1. Bobby Schindler: Marking the 16th anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s court-ordered death by dehydration
On March 18th, 2005, Florida Judge, George W. Greer ordered the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, essentially sentencing Terri to a slow thirteen-day death by starvation and dehydration. For the next thirteen days, the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network will commemorate the final, horrific days of Terri’s inhumane death. This is not only to remember Terri, but also to call attention to the countless people who are currently suffering slow, agonizing deaths in hospices, nursing homes, and hospitals in America and around the world.
2. Jeff Jacoby: Move the Beijing Olympics — or Shun them
There was no place for apartheid in the Olympics a generation ago. There should be none for genocide today.
3. Cardinal Timothy Dolan: Stand Against Unjust Discrimination: Oppose the Equality Act
The Equality Act seems to go out of its way to target religion. It exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a bill that was passed nearly unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993. RFRA basically says that if the government is going to burden religion, it needs to have a very good reason, and it needs to show that it did everything possible to avoid over-burdening the religion.
RFRA has been invoked by Muslims seeking to wear short beards in prison, American Indians using eagle feathers in religious ceremonies, humanitarians leaving water for migrants in the desert, and—yes—nuns who do not want to pay for contraceptives. RFRA protects people of all faiths. But under the Equality Act, a religious service provider is not protected by RFRA if it “discriminates” on the basis of “gender identity.” So, if a Catholic women’s shelter decides that it would be best not to house a biological man self-identifying as a woman in the same space as women who have been victims of domestic abuse, that ministry would not be protected under the Equality Act.
4. Christopher F. Rufo: Subversive Education
Last year, the Wake County Public School System, which serves the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area, held an equity-themed teachers’ conference with sessions on “whiteness,” “microaggressions,” “racial mapping,” and “disrupting texts,” encouraging educators to form “equity teams” in schools and push the new party line: “antiracism.”
. . .
At the first session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” school administrators provided two handouts on the “norms of whiteness.” These documents claimed that “(white) cultural values” include “denial,” “fear,” “blame,” “control,” “punishment,” “scarcity,” and “one-dimensional thinking.”
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Parents, according to the teachers, should be considered an impediment to social justice. When one teacher asked, “How do you deal with parent pushback?” the answer was clear: ignore parental concerns and push the ideology of antiracism directly to students. “You can’t let parents deter you from the work,” the teachers said. “White parents’ children are benefiting from the system” of whiteness and are “not learning at home about diversity (LGBTQ, race, etc.).” Therefore, teachers have an obligation to subvert parental wishes and beliefs. Any “pushback,” the teachers explained, is merely because white parents fear “that they are going to lose something” and find it “hard to let go of power [and] privilege.”
The late arrival of states ratifying the ERA long after the legal deadlines had passed troubled the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who supported the ERA but said: “There is too much controversy about late comers . . . Plus, a number of states have withdrawn their ratifications. So if you count a latecomer on the plus side, how can you disregard states that said we’ve changed our minds?”
The Centenarian ERA also risks an entire framework of laws developed specifically to protect women’s rights such as the Equal Pay Act of 1963; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972; the Federal Minimum Wage Act of 1974, and the Pregnancy Nondiscrimination Act of 1964. Currently, Students for Life of America’s Standing With You Initiative works to defend women’s Title IX rights at schools and universities to help those pregnant and parenting while in school.
6. Melissa Moschella: Parental Rights, Gender Ideology, and the Equality Act
Even worse, these experimental, irreversible, and medically risky “gender-affirming” treatment protocols have become the norm—despite the fact that there is no good evidence indicating that these interventions alleviate psychological distress or improve mental health in the long run. On the contrary, a report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services conducted under President Obama in 2016 found that “overall, the quality and strength of evidence were low” due to poor study designs, and that the most methodologically rigorous studies “did not demonstrate clinically significant changes . . . after GRS [gender reassignment surgery].”
In fact, the report notes that a Swedish study — the largest and most rigorous long-term study that has yet been conducted — found that those who had received gender reassignment surgery had “increased mortality and psychiatric hospitalization compared to matched controls,” with the increase in mortality caused primarily by suicide rates nearly 20 times higher than controls. Other reviews of the literature conducted by respected research agencies such as Birmingham University’s Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility and Hayes, Inc., came to similar conclusions.
7. The Daily Signal: One Female Powerlifter’s Fight to Defend Women’s Sports
. . . The differences start at age 6 between boys and girls. This is a reality. It goes from bone structure to bone mass, muscle mass, heart size, lung size. That all contributes to the oxygen-carrying capabilities.
So many differences and not just how the bone structure like the Q-angle of hips. Women’s skulls are different. We are way more prone to concussions. There’s so many differences besides the realities of pregnancy, menstruation, menopause that we have to train around.
8. Chad Felix Greene: Elliot Page’s Rapid Transformation Looks Like An Alarming Cry For Help
Page’s personal journey is not really in question or a concern. As an adult, you are free to make big changes and redefine yourself as you please. If medically changing one’s body and adopting a new identity is what brings Page happiness, then there is really nothing to discuss. If so, I and many others are happy for Page.
There is a legitimate concern, however, about the overall messaging of her transition and how LGBT media and left-wing activists exploit this general tolerance to bully for more aggressive and extreme politics. Page now says this has been a lifelong challenge of differing degrees. Formerly identifying as a lesbian, now Page identifies to Time as nonbinary and queer, with an identity that is an “ongoing process.”
But the rest of us saw a successful, happily married lesbian icon unexpectedly announce she is transgender, quickly file for divorce, and undergo top surgery shortly after. For the audience of young people Page claims to want to help, the entire transition happened in the blink of an eye.
9. John Finnis: Abortion is Unconstitutional
Is the unborn child a person within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment? The Court in Roe v. Wade (1973) began its response with the acknowledgement already noted: If the answer is “Yes,” the case against the Texas abortion statute “of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” The Court’s answer was “No.”
For this answer it offered, in effect, three reasons. None of them is defensible.
10. The Daily Signal: 4 Highlights From Senate Hearing on Liberals’ Equality Act
“Everyone should be treated with dignity and respect,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the committee’s ranking member, said in his opening remarks. “But the Equality Act, I strongly suspect, … would actually dictate what women, girls, schools, churches, doctors, and others must believe.”
12. The Federalist: Americans’ Obsession With Careers Is Contributing To Our Dangerous Lack Of Babies
Many demographers have argued that societal values that flatten the differences between the sexes would help boost fertility — for example, if husbands did more childcare and household chores and women had more earning power. Yet this study finds that people with so-called “egalitarian” values are less fertile than those who embrace differences between men and women.
The differences were especially pronounced among those who both expressed feminist values and prioritized work over family. Beliefs about sex roles affected fertility the least among those for whom family was their highest priority.
The couple first met at a dance near Walsall, West Midlands, in the late 1940s and Wilf recalls: ‘I thought she was a smashing looking piece. I asked her to dance and of course she said yes. Thing is, she hasn’t left me alone since.’
The couple now share two children, aged 61 and 57 and six grandchildren and are as in love as ever.