June 27, 2018

Speech Righters: SCOTUS Sides With Pregnancy Centers

If you’re wondering how effective pregnancy care centers are, just look at how hard abortion activists are working to shut them down! They’ve tried discrediting them, silencing them, and — most recently – using the government to force PCCs into *advertising* for them. But, thanks to five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, states like California won’t be able to use the government to push around pregnancy care centers anymore.

If you’re wondering how effective pregnancy care centers are, just look at how hard abortion activists are working to shut them down! They’ve tried discrediting them, silencing them, and — most recently – using the government to force PCCs into advertising for them. But, thanks to five justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, states like California won’t be able to use the government to push around pregnancy care centers anymore.

After a long, three-year battle, the Court issued its ruling making clear that if abortion clinics want more business, they won’t be able to bully PCCs to get it. By a 5-4 decision, it struck down the extremists’ Reproductive FACT Act that actually ordered these pro-life centers to promote the one thing they’re trying to discourage: abortion!

Under the law that Gov. Jerry Brown signed in 2015, every pro-life center had to post information in huge 48-point font — sometimes in as many as 13 languages — about where these mothers could get a free or low-cost abortion. As if that weren’t enough, California officials decided to bleed the centers dry, fining them $500 on the first day, and up to $1,000 every day if they didn’t comply. National Institutes of Family and Life Advocates (NIFLA), which is affiliated with about 1,500 PCCs in America, filed suit, saying the law forces its centers to become “abortion referral agencies.” Not to mention that most of these PCCs operate on a shoestring budget, and fines in the thousands of dollars would have totally devastated them.

Fortunately, after yesterday’s groundbreaking win, the only thing that’s devastated is the country’s abortion movement. Nothing, the majority argued, could be more unconstitutional than regulating speech. Yet that’s exactly what the FACT Act does. Just as we’ve seen with bakers, florists, and even therapists, liberal activists are using the government to force people to communicate a message that violates their beliefs.

“The Ninth Circuit … concluded that the notice regulates ‘professional speech,’” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority. “But this Court has never recognized ‘professional speech’ as a separate category of speech subject to different rules. Speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by professionals… As with other kinds of speech, regulating the content of professionals’ speech ‘pose[s] the inherent risk that the government seeks not to advance a legitimate regulatory goal, but to suppress unpopular ideas or information.’”

Justice Anthony Kennedy tackled the topic of free speech in his concurring opinion, writing that Americans should all reread the First Amendment as ratified to understand “the history of authoritarian government as the Founders then knew it; to confirm that history since then shows how relentless authoritarian regimes are in their attempts to stifle free speech; and to carry those lessons onward as we seek to preserve and teach the necessity of freedom of speech for the generations to come.” Governments, he insisted, “must not be allowed to force persons to express a message contrary to their deepest convictions. Freedom of speech secures freedom of thought and belief. This law imperils those liberties.”

What if California had made a vegan grocer advertise for the local butcher, or forced Alcoholics Anonymous to post directions to the nearest liquor store? Everyone would agree that’s ridiculous, including — fortunately — this Supreme Court.

For attorneys at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), who are celebrating their second SCOTUS victory of the month, yesterday’s opinion had something in common with the Jack Phillips bakery win. “No one should be forced by the government to express a message that violates their convictions, especially on deeply divisive subjects.” This case, NIFLA President Anne O'Connor told reporters, “is not just about whether or not to hand out abortion information on a piece of paper or post it on the walls of our pro-life centers. It is about the right belonging to all American citizens to be free from government-compelled speech, and from being coerced into promoting a message that contradicts their values.”

Meanwhile, the victory is another reminder of just how significant the election of Donald Trump was. It’s sobering to think what could have happened to pregnancy care centers, Christian bakers, and a whole host of other issues had Neil Gorsuch not been confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As Jonathan Tobin pointed out in an op-ed a few months ago, America could have easily been stuck with a deadlocked Court that left atrocious laws like California’s in place.

Had Hillary Clinton beaten Trump in November 2016, Neil Gorsuch wouldn’t be on the court. It’s not clear that Garland or anyone else would be sitting in that seat either, because there’s no way of knowing whether Clinton could have persuaded a Senate that was still controlled by the Republicans to replace Scalia with anyone but another conservative. It’s entirely possible that we might still be stuck with a Supreme Court vacancy today if Clinton had won. But Clinton didn’t win. Gorsuch was confirmed, and that fact remains the single most potent argument in favor of voting for Trump two Novembers ago.

The president may try the nation’s patience at times, Tobin admits, but the “SCOTUS docket is a reminder how much good his election has done, too.”

Originally published here.


Army Gives Trans Training the Boot


Finally, the military is announcing a kind of transitioning we can support! For the first time since President Trump overturned Obama’s transgender military policy, the Army is shifting away from the focus on politically correct topics like gender and back to the issues it should be concerned about — like combat.

In a message no one could mistake, the memo makes it clear: “Transgender training is complete across the total Army.” From now on, sensitivity classes and lessons on gender transitions will be 100 percent optional. “The move, Army leaders argue, is designed to relieve stress on the overburdened troop training regimen and refocus on soldiers’ ability to fight in combat.” In a nod to the hundreds of wasted hours spent on ridiculous topics like “male pregnancies” and “off-duty drag,” the chief of the Army’s training program explained, “It was all the other [training] requirements that we levied on ourselves, or we had levied from other places” that took away from military readiness.

Like a lot of commanders, he told The Washington Times that the trainings Obama handed down as part of the integration of people who identify as transgender “served as barriers to maximizing time … to build readiness and lethality.” Of course, this is the argument that experts like FRC’s Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin had been making all along. The military is a fighting force, not a gender clinic. “Talk to any service member today and you will find that a majority of them will express great frustration with the amount of time that they spend in these lectures at the expense of preparing for war,” he argues. “They spent all their training time in classrooms listening to lectures on diversity, tolerance, and inclusion instead of the Military Code of Conduct.”

That’s time our military can never get back. Every hour (and dollar) our troops waste on the social engineering of the last administration is time they could have been on the range or practicing combat maneuvers. “When do you train for battle when you’re bogged down with these politically correct mandates?” Gen. Boykin asked. “You don’t. You go out and crash ships or get captured by Iranians, because you were never prepared for war.”

Fortunately, the Army is putting an end to two years of this PC nonsense. “One of the things this [change has done] is reinforce to commanders out in the field that you have the authority and responsibility to ensure your units are as highly trained as humanly possible” to carry out combat operations, Col. John O'Grady said. And sexual politics aren’t the only thing getting the boot. Branch leaders are also paring down on other nonessential trainings. It’s about time, say most troops, who were overwhelmingly opposed to the idea anyway. With the growing number of global threats, we need our servicemen and women focused on what matters: making America safe again.

Originally published here.


Schools Give Permission the Slip on Sex Ed


Most Americans have probably never heard of Fairfax County, Virginia, but their children could be the next victims of its latest policy. That’s because the tenth-largest school district in the country rewrote the rules on sex ed — and the LGBT activists who helped are about to take the model everywhere.

It was one of the fiercest debates that most locals had ever seen. Parents, furious that they’d been left out of such a controversial subject, flooded the public comment lines with objections. No, they didn’t want their young children learning that gender is something you choose, biological sex is meaningless, and daily gay sex pills can help prevent HIV. And that’s just the LGBT portion of the lesson! There were other, more graphic explanations of “healthy” sex acts and ways of pleasuring one’s self that didn’t exactly have the ringing endorsement of concerned moms and dads.

The lessons are so radical that the word “marriage,” FRC’s Cathy Ruse (and resident Virginian) points out, doesn’t appear even once. “The sex-ed curriculum advisory committee that is responsible for drafting the lessons is supposed to be made up of stakeholders, namely parents. Any curriculum it devises must reflect ‘broad-based community involvement.’ These are mandates from the Virginia Department of Education,” she writes. And yet the 40-member committee is made up of “mostly of people on the county payroll, not parents.”

One outside voice who seemed to have more authority than anyone was the national Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance (GLSEN). In a Washington Post puff piece that focuses on how important these extremist curriculums are (and ignores the public outcry), GLSEN admits that it was using Fairfax to pave the way for a broader onslaught. Northern Virginia, says local GLSEN co-chair David Aponte, served as a “laboratory” for its LGBT school policies. And local children are the rats.

One board member, Tom Wilson, made a last-ditch effort that schools should have to “obtain written permission before exposing students to this kind of sex-ed.” But the majority of the board refused. “Board member Pat Hynes said it would be too much of an administrative burden, and the parents in the audience erupted with yells. One mom stood and shouted, ‘You require it for field trips!’ She was ignored. Board member Elizabeth Schultz ran down a long list of things kids need permission slips for, course selections, prescription medication, even music class.” Apparently, Cathy writes, “you need your mom’s permission to learn the oboe but not to learn about oral sex.”

Despite the county’s record-shattering 1,300 comments — 83% of which opposed the policy — the school board marched ahead with GLSEN, voting 10-1 to ignore parents and force their own twisted ideas of sexuality on innocent and impressionable kids. I don’t know about you, but as a dad, the idea that I wouldn’t have control over what my children are learning at school is absolutely unacceptable. Parents — not teachers, state legislatures, school boards, or outside groups — should be the ultimate authority on what their kids learn and when. But, because of radical influences like GLSEN, teenagers growing up in Christian homes could be morally compromised because their parents don’t know what they’re hearing in class.

The moral of the Fairfax County story is a simple one: If your children are in government schools, (a) consider the alternatives, or (b) pay very close attention to what kind of sex ed your child’s school is teaching. You might even consider running for your local school board so that you can have an even greater influence on the content. Either way, don’t let local bureaucrats rob you of your responsibility in an area that can make so much difference in a child’s future. The only way schools can really keep parents in the dark is if we let them.

Originally published here.


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

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