This Week‘s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

9 Children On The Devastating Moment They Learned Their Parents’ Marriage Was Over.

It’s true that the marriage challenges adults face are often weighty. But what both The Cut and our culture largely ignore is the life-long cost divorce inflicts on children, preferring to believe that what children want most is “happy” parents rather than parents who work to stay married.

In reality, many children feel their parent’s divorce is one of the most devastating events in their life, an event that damages their own self-perception and hinders their ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. The Federalist spoke with nine children, whose names have been changed, about their lives in the moments and years following their parents’ announcement that their marriage was over. Read more

Employee egg freezing benefits seek profits by delaying families.

Employers who offer women egg freezing benefits are delaying families and padding their bottom lines , a sociologist told the Washington Examiner.

A company’s “incentive is to maximize the worker’s time and commitment to the job and minimize their investments in their own family including when it comes to having family in the first place,” University of Virginia sociology professor W. Bradford Wilcox said. Read more

Three couples are taking the Lithuanian state to court over its failure to legally recognize same-sex partnerships and marriages.

Article 38 of the Lithuanian Constitution states that “Marriage shall be entered into by the free consent of a man and a woman”.

However, in 2019, the Constitutional Court ruled that Lithuania must grant a residence permit to a foreign man who married a Lithuanian man in another country, even though Lithuania does not allow same-sex marriages.

According to Žilvinskas, by refusing to recognise and register same-sex families, Lithuania is in breach of its international obligations. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

‘Deeply Perverse’: California School Board ‘Turns Education on its Head’ in Transgender Vote; Faces Lawsuit.

Another public school system has voted to hide mental health information about students from their parents. This time, however, parents are fighting back.

At an April 5 Chico Unified School Board meeting, parent Regino claimed that Chico Unified transitioned her daughter without her knowledge or consent. According to Regino, during a time of intense stress in which Regino’s father had died and she was battling breast cancer, her elementary school-age daughter sought help from a school “mental wellness” counselor. Read more

Supreme Court may decide fate of ‘conversion therapy’ bans for children.

The Supreme Court could decide in the coming weeks whether to take up a challenge to a Washington state law that bans therapists from trying to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of children.

Christian licensed marriage and family therapist Brian Tingley sued the Evergreen State in 2021, claiming a law barring licensed mental health professionals treating minors with gender dysphoria from recommending against gender transitions violated his First Amendment rights and infringed on his religious faith. Read more

This NY Mag article about parental rights might be the most unhinged, uneducated piece of bear scat I have ever read.

The lie is that the government cares about you more than your parents.

And young people, often in rebellion against their parents in those formative years where they are rebelling against everything to make sense of the world, eat up that lie to their own demise, trading family identity as a son or daughter for a number in a vast stormtrooper regime that cares only about power. Read more

Sanctity of Life

French president Macron announces plan to introduce pro-euthanasia legislation.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron announced Monday that the country will be introducing legislation to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia later this year.

The announcement comes on the heels of the conclusion of a citizens’ panel implemented to determine if the country should consider assisted death legislation. Established in November, the panel consisted of 184 citizens chosen at random who came together to debate whether or not the country should revamp its current laws, which allow doctors to stop life-sustaining treatments, but not to actively kill their patients. An overwhelming majority of 76% of panel members ruled in favor of legalizing euthanasia, prompting Macron to declare that legislation would be drafted. Read more

Gov. Little signs ‘abortion trafficking’ bill into law.

Idaho is poised to become the first state in the country to make it a crime to help a minor get an abortion without their parent’s consent after Gov. Brad Little signed the bill into law Wednesday.

The law also applies to someone obtaining abortion pills for a minor in Idaho unbeknownst to their parents. Read more

Spanish evangelicals: “Surrogacy threatens women and children”.

As the document explains, although surrogacy is illegal in Spain, the lack of specific legal regulation – babies born this way in other countries can be registered in the Civil Registry – leads many people to continue hiring foreign agencies to access surrogacy services.

The AEE claims that “this practice should not be authorised or legalised”; it calls for it to be considered as “medical, physical and psychological violence against women”; and demands that “any activity related to intermediation that facilitates access to these practices in third countries be prohibited in Spain”. Read more

Religion

Leftists Violate Separation Of Church And State With ‘Spiritual’ SEL In Public Schools.

Social-emotional learning will soon become spiritual-ethical learning, and the public school systems will decide whose spiritual and ethical beliefs to teach.

For families that care about raising their children with the moral and religious values of their own faith tradition, questions about which spiritual and ethical teachings should be taught prompt even more speculation about whether so-called social-emotional learning (SEL) should be taught in public education at all. Read more

5 Benefits of Religion Compared With Spirituality.

Various surveys in the United States regularly ask respondents to select which of four options best describes them: (1) both religious and spiritual, (2) spiritual but not religious, (3) religious but not spiritual, and (4) neither religious nor spiritual. Results consistently show that respondents most likely think of themselves as “both religious and spiritual.” However, individuals in these studies increasingly identify as “spiritual but not religious.” Read more

We know Americans have become less religious. Surprising new data shows us where.

With the share of Americans with no religious affiliation rising dramatically over the last few years, it stands to reason that the Religion Census would also note this decline at the county level. What’s surprising is where the largest drops in religious adherence came from.

Between 2010 and 2020, many counties across North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Michigan saw drops in total religious adherents of at least 10%. That same decline appeared in Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts, as well. Read more

Sexuality

LGBTQ Group Study Finds That Kids Who ‘Come Out’ Younger Are At Greater Suicide Risk.

Among youth who came out as transgender or nonbinary before 13 years old, 62% have considered suicide and 29% have attempted suicide, according to the study. But among those who came out at the age of 13 years or older, 51% have considered suicide and 17% attempted suicide.

“Young people who came out about their gender identity before age 13 reported higher rates of victimization due to their gender identity,” the study further found. Read more

U.K.’s Largest Teacher’s Union Votes To Invite More Drag Queens To Schools.

The U.K.’s largest teacher’s union said this week that schools across the country should welcome in drag queens and promote more LGBT events.

At a meeting of the National Education Union (NEU) this week at Harrogate, the teachers voted in favor of a motion to bring drag queen story hour and other LGBT events to schools in order to take on “heteronormative culture.” Read more

Blessings and Curses: Choose!

What can we do to bring our country back to the biblical morality of America’s founding principles? We could ask the famous liberal English anthropologist J.D. Unwin. He chronicled the historical decline of 86 primitive and civilized societies over 5,000 years. From all this, Unwin admitted that he could find no instance of a society that did not experience social and economic decline once it abandoned principles akin to biblical morality — and in particular, sexual self-restraint.

The gradual erosion of age-old moral and legal sanctions surrounding adultery are symptomatic. The Sexual Revolution has radically transformed love into “a splendid experience more magnificent than morality” and sex into an anarchic sport. Cohabitation and casual sex without the benefit of marriage have become prevalent. Neither carries a stigma. Read more