U.S. Military Seems More Ready for Motherhood Than Warfare

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On the list on touchy hot-button issues, pregnancy in the military is at the top. The branches are loath to disclose the numbers and costs, not to mention the harm to combat readiness.

Richard Pollock recently got the latest numbers for pregnancy on Navy vessels through a Freedom of Information Act request. In 2016 they were up to an all-time high of 16 percent or 3840 women. About 10% of active duty women are pregnant at any given time. The Marines are at the low end of military pregnancies at 8 percent. Yet to be revealed is how much these thousands of pregnancies are costing per year in wasted training, taxpayer dollars and lack of readiness for combat.

A pregnant active-duty female has several options. She may decide to have an abortion, which will be funded by tax-payers. She may decide, as thousands of women do annually, to exit the military before her service contract’s end. She may decide to have the baby, which will be fully funded.

If she’s on ship or overseas deployment, she’ll be sent back to the states at a cost of roughly $30,000, her expensive military and combat training up to that point rendered useless. If she doesn’t opt to leave the military, the duties she can perform will be increasingly limited as the pregnancy progresses so as not to endanger mother or child. Postpartum she’ll have 18 weeks of maternity leave and up to twelve months to return to fitness standards — timelines that were extended in 2016 from nine and six respectively by then-Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus.

Having made policy of feminist ideology, the U.S. military treats pregnancy as “no different than a broken leg,” so in many cases she won’t be replaced. Rather, her spot in her unit will be held open until she’s again fit for duty, leaving her peers with extra work until her return. That is, if she does return.

Unintended Pregnancies Higher Among Military Women

Of course, pregnancy is nothing like a broken leg, but don’t expect those who are pushing for more females in the ranks to concede such an obvious point. There’s nothing comparable for men that renders them non-deployable. And a broken leg doesn’t come with an eighteen-year child-rearing commitment or a taxpayer-funded abortion. The Navy changed postpartum tours from four months to twelve in 2007, which means overall a pregnant sailor is on limited duty for about 21 months. When she is transferred to shore duty, she pushes out others who may be more qualified for those billets, and often cannot perform the duties required.

What’s more, most are unintended. The rate of unintended pregnancy in the Navy as reported by Stars & Stripes was a stunning 74 percent in 2013 and these numbers are only getting higher. Some claim this is due to lack of access to birth control, but practically every kind of birth control is obtainable by military women, including while deployed. Many are simply choosing not to use it.

According to one 2012 study by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology “[S]urveys of active-duty personnel of reproductive age demonstrate that although 70 to 85 percent were sexually active, nearly 40 percent used no contraception.” The study also found that “women actively serving in the military have lower reported contraception use and higher rates of unintended pregnancy than the general U.S. population.”

According to the Marine Corps’ 2015 combat integration analysis, over a two year period “the number of pregnant lance corporals averaged around 50 per month.This represents 12 percent to 17 percent of medically non-deployable female lance corporals.”

Meanwhile, the Navy Times reports that the Navy is short slightly more than the number of pregnant sailors: “Currently there are 3,898 unfilled billets at sea. …” Policy makers don’t connect the consequences of pushing for more female representation in the ranks and billet shortfalls when many of them become pregnant.

Dangerous Consequences

This greatly harms our readiness to engage our enemies. “Overall, women unexpectedly leave their stations on Navy ships as much as 50 percent more frequently to return to land duty, according to documents obtained from the Navy,” Pollock reports. In 2013 the Globe & Mail reported that “one study of a brigade operating in Iraq found that female soldiers were evacuated at three times the rate of male soldiers — and that 74 percent of them were evacuated for pregnancy-related issues.”

It was the same 3:1 rate, “largely due to pregnancy,” during Desert Shield/Desert Storm according to the 1992 Presidential Commission on Women in the Armed Services. Cohesion built up over months of training, the value of her training and care, and potentially a critical leadership role are all lost, and her peers have to make up her job function. These losses are due to the consequences of consensual behavior (except, of course, in the case of rape). These losses get higher and the readiness gets lower every year.

The Left wants us to pretend that this doesn’t matter. It’s just the cost of doing business with a gender-integrated military. In fact, one of the primary concerns of the heavily feminist Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services (DACOWITS) was to ensure women are not discriminated against because of pregnancy. Their 2015 report states: “Several formal programs exist to prevent pregnancy-related discrimination and help military women balance their careers with parenthood.” The Air Force even funds a sabbatical program whereby personnel can take one to three years off to have children.

We’re not allowed to acknowledge that pregnancy is antithetical to preparing for and executing warfare, whether it’s combatant ships, combat pilot jobs or ground combat units. But if America knew how much we were spending on pregnancy, prenatal and postpartum care for women who can only serve in a limited capacity for two years, or how much we’re spending to train women who end up leaving the military to have their babies, it might put some things in perspective. For example, early in the Iraq War there were reports of deployed servicemen having to buy their own body armor and protective gear and of inadequately armored vehicles.

Our Marine aircraft are at a mere 30 percent readiness and cuts to training budgets have resulted in fatal flight crashes. Military Times recently reported:

Only three of the Army’s 58 Brigade Combat Teams are ready to fight; 53 percent of Navy aircraft can’t fly; the Air Force is 723 fighter pilots short; and the Marine Corps needs 3,000 more troops. “We’re just flat-out out of money” to address those immediate needs and provide the additional personnel and maintenance funding to plan for the future, Navy Adm. William Moran said…

This is what happens when the top military priority is how the force looks instead of how it functions in wartime. Our priorities have been way out of whack. The new Secretary of Defense James Mattis should take a good hard look at our pitiful state of non-readiness and make changes accordingly. We cannot afford to continue this status quo. Our peer enemies like Iran are doing no such thing. They’re preparing for serious warfare. So should we. (For more from the author of “U.S. Military Seems More Ready for Motherhood Than Warfare” please click HERE)

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Disney Faces Backlash After Revealing ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Homosexual Scene

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People are beginning to take a stand against Disney after it was revealed the upcoming live action version of Beauty and the Beast will feature the company’s first-ever “exclusively gay moment.”

Director Bill Condon said in interview with Attitude magazine that Belle’s suitor, Gaston- has a male admirer in manservant LeFou, and that he will be used in the movie to highlight homosexuality.

However, some audiences aren’t happy with this.

Already, a movie theatre in Alabama has decided it will not be showing the latest version of the Disney classic.

“It is with great sorrow that I have to tell our customers that we will not be showing Beauty and the Beast at the Henagar Drive-In when it comes out. When companies continually force their views on us we need to take a stand. We all make choices and I am making mine,” the owner said in a statement on Facebook.

He added, “If we can not take our 11-year-old granddaughter and 8-year-old grandson to see a movie, we have no business watching it. If I can’t sit through a movie with God or Jesus sitting by me, then we have no business showing it.”

The owner says he only wants to show “wholesome movies” and will not compromise on what the Bible teaches.

Responses to the post ranged from hatred to support.

One person posted “Maybe you could take your 11- and 8-year-old grandchildren to see the movie and teach them that love is love so they don’t grow up hateful and miserable like you.”

Another wrote “I support your decision 100%. As usual, the left-wing anything-goes crowd is posting negativity. Please do not be swayed in your belief. I don’t think you’ll be out of business, I’m positive there are millions of people that share your values and will stand beside you to keep decency alive. Thank you. May you continue to be blessed.”

Others upset with Disney’s decision have decided to sign a boycott and let their frustrations be heard.

LifePetitions, a website used to serve pro-life and pro-family communities, started a petition in order to send a “strong message to Disney that children’s entertainment is no place to promote a harmful sexual political agenda.”

The petition already reached more than half of its 100,000 signature goal. (For more from the author of “Disney Faces Backlash After Revealing ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Homosexual Scene” please click HERE)

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Feminists and Conservatives Link Arms to Confront Transgender Ideology

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On Feb. 16, a rape survivor, a lesbian, a radical feminist, and a conservative activist gathered at The Heritage Foundation in support of a common cause.

As members of the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, these unlikely allies have banded together to combat the increasingly anti-woman positions adopted by the transgender movement.

The event, which focused on the impact of laws and policies that privilege “gender identity” over biological sex, was hosted by Ryan T. Anderson, the Heritage Foundation’s William E. Simon senior research fellow.

Leading off the panel was Kaeley Triller Haver, whose past as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse drives her current work fighting to protect the safety and privacy of women and girls. She first encountered the push to allow men in women’s restrooms while on staff at her local YMCA.

As part of her job duties, she conducted regular sex offender screenings, and the results were disturbing, as she recounted:

Every single time that I would run one of these screenings, I would find somebody who’d infiltrated the system, because that’s what predators do—they prey, and they seek opportunity. And I recognized that this new policy that they were asking us to embrace and adopt was basically the equivalent of rolling out a welcome mat for any man who decided that he wanted to come in and access our spaces.

Haver recognized the transgender activists’ strategy of accusing those who oppose their agenda of being close-minded and unloving. Her abuser had used similar tactics to persuade her to compromise her personal boundaries, she said.

Emily Zinos, a mother of seven, was unable to attend the event, but her comments were read in her absence. Zinos faced this issue in one of her children’s schools. As part of the Ask Me First campaign, she advocates safety and privacy for all students.

She wrote:

What worries me most is that schools across the country are quashing debate, abandoning academic pursuits, and reducing themselves to pawns in a political movement whose claims are highly questionable, unscientific, and have been shown to harm children. Public schools have a duty to serve all children, but schools cannot serve children and a totalitarian ideology all at once.

Miriam Ben-Shalom, a longtime gay rights activist and the first lesbian U.S. service member to be reinstated after being discharged from the military under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” spoke next. She asked conservatives to differentiate between the gay and lesbian community and transgender activists, whose agenda is more about infringing women’s rights and safety than protecting those of transgender citizens.

She said:

It’s not about bathrooms. It is about bathrooms, locker rooms, women’s shelters, women’s jails, and women’s spaces, and the real issue here is male violence. That’s what it is, and that’s what we’re talking about here. If trans women were really women, they would understand that the issue is male violence and they would sit down with us and civilly work together to find an acceptable solution to this problem.

The question of public restrooms, locker rooms, and showers sparked an intense political battle last year across the nation, but particularly in North Carolina. (For more from the author of “Feminists and Conservatives Link Arms to Confront Transgender Ideology” please click HERE)

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Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Swim Rescues Boy in Hotel Pool

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Police say a Pennsylvania man who doesn’t know how to swim jumped in and rescued a boy from drowning in a pool at a New Jersey hotel.

Fairfield police say a Paterson woman and a male companion were in the pool at the La Quinta Inn on Thursday with her five children, who range in ages from one to nine. Police say none knew how to swim, and the 9-year-old went under water. (Read more from “Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Swim Rescues Boy in Hotel Pool” HERE)

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‘Pope Francis Has Urged Us to Have Fewer Children,’ Claims Vatican Academy Member

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“Pope Francis has urged us to have fewer children to make the world more sustainable,” a panelist at a Vatican-run workshop on “how to save the natural world” claimed on Thursday.

This solution to securing the world’s sustainability was presented by botanist and environmentalist Peter Raven during a press conference that concluded the “Biological Extinction” workshop that took place at the Vatican earlier this week.

Greg Burke, director of the Holy See Press Office, moderated a panel, which included Raven, President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS), Werner Arber, University of Cambridge Professor Emeritus of Economics Partha Dasgupta, and PAS chancellor Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.

“We do not endorse any of the artificial birth control [methods] that the Church does not endorse,” said Raven . . .

According to Raven, the central element of the solution for “overpopulation” is that “we need a more limited number of people in the world.” In addition, “the problem is one of inequality,” where the rich use more of the world’s resources than the poor. (Read more from “‘Pope Francis Has Urged Us to Have Fewer Children,’ Claims Vatican Academy Member” HERE)

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The Beastly Beauty of Disney’s ‘Gay Moment’ — and How We Should Respond

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So Disney is going to have an “exclusively gay moment” in the live-action film version of Beauty and the Beast. It’s not going to be a big thing, just a moment in the action of LeFou the manservant. Something “nice.” Something very feelings-oriented.

That news follows close upon Disney Studios’ first animated same-sex kiss.

We’ve been talking about this behind the scenes here at The Stream. Al Perrotta, our managing editor, made this prediction by email:

Let’s not kid ourselves. The reason you put in a lighthearted, perhaps even obvious, gay attraction theme in Beauty and the Beast is to soften the ground so a Disney princess or heroine can be gay. That’s the goal. They’ll get away with it here because it’s likely to be humorous, over-the-top fun, and done with much skill. (The Modern Family lesson well applied. And the film’s director Bill Condon is no slouch.) But I guarantee Disney is eyeballing a feature with a gay lead.

He’s right. Modern Family presents gayness in such a pleasant and positive light, it’s done more for gay-rights activism than any gay op-ed or slogan has ever done.

Strategically Putting Christians In a Corner

Make no mistake, this was by strategic intention. Marshall Kirk and “Erastes Pill” (a pseudonym for Hunter Madsen) laid it out decades ago in a strategy document they called “The Overhauling of Straight America.” Written in 1987, it’s a disturbing paper yet still worth the read if you can stand it, for the insight it gives into decades of gay activism.

Kirk and Pill speak of opening up “a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message — of normalcy. So far, gay Hollywood has provided our best covert weapon in the battle to desensitize the mainstream.”

It’s a strategy centered in positive imagery: “For openers, naturally, we must continue to encourage the appearance of favorable gay characters in films and TV shows,” they write. “The visual media, film and television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western civilization.”

Their approach has been astonishingly effective. Consider the strategic savvy of what they’re setting up in Beauty and the Beast. If we say, “That’s wrong!” people will hear it as “That’s ugly” instead. Everything is happening on the level of images, remember.

So there’s no easy way for conservatives to object without looking ugly ourselves. They’ve put us in a corner. If we object, we lose now. If we don’t object, we lose later, when Disney plies gay princes and princesses upon us. Disney is the Beauty, critics are the Beast.

Overhauling Under Way

But how did that happen? How did we get that way? It comes out of “Overhauling Straight America.” Opponents “must be vilified,” say Kirk and Pill:

The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes. … Bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the “f*gs” they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If you haven’t seen those precise images, still you know how neatly Christians have been maneuvered into the place of the “intolerant haters.” You could almost admire a strategy so effective, if it weren’t so dishonestly manipulative.

And that, fellow Christians, is the difficult strategic setup we’re dealing with. What’s our best response?

Fight Beastliness With Beauty

What we’ve been doing for the most part (and I include myself here) has been trying to make gays and gay activism appear the Beast. We have ground to stand on there, to be sure. Even their strategies are beastly.

But just as there are no fairy tales where the heroine turns ugly at the end, and “they all live happily ever after” (I don’t think even Shrek is an exception, though that’s another discussion), it’s hard to make people happy by exposing gay activism’s ugliness. From both a strategic and biblical perspective we’ll get much further by revealing the true beauty of the way of Jesus Christ.

We must be His Beauty in the world. We won’t be able to do that the way Disney does, with multi-million dollar budgets, decades of film experience and a distribution system to drool over. But we are not without resources of our own.

We have the beauty of Christian marriage. Couples who pray together have more loving unions and divorce less often. We have the beauty of Christian forgiveness. We have the beauty of the love of Christ, reaching out to neighbors, friends, and even enemies. We have the beauty of truth, openness, honesty, transparency and humility.

Personal Relationships and Public Conversations

I could go on. These things are best seen up close, not onscreen. We need to love our opponents. The closer we connect in real relationships with people who consider us beastly, the harder it will be for them to ignore the reality of Jesus Christ in our lives.

Meanwhile the discussion must go on. Disney’s support for homosexuality is very public, so we have to respond in public. But we must be wise to the trap they’ve set for us. Someone commented regarding the cartoon kiss, “It’s official. Our society has gone to sh*t.” Someone else wrote, “You Liberals are disgusting creatures of perversion!!” That’s falling into the trap, and it’s no help at all. Language like that is just as ugly as what it’s objecting to.

No, in our public conversations we have to keep pointing back to the better way. We need to learn to paint the picture better, to show the truly beautiful way, the way of strong and lasting marriages that unite in godly love to build the next generation.

Because the way of Jesus Christ, which our culture has come to consider beastly, is really beautiful. The more people can see that with their own eyes, the more likely they’ll be to believe it. (For more from the author of “The Beastly Beauty of Disney’s ‘Gay Moment’ — and How We Should Respond” please click HERE)

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Choice Is a Good Thing, Right, Liberals? Oh, Not on Schools?

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Choice is a good thing, right, liberals? Not on schooling, you say? Betsy DeVos’s ideas for promoting school choice are disastrous?

That’s the new liberal position on choice, when it applies to schooling. Oh, they may say they’re worried about DeVos’s “inexperience” — but Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan didn’t have experience, either. They may believe that her policies that will — get this — “kill children,” in the literal, not figurative sense. They’ll say they’re offended that she’s sabotaging the public schools, as said so eloquently by Sen. Chuck Schumer:

The president’s decision to ask Betsy DeVos to run the Department of Education should offend every single American man, woman, and child who has benefited from the public education system in this country.

What About Public Education?

What about the public education system in this country? Fox News’ Andrew Campanella, in an attempt at peacemaking, maintained that, “The concept of school choice isn’t about elevating one choice above another, or about demonizing any schools as ‘failures.’ It’s about recognizing the individual needs of individual students, and pairing students with the schools that best meet their needs.”

That’s true. But school choice is also about calling out the public schools that are failures and giving desperate parents good alternatives.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 35 countries outrank our students in Math, 27 outrank our students in Science and 23 outrank our students in reading. The Nation’s Report Card found in 2015 that, by grade 12, only 25 percent of students were at or above proficiency level in Math, 22 percent were at or above proficiency in Science and 37 percent were at or above proficiency in reading. Certain students, such as African Americans in urban areas, fare much worse.

Maybe liberals believe all the things they’re saying about DeVos and school choice. There’s another reason they don’t want school choice: loss of control over funding. With school choice, education dollars will flow to private, charter or possibly even homeschools, diverted from funding pools within their grasp.

Jeffrey Dorfman explains in Forbes that teachers’ unions receive money for each child enrolled in public schools. “Opponents of school choice are not worried about children, either the ones who want to leave or the ones that would stay. They only care about the teachers’ job security. So remember, the debate about school choice isn’t about education quality, it is really about jobs and union dues.”

Competition — Not Just for Businesses

Students enrolled in alternative education based on school choice consistently outperform public school counterparts. But school choice improves the public schools as well by providing them with competition. Even their students benefit from school choice.

A 2016 University of Arkansas study found that school choice encouraged public schools within the district to compete with the alternative school to perform better. A separate 2016 study on school choice also found that competition drives performance:

Thirty of the 42 evaluations of the effects of school-choice competition on the performance of affected public schools report that the test scores of all or some public school students increase when schools are faced with competition.
School choice, however, isn’t just about the numbers. Charter, private, Christian and homeschools are in large part value-driven — that is to say, they strive to build character and purposed values in a core-values model over and above what a student would receive in public school. For example, if a student is late in a Colorado charter school, they are required to apologize to their classmates for the disruption and late start.

Jamey Verrilli, co-founder of North Star Academy and Uncommon Schools, said that his charter school’s core values model is an integral part of the program. Uncommon Schools creates and runs urban charter public schools for low-income students. “You have to build a culture that’s going to enhance learning,” said Verrilli on a Fox News interview, “that’s going to strengthen core values, that’s going to build a sense of community for any child, particularly children in hard-pressed areas.” He added that the culture is a platform on which to build rigorous academics.

Support DeVos

Most of all, school choice is about empowering families to make the decision for themselves and taking back control over their children’s education. School choice allows students to attend the school of their family’s choosing, to excel in a school with high expectations and/or a core-values model and it propels public schools to think of these alternative schools as competition, pushing their programs to be better for students.

Amy Kelley, President of My School My Choice, a coalition of teachers, parents and non-public schools striving to give a voice to families for school choice, believes parents are in the best position to make the best educational decision for their children — not the government.

“A good education is important, it is the foundation of a successful future for our kids,” said Kelley. “So providing our children with an education in the learning environment where they can thrive is crucial. Finding that environment is not always as simple as sending your kid to the local public school building. But there is no one who can possibly determine the place where our children will learn better than us, the parents. We know our children the best and, we are the best advocates for them.” (For more from the author of “Choice Is a Good Thing, Right, Liberals? Oh, Not on Schools?” please click HERE)

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Disney Goes Full Homo, Decides to Indoctrinate Children in Perversity

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By Todd Starnes. The folks who gave us Mickey Mouse and Goofy have decided it’s time for your children to enjoy same-sex romance while they slurp down their Fruit Loops. Disney just broadcast their very first gay cartoon kiss.

The smooch happened during the second season of Star vs. The Forces of Evil, a cartoon broadcast on Disney XD. An audience scene shows two guys kissing and a later scene show two ladies sharing an intimate moment . . .

There’s also word the upcoming live-action version of Beauty and the Beast will include a gay storyline — between LeFou and Gaston. I figured it would’ve been the candlestick. But whatever.

“LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston. He’s confused about what he wants,” director Bill Condon told Attitude magazine . . .

So, don’t be too surprised if the next Disney animated classic documents Tinker Bell’s torrid lesbian affair with Snow White while a gender questioning Peter Pan crushes on Pinocchio who just got out of a long-term relationship with one of the seven gender-fluid dwarfs. (Read more from “Disney Goes Full Homo, Decides to Indoctrinate Children in Perversity” HERE)

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Disney Announces First ‘Exclusively Gay Moment’ in Live-Action Beauty and the Beast

By The Week. The director of the forthcoming live-action Beauty and the Beast movie announced Wednesday that his film will feature Disney’s first-ever “exclusively gay moment,” Pacific Standard reports. “By representing same-sex attraction in this short but explicitly gay scene, the studio is sending out a message that this is normal and natural  —  and this is a message that will be heard in every country of the world, even countries where it’s still socially unacceptable or even illegal to be gay,” wrote Attitude editor-in-chief Matt Cain, who published the interview with director Bill Condon. (Read more from “Disney Announces First ‘Exclusively Gay Moment’ in Live-Action Beauty and the Beast” HERE)

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School District Asks Supreme Court to Postpone Transgender Case Grimm v. Gloucester

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The defendants in Grimm v. Gloucester have asked the Supreme Court to push the oral argument date back by at least a month, the Associated Press reported Wednesday. The Court was scheduled to hear oral arguments on March 28.

Gavin Grimm, a high school student in Gloucester County, Virginia is suing for the right to use the boys’ restroom. Grimm is a biological female who identifies as a male.

Defendants Want Trump to Weight In

The Gloucester County School Board asked the Court to halt consideration of the case so that the new presidential administration has an opportunity to offer input, according to the AP.

Barack Obama was president when Grimm’s complaint was first filed in 2015. In 2016, Obama issued a Dear Colleague letter to public schools around the nation making the same assertion as Grimm: that refusing to allow transgender students to use the restroom opposite their biological sex is the same as sex discrimination per Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

President Donald Trump rescinded Obama’s policy in another Dear Colleague letter last week. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said the issue was best left to states and local school districts.

Conservatives Want Gorsuch Confirmed Before Grimm Decided

As The Daily Signal reported last month, many conservatives hope that Neil Gorsuch, a demonstrably right-leaning judge of the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals and Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, is confirmed in time to hear Grimm. If the Court agrees to the school board’s request, he very well could be — his confirmation hearing is set to begin March 20.

As the AP reported, the Supreme Court could hear Grimm’s case in March as planned or postpone it by one month or several. It could also send the case back to a lower court.

Other cases on the issue of transgender bathroom policies are pending in Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Texas, according to the AP. (For more from the author of “School District Asks Supreme Court to Postpone Transgender Case Grimm v. Gloucester” please click HERE)

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I’m Sorry, but Caitlyn Jenner Is a Man Wearing a Dress

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I do not write these words lightly, and there is not an ounce of mockery or, God forbid, hatred in my heart when I say that Caitlyn Jenner is a man wearing a dress. I am simply speaking the plain and obvious truth, as politically incorrect as that truth might be right now. But with transgender issues dominating the news these days, and in light of Tucker Carlson’s epic takedown of Democratic leader Zac Petkanas on national TV last week (specifically, discussing gender-related questions), it appears that now is as good a time as ever to state some things clearly.

So then, to avoid all ambiguity: No, you do not get to choose your gender; no, gender is not determined by the level of your personal enlightenment (as Petkanas alleged); no, your gender does not change simply because you announce that it has changed; and no, it is not good science to allow people to change their sexual identity on their birth certificates. In fact, there is nothing scientific about that at all.

This being said, I do not minimize for a moment the very real struggle of precious little children who struggle deeply with their gender identity, nor do I deny that many children (and adults) report that their lives are more stable and fulfilled when they identify as the opposite of their biological sex.

I do not minimize the traumas through which Bruce Jenner (or others like him) has lived, nor do I claim to be able to relate to those traumas personally.

And I do not make a spiritual judgment about someone who struggles with their gender identity, as if this struggle somehow made them into the vilest of sinners. Why should that be the case?

Again, my goal is not to belittle or disparage, and as loudly and clearly as I can, I proclaim God’s love for all of you who identify as transgender, reminding each one that Jesus died for you just as He died for me and that God has a good and godly purpose for each of your lives.

You are not defective any more than I am defective, and every human being on the planet is broken in some way and in need of a Great Physician.

Caring Enough to Speak the Truth

But because I care enough about the transgender community to speak out, even though I’ll be branded a transphobe and bigot, I’m going to state things with clarity and conviction here, reminding us that the emperor has no clothes (as Carlson rightly did on Fox last week). And I’m going to encourage parents and policy makers, counselors and pastors, educators and activists, along with all those who care about their trans-identified friends and family that: 1) there is no settled science confirming transgender identity; 2) we still know very little about many operations of the brain, including those related to what is now called gender dysphoria (previously known as gender identity disorder, or GID); 3) studies continue to indicate that the vast majority of children who identify as transgender do not do so after puberty (even if many ultimately identify as gay); 4) there must be a better way than our current approach to treating gender dysphoria; 5) it is unfair to impose the struggles of less than 1 percent of the population on the rest of the population, especially on impressionable kids; and 6) gender distinctions should be celebrated and appreciated, rather than branded patriarchal or heterosexist or the like.

And while I’m at it, let me say this to CNN’s Chris Cuomo: Sir, it is not intolerant for a father not to want his daughter to see a boy’s penis at school. That’s called being a good dad.

I address these issues (and more) on this new video commentary, including some telling clips with Jenner and with Carlson and Pektanas, along with some shocking statements from Cuomo and from California public universities.

Please take a few minutes to watch and share the video (it’s less than 8 minutes), and then do three things: 1) pray for a fresh and real love for those who struggle with their gender identity; 2) reach out to those who identify as transgender and ask them sincerely to tell you their story; and 3) help them find wholeness in the Lord.

And remember: Caitlyn Jenner is no more a woman than Rachel Dolezal is black.

Those are the facts, and nothing more.

WATCH:

(For more from the author of “I’m Sorry, but Caitlyn Jenner Is a Man Wearing a Dress” please click HERE)

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