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The Biden-Harris regime engaged with left-wing activist group

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How many concerning actions by the Biden-Harris regime can you remember? There was the labeling of parents and traditional Catholics as “domestic terrorists”, pre-dawn raids on pro-lifers, weak prosecution of church burnings and attacks on pro-life centers, delayed the release of the Nashville shooter’s manifesto, and ignoring the persecution of Christians abroad.

And now we are finally finding out to what extent they were weaponizing government to persecute their political (and religious!) rivals.

Here’s the latest news from Daily Signal:

A left-wing activist group known for putting its political opponents on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan advised Justice Department prosecutors at a “hate crimes1 symposium,” newly unveiled documents show.

America First Legal obtained the documents via a Freedom of Information Act request and provided them first to The Daily Signal.

“All Americans should be shocked, appalled, and terrified that the Biden Justice Department was taking advice from a hate-filled, morally bankrupt organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center,” Ian Prior, senior counselor at America First Legal, told The Daily Signal in a statement Monday. “The SPLC’s agenda is anti-American to its core, and we must ensure that the SPLC never regains the power that it was so wrongly granted by the woke bureaucrats who ran this country until this past January.”

You might remember my blog post of a few days ago about how the SPLC labeled FOCUS ON THE FAMILY as a “hate group”. That’s not the only Christian group they’ve done that with, either. The Family Research Council was also on the SPLC hate map. The Family Research Council headquarters building was attacked by a gay activist in 2012, and the shooter cited SPLC’s hate map as inspiration, per The Daily Caller. The Alliance Defending Freedom, a presitigous religious liberty law firm, even says “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s labels have led to violence”. By the way, the SPLC labels groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty as “extremist” or “hate” groups.

And this SPLC – DOJ symposium was not a one off:

The Justice Department repeatedly engaged with the SPLC during the Biden administration. DOJ staff seemed receptive to meeting with the SPLC shortly after the group put the parental rights group Moms for Liberty on the “hate map” in 2023. Clarke appears to have met with the SPLC in March 2023.

The FBI’s Richmond office cited the SPLC in its since-rescinded memo on “radical traditional Catholics.”

The Daily Signal also talked about Kristen Clarke, who I’ve blogged about before. Fortunately for Christians, Trump appointed someone much better than her when he took office. (Clarke admitted to not disclosing an 2006 arrest for domestic violence, as reported by NY Post).

Harmeet was talked about in the Daily Signal recently:

Harmeet Dhillon, who was selected by Trump in December to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has been nearly the opposite of her Biden administration predecessor.

Former Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights office before Dhillon, was one of the most aggressive in weaponizing the DOJ against political opponents, especially pro-lifers.

Dhillon achieved some notoriety before being appointed to office. Her California law office took up a few high-profile cases in the last decade, including that of James Damore, the Google employee who said he was fired because he criticized the company’s diversity policies.

“While the Civil Rights Division prosecuted pro-lifers, Dhillon has represented pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who exposed Planned Parenthood staff who sold aborted-baby body parts,” my colleague Tyler O’Neil wrote in December.

Dhillon has not only stopped the persecution of pro-life activists but has initiated DOJ investigations into states that have endangered women while violating civil rights law, like California.

She announced in May that her department was investigating whether California is violating Title IX by allowing males to compete in women’s sports.

“Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education. It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” Dhillon said in May. “This Division will aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.”

She’s doing a great job. Conservatives should keep an eye on her, she would make a nice Attorney General in the next Republican administration. That’s who I would pick. I like her far more than Pam Bondi, the current Attorney General. She has more fighting spirit.

One thing for sure, it really shows the importance of Christians voting. And not just voting, but advocating for conservative policies with independent voters during the election campaign period.

News

Southern Baptists fail to shut down Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission

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Regular readers will remember the ERLC, which is a branch of the Southern Baptist Convention that is often accused of advancing left-wing Democrat party policies. There was an opportunity to de-fund the ERLC at the most recent SBC convention, but the attempt failed. In this post, let’s review a couple of articles that explain what the ERLC is, and why conservatives wanted to shut them down.

The first article is from Daily Signal:

The Southern Baptist Convention held its annual conference this week, and delegates narrowly voted against eliminating the public policy arm, which has been accused of advancing left-wing ideology.

[…]ERLC has been accused of pushing social justice initiatives like critical race theory and gun control. ERLC President Brent Leatherwood has lobbied for gun control under a pro-life banner and led a group to block the release of the transgender Nashville shooter’s writings.

Former ERLC president, Russell Moore, repeatedly denounced President Donald Trump, even though the majority of Southern Baptists voted for him.

About that mention of critical race theory in the quote above… A resolution opposing critical race theory was blocked at a previous Southern Baptist conference. It makes sense to me that this refusal to condemn critical race theory would come from the ERLC, based on their other leftist positions on political issues. But let’s review the refusal to condemn first.

Here’s what Dr. Voddie Baucham had to say about it, as reported by Capstone Report:

The Southern Baptist Convention messengers were cowards for not repudiating Critical Race Theory by name, said Dr. Voddie Baucham on the Todd Starnes Show.

“I don’t think it was so much buying in (to CRT) as much as white guilt and cowardice,” Dr. Baucham said. “It was obvious building up to the Convention that the issue at hand was Resolution 9 on Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality from two years ago and how that was going to be responded to. And when you respond to it with a Resolution that refuses to even name Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality, that is an act of cowardice.”

And another black conservative Carol Swain said this:

I was most interested in the Critical Race Theory issue and a resolution that the Conservative Baptist Network crafted and put forward.

And I am on the steering committee of that network. Our resolution was killed by the resolutions committee. And they put forth a substitute that was vaguely worded and did not mention intersexuality or Critical Race Theory itself.

[…]…then they shut down any debate about how the issue was handled.

Critics of the ERLC claim that the ERLC associates with and is influenced by secular left-wing groups. Critics also claim that the ERLC takes their marching orders from the secular left – not from Scripture or Baptist faith and convictions. And those critics may have a point, when you consider the previous leader of the ERLC, Russell Moore. You might remember him, because he met with Barack Obama. They got along really well! And now Moore is heading up Christianity Today. Check this out: “Between 2015 and 2022, nine Christianity Today employees made 73 political donations. All of them went to Democrats“.

Regarding the ERLC’s links to the secular left, Daily Signal notes:

Between 2018 and 2021, during Moore’s presidency, ERLC received $150,000 from eBay founder and longtime Democrat donor Pierre Omidyar, Basham reported. The Fetzer Foundation, which gets money from Bill Gates, has given ERLC $220,000. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg gave another $90,000.

And that’s not even to mention their connections with the Evangelical Immigration Table, which receives funding from none other than George Soros.

The Center for Baptist Leadership explains in this May 2025 article:

The National Immigration Forum launched the Evangelical Immigration Table with funds from George Soros. The 2013 Open Society Foundations board book notes explicitly that funding from Soros’ organization was sent to the NIF action fund for the purpose of “muster[ing] evangelical support”.

[…][T]he ERLC continues to actively participate in the Evangelical Immigration Table as one of the leadership organizations.

[…]Not only does the ERLC serve as one of the leadership organizations of the Evangelical Immigration Table, but the ties between the ERLC, the National Immigration Forum, and the other leadership organizations of the Evangelical Immigration Table seem unusually interconnected.

Consider this: the ERLC’s former Director of Public Policy was hired directly from the National Immigration Forum. This alone should raise alarms: an employee of a Soros-funded organization that explicitly targeted evangelicals for ideological reformation was hired by the ERLC to represent Southern Baptists on matters of public policy. When she left the ERLC, she moved on to another EIT leadership organization. And she’s not alone.

Megan Basham authored a recent article with Christ Over All, where she talked about the current leader of the ERLC, Brent Leatherwood.

She wrote:

Though Leatherwood told The Baptist Press the ERLC supported a law to ban transgender treatments on children “as it made its way through the Tennessee legislature,” House Majority Leader William Lamberth, who was a principal architect and co-sponsor of the bill, couldn’t remember receiving that support. He did not recall any involvement from the ERLC.

[…]One issue that did not find the ERLC so motivated was protecting women’s private spaces. Lamberth’s colleague, Tennessee Representative Monty Fritts, told me the ERLC was similarly MIA on a bill he sponsored to keep men out of women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, and prisons. Again, this is an issue the ERLC regularly highlights in its appeals to Southern Baptists for support. Fritts also said that while many ministries and faith groups in Tennessee backed his proposal to officially name July a month of prayer and fasting, the ERLC was not one of them.

How should the ERLC respond to the charges of conservatives? Well, they can differentiate themselves from the Democrat party, and show the conservatives that they understand what the Bible teaches that affects policy and apologetics. Where is the evidence for their advocacy for socially conservative policies? Do any of them even know how to make a case from the Bible for conservative positions like pro-life or natural marriage? What about defending the existence of God, or the resurrection of Jesus? Does anyone at the ERLC know how to use reason and evidence to make a case to non-Christians about the reasonableness of basic Christian beliefs? Where’s the evidence that this is a priority for them?

Commentary, Polemics

The importance of fathers for teaching children about Christian worldview

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One thing I wish that Christian parents and pastors emphasized more with young, unmarried Christian women is the need to choose a man who keeps his commitments. It turns out that passing on Christian values and worldview works a lot better when there is a man around to teach the children himself.

Here is some statistical evidence showing the difference that Christian fathers make, from Touchstone magazine.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

[…]In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

Basically, a child who doesn’t have a benevolent, involved father is going to have an more difficult time believing that moral boundaries set by an authority are for the benefit of the person who is being bounded. The best way to make moral boundaries stick is to see that they apply to the person making the boundaries as well – and that these moral boundaries are rational, evidentially-grounded and not arbitrary. It is therefore very important to children to be shepherded by a man who studied moral issues (including evidence from outside the Bible) in order to know how to be persuasive to others.

If a woman wants her child to be religious and moral, then she has to pick a man who is religious and moral. And it can’t just be a faith commitment that he claims with words, because he can just lie about that. Women ought to check whether men are bound to what they believe by checking what they’ve read. A man usually acts consistently with what he believes, and beliefs only get formed when a man informs himself through things like reading. It would be good to see how he puts those beliefs into practice, too.

My advice to Christian women is this. When you are picking a man, be sure and choose one who is already invested in Christian things and producing results. It’s very unlikely that he’s going to be interested in developing that capacity from scratch if he’s not already doing it. If you want your kids to be taught Christianity by their father, then make spiritual leadership a priority when you’re choosing a husband.