Trump and the Baby Snatchers

His comments are the latest example of his asking the public to discount what it sees with its own eyes and instead believe his own self-serving version of reality. They also reflect how politically poisonous the issue has become, as photographs and news articles circulate about the effects of the practice.”

.. there is no law that requires families to be separated at the border. There is a law against ‘improper entry’ at the border, as well as a consent decree known as the Flores settlement that limits to 20 days the amount of time that migrant children may be held in immigration detention, which a federal judge ruled in 2016 also applies to families.

.. A 2008 antitrafficking statute — signed into law by a Republican president, George W. Bush — also requires that certain unaccompanied alien minors be transferred out of immigration detention in 72 hours. None of those laws or precedents mean that children must be taken away from their parents.

.. “It is the Trump administration’s decision this year to prosecute all unlawful immigrants as criminals that has forced the breakup of families; the children are removed when the parents are taken into federal custody. While previous administrations have made exceptions to such prosecutions for adults traveling with their minor children, the Trump administration has said it will not do so.”

.. Trump is lying, as he often does. This barbaric policy is an outgrowth of his own personal cruelty. It’s absolutely reprehensible and an absolute reflection of him.

.. not only needless and cruel, it threatens the mental and physical health of both the children and their caregivers. Psychological research shows that immigrants experience unique stressors related to the conditions that led them to flee their home countries in the first place. The longer that children and parents are separated, the greater the reported symptoms of anxiety and depression for the children. Negative outcomes for children include psychological distress

What to Do in Our Current ‘Transgender Moment’

Ryan Anderson on how to tell the truth about gender & sexuality in a loving way.

Ryan T. Anderson — William E. Simon senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation — has written a new book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, that addresses many of these important issues with compassion.

.. The transgender moment may turn out to be fleeting, but that doesn’t mean we should expect it to fade away on its own. We need to insist on telling the truth, and on preventing lives from being irreparably damaged.

.. Why is the work of Paul McHugh important, and why and how can it become more mainstream?

.. Why is the work of Paul McHugh important, and why and how can it become more mainstream?

.. Hormones and surgery cannot actually transform a man into a woman or a woman into a man, McHugh argued. His colleagues responded by introducing him to patients they claimed had successfully transitioned. They thought that if he met enough sexually reassigned people, he would come to see the benefit. But as McHugh recalls, “none of these encounters were persuasive.”
..Meyer found that only a few of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery actually regretted it, yet most did not appear to have benefited psychologically.
..After studying the evidence, McHugh decided that sex-change surgery was bad medicine and was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.” Psychiatrists, he thought, could better help patients with gender dysphoria by “trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
.. this transgender perspective on sex and gender has deep roots. Chapter 7 of the book traces our cultural gender confusion to its roots in gender theory and in certain strains of feminist thinking about our embodiment.
.. First-wave feminism was a campaign to liberate women from an overly restrictive concept of gender, so they could be free to fulfill their nature, but it gave way to a movement seeking to make women identical to men.
.. This means that women should not be forced to live, work, and compete as if they were men
.. there are signs of defensiveness among its advocates, as if they realize that their claims are contrary to basic, self-evident truths.” When you wrote those words, did it worry you that it might harken back to same-sex marriage opponents who believed that arguments for traditional marriage would inevitably win the day?
.. there are signs of defensiveness among its advocates, as if they realize that their claims are contrary to basic, self-evident truths.” When you wrote those words, did it worry you that it might harken back to same-sex marriage opponents who believed that arguments for traditional marriage would inevitably win the day?
.. But he cares very much about what affects his kids. He doesn’t want his daughter coming home from school to say that a boy who thinks he’s a girl is sharing a locker room with her. He doesn’t want his son to announce that he’s “gender-fluid.” Average parents of various political stripes are not on board with “gender identity”–access policies or school lessons about gender ideology.

How heavy use of social media is linked to mental illness

Youngsters report problems with anxiety, depression, sleep and “FoMO”

..  Roughly a quarter of British adults have been diagnosed at some point with a psychiatric disorder, costing the economy an estimated 4.5% of GDP per year.
.. On average, they reported that these social networks gave them extra scope for self-expression and community-building. But they also said that the platforms exacerbated anxiety and depression, deprived them of sleep, exposed them to bullying and created worries about their body image and “FOMO”
.. Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, has admitted that the product works by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology”
.. Indeed, an experiment by five neuroscientists in 2014 concluded that Facebook triggers the same impulsive part of the brain as gambling and substance abuse.