A roundup of news and commentary from around the interwebs.
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The story of James Younger has taken another tragic turn. From National Review:
A Texas judge has granted full custody of eight-year-old James Younger to his mother, who has fought publicly to transition her son into a girl against the father’s wishes.
Judge Mary Brown granted full custody to Anne Georgulas in an order on Tuesday, awarding the mother exclusive control over James’s primary residence, counseling, medications, education and extracurricular activities. It allows Georgulas to withhold information from Jeff Younger, James’s father, “regarding the children’s extracurricular activities, school functions, school enrollment, counseling, and medical care.”
However, while Georgulas has the exclusive right to consent to James’s medical procedures, the order notes that that power does not extend to hormone-suppression therapy, puberty blockers, or transgender reassignment surgery.
The high-profile custody case has played out publicly for years as Georgulas has insisted that her son identifies as a girl named Luna. Younger has disagreed, saying that James chooses to present himself as a boy at his house, even though he keeps feminine clothes in his son’s closet as an option.
Georgulas claims that James chose the name “Luna” after expressing the desire to be a girl at young age by showing a preference for female pronouns and Disney princesses. However, Younger argues that James’s transgender status is contrived, and says he has a video of James as a 3-year-old saying that “Mommy” told him he was a girl.
The ruling says that Younger “failed to timely make the payments of child support, medical support and interest as ordered and only paid his past due support after the motion for enforcement was filed.”
My friend John Jalsevac—a pro-life writer who has been carefully examining the various claims about both COVID-19 and the vaccines—has been doing some excellent writing on the issue. I’ve had many, many videos sent to me over the past months, and he does a good job responding to some of the key people in this column at his Substack, “Beware the anti-vax panic porn.” Having concerns is all well and good, but the reality is that balance is necessary. Jalsevac does a great job of that, and I highly recommend this article.
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C-Fam has a grim report on “Global Family Planning Partnership Garners U.S. Support in Rebranding and Promoting LGBTQ Issues.” The Biden Administration, like the Obama Administration, is doing a tremendous amount of damage to the natural family abroad.
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At First Things, Carl Trueman has a savage critique of Josh Harris’s latest transformation. Many of you may know Harris as the author of the evangelical bestseller I Kissed Dating Goodbye, which the erstwhile author lately repudiated along with Christianity itself. But as Trueman pointed out, the more Harris changes, the more he stays the same—he’s now hawking a course on how to recover from purity culture, of which he was a key architect and promoter:
A man with a greater sense of self-doubt, not to say appropriate shame, might have decided that someone else would be better qualified to apply the balm of Gilead to the wounds of his earlier victims.
Which leads us to the second striking aspect of the project: The accidental properties of the message have changed, but at root its substance is still the same: Josh Harris. He may have abandoned the religious sales pitch, but he has not reframed his life at its most fundamental level. It remains driven by that which places him at the center and presents him as the solution, not the problem. While it would appear that he is now selling a different message, that conclusion would miss the reality of the situation. From purity culture to therapeutic gibberish, there is remarkable underlying consistency here. Harris may have glued a different label on the bottles of life’s elixir that he is hawking, but he is still selling exactly the same product: Josh Harris.
Some good news—Election Canada confirms what we already knew, which is that the pro-life lobby group Right Now did nothing wrong in their political work. From The Western Standard:
After more than one year of communications between Elections Canada and lawyers for the pro-life lobby group RightNow, the agency announced its investigation into allegations the group contravened the Canada Elections Act has concluded without finding guilt.
Elections Canada still won’t explain what they were investigating, in the first place.
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The dirty little secret of Canada's pro-choice politicians is that they all know that the human being developing in the womb is a baby. They just conveniently forget this fact when discussing abortion, which is legal until birth in this country. https://t.co/SCfNe70ydW
