John Stonestreet – Page 11

The Pot Experiment Has Been a Disaster: Guest Column

Oct 28, 2024John StonestreetMarijuanaMarijuana

If marijuana definitively destroys lives, should we be free to smoke?

A few weeks ago, Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports publicly supported a measure that would legalize marijuana in Florida. “As an adult,” Portnoy said, “I should be allowed to smoke weed, watch football, and eat pizza on Sunday regardless if I’m at home in Mass[achusetts] or Florida.”

To which, Matt Walsh replied:

Can you point to any state or city in the country where life has been, in any way, measurably improved after legalizing marijuana? Where are the legalization success stories? Give me just one please.

After the rushed social experiment by many states to legalize marijuana, we know the answer to this important question. Study after study has demonstrated that legal pot has been even more disastrous than predicted.

The most obvious consequences have been in basic safety concerns. Legalizing pot correlates with a rise in auto crashes, as well as property and violent crimes. Also, despite the fact that this is now a multibillion-dollar industry, legalizing pot has grown rather than reduced the black market. Promises of health benefits have also proven to be more smoke than substance.

Pot’s most devastating impact has been in the arena of mental health, which has declined to epidemic levels in the U.S. This is largely due to the increased potency of pot that is sold today, which is significantly stronger than what was passed around at Woodstock. Analyzing medical data from 6 million people, researchers in Denmark found that up to 30% of schizophrenia cases among young men could be linked to marijuana use. Though advocates and lawmakers have worked to “decrease the public’s perception of its harm,” as the study’s lead author said, they have misrepresented the reality.

Other studies also have shown a clear link between marijuana use and psychosis. For example, according to a report at CBS News,

[P]eople who smoked marijuana on a daily basis were three times more likely to be diagnosed with psychosis compared with people who never used the drug. For those who used high-potency marijuana daily, the risk jumped to nearly five times.

In other words, pot isn’t a victimless crime and, given its social impact, cannot simply be reduced to a matter of personal freedom. Not only are cannabis users more likely to start using opioids, but the National Academy of Medicine reports that using pot “is likely to increase the risk of schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.” Between 2006 and 2014, emergency room visits for marijuana-induced psychosis tripled to 90,000.

Most troubling of all is the link between pot and teen suicide. According  to Colorado state statistics, the drug was found in the system of some 42% of teens who had taken their own lives, a rate nearly twice that of alcohol and four times that of any other substances. Colorado consistently ranks among the worst states in terms of suicide rates.

Critics will quickly argue that correlation does not imply causation, but connections like this must be investigated. If nearly half of stroke victims took the same medicine, would we wonder if there was a link worth our consideration? Why the reluctance to connect the dots when it comes to marijuana? Since suicide rates have risen every year that pot has been legal, we’re far past giving the benefit of the doubt.

Of course, if lawmakers took up Matt Walsh’s challenge, they’d have to reconsider and recant their promises of personal liberty, not to mention millions of dollars for education and better roads. The science here is all but settled. Pot is bad for individuals, and it’s bad for society.

The kind of freedom Portnoy is claiming ends in slavery, a slavery to one’s own passion. It is a freedom from rules and restraint, not a freedom for the good life. True freedom is a necessary means for human flourishing, but as Chuck Colson often noted, there is no true freedom without virtue. A freedom that wrecks the mind, puts families, children, and neighbors at greater risk, and contributes to general social degradation is not freedom. It’s license built on selfishness.

14,000 Children Are Forever Harmed: Guest Column

Oct 22, 2024John StonestreetLGBTChild Welfare, LGBT, SAFE Act, Transgender

We now have numbers for the push to transgender a generation.

According to the new bombshell report from the group Do No Harm, nearly 14,000 minors underwent transgender surgeries, took puberty blockers, or were given cross-sex hormone injections, between 2019 and 2023. This report directly counters a refrain often thrown at anyone who expressed concern for the wellbeing of children, that “it’s just not happening.” In fact, just three months ago, researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health announced that “gender-affirming” surgeries were “rarely performed on transgender youth in the U.S.”

Rare, however, is the wrong word for 14,000 youth. As Dr. Miriam Grossman, my guest on a Breakpoint Forum earlier this year, told Washington Watch,

This release of data is really a nuclear bomb. … We are led to believe by politicians and by many groups that these interventions are very rare and hardly happening at all in this country. And that is simply not true.

Indeed. According to the Do No Harm report, just under 14,000 children received transgender-related treatments. More than 5,700 of those treatments were “sex change” operations and more than 62,000 hormone and puberty blocker prescriptions were written in that time frame. These numbers do not include young people who underwent some form of “social transition.”

When these treatments, which go under the misnomer “gender-affirming care,” are carried out on children, the consequences are severe, and often irreversible. As the Cass Review (a comprehensive report out of the U.K. on “gender services” for children) revealed, doctors who recommended and administered these “treatments” knew of the risks of complications. These risks include pelvic inflammatory disease, pelvic floor dysfunction, and pain during any kind of arousal or sexual intercourse. Others saw no issues continuing “treatments” on those who showed serious co-morbidities, including mental health issues. According to one doctor: “The mere presence of psychiatric illness should not block a person’s ability to start hormones.” Another “referred for genital surgery people diagnosed with major depressive disorder, c-PTSD, and who are homeless.” Most troubling is that clinicians and activists from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) have openly admitted that minors cannot fully understand what’s at stake in these “treatments,” especially the permanent damage done to their ability to have children in the future.

In fact, for years, activists have pushed these chemical and surgical interventions on children and their parents by threatening them. “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live son,” parents are asked, as if anything less than their full affirmation will lead their child to commit suicide. This is a manipulative myth. According to one study published earlier this year, those who undergo so-called “gender transition” surgery are over 12 times more likely to commit suicide than those who do not.

Although the effects of surgery and puberty blockers on children can never be reversed, almost always a child with gender dysphoria grows out of those feelings by the time they hit their mid-twenties. Puberty, it turns out, is quite effective in aligning one’s internal sense of self with the realities of the body. As the authors of landmark research out of the Netherlands wrote, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims. This report from Do No Harm reveals that there have been victims of trans ideology, and many of them have been children. This is an ideology with no basis in medicine, science, or observable realities. And yet, it is an ideology that has given birth to atrocities performed in doctors’ offices and hospitals by “experts” we were supposed to “trust.”

We shouldn’t have. This ideology shatters the lives of young people and the lives of their parents. Until this report, we didn’t know how many.

Outsourcing Discernment in An Age of Mass Information: Guest Column

Oct 14, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, News

Elon Musk recently found himself fighting the government of Brazil after his X social media platform was briefly banned there. Ironically, the censorship was marketed as a defense of democracy, i.e. the government “graciously” stepping in to save the people and the voting process from harmful disinformation.

Of course, claims of disinformation is a common tactic often employed by the powerful to silence critics. Once limits are placed on what can be written and spoken, many other liberties are at risk. Indeed, there are real dangers of an unchecked flood of information, too. In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described this tension by comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

In the end, the explosion of information everywhere, all the time, has made us believe everything and nothing at all.

And our reputation precedes us. There’s been understandable concern about Russian interference in the last few U.S. Elections, but their strategy reveals as much about us as it does them. Imagine a group of operatives from Moscow planning and scheming how to dismantle America, and finally one of them announces, “I’ve got it! Memes! We’ll use memes to interfere with their democracy.”

Of course, it’s far more serious and strategic than that. In fact, it’s even more troubling how the interference from our international enemies resembles so closely the behavior of social media giants like Facebook and legacy media outlets. Shutting down conversations they don’t like and highlighting narratives they do is not the free exchange of information.

Over 30 years ago in First Things, C. John Sommerville wrote an article entitled “Why the News Makes Us Dumb.” His answer was that the very idea of “news,” as the name suggests, prioritizes novelty. To stay in business, the media “have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context.”

If we read philosophy, history, science, theology—regularly—we would be able to make much better sense of the day’s events. But we don’t. We’re too busy to manage anything but the News.

Sommerville wrote this before the internet was much of a thing and social media even existed. At the time, he was complaining about archaic things called “newspapers,” but his concerns proved prophetic. If people were “too busy to manage” one daily news reading back then, how can we possibly make sense of news firing at us all the time and from every direction now? The answer is, we don’t. In fact, many don’t even try. We prefer our “news” pre-digested and delivered to our feeds. In other words, we have outsourced the hard work of discernment to others.

Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, especially Facebook. Nearly three-quarters of X users rely on that platform for news. When Americans say they rely on “multiple sources,” they typically mean multiple social media sites, not a combination of traditional media and social media sites, or sources from multiple perspectives.

If Americans weren’t regularly reading “philosophy, history, science, theology” in 1991, it’s even worse today. In 1990, 16% of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. In 2015, it was 27%. Last year, it was 65%. Most of what was read isn’t helpful anyway. According to USA Today, between 1993 and 2013, the best seller lists were dominated by self-help and young-adult fiction. Today, people are mostly just reading their phones.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman presciently warned of a “vast descent into triviality.” Christians, because they believe that Christ is the truth and the Word, should always prioritize discernment, but especially in the information age. Otherwise, we risk being tools in somebody else’s arsenal.