Mormon Church Backs Gay Conversion Therapy Ban in Utah

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Utah is close to banning gay conversion therapy after receiving the backing of the influential Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Utah is set to become the 19th state in the country to ban conversion therapy after the state legislature failed to pass a similar bill earlier in the year. GOP Gov. Gary Herbert announced a regulatory rule on Tuesday that would accomplish much of what was drafted in the legislation, according to the Associated Press.

“I have learned much through this process,” Herbert said in a statement. “The stories of youth who have endured these so-called therapies are heart rending, and I’m grateful that we have found a way forward that will ban conversion therapy forever in our state.”

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as the Mormon Church, did not take a stance on the earlier legislation. The state government secured the church’s support by including a provision in the rule that would allow therapists in the church to provide spiritual support and counseling for families seeking it. . .

“We are opposed to conversion therapy and our therapists do not practice it,” church director of government relations Marty Stephens said in a statement. “However, we are grateful for the clarifications the new rule provides, and we support its adoption.” (Read more from “Mormon Church Backs Gay Conversion Therapy Ban in Utah” HERE)

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Incredible: Mom Hears Disabled Son Say ‘I Love You’ for First Time in 19 Years

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A mother in Malden, Massachusetts, recently received the sweetest gift she could ever have imagined from her disabled child.

For almost 19 years, Beth Bostic has been unable to communicate verbally with her son, James. Even though the young man was born perfectly healthy, he became disabled after developing severe Jaundice, according to KRON 4.

If the condition, which is sometimes hard to detect, goes untreated for long periods of time it can cause kernicterus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The website stated:

Kernicterus is a type of brain damage that can result from high levels of bilirubin in a baby’s blood. It can cause athetoid cerebral palsy and hearing loss. Kernicterus also causes problems with vision and teeth and sometimes can cause intellectual disabilities. Early detection and management of jaundice can prevent kernicterus.

(Read more from “Incredible: Mom Hears Disabled Son Say ‘I Love You’ for First Time in 19 Years” HERE)

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Police Officer Receives Coffee from Starbucks Labeled ‘Pig’

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An on-duty Oklahoma police officer decided to drop by Starbucks on Thanksgiving Day to buy drinks for his department’s 911 dispatchers who were also working shifts on the holiday in the town of Kiefer. Every cup in the order was labeled with the word “PIG.” . . .

The officer reported the incident to Kiefer Police Chief Johnny O’Mara, who called the Starbucks location and spoke with a manager. . .

Unsatisfied with the manager’s response, the chief took to social media to tell the story, which has now gone viral. . .

In response to O’Mara’s Facebook post, Starbucks wrote in a comment, “This is totally unacceptable and offensive to all law enforcement. We are deeply sorry and have apologized directly to the officer who experienced this. We have launched an internal investigation into this matter and our leaders would like to connect with you directly to apologize to you and the entire department.”

A spokesman for the company, Jory Mendes, told WGN-TV a barista has been suspended in connection with the incident, pending an investigation. (Read more from “Police Officer Receives Coffee from Starbucks Labeled ‘Pig'” HERE)

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Woman Impregnated by Hunter Biden Was Washington DC Stripper Called Dallas

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The Arkansas woman who was recently revealed by a court-ordered DNA test to given birth to a child father by Hunter Biden’s son was a stripper at a Washington, D.C., club.

Lunden Roberts, 28, worked as an exotic dancer at Mpire Club, near Dupont Circle, just blocks from the White House, where Biden, 49, was a regular, according to the New York Post. Biden, a former lobbyist who has struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, is the son of 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden, 77.

Around the time Roberts became pregnant with “Baby Doe” – the gender of the child was not revealed in court proceedings triggered by Hunter Biden’s refusal to admit paternity – Hunter Biden was dating Halle Biden, 44, the widow of his brother Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46.

Roberts used to perform under the stage name “Dallas.” She was working at the club at about the time she became pregnant with Biden’s child. Employees remember Dallas as “really sweet,” with one employee saying she has a “heart of gold and is a smarty-pants.”

Mpire Club, where guests said Biden was “well-known,” is three blocks away from the club Archibald’s, a VIP club where Biden was accused of smoking crack last year while holding $50,000-a-month position on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that has been a key figure in the impeachment hearings against President Trump. Hunter Biden joined the board when his father was vice president and President Barack Obama’s “point man” on Ukraine. (Read more from “Woman Impregnated by Hunter Biden Was Washington DC Stripper Called Dallas” HERE)

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Receiving the Certainty of Hope with a Posture of Thanksgiving

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Life has a way of sometimes being more difficult than you can imagine, throwing a curveball when you expected the fast pitch down the center of the plate. We make plans and settle into a routine only to be violently inconvenienced when we least expect it.

It is from that vein that I want to share with you what I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving — the certainty of hope.

The Christian life is defined by a different ethos than what our culture offers. One of the highest ideals sold to us by the culture is that we should attain to be happy, that positivity and optimism should be our default posture, and that we should cut off anything that stands in the way of obtaining personal happiness. . .

It is often during the difficult seasons of life that we self-medicate using the great idols of our day, like rampant consumerism and addiction to hurry. That if we can simply block out difficulties or ignore them for just a little bit longer, we might perhaps be closer to the utopian idea of bliss.

However for the Christian, the Messiah person, the man and woman through whom the Kingdom of God comes on earth as it is in heaven, there is the promise and certainty of hope. (Read more from “Receiving the Certainty of Hope with a Posture of Thanksgiving” HERE)

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How to Talk to Your Left-Wing Family Member About Thanksgiving at Thanksgiving

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Advice columns abound instructing leftists on how to endure the misery of conversing with conservative relatives at Thanksgiving. The genre has become a holiday tradition. The L.A. Times outlined “what to do if your crazy right-wing uncle comes to Thanksgiving.” The New York Times explained “How to have a conservation with your crazy [conservative] uncle over the holidays.” Mother Jones warned, “You won’t change your cranky conservative uncle in one dinner conversation.” Someone seems cranky, but I don’t think it’s your conservative uncle.

The articles always run in one direction, preparing leftists for their annual interaction with a conservative. One rarely, if ever, sees a think piece bracing conservatives to deal with their crazy leftist nieces. What would be the need? Politics might be religion for the Left, but conservatives understand there is more to life than politics. Besides, we live in a leftist culture. We encounter leftism every time we turn on a screen. We understand their arguments better than they understand ours, and we don’t need to spoil our dinner with banal bickering over politicians.

For the Left, Thanksgiving is about politics; for the Right, politics is about thanksgiving. The different approaches to holiday conversation come from opposing views of politics. The leftist vision of politics as a matter of rights begets an attitude of grievance and entitlement. If ”the political is the personal,” as the radicals of the 1960s insisted, then all personal interactions must take on an activist agenda. As GQ told its left-wing audience, “It’s your civic duty to ruin Thanksgiving by bringing up Trump this Turkey Day,” urging them to “consider making life HELL for a few of your relatives.”

The conservative vision regards politics more as a matter of gratitude than entitlement—duty over rights. We have inherited so much: a wonderful country, a culture of freedom and abundance, even our life itself, earned through no effort of our own but bequeathed as a gift from our forefathers. The leftist unease at Thanksgiving represents an unease with thanksgiving more generally. Revisionist attacks on our Pilgrim forefathers at Plymouth express a fundamental ingratitude for the country they gave us.

In certain leftist circles, it has become fashionable to refer to Thanksgiving as the ”National Day of Mourning” to commemorate rather than celebrate alleged Puritan crimes against defenseless Native Americans. This anti-historical narrative commits a grave injustice to both the English and the Indians: it robs the Pilgrims of their virtue and the Indians of their dignity. Worst of all, the revisionism fuels the grievance politics that ails our nation four centuries after the landing of the Mayflower. (Read more from “How to Talk to Your Left-Wing Family Member About Thanksgiving at Thanksgiving” HERE)

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Lawmakers Propose Ban on Drugging and ‘Mutilating’ Transgender Kids

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South Carolina legislators have proposed a bill that would ban “transgender” children from being drugged or operated upon for the purposes of their gender transition.

The legislation would prohibit drugs treating the “symptoms of clinically significant distress resulting from gender dysphoria.” It would criminalize all efforts to transition minors under the age of 18 toward a different gender.

The legislation’s primary sponsor is State Rep. Stewart Jones (R-Laurens). He told Post and Courier that he drafted the legislation after being alerted to the tragic case of 7-year-old James Younger of Texas. . .

Chase Glenn, who works as the executive director of LGBTQ-rights advocacy group Alliance for Full Acceptance in Charleston, is firmly against this legislation to protect children from these predatory practices. . .

The “disastrous implications” are more likely to come from children who are coerced into adopting this destructive lifestyle. A movement has developed in recent months of former transgender people wishing to de-transition from their non-birth gender. (Read more from “Lawmakers Propose Ban on Drugging and ‘Mutilating’ Transgender Kids” HERE)

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U.S. Birth Rate Reaches a New Low

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The U.S. fertility rate declined in 2018 for the fourth consecutive year, reaching a record low 59.1 births for every 1,000 women able to bear children, the National Center for Health Statistics announced on Wednesday.

The fertility rate has been on the decline since the 2008 recession, with a slight rebound in 2014. Typically, economic crises lead to a decline in fertility rates, but the current decline has not reversed even as the economy has recovered.

“It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down,” University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson told to the New York Times. . .

The median age at which women give birth has increased continuously over the past several decades. William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, said the median childbearing age in the 1970’s was 21 for women and 23 for men, while data from the Census Bureau show that the median childbearing age in 2018 was 28 for women and 30 for men. The number of women giving birth under the age of 35 has also steadily declined, with more women giving birth in their 30’s and 40’s. (Read more from “U.S. Birth Rate Reaches a New Low” HERE)

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Report: Strip Club Employees Recall ‘Suspecting’ Hunter Biden Smoked Crack

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Employees at a DC strip club suspect Hunter Biden used the VIP room to smoke crack, they told the New York Post.

Biden was a regular at Archibald’s, a gentleman’s club located just a few blocks from the White House, and spent thousands of dollars in the VIP room there — and on at least one occasion, he was suspected of using that VIP room to smoke crack, according to a report from Page Six.

James Ritter, a former managing partner at Archibald’s, recounted the incident that he said took place in late 2018. “There was a smell of burning styrofoam in the VIP room. We told him nothing illegal can go on here. We didn’t see anything illegal. After he was spoken to, the smell stopped,” Ritter explained to Page Six. “VIP employees suspected it was crack.”

Ritter also claimed that Biden paid his considerable tab with credit cards that did not have his name on them, something that was technically against Archibald’s usual policy which required customers’ credit cards to match photo identification. “Hunter was a bit of an exception,” Ritter added.

(Read more from “Report: Strip Club Employees Recall ‘Suspecting’ Hunter Biden Smoked Crack” HERE)

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Armed Robber Paroled After Just 2 Years Admits to Raping, Killing College Student

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In December 2018, Donald Thurman was released from prison in Chicago after serving just two years of his six-year sentence for robbery and vehicle theft. It must have been roundly celebrated by local Cook County officials as another “criminal justice reform” success story, where success is defined by reduction of the prison population, not a reduction in crime. Fast-forward 11 months later, and a 19-year-old college student is now dead after Thurman confessed to raping and strangling her. And the endless list grows of victims of jailbreak policy.

After being reported missing by her family, Ruth George, 19, was found strangled in the back of her car on Saturday in a parking garage at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she was a student. On Monday, campus police announced that Donald Thurman, 26, who had no affiliation with the victim or the university, had been charged with first-degree murder and aggravated sexual assault. Police say that he was seen on surveillance footage entering the garage at the time of the murder and later confessed to the crime.

In recent years, with the frantic one-sided push for prison reduction, Chicago has paroled a great many violent offenders and has shown a reluctance to re-incarcerate those who violate the terms of their release. Furthermore, there are too few officers to monitor that many volatile convicts out on the streets. This has collectively reduced the deterrent against career criminals because they know the politicians and judges would rather see the prison population reduced than prevent crime.

In addition to monitoring those out on parole, Chicago police are increasingly stretched thin monitoring violent criminals out on little or no bail. As part of a growing fad across the country, Ed Rush, 24, was released by Cook County Judge David Navarro on just $5,000 bond after being arrested in September for aggravated battery on a police officer. Despite a previous gun conviction and a domestic assault charge, Rush remained out even after missing one hearing in October, according to the Chicago Tribune. Chicago really is not tough on guns at all, at least not if they are possessed by violent criminals. Fast-forward to last Friday, and he was arrested after police caught him on video allegedly shooting Rayveon Hutchins, 20, to death.

According to data from the Illinois Department of Corrections, the prison population has declined by almost 20 percent since 2013. Even the worst offenders barely serve time any more. Yet, shockingly, there is still a bipartisan clamor to reduce sentencing even further rather than go back to the drawing board with real reforms to address cases like Donald Thurman.

We now see plain as day that this “reform” movement has nothing to do with “first-time, low-level, nonviolent” offenders. It applies to those convicted of assault, robbery, and gun crimes. Now, they are looking to let out even mass murderers. Earlier this year, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a new law granting criminals convicted under the age of 21 the opportunity for endless parole hearings, even for violent crimes and repeat offenses.

Discretionary parole decisions for all criminals are becoming more and more lenient. This past week, the Illinois Prisoner Review Board agreed to release Chester Weger, the infamous 1960 “Starved Rock” murderer who was sentenced to life for brutally bludgeoning three victims in an Illinois state park. Weger is now 80 years old, but had he gotten the death penalty there would be no room for bleeding-heart liberals to let their hearts bleed just for the murderer and not for the families of the victims who are horrified by his release.

The parole epidemic is not just limited to left-wing Chicago; it’s nationwide. Just last week, in Augusta, Georgia, police investigator Cecil Ridley was killed while on patrol allegedly by Alvin Hester Jr., who was out early on parole.

These are the jailbreak stories you will never hear cited during the hushed and rushed criminal justice debates in Congress and in state legislatures.

This fad to abolish prison has clearly gone too far. The question is how many more cases like Ruth George must there be before the politicians have a change of heart, assuming they have one at all. (For more from the author of “Armed Robber Paroled After Just 2 Years Admits to Raping, Killing College Student” please click HERE)

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