John Stonestreet – Page 12

Guest Author: If You Give a Kid a Phone, You Give a Kid …

Oct 9, 2023John StonestreetDecencyPornography

In an article at The Guardian, theater director Abbey Wright described talking with 10,000 children and teenagers about the impact of pornography on their lives. She was careful not to tell young children more than they knew, asking them simply, “What is bad about the internet?” Still, she was shocked how many described pornography finding them.

Children as young as six recalled popups and ads placed in otherwise innocent content. Some were shown porn by friends or siblings. Yet many parents remain naïve about what their kids are seeing.

One teenager offered this reality check: “If you put a phone in a child’s hand, you are putting porn in a child’s hand.”

There’s more to the fight for the souls of our kids than keeping phones and tablets away from unsupervised children, but there is not less. The average age of porn exposure is 12, and the availability of internet browsing devices is the most reliable predictor that a child will be exposed. Don’t take the risk. It’s not worth their innocence or wellbeing.

Guest Column: Tiny Forests

Oct 2, 2023John StonestreetEthicsEthics

According to Cara Buckley with The New York Times, a growing number of “tiny forests” are appearing across urban areas in the U.S.

In addition to absorbing carbon dioxide, reducing water runoff, and providing homes for wildlife, “[T]iny forests can help lower temperatures in places where pavement, buildings and concrete surfaces absorb and retain heat from the sun.”

The concept was pioneered by Japanese ecologist Akira Miyawaki and suggests that people are the best stewards of nature. What the world needs is not some return to vast, unspoiled “wilderness” by massively reducing the human population, as so many suggest. Instead, we need more of this: creating space for people to use their ingenuity, resources, and innovation to increase creation’s fruitfulness.

Our screens and concrete jungles disconnect us from God’s creation, while bad ideas about “nature” and the environment treat humans as its biggest problem. But humans were created to care for the rest of creation. In fact, only humans can.

“Egg Producers” or Moms?

Sep 11, 2023John StonestreetTransgenderTransgender

According to The Daily Mail, the Biden administration’s health secretary recently endorsed a gender clinic in Alaska. The secretary is a man who identifies as a woman. The clinic advocates for replacing the term “mother” with “egg producer.”

Somehow “Happy Egg Producer Day!” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Mother’s Day.” As a colleague of mine noted when she heard the story, “That really is The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Language matters. Especially from people who occupy positions of cultural power, from the media who call this man a “she,” to politicians who claim he is a powerful woman, to a clinic obscuring reality. When they detach from reality, incoherent and dangerous ideas like this are the result.

Reality, however, has hard edges, and neither our bad ideas nor our bad language can change that. The farther afield from reason and science our cultural elites wander, the more revolutionary it will be to say what is true.