A Listening Sessions on Faith
“In every generation, there’s somebody who will hate,” Audrey Glickman said outside of her Pittsburgh synagogue, now overflowing with flowers, candles, and 11 Star of David markers.
“In every generation, there’s somebody who will hate,” Audrey Glickman said outside of her Pittsburgh synagogue, now overflowing with flowers, candles, and 11 Star of David markers. “And you have to deal with it, and you have to move on.” Moving on is never easy, not even now, in a year already marred by so many tragedies — in high schools, newspaper offices, and university campuses. But Audrey is right. We have to deal with it — and we have to deal with it as a country.
So much about Saturday’s massacre is heartbreaking, but one of the most profoundly sad things about it is how unsurprising it is. And not just the violence — but the growing disgust people have for one another. “We Jews teach our children that they’re going to be hated,” Audrey told a reporter. What an unbelievably depressing commentary on where we are as a culture.
Faith used to unite us. We may not have shared the same beliefs, but there was always a common understanding of what brought us here. Now, hundreds of years later, we’re suffering from the same religious prejudice that drove the settlers here in the first place. Maybe, Attorney General Jeff Sessions pointed out at a gathering on Monday, that makes the conversation about religious liberty that much more important. “We are all still reeling,” he said somberly, from the rampage in Pittsburgh. “This was not just an attack on the Jewish faith. It was attack on all people of faith. And it was an attack on America’s values of protecting those of faith. It cannot — it will not — be tolerated.”
Apart from Donald Trump, no one in the administration has been more committed to rolling back the climate of religious hostility than General Sessions. Of course, a lot of the credit for that mess belongs to the last administration, which spent Barack Obama’s two terms cracking down on faith across American life. Sessions goes through the litany of attacks in his speech (there are plenty to choose from), and then insists that Obama’s “solution” — banishing religion from the public square – only made tensions worse.
Almost as soon as he took office, President Trump set to work undoing the damage done to our First Freedom. Within months, the DOJ barely resembled the Obama agency. Instead of punishing believers, the Justice Department started protecting them. “Shortly after he took office, the president directed me to issue legal guidance to ensure that all executive agencies would faithfully apply the federal laws that protect religious liberty,” the attorney general explained. “Our team embraced that challenge.”
Under Sessions’s leadership, the agency released a special guidance ordering federal offices to respect religious liberty. It started going to court to defend people of faith, creating a fresh respect for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. “We are aggressively and appropriately enforcing our civil rights laws, our hate crimes laws, and laws protecting churches and faith groups,” the attorney general explained.
Now, a few months after announcing a special Religious Liberty Task Force, the DOJ is taking another step. After the Supreme Court ruled that religious groups have to be eligible for the same state grants as everyone else, Sessions is ordering his new task force to “to examine… whether there are other instances in which this kind of discrimination is occurring at the federal level. If so,” he vows, “it must — and will — stop.”
“We are going to keep going to court,” he promised. “We are going to keep winning. I say that because we are winning and because our superb legal team carefully reviews each case we take to ensure it is legally sound.
… But we also need a recovery of respect for one another… Not everything needs to be decided in court. We don’t have to get offended over everything. Maybe what we need is not more litigation — but more tolerance, or simple patience, for others.”
The administration is doing its part to make sure that people of all faiths are treated fairly. The rest is up to us. The path to civility is right in front of us. Let’s choose it.
Originally published here.
A Trans Parent Letter to the AAP
There are 67,000 members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), National Review points out, but it only took a few dozen to change an 88-year-old policy. Like a lot of professional associations, the AAP sold out to the liberal agenda a long time ago. But its latest push — supporting dangerous treatments for kids confused about their gender — is a step too far. And parents from across America are letting them know.
It used to be that medicine was guided by science, or, at the very least, common sense. Now, both have flown out the window in this national stampede to encourage gender-free living. Earlier this fall, the AAP became the latest organization to turn its back on basic biology and stacks of research that show how damaging the pursuit of transgenderism can be. In teenagers or kids in particular, the devastation is far-reaching. “It’s hard not to think that we might be harming children,” one member of the AAP told NRO anonymously. “But if we say something publicly we could get in trouble.”
Thumbing its nose at the millions of people urging caution, the AAP changed its official policy on minors struggling with gender confusion. “Big news! The American Academy of Pediatrics published a policy statement in support of trans kids today and it is TRULY supportive!” one activist tweeted. But supportive how? Certainly not in their pursuit of a healthy, fulfilling future. Instead, AAP’s leadership believes we should encourage a radical ideology with minors that its counterpart, American College of Pediatricians, calls “child abuse.”
“According to the DSM-5, as many as 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” Dr. Michelle Cretella of the ACP warns. “Puberty-blocking hormones can be dangerous,” she insists, and they’re “associated with dangerous health risks including but not limited to cardiac disease, high blood pressure, blood clots, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.” What self-respecting medical association would green light a course of treatment with such real-world risks?
One that’s determined to put politics above patients. And parents have had just about enough. In a letter to the AAP, 1,000 moms and dads are protesting the association’s radical new stance. “Our own children have become obsessed with the notion that they need powerful puberty blockers and hormones and bodily surgeries to transition to the opposite sex,” wrote the anonymous group of over 1,100 parents with trans-struggling children in a press release. “The American Academy of Pediatrics fully supports this. We do not.”
In a statement, the parents expressed “serious concerns” about the new policy, which they believe will “continue, and possibly worsen, the harm brought to many children by the recent radical changes to treatment guidelines for transgender-identifying youth.” They write: “Many parents and caregivers have been coerced into thinking these treatments are necessary.” But, what about their rights as moms and dads to disagree? If agendas like the AAP aren’t stopped, parents won’t have the final say in their children’s treatment.
Just last week, one of the world’s premier genital reconstruction surgeons spoke publicly about his fears that these procedures are doing more harm than good. His office has been flooded with unhappy and “even suicidal” patients, who thought sex reassignment surgery would bring the happiness they’d been hoping for. It didn’t. Now, he worries, what will happen if children are rushed into the same procedures?
“While the World Professional Association for Transgender Health guidelines currently state nobody under the age of 18 should undergo surgery, Dr. Djordjevic fears this age limit could soon be reduced to include minors. Were that to happen, he says, he would refuse to abide by the rules. ‘I’m afraid what will happen five to 10 years later with this person,’ he says. ‘It is more than about surgery; it’s an issue of human rights. I could not accept them as a patient as I’d be afraid what would happen to their mind.’” Already, the same National Post article points out, doctors are being investigating for treating children as young as 12 with hormones.
In the parents’ letter to the AAP, the 1,100 signatories remind the association, “We need you and our children need you… We are members of a rapidly growing online community of over 1,100 parents of transgender-identifying youth who need your help. We have no unifying political affiliation. We empathize with mature transgender-identifying people who deserve respect.” But, they insist, “We need to stop the harm to our children.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC Action senior writers.
