News

Elizabeth Warren likes to paint herself as a victim, but is she telling the truth?

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Elizabeth Warren says she was the victim of discrimination, but was she?
Elizabeth Warren says she was a victim of discrimination

Everyone knows that Elizabeth Warren claims Native American ancestry, and that she publicized a blood test showing that she has very little Native American ancestry. But that’s not the only time she’s made claims like this. In the past, she claimed that when she was pregnant and working as a teacher, that her male boss hired a replacement for her. Is she telling the truth? Let’s see.

The Daily Caller explains what she’s been saying:

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly claimed on the presidential campaign trail that she was pushed out of her job as a special needs teacher after one year because she was “visibly pregnant” — but she told a different story in 2007.

The Democratic senator today portrays herself as a victim of discrimination; however, in 2007 she linked her departure to lacking proper credentials for a permanent teaching position.

Warren said during a September presidential debate that she “made it as a special needs teacher. … But at the end of that first year, I was visibly pregnant. And back in the day, that meant that the principal said to me — wished me luck and hired someone else for the job.”

She similarly said at a campaign rally in May that she would “probably” still be teaching today, “but back in the day, before unions, the principal, by the time we got to the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant. And the principal did what principals did in those days: They wished you luck, showed you the door and hired someone else for the job.”

Well, did things really happen like she says they did?

Surprisingly, this one is pretty easy to decide, because there are records of hiring and firing for the county where she worked.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

The Riverdale Board of Education approved a second-year teaching contractfor a young Elizabeth Warren, documents show, contradicting the Democratic presidential candidate’s repeated claims that she was asked not to return to teaching after a single year because she was “visibly pregnant.”

Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”

[…]Warren’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the board of education records.

Just to re-cap the last time she claimed to be a victim, let’s go back to the Daily Caller article from above:

Warren has already faced scrutiny for laying claim to Native American heritage for years. For example, Warren listed herself as “American Indian” while applying for a legal license in 1986.

A genetic test showed that Warren possesses a minuscule fraction of Native American DNA. Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is actually more Native American than Warren is.

And she doesn’t like people asking about it. She gets very angry when people ask her for evidence, and insists that people should just believe her because she claims it. Like Rachel Dolezal, that white woman who claimed to be black. For some reason, the same people who thought that a white woman claiming to be black was morally wrong are perfectly find with a white woman claiming to be a Native American. She’s going to be the Democrat nominee!

It’s very popular on the secular left these days to try to convince people to support leftist policies by lying about being a victim. And this will work on a large segment of the population that only listens to progressive news media, and doesn’t check the facts for themselves. We should probably make a plan to have an influence on our neighbors before the election by sharing the truth about her claims of victimhood.

News

Why don’t men go to church anymore? The decline of male church attendance

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Church sucks, that's why men are bored there
Church sucks, that’s why men are bored there

I most recently spent half a year at a PCA church, and then another half a year at a Southern Baptist church. I attended Sunday services as well as Wednesday night Bible study. I am now looking for a new church. For now, I just look around for a sermon I like and listen to that. In this post, I’ll explain why I think men don’t like church.

There are three areas where churches fail to attract men:

    1. Apologetics
    2. Feminism, sex and marriage
    3. Policy and current events

Apologetics

The PCA church discouraged me from becoming a member of the church because they said that conversion to Christianity due to reason and evidence was contrary to their teachings, and a “red flag”. Their words. I didn’t try to fight them on it, because they are Reformed Presbyterian, and this is their actual view. Their approach to apologetics was “pre-suppositional”, which is to say, they try to convince people to become Christians by asking them to assume that the Bible is infallible, without any argumentation or evidence. Naturally, this doesn’t work, so they aren’t trained to answer any serious questions from non-Christians. (1 Pet 3:15-16)

The Reformed Baptist SBC church is led by people like Russell Moore and Al Mohler, who take the “magic words” approach to evangelism. I.e. – they think that people become Christians just by speaking Bible verses out of context to them. So, when the atheist asks “do you have any evidence for God’s existence?” or “do you have any evidence for Jesus’ resurrection?”, their response is to quote Bible verses to the atheist, which have nothing to do with those topics. Christianity has lost so much influence in the culture under their approach, which is not even Biblical. (Mat 12:38–41)

These approaches to evangelism are not used in any other area of human endeavor. No one replies to questions about auto mechanics, or software engineering, or gardening, or cooking, by spouting Bible verses. In literally every other area of human endeavor, the laws of logic and supporting evidence are seen as assets when making claims to know something about the world to someone who disagrees with you.

Feminism, Sex and Marriage

First wave feminism simply asked for women to be given the same liberty and opportunity as men. That was good. But later versions of destroyed all distinctions between men and women. By destroying femininity, feminism directed women away from the traditional life plan of marriage, children and home-making.

Feminism changed how women voted. Today, about 75% of young, unmarried women vote for policies like taxpayer-funded birth control, taxpayer-funded abortion, no-fault divorce, affirmative action for women in schools and in the workplace, taxpayer-funded daycare, public schools, single-mother welfare, social security, etc. These policies and programs raised tax rates, and grew government, making it easier for women to have children without having to choose a marriage-ready man she wasn’t attracted to. Instead, she could choose men she was attracted to, and just use government programs as a substitute provider if it didn’t “work out”. Thanks to feminism, we have a 42% out-of-wedlock birth rate, and it’s rising. Few female college graduates are debt-free. About 5% of women emerge from college as virgins.

Under feminism, the traditional male roles and virtues were deemed “sexist”. Women were shamed for choosing early marriage, large families, and stable men who were good at being husbands and fathers. Instead, women today chose men based on appearance. They spend their 20s and early 30s giving men who will not commit to them premarital sex. The men who are getting sex thrown at them have no interest in Judeo-Christian values, chastity, fidelity, commitment or raising children. Women mistake the men’s willingness to have sex and cohabitate as signs that they are close to marriage. But in fact, chasing the hot bad boys just eats up the chastity, youth and beauty that could have made them interesting to the marriage-minded men they scorned. Later on, they realize that they’ve wasted their 20s on bad boys, but by then they are not attractive for marriage.

What has the response been to feminism from pastors and churches? They accept the anti-male, anti-marriage policies, that came out of feminism. They accept the promiscuity, and the marriage-delaying that came from feminism. Today, pastors just try to bully the men who were passed over to marry the women who had previously rejected them, despite the higher risk of divorce caused by the women’s past behavior.

Policy and current events

Most pastors are anti-intellectual, and they believe that this is a virtue, since they are focused narrowly on what the Bible explicitly says. Because of this, they aren’t able to understand which laws and policies allow Christianity and Christian families to flourish. I agree that what the Bible speaks about is of the highest importance. But we need to understand how to achieve the goals that the Bible states, as well as how to counter the forces that threaten the achievement of those goals.

For example, Christianity thrives when marriage thrives. Christianity is passed on from parents to children. Anything that threatens marriage, or interferes with parental authority, weakens the influence of Christianity. So, policies like higher taxes, no-fault divorce, SOGI laws, all harm the Christian family, while policies like lower taxes, protections for Christian businesses, protection for Christian schools (statements of faith, moral codes), etc. are all good for Christian families. But most pastors never talk about policies or laws, because they don’t think about how to defend the Christian worldview, how to educate Christian children, how to promote marriage, how promote Christian moral values in the public square. Even protecting the right to life of unborn children is ignored.

As the churches lose relevance, it becomes tempting for pastors to accept what the secular left promotes as good and true and beautiful. The big one is pastors pushing for redistribution of wealth by the secular government as a solution to “poverty”, even though the Bible only sanctions voluntary charity. This diminishes the cultural relevance of the church and elevates the secular government. SBC leaders like Russell Moore champion amnesty for refugees and unskilled illegal immigrants, not realizing how it will harm Christian institutions and values down the road to import large numbers of people who will eventually vote for policies like higher taxes, bigger government, etc.

News

Hundreds of young transgender people seeking help to return to original sex

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Thinking about transgenderism
Thinking about transgenderism

I know that in my office, the people on the left are very adamant about gay rights. And they basically equate disagreement with gay marriage and transgenderism with racism. But what if some people who are in those lifestyles aren’t happy with their choices, and are looking for someone to talk to about getting out of it?

Here’s a story from UK Sky News about transgender people with regrets:

Hundreds of young transgender people are seeking help to return to their original sex, a woman who is setting up a charity has told Sky News.

Charlie Evans, 28, was born female but identified as male for nearly 10 years before detransitioning.

The number of young people seeking gender transition is at an all-time high but we hear very little, if anything, about those who may come to regret their decision.

[…]Charlie detransitioned and went public with her story last year – and said she was stunned by the number of people she discovered in a similar position.

“I’m in communication with 19 and 20-year-olds who have had full gender reassignment surgery who wish they hadn’t, and their dysphoria hasn’t been relieved, they don’t feel better for it,” she says.

[…]Charlie says she has been contacted by “hundreds” of people seeking help – 30 people alone in her area of Newcastle.

That story from Sky News didn’t really drill into any details, but I found a good case study at the Daily Signal:

Two years ago, I was a healthy, beautiful girl heading toward high school graduation. Before long, I turned into an overweight, pre-diabetic nightmare of a transgender man.

I won’t place the full blame on health care providers, because I should have known better. But they sure helped me do a lot of harm to myself—and they made a hefty buck doing it.

[…]The first step was to find a therapist who would write me a letter to start me on male hormones.

I soon found a therapist who said she would help me, and I told her I wanted to start the hormones on my 19th birthday, which was only five weeks off. She required only a one-hour appointment each week.

That’s hardly enough time to get to know someone. Yet those five hours got me an official letter that unlocked the doors for me to get hormone therapy and become a “man.”

[…]But by this time, I’d seen the promotional videos. I was convinced that my gender is what was “off,” and the therapist guided me along and made me feel like a sex change is what I needed.

By this point, my friends were also encouraging me to transition… Others were too afraid to say anything against it, because after all, it was 2017. I never got pushback from anyone.

In reality, of course, I was not a boy, and hearing otherwise was the last thing I needed. I was simply insecure about being tomboyish and a lesbian in public.

My therapist never once tried to sit down with me and figure that out.

[…]Not once did she tap the brakes to keep me from gender transition.

The doctor prescribed testosterone injections:

The injections of male hormones started to have their effect, but not in the way I expected. I started gaining more and more weight. My skin started to get more and more puffy and discolored. My blood started to thicken.

The doctor’s office was running bloodwork for me every three months, and it actually said I was now pre-diabetic—something that was totally new for me.

My gender-transition doctor said not to worry, but I decided to see another doctor for a second opinion. He said my thickening blood put me at risk for a heart attack or stroke.

I did this to myself for almost a year. During that time, I gained 50 pounds and was miserable.

This part was the most interesting to me:

I started feeling regret.

Unfortunately, I was stuck: I had already declared to everyone that this was who I was. I had changed my gender, and I had forced people to play along with it and call me by a new name: Jaxson. At work, men had to be OK with their former female co-worker now using the same restroom as them.

Everyone was walking on eggshells around me—and people fell in line for fear of what might happen if they objected. (Employers are already being sued over this kind of thing, after all.)

Indeed. People are losing their jobs when they disagree with transgenderism these days:

But the Department for Work and Pensions panel ruled that Mackereth’s biblical view of gender conflicts with fundamental rights:

Irrespective of our determinations above, all three heads, belief in Genesis 1:27, lack of belief in transgenderism and conscientious objection to transgenderism in our judgment are incompatible with human dignity and conflict with the fundamental rights of others, specifically here, transgender individuals.

“Without intellectual and moral integrity, medicine cannot function and my 30 years as a doctor are now considered irrelevant compared to the risk that someone else might be offended,” Mackareth said.

Having Christian convictions about male and female is no defense to being terminated in the UK. The Democrats have already passed the “Equality Act” in the House, and that would bring this level of persecution of dissenters to America.