Author: Penna Dexter

Penna Dexter
Why aren’t our 20 and 30-year-olds having more children? One reason is economic. Should the U.S. government consider subsidizing childbearing?
Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University suggests some less expensive and non-taxpayer-funded ways to convince Americans to have more kids. He lists these ideas in an article in National Review entitled, “We Need More Babies.”

First, transporting kids is expensive.  One shocker to families expecting a third child is learning that the back seat in many cars and SUVs is not wide enough for three car seats. Transporting a third or  fourth child could necessitate a minivan or something larger.Robert Whaples points to research by economist Steve Levitt showing “that child safety seats are no better than seat belts in reducing fatalities among children ages two to six.” Yet, in many states, six-year-olds, who are under a certain weight, are required by law to ride in car seats. Dr. Whaples recommends relaxing those laws.

Secondly, and importantly, the cost of housing can deter couples from planning a family. Many localities have zoning laws that prevent affordable homes from being built. Dr. Whaples says relaxing these restrictions would be “pro-natal.”
Student debt is another reason couples delay having children. As a university economics department chair, Dr. Whaples has some solutions that could be implemented at the college level. One is for “middle-tier colleges” to shift resources from research to teaching. Another is to “mainstream the idea of having students graduate in three years, which would cut their debt and give them an extra year to achieve career goals before starting a family.”
Another idea involves potential grandparents. Dr. Whaples suggests scaling down the posh wedding and, instead saving to help the newlyweds afford a future grandchild.

The birth rate is dropping partially because many young people no longer see marriage as a given. Parents, churches, and governments should do what they can to fix that situation.

Need More Babies Read More

Penna Dexter
Does it seem to you that things that should be working well are not. Not everything. And not all the time. Just certain things don’t work the way we used to expect in America. Electrical grids. Supply chains. Our medical system. Airlines and airports. The service in some retail stores.
Am I crazy for thinking this? Not according to institutional investor and writer Harold Robertson, who says, “America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.”  But why? He explains in an extensive article for Palladium Magazine entitled “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis.”
“The core issue,” he writes, “is that changing political mores have established the systemic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent.” By the early 20th century, it had become the norm to emphasize the evaluation and selection of people based on ability and merit rather than on wealth, class, or political connections. We saw the rise of the SAT and other aptitude tests which “revolutionized college admissions” by allowing universities to find the best and brightest.
“By the 1960’s,” he continues, “the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement.”  Diversity for protected groups became a key priority. In fact, diversity began to trump meritocracy when the two came into conflict. Mr. Robertson says an erosion in “institutional competency” ensued.  He points to “several high-profile enforcement actions against employers” that resulted in their abandoning certain tests and methods of screening potential hires for ability.
Employers turned to degrees from top universities to help them in choosing who to hire. But diversity requirements soon ushered in differing entrance standards for different groups and, increasingly, a lower reliance on standardized tests. Even standards for selecting doctors “have been weakened to promote diversity.”
Diversity requirements are causing America’s interdependent systems, which have brought us history’s highest standard of living, to deteriorate.  We must protect what Harold Robertson describes as the “competency that made those systems possible.”

Competence Crisis Read More

Penna Dexter
Hundreds of parents showed up recently to oppose a piece of legislation being considered in the California State Senate. The bill pertains to custody battles that involve transgender-identifying children. The version that passed the State Assembly in March requires judges to favor the parent who “affirms” a trans child in his or her gender identity over one who does not.  The bill moved over to the California Senate and recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party line vote.
Then, the bill’s co-authors upped the ante.
As if the bill’s bias toward the gender-affirming parent were not bad enough, before the vote in the Judiciary Committee, Assemblywoman Lori Wilson — who has a transgender child —and Senator Scott Wiener — who is gay — updated the bill’s language to make parents’ “non-affirmation” of a child’s gender identity a violation of the California Family Code’s standard for the health, safety, and welfare of a child. This means non-affirming parents could be subject to claims of child abuse.
The bill provides no definition of “non-affirming.” In each case, a judge would have to make the determination.
Over 100 California residents testified against AB 957. Only 17 voiced their support.
In her testimony against the bill, attorney Erin Friday said she’s the “mother of a girl who used to believe she was a boy. She said, “AB 957 is the first bill in the nation to codify into law that a parent who does not affirm the gender identity of their child is abusive.” She emphasized the danger, stating, “There is no nuance in this bill.”
Senator Scott Wilk, one of two Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, has served in the Legislature for 11 years and sees it increasingly putting government between parents and children. He says he believes this bill will result in “children being taken away from the home.” He warned parents: “If you love your children, you need to flee California.” 

Failure to Affirm Read More

Penna Dexter
What happens when a Boston middle school holds a Pride Month Spirit Day complete with rainbow streamers, Pride banners and invitations to students and faculty to wear rainbow clothing in support?
In bright blue Massachusetts, one might expect that most kids would get onboard. But that is not what happened on June 2nd at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, a Boston suburb. As The Washington Stand reports, “Some students not only refused to bow to the rainbow idol, but also organized a counterprotest.” Groups of students wore red, white, blue or black, including face paint. They chanted, “U.S.A. are my pronouns.” Some of them got feisty and tore down decorations and ripped them up and stuffed them in water fountains.
The school’s principal, Cari Perchase wrote a letter to parents stating she was “extremely disheartened” by the protest. She complained that the protesting students “glared intimidatingly at faculty members showing pride.” She said celebrating students were shamed, causing some to remove rainbow stickers or cover up Pride messages on their clothing.
The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold observed that, the protesting “middle schoolers responded to peer pressure to celebrate LGBT Pride with peer pressure against celebrating LGBT Pride — and they succeeded.”
Principal Perchase’s letter prefaced her apology to Marshall Simonds LGBT-identifying students with this statement: “When one individual or group of individuals’ beliefs and actions result in the demeaning of another individual or group, it is completely unacceptable.” But, more than a few Marshall Simonds students do not buy into LGBT ideology. Doesn’t the school’s insistence that they celebrate Pride month “demean” them?
The Burlington Superintendent of Schools also sent out a letter. In it, he insisted. “We embrace everyone for who they are.”  Then he encouraged citizens to “join us in taking a stand against homophobia.”
To stand against oppressive, in-your-face contempt for traditional morality and simple biology is not homophobic. It’s courageous.  

Middle Schoolers’ Pushback Read More

Penna Dexter
In a postmodern society, as more and more people deny biblical and biological truth, a vacuum arises in which individuals come up with their own truth. Consider the transgender movement and its requirements. A person who claims a different gender from that in which they were born is saying, ‘I have my truth and you must accept it.’ We shouldn’t.
To “affirm” a person’s gender confusion may sound respectful, even compassionate. Former FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly thought so. She recently explained: “I was an early proponent of using preferred pronouns as far back as the early 2000’s. Of saying ‘she’ when I knew the truth was ‘he.’ It seemed harmless and I had no wish to cause offense.”
Broadcasting on FOX, and later at NBC, she supported trans people’s right to use restrooms of their choice. She employed their terminology: “gender assigned at birth,” “gender-affirming care.” She said, “I wanted to be supportive of those who were suffering.”
By 2020, Megyn Kelly had her own podcast where she interviewed female athletes and learned they are also suffering.  She says, “Competing against boys who claimed they were trans was dejecting and often near-impossible.”
Megyn Kelly has evolved in her assessment of the harms that result when a society bows to the transgender lobby: Harms to female athletes. Harms to gender-confused students and to parental rights. Physical harms from assaults by trans women on real women in bathrooms and prisons. Harms to the bodies of young people from medications and grotesque surgeries. She says, “for far too long, I failed to see the harm and therefore helped cause it.”
Megyn Kelly promises to no longer use preferred pronouns. She says, “I have resolved to base my conversations around gender on the same tenets that already govern my life: truth and reality.
Megan Kelly’s misguided compassion led her to accede to the trans agenda’s demands. It was destructive. Her reversal exhibits true compassion. 

Megyn’s Newfound Compassion Read More

Penna Dexter
One purpose of the National Religious Broadcasters Convention is to help Christian ministries, especially media organizations, figure out how to meet the challenges they face in getting their message out. This year, a key topic was the cancel culture and how to fight back against it.
In his keynote address at the opening session, Franklin Graham described how Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have taken steps to deal with cancellations by service providers like banks and payment processors. He warned leaders of the organizations gathered in Orlando, Florida, that the Left’s efforts to deprive Christian organizations of their funding could destroy their work if they do not take action to protect against it.
The risk of being cancelled applies, not only to large media ministries, but also to smaller online news outlets, individual journalists, podcasters, and even everyday Christians posting comments on social media. For them, cancellation can range from lost opportunities for communication to loss of livelihood.
The Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody moderated a helpful panel.
Panelist Allie Beth Stuckey, host of the popular podcast Relatable, said cancel culture is the fruit of moral relativism. Standards are arbitrary and are constantly changing. Christians must reject this because we have the unchanging standards of God’s Word. “We have the right and responsibility,” she said, “to say that which is good, right, and true.“  She reminded the audience that, throughout history, the Church has been persecuted, but the gospel cannot be cancelled.
To a question about cancellation by social media outlets, syndicated radio host Dennis Prager responded that 45% of young Americans say, ‘I believe in free speech, but not hate speech.’ Mr. Prager says, “Hate speech is anything the Left disagrees with.”
The Left claims compassion as its motive for curtailing certain speech. Allie Stuckey calls this “weaponized empathy.”  She said, “Ruining an individual’s life for something they said is the opposite of compassion.”
Cancel culture is the opposite of freedom.

Cancel Culture Read More

Penna Dexter
In 2015 the United States Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, struck down the nation’s marriage laws, bringing same sex marriage to every state.
Same sex marriage: That’s what LGBTQ activists said they wanted. But they moved on very quickly. Within a year the quest to mainstream transgenderism was underway. First there were high-profile battles over bathroom policies. Soon biological males were participating in women’s sports. Then the Left was insisting that everyone in the corporate world, in education and in the media respect gender-confused individuals’ preferred pronouns. The trans agenda was quickly being implemented by major institutions of our society. It seems to have happened so quickly.
Journalist Brandon Showalter reports for The Christian Post on the trans phenomenon. He has learned that it didn’t rise as suddenly as it may seem. He told an audience at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention that deconstruction of the gender binary has been a long-running goal of gender and queer theorists.
This new gender ideology has gained strength recently because the medical industry has learned of the tremendous amount of money to be made. Place a teenager on puberty blockers and you have begun the process that leads to cross sex hormones and surgery — often several very expensive surgeries. Once a transition is complete, a person is enslaved to the medical/industrial complex for life.
Mr. Showalter and others point to the totalitarian nature of this agenda. This movement is divisive. It assaults language and our way of communication. It inserts itself between children and their parents. It destroys the minds and bodies of young people.
The human body is good and our spiritual leaders should be saying that. Transgender ideology is an attack on the very image of God. Despite what troubled teens and their parents are being told, no one has ever been born in the wrong body.
We must summon the courage to tell them the truth.

Transgenderism’s Speedy Rise Read More

Penna Dexter
In 2015 the United States Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, struck down the nation’s marriage laws, bringing same sex marriage to every state.
Same sex marriage: That’s what LGBTQ activists said they wanted. But they moved on very quickly. Within a year the quest to mainstream transgenderism was underway. First there were high-profile battles over bathroom policies. Soon biological males were participating in women’s sports. Then the Left was insisting that everyone in the corporate world, in education and in the media respect gender-confused individuals’ preferred pronouns. The trans agenda was quickly being implemented by major institutions of our society. It seems to have happened so quickly.
Journalist Brandon Showalter reports for The Christian Post on the trans phenomenon. He has learned that it didn’t rise as suddenly as it may seem. He told an audience at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention that deconstruction of the gender binary has been a long-running goal of gender and queer theorists.
This new gender ideology has gained strength recently because the medical industry has learned of the tremendous amount of money to be made. Place a teenager on puberty blockers and you have begun the process that leads to cross sex hormones and surgery — often several very expensive surgeries. Once a transition is complete, a person is enslaved to the medical/industrial complex for life.
Mr. Showalter and others point to the totalitarian nature of this agenda. This movement is divisive. It assaults language and our way of communication. It inserts itself between children and their parents. It destroys the minds and bodies of young people.
The human body is good and our spiritual leaders should be saying that. Transgender ideology is an attack on the very image of God. Despite what troubled teens and their parents are being told, no one has ever been born in the wrong body.
We must summon the courage to tell them the truth.

Transgenderism’s Speedy Rise Read More

Penna Dexter
Results from a study on the effects of giving cross-sex hormones to young people who identify as transgender were published in the January edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. Cross-sex hormones, described in the article as “gender-affirming hormones,” have the effect of changing people’s bodily characteristics to resemble more closely those of the opposite sex.
The study, entitled “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth After 2 Years of Hormones,” analyzed 315 participants between the ages of 12 and 20. Of this group, 240 were minors.
The study is being funded by the National Institutes of Health in the form of a five-year grant to Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of California at San Francisco, and Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Summarizing the results, the article states that “appearance, congruence, positive affect, and life satisfaction increased, and depression and anxiety symptoms decreased.”
The authors tout the study’s ‘successes’ even though they acknowledge that two participants committed suicide and eleven experienced “suicidal ideation,” which means they thought about it.
Fifteen members of Congress wrote to the NIH of their “grave concerns” about this government-funded experimentation on children. They asked 14 pointed questions including: Why wasn’t the research halted “after the first and second deaths?”
Pediatric Endocrinologist Quentin Van Meter told Washington Watch host Tony Perkins, that every one of the cross-sex hormone drugs being given to minors “has adverse consequences.” He said, “these poor individuals not only are sterile, but they are sexually incompetent….their organs are fried.”  He pointed to these hormones’ adverse effects on brain development and adolescent bone density.
As former president of the American College of Pediatricians, Dr. Van Meter has witnessed European countries begin to restrict gender transition procedures as they realize how ineffective, and likely detrimental, they are to mental health.
Tony Perkins brought up the 1930s Tuskegee syphilis study on black men. A shameful study, it should also be remembered with “shock and horror.”

NIH Transgender Experiment Read More

Penna Dexter
During her senior year swimming for the University of Kentucky, Riley Gaines learned something about feminism’s identity crisis. She says she never considered herself a feminist. She told FOX News, “It almost goes against the co-dependency that I believe the sexes should have.”
Then, last spring, Riley tied for fifth place in the NCAA 200-meter freestyle finals with the University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who for 3 years, had been swimming, as William Thomas, for the men’s team. Riley and her teammates were also subjected to Thomas in all his undressed glory in the women’s locker room.
Riley told FOX News: “The feminist movement has gone two directions,” She says she resonates with one of those branches and it’s not the one that’s “fighting for male inclusion in women’s sports, women’s spaces.”
Lia Thomas says of the criticism from female teammates, “They’re using the guise of feminism to sort of push transphobic beliefs.”
Laura Favaro is also a feminist and a sociologist at City University of London. Like Riley Gaines, she believes in just two biological sexes. She conducted research, she says, “to investigate the disputes around sex and gender that have escalated dramatically since the 2010’s.” Her plan, as described in The Telegraph and by Daily Signal writer Nicole Russell, was to conduct “the first taxpayer-funded study into ‘whether social scientists at universities feel censored over their views on transgender issues.’” Laura interviewed 50 feminists who worked in gender studies departments and surveyed 650 social scientists.
Scholars who were open about their traditional views of sex and gender reported they had experienced threats and smears from colleagues. They sometimes feared for their jobs. These findings were deemed “dangerous’ by Laura Favaro’s bosses at City. Eventually, administrators denied her access to her email account and demanded she give up her material and findings. She ultimately lost her job.
Riley and Laura are learning what it costs to be the wrong kind of feminist.

Are Feminists Transphobic? Read More

Penna Dexter
Early last year The Daily Wire investigated Vanderbilt University Medical Center and found a robust gender transition program including pressure tactics against conscientious objectors and a “Buddies Program” in which trans activists accompany patients seeking treatment to make sure nothing deters them along the path to transition. Doctors pushing for the gender program touted so-called gender affirmation surgeries as “huge money makers.”
When Tennessee House Republicans saw this evidence, they sought clarification from Vanderbilt Medical Center. The clinic paused transition surgeries on minors, pending “review” of the program.
Fast forward to the session of the Tennessee General Assembly that wrapped up last month. Legislators passed and the governor signed, SB1, which prohibits gender transition procedures from being done on minors.
House Majority Leader William Lamberth exhibited blunt southern honesty when he stated,  “We’re not gonna have any kind of quack doctor coming to this state and start doing double mastectomies on children that are suffering through body dysphoria.”
The U.S. Department of Justice has now sued Tennessee to block this law. The DOJ claims SB1 violates the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The complaint states that this new law “denies necessary medical care to children based solely on who they are.”
The complaint argues that, under SB1, a doctor would be allowed to prescribe testosterone for a “non-transgender male minor” for delayed puberty, but would be prohibited from issuing that same prescription for a transgender male — i.e., a biological female.
SB1 defines a person’s sex as “determined by anatomy and genetics.” The DOJ’s complaint, instead, elevates gender identity over sex “assigned” at birth. In an article describing the lawsuit, Washington Stand writer Joshua Arnold, points out that the DOJ is supposed to enforce federal law. But the language in this complaint signals what he terms “a revisionist reality at work,” which “would retroactively rewrite laws distinguishing the sexes.” 
The courts must shut down this overreach.

DOJ v. Tennessee Read More

Penna Dexter
The trend toward de-emphasis on hard work and merit is playing out in large school districts in Nevada, California, Iowa, Virginia and other states. Policies there now require that schools make doing homework optional and give students multiple opportunities to complete tests and assignments. The Wall Street Journal reports that these districts have decided to jettison hard due dates, giving students “more chances to prove they have mastered a subject without being held to arbitrary deadlines.” Students’ knowledge of material is only measured at the end of the term.
This is being done, says The Journal, “in recognition of challenges some children have outside school” — perhaps a job or caring for siblings. A new theory, equitable grading, purportedly eliminates bias toward students living in stable homes. It relies on students’ “intrinsic motivation” in allowing them to decide when, or if, they will turn in homework.
Clark County, which encompasses Las Vegas, is the fifth largest school district in the nation. Laura Jeanne Penrod, who teaches English there, told The Journal, “intrinsic motivation…is the furthest thing from the truth” for students in her 11th grade honors class. With an assignment to write a persuasive essay, she would normally require them to first brainstorm the project and then to write a rough draft. Under the new system, students skip these steps without penalty, but they miss out on the teacher’s guidance along the way.
Alyson Henderson, another Clark County high school English teacher says, “If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones.” Samuel Huang, a straight-A student in the district doesn’t like the new system. He sees AP students skipping class until the exam and says “There’s an apathy that pervades the entire classroom.”
These are top students. Ditching homework is even worse for average students and those who struggle. They need more accountability, not less. 

Ditching Homework Read More

Penna Dexter
House Republicans proposed the Limit, Save, Grow Act as an attempt to pair modest reductions in spending growth with approval of an increase in the debt limit. The legislation includes requirements that able-bodied adults work if they are to receive welfare such as food stamps and Medicaid.
This is not angry mean Republicans “cutting benefits.” The Wall Street Journal points out that both SNAP, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, and Medicaid “were turbocharged in pandemic measures, including higher food stamp benefits and a ban on states from removing from the Medicaid roles individuals who may no longer be eligible.” Work requirements for SNAP were “waved away” and should be restored with the end of the emergency in May.
And Medicaid, which was expanded under ObamaCare to include men of prime age above the poverty line, needs to include a work requirement. Otherwise, the Journal warns, we threaten “America’s social and economic future as government sustains a permanent dependent class.”
A new entitlement is on the table: A proposal for increasing child tax credit payments which contains no work requirement.
With nearly two jobs open for every unemployed person, it’s a terrible time to implement policies that discourage work. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (TX) argues, in a Journal op-ed, that Congress should “return to commonsense policies that encourage people to look for work and rejoin the labor force.”
Rep. Arrington says getting people back to work is “pro-growth and pro-family.” It provides “the surest way out of generational poverty.” It will improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
When we require Americans who work to subsidize able-bodied Americans who don’t, we exacerbate political and social divisions.
In God’s eyes, work has dignity and importance. A recent survey that shows the decline of hard work as a core value for Americans bolsters the case for encouraging work in law and policy. As Rep. Arrington says it’s a “moral imperative.”

Culture of Work Read More

Penna Dexter
House Republicans proposed the Limit, Save, Grow Act as an attempt to pair modest reductions in spending growth with approval of an increase in the debt limit. The legislation includes requirements that able-bodied adults work if they are to receive welfare such as food stamps and Medicaid.
This is not angry mean Republicans “cutting benefits.” The Wall Street Journal points out that both SNAP, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, and Medicaid “were turbocharged in pandemic measures, including higher food stamp benefits and a ban on states from removing from the Medicaid roles individuals who may no longer be eligible.” Work requirements for SNAP were “waved away” and should be restored with the end of the emergency in May.
And Medicaid, which was expanded under ObamaCare to include men of prime age above the poverty line, needs to include a work requirement. Otherwise, the Journal warns, we threaten “America’s social and economic future as government sustains a permanent dependent class.”
A new entitlement is on the table: A proposal for increasing child tax credit payments which contains no work requirement.
With nearly two jobs open for every unemployed person, it’s a terrible time to implement policies that discourage work. House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (TX) argues, in a Journal op-ed, that Congress should “return to commonsense policies that encourage people to look for work and rejoin the labor force.”
Rep. Arrington says getting people back to work is “pro-growth and pro-family.” It provides “the surest way out of generational poverty.” It will improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.
When we require Americans who work to subsidize able-bodied Americans who don’t, we exacerbate political and social divisions.
In God’s eyes, work has dignity and importance. A recent survey that shows the decline of hard work as a core value for Americans bolsters the case for encouraging work in law and policy. As Rep. Arrington says it’s a “moral imperative.”

Culture of Work Read More