Arkansas Supreme Court Rules Against Marijuana Amendment
The following is a press release from Family Council Action Committee.
Little Rock, Ark. — On Monday the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that the Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment of 2024 failed to qualify for the November ballot.
Family Council Action Committee Executive Director Jerry Cox issued a statement, saying, “This is a good decision. The constitution is our state’s most important governing document, and any effort to change it must go through a rigorous and thorough process. The bar should be high, and any effort that doesn’t meet it shouldn’t make the ballot. Today’s Arkansas Supreme Court decision helps protect the integrity of our election process and our constitution.”
Cox called the marijuana measure’s wording confusing and deceptive. “This marijuana amendment is a fatally flawed effort to bring recreational marijuana to Arkansas. It would make more than 30 changes to Arkansas’ constitution. This amendment would give a handful of businesses a monopoly over an unregulated marijuana industry, and it would remove important restrictions that protect children from marijuana marketing. A measure this bad simply has no business being on the ballot or in the constitution.”
Cox praised the various groups and leaders who opposed marijuana amendment Issue 3. “Governor Sanders, Secretary of State John Thurston, and Attorney General Tim Griffin all worked hard to uphold Arkansas law regarding ballot issues. Groups like Stronger Arkansas, Protect Arkansas Children, and Arkansas Farm Bureau opposed Issue 3. Family Council Action Committee coordinated with volunteers in every county across the state to oppose Issue 3 in churches and communities. Without these groups and individuals, the sponsors of Issue 3 might have collected enough valid petition signatures to place the amendment on the ballot. We want to thank everyone who helped stop this fatally flawed measure.”
Cox said Family Council Action Committee will continue opposing marijuana in Arkansas. “Marijuana is a multibillion dollar industry. Since 2022, big businesses have spent millions of dollars trying to legalize marijuana in Arkansas. They have a lot of money at stake in this issue. That is why Family Council Action Committee plans to continue fighting marijuana in Arkansas. Our state simply does not need another drug problem.”
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14,000 Children Are Forever Harmed: Guest Column
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.
Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.