I thought that states like Washington, California, New York, etc. were the worst blue states, but Colorado is really getting nasty. If you asked me what my nightmare is as a taxpayer, it would be having my tax money used for immoral things. I fled my home country in part because they were making me pay for abortions, IVF and sex-changes. If you’re in Colorado, it might be time to leave.

Here’s the story from The Federalist:

Democrats in the Colorado General Assembly bulldozed their way forward to require health insurance to cover genital mutilation for children, kidnap children from parents who do not “affirm” a transgender claim, and make sure the state is the biggest taxpayer-funded abortion enterprise in the country.

Left-wing lawmakers in the state House are advancing two bills related to “transgender” identity, one of which forces healthcare providers to cover everything from chemical castration to genital mutilation in their plans, while the other would codify “misgendering” as child abuse with the ability to strip custody rights from parents who do not “affirm.”

In the Senate, one bill codifies taxpayer-funded abortions, and the other one expands Colorado’s ability to mail abortion pills out-of-state to kill even more babies.

They’re also preventing Republicans from debating the legislation:

Democrats in the House started the weekend by using parliamentary tools to restrict Republicans from being able to debate or object to the bill to only two hours.

One Republican legislator said “The most egregious moment was when they prevented any debate on HB25-1312. This bill enshrines that if you are having a custody dispute and your child is suffering from gender identity delusions, not affirming those delusions are considered child abuse and grounds for losing custody”.

Remember that article I posted earlier in the week, about how white secular leftist women were choosing to trans their kids against their husbands wishes? Well, it turns out that this is being done intentionally in order to get custody of the kids. How? Well, the leftist parent pressures the child into gender dysphoria, and then uses that as an excuse to keep the moral parent from getting custody. Hello, big child support money.

The article explains:

As The Federalist reported, HB25-1312 would allow Colorado to become a “transition” mill for parents who want to use the “transgender” claims of their children as a weapon in custody battles. As one parent advocate in the Colorado described it, the bill allows “state-enabled kidnapping.”

The bill would require that “a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control,” meaning that any parent who does not want to see their child mutilated.

And taxpayers will be paying for it – all of it:

The tandem “transgender” bill in the House, HB25-1309, requires that all health insurance plans sold in the state cover medical gender transition interventions.

[…]SB25-183…  repeals a constitutional amendment that prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars on abortions and adds one, recognizing the right to an abortion and prohibiting Colorado state and local governments from denying, impeding, or discriminating against the exercise of that right, including prohibiting health insurance companies from excluding coverage for abortion,” a bill summary states.

Remember, transing a kid means a lifetime of drug use and surgeries to keep it going. So, if you’re paying for health insurance, then you’ll be paying for people to trans their kids and for abortions. Your health premiums will go up, because more stuff is being covered. Disgusting. The people who are living clean are subsidizing the people who are living recklessly. Can you say “moral hazard”?

And here’s how opposition was characterized by the Democrats:

The Democrats behind the bill are crazed, too, with state Rep. Yara Zokaie comparing parental rights groups opposed to the destructive bill to the Ku Klux Klan, saying, “A well-stakeholded bill does not need to be discussed with hate groups, and we don’t ask someone passing civil rights legislation to go ask the KKK their opinion.”

One of the divorce horror stories I blogged about recently was out of Colorado, and there, the secular leftist wife did seem to be using lack of support for transgenderism to wrestly custody (and those yummy child support dollars) away from her ex-husband. This legislation will definitely lead to more of that, which is why men need to take responsibility for choosing women who have demonstrated their morals and religion through a sustained pattern of action, over many years.

Daily Signal notes:

Critics warn that a bill like this could make stories like that of California father Jeff Younger more likely in Colorado. Younger is battling in court to prevent his ex-wife from putting his son on experimental treatments to make him appear female.

“It prejudices the court by saying any non-affirmation of gender, anything short of actual celebration of the genital mutilation and the hormone therapy, the conversion, is discriminatory and is coercive control,” state Rep. Ken DeGraaf, a Republican, told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday. “It just prejudices the court in this civil arena.”

“This bill puts one parent waste-deep in a hole for the other one to start throwing stones at them,” he added.

Caldwell, the Republican who asked about stakeholders, told The Daily Signal that the bill creates a “legal imbalance that could lead to serious consequences for parents who do not affirm their child’s gender dysphoria.”

“I believe the ultimate intention of this bill is to make it impossible for a parent to get their child help when the child is gender confused by declaring such help as child abuse,” he added.

Personally, if you are a conservative man, you need to be in Tennessee, Oklahoma, Alabama and other states that are socially conservative. You do not want to be paying taxes and health insurance premiums to cover these sorts of behaviors. Part of being an intelligent man is to take action to achieve results. You don’t choose to live in a blue state, and then cry victim when they smash your finances and your marriage and ruin your kids.

Recently, I wrote a post about how you can make a simple argument for intelligent design based on junk DNA.  Step 1: find out what Darwinian naturalists claim about junk DNA. Step 2: find out what design proponents claim about junk DNA. Step 3: compare those predictions with scientific discoveries about junk DNA over the past decades. Today we’ll do it with the fossil record.

I’m going to use an amazing article from Günter Bechly (who recently passed away) from over at Evolution News. Günter used to write an article about fossils every Friday (he called it “Fossil Friday”).

Here’s an  article, where he gave a nice overview of why Christians should care about the fossil record.

He writes:

This Fossil Friday I want to address the common request to provide an expanded written form of my lectures on discontinuities in the fossil record (e.g., on YouTube) together with references to mainstream scientific papers that back up these arguments against neo-Darwinism. Since the sudden appearance of trilobites in the Cambrian Explosion is one of the best known examples for discontinuities in the fossil record, I chose the early trilobite Wanneria sp. from the Lower Cambrian of Canada as today’s featured fossil. So let’s jump right in.

Then he talks about the predictions of Darwinists and design proponents:

Every theory makes certain predictions and these predictions have to be tested with empirical evidence. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution necessarily predicts a gradual development of life. Therefore he insisted on gradualism, against the advice of his good friend Thomas Huxley. Darwin quoted in his magnum opus The Origin of Species (Darwin 1859) not less that six times the Latin dictum “natura non facit saltus”, nature does not make jumps, because he wanted to present a fully naturalistic explanation for the history of life on our planet, knowing perfectly well that saltations would have tacitly implied miracle-like intelligent interventions. The prediction of gradualism is not accidental and not a dispensable side issue in Darwinism. This was made clear by Richard Dawkins, arguably the most ardent modern popularizer of Darwinism, in his bestselling book The Greatest Show on Earth (Dawkins 2009), where he explicitly clarified that “Evolution not only is a gradual process as a matter of fact; it has to be gradual if it is to do any explanatory work.” In another book titled Climbing Mount Improbable (Dawkins 1996) he explained the reasons with a beautiful metaphor: Imagine the task to reach the top of a steep and tall cliff from the sea shore. It would be an improbable (or rather impossible) miracle to achieve this task with a single big jump. However, if there was a gentle slope on the backside of the cliff, you could easily and effortlessly climb the mountain with a lot of small successive steps. This is the way evolution must operate according to Darwin and Dawkins: not by sudden miraculous jumps, but many small steps, that are each not unlikely to happen accidentally without intelligent intervention, and which accumulate over long periods of time to add up to big biological differences.

Engineers don’t check in code gradually, one letter at a time. We check in a bunch of related changes to different files that implement some feature. Some days, I have a lot of meetings. Some days, I spend time doing code reviews or making diagrams or writing documentation. And some days, I get to write code all day. So, if you look at my Github history, you’ll see that some days I have 35 commits, and other days none. That’s consistent with having a “designer”. The complexity increases in “jumps”, with each jump containing changes to several files, and the changes add some new feature. But that’s not available to Dawkins and Darwin, they don’t like engineers, or sudden jumps in complexity.

Günter lists out a bunch of biological “jumps”, where God pulled an all-nighter, with pizza and Mountain Dew, and checked in a whole bunch of new code all at once.

Here are a few from his list of about 15 of them:

• The Origin of Life (3.8 bya)
• The Origin of Photosynthesis (3.8 bya)
• The Cambrian Explosion (537-508 mya)
• The Carboniferous Insect Explosion (325-314/307 mya)
• The Early Triassic Marine Reptile Radiation (248-240 mya)
• The Mid Triassic Gliding / Flying Reptile Radiation (230-210 mya)
• Upper Triassic Dinosaur Explosion (234-232 mya)
• The Abominable Mystery of the Origin of Flowering Plants (130-115 mya)
• The Paleogene Big Bang of Modern Birds (65-55 mya)

Günter has the details of each of these, but if you have listened to our recent episode about the origin of life with Dr. Fazala Rana, then you already know about the first one. The point is that the fossil record has a whole bunch of “big bangs”, where God checked in a whole bunch of new code in a very short period of time. This is strictly forbidden in Darwinian theory, but the fossil record doesn’t care about theories.

Günter concludes:

The gradualistic core predictions of any unguided evolutionary mechanisms such as neo-Darwinism are strongly contradicted by the empirical evidence. The cumulative conflicting evidence from molecular biology, genetics, population genetics, and the discontinuous fossil record can no longer be explained away as anomalies or as artifacts such as under-sampling of an incomplete fossil record. The total evidence is better explained with pulses of infusion of new information from outside of the system (top-down), rather than with a purely mechanistic stepwise bottom-up process. The only known cause in the universe that is able to produce significant amounts of new complex specified information is the activity of an intelligent conscious agent, so that intelligent design theory qualifies as superior alternative to unguided Darwinian evolution in an inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning) among competing hypotheses. This is not an argument from ignorance (i.e., God of the gaps) as is often incorrectly claimed by critics, but is based on empirical data and our positive knowledge about the regular causal structure of the universe and the type of causes that exclusively are known to produce certain effects.

And I found a nice lecture that he gave on the topic:

The article was tough for me to understand, but I think I got the big picture of what he was saying. The video was much easier to understand. I blogged on this topic so that I can find it again if I get questions about what evidence there is for a designer. I sure hope that we are making more scientists like him for Team Design, because his post was quality work.

We did a podcast with Gunter recently, and it was popular on YouTube.

Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot from UK voices, including the Prime Minister, about how the secular leftist government of the UK allows free speech, just as much as in America. The UK doesn’t have a first amendment, or anything equivalent. Let’s take a look at a very recent case and see what you can expect from the secular left if you act like a Christian in public.

Here’s the story from The Stream:

A U.K. court earlier today convicted a pro-life clinical scientist of violating a “buffer zone” outside an abortion facility in a trial that has triggered threats of trade reprisals from the Trump administration over “freedom of expression” in Britain.

Dr. Livia Tossici-Bolt, a devout Catholic, was found guilty on two counts of breaching a Public Spaces Protection Order (PSPO) or “buffer zone” outside the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) abortion facility in Bournemouth in March 2023.

The 64-year grandmother from Italy, who lives in Britain, was holding a sign that read: “Here to talk, if you want.” The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which is defending Tossici-Bolt, said that several women approached her to converse about issues they were dealing with.

Tossici-Bolt was sentenced Friday to a conditional discharge and ordered to pay prosecution costs of £20,000 in full by May 31. According to the order, she will face prison time if she is convicted of any future offenses in the next two years.

You can see the sign that she was holding up in the image. Does that look scary or threatening to you? In Tennessee, you can hold up a sign like that, and you can have a conversation, and you won’t be arrested by multiple armed policemen. But not so in the fascist UK. The secular left is very sensitive about speech that offends them. And they’re willing to use force to stamp it out.

The bad thing about this case is that ADF argued for her, and they lost, which is unusual for the ADF. It shows you how far the UK has gone down the road of secular left fascism.

Here is her reaction to the verdict:

In response to the verdict Friday, Tossici-Bolt said, “This is a dark day for Great Britain. I was not protesting and did not harass or obstruct anyone. All I did was offer consensual conversation in a public place, as is my basic right, and yet the court found me guilty.

“Freedom of expression is in a state of crisis in the U.K. What has happened to this country? The U.S. State Department was right to be concerned by this case as it has serious implications for the entire Western world.”

This sort of thing happens a lot in the UK:

Pro-lifers were expecting Tossici-Bolt to be found guilty after they became aware that the judge in her case had already found pro-life advocate Adam Smith-Connor guilty last October for silently praying outside the same abortion clinic in November 2022.

[…]Judge Orla Austin found him guilty of breaching the buffer zone and sentenced him to a conditional discharge after ordering him to pay prosecution costs of £9,000 (about $11,700).

In her decision, Austin reasoned that Smith-Connor’s prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped.

[…]In Tossici-Bolt’s case, Austin said, “I conclude that she lacks insight into the fact that her presence could have a detrimental impact upon women attending the clinic, their associates, the staff, and members of the public.”

I’m giving you all of these facts, so you can really understands what happens when people elect the secular left to run the government. A lot of people in the UK don’t know the history of Stalin, Mao, and other secular leftists in history. But they are finding out now.

By the way, the Stream article notes that the leader of the Conservative Party of the UK had no problem with this verdict, and opposed the United States for disapproving of it.

You might remember a previous story that I blogged about, in which another pro-life Christian was arrested just for praying outside of an abortion clinic.

Here’s that story, reported by the Daily Wire:

Isabel Vaughan-Spruce, a 45-year-old charity volunteer, was arrested and charged on four counts after she told police she “might” be silently praying near the U.K.’s leading provider of NHS-funded abortion services BPAS Robert Clinic in Kings Norton, Birmingham, according to local media.

[…]Police arrested Vaughan-Spruce on December 6 and subsequently charged her on December 15 with four counts of failing to comply with a Public Space Protection Order in so-called censorship zones, which authorities introduced to criminalize individuals appearing to be “engaging in any act of approval or disapproval or attempted act of approval or disapproval.”

Just a few days ago, there was an EXCELLENT article that appeared in the UK Telegraph, written by Allison Pearson. (archived here)

She wrote about another free speech case:

If the name Lucy Connolly rings a bell it’s because she was one of the 1,500-plus people arrested in connection with the social unrest which followed the July 29 Southport massacre of three little girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class. In fact, that’s not strictly accurate. Mrs Connolly, then aged 41 – she turned 42 in prison in January – played no part in the rioting, but a tweet she posted on the day when Elsie Dot Stancombe, Bebe King and Alice da Silva Aguiar were murdered by Axel Rudakubana was enough to get her arrested eight days later, and charged under Section 19 of the Public Order Act 1986, with publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred.

The secular left in the UK has made a commitment to “multiculturalism”. And they don’t mean giving work permits to brown-skinned software engineers who speak perfect English, like America did with me. They mean letting in men of Middle Eastern origin, who have very different views of stabbing and raping than most Americans have. And if any UK citizen expresses disapproval of the stabbing or the raping, then the UK police is right there to put them in prison. In fact, that’s what they think their job is.

It’s very important for American tourists to understand that the UK is no longer a free, Western country. They’ve gone fascist. They have two-tier policing. You need to stay out of there.

(Image source: Alliance Defending Freedom UK)