Recently the president of iVoterGuide explained on my radio program how COVID shows how elections matter.

Debbie Wuthnow said that COVID reminds us that elected officials can make life and death decisions. It may be tempting to think that elections are “just politics.” We learned from the various orders and pronouncements by our elected officials that they have significant power over our lives.

She also argued that COVID revealed how vulnerable our religious liberties are. Some elected officials singled out church services for special sanctions. Legal organizations were busy trying to defend churches.

Also related was the reality the COVID revealed how vulnerable our civil liberties are. A lone surfer was fined. Police ticketed 22 people in cars watching the sunset. A man was arrested for playing T-ball with his 6-year-old daughter in a park.

On the other hand, she noted, COVID also showed that many elected officials still support religious and civil liberties. Many elected officials pushed back against irresponsible edicts. Judges struck down some of the most blatant acts of bullying.

Unfortunately, politicians used the pandemic crisis to stuff special interest pork into laws meant to help average Americans. But these bills were also used to funnel money to wealthy universities and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

COVID also showed that politician’s worldview matters. We all agree that saving the lives of the elderly and at-risk people is something the government should do. But that same concern for life did not extend to the unborn. Abortion clinics were kept open because they were considered “essential services.”

The pandemic was a reminder of how important the November elections will be.

Perhaps you have heard the phrase that people follow their basic principles, until they don’t. As much as most of us try to follow key principles in our life (whether they be principles of leadership, family, or morality), sometimes an issue arises that changes our behavior. That is certainly true of judicial interpretation.

While on the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has staked out his belief that legislatures (not the judiciary) should make law. And he has on more than one occasion been willing to tell Congress or a state legislature to write a less ambiguous law and not depend on the Supreme Court to fix it.

That is why his opinion in the Bostock case is most confusing. The editors of the Wall Street Journal started their editorial with these words: “An alien appears to have occupied the body of Justice Neil Gorsuch as we wrote Monday’s opinion.”

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was attempting to outlaw discrimination based on such issues as race, color, religion, and national origin. An amendment was proposed to include “sex” in the statute. It is obvious to just about anyone that in 1964 the word “sex” meant male and female. But Justice Gorsuch ruled that it also includes sexual orientation and gender identity.

In previous Supreme Court rulings, he has ruled that “it’s a fundamental canon of statutory construction that words generally should be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning . . . at the time Congress enacted the statue.” That is not what he and the other justices did in the case. Justice Gorsuch and the other justices reinterpreted the meaning of the word “sex” to fit their desired conclusion.

This is a debate that has been taking place in Congress, but the Supreme Court short-circuited the debate that should have taken place in a legislative body not in the court.

We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based in love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys.

They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are as divided as the Palestinians and Israelis. In his op-ed in the New York Times Arthur Brooks says we see the other side as “an enemy with whom one cannot negotiate or compromise.”

He comes to this startling conclusion. “People often say that our problem in America is incivility or intolerance. That is incorrect. Motive attribution asymmetry leads to something far worse: contempt, which is a noxious brew of anger and disgust.” And it is made worse by what he calls the “outrage industrial complex” that caters to one side and criticizes the other.

When people hear about political conflicts, they often prescribe the wrong solutions. Just because we disagree, doesn’t mean we should put aside our disagreements. Arthur Brooks says we need not disagree less. Instead, we need to disagree better. Whether we are discussing politics, economics, or philosophy we should engage is a robust “competition of ideas.” We can disagree without being so disagreeable.

He suggests two steps. First, turn away from what he calls the “rhetorical dope peddlers.” These are powerful people on your side who are profiting from the culture of contempt. Second, make a commitment never to treat others with contempt. Christians should be civil and gracious.

You have heard most of them before. They are little phrases and one-liners that Christians (and even non-Christians) say in order to encourage you. You might be going through some tough struggles, and they remind you, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” At a funeral for a child, someone will likely explain, “God gained another angel.” And of course, there are the millions of people who believe that “God just wants you to be happy” and that you need to “Believe in yourself.”

Fortunately, Shane Pruitt has been willing to tackle these and other false one-liners in his new book, “9 Common Lies Christians Believe.” He was on the Point of View radio talk show recently to discuss his book.

Shane wrote about these common lies because of his own experience. When his wife and he adopted a disabled child from Uganda, they faced numerous surgeries for him and major emotional challenges. That is why his first chapter addresses the lie that “God won’t give me more than I can handle.” He takes on that misunderstanding both with personal examples and sound biblical interpretation.

Some of the lies we believe have been challenged in society. Common lie #5 says you must “follow your heart.” Mike Rowe is known for his work on such TV programs as “Dirty Jobs” and “Returning the Favor.” No doubt you have also seen his YouTube videos or Ted Talks about how we are doing a disservice to so many young people by telling them merely to “follow their heart.”

Shane also addresses some important theological errors. Common lie #6 is “God doesn’t really care” and common lie #8 is “I don’t think God likes me.” He hears these comments not only in this country, but even when he has travelled to Africa.

I recommend this book for a sermon series, for small groups, and for individual study. We need to reject these lies and embrace God’s truth on these issues.

In a PragerU video, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper talked about two different types of people. He described these two groups in order to explain why Donald Trump won in 2016. I will ignore his explanation and conclusion in this short commentary in order to focus on the impact of two people groups.

He says there are many people who “can live anywhere” and many more people who have to “live somewhere.” David Goodhart makes this important distinction in his book, The Road to Somewhere. He explains there is a key fault line in Britain between the Anywheres and the Somewheres. Stephen Harper believes this explains the populist rising in many countries including the United States.

“Imagine you work for an international bank, computer company, or consulting firm,” says Harper, “You can wake up in New York, London, or Singapore, and feel at home. Your work is not threatened by import competition or technological dislocation — you’re one of those who can live anywhere.”

This is not the case for those forced to live somewhere. “Let’s say you’re a factory worker, small business person, or in retail sales,” said Harper, “If things go badly at your company, or policy choices by politicians turn out to be wrong, you can’t just shift your life to somewhere else.”

The Anywheres are not really that affected by outsourcing labor or cheap labor or even technological imports. The Somewheres are affected by all of these things and have become angry when the elites (in government, media, and business) seem unconcerned about the disruptions that occur because of policies by government officials and decisions by multinational companies. That is why more and more of the Somewheres are making their voice heard in elections and in the populist movement.

Americans currently promoting socialism tell us that we shouldn’t look at the failed socialist experiments in Cuba or Venezuela. Instead, we should look at Sweden as proof that socialism works and can bring great prosperity.

That’s not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says. He is featured in a new documentary, “Sweden: Lessons for America.” John Stossel also interviewed Norberg for Stossel TV.

Norberg makes it clear that “Sweden is not socialist—because the government doesn’t own the means of production. To see that, you have to go to Venezuela or Cuba or North Korea.” He does admit that the country did have something that resembled socialism a few decades ago. The government heavily taxed the citizens and spent heavily. That was not a good period in Swedish history, especially for the economy.

One example he uses is Astrid Lindgren, author of the popular children’s books, Pippi Longstocking. Because her books were popular and sold well, she experienced something Americans cannot even imagine. She had to pay a tax of 102 percent on any new book she sold.

Yet even with the high Swedish taxes, there was simply not enough money to fund Sweden’s huge welfare state. Norberg explains that, “People couldn’t get the pension that they thought they depended on for the future.” At this point, the Swedish people had enough and began to reduce the size and scope of the government.

John Stossel says, “They cut public spending, privatized the national rail network, abolished certain government monopolies, eliminated inheritance taxes and sold state-owned businesses like the maker of Absolute vodka.” While it is true that Sweden does have a larger welfare state than the US and higher taxes than the US, there are many other areas where Sweden is actually more free market.

Sweden isn’t socialist and is actually a good example of why a country doesn’t want to implement socialism.

A new documentary reminds us how intrusive social media can be in our lives and how personal privacy is quickly vanishing. Kyle Smith writes about this in his op-ed and mentions the documentary The Creepy Line. The name of the documentary is taken from a comment by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He has a nickname for the invasive nature of his company. “Google policy on a lot of these things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

In the film, Peter Schweizer illustrates how your search history gives Google an enormous amount of information. Of course, this is supposed to tell Google and other advertisers what you like to buy. But this enormous cache of information also tells anyone who has access to it all sorts of other things about you and your personal tastes.

Google also noticed that you would leave the search engine in order to surf the Internet. So, it developed the browser, Chrome. That means that everything you do online through Chrome is also collected in the cache of information at Google.

But that’s not enough. Google wants to know what you are doing even when you are not online. So, there is Android that uploads a complete picture of what you have been when you are not online. Smith concludes, “It’s a surveillance business model. Google Maps, Goggle Docs, Gmail . . . Google knows more about you than your spouse does.”

Over the last few months, Congress has shown some interest in understanding how Google (and the other Big Tech firms) make their editorial decisions. But Smith also remind us that the federal government is “a heavy user of Google products, and has shown little interest in oversight.”

If Google isn’t going to self-police itself, and if Congress isn’t going to take any meaningful action, then we as consumers need to be wary of how Google and others use us and our information.

Dinesh D’Souza has written about The United States of Socialism. It provides a good overview of the influence of socialism in our world today with good responses to the arguments used to support socialism and to criticize capitalism. He also introduces the concept of “identity socialism” which attempts to cobble together various victim groups in an effort to promote a socialist revolution.

Millions of young people in our country today are convinced that socialism is superior to capitalism. But is that really true? Dinesh D’Souza proposed two test cases. The first is the difference between East Germany that was socialist and West Germany that was capitalist. At the time of reunification, the GNP of socialist East Germany was about a third of the what existed in capitalist West Germany.

A better example is North and South Korea because the separation has lasted longer and continues to this day. Capitalist South Korea is more than 20 times richer than socialist North Korea. South Koreans are obviously freer than North Koreans. South Koreans are also taller, healthier, and live about 12 years longer than North Koreans.

Dinesh D’Souza also draws upon his own experience growing up in India that was influenced by the Fabian socialism of England and then adopted Soviet-style five-year plans when India became independent. His family had a ration card which specified the paltry amount of sugar or cooking oil they could purchase. There was a seven-year waiting period to get a phone.

Not only does this book document the problems with socialism, but I also appreciate that it provides a moral basis for capitalism and a plan to defeat socialists seeking to transform America.