Page 182 – Family Council

Federal Court Rules Indiana Can Protect Children from Sex-Change Procedures

Nov 20, 2024Jerry CoxTransgenderSAFE Act, Transgender

Last week the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling effectively letting the State of Indiana protect children from sex-change procedures.

Joshua Arnold with The Washington Stand reports,

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld an Indiana law protecting minors from gender transition procedures last Wednesday. The appellate court had stayed a preliminary injunction that blocked all of the law except its prohibition on gender transition surgeries in a simple order on February 27, allowing the law to take effect. Wednesday’s ruling (K.C. v. Medical Licensing Board of Indiana) included a 50-page opinion for why the court reversed the lower court ruling, vacated the preliminary injunction, and remanded the lawsuit back to the district court.

In response to the ruling, Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel and Vice President of Litigation Strategy and Center for Conscience Initiatives Jonathan Scruggs said,

“Indiana rightly enacted a law that protects the health and welfare of all children—supporting their natural biological development and ensuring that children experiencing gender dysphoria have a chance for comprehensive healing and compassionate mental health support. Relying on bad science, activists and the Biden-Harris administration have pushed these harmful procedures across the country and even taken steps to prevent state legislatures from regulating these procedures. These procedures have devastated countless lives, which is why countries that were previously leaders in so-called ‘gender affirming’ care are reversing course and curtailing these experimental efforts to alter children’s bodies. The 7th Circuit was on solid ground to uphold Indiana’s law that allows children to receive the help they need—safely.”

ADF filed a friend-of-the-court brief last year asking the court to let Indiana’s law to go into effect.

This is a significant victory.

Sex-change surgeries and similar procedures can leave children sterilized and scarred for life.

Doctors do not know the long term effects that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones might have on people, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was prompted to add a warning label to puberty blockers after discovering they caused some biological girls to experience brain swelling.

Three years ago a major hospital in Sweden announced that it would no longer give puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids. This year the United Kingdom announced a new policy protecting children from puberty-blocking drugs.

In 2021 the Arkansas Legislature overwhelmingly passed the Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act — a law very similar to Indiana’s. The SAFE Act is a good law that protects children in Arkansas from cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and sex-reassignment surgeries.

Unfortunately, the SAFE Act has been blocked in court since 2021.

It’s good to see federal courts let Indiana protect children. We believe our federal courts ultimately will recognize that Arkansas’ SAFE act is a good law and uphold it as constitutional.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

TikTok’s Parent Company Valued at $300 Billion, Underscoring Social Media Giant’s Influence

Nov 19, 2024Jerry CoxSocial MediaSocial Media, TikTok

The Wall Street Journal reports ByteDance — the Chinese-based company that owns social media giant TikTok — is valued at $300 billion.

With approximately one billion users worldwide — including upwards of 135 million or more in the U.S. — TikTok is regarded as one of the most popular social media platforms on the planet.

The Wall Street Journal reports,

The [$300 billion] valuation came in a recent buyback offer by ByteDance, according to people familiar with the offer, and suggests the company expects its growth to continue. A law signed by President Biden earlier this year would ban TikTok in the U.S. unless ByteDance divests itself of the app by mid-January.

The article goes on to highlight the political turmoil surrounding TikTok and ByteDance.

ByteDance is headquartered in China, and has come under fire time and again for serving kids a steady “diet of darkness” on TikTok while also struggling to protect private user data from entities in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party.

Authorities in Canada recently ordered TikTok to stop operating in the country, citing national security concerns.

In September the Wall Street Journal highlighted how TikTok let accounts linked to the Chinese government spread misleading content targeting U.S. voters ahead of the 2024 election.

And earlier this year the U.S. Department of Justice sued TikTok for allegedly violating federal laws intended to protect children online.

Stories like these — and others — have raise serious concerns about TikTok’s operations.

Last year Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin filed two lawsuits against TikTok and its parent company ByteDance.

The A.G.’s lawsuits allege that TikTok and ByteDance failed to fully disclose that the company is subject to Chinese laws that mandate cooperation with intelligence activities of the People’s Republic of China and that TikTok aggressively collects sensitive user data. The lawsuits are ongoing in state court.

As we keep saying, social media platforms are not just websites or phone apps. These are multibillion dollar corporations owned and operated by investors and other interests. The fact that ByteDance is now valued at $300 billion and counting underscores just how powerful these tech giants have become.

Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.

Bioethics and Big Sheep: Guest Column

Nov 19, 2024John StonestreetBioethicsBioethics, Human Cloning

If cloning farm animals is illegal, should society clone children?

Don’t let anyone pull the wool over your eyes, sheep are big business. So big, in fact, they landed one 81-year-old Montana man in jail.

The Washington Post reported recently that Arthur Schubarth was sentenced to six months in federal prison for illegally cloning a giant species of sheep and using it to produce even bigger hybrids for lucrative canned hunts. In 2013, Schubarth acquired tissue from a Marco Polo argali, a rare and protected species of bighorn sheep from Kyrgyzstan. He then contracted with a cloning facility to create embryos of what he called “Montana Mountain King,” a 300-pound hybrid breed with the curling horns sought after by high-dollar hunters.

Schubarth then bred the Mountain King to North American bighorn sheep, resulting in an even larger hybrid species, which he began selling to captive hunting preserves for up to $10,000 a head. He also sold dozens of DNA samples to breeders around the country. So, it’s difficult to know just how many of these Jurassic Park hybrids there are.

Schubarth’s business venture violated numerous conservation and commerce laws. As one assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put it, he risked “introducing diseases and compromising the genetic integrity of our wild [bighorn] sheep populations.”

The bizarre story raises an important question: Why are we so good at recognizing and enforcing ethical limits when it comes to medical or genetic experimentation on animals, but not humans?

These two discussions were, at one point, connected. Remember Dolly the Sheep? It was 30 years ago that the cloned sheep made headlines. Hailed as the first “successful” experiment in cloning, Dolly sparked debate about the promises and limits of this technology, especially about if and how it should be used with humans. Buried in the press coverage was just how unsuccessful this success story was. Dolly only lived about half as long as a normal sheep and was the sole survivor among hundreds of attempts, many of which were deformed.

The implications for humans were among the main reasons that, several years later, then-President George W. Bush banned the cloning of human embryos. At the time, he was widely criticized for standing in the way of science and dashing the hopes of the disabled.

However, the years have vindicated Bush’s policy. The promised cures of human embryonic stem cells never materialized, even after the Obama Administration lifted the ban in 2009. By contrast, non-embryo-destructive methods of stem cell research have yielded hundreds of treatments.

Bush, in fact, approached the issue in a fundamentally different way than his critics and successor. His policy emerged after he convened a remarkable panel of experts. The President’s Council on Bioethics included not only scientists with the knowledge of how to clone and experiment on embryos, but philosophers, ethicists, legal scholars, and even theologians who asked whether we should do this; and if so, when and how. Their work, collected in a volume called Human Dignity and Bioethics, demonstrates the breadth of source material about human personhood and value that was consulted. In addition to loosening restrictions, President Obama replaced the theologians, philosophers, and ethicists from the President’s Council on Bioethics with more scientists and researchers.

The problem with that approach is even more obvious today, when technology has come so far. If an old guy in Montana can pull off a do-it-yourself sheepzilla, imagine what’s happening with human cloning in China. For that matter, compare the concern with Schubarth’s scientific meddling to the widespread indifference of human manufacturing in the United States. IVF, surrogacy, and gamete “donation” have made it possible to create children to-order, often for same-sex couples or those who’d simply rather outsource the work of pregnancy and birth. We buy, produce, and distribute children to couples, throuples, and other relational mix-and-match arrangements without an ethical care in the world. And who knows what technology will make possible tomorrow?

Whatever it will be, we’re not ready. The consistent trend in science is to plow ahead and save concerns about right and wrong for later. By the time someone turns up doing with humans what Arthur Schubarth did with sheep, it will be too late to hit the brakes.

In the presidential debate awhile back, Kamala Harris said we should “trust the experts.” What she didn’t clarify is “which experts?” It’s one thing to master a technique like cloning or IVF. It’s another to know whether to ever use that mastery, evaluate if and how it helps people flourish, and to know who is qualified to decide.

For those questions, we need those who make a habit of asking not only what’s possible or profitable, but what’s right, and what honors the value of every human made in God’s image. Dolly, the sheep nature never intended, got us asking these questions decades ago. Maybe that can happen again.