state agency that acted as both prosecutor and judge in this case was biased against the Kleins’ faith. Yet, despite this anti-Christian bias that infected the whole case, the court is sending the case back to the very same agency for a do-over.”
“Today’s opinion should have been the end of this ten year long saga,” Taub added. “It’s time for the state of Oregon’s hostility toward Aaron and Melissa to end.”
LGBT activists have nearly destroyed this family. I hope the Supreme Court puts an end to this.
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France has also now passed a “conversion therapy ban,” and it is bad news:
Yesterday the Parliament of France definitively adopted a law to introduce a new crime into the Criminal Code. Anyone who practices “conversion therapies” to change a person’s sexual orientation, even at their request, will risk up to three years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros. The law was advanced by Lrem, the party of Emmanuel Macron, and the Minister for Equality, Elisabeth Moreno, called conversion therapies “the antithesis of our republican values”.
However, the text has sparked the protest of psychiatrists and jurists, collected by Figaro, because it does not limit itself to prohibiting medical and psychological interventions to change the orientation of homosexual people. In fact, in the first article, gender identity was also included. Conversion therapies, it states, are “practices, behaviors or repeated proposals aimed at modifying or repressing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, true or supposed, and having the effect of altering physical or mental health “.
By including gender identity in the text, protested the Observatoire la petite sirène, a collective that brings together doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts for children, “we will no longer be able to take care of minors suffering from gender dysphoria”. As the jurist Olivia Sarton explains, in the law “there is no distinction between minors and adults and the problems of the two categories of people are not the same”.
These laws are, in part, a retrenchment in the face of growing pushback to gender ideology. LGBT activists will do anything to ensure the success of their agenda—even make it illegal to refuse sex changes to children.
One thought on “France bans refusing sex changes to children (and other stories)”
Navi says:
Sort of ironic that abortion advocates accuse the pro-life movement of trying to make the Handmaid’s Tale real, even though the Handmaid’s Tale had nothing to do with abortion. Rather, it was about lower caste women deliberately serving as concubines for rich and powerful men because they had virtually no other options. That’s not the sort of thing the pro-life movement supports. In fact, the biggest pro-life religious denomination strongly opposes the practice and views it as degrading to the dignity of women and families.
Indeed, the civil enforcement portion of the Texas law should be considered across the country. The deterrent was enough to nearly shut down the abortion industry, and non-criminal penalties preclude rogue prosecutors and jury nullification (tactics used by the KKK as well as abortion activists).
Sort of ironic that abortion advocates accuse the pro-life movement of trying to make the Handmaid’s Tale real, even though the Handmaid’s Tale had nothing to do with abortion. Rather, it was about lower caste women deliberately serving as concubines for rich and powerful men because they had virtually no other options. That’s not the sort of thing the pro-life movement supports. In fact, the biggest pro-life religious denomination strongly opposes the practice and views it as degrading to the dignity of women and families.
Indeed, the civil enforcement portion of the Texas law should be considered across the country. The deterrent was enough to nearly shut down the abortion industry, and non-criminal penalties preclude rogue prosecutors and jury nullification (tactics used by the KKK as well as abortion activists).