December 2022 — Ed Reporter Monthly Email Edition

An accomplished psychiatrist and consummate scientist for more than 50 years, Dr. Paul McHugh is a tireless defender of objective truth. Educated at Harvard Medical School, McHugh continued his studies at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he focused on neurology and neuropathology. He went on to attend the Institute of Psychiatry in London, followed by a stint in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

During his studies and subsequent work in the field of psychiatry, Dr. McHugh developed a healthy skepticism of certain psychiatric theories and fads. As the famed late author, Tom Wolfe, said of McHugh, who treated him for depression following bypass surgery: “Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins is the man who rescued modern psychiatry from a coven of flaming nut cases with medical degrees who actually believed in such lunatic notions as ‘recovered memory,’ ‘sexual reassignment,’ ‘multiple personality disorder,’ ‘physician-assisted suicide,’ ‘Vietnam-specific post-traumatic stress syndrome,’ and destroyed innumerable lives as long as they held sway.” (Quote taken from DenverCatholic.org, May 2021.)

Following a series of appointments to various medical centers from New York to Oregon, Dr. McHugh joined Johns Hopkins University in 1975 as director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, while at the same time serving as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. In 1979 he was instrumental in stopping the institution’s performance of “sex reassignment surgeries,” a moratorium that he oversaw for 38 years.

In a 2015 article on Public Discourse, Dr. McHugh wrote that Johns Hopkins’ pioneering of sex-change surgery “demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of ‘transgendered’ among young and old.”

Just one year later in 2016, the famed medical center caved to pressure from the transgender lobby — primarily from the activist group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) — and reinstated the transgender surgeries. In August of that year, in partnership with Dr. Lawrence Mayer (also of Johns Hopkins), Dr. McHugh published what LifeSiteNews.com described as “an authoritative 143-page study of all peer reviewed papers on sexual orientation,” and came to the conclusion that “there is no scientific evidence that sexual orientation is inherited.”

Persecution of Dr. McHugh

By the spring of 2017, transgender activists had circled the wagons and some 600 “health experts” signed onto a letter condemning McHugh’s and Mayer’s report. As may be expected, McHugh was no stranger to the LGBT lobby, who had attacked him previously for his belief as a scientist and a Christian that “transgender people need mental health services, not medical ones.”

According to an article in The Christian Post, the letter attacked the report because “it was not peer-reviewed.” However, it cited many studies that were peer-reviewed and included “a careful summary and an up-to-date explanation of research — from the biological, psychological, and social sciences — related to sexual orientation and gender identity.” Nonetheless, the letter claimed that the research “misleads readers” and that its conclusions “do not reflect current scientific or medical consensus about sexual orientation or gender identity research findings or clinical care recommendations.”

In response, the then-85-year-old McHugh dismissed the letter as “not serious because the objection that the signatories have to the report is not made clear.” He told The Christian Post that “the main point about this letter is that they just don’t like us. That’s all there is about this matter. I’m sorry they don’t like us but if they disagree with something specific, they should say so. They should make the specific objection clear to us. After all, we said we expected there to be ongoing discussion about our views, interpretation, or even what the data should signify…” He added: “We are not against anybody. We are a group of doctors talking about the treatment of patients. [The letter] is just an attempt to silence us and it won’t succeed.”

At the time the study was published, Dr. Mayer also stood by the duo’s research. “Every line in this [report] I either wrote or approved of,” he said. “There is no bias either way. The bias is just towards science.”

The study was also cited in a Supreme Court amicus brief dated January 10, 2017, filed by the conservative Liberty Counsel in support of a Virginia school district being sued by a transgender student for the right to use the bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with the student’s gender identity. The student was a female who decided to become a male and was using the boys’ bathrooms at school. The school district ultimately lost the case on appeal to the Fourth Circuit in 2020 (Gavin Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board, No. 19-1952 (4th Cir. 2020)), and in 2021, the Supreme Court denied certiorari, leaving intact the decision of the Fourth Circuit.

The transgender lobby was undeterred by Dr. McHugh’s extensive professional accolades, awards, and credentials, and continued their attempts to discredit his work. LifeSiteNews reported that in 2017, HRC created a “special attack website — which appears to no longer be active — called ‘McHugh Exposed,’ which accused him of peddling ‘junk science.’” Dr. McHugh and anyone espousing his views was labeled “homophobic,” “transphobic,” and an “exporter of hate.” Name-calling and negative labeling are hallmarks of the left, which has no valid argument against scientific reality.

LifeSiteNews continued: “McHugh’s popularity on the national stage among conservatives grew after The Wall Street Journal published his op-ed, “Transgender Surgery Is Not the Solution,” in 2014. The Journal piece is cited regularly by opponents of “transgender activism the world over.”

McHugh wrote in the op-ed:

• [P]olicy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment, and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken — it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

Transgender activists especially resented McHugh’s comparison of gender-confused people to those with eating disorders. As McHugh further wrote:

• The transgendered suffer a disorder of ‘assumption’ like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature — namely one’s maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.

Pro-family professionals defend McHugh

While Dr. McHugh’s voice for gender sanity may have the most longevity and scientific credibility, his is fortunately not the only one. LifeSiteNews reported that Ryan Anderson, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, tweeted during the height of the attacks against the scientist: “Dr. McHugh is an accomplished medical professional completely devoted to the health of his patients… Attacks on Dr. McHugh are amazing: It’s not the man who thinks he’s a woman who has mental issues, it’s the doctor who dares speak truth.”

In a 2016 article on Public Discourse titled Transgenderism Has No Basis in Science or Law, Margaret Hagen, JD, Ph.D, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, described the laws being proposed at the time to accommodate the transgender agenda. She called them “highly controversial legislation, threatened executive edicts, and heavy-handed federal mandates regarding discrimination and public accommodation; laws that require—among other things—public and private institutions, businesses, and schools to allow biological males who self-identify as females to use the toilet facilities and locker rooms of females (and vice versa).” She added that “such forced accommodations have no reasonable basis in law or medicine.”

Echoing the findings of McHugh, Hagen wrote: “Let us be clear: there is no such thing as ‘sex-reassignment’ surgery. A mutilated male pumped full of estrogen remains just that—a mutilated male pumped full of estrogen. He has not ‘transitioned’ into being a woman. He can never be a woman. Nor are the hundreds of thousands of women who have undergone total hysterectomies for various reasons transformed into males. They remain women whose ovaries and wombs have been removed. They are not men.”

Hagen’s article also decried “interference with the normal sexual development of children on the basis of political ideology,” asserting that “it is not just unethical—it is child abuse. It is not only past time for an extensive public discussion of this practice; it is past time to put an end to it.”

Of course, she wrote this article six years ago, and despite her best efforts and those of other true scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, parents, concerned citizens, and some politicians, the transgender juggernaut rolls on, with more and more children falling victim to its false ideology.

Meanwhile, at the age of 91, Dr. Paul McHugh’s long career in pursuit of scientific truth is winding down. As Denver Catholic noted in May 2021 on the occasion of his 90th birthday:

• Few scientists have made greater contributions to unraveling the mysteries of our complex inner lives than Paul McHugh; few men of such eminence have suffered such calumnies from critics who haven’t one-fifth of his intellectual wattage or one-tenth of his moral courage. He has been a sign of contradiction for much of his professional life, not because he sought controversy but because he sought truth. And he did that because Paul McHugh, consummate scientist and serious Catholic, understands that knowing and living by the truths embedded in us and in the world helps satisfy our innate desire for happiness, while ignoring or denying those truths adds to the burdens of human suffering.

The world needs others similarly motivated to rise up and carry on the fight.

According to the pollster Gallup, a new high 71 percent of Americans support same-sex marriage, while nearly 60 percent of regular church goers oppose it. Gallup also shows that just 17 percent of Americans say they are “satisfied with the direction of the country,”

Moreover, the percentage of Americans who admit they are “not too happy” with how things are going has increased from 10 percent in 2000 to nearly a quarter in 2022, and those who profess to be “very happy” has decreased during the same time period, from 34 percent to just 19 percent. As conservative pundit Star Parker observed in The Liberty Dispatch: “Clearly, many Americans sense there is something very wrong going on in our country.”

Those opposed to the so-called Respect for Marriage Act (RMA), H.R.8404, which passed the U.S. Senate on November 29 with no amendments to protect religious freedom and with the help of 12 Senate Republicans, point out that it not only codifies same-sex marriage at the federal level but it also nullifies First Amendment protections.

All 50 states will now be required to recognize “any marriage legally recognized by any other state, and gives individuals the right to sue if they feel they have been harmed by people who believe in natural marriage.” If a state such as California should decide to recognize polygamous “marriages,” the other 49 would be required to recognize these unions as well.

An enthusiastic supporter of the bill, President Biden signed it into law with controversial fanfare on December 13. (See Education Briefs in this issue.)

Dangers of the RMA

Phyllis Schlafly Eagles President Ed Martin said of the bill just prior to its final passage: “Frankly, there will not be a single unintended consequence of this law, since its whole purpose is to exercise tyranny over those of religious faith and put a crushing stop to the fundamental American ability to dissent.”

Martin predicts that faith-based institutions and businesses will “legally be labeled bigots according to federal code. There is simply no other purpose or conclusion of this bill,” he says, “than to stamp out protections for conscience and religious belief. Anyone who says otherwise is incredibly ignorant or a willful liar.”

Some conservatives labeled the bill the Disrespect of Marriage Act when it was introduced in July. Both the U.S. House and Senate produced similar bills, ostensibly in retaliation for a suggestion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion on the Dobbs decision that perhaps the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, among others, might also deserve scrutiny by the high court.

Journalist Ben Johnson noted on WashingtonStand.com that the RMA prevents “any state from exclusively protecting the natural family in law, in the unlikely event the Supreme Court overturns Obergefell v. Hodges, which created the constitutional ‘right’ to same-sex marriage.”

Johnson quoted Democrat Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York who said: “The far-right Supreme Court is on a rampage against the freedoms of the American people.” And Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, also of New York, threatened: “We will not sit idly by as Republicans and their activist judges take our country backward.” Both legislators identify as LGBT.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) called the bill a response to “unfounded fear” on the House floor when it was introduced in July. Roy said: “There is no threat. My colleagues are here for political messaging. … We’re here because my Democratic colleagues have no answer” to the nation’s economic woes.

Johnson further wrote that the move “comes as part of an aggressively legislative push by congressional Democrats to set their view of hot-button values issues into stone, since it can no longer rely on the Supreme Court, which recently closed its most constitutionally based session in 87 years.”

In a follow-up article on November 30, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins called the bill “a club with which the Left will attempt to beat people of orthodox faith — who believe in marriage as God designed it and history has defined — into submission.”

The Alliance Defending Freedom agreed, stating: “While proponents of the bill claim that it merely enshrines the 2015 Obergefell decision, in reality it is a direct attack on the religious freedom of millions of Americans with sincerely held beliefs about marriage.” The RMA embeds “a false definition of marriage in the American legal fabric,” and could jeopardize the tax-exempt status of religious nonprofits that exercise their belief in traditional marriage. Furthermore, it could make freedom of religion cases harder to win and “could result in predatory litigation by activists against faith-based social-service organizations that could mire Americans in courts for years to vindicate their rights under the First Amendment.”

The final House version passed on a vote of 258-169, with 39 Republicans joining all Democrats in voting yes for the measure. The initial House version passed last August with 47 Republicans joining the Democrats in a favorable vote.

Religious freedom amendments defeated

Several amendments to the final Senate bill were offered by Republicans, including a comprehensive religious liberty amendment by Utah Senator Mike Lee that would have protected religious believers from vindictive federal officials who might take “discriminatory action … wholly or partially on the basis of their belief in marriage.” Lee’s amendment received bipartisan support, with Democrat Joe Manchin (WV) voting yes. But one Republican, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), voted against Lee’s amendment, while two Republicans, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, skipped the vote, as did Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock.

Amendments by Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma and Marco Rubio of Florida also went down to defeat with the help of Republican Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rob Portman of Ohio.

As Ed Martin of Phyllis Schlafly Eagles correctly observed: “There’s not a single protection for religious institutions in this bill and the entirety of the Senate body knows it. GOP Senators have gaslighted Americans about the marriage bill’s consequences.”

RMA will harm children, families

Teacher, writer, and mom of two, Jean C. Lloyd, published an article in October on Public Discourse in which she described the RMA’s potential harms to children. Now that the bill has received congressional approval and is about to become the law of the land, her timely piece has been reposted on MercatorNet.

A child of adoption, Lloyd describes RMA’s potential fallout from that perspective. She writes:

• ‘The Respect for Marriage Act’ is intended to protect gay couples, but in so doing legally enshrines the denial of children’s need for a mother and father. Whether through adoption or artificial reproductive technology (ART), same-sex parenting and other modern arrangements divide and sometimes even eradicate the maternal and/or paternal bonds children need to thrive.

Lloyd describes the ROPA Technique, which is an acronym for “reception of oocytes from the partner.” It is a means for female same-sex couples to “participate in the gestation process.” She explains:

• Pioneered in Spain, ROPA is an arrangement in which the intended parents are lesbian partners—one woman serves as the egg donor and the other the gestational surrogate. Researchers on planned lesbian families describe ROPA as fulfilling “the wish of a lesbian couple to conceive a child together (although they still need the contribution of a sperm donor) through a combined genetic and biological link.” This “shared IVF motherhood” option has been described as an “acceptable, successful, and safe treatment option for lesbian couples with financial means.” I think of children whose primal maternal bond is split and divvied up, or the stories of sperm-donor-conceived children longing for a father, and I wonder: Acceptable to whom?
• Calling ROPA a “safe treatment option” is yet another destructive lie. These glowing reports fail to mention that using this new family model creates increased risk of serious harm, even unto death in some cases, for each member of the triad: the egg donor, the surrogate/gestational mother, and the ART-conceived and carried child.

Although for a time she identified as a lesbian, Lloyd is now happily married with two children, and she is in a unique position to provide an assessment of the RMA. “The law is a teacher, and the ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ is a bad one. Enshrining legal lies about the truth of marriage harms all of society, most especially children. From facile heterosexual marriage dissolutions to novel family arrangements, children are harmed when their rights to their own mother and father are disregarded for the sake of adult desires.”

While these circumstances are already present in our society, the RMA can only intensify the attempts to mainstream them in the home, in the schools, and in society as a whole. But as Lloyd observes: “Children suffer when they are no longer considered central to the institution of marriage—an institution that for millennia served to bind together a father and mother from whose union children would naturally spring. A society suffers when it no longer distinguishes in law, much less guards and encourages, the one arrangement that provides the most stable environment for its future citizens to grow and flourish: the intact biological family, held together and supported in the institution of traditional marriage.”

Playing the race card

In her op-ed, Star Parker points out the false claim that the RMA is needed to protect interracial marriage. “Some have found it politically expedient to use the once prohibition on interracial marriage as a rationale for showing the alleged unfairness of a prohibition on same-sex marriage,” she writes. “But the bans on interracial marriage had nothing to do with our understanding of marriage. The ban on interracial marriage, which the Supreme Court found unconstitutional in 1967, stemmed from the ban on interracial marriage in Virginia going back to 1924. That legislation was called The Racial Integrity Act. It was about racial purity. It had nothing to do with the definition of marriage.”

The LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus in the U.S. House used that argument to advance the RMA last summer. According to The Western Journal.com, Democrat Rep. David Cicilline, a co-chair of the caucus, said on the occasion of the first vote: “Today we will vote for equality and against discrimination by finally overturning the exclusionary, homophobic Defense of Marriage Act and guaranteeing crucial protections for same-sex and interracial marriages.”

Clearly, as many conservative journalists, pundits, politicians, and observers have discerned, the real purpose of the RMA is yet another leftwing power grab. It is an obvious effort to pre-empt any action by the Supreme Court, as well as to ensure the law is signed, sealed, and delivered before the new GOP-majority is seated in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The left knows there is no threat to interracial marriage, which has been accepted in American society for decades. And as The Western Journal article noted, “SCOTUS doesn’t just hand out edicts. They have to wait for a suitable case to be brought to them. In other words, there is no guarantee that the SCOTUS would ever even hear a case that would overturn Obergefell. Indeed, it took fifty years to get the proper case to overturn Roe!”

Lovers of truth and liberty for all citizens are unlikely to give up America’s time-honored truths, including the sacred bond of traditional marriage between one man and one woman. As Star Parker warned: “In 2022, know that those who love our country and understand what made and makes it great are in for the long haul. An America without truth is an America without a future.”

An exciting development has been quietly unfolding in higher education since early summer 2022. The Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration garnered some publicity when it was issued last June with 160 professors’ signatures, but much lesser known is the fact that as of this writing it has more than 1,650 signatures and counting. While members of the general public are also welcome to sign, most of the signatories are professors and affiliates of the nation’s non-sectarian universities and colleges.

Essentially, the declaration, or the “open letter” as it has also been called, urges universities and colleges to move away from the speech-stifling wokeness that has become so pervasive in recent years, and instead to embrace academic freedom. As writer/contributor Esther Wickham noted in The College Fix, the Declaration advises universities “to adopt and implement the ‘Chicago Trifecta’ — the Chicago Principles on unilateral free speech, the Kalven report that requires institutional neutrality on political and social topics, and the Shils report, making ‘academic contribution the sole basis for hiring and promotion.’”

The Chicago Trifecta

The Chicago Principles were developed in 2014 at The University of Chicago through a committee made up of university faculty appointed by then-president Robert J. Zimmer (now chairman emeritus) and Provost Eric D. Isaacs. Zimmer and Isaacs were concerned about “recent events nationwide that have tested institutional commitments to free and open discourse.” Their committee issued a report stating that “the principle of complete freedom of speech on all subjects has from the beginning been regarded as fundamental in the University of Chicago” and that “this principle can neither now nor at any future time be called in question.”

The report harkens back to the founding of the university in 1902 and offers examples of its commitment to free speech over the one hundred-plus years since its founding, including invitations to controversial on-campus speakers. It concludes with a quote from the university’s founder, Robert M. Hutchins, who maintained that “without a vibrant commitment to free and open inquiry, a university ceases to be a university.”

The Kalven report is similar in its commitment to free speech. It states in part: “To perform its mission in society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures.”

Also developed by The University of Chicago and published on November 11, 1967 by a committee under the chairmanship of Harry Kalven, Jr., hence its name, the report continues: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars … A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

The Shils report followed in 1972, stating in part that there are “three major functions of universities in the modern world.” These functions include: “(1) the discovery of important new knowledge; (2) the communication of that knowledge to students and the cultivation in them of the understanding and skills which enable them to engage in the further pursuit of knowledge; and (3) the training of students for entry into professions which require for their practice a systematic body of specialized knowledge.”

Can the Declaration make a difference?

Some may believe that the Marxist/Progressivist propaganda that has spread throughout higher education is a result of the traditional liberal tolerance of all viewpoints, and that this has paradoxically resulted in the loss of free speech today. But it may also be true that the restrictions on our freedoms, not only at the university level but throughout our culture as well, are primarily the result of a 60-year political agenda designed to destroy the American system.

Robert P. George, professor of Jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, wrote in Deseret News: “Historically, censorship has supported monstrous regimes and their ideologies. Bad ideas are only defeated by argument and persuasion, not by suppression. True justice and freedom cannot exist without each other.”

Professor George believes that “freedom is a culture” which must be nurtured if it is to be preserved and that university leaders “must also promote and institutionalize free speech and academic freedom by concrete actions.” One of his recommendations is that colleges emphasize in orientation materials for incoming freshmen that “[f]ree speech, free inquiry, tolerance for opposing views, meeting such views with argument, logic and fact, abstaining from ad-hominem attacks, character assassination, doxing, and other unethical behavior” is the expectation for all students.

New York University Professor Jonathan Haidt has a bleaker outlook for the future, but the good news is that he speaks out in traditionally liberal circles, which could make for a broader appeal to restore basic freedoms. For example, Haidt published an essay in The Atlantic which compares “what has happened in the U.S. over the last decade to the biblical Tower of Babel — how we’ve become disoriented and ‘unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth’ to the point of ‘becoming like two different countries’ with divergent ideas about ‘the Constitution, economics, and American history.’”

Haidt believes “we are on a path to catastrophic failure of our democracy” if we don’t change course, and fears that “the next war, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis” may cause the collapse of society. Others hope that the dissemination of The Stanford Academic Freedom Declaration and similar efforts can gain enough traction to help avoid such a calamity.

Cutting the purse strings

John Cochrane, Stanford economist and co-author of the Declaration, told The College Fix in an email that “The larger hope is to bring back academic freedom on campus and in the academic enterprise more generally. Only with robust academic freedom, the ability to investigate ideas and bring out uncomfortable facts, does scholarship bring about new and reliable knowledge, especially on crucial issues to our society.”

The Declaration points out that many colleges and universities claim to support free speech yet “punish those who express views deemed to be incorrect and enforce ideological conformity in hiring and promotions.”

Cochrane adds that often university funding sources demand conformance with the accepted political narrative “instead of a free exchange of ideas.” This begs the question of why putting a wall between funding resources and academics isn’t the single most important goal at every institution of higher learning, since a purse-string-enforced narrative can only serve to create fear of speaking out among university professors, staff, and students. Cochrane says such fear has impeded the signing of the Declaration, with some academics afraid because other signatories have been labeled “well known deplorables.”

He wrote: “That reaction tells us a big part of the problem. All along we have tried very hard to reach out to self-described left/liberal/democrat colleagues, who privately bemoan what’s going on but are too afraid to be seen in public. But why not fix it: if some of you sign perhaps that will give courage for more of you to sign. Take it over, get together with your friends, add lots of signatures, make this your cause, prove that we can stand together for freedom!”

With more than 1,650 signatories thus far, there is reason to hope that the higher education community and members of the general public as well, will band together to restore basic freedoms on college campuses, and that the Stanford Declaration may prove to be a galvanizing step in the right direction.

On December 13, President Joe Biden turned the signing of the unnecessary and controversial ‘Respect for Marriage Act’ into a radical LGBT spectacle. Pandering to the far-left base of the Democrat Party, the Biden White House was lit up on Tuesday night with the rainbow colors that have become the symbol for LGBT activism. But it seems the fanfare may have only been appreciated by the extremist minority. The Western Journal reported that Biden was “slammed for the White House light display,” which turned it into “the symbol of an interest group.” Users flocked to social media to air their disgust. According to the Journal, “one Twitter post called the display ‘Shocking. And stealing God’s rainbow. This is the tyranny of the twisted.’” Another tweeted: “the world is laughing,” while another vented “Now we’ve seen it all.” But passage of the RMA is hardly a laughing matter. Fox News reported that during the bill-signing ceremony, Biden attacked states that protect children by limiting gender-transition surgeries for minors, saying “those laws need to be challenged.” Besides the usual gaggle of fawning Democrat leaders, Fox reported that “members of the LGBTQIA+ community, advocates and allies,” including activists such as “non-binary drag queen Marti Gould Cummings and drag performer Brita Filter [aka Jesse Havea]” were invited guests. Fox noted that Cummings is known to have “repeatedly attacked police online.” And celebrities including pop singer Cyndi Lauper whined that “finally we are all able to love,” as if same-sex couples haven’t been basking unfettered in their love for years. Some conservatives accused Biden of “virtue signaling.” Fox quoted in part a statement from Ryan Bangert of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm opposed to the bill: “The president chose virtue-signaling over protecting millions of Americans, churches, and faith-based organizations that spoke out for months about the undeniable harms of this unnecessary bill.”

Actor, writer, and outspoken Christian, Kirk Cameron has approached more than 50 public libraries requesting a story hour slot to read his new faith-based children’s book, without a single one granting permission until recently. This despite the fact that numerous libraries across the country champion drag queen story hours, and some even have programs promoting “gender fluidity, inclusion, and diversity.” According to a Fox News report, other libraries offer “’name change’ clinics for older teens and adults who want to alter their official paperwork for gender-identity reasons.” Fox News Digital reporter Maureen Mackey wrote: “With a new children’s book out that celebrates family, faith, and biblical wisdom, actor-writer-producer Kirk Cameron cannot reach scores of American children or their families in many U.S. cities via the public library system because over 50 public libraries have either outright rejected him or not responded to requests on his behalf. A story-hour program for kids and parents connected to new book releases is an activity that many libraries typically present to their patrons and communities.” One example of the rejections is a library in Providence, Rhode Island that admitted to Cameron’s publisher, Brave Books: “We are a very queer-friendly library. Our messaging does not align. We will pass on having you run a program in our space.” Cameron’s new book is called As You Grow and is part of a series of children’s books that are both entertaining and moral. But Cameron didn’t give up, and on December 19, Fox reported that two of the libraries that had previously denied him have “caved” and will “move forward” with Cameron’s story hour. One of these libraries is in Scarsdale, New York, and the other is in Indianapolis, Indiana. Cameron told Fox: “I’m happy that the two libraries changed their decision and will allow my voice to be heard and my book to be read.” It probably helped that he is a celebrity and that he indicated he was “prepared to assert my rights in court.” It remains to be seen whether more libraries will change their tune as well.

Public-school enrollment continues its downward trend for the 2022-2023 school year. In her monthly subscriber email, Kerry McDonald of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) showed that public school districts “from Austin to Minneapolis, and Los Angeles to New York City are reporting enrollment declines this academic year.” According to Stanford University education professor, Thomas Dee, “current enrollment data indicate that a broad return to public schools simply did not happen.” A November 30 article in the Washington Post reported that “since 2019, private enrollment is up, public enrollment is down, and home schooling has become more popular.” A related article on Republican Nation.com showed that home schooling’s not just for conservatives anymore. “Leftist reasons for homeschooling may be different from conservatives,” the article states, but parents of every political leaning and background [have] accepted homeschooling responsibilities as the new normal.” The Post cited a variety of reasons for public school enrollment declines, starting of course, with the pandemic. The newspaper solicited comments from respondents on why they had removed their children from their public schools, and those they saw fit to quote predictably made generally positive comments. Yet all planned to keep their children in their new schools. One parent gave the most telling reasons: “First, we are very committed to our religious convictions. Our children memorize Bible verses each week; administrators and teachers use every opportunity to show how the Bible informs our lives … Second, we love that our school partners with us in education. They see themselves as helpers of a parent’s obligation to train children. So we work in tandem to best meet each child’s needs. Third, we love the actual pedagogical method employed at our school, which differs substantially from public school.” FEE’s McDonald observes that many parents — and teachers — have no desire to return to public schools. She says many “have discovered better alternatives for themselves and their children” over the past two years and are not going back.