North Carolina’s policy may be settled — but the dust certainly hasn’t. After having their way with political squishes like Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal (R), liberals are beside themselves with Governor Pat McCrory’s decision to listen to the voters of his state and repeal Charlotte’s hugely unpopular bathroom bill. Big Business is hyperventilating, out-of-state leaders are boycotting, and the ACLU is suing. But does North Carolina regret its decision? Not one bit. Unlike Georgia, McCrory knows the best way to silence a bully is ignore it.

While Georgia tried to appease the unappeasable, North Carolina set aside the hysteria and did what was in the best interest of the people and children of the state. Seven or eight years ago, most Americans would have been appalled at the idea of letting grown men into girls’ restrooms. Now, after two terms of this radical president, liberals are banning travel to a state because they won’t allow it. Honestly, it’s almost baffling that this is where we are as a nation. The governor of New York and mayor of San Francisco are so adamant about allowing men to shower with our daughters that they’re forbidding “non-essential travel” to the state of North Carolina to promote it!

Isn’t it interesting how intolerant people are? Christians aren’t outlawing trips to Georgia because the governor trampled on their religious liberty. Yet entire companies are threatening to pull out of the state because Governor McCrory refused to risk the safety of his entire state for less than one half of one percent of the country’s population. And, it turns out, he may have done more to protect the people who identify as transgendered more than most liberals have. Just this week, a transgendered woman was raped in one of these new unisex bathrooms — at an LGBT landmark no less. At the Stonewall Inn in New York City, the liberals’ monument to “tolerance,” one of their own was attacked. Even here, at this bastion of sexual confusion, these policies are hurting the people they were designed to “help!”

So when organizations like the NCAA are blasted for staying on the sidelines in fights like Houston’s, maybe they’ve already learned a lesson we should be teaching corporate America: neutrality is the best policy. When the Final Four tips off in Space City, it will be because college basketball decided to listen to voters. After a similar bathroom bill lost in a landslide in November, the NCAA realized that while it could roll governors like Indiana’s Mike Pence (R), voters like Texas’s were too much for them. Now, the organization is the target of liberals who can’t understand why college basketball won’t join in their sexual confused crusade. “We wanted them to make a statement before the election…” the president of Texas’s ACLU complained, “and we didn’t get it.” That’s because Houston had already made a statement — sending the measure down in flames.

Still, governors like Louisiana’s John Bel Edwards (D), the same man who spoke to an annual gathering of pastors last week about the importance of prayer and faith, has pledged to roll back the religious liberty of those same pastors in an executive order that was adopted last year by former Bobby Jindal. Now churches could lose their tax exemption, businessmen and women of faith can be fined, religious groups that help homeless people or drug addicts can be denied funding — all because they don’t believe in same-sex marriage and gender by self-determination. Yet ironically, these are the same people who’ve expressed the most concern for children. Unlike the White House, they don’t believe that the compassionate response is trapping teenagers in this sexual confusion.

“Like so many others across the country,” Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, “we are concerned about the potential harmful impact of [North Carolina’s] law, especially on transgender youth, and believe it is mean-spirited and sends the wrong message.” Mean-spirited? According to the American College of Pediatricians, the Left’s agenda is child abuse! The harms of this gender ideology, which the ACP lays out here in its statement of opposition, can destroy a person for life. What sends the wrong message are policies that try to keep children frozen in this fleeting phase of uncertainty. A full 98% of gender-confused boys and 88% of gender-confused girls “eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.” Yet here we are, as a nation, holding states hostage for recognizing what science already has: that political correctness is hazardous to your health and to the health of millions of young people.

Originally published here.

Omission Impossible

Just because the Obama administration has made a declaration on Christian genocide doesn’t mean they’ll recognize it when they see it. Over the weekend, at a Pakistani park where children were playing after Easter services, a radical Muslim walked to the shouts of playground joy and silenced it with a suicide bomb. With more casualties than the Brussels attack, the Taliban are celebrating the massacre of their intended targets: innocent followers of Jesus Christ. World leaders, the families of the lost, even the terrorists themselves have acknowledged the religious nature of the attacks. To the amazement of most Americans, the president refuses to.

[Monday], pressed about this bizarre omission, a State Department official hemmed and hawed over their certainty about the motivation for this latest atrocity. AP reporter Matt Lee is as surprised as the rest of us about the administration’s hesitance to take even the terrorists’ word for it. “There’s been some commentary about why you guys didn’t mention either the Easter connection or the Christian connection in your condemnatory statements over the weekend and again today. Do you believe the claim of responsibility that Christians were targeted and are targets?” Spokesman John Kirby insisted that he didn’t have “the fidelity of information to confirm overtly” that the suicide bomber wanted to harm Christians.

“We have no indications that their claims of responsibility are false, though I can’t sit here and confirm it 100 percent,” he hedged. “Therefore, I have no indications that their motivation that they claim was the reason is also false, but this is all going to be investigated by the Pakistanis.” What is there to confirm? The killers were quite clear who they were massacring and why. It’s amazing. When there’s a shooting in America, the White House blames the lack of gun control laws right out of the gate. Or when radical Islamists attacked a U.S. embassy in Libya, they certainly had no reservations in assigning blame to an obscure video within hours of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s death. But when Christians are killed at Easter because of their God, the administration can’t pre-judge. It’s a shame they didn’t have that same mindset in Benghazi.

Originally published here.

In Texas, Schools Are Collin the Shots

Most parents shudder to think of their kids learning about sex at school — let alone homosexuality or transgenderism. Unfortunately, that’s where the slippery slope has led in places like Collin County, where moms and dads are outraged to find out that their elementary kids are hearing what it’s like to identify as transgendered. As part of a presentation from high school students, younger kids came home with all kinds of questions about why boys would want to be girls and vice-versa.

Parents like Melissa Marrow, who were never notified that this assembly would take place, are fuming that the Texas school is substituting its judgement for families’. “I think those topics [may make] sense on the high school level,” said Melissa, whose boys were among the third and fourth graders in the audience. “But I don’t’ think my eight- or 10-year-olds are prepared to tackle some of those things without serious questions. I want to be the parent. I want to be able to walk through those things with them and not be surprised.” Good luck with that. While school officials promise to address the concerns individually, they still maintain that the subject was “age appropriate.”

This is why I keep hearing from people who’ve never voted before that they’re making the decision to get involved in this election. They’re starting to realize that national elections have a local effect, especially when topics like this are quietly and secretly making their way into class curriculums. Sadly, this is just another effect of the policies and pronouncements of the Obama administration, which has used its influence and bully pulpit to pursue these aggressive, anti-family, anti-common sense policies. Policies that the American College of Pediatricians has labeled “child abuse.” As moms and dads, we have to be alert to what — and whom — our children are exposed to.

With some LGBT activists promising to “recruit” kids, there’s no limit to the damage that can be done to teenagers who are struggling to deal with peer pressure, hormones, and the many emotions that come with growing up. But this state of teenage (and pre-teen) confusion is exactly when they’re most at risk to the agenda of the Left. It’s up to families to keep their sons and daughters from getting snared into a tragic life of drugs, surgeries, and sexual experimentation. That starts by paying attention to what’s happening in your schools, communities, and even state and national policies. Elections have consequences — and we need to make sure they aren’t negative ones for our children.

Originally published here.