The Patriot Post® · There's No Corking DeWine on Obama Order

If Ohio is the bellwether of America, then the president’s agenda is in a heap of trouble. The Buckeye State isn’t about to stand back and let the Obama administration take its schools hostage to a transgender agenda that puts its students at risk. [Friday] morning, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine joined the chorus of state leaders resisting the tyranny of the Departments of Justice and Education for its order that schools open their showers, bathrooms, and locker rooms to boys and girls — no matter how unsafe or uncomfortable it may make them.

While 11 other states tell President Obama “we’ll see you in court,” leaders from Ohio are letting their district know where the administration’s mandate belongs — in the trash can. Calling the agencies’ threat to pull federal funds over the issue “astonishing,” DeWine pointed out what several senators already have: “Congress has not changed the law — and no ‘guidance’ from federal officials can do what Congress has declined to do.” Regardless of what the radical Left thinks, DeWine went on, local schools should be the ones making decisions on issues like student privacy and gender identity.

“There are many questions that, consistent with constitutional guarantees, are best left to the fair-minded, sensible determinations of our local communities. Under our system of government, how schools work to handle locker room questions involving students’ gender identity is one such issue. If the Obama administration takes action to remove these decisions from Ohio parents and local schools, I will vigorously fight against such overreach,” DeWine warned in a letter to the DOJ and DOE. “As our state’s Attorney General, I don’t determine local school policies on these issues — but neither should federal bureaucrats or the President of the United States.”

If the uproar from attorneys general like DeWine is any indication, President Obama is making one of the biggest political miscalculations of his eight years. Like Congress, these state leaders are tired of being bullied, bypassed, and berated on issues that have nothing to do with the real priorities of the day. Never underestimate the outrage of a country in a debate where the safety and innocent of children hang in the balance. This administration may not have learned that lesson — but thanks to states like Ohio, it’s about to.

Originally published here.

Courage Gets Its Phil

C.S. Lewis wrote that, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.” Well, the high reality is that courage is needed in America now more than ever. When our freedom to believe and to live according to our beliefs is under constant threat from government and external pressure from business, the testing point of our faith is ever before us.

We need examples of courage to encourage all of us in the struggle to maintain the exercise of our first freedom. When courage comes in the form of a statesman — in an area where it’s so often lacking — that statesman deserves special recognition. [Thursday] night at our Watchmen on the Wall National Briefing for pastors, I had the privilege of presenting Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant with the first-ever Samuel Adams Religious Freedom Award.

In 2014, Governor Bryant signed the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2014, a law stating that without a compelling reason, government cannot interfere with a person’s exercise of religion. Just last month, Governor Bryant continued his stand for religious freedom by signing the Protecting Freedom of Conscience from Government Discrimination Act, of which he said, “This bill … is designed in the most targeted manner possible to prevent government interference in the lives of the people from which all power to the state is derived.”

These monumental actions of Governor Bryant have not come without great pressure from those who seek to advance a radical social agenda — an agenda that does not include religious freedom. Faced with opposition that would have made many with lesser backbone capitulate, Governor Bryant has been unyielding in his stand for people’s freedom to believe and to live out their beliefs.

Samuel Adams said, as the governor alluded to in his remarks [Thursday] night, “Courage, then, is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.” I’m glad there are still statesmen like Phil Bryant who are courageous enough to point us forward toward that asylum for liberty.

You can watch the entire award presentation, along with Governor Bryant’s remarks in the video below. You can also see all of the speakers from the Watchmen briefing here, and find out how your pastor can get involved in our Watchmen on the Wall network.

Originally published here.

HHS to Communities: Let the Fun(d) Begin!

There’s a reason Congress agreed to fund more abstinence education — the alternative isn’t working! In a report last year from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), America experienced its first uptick in teen sexual activity a few years after the president kicked off his radical sex education experiment. Almost immediately after taking office, the modest slice of federal abstinence funding that was available under President Bush was zeroed out by the Obama administration. But there are ten million reasons to be optimistic about the direction of these programs, now that Health and Human Services has announced a new funding stream for sexual risk avoidance.

In one of the few bits of positive news to come out of the omnibus spending bill last December, our conservative friends managed to set aside a relatively small pool of money for reinforcing the positive messages of healthy decision making. The $10 million in community-based grants will be spread over a three-year period so that educators can study the positive effects of this kind of sexual risk avoidance. Unlike liberal sex ed, which seems to promote more bad behavior than it prevents, these programs take a holistic approach. Instead of just telling students to say no to sex, the new grants are designed to “teach the benefits associated with self-regulation, success sequencing for poverty prevention, healthy relationships, goal setting, and resisting sexual coercion, dating violence, and other youth risk behaviors such as underage drinking or illicit drug use without normalizing teen sexual activity.”

Valerie Huber, who heads up Ascend, was thrilled that Congressmen Randy Hultgren (R-Ill.), Joe Pitts (R-Pa.), Bill Flores (R-Texas), and Tom Cole (R-Okla.) went to bat for this funding in the omnibus. “We are encouraged that Congress is committed to reinforcing and amplifying the good decisions of the majority of youth,” she said. Most teens have not had sex — and that percentage has increased more than 15% over the past 20 years.“

And the idea isn’t just popular with parents, but kids too. Four in 10 teens feel like liberal sex education pressures them to have sex. In fact, the Barna Group explains, 32 percent of young people say they felt more pressure to engage in sex from their sex ed curriculum than from their boyfriends or girlfriends! Yet that’s the message that 90 percent of our tax dollars are sending. Although the Left’s idea of "pregnancy prevention” still rakes in $9 for every $1 in sexual risk avoidance, it’s still a step in the right direction. Our teenagers need to know how to make positive decisions of all kinds, and while engaged parents are the best way to direct this decision, these programs are valuable backstops.

Originally published here.