Skrmetti and More Transgender Cases

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

The 6-3 affirmance by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Skrmetti on June 18 was a decisive defeat for the transgender movement. The Court fully upheld a good Tennessee law banning transgender operations and treatments in children, and this conservative decision went further than it had to by declaring the law constitutional.

The pro-transgender side brought this appeal, apparently hoping for a Supreme Court ruling that would invalidate the Tennessee law and similar laws in at least 24 other states. Instead, the Court opens the door to additional states banning these surgeries and drug treatments.

Strident dissents by liberal justices on the Supreme Court are becoming a familiar pattern as 6-3 conservative decisions become the norm. On Monday, the same 3 liberal justices dissented with extreme dismay at a brief order by the Court majority that allows Trump to deport criminal migrants to other countries when their own country of origin won’t take them back.

The last election resolved the transgender and immigration issues as Trump campaigned on them at every rally. The Democrat Party ran and lost as the party that is pro-transgender and pro-illegal immigration, and no one should be genuinely surprised that the majority on the Supreme Court is rejecting the Democrats’ positions now.

Some liberals have been hopeful of bringing Justice Amy Coney Barrett to their side, after she ruled against Trump a couple of times. But her concurring opinion in Skrmetti last week was a complete rejection of the notion that there is any constitutional right that protects being transgender or transitioning to the opposite sex.

As a result of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, racial discrimination gets special scrutiny from the courts. Justice Barrett flatly rejected giving that sort of scrutiny to laws touching on transgender issues, and Justices Thomas and Alito agreed with her.

On Friday, the Eleventh Circuit, while considering the issue of court-ordered taxpayer funding of transgender treatments for a county employee in Lange v. Houston County, immediately requested supplemental briefing on the impact of the Skrmetti decision on this case from Georgia. An initial panel of that court had ordered the county, and thus the taxpayers, to fund these medical procedures, but that ruling is being reconsidered by the full court on which Republicans have a 7-5 majority.

Skrmetti is not even the only transgender case being decided by the Supreme Court this month. The case of Mahmoud v. Taylor has proven to be as contentious for the High Court to decide.

In Mahmoud, a group of Muslim and Christian parents object to the indoctrination of their children in public school about transgender and sexuality issues without the parents’ consent, and without the parents even receiving advance notice. This is where the transgender issue is resolved long-term: whether schools can brainwash kids about it, rewarding pro-transgender answers with an “A” while penalizing students who disagree.

There should be an even larger majority of Justices on the side of parents who object on religious grounds to LGBTQ+ indoctrination in this upcoming Mahmoud decision as there was on the side of Tennessee in Skrmetti. During an exhausting oral argument that lasted nearly two-and-a-half hours in April, none of the Justices could point to any harm in letting parents opt out of this indoctrination.

But parents need advance notice before they can opt out, and public schools are not doing that. One of the objectionable books being taught was about a puppy who got lost during a Pride Parade, which is a clever way to make students comfortable with these parades that promote transgender lifestyles.

Ordinarily very few parents exercise the existing rights that they have today in many states to pull their children out of objectionable instruction relating to sex or health. The opt-out process can be cumbersome and parents who object the most have already taken their kids out of public schools.

Requiring public schools to give the community notice of these objectionable materials would be helpful, as then taxpayers could see what their high property taxes are being spent on. Lower reading and math scores in schools should be of concern to taxpayers, and so should high amounts of objectionable indoctrination.

Biden-appointed Ninth Circuit Judge Jennifer Sung wrote a decision for that left-leaning court in favor of Oregon schoolteachers who had been fired for objecting to the transgender ideology being imposed in schools there. The district court had dismissed the lawsuit by these schoolteachers, but the Ninth Circuit held in their favor and reinstated the case, captioned Damiano and Medart v. Grants Pass School District No. 7.

The school board later reinstated the teachers to different positions that were inferior to the ones they had before they spoke out. The courageous teachers had used their own electronic devices, on their own time, to promote the “I Resolve” campaign with resolutions for ending restroom access by the opposite anatomical sex and stopping the practice of schools using a gender-different name for a child without parental consent.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Trump Will Punish California for Trans Travesty

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

California just gave first-place awards to a transgender athlete in a girls’ state track championship. “A Biological Male competed in California Girls State Finals, WINNING BIG, despite the fact that they were warned by me not to do so,” Trump retorted on Tuesday on Truth Social.

“As Governor Gavin Newscum fully understands, large scale fines will be imposed!!!” Trump continued. Democrats are allowing this trans invasion of girls’ sports in multiple blue states, and it is typically not disclosed or reported unless someone speaks out.

Males are usually taller, faster, and stronger than females, and these differences are substantial in track and field events. The world record in the men’s long jump is nearly 5 feet longer than that of women’s, while the men’s high jump world record is more than a foot higher than women’s.

Hurdles for boys’ races are a half-foot higher than hurdles for girls in high school, which creates an additional incentive for boys to cross over to compete in the girls’ races. In 2023, a Massachusetts high school won the state title with points awarded to its transgender hurdler in a girls’ race.

Oregon allows any biological male to “access athletics and activities” by asserting that his gender identity is that of a girl. Only some of the competitors themselves know who the transgender athletes are, as this can be concealed from parents, spectators, and conservative media.

The second and third-place finishers in a recent Oregon high school girls’ track event protested awarding first place to a transgender, by declining to stand on the awards podium. “I just want everyone to know that this isn’t just about me or the other girl to step down. It’s about the girl in ninth place who should have had a place on that podium,” Alexa Anderson of Tigard High School told ABC’s local affiliate, KATU.

“It’s about the girl who didn’t qualify for state because they were beat by a biological male in districts,” she added. “It’s about the integrity and fairness of women’s sports.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is term-limited out in 2026 while eyeing a longshot bid for the Democrat nomination for president in 2028, admits that this is unfair. “It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair,” Newsom told Trump-supporting Charlie Kirk, adding that “I totally agree with you.”

Yet Newsom has failed to protect girls’ sports in California, and let a transgender athlete win girls’ championships. The California school sports association did allow for the podium to be shared by the top girl competitors under a hasty rule change, but only after Trump objected.

While Democrats oppose protecting girls’ sports from the transgender invasion, they are funding a $20 million project to study why young men are shifting from Democrat to Republican. The shift in this demographic has steadily progressed since beginning in 2016, continuing through 2020, and then helping propel Trump to his victory by a wide margin in 2024, at the same time that the transgender invasion has increased.

Democrat politicians are doing what Planned Parenthood wants, as they have for more than half a century. Every House Democrat recently voted against removal of the $792.2 million in federal taxpayer money that has been flowing to Planned Parenthood, and Democrat senators will do everything they can to try to reinsert that funding back into the “big, beautiful bill” that has reached the Senate.

An analysis by the Heritage Foundation of Planned Parenthood in 2023 found that the abortion giant is “trying to corner the market in so-called transgender services,” and that its transgender approach likely “makes up the bulk of the dramatic rise” in its revenue and multi-billion-dollar assets.

More than a decade ago, Planned Parenthood first mentioned providing “hormone treatments for transgender patients,” disclosing 26 centers in 10 states for these treatments in its 2014-2015 annual report. By its 2021-2022 report, Planned Parenthood had “41 affiliates provide gender-affirming hormone therapy.”

Surgical abortions in clinics have been declining in the United States, for a variety of reasons. But Planned Parenthood has grown its revenue in the transgender world to more than make up for the shortfall.

An all-out attempt to change one’s gender can rack up bills easily exceeding $100,000 per person, which some attempt to shift to taxpayers to pay for. Last year the American Principles Project estimated that overall revenues for transgender drugs and surgeries exceeded $4.4 billion in 2023.

Harmeet Dhillon, the tough and savvy new head of the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Department of Justice, has threatened to sue California for allowing transgender athletes to win top prizes in girls’ sports competitions. At its championship track and field meet over the weekend, two first-place awards and one second-place award were given to a transgender athlete.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

“Transgender Lunacy” Remains a Big Issue

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Transgender activism was on the ballot in November and lost big in the presidential and U.S. Senate races. But there is no sign that Democrats are letting up on this issue, and on Monday Biden said he “strongly opposes” a restriction on transgender surgeries on kids of service members contained in the defense authorization bill, which many Democrats voted against for that reason.

Under Biden, transgenders serve openly in our military, but Trump can end that along with banning federally funded transgender drugs and surgeries on minors. “I will sign executive orders to end child sexual mutilation,” Trump announced in Phoenix on Sunday, and “get transgender out of the military and out of our elementary schools and middle schools and high schools.”

An estimated 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youths in America identify as transgender, and those numbers have been growing rapidly due to encouragement from schools, liberal professionals, and culture. Unfortunately, Democrat-appointed judges rule for the transgender side every time, as no Democrat crosses the agenda of Planned Parenthood which has expanded into the transgender business.

In its final hours, the Senate confirmed the 235th Biden-appointed judge to the federal courts, one more than it allowed Trump to appoint in his first administration. In addition, hundreds of federal judges appointed by Presidents Clinton and Obama are still deciding cases.

Two recent decisions within the same federal circuit illustrate the immense divide between Democrat and Republican-appointed judges on the transgender issue. A Republican-appointed judge in Pennsylvania held in favor of three mothers after a teacher taught transgender identity to first-graders, while a Democrat-appointed judge in New Jersey ruled against a father objecting to transgender facilitation without his consent.

In the New Jersey case, a widowed father was dismayed to learn that the public high school where his daughter was a freshman was using male pronouns for her without his knowledge or approval. He sued in federal court to stop this abuse of his parental rights, but the court ruled against him and in favor of the school.

The student’s interest in transitioning was supported by a school club known as “Students Advocating for Equality,” or SAFE. Its purported purpose is to “promote open discussion and awareness about modern cultures and topics surrounding intersectionality while aiming to make positive contributions to [the] community and school.”

Not only did school officials conceal from the father that they were referring to his daughter by male pronouns, but they also excluded from an email teachers who would be candid with the father. Even though gender dysphoria among teenagers is known to be potentially dangerous, the father was kept in the dark and the Biden-appointed federal judge ruled against his motion for a preliminary injunction, which is now on appeal.

Trump has ingeniously proposed that school principals be elected by a vote of parents instead of by tax-salaried administrators or school boards. “If you have a bad principal that’s not getting the job done, the parents will—under the Trump administration—be allowed to vote to fire that principal,” Trump told Moms for Liberty last summer.

Trump could force that change with strong regulations from his Department of Education, which could tie federal funding to schools that allow more parental control. Similarly, new transgender regulations of schools could deny federal funding where biological males are allowed to compete as transgenders in girls’ sports.

Last week NCAA president Charlie Baker appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Republican Senators Musgrave, Kennedy, and Hawley took the opportunity to challenge him about allowing male-bodied athletes to invade college women’s sports. Baker tried to deflect pointed questioning by saying he was just following federal law, but when Sen. Hawley challenged him to identify the law he was following, he could not do so because there is none.

Almost daily a women’s sports team defaults in a scheduled match because an opponent includes a transgender player who is a biological male. Lawsuits are pending over this issue, which the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly dodged while many lower courts are pro-transgender.

At oral argument in early December in a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging Tennessee’s sensible ban on transgender surgeries and drugs for minors, which 26 states have enacted, all three Democrat-appointed justices spoke against this good law. Earlier the liberal Montana Supreme Court blocked a conservative Montana law that protected children against transgender procedures.

As boys who say they identify as girls are allowed into girls’ locker rooms, in Westosha, Wisconsin, an outraged father declared “I find it unacceptable that a 14-year-old girl is required to change in front of a 16-year-old boy to complete a required class in school.” In Reno, Nevada, a boy identifying as a girl “gets a front-row seat to view naked females,” complained a girl’s grandmother.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Blocking Biden’s Transgender Mandate on Schools

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

In the last week, four different federal courts independently arrived at the same conclusion: Biden’s policy to impose his transgender ideology on public schools is unlawful. Biden insists, beginning with the upcoming school year, that every public school in America open its girls’ restrooms and locker rooms to boys who think they are girls.

More than half our country – 27 states – have sued to block this policy. Republican states seek to protect girls against this transgender invasion by biological boys, while Democrat politicians controlling the other 23 states promote the trans agenda.

California cities declare themselves to be sanctuaries for transgenders, and that state’s legislature also recently voted to prohibit school district policies of informing parents when their own children try to switch genders. Misnamed the SAFETY Act, AB 1955 is so anti-parent that it would result in schools concealing children’s gender confusion from their own parents.

In five blue states this spring, biological boys won state championships by competing in girls’ sports. Biden wants to extend this liberal madness nationwide, by misinterpreting a 1972 law that was intended to protect girls against discrimination in schools: Title IX.

Title IX states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” By redefining “sex” to include students’ changing views of their own gender, Biden bans any limits by public and charter schools on transgenders.

On Monday, federal judge Danny C. Reeves in Kentucky held that Biden’s new regulation is “arbitrary in the truest sense of the word,” and he blocked it in that state plus Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Last Friday another federal judge, in Louisiana, blocked Biden’s regulation from being enforced in Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Montana.

The election of Trump would shut down Biden’s lawless push for the trans agenda in our public schools. Trump has campaigned on his commitment to protect girls’ sports and locker rooms against boys who think or pretend they are girls.

In Boston, an all-Democrat panel of the First Circuit held on June 9 that 12-year-old Liam Morrison was properly prohibited by a public school from wearing a t-shirt that said, “There Are Only Two Genders.” He was further prevented from wearing that same t-shirt with the words “Only Two” covered by a piece of tape on which was written “CENSORED,” all of which the court held the school properly banned under its hate speech code.

But the Northeast and the West Coast do not have the final word on this issue. On June 11, a GOP-appointed federal judge in Fort Worth blocked Biden’s transgender school policy for all of Texas.

Judge Reed O’Connor held that the Biden Administration “lacks authority to redefine ‘sex’ in a way that conflicts with Title IX.”

A federal judge in Louisiana, Terry Doughty, held that Biden’s analysis wrongly focused on only the effect on transgender students, rather than girls who must then “use the bathroom, undress, and shower in the presence of persons who may identify as females but still have male biological parts.” Biden’s Department of Education “made no attempt to determine the effect on students having students who are biologically the opposite sex in their locker rooms and bathrooms.”

Judge Doughty further held that “the DOE declared in the Final Rule, with no explanation, that transgender students do not pose a safety risk for cisgender students.” The newly coined term for the vast majority of children, who are not transgendered, is to call them “cisgendered.”

More good news came last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Trump-appointed judges provided the 2-1 majority decision against Biden’s pro-transgender policy for schools, as embodied in Biden’s 2021 Title IX guidance.

This appellate decision protects 20 red states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia. Additional states, including Florida, Utah, and Wyoming, have filed lawsuits within their own jurisdictions.

Midwestern states, including Iowa and North Dakota, have sued in St. Louis within the conservative Eighth Circuit, and other lawsuits including Texas and Virginia mentioned above round out the total of 27. Prior rulings by the more liberal Fourth and Seventh Circuits held that there is a transgender right of access to girls’ restrooms under both Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

While some expect the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the widening divide in our country on this issue, that Court remains unwilling to get involved. Instead, it will be the upcoming presidential election that determines whether gender-confused boys will invade schoolgirls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and sports competitions.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Reversing the Birth Rate Decline

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

Cultures as different as Italy and South Korea are facing the same crisis: declining birth rates that have fallen far below what is needed to sustain a population and an economy.

Italy just reported another drop in its birth rate to its record low, decreasing by a startling 34.2% since 2008. There were nearly twice as many deaths as births in Italy last year, and the average number of children per woman has declined to only 1.2, far below the 2.1 necessary for a population to survive.

“Every year I look at the birthrates and it’s kind of depressing,” Elon Musk told Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni in Rome last year. “One can’t depend on other countries for immigration. Italy is the people of Italy. Please make more Italians.”

South Korea, a prosperous nation with more Christians than any other faith, is in panic mode as its birth rate per woman fell to only 0.72 in 2023 and is projected to fall further this year. The country we saved in the Korean War is on a path to self-destruction by failing to have enough children.

Measures being considered in South Korea are instructive because the United States is on a similar course, as our birth rate has continued to fall since Obama was elected president in 2008. Young women are the demographic most influenced by political ads, and billions have been spent by the Left in promoting every alternative other than starting a family and having children.

CBS News recently reported that a South Korean company Booyoung is providing employees with a bonus of $75,000 for each new child that they parent. South Korean tax law allows companies to treat such bonuses as business expenses up to that amount, while American tax law generally fails to incentivize having and raising children.

Booyoung Chairman Lee Joong-keun candidly predicts that if the birth rate decline in South Korea continues, then “Korea will face a crisis of national existence 20 years from now, including a decline in the economically productive population and a shortage of defense personnel to ensure national security and maintain order.”

The United States is not far behind. The American birth rate declined by nearly 25% between 2008 and 2022, to only about 1.6 per woman today.

Demographic trends are very difficult to reverse, as children from small families tend later to have small families or no children themselves. Political leaders in Italy and many other countries recognize the plummeting birth rates as a crisis.

Taiwan’s birth rate has fallen to only 0.87, far less than half of the 2.1 children per woman needed just to survive long-term. Although a conservative country, Taiwan has turned to liberal approaches such as more government-funded child care, which have never succeeded in boosting the birth rate.

Beginning in 2019, Hungary addressed its declining births by providing a $30,000 loan to newlyweds that is forgiven if they have three children, which makes more sense than Biden’s trillion dollars in student loans. Conservative policies by Viktor Orbán, the pro-Trump leader of Hungary, have increased its birth rate, which used to be the lowest in the European Union when he started and now exceeds the EU average.

Trump and the Republican Party could lead in promoting policies that encourage American families to have more children. Trump himself has a beautiful family with five children and ten grandchildren, and our country would benefit by hearing about pro-family childbearing as a campaign issue.

A pro-birth message fits well with the Republican platform of creating good jobs for Americans, which occurred from 1980 through 2007. The Obama-Biden policy of shipping our jobs to other countries while allowing in a flood of immigrants to take jobs here has been a factor in decreasing our birth rate.

Larger families typically require a good job for the husband as breadwinner in order to create a stable family life. That model, featured in many popular television shows from 1950 through the 1980s, has disappeared in the economy and in Hollywood.

Western liberals, led by then-First Lady Laura Bush, criticized Afghanistan during the U.S. occupation for not sending more women to higher education, but our birth rate is only one-third of Afghanistan’s. By contrast women comprise nearly 60% of U.S. college students, far outnumbering men there while racking up over a trillion dollars in student debt.

Studies show that, on average, the more time that women spend in higher education, the less likely they want to have children. Students are misled into thinking that advancement in educational degrees and corporate America will be more rewarding to them than having children, when it is family life that brings greater long-term benefits.

Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest men in the world, talks as much about the need to increase the birth rate as he does about own successes. Most world leaders, other than Democrat politicians, agree.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

Disappearing Motherhood: Who’s to Blame?

The Phyllis Schlafly Report
By John and Andy Schlafly

A British tabloid carried a grim headline Monday announcing “America’s fertility crash,” over an article detailing the precipitous drop in the U.S. birth rate during the last 15 years. The decline was greatest in Utah, whose birth rate fell by more than a third despite the Beehive State’s reputation for large families.

Ignoring such a dire long-term trend that harms the health and happiness of the American people, our media have spent most of 2023 promoting entertainment aimed at single young women, starting with Barbie. That blockbuster movie featured an unmarried woman without children, with merely a cameo appearance by one pregnant character who is portrayed as an outcast.

The Barbie phenomenon is joined by the female pop star Taylor Swift, whose record-setting concert tour caused an unprecedented meltdown at Ticketmaster. Now the film version has broken the box office record for a concert movie, drawing mostly young women to theaters where they dance on chairs and sing off-key rather than merely watching.

Taylor Swift, herself childless and nearly 34 years old, was asked when she turned 30 whether she wants to have children. She curtly replied, “I don’t really think men are asked that question when they turn 30, so I’m not going to answer that now.”

A man’s fertility, of course, doesn’t begin falling at age 30. But every young woman should be warned how much more difficult it becomes to have children as she moves through her 30s.

Taylor Swift won’t need children to support her financially in her old age, due to her fortune. But the future of our country and the “Swifties,” as her followers are called, is less rosy in our increasingly childless society.

The percentage of women under 45 having children has fallen to barely half today. Childless young adults will eventually become an elderly population dependent on public support, but Social Security works only if there are enough young workers to fund the system on a continuing basis.

For the most part, Swifties have not been attending these concerts on dates with young men. An estimated 90% of these concert fans are women, an imbalance so severe that it has caused havoc with the availability of restrooms at performance venues.

Our nation already has a record number of women and men who are single in the 18-29 age group: 34% of women and 63% of men. Many of them have given up on seeking a relationship.

This isolation is not healthy for our society, or for young women. Single women are obese at a rate of 7-12% more than married women, and Taylor Swift had to remove a reference to “fat” in one of her music videos last year to appease her fans.

Meanwhile, the number of men who have no close friendships has increased five-fold in the last 30 years, to 15%. The hordes of young men and women who are unmarried today are having difficulty finding partners who share their political views, while Democrat politicians play gender-gap politics for their benefit.

Married women typically vote Republican as married men do. But single women vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidates, in part because Democrats spend billions of dollars advertising to them.

The percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds who are married today is less than half of what it was a generation ago. In liberal Seattle, it is predicted that soon the number of older teenagers and adults who have never been married will surpass the number of married residents there.

Educated women are deciding not to have children at all. About 25% of women nearing the end of their childbearing age who hold at least a master’s degree are childless.

The decline in the birth rate is something that President Trump and the Republican Congress addressed over Democrat opposition back in 2017, by instituting a $2,000 annual tax credit for each child under age 17. But this child tax credit has fallen in real value due to inflation, and a boost in it during Covid was not extended beyond 2021.

This child tax credit is paltry compared with the benefits that every newborn American contributes to our country over a lifetime. In addition to military service and other sacrifices, the average American will pay $500,000 in taxes over his life, so the child tax credit should be far higher than $2,000.

Other countries have changed their policies to encourage more childbearing. Communist China replaced its one-child policy with a two-child policy in 2016, and then ended its two-child policy in 2021 in favor of promoting having three children.

Poland’s conservative-leaning government was just ousted from power in part because it allowed Poland’s birth rate to decline to its lowest level since World War II. Our minuscule, inflation-depleted child tax credit should likewise become an election issue as our birth rate plummets.

John and Andy Schlafly are sons of Phyllis Schlafly (1924-2016) and lead the continuing Phyllis Schlafly Eagles organizations with writing and policy work.

These columns are also posted on PhyllisSchlafly.com, pseagles.com, and Townhall.com.

The Left’s war against parental rights

Ed Martin writes:

An ideological campaign has taken shape, from schools and statehouses to courtrooms and even in to the White House, to push parents out of fundamental decisions involving their children and thus to destroy parental rights.

The Biden Administration is leading the charge. President Joe Biden himself has said, “There is no such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.” Similar sentiments have been echoed by Vice President Harris who has referred to American children as “our children” and White House Press Secretary Karin Jean-Pierre, who has similarly said, “These are our kids. They belong to all of us.”

NY Times trashes dads on Fathers Day

Philip Greenspun writes:

In a recent NYT piece, “Why Fathers Leave Their Children,” I think that he [David Brooks] has outdone himself. He looks at a phenomenon that is roughly 3 percent of GDP and never considers that cash incentives might influence behavior.

My comment on the piece:

Touching sentiments, but hard to see how they can be squared with statistics. Compared to other developed countries with no-fault divorce, the United States has roughly twice the percentage of children living without both parents. In winner-take-all jurisdictions within the U.S., such as New York, Massachusetts, California, roughly 75 percent of divorce/custody lawsuits are filed by women (and, in more than 90 percent of the cases, the court declares that the mother will be the primary or “winner” parent). “fathers abandon their own children”? That’s a touching story, but if you look at what actually happens a better summary is “fathers discarded by courts as secondary parents”.

A shorter summary would be “If you set up a family law system in which the only thing that you want from fathers is cash, probably cash is the main thing that you’re going to get from fathers.”

Yes, of course, financial incentives make a difference in this, as in everything else.

Every year, Father's Day brings us messages blaming fathers for all sorts of things, many of which are created by bad social policies.

Republican is the family values party

Steve Sailer writes:

Sine late 2004, I’ve been pointing out how the family values party does best in Presidential elections in family values states, which tend to be those with high rates of marriage, likely due to Affordable Family Formation. At the Electoral College levels, these correlations are extraordinarily high for the social sciences.

In other words, Democrats can win elections by destroying marriage and the family.

Women want to stay home with kids

The NY Times reports:

Why Women Quit Working: It’s Not for the Reasons Men Do ...

Certainly women who have dropped out are not typically encumbered in the same ways as many men. They are much less likely to have a criminal record or a disability. They are getting college degrees in greater numbers, and many of the sectors that they have traditionally dominated — lower-paid service jobs — are growing compared with middle-class occupations where men have ruled. Nor are they whiling away their jobless hours playing video games, which some economists suspect is helping to lure men away from the time clock.

But women are still the primary caregivers — for children, aging parents and ailing relatives.

“Child care, that’s my main thing,” Krystin Stevenson said, explaining why she had not yet returned to the work force.

Hardly any men who have dropped out say it is because they are helping with children or other family members, said Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Maybe this is news to the NY Times, but it has been true for centuries.