EFA Rules Approved, Teacher Labor Union Donates to Keep Ballot Initiative Process Wide Open, and More: New This Week

Current Events,
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Here’s a quick recap of the week’s top stories from Family Council and our friends:

From Family Council

💵 Teacher Labor Union Gives Nearly $1M to Arkansas Ballot Measure Campaign. On Monday, Arkansas Ethics Commission filings revealed an out-of-state group gave nearly $1 million to a campaign to place the Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment on the November ballot. The measure would amend the Arkansas Constitution to keep the ballot initiative process wide open and prevent the state legislature from enacting safeguards against petition fraud and other offenses. Keep Reading.

🏛️ Lawmakers Approve EFA Rules Despite Homeschoolers’ Concerns. On Monday, a legislative subcommittee approved a new slate of Educational Freedom Account (EFA) rules despite strong concerns voiced by homeschoolers in the EFA program. The new rules are slated to take effect July 1. Keep Reading.

🏫 Data Shows 141 Arkansas Students Took Academic Study of the Bible Courses this Year. Data from the Arkansas Department of Education shows 141 public school students enrolled in courses to study the Bible academically this school year. Keep Reading.

💉 Poll: Most Americans Say Suicide Is Wrong — But Many Support Physician-Assisted Suicide Anyway. A new Gallup poll shows most Americans believe suicide in general is morally wrong, but opinions are split over physician-assisted suicide. Keep Reading.

💊 Ethicists Argue People Who Want to Starve Themselves to Death Should be Eligible for Assisted Suicide. Last month, three prominent bioethicists published a paper in the journal Bioethics arguing that people who try to commit suicide via self-starvation and dehydration should be eligible for “terminal sedation” — which other experts argue would be nothing more than assisted suicide. The column underscores the “slippery slope” that assisted suicide leads to. Keep Reading.

🍼 Republican Congressmen Introduce Measures to Prevent Sex-Offenders, Foreign Nationals from Acquiring Children Through Surrogacy. Earlier this month, more than a dozen GOP congressmen co-sponsored legislation preventing sex-offenders from acquiring children through surrogacy and prohibiting foreign nationals from entering into surrogacy contracts in the U.S. Keep Reading.

📉 Support for Sex-Change Procedures, Polygamy Falls Among Democrats: Gallup. Last week pollsters at Gallup released a survey showing support for sex-change procedures and polygamy has fallen significantly among Democrats over the past year. Keep Reading.

From Our Friends

The Wholesome Side of Social Media. From Breakpoint.

14 AGs Press EPA on Abortion Pill Water Contamination. From Daily Citizen.

MLB Players are Right to Reclaim the Rainbow. From Daily Citizen.

Louisiana Dad Poisons His Daughter with Abortion Drug in Latest Mifepristone Horror Story. From The Washington Stand.

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

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Guest Column: Unlaughable Comedy

Culture,

Over 13 million people watched the Netflix celebrity roast of comedian Kevin Hart. Irreverent insults are part of roasting, but the recent series of celebrity roasting has featured increasingly outrageous and often profane jokes, from mocking abortions to vilifying women. However, Hart’s roast has won the prize for the vilest yet.  

The extremely inappropriate comments made at this roast about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, for example, demonstrate how debased mainstream comedy has become. Even worse, in a social media context, comedy is captive to likes and shares, so the desire to provoke and shock is ever escalating. So, what is the proper approach to comedy? Can the current state of comedy be redeemed?  

Sociologist Philip Rieff coined a unique term for understanding many elements of modern culture, including debased comedy. Cultures produce artifacts. Cultures without a moral center produce what he called “deathworks,” or cultural artifacts that don’t build up but only tear down the sacred orders of a civilization. Roasts like the one for Hart are a deathwork, leveraging humor for no constructive noble or redeeming purpose. It’s just about degradation or, to borrow Carl Trueman’s term, desecration all the way down.  

Humor is a unique, human characteristic that reflects the creativity and world-making for which humans were made. As such, it should rise above the mere profane and childish.   

A Christian worldview offers the kind of moral framework humor needs, including the ability to discern between what one should laugh at and what one should not. If, on the other hand, nothing is sacred, then nothing is off-limits. Truly creative comedy operates within a worldview that identifies what is humorous while recognizing—and respecting—what is sacred. Put simply, if everything is funny, then nothing is sacred.  

A notable exception to the current comedic trend is Nate Bargatze, a comedian who professes belief in Christ and stands out from virtually everyone else in his field. Bargatze’s humor is clean and avoids morally objectionable content. And yet, he has emerged as the top grossing comic in the world. His Saturday Night Live skit “Washington’s Dream” and its sequel, “Washington’s Dream 2,” became two of the most popular SNL skits in recent memory, with the first sketch now having amassed an amazing 30-plus million views on YouTube. In it, his comedic genius highlighted quirks of American culture that we hardly notice.  

Or consider the Babylon Bee and its humorous satire on real-life events. Bee humor includes both inside jokes, that point out the foibles of the Christian community, and outside jokes, that expose dangerous ideas that need to be taken captive. A common experience after reading a Bee headline is to chuckle and then to think, “That sounds like it could be real.” That’s because they use satire to speak truth from the Christian worldview in a post-truth culture when others do not. As Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon said at our 2025 Great Lakes Symposium, humor is effective as a “vehicle for truth delivery,” and to “expose an absurdity for what it is.”    

The gulf between comedy that acknowledges the sacred and comedy that denies the sacred reveals to us truth about reality. In the Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis described how modern attempts to remove man’s moral discernment has formed “men without chests.” As he put it: 

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. 

Notice Lewis’ words, “we laugh at honor.” In a morally castrated culture, nothing is truly sacred. In such a scenario, nothing is off limits from what is considered “funny.” When the counterbalance of a Christian worldview is removed, and the laughing gas is emitted, we laugh at anything—even the honorable.  

Such a perspective brings to mind the less-than-morally upright comedian, Woody Allen, who sometimes closed his routines by saying, “I’m sorry I can’t leave you with something positive—would you accept two negatives?” At least Allen’s joke acknowledged the objective nature of mathematics. Still, since so much modern comedy is deathworks, there is opportunity for something better. Comedy that’s not only funny but, properly speaking, holy.

Copyright 2026 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.

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