A blogger named Robyn Openshaw – a.k.a. GreenSmoothieGirl – wrote a post that will tug at the heartstrings of any parent who has been shocked when made aware of their child’s rejection of carefully-taught, seemingly-traditional values. She writes: “I wish I had figured it out sooner: the worst mistake we ever made was delegating the education of our kids to the state.”

Robyn’s youngest son, age 22, recently informed her of his realization that the founders of our nation are “rich,” “racist,” and worse. Their ideas, he now believes, should be dismissed. He now also affirms that, with the aid of puberty blockers, hormones and surgery, “a girl he knows can become a boy.” Robyn laments: “His values have turned out so different than mine, and I’m still figuring out why. “

Robyn is not a mom who blithely sent her children off to school expecting the values they learned in their Mormon upbringing to go unchallenged. She co-founded their charter school and “helped choose conservative and accurate and rigorous curriculum.” She made them do chores and helped them “start little businesses, to get a taste of entrepreneurialism.”

Robyn now wonders, like so many other parents across America who find themselves on the way to being cancelled by one of their children, if this is just the modern iteration of the “generation gap.” She fears it’s something more insidious. She doesn’t “think any generation in history went from their kids sitting in a church pew on Sunday learning how they were made in the image of God, to believing that you’re a woman if you ‘feel’ like one.”

So this diligent mom, the GreenSmoothieGirl, officially repents – yes – she uses that word. She writes: “I’m deeply regretting delegating his education to people whose values are apparently very different than mine – especially the university degree I paid for.”

Oh Lord, enlighten Robyn. Grant her, and other parents who want a do-over, grace and truth to get through to their kids.

Not that long ago, majorities in both political parties believed that marriage was the union of one man and one woman. In 1996, when Congress passed DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, only one Republican voted against it.

In 2013, the Supreme Court, in its Windsor decision, struck down DOMA’s definition of marriage. And in 2015, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court ruled that states must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. The 5-4 Obergefell decision not only finished off DOMA, it also wiped away constitutional amendments passed by 29 states as well as 35 state laws.

The shift among politicians and the public has been breathtaking, with polls showing two thirds of the country currently supporting same-sex marriage.

But marriage is God’s idea and its definition is not ours to change. Conservative Republicans made certain clear language condemning the Supreme Court’s Windsor and Obergefell rulings was placed in the party’s 2016 and 2020 platforms. Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, who led the effort, says “the issue of marriage is non-negotiable.”

Now the Left has seized on the suggestion in Justice Clarence Thomas’s Dobbs concurrence that Obergefell and certain other decisions could be reconsidered based on arguments used to overturn Roe..

So House Democrats quickly passed the Respect for Marriage Act, to repeal DOMA – it’s still on the books. Their effort to force Republicans to take uncomfortable positions ahead of the midterm elections bore fruit in this case. This bill, codifying same sex marriage drew forty-seven Republican votes.

In a piece in the Washington Standard, FRC’s David Clossen decries ”the lack of a robust defense of marriage” during debate. On the Senate side, too many Republicans have been non-committal or blasted the bill as a diversionary waste of time. Mr. Clossen observes that many “see the issue as settled.”

As Tony Perkins reminds us, “the truth hasn’t changed.”

If we really respect marriage, we should defend it.

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision restores the regulation of abortion to the states where it belongs. The abortion industry is pushing back with scare tactics as evidenced at a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP).

In testimony before the HELP Committee, Kristyn Brandi, chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, tried to convince senators that banning abortion would deprive women with ectopic pregnancies of lifesaving care.

Ectopic pregnancy is any pregnancy that occurs outside the uterine cavity. In most such pregnancies, the embryo implants in a fallopian tube. Some ectopic pregnancies resolve on their own. As Family Research Council’s Ben Johnson explains in The Washington Stand, ectopic pregnancy “is always fatal for the child and can prove deadly to the mother if not caught early enough.”

An early ectopic pregnancy without unstable bleeding is most often treated with medication which stops cell growth and dissolves existing cells. If this fails to end the pregnancy, or if the situation is diagnosed later, surgery is required to remove the fetus, hopefully before the fallopian tube ruptures. None of the procedures used to end ectopic pregnancies are classified as abortions. Many state laws restricting abortion, including those passed in Louisiana, Texas, and Oklahoma, explicitly state this fact.

But Dr. Brandi sought to muddy the waters, telling the senators at the HELP committee hearing, “We have heard people question whether bans on abortion will impact care like ectopic pregnancy management…or if miscarriage management will be allowed.”

This is disingenuous. In his Washington Stand piece, Ben Johnson points out that the abortion industry, including doctors like Kristyn Brandi, is all about protecting the right for women of all states to get medication abortions. Increasingly, these medication (or chemical) abortions are prescribed via telemedicine – that means there’s no physical exam, no ultrasound study.

Prompt ultrasound evaluation is key in diagnosing ectopic pregnancy. Abortion pills don’t work to stop ectopic pregnancies and – yes – women will die.

The 8.6-percent rate of inflation we’re seeing in headlines is bad. If you’re 40 or younger, you’ve never experienced anything like it. But inflation, for most Americans, is much worse.

Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen explains that “The official government inflation rate comes from the consumer price index, which measures the prices of a basket of goods that reflect the overall annual consumption of items and services that an average household pays for.”

But prices differ from city to city and families’ purchases obviously vary. Mr. Olsen states that prices for “goods that people regularly purchase” are rising faster than for items that are purchased with less regularity. “Food used at home” is up 12 percent over the last year. Gasoline prices are up nearly 50 percent over a year ago. People feel these increases more than they would something like a dishwasher or an annual visit to the doctor.

Most Americans won’t buy a house or a car this year. But some will. Circumstances sometimes necessitate that you’ve gotta bite the bullet. Ouch! Home prices are up 40 percent since March 2020. People who bought new and used cars over the past year paid 12 to 16 percent more than they would have the just a year earlier.

Henry Olsen says, “these facts explain why Americans are furious about inflation.”

Polls now reveal the political impact of double-digit price hikes especially in contrast with America’s decades-long period of low inflation.

Many Americans understand that too many trillions of dollars in Covid stimulus spending was inflationary. Surveys show they also blame draconian lockdowns, overly generous unemployment benefits and other Covid restrictions that have kept workers at home well past the emergency. Now we have fewer products and services available and that’s inflationary.

But the most politically potent component of inflation is the shocking increase in gas prices – the result of the inexplicable destruction of our fossil fuel industry.

The reckoning comes inn November.

The sexual revolution was well underway when the Roe v. Wade decision brought abortion to the nation. If anything, the free sex culture of the sixties brought about the demand for legal abortion. Now, the demise of Roe may very well shine a spotlight on real damage to the culture enabled by legal abortion. A couple of well-known cultural commentators predict this in pieces published at Townhall.com.

Radio host Dennis Prager wrote last week that the 70’s feminists told women they could now “enjoy sex without commitment” the way men did. Roe facilitated the use of abortion as “a form of birth control.” Mr. Prager contends that, in this sense, feminism hurt women because “men impregnating women to whom they were not married came with no consequences.”

But, since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson makes abortion harder to get in some states, it has many women rethinking casual sex. Mr. Prager points to social media comments by women calling “for an end to hookups (casual sexual encounters)” and predicting “the end of the hookup culture.” Good riddance.

Star Parker, syndicated columnist and founder of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, writes that Roe “introduced a culture of death to our nation.” She explains that, “When we lose appreciation for the sanctity of life, along with this we lose the sense of sanctity of behavior that brings life to the world. Marriage and sex become no longer responsible expressions of love and creation but expressions of egoism and self-gratification of the moment.”

The result is “collapse of the institution of marriage and of childbearing” which has brought historically low fertility. “This,” says Star Parker, “is what I call a culture of death.”

The Dobbs ruling overturning Roe gives us an opportunity to restore a culture of life.

Now it is up to states to decide. Will they begin to undo the damage Roe. v. Wade and the sexual revolution have wrought?

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) has issued a report warning of a “high risk of energy emergencies during peak summer conditions” across much of the country. NERC estimates that two thirds of the U.S. could experience blackouts this summer.

Progressives want to limit our dependence on fossil fuels. They are shutting down coal plants without enough full-time power to avoid frequent and prolonged grid failure.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, “Solar and wind are rapidly increasing, but they’re as erratic as the weather and can’t be commanded to ramp up when electricity demand surges.”

In an article at Townhall.com, Former Wisconsin State Senator Frank Lasee reveals a few “dirty green secrets.”

First: “coal is full-time power and wind and solar are not.”
And secondly: “wind and solar produce little or no energy 70 % of the time.”
Third: Electric grids cannot store electricity without batteries and batteries are scarce and expensive.
And fourth: When supply doesn’t meet demand, you have blackouts.

States are shutting down coal and nuclear plants as dependence on renewables grows. When the wind doesn’t blow and the son doesn’t shine, there aren’t enough natural-gas-fired plants to provide the necessary backup.

The problem is national. Among the Journal’s examples:

Michigan just shut down a nuclear generating station that provided 6.5% of the state’s electricity and 15% of the state’s clean energy. The state is focused only on building weather-dependent renewable energy, leaving Michiganders with less reliable electricity and higher prices.

California’s grid-overseer is warning of power outages this summer. The state normally imports power from neighboring states when the need arises. “But coal plants across the West have been shutting down as renewables grow.”

Manufacturers in the Midwest may no longer be able to rely on “cheap and reliable power….especially if there’s little wind.”

Without sufficient replacement energy we’ll have outages, putting our economy, national security, and lives at risk.

Perhaps that means, you should get a generator.

A Wisconsin school district has charged three eighth-grade boys with sexual harassment and has initiated a Title IX investigation associated with these charges. This type of accusation is normally tied to rape or other unwanted sexual advances. If convicted, the damage to a young man’s reputation and future can be devastating.

When the boys’ parents got the call from Kiel Area School District authorities �” their first notice of the charges �” they were understandably terrified. To qualify as sexual harassment under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the conduct must be “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to education.” According to an op-ed the boys’ attorneys wrote for The Wall Street Journal, the district didn’t “initially explain what the boys had done to warrant being investigated for a violation of federal law.”

As Rick Esenberg and Luke Berg of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty explain in the Journal, the boys were accused of something called “mispronouning,” defined as “using incorrect pronouns.” Apparently, the attorneys write, “These children used ‘her’ to refer to a classmate who wants to be called ‘them.’” The attorneys point out, that these allegations, even if proven, would not qualify as sexual harassment. The district, they write “should have dismissed the complaint immediately.”

That was true at the end of April. But the Biden Administration has been signaling for months it plans to implement a rule change expanding Title IX to require schools to update non-discrimination policies that currently protect female students. This would not be a law but a decree by the administration elevating sexual orientation and gender identity to receive these protections.

When that happens, if “misgendering” individuals is shoehorned into the sexual harassment category, teachers and students who refuse to call a transgender person by their preferred pronoun could face federal charges.

This is coming to a school near you.

There’s new research into the magnitude of the decline in children’s achievement that resulted from Covid-19 school closures.

Thomas Kane, an economist and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says the learning loss is “far greater than most educators and parents seem to realize.” He’s part of a team from the American Institutes for Research, Dartmouth College, Harvard, and NWEA, an educational assessment non-profit. The team is investigating how student learning was affected by the remote and hybrid instruction implemented during the pandemic. Dr. Kane’s article for The Atlantic describing this research is titled “Kids Are Far, Far Behind in School.”

The team compared student achievement growth for the two-year pre-pandemic period with the period from fall 2019 to fall 2021. This was done using “testing results from 2.1 million elementary-and-middle-school students in 10,000 schools in 49 states and Washington D.C.”

For students in districts that “remained remote for the majority of the 2021 school year,” Dr. Kane describes the results as “severe.” Even in low-poverty schools, these students, he writes, “lost the equivalent of 13 weeks of instruction” And, “at high-poverty schools that stayed remote, students lost the equivalent of 22 weeks.” In districts that were quicker to reopen, the learning loss was still disturbing: the equivalent of seven to 10 weeks of in-person-instruction.”

How can schools help students catch up? Eliminating a 22-week loss of instruction would require a trained tutor to work with one to four students at a time, three times a week for an entire year. Dr. Kane points to research showing that about a quarter of districts have some, but likely not enough, tutoring in their plans.

Other possible interventions are voluntary summer school, an extra period each day to teach math, and/or a longer school year for the next two years. �” difficult and expensive propositions

We should never have stuck our kids with this loss.

When are America’s established, successful and reliable corporations going to stop generating PR disasters for themselves by wading into woke gender politics?

State Farm Insurance Company operates on the franchise model with thousands of agents serving tens of millions of customers. The company is about to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Until last week, State Farm’s famous claim, “Like a good neighbor State Farm is there” seemed a pretty good fit.

Then the company made headlines when a consumer watchdog exposed its plans to enlist hundreds of staff volunteers to distribute transgender and non-binary-themed books to public libraries �” including school libraries. The project was especially targeted toward kids as young as five and was to be followed by a social media campaign highlighting State Farm’s “commitment to diversity.” To accomplish this, State Farm partnered with a non-profit called GenderCool which Family Research Council describes as “one of the most radical grooming groups under the LGBT umbrella.”

State Farm management was not prepared for the backlash.

Agents in Florida got wind of the plan. Some worried its implementation might violate Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law. State Farm agents started fielding phone calls from angry customers who expect their insurance company to focus on protecting their assets, not on woke politics. Company execs announced the company would walk away from its affiliation with GenderCool but not, it appeared, from its transgender indoctrination efforts. Chief Diversity Officer Victor Terry reiterated the company’s “commitment to diversity and inclusion, including the LGBTQ+ community.”

Family Research Council reports that complaints are pouring into corporate from State Farm employees, “furious that the company would drag its good name into the mud, and them with it.”

FRC has launched a petition asking State Farm not to facilitate the “immoral efforts” of adults who seek to “groom children into radical gender and sexual identities.”

Other big brands are watching to see if and State Farm can win back the title: “good neighbor.”

Over time, Target Corporation has made a string of marketing and policy decisions that blur gender lines �” and more.

First, the company stopped separating children’s clothing according to sex. Boys’ and girls’ departments ceased to be specifically identified and much of the clothing for kids skewed androgenous.

This didn’t generate much controversy but, in April 2016, Target made a public announcement that did. Management said bathrooms and dressing rooms would open for use by customers and employees according to the gender with which they identify. This sparked a nationwide boycott. A longitudinal study amassed a shocking number of stories of voyeurism, changing room attacks, and attempted molestations. The company took a financial hit as 1.4 million consumers signed a pledge to boycott the stores. The company’s sales took a hit the next quarter �” and the next. Stock prices dropped. The policy remains.

Now there’s evidence Target Corporation has what Family Research Council calls “a much more serious agenda.” Target is stocking and marketing undergarments to transgender youth to aid them in social transition. The company has partnered with a brand called TomboyX to create and sell compression tops, advertised as a more comfortable and less restrictive version of a chest binder. There’s also underwear that helps girls look more like boys and compression underwear for males. Unisex swimsuits comprise about a third of the swimwear section.

FRC says Target is “filling its racks with one invitation after another for young people to reject the bodies God gave them” and pursue a transgender identity “despite the cost,” which can be irreversible.

I’m not much of a boycotter. It’s hard to break entrenched shopping habits. But Target’s action six years ago was a brazen attempt to normalize the transgender lifestyle. I joined the nationwide boycott of Target. I wrote them a letter informing them. And I haven’t set foot in a Target store since.

It’s past time to take a side in Target’s destructive war on reality.