A roundup of news and interviews from around the interwebs.
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A Baptist pastor from Calgary has launched a nation-wide initiative to provide a wholesome alternative to Drag Queen Story Hour that affirm biological gender and a positive vision of masculinity and femininity called “True Readings with True Royalty.” It’s a great project: “Christian alternative to Drag Queen story hours goes nationwide.”
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On the frontlines of Frankenstein medicine where transgenderism and transhumanism meet, a report from Christopher Rufo: “Oregon’s Castration Machine.” An excerpt:
The gender surgery program at Oregon Health & Science University, a public teaching hospital in downtown Portland, provides a productive tableau for analysis. The program is led by Blair Peters, a self-described “queer surgeon” who sports neon-pink hair, uses “he/they” pronouns, and specializes in vaginoplasty (the creation of an artificial vagina), phalloplasty (the creation of an artificial penis), and “non-binary” surgeries, which nullify the genitals altogether. Peters and his colleagues have pioneered the use of a vaginoplasty robot, which helps efficiently castrate male patients and turn their flesh into a “neo-vagina.”
Could anybody have imagined this ten years ago?
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This news, from Aaron Renn, is totally unsurprising: “Military Recruitment Challenges Show American Leadership Failures.” The hardcore woke recruiting of America’s military brass is driving away precisely the sorts of young men who traditionally would have joined.
Mainline denominations continue to split over allegiance to biblical sexuality. Some churches are choosing to stay with Scripture; others are defecting to the Sexual Revolution: “United Methodists lose one-fifth of US churches in schism driven by growing defiance of LGBTQ bans.” An excerpt:
More than 6,000 United Methodist congregations — a fifth of the U.S. total — have now received permission to leave the denomination amid a schism over theology and the role of LGBTQ people in the nation’s second-largest Protestant denomination.
Those figures emerge following the close of regular meetings in June for the denomination’s regional bodies, known as annual conferences. The departures began with a trickle in 2019 — when the church created a four-year window of opportunity for U.S. congregations to depart over LGBTQ-related issues — and cascaded to its highest level this year. Church law forbids the marriage or ordination of “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals,” but many conservatives have chosen to leave amid a growing defiance of those bans in many U.S. churches and conferences.
Many of the departing congregations are joining the Global Methodist Church, a denomination created last year by conservatives breaking from the UMC, while others are going independent or joining different denominations.
