An ocean away, another seven caskets tell the story of a war the West is desperate to end. For the British, who’ve watched the tide of terrorism swell to three attacks in as many months, the time for sensitivity is over. There’s been “too much tolerance” of Islamic extremism, Prime Minister Theresa May warned, as police searched for clues to another ISIS-inspired rampage. Just days after families put 22 loved ones to rest after the Manchester Arena bombing, three men slammed their van into a crowd of people while others hacked through a local market with foot-long machetes.

“It is time to say enough is enough,” May said of the lax attitude that’s given radical Muslims a foothold on their soil. “Right now, through weak policies, we have allowed the fundamentalists to spoil it for the majority,” intelligence sources explained. After three bloody months, British officials are putting every option on the table — including burka bans and new citizenship rules. As far as May is concerned, political correctness is a luxury the UK can no longer afford.

Three thousand miles away, that’s a point Donald Trump has been trying to drive home since the earliest days of his candidacy. After eight years of letting foreigners stream into our country — with the barest of background checks — U.S. leaders have watched ISIS’s infiltration of Europe with an anxious eye. In his first week on the job, President Trump rolled out an executive order designed to keep what’s happening in England from coming here. Liberals came unglued, accusing the new administration of religious profiling — or worse. Now, months into a vicious court battle that’s stopped the president from keeping America safe, the Left’s protests seem more ridiculous than ever. While the London police rush to put up concrete barriers across its most beloved landmarks, the world has a choice: It can learn from Britain’s mistakes — or repeat them.

We know where this White House stands. “In any event we are EXTREME VETTING people coming into the U.S. in order to help keep our country safe,” the president tweeted. “We need the courts to give us back our rights.” While the Supreme Court decides whether to take the case against the president’s “travel ban,” President Trump is already asking for a tougher version. And there’s good reason for it, as Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) pointed out over the weekend. “You’ve got some [terror] groups that are looking at a big play like taking down an airliner. You’ve got others who need very little support, very little planning, and can do incredible damage, which is actually in many ways almost more of terrorism because you go anywhere, do anything, you wonder what could happen at any moment. It could happen here.”

Perhaps the most maddening part of the liberals’ effort is that they’re trying to tie Trump’s hands, when he has the benefit of intelligence that most people don’t — including the judges deciding this case. As someone who worked in counterterrorism and law enforcement, I understand that there’s a reason the president is entrusted with screening protocols, especially when they’re in the interest of national security. As David French wrote in National Review, there’s nothing extreme about that.

We know that terrorists are trying to infiltrate the ranks of refugees and other visitors. We know that immigrants from Somalia, for example, have launched jihadist attacks here at home and have sought to leave the U.S. to join ISIS. Indeed, given the terrible recent track record of completed and attempted terror attacks by Muslim immigrants, it’s clear that our current approach is inadequate to control the threat. Unless we want to simply accept Muslim immigrant terror as a fact of American life, a short-term ban on entry from problematic countries combined with a systematic review of our security procedures is both reasonable and prudent.

“The stakes are indisputably high,” White House officials warned in its brief to the Supreme Court. “The court of appeals concluded that the president acted in bad faith with religious animus when, after consulting with three members of his cabinet, he placed a brief pause on entry from six countries that present heightened risks of terrorism.” Is the Left going to take responsibility if its lawsuit succeeds and people are killed on American soil because no one could look into these foreigners’ backgrounds? Will they hide behind black robes when Britain’s terror lands at our shores, ushered in by eight years of Obama’s indifference?

Meanwhile, liberal hypocrites like Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are daring to criticize President Trump for not doing enough on terrorism. That’s ironic, since Schumer’s party is the one standing in the way of the White House’s security overhaul! “Rigorous vetting and tightening up wherever we have to is essential in this new world,” he argued. Of course, this is the same man who in January decried Trump’s stricter immigration policy, insisting, “Tears are running down the cheeks of the Statue of Liberty.” Better the Statue of Liberty, British mourners would say, than thousands more grieving families who will never see their loved ones again because their government was more concerned about being politically correct than protecting their citizens.

Originally published here.

Gender Distortion and Tragedy

Erin Georgia had prayed for a son all her life. She says she got one, but not in the way she expected. When her sixth grade daughter came to her and said she was struggling with her identity, Erin and her husband, Matt, said their first stop was the psychologist. Eventually, the Alabama couple decided the best decision would be to let Jane Marie start living as Jay. “We’ve always just loved and accepted our children for whoever they are. I’m a very outspoken, tattooed Christian, very strong in my faith. We were just encouraging Jay.”

That encouragement ended in absolute heartbreak last month, when Jane took her own life at their home. Now, absolutely devastated, her parents — both Marine veterans — struggle to understand what went wrong. After all, Jane was part of group therapy and started taking medication to help her cope. But in the end, it wasn’t enough, the Georgias believe. “Jay was not ready to come out to the world in the sixth grade. Jay wasn’t really ready at the end.” For her parents, who only wanted the best for their daughter, it was a blow no one saw coming. “As Jay was going through this journey, he would go to church with us. The church was welcoming, but there was no safe space.”

Erin and Matt tried to create that, giving her an environment to be herself. But in the end, no amount of encouragement could heal the hurt in their daughter’s heart. That’s because, like so many struggling teenagers, there’s a much deeper conflict at work. For years, LGBT activists have tried to persuade people that transgender teens are perfectly normal and that 100 percent of their problems are caused by discrimination and “stigma.” Unfortunately for parents like the Georgias, the evidence doesn’t bear that out.

Regardless of what liberal psychologists or others might suggest, there is no scientific evidence to prove that “affirming” someone in a transgender identity actually leads to better mental health outcomes. This loss is a painful reminder of that. As Peter Sprigg points out, the most tolerant, pro-LGBT societies often have the highest suicide rates. That’s a powerful refutation of the popular “it gets better” approach (which researchers just panned here).

Obviously, these parents loved their daughter and tried to help her. Maybe they even got bad advice from a trusted counselor. But as the American College of Pediatricians points out, “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.”

What’s more, the struggle is usually a phase. “According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.” At the very least, both sides should agree that the decision to adopt a transgender identity is one that only an adult is competent to make. That doesn’t mean we aren’t supportive of the child as a person, but it can be devastating to encourage them to embrace a gender identity in conflict with their biological sex until they’re more mature. Lives like Jane’s are too important and irreplaceable to risk.

Originally published here.

Religious Liberty Makes a World of Difference

President Trump is determined to beat back religious hostility — and not a moment too soon, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). The government group released its 2017 annual report chronicling religious freedom violations around the world, and it’s as horrific as you expect. A lot of the ongoing problems we’ve seen for years continue to persist, with the severity of persecution also on the rise.

As required by law, USCIRF designated certain nations to be “countries of particular concern” for their anti-religious freedom laws and practices. This year, USCIRF recommended that Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan be again designated as CPCs. In addition, Central African Republic, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, and Vietnam were recommended to be added to the list. While not at the CPC level, USCIRF recommended that Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cuba, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Laos, Malaysia, and Turkey be added to the Tier 2 violator list.

After a number of years on the CPC list, Egypt and Iraq were removed this year. While ISIS continues to attack Christians in both places, the respective governments have taken steps to address religious freedom violations. In response to the increasing threat from non-state actors like ISIS, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act of 2016 now requires the president to identify any such actor engaging in severe religious freedom violations as an “entity of particular concern” (EPC). USCIRF recommended that ISIS in Iraq and Syria; the Taliban in Afghanistan; and al-Shabaab in Somalia be so designated this year.

The 2017 report also notes that President Trump is right to make religious freedom a foreign policy priority — and while his approach might differ, his urgency must not. For those of us at home, watching helplessly as Coptic Christians are mowed down on their way to prayer, we wonder: what can we do?

For starters, we can be encouraged by the thousands of people standing for Christ in the face of death, torture, and loss. As we stare down our own issues in America of marginalization and intimidation for our beliefs, we can learn to rely on the power of the same Holy Spirit who comforts and emboldens our brothers and sisters overseas. After all, this isn’t a struggle waged on our power alone — we need supernatural strength. We need God’s strength.

When the 21 martyrs were lined up and beheaded on a North African beach several years ago, it’s reported that one of them was not yet a Christian. After seeing his companions’ stand for Christ to the end, he chose to follow Christ at that moment. One of the terrorists asked him: “Do you reject Christ?” He responded: “Their God is my God,” and was martyred with the rest of his brothers in Christ. If the strength of the Holy Spirit is sufficient to allow those overseas to stand strong, it can allow us to stand here without compromising the truth.

Originally published here.

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