Watchmen Ministry North Idaho

(Faith & Freedom) The Satanic Temple recently announced multiple new after-school clubs across the country, raising concerns from religious leaders about the impact that pushing Satanism on students could have in the future.

This is not isolated to areas where New Age mysticism is popular. It’s spreading and sprouting in public schools across the nation.

Penny Nance, CEO and president of  Concerned Women for America, the nation’s largest women’s public policy organization, says: “Parents need to wake up and understand false ideologies are everywhere and they must train up their children to follow the one true God of love, not one of evil and destruction.”

Be informed, not misled.

The Satanic Temple (TST) describes its religion as a “scientific, rationalist and non-superstitious worldview” and TST’s National Campaign Director June Everett told NBC affiliate WAVY that the purpose of the clubs is to go “to schools where other religious clubs are operating” to provide an alternative.  (Read More)

(John Piper) Today’s topic is a sensitive one. We get a lot of questions from a lot of listeners on a very wide range of life situations, obviously. And many of these questions come to us from pretty broken places. And I think that’s true today. We address an email from a woman, a female by birth — born with two X chromosomes. She’s written in anonymously to ask this: “Pastor John, hi. I find myself at a stage in my life when I am seriously considering removing my female body parts — namely, my breasts and my uterus — because I no longer want to be a woman. Women are perceived as weak vessels whose only purpose is to have children. Even Scripture supports that ideology,” she writes. “As a modern ‘woman,’ I have no desire to have children or get married but to have a successful career to help support less fortunate people and animals live better lives. My question is this: Would doing this to my body be sinful?”

Yes, it will be sinful, and it will probably be dreadfully destructive to you as a person. I want to give you six reasons for that response to what you’ve said. So I hope you’ll be willing to listen to me, because this is not going to be easy for you to hear. I hope you have the courage to listen.  (Read More)

(Breakpoint) One of the strangest stories of the last couple of years is how teenage girls have been stricken with facial tics after browsing the video-sharing app TikTok. Earlier this month, Azeen Ghorayshi published a deep dive on the strange phenomenon in The New York Times. Looking back at the puzzling explosion of TikTok tics during the pandemic, she reported that contagious outbreaks of strange behavior are not new and have a technical name: “mass psychogenic illness.”  

For example, long before TikTok, back in 2011, 18 girls at a high school in Le Roy, New York, broke into twitches and head snapping after one of their peers suffered a sudden spasm. The incident became a legend in medical literature. History is full of stories of patients, “mostly women,” who seemed to catch “tremors, seizures, paralysis, and even blindness” from each other like contagious diseases. Such mass psychogenic events used to be limited to real-life social circles, but social media has “dissolved the boundaries” that once kept outbreaks “geographically contained.” Now anyone with a smartphone can “catch” such behaviors.  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) Like a lot of parents, Cindy Martin didn’t realize how out of control the book situation had gotten in their local schools. When a friend told her there was pornographic content on the shelves, she decided to investigate herself. What she found defied imagination. “I wish I could share some of the book excerpts with you,” she told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, “but that wouldn’t be possible on TV,” They are “so sexually explicit,” she emphasized. “And every time I find another one, it’s worse than the one before…”

Martin said the situation was so out of control that she decided to recruit other parents to join her. She put out a call on social media in 2021, asking if other Georgia moms would be willing to take a stand. “And I had so many moms come forward that we decided to form a group.” They called it Mama Bears. “It stuck. It sounded right.”

Their plan was simple: Go directly to Forsyth County school officials and ask, “Hey, did you know these are in here? We’d like them removed.” Almost immediately, the moms hit a wall. So they tried another tactic. “We asked for an audit, so that they could find these books. They refused.”  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) Christian apologist Hillary Morgan Ferrar has written, “Agendas are often promoted through media and education until they become so ingrained that they define the new normal. We must resist agendas which rewrite the rules of truth and morality and teach our kids to do the same” (“Mama Bear Apologetics Guide to Sexuality,” p 71).

K. Yang used to indoctrinate youth with “gender identity” ideology in New York public schools while working at an LGBT nonprofit funded by the New York State Department of Health. She has since realized the damage she did and has made it her mission to educate America about the efforts at the international, national, state, and local levels by non-profit activists, corporations, and governments to indoctrinate children and teenagers with LGBT ideology. She is also working to help parents counter the lies of these powerful groups and to “deprogram” their kids.

During her recent interviews with “Fox & Friends” and “Fox & Friends Weekend” she explained the other side’s strategy.  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves (R) didn’t just sign a bill on Tuesday protecting children from harmful drugs and surgeries that accompany a gender transition. He also offered a lengthy, well-reasoned defense of the legislation and then competently defended his conservative position against the media’s attacks.

In doing so, Reeves broke the mold of previous red-state governors who have been given a chance to sign robust protections against gender transition procedures for minors. Arkansas’s Asa Hutchinson vetoed the nation’s very first SAFE Act in 2021. South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, closely allied to a hospital system that performs gender transition procedures on minors, did sign a “Help Not Harm” bill last month, but only after facing down conservative outrage over her 2022 veto of a women’s sports bill and a massive public pressure campaign that culminated in the bill garnering a veto-proof majority in the legislature.

By contrast, Reeves was neither hostile nor reluctant, but he forthrightly championed the conservative, commonsense principles embodied by a bill to protect children from bearing the lifelong pain and scars of an immature infatuation with the transgender ideology.  (Read More)

(The Federalist) In mid-February 2023, administrators at an elementary school in Springfield, Ohio, called the police to intervene in a racially charged incident on the playground. According to the police report, a group of black students forced several white students to say “black lives matter” against their will.

Around the same time in Orlando, Florida, a teacher at Howard Middle School created and posted to his personal social media account a demeaning skit using students from his classroom. In it, white students bowed to their black classmates, feeding them snacks and fanning them. The teacher, now on administrative leave, captioned the video: “Black History Month. The shortest month of the Year.” Critical race theory is permeating public education across the country and aggravating racial hostilities, even among elementary school children.

At the end of February, sixth-grade teachers at Hunt Valley Elementary School in Fairfax County discussed heightened racial tensions with their students. There had been reports of racial slurs used on the playground. One teacher, in particular, told her students that the faculty instructs in detail about the living conditions of enslaved Africans to foster a sense of empathy among children. But it seems that the hyper-focus on racial differences in both primary and secondary education widens the racial chasm.  (Read More)

(The Federalist) As the Biden administration pushes the Department of Health and Human Services to make “gender-affirming health care” more widely available, HHS’s own National Institutes of Health is funding multiple studies premised upon how little research has been conducted on the long-term risks of taking cross-sex hormones and whether they improve mental health. The NIH research on transgender issues also emphasizes intersectionality and about half has been on HIV prevention.

The NIH Reporter database, which lists active federally funded research projects, shows 74 with “transgender” in the title, totaling more than $26 million of taxpayers’ money annually. Several NIH-funded studies examine specific health risks of cross-sex hormone treatment — such as associated bone loss and possible increased risk of thrombosis, drug overdose, heart attack, and stroke.

Only a few studies evaluate the risk of infertility, even though “the impact of long-term cross-sex hormone therapy on reproductive health is largely unknown,” as one such project states and experts have warned. In contrast, seven studies examine stigma and disparities in health care for transgender people, in response to NIH’s Notice of Special Interest in understanding the role of alleged intersectional stigmas and how they harm health.  (Read More)

(Standing For Freedom Center) Courage is the operating system that your convictions run on. There’s a reason we talk about the importance of “having a backbone.” Take the skeleton out of a body and the entire thing collapses into a useless pile. In other words, it doesn’t matter if you believe all the right things, or that you believe them strongly — if you don’t have the courage to take action, your convictions are ultimately worthless.

And right now, what so many Christians (and pastors) across our country need more than almost anything else is courage.

Because you can believe that children should be protected from radical gender ideology and groomers. You can know that preborn babies are deserving of equal protection the law. You can argue that churches shouldn’t let the government shut them down while they let liquor stores and strip clubs stay open. You can see that William “Lia” Thomas is a man and had no business competing against girls in NCAA swimming.

But if you never find the courage to speak out — or even better, do something — about these problems, then what good are your convictions?

When it comes to standing tall in the public square, Christians should have more courage than anyone else because we have the Creator God of our universe on our side. Or, more accurately, and more importantly, if we are in Christ, we are on His side.  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) Recently in the “Powerline Blog,” John Hinderaker wrote that when Scott Johnson and he launched the site in about 1990, they “never imagined that someday, we would have to write about sex-change operations and mastectomies carried out on 13-year-old girls.” He noted he is “much more comfortable writing about economic data and the like. But unfortunately, the Left has mounted a campaign against America’s youth that it is impossible to ignore.”

This is something with which we can all identify. The transgender movement has been perhaps the most unexpected in the history of the “sexual revolution,” the 1960s-based radical reshaping of American views and practices concerning sexuality.

The corruption of human sexuality didn’t start in the 1960s, though. It has been under attack since the days of our earliest ancestors. Genesis recounts the moral debauchery rampant in the days of Noah, such that “the Lord regretted that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him to His heart” (6:5-6). The flood followed and, as history moved along, so did a renewed descent into immorality.  (Read More)

(Idaho Freedom Foundation) The House Education Committee entertained presentations on three draft bills this morning, showing that efforts to give Idaho students at least some form of school choice are still alive, despite a significant setback yesterday on the Senate floor where 23 Senators voted to kill Senate Bill 1038, a universal education savings account bill.

Twelve conservative Senators voted to send that bill to the House, but 16 Republicans joined the Democrats to kill the bill. The bill would have created an education savings account (ESA) program that would have been open to all K-12 students and given each participating student about $6,000 annually to customize his or her education. It was modeled after Arizona’s highly successful ESA program, which has been empowering students for more than a decade.

One of the three draft bills presented by Sen. Lori Den Hartog and Rep. Wendy Horman to the House Education Committee this morning is worthy of a closer review. Their bill would expand the existing Empowering Parents micro-grant program to add a “tuition grant” component that would serve no more than 2,000 students. Participating students would receive $6,000 per year that could be used to hire a certified teacher or offset the costs of private school tuition.  (Read More)

(PJ Media) The independent Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) has issued an impressively strong eight-point statement on the so-called “gender-affirming care” for kids that’s all the rage with the LGBTQ+++™ ideologies (certain sections are bolded for emphasis):

1. “Physicians and medical professionals should refuse to be mandated or coerced to participate in procedures to which they have ethical or scientific objections or which they believe would harm a patient.

2. Reproduction requires a male gamete (sperm), which can only be produced by a person of XY genotype, and a female gamete (egg), which can only be produced by a person of XX genotype. Primordial germ cells are present at birth.

3. Biological sex is determined at conception by genotype and apart from rare anomalies, which result in ambiguous genitalia, sex is correctly identified at birth—and is indeed obvious.  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) In another international setback for the LGBTQ agenda, the British government has banned nearly all men who identify as women from being jailed inside women’s prisons — implicitly condemning the unisex prison policy advocated by President Joe Biden.

Under the new UK government policy unveiled on Monday, no one convicted of a future crime who has intact male genitalia will be sent to a female prison estate. Neither will any male convicted of sexual crimes or such violent offenses as murder, attempted murder, assault, or crimes harming children — even if the offender has a government-issued Gender Recognition Certificate.

“Safety has to come first in our prisons, and this new policy sets out a clear, common-sense approach to the housing of transgender prisoners,” said Justice Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, a member of the ruling Conservative Party. “With these sensible new measures in place, transgender offenders who have committed sexual or violent crimes or retain male genitalia will not serve their sentence in a women’s prison, unless explicitly approved at the highest level.”  (Read More)

(Life News) Senator Ted Cruz slammed Attorney General Merrick Garland during a Senate hearing today for failing to prosecute a single abortion activist for illegally protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices.

In the days following the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, radical abortion protestors camped outside the homes of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn roe and threatened them and their families. Such protests are technically illegal under federal law, but Garland never held anyone accountable.

Garland let the protests continue even as one radical leftist was charged with attempting to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Cruz said that the Department of Justice “in his judgment” has become “politicized to the greatest extent” he’s ever seen.

And the Texas Republican got Garland to admit the protests were illegal.  (Read More)

(CNS News) The Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines, who holds master’s degrees in theology and divinity from the Yale Divinity School, posted a video of himself on Facebook this week in which he states that “God is gay.”

“God is gay. God is a lesbian. God is trans. God is gender non-binary. God is straight. God is cisgender,” Lines says on the video.

“God is black. God is white. God is Middle Eastern. God is Asian,” he says.

“God is differently abled, mentally and physically. God is able bodied,” says Lines.

“God is you and you are God, because you are a reflection of God’s divine image,” he says.

In the video, Lines is wearing a stole that features rainbow colors on both its right and left sides.  (Read More)

(The Federalist) Since Trump entered the political arena and proved the efficacy of sidestepping the legacy media and speaking directly to the people, a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech have joined forces to erect a Censorship Complex. Collaboration, funding, and groupthink connect these players, and an analysis of their functioning reveals six ways they operate to censor speech in America.

1. Big Tech Censored Speech It Didn’t Like

While Twitter censored certain speech as part of its coordination with other partisan actors, Twitter also censored speech in the normal course of its operations. And because Twitter was staffed heavily by Democrats, it was mostly conservative voices that were silenced.

As the “Twitter Files” revealed, “Twitter had a huge toolbox for controlling the visibility of any user, including a ‘Search Blacklist’ (for Dan Bongino), a ‘Trends Blacklist’ for Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and a ‘Do Not Amplify’ setting for conservative activist Charlie Kirk.” As one insider explained, the visibility filtering is a “very powerful tool” “to suppress what people see.”  (Read More)

(The Federalist) What has changed in the last decade and in the last few years that has driven young women ever further to despair? From what I’ve witnessed as a high school teacher, this would probably be the rise of social media and transgenderism.

Social media is particularly bad for adolescent girls because of its addictiveness and promotion of unattainable ideals. For hours at a time, girls will scroll through TikTok or Instagram, studying the many ways they fall short, be it their intelligence, their looks, or their charisma. They are bombarded with each new trend and fad and behave impulsively because of their fear of missing out. Due to the immediacy of these platforms, there is little time to reflect on the content they’re passively internalizing.

The featured images of happiness and material success they consume are utterly fake and frequently incompatible with the destructive ideas and habits that are inculcated through social media (like idling so many hours a day on their smartphone). Online, they are told they can have it all, but in the real world, this just isn’t so.

There’s also the narcissistic component of social media. Self-consciousness deepens into obsession when a girl has to produce a steady stream of videos, pictures, and personal beliefs for her peers and anonymous followers. As Logan Lane, a teenage girl who eventually swore off social media and started a Luddite club, attests, “I became completely consumed. … I couldn’t not post a good picture if I had one.”

Related to the problem of social media is the transgenderism movement, which argues that sex is fluid and that changing one’s sex will make someone happier. This idea has been incredibly destabilizing for female identity and has led to the wide-scale invasion of women’s spaces.  (Read More)

(Idaho Tribune) Dozens of citizens from Kootenai County filled the Post Falls Library to the brim at the February 16th Community Library Network board meeting.  Concerned parents and grandparents were eager to confront the (majority-liberal) board, over the distribution of obscene, hardcore pornographic books to minors.

During public comment, several community members complained about pornographic books in the adolescent Section of the Library. Books like Identical by Ellen Hopkins, Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe, and A Court of Silver Flames by Sarah J. Maas are all books available through the Community library network, and they all came under fire. A woman named Heather said:

“It’s like the library taking a glass of water with a piece of poop in it… Then saying to the kids and their parents “There’s only a piece of poop in it, therefore it’s still good to drink.” Would anyone here drink water with poop in it? Why then would you think it’s OK to give kids porn? However big or small.”

“Now this book, A Court of Silver Flames is more like 64 pieces of poop loaded into the water for our kids to drink. 64 pages of explicit, mostly pornographic content. It’s labeled adolescent in the system and it’s available for kids as young as 12.”  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) A school board meeting in Anchorage, Alaska took a testy turn last week when a local dad decided to read aloud from one of the books the district was using to promote “tolerance.” “We hear so much about ‘diversity, inclusion, and equity,’” Jay McDonald said. “[But] we don’t often see specific examples … So today I brought an excellent representation … from one of the books that was just recently purchased for our libraries.” He barely made it three sentences before the vice president of the board ordered him to stop.

Before Carl Jacobs interrupted McDonald, he’d shocked parents by reading a section of the book “Let’s Talk about It” that encourages kids to send naked pictures to their friends. Other excerpts encourage children to seek out sexual websites to help them figure out their sexuality: “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some porn, it’s a fun sugary treat.”

“This is a book for kids!” McDonald fumed. Jacobs jumped in, saying, “I’m going to interrupt you at this point. Just sounds like you have a concern about a book. I’d be glad to get [you] connected to the superintendent or team to go through the appropriate process,” — to which the dad replied, “I’d appreciate if you don’t interrupt my time.”

Moments later, things got heated as the board debated whether or not to let him continue. Finally, by a 5-2 vote, they decided to end McDonald’s time.

This is exactly the kind of controversy Idaho conservatives are hoping to prevent. This month, the House State Affairs Committee proposed a new bill called the Children’s School and Library Protection Act to protect students from “harmful material,” including books, movies, or other related media with sexual content.  (Read More)

(Washington Stand) An overwhelming majority of books removed from Florida schools since the beginning of the academic year in September 2022 were pornographic, violent, or inappropriate for students’ grade levels, according to school district data submitted to the state’s Department of Education.

Twenty-three out of 56 school districts reported that they had removed a total of 175 books, while 33 districts (59%) said that they had not removed any books this academic year, according to data reviewed by The Daily Signal.

The data reveals that 164 of the 175 removed books were taken out of school media centers, rather than classrooms, and 153 of the books that were removed (87%) were taken out because the district discovered that the book was “pornographic, violent or inappropriate for the grade level for some other reason.”

The school districts in Duval County and St. Johns County removed the most books at 19 each, according to the Florida Education Department data. Duval County schools reported that they removed 16 out of the 19 books because they were pornographic, violent, or inappropriate.  (Read More)

(Idaho Family Policy Center) In the early nineteenth century, the State of Pennsylvania prosecuted Jesse Sharpless, an unscrupulous huckster who “scandalously did exhibit and show for money” a pornographic painting in a private viewing. Despite having admitted to displaying the painting for paying customers, including underage children, Sharpless defended himself by arguing that he should not be held criminally culpable for immoral acts done in private.

[…]Sharpless faced criminal penalties because early Americans acknowledged that the distribution of pornography must be restrained in a civilized society. They understood that some acts, even when done in secret, victimize society at large.

The proliferation of pornography in recent decades has borne this out. As many as 10% of American adults now admit to struggling with pornography addiction. Not surprisingly, pornography distribution and consumption are correlated with markedly higher divorce rates, as well as juvenile crime, property crime, and sexual violence.  (Read More)

(American Family News) Conservative Anglicans have been lamenting their denomination’s demise since the Church of England started compromising on scripture. But at least one faithful voice remains.

(Breakpoint) Two weeks ago, what started as a routine (and according to the preacher, “lackluster”) chapel service at Asbury University became something remarkable. Instead of heading off to classes, students stayed to pray and worship. Services have continued ever since, with people traveling from near and far to join in prayer, repentance, and song. What is being called a “revival” by some and an “awakening” by others has now spread to other Christian colleges.  

The past few days echo the revivals that were experienced in the recent past on other Christian college campuses, including one at Wheaton College in 1995, and those at Asbury in 1970 and 1950. In each case, there were seemingly spontaneous expressions from students of prayer, confession, and praise. The revivals of the past are an indelible part of Asbury’s historical memory, and many who experienced the 1970 revival have prayed ever since for it to happen again. 

Revivals have been, in fact, a consistent, distinct feature of American religious life since before our nation’s founding. The First Great Awakening, in the early 1700s, was part of a larger, trans-Atlantic spiritual renewal centered on personal conversion, an emphasis that had a transformative effect on the emerging American consciousness.  (Read More)

(Faith & Freedom) Remember CHOP?

Former Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called it a “summer of love.”

Most of us saw it as a shining example of inept leadership, and far-left governance.

The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit filed by more than a dozen businesses, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, all located in and around the eight-block area that became known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone, or CHOP.

The city has also paid the Seattle Times for deleting important emails between city leaders during the time “CHOP” was happening.

Actions have consequences.

The city of Seattle is showing the world what the “consequences” of far-left progressivism look like.  (Read More)

(Daily Caller) A California school district is using lesson plans designed by its Black Lives Matter Task Force (BLM) to help teach 7th graders about their implicit bias during Black History Month, according to the curriculum obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In an effort to address “issues related to racial justice,” Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD) requires 7th through 12th grade teachers to use a curriculum created by the schools’ Black Lives Matter Task Force, a coalition dedicated to creating equity for African American students and staff within the district, according to screenshots of the curriculum obtained by the DCNF. The curriculum teaches students about the “daily effects of white privilege” and “implicit bias.”  (Read More)