When people ask Jeremy Chong about his Friday night plans, they don’t get the typical college sophomore response. He and his friends usually head to downtown Chicago. But the point isn’t to party — it’s to evangelize. And thanks to federal judge, the group of Wheaton students can finally resume that without harassment.

For months, students like Jeremy and Matthew Swart would pass out gospel tracts at Millennium Park. They were just simple three-fold pamphlets telling people about faith in Jesus Christ. “[We were] passing those out to anyone who would take [them] and having conversations when we were approached.” Simple enough, right? Wrong. The park’s security team saw what was happening and stopped them — not once, but again and again. By the fifth time, the students had enough.

They connected with a religious freedom law firm called Mauck & Baker and started knocking on the doors of park management. “We went back and forth with the city for a while, asking them to change their rules,” Matt explained. Well, they changed their rules all right. They decided, in an absurd new policy, to divide the park into 11 imaginary rooms. And, give Chicago points for creativity — only one of those “rooms” allowed open conversations about faith. “It’s a public park!” Matt’s attorney John Mauck said incredulously. “… Not rooms.” After weeks of meetings and letters, they all agreed there was no resolving the matter amicably, as they hoped. So, they took the city to court.

Six months later, their persistence paid off. U.S. District Judge John Blakey — a Barack Obama appointee, no less — decided that while the park may want “protect [its] aesthetic integrity… the city’s restrictions prohibit reasonable forms of expression in large areas of the park.” The students, he agreed, had a First Amendment right to evangelize and hand out Christian material — and then ticked off several reasons why. Blakey also took a shot at the city’s internal intolerance, pointing out that “[Scott] Stewart, [the executive director of the Millennium Park Foundation] conceded that ‘almost no one lodged complaints about their inability to enjoy the art’ in the Park, even before the current Park restrictions became effective.”

In the end, it was such a thorough judicial rebuke, Mauck said happily, that it would be difficult for the city to “circumvent the opinion with a quick rule change” as it had before. That’s good news for students like Chong, who feel the stakes could not be higher. “[This is about] getting the gospel to people because we love them,” he insisted. And salvation, he argues, is a life or death matter. “If somebody believes that the Willis Tower is going to collapse in an hour, it doesn’t matter what they believe," explaining that he feels it is a calling to "run into the building and warn people that it’s going to collapse.”

Congratulations to the courageous team at Wheaton, who God is using to do great things for his kingdom! Hear the passion behind this effort from last year’s Values Voter Summit, where Matt joined a special panel of college students called “No Fear: Real Stories from a Generation Standing for Truth.”

Originally published here.

A Mayor, a Nine-Year-Old, and a Country That’s Lost Its Way

There’ve been a lot of soul-searching moments for our country in this presidential season. But every once in a while, something happens — a single crystallizing instant — when America needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. Saturday night, at a campaign rally outside of Denver, a nine-year-old boy gave us one. He’d come on stage, he said, to ask Pete Buttigieg a question. “Would you help me tell the world I’m gay too?” And instead of questioning it, or even hesitating, the room of 4,000 had one reaction: it cheered.

“Love is love!” the crowd chanted. Mayor Pete looked at fourth grade Zachary and smiled. “It took me a long time to figure out how to tell even my best friend that I was gay," he explained, "let alone to go out there and tell the world.” Then, over the next few minutes, Buttigieg held the little boy out as a hero. “To see you willing to come to terms with who you are in a room full of thousands of people you’ve never met, that’s really something.” He warned him that it wouldn’t always be easy, but said, “that’s okay, because you know who you are.” And who knows, Buttigieg went on, “who [might be] taking their lead from you — who’s watching you and deciding that they can be a little braver because you have been brave.”

It was a “special moment,” CNN declared. A boy, not even 10, being celebrated for a sexual identity he’s too young to assume — by a presidential candidate in a same-sex marriage. Is this even America? Nine-year-old children didn’t used to know what sex is — and now, five years into Obergefell, they’re ready to make pre-pubescent decisions about their future partners? That should be horrifying to anyone, no matter which side of the aisle they’re on. Almost as horrifying as a grown man sexualizing a fourth grader on the Democratic stage.

The reality is, Buttigieg had a lot of options for responding to Zachary. He could have said, “You’re nine years old. I know the culture is sending a lot of confusing messages, but sexual decisions are for adults. Enjoy being a kid and focus on fun and school.” Instead, Buttigieg didn’t even blink. He affirmed this young boy without any regard to Zachary’s wellbeing or future happiness. That, more than anything, ought to raise serious red flags about the kind of presidency we could expect from the former mayor. If Pete will push a fourth grader down this dangerous path, no questions asked, imagine what he’d do as head of our country and public schools? Things like transgender bathrooms, drag queen story hours, and graphic sex ed would be just the beginning of a nationwide campaign to entice and indoctrinate more kids like Zachary.

And while this nine-year-old obviously didn’t arrive at this conclusion about himself alone (his parents were applauding in the wings), the reality is, feelings like his do fade. In fact, FRC’s Peter Sprigg points out, young people’s sexual identities are even more fluid than adults’. Two papers by Ritch Savin-Williams of Cornell University, probably the country’s leading expert on sexual minority youth, found that this fluidity is even more common among the kids who, at some point, have expressed “non-heterosexual” attractions, behaviors, and identities. “In the data set of the longitudinal Add Health study," Peter explains, "of the… boys who indicated that they had exclusive same-sex romantic attraction, only 11 percent reported exclusive same-sex attraction one year later.”

Of course, the irony is that boys as young as Zachary aren’t old enough to feel that attraction either way. But when they do, it’s almost certainly fleeting. “A nine-year-old boy has not even begun puberty, and therefore should not even be having thoughts about his sexuality, straight or gay,” Peter argues. “The last thing any adult should be doing — let alone a presidential candidate — is planting the idea in such a child that being ‘gay’ is just ‘who you are.’”

Worse, if kids like Zachary do start to struggle with their feelings, the Democratic Party has made sure they can’t get help. In Colorado, where Zachary lives, he couldn’t even see a therapist to talk through his struggles if he wanted to. Last year, the state legislature outlawed counseling for minors on sexuality — one of the many efforts supported by liberals like Pete to keep people from finding out the truth that they can change.

Like the rest of the LGBT activists running for president, Buttigieg doesn’t believe in compassion or freedom for people suffering through these feelings. If he did, he wouldn’t try to keep children as vulnerable as Zachary locked in a life of struggle and pain.

Originally published here.

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