Government meeting in Alaska opened with “hail Satan” prayer, Elizabeth Warren demands reparations for gay people (and other stories)

By Jonathon Van Maren

A new roundup of culture war news:

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This new case will dictate whether or not female sporting events actually survive, or whether they end up being a collection of confused and mutilated males competing against one another to the cheers of the LGBTQ crowd. From FOX News:

Three Connecticut girls who participate on high school track teams have filed a federal discrimination complaint against a statewide policy on transgender athletes, saying it has cost them top finishes in competitions and possibly college scholarships.

The conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom filed the complaint on behalf of Selina Soule and two other minor girls Monday with the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. It seeks an investigation and actions to make competitions fair.

The Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference governs high school sports in the state. It says its policy follows a state anti-discrimination law requiring students to be treated in school according to the gender with which they identify. The complaint says transgender athletes have been consistently winning track and field events and the policy violates federal protections for female athletes.

If the girls lose, biological males will dominate both male and female sporting events, and another female-only space will be eliminated. It is interesting to note that the transgender revolution has primarily impacted women, who are losing the spaces they fought for over the past several decades and are being told they are bigoted if they complain: Bathrooms, locker rooms, battered women’s shelters, and even Girl Scouts. Each new inalienable “right” invented by the progressives comes at the expense of another group. In this case, it is women and girls.

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As the Democratic candidates for president fight to find breathing space in their overloaded clown car, the battle to see who can become the wokest has begun in earnest. Joe Biden, as I mentioned earlier, has already caved on federal funding for abortion, and he’ll be sure to sacrifice any of his remaining loosely-held principles in his final geriatric bid to achieve the White House as the race wears on. Elizabeth Warren, who has already suggested nationalizing everything and seizing private property, has now decided that the reparations debate (which is currently raging in a far-off corner of the Left regarding slavery) should also be applied to the gay-married couples who didn’t get quite as much as she thinks they were owed in tax returns. From Mic.com:

LGBTQ+ Americans have historically received unjust treatment by the United States government, but some politicians are now looking to correct past wrongs. On June 20, Massachusetts Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren introduced the Refund Equality Act, a bill that would benefit same-sex couples formerly discriminated against through the U.S. Tax Code due to unequal marriage laws.

If the act passes, LGBTQ+ couples married in states where their union was recognized before gay marriage was legalized nationwide in 2013 could amend their past tax returns to receive IRS refunds. According to NBC News, that’s approximately $57 million in total owed to countless couples who weren’t able to jointly file federal tax returns prior to the Supreme Court’s decision.

As Warren noted in a statement, her home of Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to legally recognize same-sex marriage back in 2004. Yet because the government’s definition of marriage didn’t match the state’s, many married LGBTQ+ couples in Massachusetts, depending on their incomes and individual finances, were prevented from receiving the refunds they deserved.

“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”

Once we decide that reparations are the thing to do, there’ll be no end to them. Just as Justin Trudeau is constantly discovering new groups that have suffered injustices in history (and history is famously full of them) that he can apologize for, thus sprucing up his re-election bid with the appropriate amount of virtue-infused penitence, Warren has clearly realized that if the Left has accepted the concept of reparations for slavery, there will be more reparations debates to come. She is decided to get out in front of that parade with a Pride flag, and whaddaya know, it coincidentally happens to be Pride Month. Of course, if Warren’s plan goes through, the LGBT reparations debate will balloon faster than their acronym, and the federal government will soon find itself on the hook for smashed windows at Stonewall and everything else anyone can think of. (I’m sure Eric Swalwell has some ideas that nobody cares about.)

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I know most of the Satanists believe themselves to be trolls attempting to offend as many people as possible, but for those of us who believe Satan actually does exist and that calls on him could actually be answered, this sort of thing, reported by The Hill, constitutes playing with fire:

Several attendees at a government meeting open to the public in Alaska walked out in protest after an opening prayer praised Satan. The Associated Press reports the prayer, where a woman declared “Hail Satan,” was given by Satanic Temple member Iris Fontana, who won the right to open the meeting with an invocation of her choice. “That which will not bend, must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared as demise. It is done, hail Satan,” Fontana said to open the meeting, according to local radio station KSRM The controversial prayer Tuesday night started the meeting of the Kenai Peninsula Borough and prompted several attendees to exit.

A protest outside the borough’s administration building ensued, drawing 40 or so people. Fontana was reportedly among one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit litigated by the ACLU of Alaska against the borough after it approved a policy in 2016 to only allow people belonging to official organizations with an established presence on the Kenai Peninsula to give invocations at meetings. Last year, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the borough policy was unconstitutional and the policy was changed to allow anyone to offer invocations regardless of affiliation.

We’ll file this one under “be careful who you invoke.”

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Dr. Jordan Peterson is taking aim at Canada’s public school system again, over a recent story about a young girl traumatized by gender ideology. From the National Post:

This week, journalist Barbara Kay released a story on The Post Millennial website about an application filed before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario by the parents of a six year girl, “N,” who was made subject to the new tenets of gender identity theory by her hypothetically well-meaning elementary school teacher at Devonshire Community Public School (Ottawa-Carleton District School Board). According to Kay’s account, the teacher insisted to the children that “there is no such thing as girls and boys,” and “girls are not real and boys are not real.” In consequence, “N” began to manifest substantial confusion about her identity. She asked her parents why her existence as a girl was not real. She asked to see a doctor for an opinion. She became unsettled about the reality of her biological existence. Her concern persisted over a three-month period — a long time in the life of a young person.

Consider this: At the tender age of six, “N” was being required, first, to question an identity she had spent continual and effortful time developing since (at minimum) the age of two — learning the rules she understood to be generically appropriate for her role, so that she knew how to fit in, play her part, get along, refrain from violating the expectations of her peers and the adults she interacted with, and planning, as best as she could, her course through life as a female. Second, she was being required to question what constitutes “real” — because if you are six, and you’re a girl, and you know it (and so does everyone else), and you are now being told that none of that is “real,” then the whole idea of reality becomes shaky and unstable. The seriousness of the philosophical and psychological confusion that such demands are capable of generating should not be underestimated.

I can barely envision a pedagogical strategy less conducive to stable early childhood development, particularly for a thoughtful child, which is exactly what “N” seems to be — much to her detriment, in this situation. Trusting her teacher, as she apparently did, “N” listened to her lessons and tried to think through what the complicated and internally contradictory mess of information she was presented with might actually signify — and failing, as was inevitable, because there is nothing that it signifies that is reasonable, logical, practical, or true. No matter: “gender fluidity” is school board policy, even for six-year olds, and the distress of a perfectly normal child at the lessons is a price well worth paying to ensure that ideological purity, no matter how counterproductive and absurd, is stringently maintained. Better the child suffers than the teacher thinks. Better the entire educational system reformulates itself around the new dogma (and to hell with the possibility that the experiment might go wrong) than the ideologues governing its structure question their absurd and fundamentally resentful presumptions.

Despite discussing their concerns with the school principal, the superintendent of the school board, and the curriculum superintendent, the parents allege that all these authorities refused to agree to “communicate with parents when sensitive discussions took place” (remember, these are six year olds) and would not issue any directive or take any corrective action “to ensure that children of female gender identity were positively affirmed.” “N’s” parents have since moved their child to another school where the same absolutely inexcusable foolishness has not yet repeated itself. And now we’re going to find out — courtesy of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal (an organization in which I could hardly have less faith and which should be abolished as soon as possible) — whether little girls have the right to maintain their normative, common, practical and realistic world-view and opinion of their own bodies, or whether that is trumped administratively and legally by the existence of the incoherent set of rights inexcusably and forcibly granted to the tiny minority of people who insist that their “identities” are entirely self-generated and absolutely inviolate socially and legally. I would place a strong bet on the latter, and I think the fact that it’s come to that is to our great collective shame and danger.

As I’ve been saying for several years now, this is not going to end well.

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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.