News

Public school administrators force girls to undress in front of male student

2 Comments

If you missed the Matt Walsh shows from Monday and Tuesday, then you missed two really good shows. One of the stories that he covered on Tuesday is the inspiration for today’s blog post. This story is from a public school in Deerfield, Illinois. Three female administrators at the school tried to force female students to get naked in front of a male student.

Here’s the story from the Lake County Gazette.

Deerfield School District 109 administrators forced teen girls at Shepard Middle School to change in front of a boy in the school locker room.

That’s according to parent testimony heard during public comment Thursday’s District 109 School Board meeting.

After receiving a complaint from girls in early February that a boy was in their locker room while they were changing for gym class, District 109 “Assistant Superintendent for Student Services” Joanna Ford, “Assistant Principal” Cathy Van Treese and “Director for Student Services” Ginger Logemann reprimanded the girls, then escorted them to the locker room and tried to force them to change in front of the boy.

That’s all I needed for this blog post – to tell you that three administrators at the goverment-run school – who are all WOMEN – reprimanded the girls, and escorted them to the girl’s locker room, and tried to force them to change (get naked) in front of a biological male. Now you see what the secular left means by “tolerant” and “open-minded”.

I was able to do a quick check on the backgrounds of these three public school administrators, to see if they had any real (STEM) degrees or trades training, and private sector work experience.

Take the case of Joanna Ford, who seems to be the ring-leader:

Joanna Ford holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Spanish from the University of Michigan, and a Master’s degree in Special Education and Teaching from both DePaul University and Hunter College.

These are not degrees that require a person to solve real-world problems and produce results. These are not degrees that allow you to work for customers in the competitive private sector. These are not degrees that require you to understand anything about how the real world really works. They’re just pieces of paper that show a willingness to be indoctrinated.

But the article also talked about the LGBT activists who attacked the mother of the female student, for questioning the actions of the three white, female school administrators.

Kerrick Goodman-Lucker of Northbrook, a female who dresses like a male and has grown a mustache and beard, said she had a male cross-dressing friend in college who “was pulled out of a woman’s bathroom and attacked by a police officer for using a bathroom (he) thought was safe.”

Jesse Holzman of Chicago, a woman who describes herself as a “Queer, Non-binary, Consensually Non-monogamous, Intersectional Feminist, Anti-Racist, Activist, Educator and Scholar,” said that “ensuring access to (girls’) bathrooms and changing rooms is not controversial.”

Charlee Friedman of Berwyn, a female who describes herself as a “transmasc nonbinary human” and also has a beard, used much of her three minutes at the podium to praise Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for “protecting” the right of teen boys to watch teen girls undress.

Tina Nelson of Deerfield, who informed the board she is a lesbian, said those opposed to letting boys watch teen girls undress in the locker room are “petty women” pushing “the white supremacist agenda of their ‘cis white’ husbands” and their “White God.”

That last one was interesting – she deliberately attacked the father’s leadership, and God, in her defense of transgenderism.

You can see several of these transgender activists in Matt Walsh’s show from Tuesday. I’ve got it cued up for you to 1:29, so watch until 23 minutes to get all of it:

So, now it’s time for me to comment.

We really need to give parents a choice to opt out of public schools. They shouldn’t be forced to pay for this. They should be able to keep their money and spend it on customer-focused private schools or homeschooling, instead. School administrators should have to compete for patents’ money in a free market. Compete against private schools and homeschooling.

News

Republicans push for election integrity to avoid repeat of 2020 election

Leave a comment

Prior to the 2020 election, Democrats expanded mail-in voting and drop box vting in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia. The election results showed that there were 65.6 million mail-in ballots in 2020, up from 33.5 million in 2016. Drop-box voting surged, too. When the votes were counted, Democrats got 15.4 million (23.4%) more votes in 2020 compared to 2016.

To prevent this from happening again, Republicans  are pushing hard to enhance election integrity.

Here’s the story from Daily Caller:

As President Donald Trump moves at breakneck speed to enact his agenda, the Republican National Committee is quietly racking up election integrity wins and gearing up for the next election cycle, the Daily Caller has learned.

The RNC won three lengthy legal battles related to the prevention of election fraud in March across the key states of Arizona, Georgia and Washington.

“These cases represent that a lot of times, things get started and resolved during an election year, but many times they don’t, and the RNC doesn’t walk away from them,” an RNC official told the Caller. “We are here to see these things through.”

Here is an interesting story about Arizona, which got a lot of press for failure to count their ballots in a timely way. It turns out that their Democrat Secretary of State (in charge of elections) wanted to weaken “safeguards against non-citizen voting”:

In March, Arizona’s Court of Appeals announced that the secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, did not “substantially comply” with the state’s proper rule making process when finalizing the 2023 Election Procedures Manual. The court’s ruling was the result of a February 2024 lawsuit filed by the GOP, which argued that Fontes’s Election Procedures Manual would weaken “safeguards against non-citizen voting,” “unlawfully limited the ability to challenge early ballots,” and “violate[d] numerous provisions of state law meant to protect election integrity,” a party official shared with the Caller.

You might remember that this Democrat also lost a case where he tried to cover up which voters were improperly registered to vote.

More from the original Daily Caller article, this time about Georgia:

Another significant win came in Georgia on March 7. The RNC intervened in a case in May 2024 after a local labor union sued trying to overturn the state’s absentee ballot rules. The state’s law sets the deadline to request absentee ballots at 11 days prior to election day, but the union wanted to extend the deadline.

Nearly a year later, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia threw out the union’s lawsuit, ultimately ruling in the RNC’s favor.

Why would Democrats and their union allies want to make it easier for people to vote absentee?

Here’s another one, from the state of Washington:

In Washington, the state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the RNC’s favor that the state’s signature verification law does not violate the state’s constitution. The RNC first got involved in that legal battle in 2023.

Why would Washington Democrats want to attack a signature verification law? What could their motive be?

Anyway, it’s good to see that Republicans are not floating blindly through their 4 years in power this time. Now is the time for them to strengthen election integrity, so that our elections are protected from mail-in ballot fraud and drop-box ballot fraud.

By the way, if you live in states like Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia, Georgia, Washington and Arizona, it might be a good idea for you to make sure that you vote for Republicans for Secretary of State. Because the Secretaries of State in many of these states are Democrats, and they certainly have an agenda.

Polemics

Mark D. Linville: does Darwinian evolution make morality rational?

Leave a comment

Have you ever heard an atheist tell you that naturalistic evolution is an answer to the moral argument? I have. And I found a good reply to this challenge in the book “Contending With Christianity’s Critics“. The chapter that responds to the challenge is authored by Dr. Mark D. Linville.

First, a bit about the author:

Blog: The Tavern at the End of the World
Current positions:

  • PhD Research Fellow
  • Tutoring Fellow in Philosophy

Education:

  • PhD in Philosophy with a minor in South Asian Studies and a specialization in Philosophy of Religion, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • MA in Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • MA in Philosophy of Religion, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
  • MA in Theology, Cincinnati Christian Seminary
  • BA in Biblical Studies, Florida Christian College

Here is his thesis of the essay:

Darwin’s account of the origins of human morality is at once elegant, ingenious, and, I shall argue, woefully inadequate. In particular, that account, on its standard interpretation, does not explain morality, but, rather, explains it away . We learn from Darwin not how there could be objective moral facts, but how we could have come to believe—perhaps erroneously—that there are.

Further, the naturalist, who does not believe that there is such a personal being as God, is in principle committed to Darwinism, including a Darwinian account of the basic contours of human moral psychology. I’ll use the term evolutionary naturalism to refer to this combination of naturalism and Darwinism. And so the naturalist is saddled with a view that explains morality away. Whatever reason we have for believing in moral facts is also a reason for thinking naturalism is false. I conclude the essay with a brief account of a theistic conception of morality, and argue that the theist is in a better position to affirm the objectivity of morality.

And here’s a sample to get your attention:

But even if we are assured that a “normal” person will be prompted by the social instincts and that those instincts are typically flanked and reinforced by a set of moral emotions, we still do not have a truly normative account of moral obligation. There is nothing in Darwin’s own account to indicate that the ensuing sense of guilt—a guilty feeling—is indicative of actual moral guilt resulting from the violation of an objective moral law. The revenge taken by one’s own conscience amounts to a sort of second-order propensity to feel a certain way given one’s past relation to conflicting first-order propensities (e.g., the father’s impulse to save his child versus his impulse to save himself). Unless we import normative considerations from some other source, it seems that, whether it is a first or second-order inclination,one’s being prompted by it is more readily understood as a descriptive feature of one’s own psychology than material for a normative assessment of one’s behavior or character. And, assuming that there is anything to this observation, an ascent into even higher levels of propensities (“I feel guilty for not having felt guilty for not being remorseful over not obeying my social instincts…”) introduces nothing of normative import. Suppose you encounter a man who neither feels the pull of social, paternal or familial instincts nor is in the least bit concerned over his apparent lack of conscience. What, from a strictly Darwinian perspective, can one say to him that is of any serious moral import? “You are not moved to action by the impulses that move most of us.” Right. So?

The problem afflicts contemporary construals of an evolutionary account of human morality. Consider Michael Shermer’s explanation for the evolution of a moral sense—the “science of good and evil.” He explains,

By a moral sense, I mean a moral feeling or emotion generated by actions. For example, positive emotions such as righteousness and pride are experienced as the psychological feeling of doing “good.” These moral emotions likely evolved out of behaviors that were reinforced as being good either for the individual or for the group.2

Shermer goes on to compare such moral emotions to other emotions and sensations that are universally experienced, such as hunger and the sexual urge. He then addresses the question of moral motivation.

In this evolutionary theory of morality, asking “Why should we be moral?” is like asking “Why should we be hungry?” or “Why should we be horny?” For that matter, we could ask, “Why should we be jealous?” or “Why should we fall in love?” The answer is that it is as much a part of human nature to be moral as it is to be hungry, horny, jealous, and in love.3

Thus, according to Shermer, given an evolutionary account, such a question is simply a non-starter. Moral motivation is a given as it is wired in as one of our basic drives. Of course, one might point out that Shermer’s “moral emotions” often do need encouragement in a way that, say, “horniness,” does not. More importantly, Shermer apparently fails to notice that if asking “Why should I be moral?” is like asking, “Why should I be horny?” then asserting, “You ought to be moral” is like asserting, “You ought to be horny.” As goes the interrogative, so goes the imperative. But if the latter seems out of place, then, on Shermer’s view, so is the former.

One might thus observe that if morality is anything at all, it is irreducibly normative in nature. But the Darwinian account winds up reducing morality to descriptive features of human psychology. Like the libido, either the moral sense is present and active or it is not. If it is, then we might expect one to behave accordingly. If not, why, then, as a famous blues man once put it, “the boogie woogie just ain’t in me.” And so the resulting “morality” is that in name only.

In light of such considerations, it is tempting to conclude with C. S. Lewis that, if the naturalist remembered his philosophy out of school, he would recognize that any claim to the effect that “I ought” is on a par with “I itch,” in that it is nothing more than a descriptive piece of autobiography with no essential reference to any actual obligations.

When it comes to morality, we are not interested in mere descriptions of behavior. We want to know about prescriptions of behavior, and whether why we should care about following those prescriptions. We are interested in what grounds our sense of moral obligation in reality. What underwrites our sense of moral obligation? If it is just rooted in feelings, then why should we obey our moral sense when obeying it goes against out self-interest? Feelings are subjective things, and doing the right thing in a real objective state of affairs requires more than just feelings. There has to be a real objective state of affairs that makes it rational for us to do the right thing, even when the right thing is against our own self-interest. That’s what morality is – objective moral obligations overriding subjective feelings. I wouldn’t trust someone to be moral if it were just based on their feelings.