An official Target company Twitter account announced Thursday they had removed author Abigail Shrier’s book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” from the retailer’s “assortment” after an unverified Twitter user complained the book questions transgender ideology, especially the concept of irreversible hormonal and surgical experimentation on minors.
“I think the trans community deserves a response from @AskTarget @Target as to why they are selling this book about the ‘transgender epidemic sweeping the country.’ Trigger warning: Transphobia,” wrote the user.
Shrier’s book is not about sexual orientation or transgender adults. It examines the growing social phenomenon of transgender identification among teen girls and how underage medical “transitions” can be a form of self-harm.
“Girls who might have encouraged each other in bulimia, anorexia or cutting are today deciding they have ‘gender dysphoria,’ pushing for hormones and surgeries—and easily obtaining them,” writes Shrier.
Target is not the first corporate entity to censor Shirer’s book. When the book was released in June, Amazon barred Shrier’s publisher from running ads for the book because it contained copy and content that “infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation.”
I want to draw your attention to a talk on “Vision in Life” given by Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig is the ablest defender of the Christian faith operating today. He has done formal academic debates with all of the best known atheists on major university campuses in front of thousands of university students.
It turns out that he owes a lot of his success to his amazing wife Jan.
This talk was Dr. Craig’s chapel address to Biola University students.
About 11 minutes into the talk, Bill describes what happened after he finished his Bachelor’s degree at Wheaton:
And so I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for 2 years, and was assigned to Northern Illinois University. And that was where I met my wife Jan. She was a graduate of the University of North Dakota where she had come to faith in Christ. And she had a similar vision for her life of evangelism and discipleship.
And as we worked at NIU together, she with gals and I with the guys, leading students to Christ and discipling them to walk with the Lord, we fell in love. And we decided that we would be more effective if we joined forces and became a team.
So their reason for getting together was because they thought that they would be more effective in evangelism and discipleship if they worked as a team.
It is at this point in the talk where Bill begins to explain just how Jan molded him into the lean, mean debating machine that travels the world striking terror into the hearts of atheists.
Bill’s first story about Jan occurs early after their marriage while he is working on his first Masters degree at Trinity:
And it was also at that time that I began to see what an invaluable asset the Lord had given me in Jan. I remember I came home from classes one day, and found her at the kitchen table with all the catalogs and schedules and papers spread out in front of her and she said, “look! I’ve figured out how you can get two Masters degrees at the same time that it would normally take to get one! All you have to do is take overloads every semester, go to all full-time summer school and do all these other things, and you can do two MAs in the time it takes to do one!”
And I thought, whoa! Are you sure you really want to make the commitment it takes to do this kind of thing? And she said, “Yeah! Go for it!” And it was then I began to see that God had given me a very special woman who was my supporter – my cheerleader – and who really believed in me. And as long as she believed in me, that gave me the confidence to dream bigger dreams, and to take on challenges that I had never thought of before.
As graduation from Trinity neared, Jan and I were sitting one evening at the supper table in our little campus apartment, talking about what to do after graduation. Neither of us had any clear leading or inclination of what we should do next.
So Jan said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”
I replied, “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to England and do a doctorate under John Hick.”
“Who’s he?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s this famous British philosopher who’s written extensively on arguments for the existence of God,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a cosmological argument for God’s existence.”
But it hardly seemed a realistic idea.
The next evening at supper Jan handed me a slip of paper with John Hick’s address on it. “I went to the library today and found out that he’s at the University of Birmingham in England,” she said. “Why don’t you write him a letter and ask him if you can do a doctoral thesis under him on the cosmological argument?”
What a woman! So I did, and to our amazement and delight Professor Hick wrote back saying he’d be very pleased to supervise my doctoral work on that subject. So it was an open door!
And in the same article, he explains how Jan encouraged him to get his second Ph.D:
As Jan and I neared the completion of my doctoral studies in Birmingham, our future path was again unclear to us. I had sent out a number of applications for teaching positions in philosophy at American universities but had received no bites. We didn’t know what to do.
I remember it like yesterday. We were sitting at the supper table in our little house outside Birmingham, and Jan suddenly said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”
I laughed because I remembered how the Lord had used her question to guide us in the past. I had no trouble answering the question. “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg.”
“Who’s he?”
“Oh, he’s this famous German theologian who’s defended the resurrection of Christ historically,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop a historical apologetic for the resurrection of Jesus.”
Our conversation drifted to other subjects, but Jan later told me that my remark had just lit a fire under her. The next day while I was at the university, she slipped away to the library and began to research grants-in-aid for study at German universities. Most of the leads proved to be defunct or otherwise inapplicable to our situation. But there were two grants she found that were possibilities. You can imagine how surprised I was when she sprung them on me!
Both of these Ph.D experiences are also described in the talk. And the talk concludes as follows:
I am so thankful to be married to a woman who is tremendously resourceful, tremendously talented and energetic, who could have pursued an independent career in any number of areas, but instead, she has chose to wed her aspirations to mine, and to make it her goal to make me the most effective person I can be, for Christ. And she has been like my right arm in ministry over these many years. And it is a tremendous privilege to be a team with a person like that.
And you young men, I would encourage you, if you marry, to find a gal who shares your vision, not some independent vision, but who is interested in aligning herself with you, and pursuing together a common vision and goal that will draw you [together], so that you will avoid the growing separateness that so often creeps into marriages.
And now you know the rest of Bill’s story. The person you marry will have an enormous influence on the impact you will have for Christ and his Kingdom. It is up to you to decide whether that influence is going to be positive or negative, by deciding if you will marry, and if you do marry, by deciding whom you will marry.
You may also be interested in this talk given by William Lane Craig, entitled “Healthy Relationships” (National Faculty Leadership Conf. 2008) (audio here) In that talk, he offers advice to Christians who want to have a marriage that is consistent with their Christian faith.
Twitter doesn’t like people sharing sworn affidavits
The following post is written by a friend, who is also a software engineer. I have linked to his sources at the bottom of the post.
Here’s my attempt at piecing together evidence for fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Misinformation is everywhere and it’s possible I have something wrong, so feel free to add, remove, or correct:
1. Voting software added votes for Biden: Antrim county, MI said their Dominion voting machines gave Biden a 29 point lead over Trump (6000 votes), even though Trump beat Hillary by 30 points there in 2016. Manual counting revealed the machines erroneously gave extra votes to Biden. [1,2] The error was blamed on a missing software update.[3] 47 other counties in Michigan also use Dominion voting machines.[4] In Oakland County, MI, separate voting software glitched 1200 votes from a republican county commissioner to his democrat challenger.[5]
2. Poll watchers denied access: Chair of the Federal Election Commission (nominated by Trump in Sep 2017, voted in by senate) says voter fraud is happening, poll watchers are not being allowed to watch.[7] Others testify of being denied access.[8,9]
3. USPS changed postmarks: Project Veritas interviewed USPS workers from Michigan[10] and Pennsylvania[11] who said the offices were illegally changing dates on ballots to allow late votes, even those postmarked on Nov 5th and 6th. Both post office supervisors hung up the phone after they were asked about it. This skews the election because Biden’s supporters are more likely to vote by mail. USPS told Veritas they’re now investigating.[12]
4. Non-citizen votes: Historically about 16% of non-citizens illegally register to vote, and about 82% of the time they vote Democrat. Those numbers alone are far more than enough to swing the election from Trump to Biden in swing states.[13] In 2013, Obama prevented states from requiring registrants to provide proof of citizenship.
5. The ratio of mail-in ballots favoring Trump vs Biden for any state should remain about the same over time as they come in, because they’re shuffled when in the mail. Or perhaps drift gradually from democrat to republican because republicans live further from cities. But in key swing states we see the opposite, with them either gradually or drastically jumping toward democrat as votes were counted late on election night.[14]
6. In Detroit, Poll challenger Andrew Sitto reports that “tens of thousands” of ballots arrived at 4:30am, with all he observed going to Biden. Poll challenger Daniel Gustafson confirms, adding that the ballots arrived in large, unsecured bins, with no label indicating their source of origin. At the same site, Republican poll challenger Robert Cushman reported poll workers adding votes from unregistered voters, registering them all with a Jan 1, 1900 birthday. Each of these witnesses signed sworn affidavits.[15]
7. I don’t think there’s anywhere that has more votes than what there are people registered to vote.
8. The middle of the night jump in Biden votes in Michigan happened because Shiawassee, MI adding an extra zero to Biden’s count. That’s since been fixed.[16]
9. The Wisconsin middle of the night Biden jump is said to have been from Milwaukee absentee ballots arriving all at once.[17] Milwaukee is very liberal and democrats are more likely to vote by absentee, plausibly explaining the high ratio of blue ballots? If not for some of this other evidence?
10. Trump Campaign has filed a lawsuit claiming 10s of thousands of votes in Nevada were from people who didn’t live there.[18] A sworn affidavit from a witness in Nevada says, “5 or 6 additional people who formed a human wall, which moved as I walked by, apparently in an attempt to block my view of the four people who were opening envelopes, marking ballots, and placing those ballots in the pink and white return envelopes” A poll worker in Nevada was told to process ballots even when the signatures didn’t match the names.[6]
Twitter and FB are censoring much of the content questioning the election results, whether legit or not. Even Trump’s tweets. It’s scary to see them take that power over the president.
Biden’s gaffe from two weeks ago about creating “the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in history” seems almost prophetic.[19]
By the way, I noticed that trying to tweet the sworn affidavits being referenced is being blocked by Twitter. They don’t want people to hear these statements, because they’re in the tank for Biden.
WINTERY KNIGHT 