John Stonestreet – Page 9

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.

The Courage of Eva Edl: Guest Column

Oct 7, 2024John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

Above: Eva Edl was arrested for criminal trespassing during a protest at a surgical abortion facility in Little Rock in 2021. She has since been charged federally for blocking an abortion facility entrance in Michigan (Photo Credit: via Facebook).

89-year-old death camp survivor faces prison time under DOJ’s criminalization of pro-life advocates.

Last month, seven pro-life protestors were convicted of engaging in “civil rights conspiracy” and violating the Clinton-era Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The protesters were arrested in August 2020 after standing in front of an abortion clinic in Sterling Heights, Michigan. Combined, the seven face up to 11 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

One of those who were found guilty is Eva Edl, an 89-year-old widow from South Carolina who survived a death camp in her youth. She first came to the U.S. in 1955 at the age of 20 after fleeing a government-led ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. The target was the Danube Swabians, a German-speaking ethnic group to which her family belonged. As she recounted to the the Daily Signal, Eva’s mom decried the injustice, “We haven’t done anything wrong! Who would harm us?”

When Eva was nine, she, her parents, sister, and brother were rounded up by soldiers, loaded on a cattle car, and taken to an extermination camp. The prisoners were forced to share the same living quarters and one outhouse. Adults were forced to work but also kept on the brink of starvation. One day, while working in the fields, Eva’s mother escaped on a wagon under a pile of grain. She would later come back and help rescue her family.

It was in 1968, after moving to America, that Eva was introduced to the atrocity of abortion. During a discussion in English class, a fellow student declared it should be legalized (this was before Roe v. Wade ruled a constitutional right to abortion). “[A]fter that,” Eva said, “I just brought up the subject all the time because it bothered me that people would actually think of killing their own children.”

In the fall of 1988, 400 protesters were arrested outside of abortion clinics after two months of pro-life protests following the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Eva was shocked by this, but also compelled to do something. Likening abortion clinics to her experience in the death camp, Eva recalled:

When we were rounded up to be killed, we were placed in cattle cars, and our train was headed toward the extermination camp. What if citizens of my country would have overcome their fear, and a number of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train? The train would have to stop. And while the guards on those trains would be busy rounding up the ones that were in front of the train, another group could have come in, pried open our cattle car and possibly set us free, but nobody did.

Later that year, Eva joined a peaceful protest in Atlanta and was arrested for the first time. She has now been part of more than 50 “rescues” (what she calls the protests) and has been arrested about as many times.

Having emigrated from the tyranny of post-war, Communist-controlled Yugoslavia, Eva said she never imagined she would be imprisoned for protecting innocent lives here:

America, in my eyes, was this country of justice and opportunity and everything that is good. A beacon for us, over there, that didn’t know what all that meant, because we had nothing but oppression from whoever was ruling us at the time. … [H]uman life is sacred. Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids. And murder is forbidden by God.

Since Roe was overturned a few years ago, the Department of Justice has indicted 40 pro-life advocates with FACE-related charges. Pray for Eva and protesters across the country who are being persecuted for standing for life.

This Breakpoint  was co-authored by Jared Hayden. If you’re a fan of Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 