David French says this happens every time he criticizes a private corporation for progressive bullying. He gets a response something like: “How do you like free markets now, Mr. Conservative? What’s your problem with free speech, Mr. Lawyer?” The problem with this response is why he wrote a column with the provocative title: “Free Speech Is Killing Free Speech.”

The thinking behind the reaction is that if you support the existence of a legal right (in this case free speech), you should support every single exercise of that right. That makes no sense. Liberals who criticize any of us concerned about the boycott of North Carolina or Chick-fil-A or whatever entity, know that you can support free speech but also at the same time disagree with the way people exercise free speech. A progressive would support the right to vote but that does not mean they are happy when someone votes for a conservative candidate.

We should support the idea of free markets. But that doesn’t mean we have to remain silent when liberal groups or homosexual activists try to boycott a state or company or shame it on Facebook because it holds to traditional views on marriage and family.

David French also acknowledges that the problem isn’t just found on the liberal side of the political spectrum. He reminds us that the so-called “alt-right” is raising trolling to an obscene art form. They bombard their “opponents with the most vile forms of constitutionally protected expression imaginable.”

He also finds it humorous that various leftwing sportswriters applaud Colin Kaepernick for making some Americans feel uncomfortable, but were silent or even cheered when ESPN fired Curt Shilling for making some people uncomfortable. These examples all seem to fit into the false mantra of “free speech for me but not for thee.”

In previous commentaries I have talked about how Europe and other countries in the world are facing a demographic winter, but now it seems that America is headed in the same direction. John Stonestreet talks about this in a recent Breakpoint commentary.

A country needs a fertility rate of about 2.1 children per woman in order to maintain its population. The population will shrink if that number drops below that number (unless compensated by increasing levels of immigration).

Greece, Italy, Spain, and Germany have a fertility rate less than 1.4. The United States currently has a fertility rate of less than 1.9. This is a significant drop off since the postwar baby boom that reached a fertility rate of 3.8 children per woman.

America’s drop in fertility has been masked by immigration. Immigrants produced children that native-born Americans were not having. Also, these immigrants tended to have higher fertility rates.

In previous commentaries, I also have talked about the fact that the fertility rate varies from group to group. For example, conservatives have more children than liberals. Christians have more children than secularists. As you might imagine, secular liberals have been writing about this “fertility gap” because they realize that Christians are giving birth to future Christians, and conservatives are having more future conservatives. That doesn’t always happen since universities and the secular media have been fairly effective at converting Christian kids into atheists and conservative students into progressives.

Sometimes it is difficult to see the prospect of a decline in America’s population when

We all know how addictive these digital devices might be, but I was surprised to see an article in the New York Post describing it as “digital heroin.” The author is a doctor at one of the country’s top rehabs and also served as a clinical professor at Stony Brook Medicine. What he says in the article is shocking.

We now know that these digital devices (iPads, smartphones, and Xboxes) are a form of digital drug. All you have to do is look at some of the brain imaging to see how these devices are affecting the brain’s frontal cortex. This is the part of the brain that controls executive functioning, including impulse control.

We also know that these devices raise dopamine levels (the feel good neurotransmitter), which involves the addiction dynamic. In fact, scientists have found that they can raise these levels as high as when people engage in sex.

One doctor who serves as the director of neuroscience at UCLA calls these screens “electronic cocaine.” Chinese researchers call them “digital heroin.” The head of addiction research for the Pentagon and the U.S. Navy has been researching video game addiction and calls the games and screen technologies “digital pharmakeia” (the Greek word for drug).

Of course, you don’t have to know much about neurophysiology to suspect there is a problem. Many parents wonder if these glowing screens are having a negative effect on their kids. They see aggressive temper tantrums and short attention spans. The few brave enough to take these devices from their kids even see them going through withdrawal.

The author has treated over 1,000 teens for digital addiction. He has found that treatment is very difficult once a child has crossed into addiction. In fact, he has “found it easier to treat heroin and crystal meth addicts than lost-in-the-matrix video gamers or Facebook-dependent social media addicts.” We shouldn’t be surprised that some call these devices “digital heroin.”

We all know that the cost of living varies from state to state and from city to city. The Tax Foundation has produced a map that shows the real value of $100 in each state. Prices for the same goods are often much cheaper in Missouri or Mississippi than they are in New York or California. The same amount of money can buy more in low-price states than in high-price states.

The first thing you notice by looking at the map is the obvious correlation with politics. In general, the low-price states are the red states, and the high-price states are the blue states. The west and northeast are not only the blue states, but they also have less buying power. The red states clustered in the south and Midwest have more buying power.

The regional differences are striking. Alan Cole writing for the Tax Foundation explains that real purchasing power is 36 percent greater in Mississippi than it is in the District of Columbia. Put another way, you need an after-tax income in D.C. of about $68,000 to equal an after-tax income of $50,000 in Mississippi. To compensate, government and businesses often pay higher salaries in these high-price states.

He also compares the states of California and Nebraska. People in these two states earn approximately the same amount in dollars per capita. But after adjusting for regional price parity, people in Nebraska can buy more.

There is obviously a difference in real value within a state. The cost of living in Manhattan, for example, is much greater than living in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

These differences in the cost of living also have policy implications. Most economic policies (tax brackets, food stamp eligibility) set at the national level do not take in account the significant differences in the cost of living. This map is a reminder that $100 goes much further in some parts of America than in others.

Could it be that nearly everything we have been told about sexual orientation and gender identity is wrong? A new report published in the journal, The New Atlantis, seems to challenge conventional secular perspectives on these issues. The paper by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh surveys over 200 peer-reviewed studies done in various social science disciplines.

Ryan Anderson of the Heritage Foundation summarizes the paper’s results. He says the major takeaway is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.” Here are four of the most important conclusions from the paper.

First, the “belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property” is not supported. In other words, people are not “born that way.”

Second, the “belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex—so that a person might be a man trapped in a woman’s body or a woman trapped in a man’s body—is not supported by scientific evidence.”

Third, “only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” It goes on to say that children should not be encouraged to become transgender. They also should not be subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.

Fourth, people who are homosexual or transgender “have higher rates of mental problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population.”

The paper only focuses on the scientific research, but it obviously has implications for public policy. Incorrect scientific claims have been used to justify court rulings, government policies, and medical practices concerning sexual orientation and gender identity. They have not been based upon sound science.

One of the perennial arguments by atheists is that religion is dangerous and that religion has led to wars and untold suffering. I thought about that claim when I was interviewing Ray Comfort about his new book and video on atheism. He has some arresting statistics.

He documents that the ideas of Karl Marx, for example, led to the deaths of more than 90 million people. Joseph Stalin alone accounted for the deaths by murder or starvation of as many as 60 million. Mao Zedong is responsible for that many or more. Add to that the atheistic regimes of dictators like Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler, and you can see that it is atheism that is has been the scourge of humanity.

In some of his earlier books, Dinesh D’Souza came to a similar conclusion that the atheist regimes were much more deadly than any religious conflict. He wrote that “death caused by Christian rulers over a five-hundred-year period amounts to only 1 percent of the deaths caused by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao in the space of a few decades.”

Dr. R.J. Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He estimates that since 1900, the total body count is approximately 262 million dead from the bloody hands of atheistic governments.

The Encyclopedia of Wars says that there have been 1,763 wars during human history. About 123 could be considered religious wars, and over half of those religious wars were pursued in the name of Islam. Even so, that number represents merely 7 percent of all wars. In other words, 93 percent of all wars were not religious but political in nature.

These are just a few facts and statistics to consider the next time you hear an atheist rail against religion and claim that religion is dangerous and the reason we have had so many wars and suffering in the world.

Religious liberty is one of the foundations of America, and it is a right enshrined in the First Amendment. But Mary Eberstadt is concerned about the widespread discrimination in today’s secular society. She explains why in her book, It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies. Her book begins with the many stories that I have presented in various commentaries and that we often discuss on radio each week with Kelly Shackelford of First Liberty. Then she goes on to explain how Christians can respond to critics by holding them to standards they supposedly accept.

Two examples show why Christians need to be concerned about this trend and need to learn how to respond. First, there is the sad story about Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich who was hounded out of his position merely because he supported Proposition 8 in 2008 in California. By the way, a majority of the voters in the state supported the proposition. Mary Eberstadt made the point that if someone this important and powerful could be forced out of a business, what chance do the rest of us have?

The second example is Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College in Massachusetts. He and fourteen other Christians signed a letter asking for a “religious exemption” to the president’s planned executive order banning sexual orientation discrimination by federal contractors. It is worth mentioning that even Senator Elizabeth Warren supported a religious exemption in such cases.

The city of Salem suspended a long-term contract with Gordon. The Lynn School Committee ended its relationship with the college and refused to accept Gordon College students as student-teachers. Then the New England Association of Schools and Colleges announced that it was going to consider whether the college violated their standards for accreditation.

It is easy to see the irony. Three centuries after the original Salem witch trials, Gordon College was subjected to a secularist witch trial. This is why Christians need to understand what is happening and take a bold stand for religious liberty.

Thomas Sowell recently wrote about what he thinks is the dumbest idea in politics. Now when you are talking about politics and public policy, there are lots of dumb ideas, but this one might be top of the list.

He thinks that the most stupid idea you can find in politics is “the assumption that people would be evenly or randomly distributed in incomes, institutions, occupations, or awards.” He argues that this assumption is the basis for so many political crusades and personal careers as grievance mongers.

What set him off were a number of articles that have appeared recently about the fact that females are underrepresented among the highest rated chess players and how women and minorities are under-represented in high tech jobs in Silicon Valley. Are girls who want to play chess finding doors slammed in their face? Are women and minorities who want degrees in computer science being prevented from pursuing that career? There is no evidence of that.

When you get into racial and ethnic differences, there is where this false assumption in the grievance industry really shows up. Differences in outcomes are just naturally assumed to be due to racism or discrimination of some type. Thomas Sowell points out that something as simple as age differences might explain the different economic circumstances.

For example, if every 20-year-old Puerto Rican in America had an identical income of every Japanese American (and identical incomes at every other age), the Japanese Americans as a group would still have a higher average income than Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Why? The median age of Japanese Americans is more than 20 years older. They have more work experience so they have higher incomes.

Perhaps you can now see why Thomas Sowell thinks this assumption about equality is a dumb idea. When you factor in relevant criteria and also recognize people have different gifts and talents, you begin find reasons why there are economic differences in society.