Kentucky and Tennessee Laws Protecting Minors Upheld

CINCINNATI, OH – The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 yesterday to enforce laws protecting gender-confused minors in Kentucky and Tennessee from receiving puberty blockers, hormones, and medical mutilating surgery. 

In L.W. v. Skrmetti and Doe v. Thornbury, the Sixth Circuit reversed a preliminary injunction and rejected a challenge by families of gender-confused children who had argued that the previous bans discriminated on the basis of sex. 

In Kentucky, SB 150 bans puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and mutilating surgeries for minors and allows a person to bring civil action against health care providers, or a person subjected to violations of the law as a minor may bring civil action until they reach 30 years of age. 

In Tennessee, SB 1 bans puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and mutilating surgeries for minors. It also allows a minor injured by violations, or the parent of the minor, to bring civil action against health care providers up until 30 years after the minor reaches 18 years of age. 

Both the Tennessee and Kentucky bans were blocked by trial court judges, but the Sixth Circuit allowed Tennessee’s ban to take effect in July while it considered the state’s appeal. 

The ruling is the second by a federal appeals court upholding such laws, after the U.S. Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August that Alabama can fully enforce its 2022 law banning harmful puberty blockers, hormone treatments, and mutilating surgeries for children. Alabama’s “Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act,” one of the most protective laws of its type in the nation, makes providing any of these procedures to minors a felony. The Appeals Court ruling only vacates the district court’s preliminary injunction while the legal challenge continues at the district court level. The district judge has scheduled a trial date for the case set to begin on April 2, 2024 to decide whether to permanently block or keep the law. 

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The Sixth Circuit has rightly ruled that Kentucky and Tennessee are free to protect children from these horrible procedures that have devastated many young lives. Our children are not social experiments.” 

For more information about state laws protecting against gender ideology, visit Liberty Counsel’s website here.

California AG accused of violating court order

Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta reportedly may have violated a federal judge’s preliminary ruling striking down a school’s pro-“trans” policy. Bonta on Tuesday directed school districts across the state to adopt policies to hide student “gender transitions” from parents. His letter came just weeks after a federal judge ruled that such policies violate the Constitution. READ

DOJ silent on pro-abortion vandal

The Department of Justice will not say why it has not prosecuted a Buffalo woman for vandalizing a pro-life pregnancy center. The woman pled guilty this month to disorderly conduct related to her March 15 vandalism of CompassCare Pregnancy Services in Amherst, New York, agreeing to pay $2,580 in restitution to the center as part of her plea arrangement.  READ

This week on FOT: Marxism in U. S.; Mother sues sues school & officials for secret transgender daughter

Podcast up now at https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/ where you can listen to all of our programs. This is episode 382.

UK Report: Over One Third of Children on Puberty Blockers Experienced Worsened Mental Health

By S.A. McCarthy, The Washington Stand 

New research from the United Kingdom is showing that over a third of children placed on puberty blockers and hormone drugs suffered severe mental health deterioration afterwards.

A 2011 study conducted at the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) clinic for children reported that children who were put on puberty blockers suffered no adverse mental health effects. However, new analysis conducted by Susan McPherson, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Essex, and retired social scientist David Freedman found that the majority of children put on puberty blockers and hormone drugs experienced erratic and fluctuating mental health, including over a third whose mental health “reliably deteriorated.”

The original study, conducted on 44 children between the ages of 12 and 15, was reportedly based on group averages, while the new analysis relied on individual results, which McPherson and Freedman explained “allows us to look at how a treatment is performing in terms of the percentage of patients improving, deteriorating, and showing clinically significant change. … It is possible, using this approach, to look at patterns, such as who is benefitting and who is not.”

Read the rest of the story at: https://washingtonstand.com/news/uk-report-over-one-third-of-children-on-puberty-blockers-experienced-worsened-mental-health-1

Poll: Dems not keen on free speech

A new RealClearOpinion Research poll found stark differences between Republicans and Democrats when it comes to censorship and free speech. Forty-seven percent of Democrats say free speech should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” Thirty-four percent of Democrats say Americans “have too much freedom,” while 75% say the government has a responsibility to censor “hateful” social media posts.  READ

Francis: ‘you don’t play with life’

Pope Francis condemned euthanasia and abortion as actions that “play with life” and said there is such a thing as “bad compassion” during a press conference aboard the papal plane Saturday. “You don’t play with life, neither at the beginning nor at the end. It is not played with!” he said.  READ

New episode of FOT: Judicial watch, Pacific Justice Institute

 Listen as podcast: https://iowacatholicradio.com/faith-on-trial/  Episode 381.

Garland Goes Mute About FBI Catholic Probe

By Bill Donohue, Catholic League president 

We learned in January that “traditional” Catholics were being investigated by the FBI for the crime of being traditional Catholics. We were assured by FBI Director Christopher Wray that only one Field Office, in Richmond, was involved. Then we learned that the FBI was also going after “mainline” Catholics, and had developed a plan to spy on them. Then we learned that it wasn’t just one Field Office—agents in Los Angeles and Portland were also involved in the probe. 

Wray has repeatedly said he knew nothing about Catholics being targeted. In fact, when he testified in July he said that when he first learned about this he was “aghast.” Merrick Garland, the Attorney General, testified on September 20 saying that he, too, knew nothing about this. When he found out, he told Rep. Jeff Van Drew that he was “appalled.” Garland said the same thing when he testified last winter. 

Let’s assume they are telling the truth—neither man knew anything about those in their employ involved in raping the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans. (Garland, by the way, previously said he knew nothing about the firebombing of Catholic churches by Jane’s Revenge in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.) Let’s also assume they were “aghast” and “appalled” about what happened. 

What exactly have they done about it? 

There has been no public record, nor statement of any kind, issued by either Wray or Garland regarding steps taken to hold those accountable for this egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of practicing Catholics. Have disciplinary measures of any kind been invoked? Has there been an internal investigation of the FBI seeking to learn if other agents have also been spying on Catholics? 

Let’s recall that Catholics were being targeted by the FBI if they were disdainful of Pope Francis, liked the Latin Mass, or if they criticized pro-abortion activists on Twitter (now X). 

No field agent decided to just dream this caper up because he had nothing else to do. No doubt many agents knew. We need to get to the bottom of this and find out who was involved, what triggered this egregious abuse of power—was it someone in the FBI who concocted this scheme, or was it someone from the outside who crafted it? We also need to know exactly what was going to be done with the information once the probe was completed. 

To this end, I am writing to Rep. Jim Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and to Committee member Rep. Van Drew, asking for their cooperation in finding the answers to these questions.

California AG sues pro-life groups

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is suing several pro-life pregnancy centers, claiming they are “misleading patients” by advertising an abortion reversal pill. Heartbeat International and its affiliate, RealOptions pregnancy centers, suggest on their website that the use of progesterone can in some cases reverse the effects of a chemical abortion pill after the first dose.  READ

 

Vance calls out military abortion policy

Sen. JD Vance, R-OH, has become the latest senator to come out in support of Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, R-AL, holds on military nominees. “There’s a law that says abortions will not be publicly funded, and the Biden administration, I think, is circumventing that law,” said Vance, a Marine Corps veteran. READ

FBI lost count of how many informants it had a tJ6 riot

Sen. JD Vance, R-OH, has become the latest senator to come out in support of Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s, R-AL, holds on military nominees. “There’s a law that says abortions will not be publicly funded, and the Biden administration, I think, is circumventing that law,” said Vance, a Marine Corps veteran. READ

New York Times Now Likes The Nuclear Family

 By Bill Donohue, Catholic League president

This is a bellwether moment: On September 20, 2023, the New York Times finally conceded that there is no family form better than the nuclear family.  

While it is breaking news to liberals that single-parent families are deeply flawed—the children typically do poorly in school and beyond—astute sociologists have known for decades that the nuclear family is the blue chip model. Consider the data. In 2020, 40.5 percent of babies in the United States were born to unmarried mothers. In 1940, the figure was 3.8 percent. Now ask yourself, what social trends have happened since then that derailed the nuclear family?  

The person responsible for this bellwether moment at the New York Times is Melissa S. Kearney. An economics professor at the University of Maryland, she wrote an op-ed in the newspaper declaring, “The Rise of Single-Parent Families is Bad for Kids.” Thus did she shock the liberal readers of the newspaper, most of whom believed—thanks in part to the Times—that at best, all family forms were equal. Many others have been convinced that the much-ballyhooed nuclear family was nothing but a patriarchal institution of oppression. 

Readers of the Times have been given plenty of reasons to draw the wrong conclusion.  

In 2019, the Times asked students 13 and older to comment on an article by Michael Gonchar that asked, “Does society need a more expansive definition of ‘family,’ in your opinion?” 

In 2020, Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” He posited that the nuclear family was an atypical form in the 1950s, and that in any event we would be better off today with extended families. Not true. We have known at least since the work of anthropologist George Murdock in the 1940s that the nuclear family is not only not atypical, it is a cultural universal. Furthermore, extended families have their own problems, and are not an option for most Americans. 

Sarah Prager wrote a piece on parenting in the Times in 2020 that bashed the nuclear family for its “heteronormative” pretensions. She said her kids have two mothers and no father, and instead of identifying that arrangement as the problem, she blamed paperwork she has to fill out that is based on the traditional family. No doubt left-handers complain that society is not fair to them, either.  

Last year, the Times ran a piece by Jessica Grose asking readers to “Celebrate Different Kinds of Families.” She made the argument that the decline of the nuclear family was good for society.  

As I pointed out in The War on Virtue: How the Ruling Class is Killing the American Dream, the Left has long sought to intentionally destroy the family.  

In the early nineteenth century, Robert Owen in England and Charles Fourier in France both made it plain that the traditional family was a problem. Owen called marriage “evil,” and Fourier praised orgies for their “liberating” effects. In the late nineteenth century, Karl Marx called the nuclear family the generator of “domestic slavery.” 

In the twentieth century, Wilhelm Reich, who was a sex maniac and the “Father of the Sexual Revolution,” preached the wonders of libertinism. Herbert Marcuse, godfather of the New Left, said the nuclear family was the source of “sexual repression.” He recommended a “polymorphous perverse” sexuality, one that would abolish the family. They both had an effect on left-wing activists like Linda Gordon: she insisted that “the nuclear family must be destroyed.”  

More recently, Black Lives Matter explicitly said that its goal was to destroy the nuclear family. In 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African History and Culture slammed the nuclear family for its “whiteness,” making the case that it is not good for blacks to adopt this model. Surely the Klan would agree with Black Lives Matter and the Smithsonian. 

It is commendable that Kearney ends her article with a plea to “find effective ways to strengthen families” and to provide for “stable two-parent homes.” She can begin by first telling her left-wing colleagues in the academy to stop denigrating the one family model that is vastly superior to all the others, namely the nuclear family.

Senators press Wray over anti-Catholic FBI memo

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, and seven other senators wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking him about the “underlying processes” behind the bureau’s controversial anti-Catholic memo from earlier this year. The letter gives Wray until September 29 to provide a briefing to lawmakers about the background of the document.  READ

Trump promises pardons for pro-life activists

President Donald Trump promised that if reelected he would pardon or commute the sentences of pro-life activists targeted by the Biden Justice Department under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. “Marxists and Stalinists in the administration got a Washington, D.C., jury to convict five pro-life activists who are now facing up to 11 years in prison for simple acts of protest,” Trump said.  READ