One of the reasons why we have 50 states in America is so that we have 50 little laboratories where we can run public policy 50 different ways and see which way works best. There are lots of ways to measure which states are best: tax rates, cost of living, crime rates, school choice, energy production, fiscal health, business climate, concealed carry laws, etc. And certainly social conservatives will want to live in a state that respects marriage and family.

Well, it’s hard to see how any state could ever beat Tennessee on that last criterion. Tennessee was already best in the nation on protecting the unborn. And their rock star attorney general Skrmetti recently won a landmark case protecting children from transgender activism at the Supreme Court. But now Tennessee is the best on marriage and family, too.

Here’s the latest news from Breitbart:

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed a resolution that designates June, considered “Pride Month” by some, as “Nuclear Family Month,” noting that the nuclear family “is God’s design for familial structure.”

The resolution states that “the nuclear family, consisting of one husband, one wife, and any biological, adopted, or fostered children,” has “been the bedrock of society” since God created the world.

The nuclear family is also described as having been “the basic building block of Tennessee’s society throughout her formative years,” and as having “built the United States of America.”

It continues to affirm that “the nuclear family built the United States of America and created prosperity within our nation[.]”

The resolution also points out that “fatherless families are four times more likely to live in poverty than married-couple families,” and that children who grow up in homes without fathers “are ten times more likely to abuse chemical substances” and have mental health and behavioral problems.”

It’s very important to make these declarations, because they start conversations about these issues. In addition, secular leftists might want to move out of Tennessee, and Christians conservatives might want to move in. Tennessee has a lot of achievements in the area of social conservatism, like the one I mentioned earlier. And one other good thing is that declarations like this allow you to see what the secular leftist legislators really think. I bet a lot of rank and file Democrats think that Democrat legislators believe in marriage and family. But do they? Let’s see how they voted.

Rose send me an article about this from her favorite news source, Daily Wire, and they had some additional details that I thought were interesting. For example, they said this:

The resolution easily passed the Republican-dominated state legislature, clearing the House 72-18 last year and passing the Senate 26-4 last month.

I asked Grok who voted no, and Grok confirmed that all the no votes came from Democrats. Why is this interesting? Because a lot of non-traditional Democrat women fancy that “some day” they will all have handsome, traditional husbands who will protect and provide for them in a permanent exclusive marriage. They think that they deserve such a marriage, that their voting for Democrats is compatible with that end result. But the people these women vote for DO NOT believe in marriage. They DO NOT believe in husbands. They DO NOT believe in children. They DO NOT believe in homes, home-making, fidelity or permanence. I see so many non-traditional women complaining that the secular leftist men they are attracted to (for permissiveness) cannot be trusted to act like traditional men. They simply don’t understand that they can’t be non-traditional and vote non-traditional and just claim traditional men and traditional benefits after spending their whole lives voting against those men and those traditional male roles.

More from that article:

Leftist organizations expressed outrage after Lee signed the resolution last week. The LGBT activist organization GLAAD called Tennessee lawmakers who passed the resolution “clueless.”

That’s what leftists really believe – but somehow, leftist young women vote for these people and then act surprised when they cannot find a man who takes marriage and parenting seriously. There just isn’t a way for a self-centered narcissist who dismisses all the obligations of healthy relationships to attract a slave who will perform all of the traditional obligations of healthy relationships. The policies passed by Democrat legislators and lobbied for by Democrat-aligned activists destroy the supply of good men and make marriage risky and costly and unattractive to good men.

So what about Tennessee as a state?

Tennessee was among the first states to ban gender procedures on children, prohibit schools from hiding children’s gender “transitions” from parents, and crack down on drag queen performances in public or in settings where children are present.

I did an evaluation of Tennessee and other states when I got my green card and had to decide where to live. I had columns for Cost of Doing Business, Infrastructure, Economy, Business Friendliness, Cost of Living, Tax as a Percentage of Income, Family Structure, Laws against same-sex marriage, Pro-life protections for unborn babies, Self-defense against criminals, Concealed Carry laws, Fiscal Health, etc. I got the numbers from rankings by CNBC, Mercatus Center, Guns and Ammo, Pro-life groups, and so on. Overall, Tennessee came out #1, edging out Texas (#2) and Utah (#3). Since then, they have improved many of those numbers.

Let me show you some examples.

I used the 2015 Mercatus Center fiscal solvency ranking, which ranked Tennessee at #9. They did another ranking in 2018, and this time Tennessee was ranked #3. I did a quick check to see how Tennessee is doing today. One ranking has them at #3 and another ranking has them at #2.

I also rated all the states for gun rights and concealed carry. The Guns and Ammo rankings from 2015 had Tennessee at #23 for gun rights. In Guns and Ammo rankings from 2023, Tennessee is #8 for gun rights.

I also rated all the states for pro-life legislation. In 2015, Tennessee got ranked #18 by Americans United for Life. In 2025, Tennessee got ranked #6 by Americans United for Life.

So, if I had Tennessee at #1 in 2016 and since then many of their numbers have improved. The legislators in TN don’t understand the meaning of “good enough”. They hear about something bad that happened in another state or at the federal level and they think “we’ve got to pass a law so that it never happens here”. It’s important to live in a state that takes Christian and conservative values seriously. You don’t want to be paying taxes to secular leftists to rule over you and ruin your life. They are stupid people and so they don’t deliver good results.

In the last two weeks, I have been gathering information about the problem that Christians parents face when they send their Christian-raised kids to college. Specifically, I met some excellent Christian parents who seem to have done a great job of raising their kids in private Christian schools and had good consversations with them about policy and apologetics. Yet, these kids still dumped their faith and their conservatism in college. What to do?

Well, I can only go off of what I have seen from people in my workplace who were raised in red states, in intact married homes, in private Christian schools, and so on and then left the faith in college. And the problem seems to be twofold. 1) They don’t want to have any “the Bible says” moral limitations on their pursuit of pleasure. And 2) They don’t want to counter claims about the world that disagree with the Bible with “the Bible says”.

There are varying degrees of going along with the secular left. Some kids are just desperate to rebel either in moral issues or in claims about reality. Some kids just have honest intellectual doubts about the Bible’s teachings on moral issues or truth claims.

So, in this post, I thought it might be a good idea to look at how kids have pressure placed on them at college, and how to counter it.

So, on moral issues, usually any sorts of limitations on the pursuit of pleasure are going to be seen as “mean”. Do you disagree with cohabitating before marriage? Oh, then you are mean. Do you disagree with same-sex marriage? Oh, then you are a bigot. Do you disagree with reckless sex leading to abortion? Oh, then you are anti-women.

How to deal with this? So, most students raised in the church either capitulate to this immediately, because that’s easier, or they just hide their Christian convictions, because “the Bible says” isn’t a good answer to “you’re a mean bigot”. So, in that case, it’s probably a good idea to teach your children early on that it’s possible for people to put pressure on you to agree with them about moral issues while still being wrong about those moral issues. For example, for abortion, you can defend your view using the science of embryology. For cohabitation, you should have a study or two showing that cohabitation has higher instability and worse outcomes for kids. For same-sex marriage, you can point out how removing marriage norms like gender complementarity impacts children.

But I also think that it’s important to prepare children for the challenges to truth claims. And what I was thinking for this is that children need to be given a “clear case” where the secular and leftist opinions that dominate on campus are proven to be factually incorrect.

Regular listeners to the Knight and Rose Show will know that we urge all Christian apologists to add economics to the list of topics that they study for apologetics. A good grasp of economics is useful for being able to see that the dominant opinions on campus (socialism, communism, etc.) produce BAD results in the real world. You can even compare countries that went from capitalist to communism (e.g. – Venezuela) to countries that went from communist to capitalist (e.g. – Chile).

And what this does is that it makes it crystal clear to your Christian kids that not everything they hear on a college campus is correct. E.g. – when their same-age peers call them “mean” for opposing minimum wage hikes, those peers could be wrong. And when their college professors call them “mean” for opposing replacing nuclear power with solar and wind, they could be wrong too. It’s possible that the people you meet on college campuses don’t know how reality works.

Here is a nice recent article by David Harsanyi in the New York Post that makes the case for this second type of college preparation.

In 2023, over 100 leading economists from around the world, including progressive darling Thomas Piketty, signed a letter warning that “far-right” Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei’s policies, which were “rooted in laissez-faire economics,” would cause “devastation,” spike inflation, expand poverty and worsen unemployment.

Celebrated economists never penned any open letters warning that the preceding Peronists’ or Kirchnerists’ perverse blend of fascism, socialism and unionism would drive Argentina — once one of world’s wealthiest nations — into destitution, unemployment, soaring inflation and bankruptcy.

Under Milei, political scientist Ian Bremmer warned, “Economic collapse is coming imminently.”

Felix Salmon, then chief financial correspondent at Axios (now at Bloomberg), argued that Milei’s “wrecking ball” policies would plunge Argentina into “a deep recession.”

When the United States provided Argentina with a $20 billion currency swap line last year, former New York Times columnist and Milei critic Paul Krugman argued that there’s “no plausible scenario in which even $20 billion in US loans will save Javier Milei’s failing economic strategy.”

So, imagine your Christian student gets to campus, and the professors are telling them how wonderful socialism is and how well it works, and quoting all these famous leftist economists like Piketty and Krugman. It would really help them to know what these elites said about Argentina before Milei took over, because look at how wrong they were.

So here is what happened, starting with the $20 billion in US loans:

Argentina only tapped around $2.5 billion of that funding, and then fully repaid the loan in January with interest, far ahead of schedule.

Well, Argentina’s 2025 GDP also blew past expectations, growing 4.4%, the highest in years.

The International Monetary Fund expects the GDP will grow at similar rates in 2026 and 2027.

Since Milei’s party won power in 2023, inflation has dropped nearly 200 percentage points, plunging to the lowest level in eight years.

it had a fiscal surplus for the second consecutive year in 2025, marking the first time since 2008 that it accomplished that feat — and the poverty rate dropped significantly in 2025, reaching its lowest level since 2018.

The crisis Milei took on was stark: In the first half of 2024, around 52.9% of the population was living in poverty, with 18% in extreme poverty.

Poverty fell 14 percentage points, to 38%, last year. It is at 31% now.

Milei did all this the old-fashioned way.

He removed price controls, got rid of tariffs and opened trade, privatized a slew of government-run agencies, cut red tape, weakened union monopolies, made major cuts in spending and eliminated an array of needless state jobs.

In other words, all the usual stuff that free marketers preach will work — and experts warn us will bring on Armageddon.

Why is this important? Because this is an evidence-based refutation of economic views pushed by students and professors on campus. When your kids understand clearly their peers and professors are blabbing about things that are known to be false, they won’t feel so much pressure to agree with them on moral issues or other truth claims that contradict Christianity.

I talked to some Christians about my idea. Some liked it and some didn’t like it. The engineers all liked it. The ones who didn’t like it didn’t like the idea of treating Christianity as a knowledge tradition – a set of claims about the world that are true. They wanted to treat Christianity as something subjective – it’s about my feelings, or it’s about my family, or it’s about my community. They wanted to insulate it from logic and evidence. But this fails because feelings, family and community are not going with the kids to college.

So, I recommend taking the truth-focused approach. That’s why on the Knight and Rose Show, we cover topics like economics, energy policy, education policy, and so on. Our next show, which comes out this Saturday, is on health care policy. And in that one, we are again countering the teachings of the secular leftist elites by opposing government-run health care and promoting a free-market alternative. And we will do it with evidence.

By branching out into these other areas of knowledge, your children will understand that Christianity is seen by you as “knowledge”. And when they compare what you taught them with what their peers and professors believe, they will say “well, I have reasons to doubt these people on other topics, so why would I have trouble doubting them on Christian worldview topics?”. All the name-calling and peer pressure in the world isn’t going to convince anybody that communism worked in Venezuela and capitalism failed in Chile.

I also do something similar with people who hate America’s history when I bring up American’s noble wars against totalitarianism, e.g. – the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Marshall Plan, etc. Or our war against cruel Japanese imperialists and genocidal German socialists in WW2. That’s another way that you can insulate your kids – by teaching them about all the good things that America has done. Take them to the museums and show them what America has done for other countries.

The key point is that your kids need some area where they have worked through the facts themselves, so they will not be easily moved by shaming and rhetoric.

Just last week, a new large-scale study was published about what happens to the mental health of adolescents who get transgender treatments. It was published in the journal Acta Paediatrica. The data comes from gender identity clinics in Finland. I waited a few days to see what the response from critics would be and it’s been surprisingly muted. I always blog about studies that will help me to debate these issues, and I think this is a good one.

So, I looked at the Results section of the Abstract, and it says this:

Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls.

I say large-scale, because the study compared 1) 2,083 people who were referred to gender identity clinics in Finland before age 23 to 2) a control group of several similar people in the general population. And this was over a long period of time – 1996 to 2019. I think the abstract explains the findings pretty well. People who got referred to gender identity clinics for treatment had MUCH higher mental health problems than the general population.

I asked a nice lady on Twitter who works for SEGM (the Society for Evidenced Based Gender Medicine) for a good write-up on this study, and she pointed me to a Substack article by Benjamin Ryan, who specializes in this area. He had some interesting context about the study.

He writes:

The Finnish study’s four coauthors have published some of the strongest scholarship challenging the assertion that providing them to adolescents improves their mental health and is life-saving. All of these Finnish investigators were also coauthors of a paper published in 2024 that found that there was no independent, statistically significant association between taking cross-sex hormones and the rate of suicide deaths among youths attending gender clinics.

The 2024 article that he’s talking about was in a different medical journal, BMJ Health. One of the four authors was actually one of the pioneers of gender transitioning treatment. She was all for it, until she got far enough into it that she realized that it wasn’t working out as expected.

Sometimes, you do see studies where people report that they feel better about getting transgender treatment in the short term. But what really matters is the long term. And also, it is important to measure outcomes using objective measurements, rather than self-reported “satisfaction”. Objective markers are things like doing well in school or holding a steady job.

The Ryan article has a nice summary of what we’ve found so far in the research:

Systematic literature reviews—the gold standard of scientific evidence—have all found that the research backing the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria in youths is weak and unreliable. It was due in part to Dr. Kaltiala’s influence that Finland conducted its own systematic literature review of pediatric gender medicine. Given the review’s findings, the nation has sharply restricted youths’ access to gender-transition interventions.

I’ve blogged before about several countries that are pulling back from transitioning children. But here in America, the left isn’t really driven by scientific studies. They are in some sort of mad rush to virtue signaling by celebrating actions that are not in the child’s best interest. They want to prove how moral they are by tolerating the maximum number of behaviors. But some behaviors are harmful and should not be tolerated.

And this was the interesting part:

The gender-dysphoric youths who did undergo gender-transition interventions arrived at the gender clinics with a much lower rate of previous use of specialist psychiatric care: 10 percent among natal males and 22 percent among natal females. But notably, two years or more after their first gender-clinic appointment, this group’s use of specialist psychiatric care shot up, to 61 percent among the natal males and 55 percent among the natal females.

So, if you go ahead with the transition treatments, it made your mental health worse than when you started.

I think this is a good study to keep around when you have to debate this issue. Please continue to debate this issue, because we want to save these children from doing anything that will cause them harm in the long term.