The advocates of tolerance sure have a funny way of showing it. Thursday, during a stop on the conservative “Free Speech Tour,” liberals took hammers and spray paint to the bus parked in Manhattan for the UN Commission on the Status of Women. “It’s biology: boys are boys… and always will be. Girls are girls… and always will be” is part of the message on the bus that was vandalized. Joe Grabowski of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the bus’s sponsors, said the other side likes to say the conservative view is dangerous. “Well, here’s the first act of violence that we’ve seen,” he told reporters with a touch of irony. “And it’s not somebody out there attacking a trans person. It’s us getting attacked.”

“This is what those who pretend to preach tolerance actually feel about … other viewpoints,” he went on. “We’re the ones who try to have an open conversation and a dialogue with people and this is the kind of intimidation that is used to try to cow people who believe in traditional values not to speak out.”

While the police were investigating outside, FRC’s Arina Grossu was speaking inside. On a panel called “Femicide, Trafficking, and Reproductive Violence Against Women and Children,” FRC’s Director of the Center for Human Dignity talked about sex trafficking and its relation to pornography, violence, and abortion. Others on the panel included Reggie Littlejohn, founder and president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers, who discussed forced abortion and gendercide in China as the real “war on women.” Since China’s installment of the one-child policy, millions of women have suffered at the hands of government violence and 400 million babies (a great majority of them being baby girls) have been aborted. Rebecca Oas, Associate Director of Research at the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), discussed how to ensure that women’s true needs and priorities are being met instead of priorities imposed on them by international groups.

“If we want to truly serve women globally,” Arina said, “we must guard their dignity by not allowing them to become victims of forced or coerced abortion and sterilizations, trafficking, and international family planning agendas. Women desire better health care, education, and support for themselves and their children, not more family planning initiatives.”

“The United Nations has a responsibility to stand up for the dignity and rights of women to be free from policies that endanger and enslave them to reproductive violence,” she went on. “No matter where one stands on the life issue, we can agree that forced or coerced abortions and sterilizations are not a choice. Further, pornography and sex trafficking aid in the sexual exploitation of women and threaten their health and safety. Last, international groups must not impose their family planning agendas on women globally but must listen to women’s actual needs.”

Originally published here.

If You See Something… Say Nothing?

In a follow-up to yesterday’s Update story on the Rockville High School tragedy, a handful of critics have accused FRC on social media of somehow exploiting the rape to advance our privacy agenda. In their opinion, if anyone saw the 14-year-old girl go into the boys’ bathroom, they would have reported it. However, one of the defense attorneys told Fox News’s Bret Baier last night, “This is a bathroom in the middle of the day, where it doesn’t appear that she was screaming or that anybody heard anything going on. And there were other kids that apparently saw her going in…”

We may never know what role the district’s transgender bathroom policy played in this horrible incident. But we do know one thing: it’s just one more obstacle to ensuring the safety of students like this one.

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.