Youtube, Amazon, HBO, Even the American Library Association Are Part of the ‘Dirty Dozen’

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“No corporation should profit from or facilitate sexual exploitation,” but many do, and every year twelve make the “Dirty Dozen” list. Created by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the list is intended to “to name and shame the bad corporate actors in America that perpetuate sexual exploitation — whether that be through pornography, prostitution, or sex trafficking.”

This year’s “Dirty Dozen” are (in alphabetical order): Amazon, the American Library Association, Amnesty International, Backpage.com, Comcast, Cosmopolitan, EBSCO, HBO, Roku, Snapchat/Snapcash, Twitter and YouTube.

The NCSE, founded in 1962, describes itself as “the leading national organization opposing pornography by highlighting the links to sex trafficking, violence against women, child abuse, addiction and more.” Until 2015, it was named Morality In Media. It also directs the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation. The Coalition’s members include the American Family Association and many of its state branches; Alliance Defending Freedom; several Catholic dioceses, including the Archdiocese of Washington; the Family Research Council; and 96 other organizations.

The Dirty Dozen

Some are obvious choices, like Backpage.com, Cosmopolitan and HBO. The NCSE describes Backpage.com as bringing “the seedy street corners of America’s red-light districts to home computers.”

As a classified advertising website known as ‘the hub’ for prostitution advertising, Backpage.com serves as a virtual auction block where sex buyers can shop for human beings for sex from the privacy of their home, office, hotel room, or cell phone. Many of those bought and sold via the website are sexually trafficked women and children. The website facilitates this activity by editing ads to conceal the illegality of underlying criminal activity

The NCSE does praise Backpage.com for blocking the ads for prostitution in the U.S., while noting that doing so was “arguably a publicity stunt.”

Other choices are not so obvious. The American Library Association, for example, is included because it “zealously encourages public libraries to not install Internet filters on public-access computers, thereby granting patrons — including children — the opportunity to view obscene material.” The ALA appears on the list for the fifth straight year.

Amnesty International is included for supporting “the full decriminalization of prostitution [which] prioritizes the special interests of pimps/sex traffickers and sex buyers over the human rights of people in prostitution.” The policy Amnesty International supports would let pimps and brothel-keepers operate “as mere ‘sex business operators,’ and creates a de facto right for men to buy people for sex. Amnesty also views prostitution as ‘sex work,’ transforming the violence inherent to prostitution into an ‘on-the-job’ requirement.”

The library resource company EBSCO supplies online resources to schools. Some of its products, according to the list, “provide easy access to hardcore pornography sites and extremely graphic sexual content. Innocent searches provide pornographic results. Via a system that bypasses school Internet filters, EBSCO brings the dark world of XXX to America’s elementary, middle, and high school children.”

Amazon, Comcast, Roku, Snapchat/Snapcash, Twitter and YouTube are all included for providing easy access to pornography and sex products (which we will not list here). The anti-pornography group Fight the New Drug recently highlighted Twitter’s “Massive Porn Problem.” This includes over 14,000 active accounts “involved in the creation and distribution of child porn.”

The Contenders and the Victories

The Dirty Dozen list includes three “contenders” on the “Watch List.” The Watch List includes corporations that might join the Dirty Dozen and those who have made some but not enough progress to stop their participation in sexual exploitation. This year the three enterprises included are Hyatt Hotels, the Department of Justice and Verizon.

Hyatt and Verizon are praised for making some progress. The DOJ is cited for its failure over the last eight years to “enforce existing federal obscenity laws (hardcore pornography) despite the fact that these laws have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court and previously enforced. This gross negligence gave a free pass to producers and distributors of pornography and enabled the culture of sexual exploitation to flourish.” The Family Research Council noted that Attorney General Eric Holder dissolved the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force.

Some in the Dirty Dozen and on the Watchlist also appear in NCSE’s list of “Victories” for making real steps to reduce their involvement in sexual exploitation. These are Backpage.com, Comcast, Hyatt, Snapchat, Verizon and Youtube.

Other “Victories” — a list that covers the last several years — are American Apparel, the Department of Defense, Google, GooglePlay, Hilton, Marsh and Walmart. The DoD is praised for having “stopped the sale of pornography in all Army and Air Force base exchanges” and also for ordering “regular search and removals of all sexual materials in public and workspaces … all military branches.” (For more from the author of “Youtube, Amazon, HBO, Even the American Library Association Are Part of the ‘Dirty Dozen'” please click HERE)

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While Women ‘Strike,’ Victim of Chinese Forced Abortion Shares Her Story

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Many women in the United States and other parts of the world are commemorating International Women’s Day by striking under the hashtag battle cry #ADayWithoutAWoman. The organizers declared that during the strike, arguably replete with problems, “women and our allies will act together creatively to withdraw from the corporations that harm us and find ways to support the businesses, organizations and communities that sustain us.”

But while elitist feminists took a day off work (even forcing some schools to shut down), Yue Zhang, a Chinese immigrant and victim of forced abortion, participated on a panel at the Heritage Foundation about the gross human rights violations intertwined with China’s family planning policy.

Zhang’s Story

“Today I understand that the victim must be grave enough to share the truth,” Zhang began Wednesday afternoon.

In August 2013, she found she was pregnant. Her initial reaction of surprise and happiness was quickly followed by worry. Zhang, 28 at the time, was not married. In China, giving birth out of wedlock is illegal. “I was worried for the future of my child,” she said.

If a woman does give birth out of wedlock, her child will not receive registration, or hukou —meaning they can never attend school, receive healthcare or even be officially married. “They are illegal persons for their entire lives in China,” Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and a fellow panelist, explained.

Nevertheless, Zhang wanted her child. But five months into her pregnancy, she found government officials waiting outside her home. They’d discovered she was pregnant, and informed her that she would need to have an abortion or pay a social maintenance fee. The next month they returned, this time breaking into Zhang’s house. Again, family planning officers told Zhang that she would have to have an abortion or pay a fee. They also threatened to call her bank, have her house confiscated and tell her employer to fire her.

Zhang inquired about the family planning policy and social maintenance policy of her province. “I learned that with my annual income and in order for my child to get hukou, I needed to pay over $60,000 U.S. dollars of social maintenance fee, a penalty I simply couldn’t afford,” she said. “But I never wanted to give up [my child’s] innocent little life.”

To the Chinese government, what Zhang wanted didn’t matter. For a third time, government officials came to Zhang’s home, pulling her into a vehicle outside. At the hospital she was placed on an operation table. “I kept shouting and struggling,” Zhang said. The doctor administered an injection into her abdomen.

“After a few hours of stomach pain, I started to see blood,” Zhang, struggling through visibly painful emotion, recalled before the panel. Hours later she gave birth to her lifeless baby.

“I dared not open my eyes to see the child. … I cried when the doctor and the nurse took away the little life. I wanted to beg them to leave this with me, but I couldn’t speak. After a while the doctor gave me another shot saying it was to stop the pain, but the pain did not stop. … Lying on that bed, I felt my body was cut open and broken.”

Zhang’s pain continued long after the abortion as she experienced nightmares, hallucinations and feelings of guilt. “Sometimes I believed it was my fault,” Zhang confessed. “I hated myself for getting pregnant without getting married and causing my child to die.”

The Continued Abuse and Extermination of Chinese Women

Congressman Chris Smith (R-NJ 4th District) is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Congressional Executive Commission on China. Even though in 2016, China adopted a two-child policy to replace their one-child policy, Smith said nothing has changed.

“There has been no change in the basic structure of coercive population control in China,” he said, pointing out that women’s menstrual cycles are still monitored, and that women are required to get regular ultrasounds to ensure that they are not pregnant without permission.

“When a woman is so maltreated by her own government … that has psychological impacts on her that are lifelong,” Smith said, noting that between 25 and 40 percent more women than men kill themselves in China. “The cruelty is just unimaginable.”

Olivia Enos, a research associated at Heritage, said during the panel that China’s child limitation and anti-female policies are leading to a future shortage of workers in the labor force and an increasingly older society. “On average China has 114 boys for every 100 girls,” Enos said, adding that in some provinces, as many as 126 boys are born for every 100 girls.

As Smith pointed out, it’s estimated that by 2020, 40 million men will be unable to find wives “because they have been exterminated” through sex-selective abortion.

So why does China continue to maintain child limitation policies? Littlejohn suggested that “terror is the purpose of the policy. … I believe this is social control masquerading as population control.”

What the United States Should Do

Even though “it’s easy to think that there’s nothing more that can be done,” Enos said, the U.S. government could do three things to help end China’s child limitation policies and human rights violations.

The first thing, Enos said, is to create working groups in China to work with Chinese officials to roll back and eventually eliminate the coercive family planning policies. Secondly, Enos said the new presidential administration should engage on human rights issues in any forum possible. Third, the U.S. should stop sending contributions to UNFPA — the United Nations Population Fund.

Federal taxpayer contributions to UNFPA have funded coercive family planning in China, Enos said. Smith added that rather than condemning human rights violation in China, the UNFPA actively encourages other nations to adopt child limitation policies. “When you whitewash crimes against humanity, you become complicit,” he said.

The Rest of Zhang’s Story

With her mother’s help, Zhang came to the United States at the end of 2014.

“As a stranger in this country, I feel the culture of open society. I feel the air of freedom, democracy and human rights,” she said.

One day during a class at a language school in the U.S., a classmate asked Zhang whether it was true that China enforced child limitation policies. When Zhang explained the policy to them and witnessed their indignation, she realized she was blameless for what happened in that hospital.

“It was at that time I realized it was not my fault,” she said. “In fact, my children always had the rights to come into this world. On the contrary, it was the Chinese government’s fault. China’s family planning policy prosecuted me and violated my legal rights. It is the government that represents Chinese Communist party that should feel ashamed.”

Watch the entire panel discussion below.

(For more from the author of “While Women ‘Strike,’ Victim of Chinese Forced Abortion Shares Her Story” please click HERE)

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Trump Makes Planned Parenthood a Deal Only an Abortion Business Would Turn Down

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Half a billion dollars in federal funding isn’t enough to keep Planned Parenthood from what it does best — abortions. This week, Planned Parenthood proved once again that, for all their talk of “women’s health,” their business IS abortion.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration made an informal proposal to the nation’s largest abortion provider: You can keep your federal funding if you stop taking the lives of unborn children.

PP refused, as abortion services are simply “nonnegotiable.”

“Let’s be clear: Federal funds already do not pay for abortions,” Dawn Laguens, the executive vice president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said. “Offering money to Planned Parenthood to abandon our patients and our values is not a deal that we will ever accept. Providing critical health care services for millions of American women is nonnegotiable.”

That’s at least the talking point. But money is fungible (as anyone who has ever handled currency ought to understand).

GOP officials, of course, promised relentlessly on the campaign trail that they’ll get taxpayer dollars out from under the abortion giant. It was an issue that found new life in 2015 after undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress purported to show PP involved in a large-scale fetal tissue racket.

This all begs the question: If Planned Parenthood was really concerned about vital low-cost health services for women, and really thought the organization would not be able to adequately service patients without an enormous taxpayer kickback, why would it put said handouts on the chopping block for something it says is such a negligible part of its entire existence?

Because it’s all a crock.

This latest development of a White House proposal blows yet another gigantic hole in the hull of Planned Parenthood’s image and racket.

The most popular example of this is, of course, their infamous “3 percent” lie, but has also taken the form of an ad released last year of women AND men touting the abortion mill’s flu and asthma treatment services.

Planned Parenthood – :30 from Wexley School for Girls on Vimeo.

Add that to the 2015 discovery that they don’t provide mammograms (which was even backed up by The Washington Post’s fact-checkers) and the more recent admissions by PP staffers that several of its locations do not provide prenatal care (contrary to claims) … and it all becomes ever more clearer that “women’s health” to this organization is little more than a high-scoring buzzword.

Given what the public now knows about the kind of operation that Planned Parenthood is running all over the country, and the Republican promises made to voters in the 2016 election cycle, there’s absolutely no reason that they should continue receiving a red cent of public money.

There are more than enough places for women to receive basic health care without underwriting this grisly termination business, and their fundraising efforts since Election Day show they do just fine funding themselves.

But no, when the cards are down, abortion is Planned Parenthood’s summum bonum. Everything else – up to and including actual health services – are little more than window dressing. (For more from the author of “Trump Makes Planned Parenthood a Deal Only an Abortion Business Would Turn Down” please click HERE)

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A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps

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The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating allegations an unspecified number of military personnel and veterans allegedly distributed nude photos of female colleagues and other women as part of a perverse social media network that promotes sexual violence.

The explosive revelation was first reported by The War Horse and published Saturday via Reveal, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Potentially hundreds of Marines may be caught up in the scandal, which has shaken top Pentagon officials and prompted death threats against the Marine veteran who disclosed it. An undetermined number of nude photos were shared online by way of a Facebook group titled Marines United, according to the report. The community has nearly 30,000 members, mostly comprising active-duty U.S. Marines, Marine Corps veterans and British Royal Marines.

The unseemly episode is deeply embarrassing for the Marine Corps and the Defense Department, proud institutions that, like many college campuses around the country, have struggled to curtail widespread problems with sexual assault. At the same time, it exposes an unsettling rift within a segment of American society consistently regarded as reputable, honorable and trustworthy.

A Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon confirmed that an investigation is underway, telling Marine Corps Times on Saturday night that military officials are uncertain how many personnel may be involved. The spokesman, Maj. Clark Carpenter, referred additional questions to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but that agency’s spokesman was not immediately available. (Read more from “A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps” HERE)

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Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It

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Actor Ashton Kutcher delivered a moving speech before Congress last month on the global problem of human trafficking. Kutcher called on America’s leaders to come together and address the “bipartisan issue” that is, at least for now, universally recognized as a gross injustice.

But what does the average American know about human trafficking? Where is it happening, and who is it affecting? It’s one thing to agree that there is a problem, but how do we even begin to solve an issue that we don’t understand?

Corporal Jon Doherty investigates sex trafficking cases for the Gwinnett County police’s vice unit. He recently spoke with Conservative Review about his efforts to combat sex trafficking in Georgia, and how it’s shaped his views on how communities and individuals can address this epidemic.

Doherty explained that technology has transformed “the game” of sex trafficking in America. Thanks to social media and websites like Craigslist and Backpage, perpetrators have been able to expand their operations to prey on women and seek clients across the country.

“[Predators] can look at girls’ Facebook pages,” Doherty told CR. “They can see what type of bait they need to give these certain girls. They can read the things they post, and know what’s going on maybe in the girl’s life or in her mind, or what she’s thinking about.”

Modern “pimps” aren’t walking around with top hats and canes, either, he warned of the stereotypical image. In many cases, they’re average-looking men (and sometimes women), some as young as college age. They lure and manipulate victims by feigning interest in a romantic relationship, or pretending to have connections in the modeling or acting industry.

And it’s not just the predators who have evolved. Doherty explained that the “type” of women targeted for trafficking today varies dramatically from decades past. There are “the girls you would expect it to happen to” — victims of abuse or poverty, with little or no support system. But in his experience, Cpl. Doherty has found that women from well-to-do families and privileged backgrounds can be just as vulnerable. Trafficking is prevalent in places like Atlanta because the excitement of big-city life is an easy sell for most victims, he said.

“These guys do their homework,” Doherty said. “They know their targets; they know what they’re looking for: the girl with the low self-esteem, the girl who’s got some kind of family issue going on. There’s so many things out there nowadays that it can happen to anybody.”

“We’ve recovered girls before that are police detectives’ — long-time police detectives’ — daughters that have come in from other areas,” he told CR. “It can happen to anybody.”

Doherty and his team view their work as a rescue operation — freeing victims from the abuse and deception of their captors. He remembers the victims he’s saved — as well as those he couldn’t. He recalled the case of a young woman named Crystal, who he and his partner arrested and successfully rescued. Years after they brought Crystal into custody, the two ran into her at a restaurant.

“My partner said, ‘You know who that is?’ He said, ‘That’s Crystal over there.’ I said, ‘Gosh, she doesn’t look the same […] She looks a lot different.’ When our food came, we were sitting there — she was the hostess. She came over to me, and she said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I said, ‘Of course I remember you,’ and I called her by her name. Tears just started running down her face.”

Many individuals forced into the sex industry become addicted to drugs, and therefore grow dependent on pimps, for both work and their next fix. The biggest challenge officers face is convincing these individuals to part with their abusers, Doherty said:

We explain to them that there’s no future in this. The things we can guarantee if you continue in this lifestyle are horrible things. There’s no retirement, and there’s no health insurance. There’s guaranteed beatings, rapes, robberies, just a bad life. But the hardest thing we have to compete with, other than the drugs, is the connections, sometimes of just love, and the pimp telling them, “I love you. We’re a team. It’s you and I against the world.” It’s that. They’re almost brainwashed. That’s one of the hardest things to break, right there.

Doherty explained that often the only way to pry these individuals away from the deceptive vortex of prostitution — the lure of money, the promise of emotional fulfilment, and a sense of belonging — is to detain them. Only then can Doherty and his team offer resources to help get the victims back on their feet.

“I know that one of the big, hot issues is, ‘Why do we arrest these girls? Why do we go after the victims?’” he said, addressing a very common attack on law enforcement. “A lot of times, we just go after them because that’s the only time we can get them, and we can separate them from the lifestyle. We can separate them from the pimp.”

Every year, Doherty and his team from the Gwinnett County force attend anti-sex trafficking conferences, where they’re often greeted with opposition from advocacy groups.

“When we go to these conferences, it’s almost like the police feel like … I mean … they hate us,” he said. “They do not like us. They’ll say, ‘Are you still locking up the victims?’”

According to Doherty, these advocates are simply unaware of how “the game” works: “They think these girls, if you just sat down and talked to them, that you’re going to talk them out of that life.”

“Something needs to be done with the courts and with law enforcement and with the advocate groups,” Doherty continued. “If we don’t get a hook in these girls — even if we just get them into probation or get them into drug treatment, or get them into something — we’ll never get them out of it.”

Doherty stressed that the effort to fight trafficking in America requires that law enforcement, advocacy groups, political leaders, and families work together to address the problem holistically.

“It’s a social issue where the community and the law enforcement have to come together and work for the better of reforming this person, and turning their life around,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we’ll every stop it [completely].”

Cpl. Doherty said that, like drugs, the demand for prostitution and the greed of sex traffickers will always be around. But the more the issue is discussed and understood, the better the chances are of reducing the threat.

Further, he believes “there needs to be a platform for educating young girls on the dangers of social media, besides the guy who wants to send you creepy pictures or ask you for creepy pictures.”

“They need to be educated in what’s out there, these are sharks in the water, and what these guys that are out there, and the lifestyle they can get dragged into. Before they even get a chance to look up, they find themselves in the middle of it.”

As Cpl. Jon Doherty said, we will never completely eradicate human trafficking — or any form of evil, for that matter. But by drawing attention to the breadth and depth of the problem, and by being aware of the modern threats facing young women especially (and their most effective solutions), lives can be saved. (For more from the author of “Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It” please click HERE)

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Will Trump Act to End Common Core’s Disastrous Math Slump?

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The verdict is in on Common Core and it’s bad. International tests towards which Common Core was supposed to be “benchmarked” show that American students’ reading and science scores are stagnant. And math scores are tanking badly. Of the 35 industrialized nations, U..S. students have slipped into the 31st place in math achievement.

“We really are doing a lot worse in math than we are in science and reading,” Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner for the National Center for Education Statistics, told The Hechinger Report. Students across the board in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests are doing worse, from bottom to middle to top performance.

The sharp drop in math performance on the international test confirms the lower scores seen on the United States’ National Assessment on Education Progress, in which both 4th graders and 8th graders posted lower math scores on the 2015 test.

Why the Drop in Math Performance is Not Surprising

To critics of Common Core this should come as no surprise. The “Common Core moms” were repeatedly derided by the experts for noticing the sudden strange collapse in math teaching standards. I first wrote about one such mom, Heather Crossin, in 2013:

In September 2011, Heather suddenly noticed a sharp decline in the math homework her eight-year-old daughter was bringing home from Catholic school. “Instead of many arithmetic problems, the homework would contain only three or four questions, and two of those would be ‘explain your answer,’” Heather told me. “Like, ‘One bridge is 412 feet long and the other bridge is 206 feet long. Which bridge is longer? How do you know?’ She found she could not help her daughter answer the latter question: The “right” answer involved heavy quotation from Common Core language. A program designed to encourage thought had ended up encouraging rote memorization not of math but of scripts about math.

When Heather and other parents complained to the principal — at a private Catholic school mind you — he threw up his hands and said he didn’t like it either but they had to teach to the state test which was now based on Common Core standards. Yet Common Core advocates persist in the Big Lie that national standards leave states free to develop their own curricula. Here’s the truth: If you control the standards you control the curriculum.

Mothers like Heather Crossin were called ignoramuses. They were told that the experts had developed wonderful new standards that were “internationally benchmarked,” that is, that they were the kind of standards countries with high performing math students use. That was also a Big Lie. The one actual mathematician on the board that developed them, Stanford mathematics professor R. James Milgram, rejected the Common Core math standards. Prof. Milgram concluded that the Common Core standards are, as he told the Texas state legislature, “in large measure a political document that … is written at a very low level and does not adequately reflect our current understanding of why the math programs in the high-achieving countries give dramatically better results.”

The education school math education “experts” managed to impose on almost the entire country standards based on untested education theories, not empirical evidence. Most of its advocates probably had no clue. They trusted the “experts” in spite of the fact that such progressive education theories get it wrong time after time. (Remember “whole language” reading wars?)

They should have known better: When most states adopted Common Core the standards had not yet been written. They were buying a pig in a poke. And students are paying the price.

Trump Recognized Common Core’s Problems — At First

Donald Trump, to his credit, acknowledged the problem.

Or at least on the campaign trail he did. He opposed Common Core from the first moment he announced his campaign in June 2015, to the closing argument on his whirlwind tour the day before the election. He used it as a club to beat back Jeb Bush (the leader of the Republican support for Common Core, whose protégé, Betsy DeVos, now heads up the Education Department).

As Breitbart’s Dr. Susan Berry reported, “Numerous reports have observed the presence of Jeb Bush supporters and Obama holdovers in the federal education department. U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos herself was both a generous contributor to and board member of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), which promoted Common Core nationwide. Bush himself said of DeVos’s nomination, ‘I’m so excited.’”

Common Core critics are now increasingly concerned that President Trump has gone silent on Common Core.

As Fred Barnes pointed out, “He didn’t mention it … in his hour-long speech to a joint session of Congress. He didn’t repeat his promise to end it in his inaugural address a month ago. And he neglected to cite it in his rousing talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference.”

Trump’s education policy since taking office has been all school choice, with dramatic silence on Common Core. But school choice has little meaning if “common standards” put pressure on virtually every public, charter, and private school to create Common Core curricula, driven by state-imposed standardized tests.

Republicans who originally supported Common Core meant well. They thought they were endorsing high academic standards that would help students learn. That’s why they made a deal with the Obama administration. But now we know the truth.

Will President Trump care enough about the Common Core moms like Heather to deliver on one of his most-frequently repeated campaign promises?

Common Core Re-branded is Still Bad

As Frank Cannon, president of the American Principles Project (where I am a senior fellow) told Breitbart, given the Jeb-heavy cast of his education appointments, “I think it’s important for Trump to personally drive to completion on this promise, as he has on so many other promises.”

There are practical steps that can be taken immediately to ease the federal pressures on states to continue with failed math standards and the curriculum craziness produced by those standards. (Given the failure of Common Core to improve reading and silence standards, states should be free to experiment across the board.)

Jane Robbins, a senior fellow at American Principles Project (see full disclosure above) has been working with state legislatures on what they can do to undo Common Core. She finds the heavy hand of the federal government is still playing an outsize role:

DeVos can ease federal mandates on standards and testing, letting states choose their own standards — that is, ditch Common Core — without fear of federal penalty, and giving them a waiver from testing requirements while they revamp their standards and aligned tests. She should also comb through all 1,061 pages of Every Child Succeeds Act passed in 2015 and push Congress to eliminate its mandates.

“What we can’t have is the components of Common Core and have it be rebranded as something else. We can’t have the testing, we can’t have the lowering of standards that is part of Common Core, we can’t have the one-size-fits-all and pretend because the words Common Core have been removed from the education lexicon, that we removed the content and substance of that,” says Fank Cannon.

Here’s the thing: Unless Trump takes a personal interest in delivering on his campaign promise, nothing in Betsy DeVos’ background as a Bush protégé makes it likely she will act. A good first step would be getting Common Core critics like Prof. Milgram, Sandra Stotsky, Jane Robbins, and Heather Crossin in a room with the President and the Education secretary to share their concerns about what must be done. (For more from the author of “Will Trump Act to End Common Core’s Disastrous Math Slump?” please click HERE)

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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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