Don’t feel sorry for or fear for your kids/grandkids because the world they are going to grow up in is not what it used to be.
God created them and called them for the exact moment in time that they’re in. Their life wasn’t a coincidence or an accident.
Raise them up to know the power they walk in as children of God.
Train them up in the authority of His Word.
Teach them to walk in faith knowing that God is in control.
Empower them to know they can change the world.
Don’t teach them to be fearful and disheartened by the state of the world but hopeful that they can do something about it.
Every person in all of history has been placed in the time that they were in because of God’s sovereign plan.
He knew Daniel could handle the lions den.
He knew David could handle Goliath.
He knew Esther could handle Haman.
He knew Peter could handle persecution.
He knows that your child can handle whatever challenge they face in their life. He created them specifically for it!
Don’t be scared for your children, but be honored that God chose YOU to parent the generation that is facing the biggest challenges of our lifetime.
Rise up to the challenge.
Raise Daniels, Davids, Esthers and Peters!
God isn’t scratching His head wondering what He’s going to do with this mess of a world.
He has an army He’s raising up to drive back the darkness and make Him known all over the earth.
Don’t let your fear steal the greatness God placed in them. I know it’s hard to imagine them as anything besides our sweet little babies, and we just want to protect them from anything that could ever be hard on them, but they were born for such a time as this.
President Joe Biden and his liberal compatriots in politics, the media, and social media constantly are crowing about “misinformation.” Although the type of censorship they seem to support is not the answer, reconsideration of the legal standard governing defamation, as Justice Clarence Thomas has urged, might be.
The Supreme Court denied certiorari Monday in the case of Coral Ridge Ministries Media v. Southern Poverty Law Center. In his dissent from the high court’s refusal to accept the appeal, Thomas once again urges fellow justices to reconsider the double standard for defamation that the court established in New York Times v. Sullivan in 1964. Thomas first did so in a longer dissent in 2021 in another case the court refused to hear, Berisha v. Lawson.
Coral Ridge Ministries, as Thomas explains, is a “Christian nonprofit dedicated to spreading the ‘Gospel of Jesus Christ’ and ‘a biblically informed view of the world.’” In 2017, Amazon told Coral Ridge Ministries that it was ineligible for Amazon’s nonprofit donation program because it had been labeled as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The ministry sued the Southern Poverty Law Center for defaming the organization, saying that although Coral Ridge “opposed homosexual conduct” due to its Christian beliefs, it is not a “hate group.” The ministry said it “has nothing but love for people who engage in homosexual conduct” and “has never attacked or maligned anyone on the basis of engaging in homosexual conduct.”
The defamation case was dismissed by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals because Coral Ridge Ministries is considered a “public figure” and could not prove that the Southern Poverty Law Center had acted with “actual malice” under the New York Times v. Sullivan standard when it made the “hate crime” claim about the ministry.
The “actual malice” standard is the issue that Thomas is complaining about.
In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court suddenly created a new legal standard that never existed before in defamation law, which had been governed by state law since our founding, claiming this new standard was required by the Constitution.
Does this sound familiar? According to the court, two legal standards govern defamation lawsuits: one for those considered “private” figures or individuals and another, stricter standard for so-called public figures.
If you are a private figure and The New York Times or the Southern Poverty Law Center publishes a lie about you, you simply have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation. The fact that the publisher didn’t know or care that the statement was false is irrelevant.
But if you are a “public figure,” you not only have to prove that the statement was false and harmed your reputation, but that the statement was made “with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
And the definition of who is a public figure constantly has expanded since 1964.
As Justice Neal Gorsuch explained in his own dissent from the denial of a writ of certiorari in the Berisha case, in which he joined Thomas in urging the court to reconsider the legal standard in libel and defamation cases, at first “public figures” meant only government officials.
Then, the definition was expanded to “public figures” outside government, then to those who have achieved “pervasive fame or notoriety,” and then to “limited” public figures “who voluntarily inject” themselves or are “drawn into a particular public controversy.”
Today, this definition of “public figure” is so expansive that the only issue is who it doesn’t cover.
As Thomas correctly observes in his most recent dissent, this double standard has no basis in “the text, history, or structure of the Constitution.” The decision in New York Times v. Sullivan “and the court’s [other] decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”
And what has been the result? According to Thomas, and to anyone who has been paying attention to the outrageous lies and misrepresentations—especially about conservatives—that we see regularly on CNN, MSNBC, and other far-left media organizations, some persons and media outlets can “cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.”
In the case of Coral Ridge Ministries, the Southern Poverty Law Center “lumped” in the Christian organization with real hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis, Thomas writes. SPLC put the ministry on “an interactive, online ‘Hate Map’ and caused Coral Ridge concrete financial injury by excluding them from the AmazonSmile donation program.”
Under the actual malice standard “this court has imposed,” Thomas writes, “Coral Ridge could not hold SPLC to account for what it maintains is a blatant falsehood.”
Even the supposed logic behind the Supreme Court’s creation of this standard fails. As Thomas explains, the court “provides scant explanation for the decision to erect a new hurdle for public-figure plaintiffs so long after the First Amendment’s ratification.”
One explanation was that false claims against private individuals are more serious than those against public figures, who are fair targets because they “invite attention and comment.” But as Thomas says, the “common law deemed libels against public figures to be … more serious and injurious than ordinary libels.”
Also, Thomas writes, it “is unclear why exposing oneself to an increased risk of becoming a victim [as a public figure] necessarily means forfeiting the remedies legislatures put in place for such victims.”
Thomas and Gorsuch make strong argument about the fundamental unfairness of the “actual malice” standard and the fact that there is no basis for it in the Constitution or our legal history. As Gorsuch wrote in his Berisha dissent:
[O]ver time the actual malice standard has evolved from a high bar to recovery into an effective immunity from liability. … The bottom line? It seems that publishing without investigation, fact-checking, or editing has become the optimal legal strategy. Under the actual malice regime as it has evolved, ‘ignorance is bliss.’
No wonder so many Americans distrust what they hear in the “news.” The public knows that the media can get away with printing or saying just about anything they want, no matter how false or malicious.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
A group of Williamson County parents filed a lawsuit against Williamson County Schools, alleging a violation of the state’s ban on Critical Race Theory teachings.
Parents’ Choice Tennessee, a group started by James and Patricia Lucente, filed the suit in Franklin and pointed to the district’s use of “Wit & Wisdom” materials.
“The claims presented in this lawsuit raise serious constitutional concerns regarding the parental liberty rights of parents to direct and control the education and upbringing of their children,” said Larry Crain, attorney for the parent group. “The school system has turned a deaf ear to these concerns, and this is what has prompted this action.”
According to the group, certain material that is presented to students provides “age-inappropriate” lessons and works to “promote a skewed and racist view of history.”
If a violation of the state law is discovered, the school district could potentially lose state funding.
“The curriculum was adopted through a process in violation of state law, and over the objections of several parents and educators who raised serious concerns about the graphic, racist, and age-inappropriate nature of much of its content,” added Ms. Lucente.
“Wit & Wisdom uses Social Emotional Learning to masquerade as a sort of “feel good” approach that steers young elementary-age children to horrific discussions of the savagery of slavery, war, misery, sexual aggression and death. Wit & Wisdom is conditioning our children to view the world through the eyes of a critical theorist which is destructive and divisive. It’s very clear that this failed curriculum focuses more on political literacy instead of literacy. Not only has Williamson County failed to protect our children from this harmful material, they have also failed to protect our teachers by instructing them to teach this questionable and destructive material with fidelity or else.”
– – –
Cooper Moran is a reporter for The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Email tips to cooperreports@gmail.com.
Photo “Williamson County Schools” by Williamson County Schools.
Days after the Supreme Court voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, several mega corporations like Disney and Facebook doubled down on their pro-choice agenda.
These companies started offering pay and other incentives to employees who want to get an abortion, and they’ll even offer compensation for traveling to abortion-friendly states.
However, one Texas insurance company is taking the opposite approach.
While pro-life advocates celebrated the historic SCOTUS decision and condemned those corporations – and certain Hollywood celebrities – for their anti-life agenda, something different is happening down south.
In the Lone Star State, there’s an insurance company called Buffer Insurance. They may not be one of the largest insurance companies in the country, but they’re about to become one of the most popular among pro-lifers.
Instead of incentivizing abortion, the company would rather pay you for supporting life and family.
They want to help new parents, and not by “un-parenting” them; i.e., killing the baby before it’s born. The company would much rather bring new life into the world and help you to do exactly that.
Via The Daily Wire:
Buffer Insurance, a small company headquartered in Southlake, Texas, took a stand for both biological and adoptive parents and mentioned the Supreme Court decision when they announced the new initiative on Facebook:
How Buffer responds to Roe v. Wade: Buffer will pay the medical costs for our employees who birth babies [and] provide paid time off for employees to have maternity & paternity leave.
Buffer will pay for the medical costs associated with adopting a baby.
This simple post, designed for their employees, has erupted on social media.
It seems like everyone is reading it and reacting one way or another. As you might expect, those who supported the Supreme Court’s ruling are in favor of Buffer Insurance’s new incentive plan.
Buffer would like to spread the love, too.
The post also says that they have “ready-to-use policies” for employers who wish to provide their employees with the same benefits. Then they add the hashtags #Impact, #WorthProtecting, and #OurChildrenAreWorthProtecting.
It’s not surprising that Buffer Insurance is headquartered in Texas, a state that has taken a strong pro-life stance in recent years.
In September 2021, the state passed the Texas Heartbeat Act, which makes abortions illegal after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In other words, it basically bans abortions after about 6 weeks.
Other states have passed similar laws, while the blue states are seeking to make it even easier to have abortions now.
At the same time, some of the world’s biggest companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Uber, are all paying employees and their dependents to help them get rid of unwanted pregnancies.
That’s why it’s interesting to see other companies pushing back on the opposite side — and it’s bound to garner plenty of applause from millions of pro-life Americans.
Key Takeaways:
Buffer Insurance in Texas is giving its employees incentive to keep pregnancies and start families.
They’re offering to pay the medical expenses for pregnancies, and paid maternity leave. They’ll also help if you wish to adopt.
This is the opposite approach to the corporations that are paying for their employees to get abortions.
Elizabeth Warren’s War on Pregnancy Resource Centers
July 7, 2022
Abortion supporters often claim that they’re “pro-choice,” not “pro-abortion,” a claim that regularly collides with their actual policies. When government policy is bent relentlessly to favor abortion, supporting a woman’s “right to choose” abortion isn’t distinct in any meaningful way from supporting abortion itself.
But abortion supporters reveal how shallow their “pro-choice” ideology is when they oppose helping pregnant mothers make, or even learn about, any choice other than abortion. The most recent example is on display in Congress, where four Democrats are targeting pregnancy resource centers, purporting to “prohibit disinformation in the advertising of abortion services.”
“With Roe gone, it’s more important than ever to crack down on so-called ‘crisis pregnancy centers’ that mislead and deceive patients seeking abortion care,” said Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, promoting her bill. “We need to crack down on the deceptive practices these centers use to prevent people from getting abortion care, and I’ve got a bill to do just that,” she added.
Under Warren’s bill, charities could be fined $100,000 or “50 percent of the revenues earned by the ultimate parent entity” of the charity for violating the act’s “prohibition on disinformation” related to abortion. But the legislation itself does not define prohibited speech. Warren’s bill directs the Federal Trade Commission to “promulgate rules to prohibit a person from advertising with the use of misleading statements related to the provision of abortion services.” Warren’s bill would thus turn the Federal Trade Commission into a national abortion disinformation board. Perhaps the task of determining what counts as a prohibited “misleading” statement would fall to the recently unemployed Nina Jankowicz for the remainder of the Biden administration. Warren does not seem to have considered who might do this job in a future Republican administration.
Warren also signed on to a letter in which members of Congress tried to pressure Google into suppressing search results for such centers — which was followed by a similar letter from the office of New York attorney general Letitia James. It appears not to have dawned on these abortion enthusiasts that pregnancy resource centers are the ones in need of protection, as activists have spent the past two months firebombing and otherwise vandalizing them in the name of promoting abortion access.
Nationally, pregnancy resource centers outnumber abortion facilities three to one, and in some states by as many as eleven to one. Knowing that many women choose abortion because they feel that they have no other option, the pro-life movement has placed tremendous resources into these centers, which exist to offer alternatives to abortion, usually at no cost. That help takes many forms: pregnancy tests and ultrasounds, other prenatal care, pregnancy counseling, assistance considering adoption and navigating the adoption process, and financial or material support for women in need.
Warren’s legislation codifies the long-standing animus of abortion advocates toward these centers, relying on the oft-repeated but rarely substantiated claim that these centers harm women. Pressed for examples, abortion supporters have little to offer.
A report from abortion-advocacy groups examined the websites of about 600 pregnancy resource centers in nine states, labeling them “deceptive” on the basis that they offer “virtually no medical care,” despite using “language and imagery signifying they were providers of medical services.” In fact, many of these centers do offer some types of medical care, and the report divulges no instance of a center advertising for specific services that aren’t actually available.
Meanwhile, NARAL Pro-Choice America’s investigation of pregnancy resource centers — which it labels “fake women’s health clinics” — has turned up evidence only of “lies” such as this one: “More than 67 percent of the locations intentionally referred to the fetus as ‘baby’ and told our investigator she was already a mother because she was already pregnant.”
It is only in the upside-down logic of abortion advocacy that these fundamental realities could be depicted as lies.
Warren’s legislation is hardly the first example of a policy targeting pregnancy resource centers. In California, former attorneys general Kamala Harris and Xavier Becerra enthusiastically enforced the Reproductive FACT Act, drafted with the help of Planned Parenthood. The law required pregnancy resource centers to post large advertisements for the state’s free or low-cost abortion program. Though the Supreme Court found the policy unconstitutional, other abortion-friendly states and localities have attempted to enact something similar.
While abortion supporters portray pregnancy resource centers as harming women, in fact these centers offer much that abortion groups themselves don’t provide. Compared with 354,871 abortions performed in 2020, Planned Parenthood offered only 8,626 instances of “prenatal care” and 2,667 adoption referrals. Among Planned Parenthood procedures and services related to pregnancy decisions — including abortion, prenatal or miscarriage care, and adoption referrals — abortion made up more than 96 percent.
It’s easy to see why abortion supporters — and especially those who profit from the provision of abortion — would want to undermine those who offer women choices other than abortion. Research suggests that the model works. One 2021 study found that pregnant women who visit a pregnancy resource center are about 20 percent less likely to choose abortion than pregnant women who don’t visit one. And the Charlotte Lozier Institute estimates that over the past five years alone, the nearly 3,000 pregnancy resource centers in the U.S. have saved the lives of more than 828,000 unborn children. Without a doubt, they will continue to save lives and help women in need — despite the best efforts of Warren and her allies.
States that have legalized marijuana have seen increasingly strong THC products and a rise in mental health issues among teenagers, a newly released nationwide study reports.
The Drug Free America Foundation authored the study, given first to The Center Square, which reports on “an association between adolescent cannabis use, the use of high potency cannabis products, and increased risk of psychosis.”
The study, also commissioned by the group Johnny’s Ambassadors, said that states that have loosened restrictions on marijuana have seen more use among teens as well as declining mental health.
“A difference-in-means test demonstrates that cannabis use is higher among all age groups in more highly permissive states, with 47 percent more monthly cannabis use among adolescents (ages 12-17) and 81 percent more monthly cannabis use among young adults (ages 18-25) in US states with fully legalized recreational cannabis programs than states where cannabis use has not been legalized,” the report said. “While cannabis use grew, subsequent raises in mean averages for major depressive events, severe mental illnesses, and suicidal thoughts all increased in more highly permissive US states.”
While causation is not necessarily proven by the study, the researchers are calling for a deeper look into this apparently corollary relationship.
“The research results presented in this study demonstrate that for each one percent increase in overall monthly cannabis use, self-reported major depression increased by 0.45 percent for adolescents and 0.21 percent for young adults,” the report said. “For every one percent increase in overall monthly cannabis use by young adults, severe mental illnesses increased by 0.12 percent and suicidal thoughts increased by 0.11 percent. Panel regression models included control variables for gender, marital status, educational attainment, veteran status, unemployment status, race, and ethnicity.”
States have loosened restrictions on cannabis sale and distribution in recent years. Amy Ronshausen, executive director of the Drug Free America Foundation, said that as the legal market for cannabis has grown, market competition has driven producers to create increasingly strong products that include more THC.
“If there is a dispensary on every corner, and people are selling these products, you better believe that your dispensary is going to sell the biggest, baddest, most potent marijuana product there is because you want your edge of that market and that is what we see happening,” Ronshausen said.
According to the National Institutes of Health, research has shown a linkage between marijuana use and negative mental health outcomes, but not all studies have not found such a link.
“Several studies have linked marijuana use to increased risk for psychiatric disorders, including psychosis (schizophrenia), depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders, but whether and to what extent it actually causes these conditions is not always easy to determine,” the federal health agency says on its website. “Recent research suggests that smoking high-potency marijuana every day could increase the chances of developing psychosis by nearly five times compared to people who have never used marijuana. The amount of drug used, the age at first use, and genetic vulnerability have all been shown to influence this relationship. The strongest evidence to date concerns links between marijuana use and psychiatric disorders in those with a preexisting genetic or other vulnerability.”
Ronshausen is calling for more research into high potency products.
“Most of the research that we have is on lower potency products, low potency THC, and the research isn’t great when it comes to the harms, it shows that these products are harmful,” she said. “So when these new strands that could be up to 90% THC, we really don’t know what the outcomes are going to be on that, and that’s kind of scary. It’s a new product.”
Researchers say teens are particularly vulnerable to the marketing for these products and the adverse mental health effects because their brains are still developing.
“It also affects brain systems that are still maturing through young adulthood, so regular use by teens may have negative and long-lasting effects on their cognitive development, putting them at a competitive disadvantage and possibly interfering with their well-being in other ways,” Nora D. Volkow, director National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in the agency’s research report on the issue. “Also, contrary to popular belief, marijuana can be addictive, and its use during adolescence may make other forms of problem use or addiction more likely.”
Casey Harper is a Senior Reporter for the Washington, D.C. Bureau. He previously worked for The Daily Caller, The Hill, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. A graduate of Hillsdale College, Casey’s work has also appeared in Fox News, Fox Business, and USA Today.
