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Protecting Witch Doctors

Is the federal government going to go after activists who tell the truth about the sick 'gender affirmation' surgeries and chemical castrations done at many US children's hospitals?
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First off, anybody who threatens to physically harm anyone at Boston Children's Hospital or any other medical facility over what they're doing to children deserves what they get from law enforcement. Physical violence, and threats of physical violence, are a bright red line. This cannot be tolerated. So if those making physical threats to hospital personnel are who the Department of Justice is going after here, fine, I've got no problem with that.

Here's what the US Attorney in Massachusetts said yesterday:

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“Today’s news about the alleged threats directed at Boston Children’s Hospital transgender health program is disturbing to say the least.  Children deserve an opportunity to thrive and grow as their own authentic selves. Parents/guardians and health care providers who support them in that journey should be allowed to do so free of threats and harassment.  I want to make it clear that the Department of Justice will ensure equal protection of transgender people under the law. As Attorney General Merrick Garland recently said, “At the Justice Department, we view confronting hate crimes as both our legal and our moral obligation.” I have made confronting hate crimes a priority of my administration, establishing a unit dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of civil rights violations. We also have worked tirelessly to send a message to hate groups that the U.S. Attorney’s Office is open for business. Our newly established hotline, 1-83-END-H8-NOW has resulted in dozens of calls and we will continue to pursue all leads. While free speech is indeed the cornerstone of our great nation, fear, intimidation and threats are not. I will not sit idly by and allow hate-based criminal activity to continue in our District.”

Again, let me be clear: if you threaten violence against the hospital or hospital personnel, I don't feel sorry for you if the law comes down on your head.

But given that we are dealing with an institution (the DOJ) captured by the ideological left, which believes, as was taught by Cher, that "words are like weapons," then we have every reason to be concerned that the State is going to go after people for speaking truths it finds ideologically inconvenient. What do they mean by "hate crimes"? Do they mean that the power of the US Government will be used to silence those who speak out about the despicable evil that Boston Children's, and other hospitals around the country, are doing to children and minors?

What we're seeing is that when activists like Chris Rufo, Matt Walsh, Libs of TikTok, Billboard Chris, and others simply point out what these hospitals are doing, usually using promotional materials and documents produced by these very people, the hospitals and their defenders go berserk. They are eager to promote these wicked practices, but when ordinary people see them and are rightly disgusted by them, these progressive institutions lose their minds.

If you call it "gender affirmation surgery," you're golden. If you call it sexually mutilating children, well, you are a thought criminal. Look:

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You should know that these hospitals and their allies in the media (see here) often lie about what they do to keep the public from being alarmed about these grotesque, Mengele-esque abuses:

Readers, you need to understand that this stuff is happening everywhere, and that medical, media, and perhaps even governmental institutions don't want you to know about it -- unless, of course, you draw the ideologically correct conclusions.

Do you know that in some states, the law grants minors the right to have sexual reassignment treatment without their parents' consent? Abigail Shrier wrote last summer about it. Excerpt:

Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

Did you know about this? Probably not: our media have been ideologically captured too, and would regard their role in this controversy as managing the Narrative. More and more school systems and individual teachers are observing policies and practices that colonize the minds of children with gender ideology, and do so while explicitly keeping parents in the dark about what's going on.

When I was researching Live Not By Lies, I discovered that it was common practice in Communist regimes for the State to regard parents as the enemy, and to interpose itself between them and their children. What I could not have imagined when writing that book is that the State in our time would do that so that these ghouls would be able to convince kids to mutilate their bodies permanently, with surgery, chemicals, or both, and then get away with it.

Can you trust your family doctor anymore, or the hospital? Really?

The ugly fact is that you can no longer automatically trust your children's pediatrician or your children's schools. This gender ideology cult has captured these professions and institutions. This is NOT to say that all pediatricians and all teachers agree with it! I'm sure most don't. But all it takes for ideological capture to happen is for the radicals to gain control, in part by intimidating everybody else within the institution into silence.

In far too many places in this country, the medical profession and the teaching profession are enemies of your family, and your children. And now, it might be the case that the State is aligning itself with them. If you don't think this can happen in America, you need to familiarize yourself a) with what's going on right now (don't wait for the legacy media to tell you; it won't), and with the history of eugenics in the early 20th century. Back then, all the most progressive forces in the country favored eugenics. Big business, philanthropists, industrialists, even Mainline Protestant pastors. It was "following the science". About twenty years ago, the scholar Christine Rosen published a fascinating history called Preaching Eugenics, about how mainstream religious leaders got caught up in promoting this stuff. From a review:

Indeed, eugenics became a key precept of the Social Gospel, the reformist Christian movement of that era. Embracing Galton’s science with fervor, religious leaders of all tendencies incorporated eugenics into a broad program aimed at eliminating poverty and rooting out moral degeneracy.

By about 1910, ministers across the United States were pressing for purity reforms, promoting marriage counseling, and giving eugenic child-rearing advice. More coercive tactics were also adopted. Walter Taylor Sumner, dean of Chicago’s Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul and a disciple of the feminist social reformer Jane Addams, decreed in 1912 that he would marry no couple without a “certificate of health” from a reputable physician. As churches and synagogues across the country followed suit, a number of states began to enshrine marriage certification in law. Meanwhile, other eugenically-minded social reformers pressed for laws mandating the sterilization of criminals and the segregation of the “feebleminded” into colonies cut off from the rest of society.

For several decades, efforts like these met with considerable success. The enthusiasm of religious leaders for race improvement culminated in the 1920’s with the establishment of the American Eugenics Society, an organization that explicitly compared its task with the “founding and development of Christianity.” As membership grew more than tenfold in its first decade, the society published a Eugenics Catechism extolling the mystical virtues of the human germplasm and downplaying the unpleasant aspects of negative plans like sterilization.

More:

[W]hat stands out from this history is the stark truth that eugenics in this country was a cause célèbre not of fascists and hate-mongers but of a circle that understood itself to comprise the enlightened, the forward-thinking, the best people in the best churches. It was part and parcel of a progressive social program that included temperance, women’s suffrage, labor reforms, the living wage, and birth control. And it was preached from pulpits across the country and exercised broad ecumenical and inter-religious appeal: when the American Eugenics Society sponsored biennial sermon contests in the late 1920’s, entries flooded in from Protestant preachers of various denominations as well as from Reform rabbis and Catholic priests.

Ironically enough, it was the opponents of eugenics, particularly religious fundamentalists, who were derided as ignorant, superstitious, and unscientific. When eugenic legislation was proposed, it was the Roman Catholic Church that mounted the staunchest defense of individual liberty, citing the supremacy of the natural right to marry and procreate over the state’s interest in promoting racial fitness.

That's right: the fundies and the Catholic hierarchy saved the poor and the weak from the progressives who wanted to "improve" them. It was only when the world saw what the Nazis did with eugenics theory that it fell into total disrepute. One last quote:

In this light, it might be tempting to regard eugenics as a vaguely sinister pseudoscience, like phrenology or Lysenkoism. But in at least one respect, that would be a serious mistake. Although the eugenics movement of the 1910’s and 20’s was replete with unsavory assumptions—not to mention bizarre and dubious theories—the reformers who embraced eugenics with such zeal had only a superficial interest in the supposed details of the science. As Rosen points out, their aim was rather more pragmatic: namely, to cure the hereditary ills of society by promoting physical and psychological fitness.

And here we are today, with advocates of this gender ideology cult saying that we have to chop the breasts off of healthy minor girls and castrate healthy minor boys for the sake of promoting their physical and psychological fitness.

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Scuds Lonigan
Scuds Lonigan
The thing I find most fascinating the is the equating of genital mutilation with authenticity.
The following is from American Heritage dictionary.

1) Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance, or belief.
2) Being so in fact; not fraudulent or counterfeit.
3) Executed in a manner so as to produce legal effectiveness.

It's as though everybody's nuts in the head.
schedule 2 years ago
    Rob G
    Rob G
    It's Lockean individualism run amok, i.e., Kennedy's "sweet mystery of life" dogma. As Rod says, see Trueman's 'Rise and Triumph...' or 'Strange New World.'
    schedule 2 years ago
JON FRAZIER
JON FRAZIER
Seems to me that the response should be a politically engaged one, specially (as I have suggested before) state level referenda to ban such surgeries and treatments on minors without parental consent. While the public is conflicted on the trans issue in general, I suspect something like this would find sufficient support to pass and with the current make up of the Supreme Court one need not worry about "emanations and penumbras" interfering. But I have yet to hear of any movement to get that sort of thing on the ballot. Instead too many (and yes, this does include Rod alas) are just sitting around wringing their hands.
schedule 2 years ago
Michael Cole
Michael Cole
I notice that a lot of these discussions talk a lot about children getting medical procedures without parental consent. But it is a sad fact that there are many parents caught up in the transgender craze who would consent. If parents bring a 13 year old girl to a doctor and say, "Mary has decided she's a boy and we now call her Mario. When can we arrange to get her breasts cut off?", we don't want to say that the parental consent makes the procedure acceptable. We should have strict rules about what doctors may and may not do with or without parental consent.

Conversely there should be situations where the minor should be able to overrule parents' objection. For example if the same hypothetical 13 year old Mary has parents who are idiot antivaxers, but she wants to get the vaccines such as polio, DTP, measles, etc. she should have gotten before starting elementary school, she should have a way to overrule the parents.
schedule 2 years ago
    JON FRAZIER
    JON FRAZIER
    As they say the making of laws is like the making of sausages-- don't expect it to be immaculate. And yes, we all have to settle for half loaves.
    In matters of solid public interest, or to prevent clear and present danger to the child, parental consent laws do have to be relaxed, and I think (or at least hope) we all grasp that.
    schedule 2 years ago
      Michael Cole
      Michael Cole
      I have struggled with the question of when and how much the state should intervene on behalf if a child. Here is a scenario: I have a low opinion of veganism. Theoretically, nutritionally expert people could make such a diet adequate, though supplements of B12 are probably needed. Suppose some idiotic vegan parents have a child. A doctor judges that the child is badly nourished, sickly, and suffering somewhat stunted growth from inferior nutrition, but not hospitalizable with immediately dangerous, severe malnutrition. Just how bad would this situation have to be before the authorities are entitled to overrule the parents’ ideas about how to feed their child?
      schedule 2 years ago
        JON FRAZIER
        JON FRAZIER
        As an aside, as an Orthodox Christian I eat a semi-vegan diet (because our fast diets are basically vegan). But yes, I do take vitamin B complex.
        schedule 2 years ago
Rob G
Rob G
A friend from the UK tells me that not only has the Tavistock Clinic set to close, but that it appears that there are going to be multiple lawsuits from parents, possibly over 1,000, against the clinic. That's a good sign.
schedule 2 years ago