1. Lynn Meagher: When Transgenderism Discards My Daughter, I Will Still Be Here For Her
I know what it means to face adversity and come through stronger. But nothing prepared me for this. Being a mom was the most important, challenging, and deeply meaningful thing in my life.
As crippling as it is, my grief at the loss of our relationship isn’t the hardest pain to bear. Far beyond that, I’m terrified for her.
2. William McGurn: The Christian Baker Who Said ‘No’
Mr. Phillips owns Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colo., and holds traditional views on marriage and sexuality. The first legal action against him came via the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, when in 2012 he declined to bake a custom cake for a same-sex wedding and found himself accused of unlawful discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. This time he’s being sued because he wouldn’t bake a cake celebrating a gender transition.
…
“Jack didn’t single Scardina out for being transgender,” Ms. Waggoner says. “He wouldn’t bake cakes with those messages for anyone.” This is a baker who won’t even make Halloween cakes, she adds, and serves everyone regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation.
It’s not clear exactly why Ms. Scardina wanted a cake featuring Satan, apart from provoking him. When asked why she ordered the Satan cake, she said she wanted to believe Mr. Phillips was a “good person” and hoped to persuade him to see the “errors of his thinking.” That’s some deal for someone you say is a “good person”: Change your thinking or I will try to ruin you.
3. Hundreds of Christian families face eviction from their homes in Pakistan
Over the past week, the houses of 450 Catholic families were destroyed in Pakistan, and those of 1,000 Christians will be bulldozed by government officials in upcoming days.
Brooks said she had a sense of what had gone through her brother’s mind Monday.
“I honestly know my brother, when he heard there was a shooting in a supermarket, I know his first thought was, ‘There are kids in there,’ ” Brooks said. “He loved his kids. His family shopped at King Soopers.”
“I know Eric would have wanted to save every single one of those lives. I know why he flew in there first, because he was thinking, there are families in that store.”
5. U.S. sanctions Chinese officials connected to ‘genocide’ of Uyghurs
One religious freedom advocate praised the sanctions as a first step of a necessary larger effort to pressure China over its human rights abuses.
“It’s a very important step for something that really needs to get much larger,” Dr. Tom Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, told EWTN News Nightly on Monday.
6. Bobby Schindler: Day 5 of Terri’s Court Mandated Death By Starvation and Dehydration
7. Seth Barron: Policing Speech
Speaking to reporters about anti-Asian attacks that have occurred around the country, the mayor encouraged people who have “witnessed or experienced any act of hate” to report it. “Even if something is not a criminal case,” the [NYC] mayor explained, “a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it’s NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they’ve done was very hurtful to another person and could if ever repeated, lead to criminal charges, that’s another important piece of the puzzle.”
…
Hating people on the basis of their race, creed, or sexuality does not constitute legitimate politics for anyone but fringe extremists—but expressions of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia, while loathsome, are constitutionally protected in the United States. What de Blasio seems to be proposing—sending the police after people who say things that his administration finds offensive—is hard to distinguish from what goes on in authoritarian police states, where any political speech that opposes the government is illegal.
8. Naomi Schaefer Riley: Reforming Child-Neglect Laws
A study by the U.S. Justice Department found that over 99% of children reported missing in 2002 were found alive. Yet thanks in no small part to breathless news coverage of high-profile kidnapping cases, American parents have developed an irrational obsession with eliminating threats to children, both real and imagined. In their bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff call this fixation “the cult of safety,” or “safetyism,” and contend that instead of protecting children, it is causing them harm.
The authors cite the work of scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who asserts that human beings are “antifragile” in the sense that they require stressors in order to learn how to cope with opposition, adapt to it, and ultimately mature. If parents never allow their children to encounter age-appropriate challenges, they will fail to develop the skills and capacities they need to handle life’s inevitable trials and disappointments without an adult. As Skenazy put it, “[t]he problem with this everything-is-dangerous outlook is that over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can’t do anything on his own eventually can’t.”
9. Charles Fain Lehman: Lockdowns and Domestic Violence
Policymakers have tools for reducing domestic violence, including education programs, early childhood intervention, and victim support. The recently passed stimulus bill includes $800 million for child-abuse, domestic-violence, and gender-based violence prevention. But the Covid-adjacent spike is a short-term phenomenon demanding faster fixes than such measures can provide. That means increased law enforcement attention to domestic violence and, where appropriate, easing of Covid restrictions, especially where they affect those most at risk for domestic violence.
Police have a significant role to play in this process. Research shows that arresting offenders, especially as targeted by special domestic-violence units, can reduce the risk of re-abuse, increase the likelihood of a successful prosecution, and improve victims’ satisfaction and safety. (This evidence also points to just one of the many ways that efforts to slash police budgets are particularly harmful.)
Cities should also move to reduce harm by reopening public spaces where health concerns permit, particularly those that cater to children. New York City is in the process of reopening its schools, giving kids a place away from potentially violent situations and a lifeline to teachers and advisors. But just one in four New York kids, and just one in five high schoolers, will actually be allowed to attend; the rest are excluded because they opted out of the system last fall.
10.
Will Native Americans receive the same protections for their religious practices that other faith groups enjoy? Becket has filed two appeals at the Ninth Circuit to stop the government from destroying sacred sites. #SaveOakFlat
— BECKET (@BECKETlaw) March 23, 2021
11. Natasha Chart: The Trans Agenda Uses Exactly The Same Tactics As Woman Abusers
The vast majority of women working for American organizations or outlets aligned with the political left more or less have to affirm a belief in sex change on the basis of gender identity. I’ve talked to women who’ve been forced out of work, out of professions, pushed out of classrooms, or hounded off campus. As a woman fired in 2015 from a left-leaning feminist charity for opposing gender identity and the legalization of the sex industry, I can say the dynamics within American leftist organizations broadly mirror typical workplace harassment of women.
…
In three recent hearings where I testified in favor of bills to protect women’s sports, opponents invoked this suicide trope to describe male access to girls’ and women’s sports, using terms like “lifesaving.” Female athletes have been reduced to watching males steal their victories, titles, and scholarships, but gender activists are the ones carrying on about how traumatized they are.
Worse, women have already had to put up with sharing domestic violence shelters and prison cells with men because of gender identity claims. Under an Obama-era directive, their federal funding is on the line.
12. Top Iraqi Catholic praises return of Christian-owned property
The properties were restored as part of an initiative launched earlier this year by Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al Sadr, head of the Sadist political group, whose party currently enjoys strong representation in Iraq’s parliament. In January, al-Sadr ordered the creation of an ad hoc committee tasked with collecting and verifying complaints of the illegal expropriation of property owned by Christians and other regional minorities.
Calling al-Sadr’s move a celebration of “patriotism and humanity,” Cardinal Louis Raphaël Sako, Iraq’s Chaldean patriarch, said such initiatives “will continue to encourage Christians to return to their country and recover their property.”
13. The Equality Act and What It Means for Catholics
14. Thomas Jipping: Debate the Equality Act, but Tell the Truth About It
The issues raised by the Equality Act are serious and need open, honest debate. But the March 17 hearing on this bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee showed that serious legislative consideration is impossible unless we are honest about what, on its face, the Equality Act would do.
During the hearing, Alfonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, claimed that while the Equality Act would grant the right not to be discriminated against, it would not take any rights away from anyone. No one who has read the Equality Act could possibly believe that, let alone say so under oath.
15. The Post Millennial: Father jailed after referring to biological female child as his daughter
Hoogland is a father to a gender non-conforming biological female 16-year-old who identifies as transgender and prefers the use of male pronouns. Hoogland has repeatedly called this person his daughter, though the court has forbade it. The transition has been underway for more than two years.
On Tuesday at 10 am Vancouver time, Hoogland surrendered himself to the court in response to the Attorney General of British Columbia’s warrant his arrest for contempt. He was then arrested and jailed. The warrant was issued by Judge Tammen on March 4, 2021.
Hoogland wrote on a GoFundMe page raising money for his defense that the legal issue “could land me in jail for up to five years for speaking truth about state sponsored child abuse” and said he is “blocked from sharing any videos at this time that oppose the sterilization of children!”
17. How one woman uses her post-abortive past to give others a future
18. Pregnant, Homeless in the Snow
19. Generational Wins: A Victory for Parental Rights in Educational Choice
20. Howard Husock: Democratizing Charitable Giving
Limiting incentives for charitable giving to the wealthy runs counter to American traditions of broad-based philanthropy. The proposed bill would make a start toward re-democratizing charity—not only by providing financial incentives for it, but also by sending a normative message about its importance to society. Expanding the charitable deduction is an acknowledgment, by government, of the limits of government.
As a one-year stimulus plan, the benefit is exciting. Instead of a Great Society alphabet soup of programs, or a ’90s-era emphasis on work requirements, policymakers are recognizing that the most efficient and direct way to support families is to give them cash.
But as it looks toward making these benefits permanent, Congress should consider the child benefit approach proposed by a Republican senator, Mitt Romney. Not only is the Romney plan more generous ($350 a month for each young child and $250 a month for each school-aged child), it pays for the expanded benefit in a sustainable way that makes life simpler for lower-income parents. By getting rid of some current tax exclusions and adjustments, it rationalizes the tax code, especially for low-income families who currently face a bewildering array of phase-ins, phase-outs and benefit cliffs.
22. Rod Dreher: A Christian survival guide for a secular age
American Christianity is entering a new era — one in which religious faith is no longer a given; one in which a creeping ideological totalitarianism is hostile toward traditionalists who dissent from the claims of today’s progressive brand of politics. There are no secret police, no gulags, no banishments to Siberia, but there are softer forms of marginalization and deplatforming aimed at those who dissent from secular orthodoxies.