Here are a couple of stories from just the last few days that really show how desperate Democrats are to hang on to political power. In one state, they want to allow self-declared non-citizens to stay on the voter rolls. In a different state, they want to prevent citizens who just went through a natural disaster from having access to vote. I’m posting these stories to remind you that you really need to vote.

First story is from the The Center Square:

A federal judge is ordering Virginia to return the names of more than 1,500 “noncitizens” to voter rolls following a lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice saying the commonwealth violated the National Voter Registration Act.

Here’s the Republican Attorney General of Virginia:

“It should never be illegal to remove an illegal voter,” said [Virginia Attorney General Jason] Miyares. “Yet, today a Court – urged by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice – ordered Virginia to put the names of noncitizens back on the voter rolls, mere days before a presidential election. The Department of Justice pulled this shameful, politically motivated stunt 25 days before Election Day, challenging a Virginia process signed into law 18 years ago by a Democrat governor and approved by the Department of Justice in 2006.”

[…]”More concerning is the open practice by the Biden administration to weaponize the legal system against the enemies of so-called progress,” Miyares added.

And here’s what the Repoublican governor of Virginia had to say:

In a statement Youngkin said, “Let’s be clear about what just happened: only 11 days before a presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals – who self-identified themselves as noncitizens – back onto the voter rolls. Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.”

They self-identified as non-citizens, so they don’t think they are eligible to vote. But the Biden-Harris administration says that they should be added back to the voter rolls.

That’s awful. But wait, there’s more. Not only does the Biden-Harris administration want non-citizens to vote, they also don’t want citizens to vote – if those citizens are in very Republican areas.

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

The havoc wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina brought disaster to homes and families, but that has not stopped Democrats from blocking the approval of emergency early voting sites in the heavily Republican area. The refusal to act forced the GOP-led state legislature to intervene.

Democrat-run local elections boards in McDowell and Henderson counties have failed to approve additional early voting sites in the disaster-stricken area, despite increasing calls for more access to voting. Both counties voted for Donald Trump in 2020.

[…]Meanwhile, Democrats in nearby deep-blue Buncombe County, home to Asheville, have already given the go-ahead for new voting locations to replace the ones damaged by Helene, bringing the county’s total to 10.

[…]Stonewalling the approval of new voting locations in the disaster area seems inexplicable, as even the Democrat-run State Board of Elections and state legislature have made it easy for local boards to open them under emergency circumstances. The state board did not respond to a request for comment from The Federalist.

Democrats playing games with peoples’ access to vote this close to the election and in Republican-heavy districts devastated by a natural disaster lends even more credence to the belief that state and federal Democrats have slow-rolled relief efforts in order to suppress the vote.

I am noticing how sites like YouTube and Facebook are regularly censoring stories that are supportive of Republicans, and critical of Democrats. So, there is a lot going on to influence the election. So I really want to urge you to vote yourself, and make sure that your friends and family vote as well.

If you are trying to live out a Christian life plan, you are NOT going to like what Kamala Harris does with policy. This will affect you, and it will affect other Christians. Some of those Christians are going to be forced to choose between honoring their faith commitments, and just being able to work and live. Just like Christians have in other places and times when the secular left got into power.

How good of a job do people on the secular left do of understanding the positions of the candidate that they vote for? If you ask them, they’ll say that they are super-intelligent, and highly informed. They don’t form their views from impressions, intuitions and sound bites at all! But what would happen if someone did an actual poll, where the secular leftists were asked about facts? Would they pass?

Here’s the story from the Media Research Center:

A significant new Media Research Center poll finds that large majorities of registered Democrats and Independents who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — exactly those who would be expected to support Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s contest — are mostly in the dark about many of the controversial and radical positions Harris has taken.

When asked about ten different aspects of Harris’s public record — on issues as varied as her sponsorship of the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE, and eliminating private health insurance — between 71% and 86% of these Democrats and Independents said they either had not heard of Harris’s position or were unsure.

My favorite question to ask people to see if they are safe to talk to is “where do you get your news?”. Because if people are relying on the corporate news media to tell them the truth, then they are likely to have tremendous confidence in their beliefs, but all those beliefs are likely to be false:

When these voters were asked about where they got most of their news about political elections and candidates, by far the top answers were broadcast television (ABC, CBS and NBC) or cable news (such as CNN and MSNBC). This suggests that the knowledge gaps found by our poll reveal a failure of these outlets to report on radical positions once (and perhaps currently) supported by the now-Democratic nominee for President.

In fact, a detailed Media Research Center examination of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage in the three weeks since Harris became the leading Democratic candidate (July 21 to August 10) shows eight of these ten issues received ZERO attention from these newscasts, while two others received only minor coverage.

Here are the facts about Kamala Harris, along with the percentage of Democrat voters who were ignorant about each one (in parentheses):

• Harris supported cutting funding for the police (71%)
• Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal (73%)
• Harris supported the elimination of private health insurance (81%)
• Harris supported reparations payments to atone for slavery (71%)
• As “Border Czar,” Harris never visited a conflict zone on the border (72%)
• Harris said it should not be considered a crime to enter the U.S. illegally. (74%)
• Harris supported abolishing ICE (77%)
• Harris promoted a fund to bail out violent protesters during 2020 riots (78%)
• Harris would consider allowing death row inmates to vote (86%)
• Harris was named the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019 (75%)

What’s funny about these questions, is that they were asked as yes / no questions. So I’ll bet some of the people saying they knew the facts didn’t really know the specifics at all!

The article has a paragraph about each of these questions, but this one about the reparations caught my eye:

Harris supported reparations payments to atone for slavery: During her 2019 campaign, Harris joined with other far-left Democratic candidates to support massive payments as a form of “reparations” to the descendants of those enslaved prior to 1865. According to a PBS account, “Harris has proposed monthly payments to qualified citizens of any race in the form of a tax credit.”

While there are various proposals for possible reparations, a CNBC report in 2020 suggested an ultimate price tag of $10 to $12 trillion, or vastly more than the size of the current U.S. federal government budget (on track to surpass $6 trillion in 2024).

Since July 21, the Big Three evening newscasts haven’t said a word about Harris’s past support for reparations. And according to our poll, 71% of the Democrats and Independents we polled were unsure or completely unaware of her position on the issue.

Keep in mind that Democrats DO believe in slavery – they just want the slaves to be the young people who will have to pay for all this government spending and welfare. They want children, born and unborn, to pay for their living high on the hog today. I don’t know what you’d call this except “slavery”.

It might be a good idea for those of your reading to send this MRC article to your friends, so they can know the answers in case these topics come up in discussions. It’s not a good idea to choose the leader of the free world if you don’t know what the candidates believe about things.

Image source: Media Research Center

A common objection against transgenderism by biological realists is to make a parallel argument from anorexia. Conservatives say “we wouldn’t want to help a skinny anorexic person lose weight because they thought they were too fat, would we?” Transgender activists reply that these two things are completely different. Who is right? Well, now we have a peer reviewed study to help us decide.

The new study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Sexuaologie, which is the journal of the German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy and Sexual Science/DGSMTW.

The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine reported on it:

A new publication* in Sexuologie (the journal of the German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy and Sexual Science/DGSMTW) takes on the issue of the sharp rise in transgender identification in adolescent females, which remains poorly understood. The authors, Korte and Gille, present an intriguing hypothesis for this novel phenomenon, comparing and contrasting gender dysphoria to anorexia nervosa, and finding a number of important similarities. The authors conclude that clinicians working with gender-dysphoric adolescents must familiarize themselves with the complex dynamics of female adolescent development, and that trans-affirmative medical interventions should not be considered until adolescent development is complete.

SEGM got permission to post the full English language translation of the study, but I didn’t. So you have to click through to read it.

But here’s the interesting part of SEGM’s synopsis of the paper:

Drawing on their clinical work with such patients, Korte and Gille observe that trans identification in adolescent girls may reflect the desire to circumvent the challenges of female adolescence rather than a deep identification with maleness. They note that “although there is pronounced rejection of the female body and/or the female gender role,” there is frequently no pronounced desire for the primary or even secondary physical characteristics of the opposite sex.

[…]The authors note several similarities between anorexia and gender dysphoria. Both involve body image disorders where  aggression is “turned against one’s own self, inward, but also outward, against important others.” The authors note:

“…in both anorexic eating disorders and gender identity disorders (gender dysphoria), relatives, especially parents, are exposed to strong feelings of helplessness and powerlessness in addition to the massive feelings of guilt and failure that often arise. In both disorders, this sometimes exacerbates the symptoms” of the … patient within a correspondingly pathological relationship dynamic.”

Korte and Gille conclude by outlining concrete steps that pediatricians, child and adolescent psychiatrists, gynecologists, and other medical providers can take to help girls navigate puberty in a way that averts or mitigates these developmental crises. They caution clinicians that in the vast majority of cases of gender dysphoria arising around adolescence, it is likely temporary and represents a maturation crisis or insecurity of ‘sexual, rather than gender identity.”

The authors criticize the “trans-affirmative” (gender-affirming) model of care for adolescents, which is focused on the provision of physical body modifications, as inconsistent with the principles of adolescent development. They highlight the importance of addressing adolescent gender dysphoria within a developmental framework, recognizing the complexity of adolescent experiences and the need for tailored interventions that address underlying conflicts and promote adaptive coping strategies.

I think this study is very helpful for understanding what’s really going on in the mind of young people when they reject their own gender.

In the most recent episode of Knight and Rose, Rose and I were talking about how to be more bold when discussing controversial issues. Our advice was to be the smartest person in the room. I remember when homosexuality was becoming a big issue, I went out and read a whole bunch of books about it, from people like Jeffrey Satinover and Charles Socarides. It’s similar to how I am handling transgenderism now.

Christians should always be the smartest people in the room when these topics come up. Nobody should be listening to the “compassionate” virtue signalers, who just want to jump to affirmation and approval. And the way you beat those people is by asking them a few simple questions about what they know, to show that they aren’t operating from knowledge at all.

The doctors and the surgeons are often just trying to hook a young person onto constant surgeries, drugs and treatments. They want money, lots of money. All you have to do is to ask them what liability they have if their treatment results in regret and the desire to detransition. Is there a warranty? Of course not. Would they put their promises about “pauses” and “rollbacks” in writing? Of course they won’t.

What about the emotion-based friends and relatives? All you have to do is ask them about technical issues. What are the long-term effects of these drugs? How much does it cost? How painful is it? Are there permanent effects? They are supporting the transition because they want to feel good. They want to be liked. When you ask them knowledge questions, the children can see that the feelings-based adults are only serving themselves.

It’s much better to discuss these issues by pointing out the long-term consequences of decisions. Of course young people have feelings. Of course they want to act on those feelings. But young people also need to hear from people who understand what is further down the road. They don’t know that, and they need to rely on adults who know for help. Not the greedy health care workers. And not the low-self-esteem feelings-based crowd.