A few weeks ago, I talked about the current trend by some commentators to minimize terrorism. Perhaps they are doing it because they don’t want Americans to over-react to terrorist acts on social media videos. Then I talked about how some commentators and even politicians want to minimize Muslim terrorism. Again, that might be so that Americans don’t paint all Muslims with a terrorist brush. I understand all of that, but think that often these attempts to minimize the risk of terrorism and the threat of Muslim terrorism go too far.

I thought I was done with talking about attempts to minimize social trends. That was true, until I read a commentary by John Stonestreet. He and others have noticed how various commentators have been using what is happening overseas to minimize any threats to religious liberty in this country.

Each week we are subjected to various videos and social media posts reminding us of the horrible fate Christians and other religious groups face from radical Muslim groups like ISIS. And it is true that nothing that is happening to Christians in America compares in any way to what is happening to Christians and other groups in many of these Muslim countries. So critics of Christianity are using this stark contrast as an “argument ender.”

In other words, until we see Christians beheaded in Washington, D.C., don’t cry about your loss of religious liberty here in America. Even some Christian commentators want those promoting religious liberty to stop talking about persecution here in America because it is insulting to Christians in other countries who are facing real persecution.

This is merely a false dilemma. We should speak out against human rights abuses in other countries and pray for our persecuted brothers and sisters. But we can and should also call attention to attacks on Christian faith and the loss of religious liberty here in the United States. This is not an either/or proposition. Most of the responsible voices in the evangelical world address both human rights abuses and the loss of religious liberty.

One action Eric Holder took as he was leaving the office of attorney general was to issue an official memorandum that creates special employment status for “transgendered” persons under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile other state officials and legislatures have also extended similar rights to men and women who have changed or are changing their gender identity.

If you wonder what the implications are to such actions, you need only see what happened in a gym in Michigan. Yvette Cormier went to Planet Fitness to shape up. Instead, she got shipped out.

She walked into the woman’s locker room and saw someone wearing a wig that she said was “huge” and “very manly.” She said she was “freaked out” and complained to the front desk about the transgender man/woman. After the employee told her it was company policy to allow members to use whichever locker room associates with their gender identity, Yvette decided to tell “everyone in the locker room what happened.” That’s why Planet Fitness canceled her membership.

She then decided to contact the corporate office of Planet Fitness. You would think that they might have tried to find a resolution. But the company’s public relations director stood by the decision and said that company’s “gender identity non- discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all facilities based on their sincere self-reporting gender identity.”

Planet Fitness is free to enforce whatever policy they want. And customers are also free to avoid a gym and fitness center that allows men who think they are women to undress and shower in a women’s locker room. Before you join a gym, I encourage you to see what policy they might have and what state regulations might have been enacted.

Sadly this is a preview of coming attractions unless government officials begin to use some biological common sense. We will see more of this in restrooms and locker rooms across the country unless we challenge some of these federal and state regulations.

Over the last few decades, we have heard more and more people in business talking about multitasking. We even have a whole generation dedicated to multitasking. That means they have a dozen tabs open on their laptop, while updating the Facebook page, listening to Taylor Swift, while they are supposed to be doing their homework.

Unfortunately, more and more studies show that multitasking is a bad idea. It can hurt your brain, your career, and change your personality. Travis Bradberry writing in Forbes puts it this way: “You’ve likely heard that multitasking is problematic, but new studies show that it kills your performance and may even damage your brain.” They found that even people who felt they have a special gift for multitasking did worse on performance tests than those who focused on a single thing at a time.

Studies also found that multitasking lowers your IQ. One study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they’d expect if they had smoked marijuana and stayed up all night. Another study at the University of Sussex compared the amount of time people spend on multiple devices to MRI scans of their brains. They found that high multitaskers have less brain density in a region of the brain responsible for empathy as well as cognitive and emotional control.

An article by Drake Baer in Fast Company documented how multitasking rewires our brains. In previous commentaries, I have talked about how our brains are plastic. The technical term is neuroplasticity. If we train our brains to multitask, we are training them to think differently. Clifford Nash at Stanford University has found that the more you multitask, the less you’re able to learn, concentrate, or be nice to people. He has found that: “People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy. They can’t manage a working memory. They’re chronically distracted.”

Multitasking is the latest fad, but I hope you can see why many researchers have concluded that multitasking is bad idea.

David Brooks recently wrote in the New York Times about “The Cost of Relativism.” Although he didn’t intend it, his op-ed makes a convincing case for why we need Christian values in society.

He was talking about a new book by Robert Putnam that describes the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school educated America. He then tells some sad stories of children in broken homes and people living in violent neighborhoods. He concludes that it is “not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles: its norms.”

He says we need to reintroduce norms, but that will require a moral vocabulary. These norms weren’t destroyed, he says, by people with bad values but by the “plague of nonjugmentalism.” That is certainly true in our world today. Most people in our secular society reject the idea of moral absolutes. They certainly reject biblical absolutes. Thus, they cannot say that something is right or wrong. It all becomes a matter of personal preferences.

David Brooks goes on to say that introducing norms will also require holding people responsible. Good luck with that in our current society. Here’s a test. Find a group of people and say something like “abortion is wrong” or “same-sex marriage is wrong.” You will most likely hear a question like, “who are you to say that?” Or you might hear a statement like, “that’s very intolerant of you.”

This is the legacy of a world that has embraced moral relativism and has rejected moral and biblical absolutes. This is the legacy of a society that accepts nonjudgementalism and refuses to condemn bad behavior.

David Brooks has hope that we will have a moral revival that will reinstitute moral norms in society. He cites a few examples of this happening in the past. I could add many more to his list and mention that nearly all of them came from a Christian revival, reformation or awakening. Yes, we need moral norms in society, and Christianity is where we will find them.

There is no shortage of people with an opinion about the treaty that the United States would like to finalize with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set forth his concerns in a speech before the joint session of Congress. Senator Tom Cotton and 46 others U.S. Senators sent a letter to the Iranian leaders explaining that the Senate would have to approve any deal the president makes with them. Every pundit has an opinion about a treaty that hasn’t even been made public.

What are the flaws in the deal the president wants to ratify with Iran? News from these nuclear talks is troubling. Apparently, Iran would be granted the “right to enrich.” That means that thousands of centrifuges would continue spinning. Sure, some facilities might be closed down, but others would remain open. That would continue to give them a path to a nuclear weapon or even multiple nuclear weapons.

Another concern is Iran’s pursuit of an intercontinental ballistic missile system. This program isn’t even part of the treaty negotiations. There would be no restrictions on the development of a missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to Europe or America.

Perhaps the greatest concern was the revelation that the treaty would have a sunset provision. The administration accepted the demand by Iran that any restrictions on its programs be limited. They might even decide to abide by the treaty (which is doubtful), and only wait until time is up. Then they can hit the accelerator and develop nuclear weapons.

If there is a sunset provision, Benjamin Netanyahu suggested three conditions that would trigger it. “First, stop its aggression against its neighbors in the Middle East. Second, stop supporting terrorism around the world. And third, stop threatening to annihilate my country, Israel, the one and only Jewish state.” He also added that if Iran walks away from the table (very typical in a Persian bazaar), then ratchet up the sanctions.

Here’s the bottom line: the Iran deal is flawed. We can do better. We should do better.

Each year at the CPAC (which is the Conservative Political Action Conference) you get speeches from pundits, politicians, and various other speakers. When the organizers invited Phil Robertson, the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty family franchise, they should have expected a speech that would be different from anything you normally hear at a CPAC conference.

I first heard about the speech when I tuned into a talk show and heard the host criticize the speech and the CPAC organizers for scheduling it. No one will ever accuse Phil Robertson of being “politically correct.” Some of his laugh lines also cause some people to roll their eyes or shake their heads.

But he did say some things about STDs that Jonah Goldberg decided to defend in a recent op-ed in USA Today. He points out that a talk on sexually transmitted diseases has not been high on the CPAC agenda. Maybe it should be. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 110 million Americans have an STD, that’s one third of all Americans.

Phil Robertson put it this way: “It’s the revenge of the hippies! Sex, drugs, and rock and roll have come back to haunt us, in a bad way.” If you don’t like that quote, Jonah Goldberg reminds us what Tom Wolfe said about doctors working at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic in 1968. They encountered maladies “no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names.”

I remember this well since I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in that era with a father that worked in the pharmaceutical industry. The traditional rules of hygiene and sexuality were tossed out the window. The hippies that rejected these rules of morality and common sense paid a price and spread those diseases to others.

Perhaps the most fitting quote comes from humorist P.J. O’Rourke. He said: “The sexual revolution is over. The microbes won.” The microbes in this case are the STDs that now infect one third of all Americans.

The release of the Justice Department report on the Ferguson Police Department has renewed the national discussion about race relations and the police. A voice that needs to be heard in this discussion is Jason Riley. He is a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal and has been on my radio program.

Earlier this year, he gave a speech at Hillsdale College on “Race Relations and Law Enforcement” that has been reprinted in Imprimis. He acknowledges that the shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson touched off a national discussion. But he wants to bring some important facts to the table.

He begins by documenting that homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in America. He also points out that 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. It is also worth noting that 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, he says, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite.

He believes any candid debate on race and criminal justice in the country must “start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes.” African-Americans constitute about 13 percent of the population but also commit half of all the murders in the United States. The black arrest rate for most offenses (including robbery, assault, and property crimes) is “typically two to three times their representation in the population.”

He says these statistics at least explain why police officers view black men with suspicion since that demographic group commits more crimes than others. He concludes that: “The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality not the cause.” The best way to change the perceptions is to change the behavior. But Jason Riley says that has become a taboo subject.

I applaud him for wanting to address the topic. His voice needs to be heard in this national discussion.