Breakpoint

John and Shane help us think well when our faith collides with mandates from an employer. In the question John and Shane empathize with a teacher pressured to call students by their preferred pronoun. John outlines a “Daniel Option”, provides insight from Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies, a title based on the phrase coined by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and encourages the listener and us with an inspiring closing thought.

There’s an old Chinese curse which supposedly goes “May you live in interesting times.” It’s a version of what’s My favorite Facebook meme for 2020 so far is, “God please give us precedented times.” I think we’ve all had enough of the unprecedented times.

In truth, of course, there’s nothing new under the sun. We aren’t the first followers of Christ forced to navigate a dizzying array of global, political, cultural, and health challenges. Not only are we part of, with centuries of the faithful before us, what Hebrews calls “the great cloud of witnesses,” we have much to learn from their examples and their failures as we, too, journey to what Scripture calls that “better city.”

Not only is it helpful to know what the faithful before us believed, we need to know how they behaved. Specifically, it is helpful to know how Christians in the past navigated the cultural storms of their day. Our next Colson Center Short Course looks at four such Christians: the great Church father St. Augustine of Hippo, Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the novelist Flannery O’Connor, and Martin Luther King Jr. The course is titled “How Four Christians from History Confronted Cultural Chaos,” and begins next Tuesday, October 20th and continues each Tuesday (except for election night) through November 17th.

Each of these individuals we will deal with in this course dealt themselves with particular cultural challenges that, in many ways, mirror ours. Each week, a stellar instructor will explore how these Christian forebears understood and responded to the cultural crisis of their times.

Augustine of Hippo, for example, lived in the midst of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. After the Goths sacked Rome in 410 A.D., his native North Africa was conquered by the Vandals. Geneva College President Dr. Calvin Troup will examine Augustine’s question, “Who is a Christian to be” when the pillars of civilization seem to be crumbling and when human government fails? The relevance for us today is obvious. 

Author and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously said that “the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.” Dr. Bill Brown, Senior Fellow of Worldview and Culture at the Colson Center will wrestle with Solzhenitsyn’s understanding of human nature in the face of grave political and cultural evils, and why the world is both broken and eminently worthy of redemption.

Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson of the University of Dallas will discuss how novelist Flannery O’Connor, through her storytelling, confronted the cultural imagination and prejudices of the “God-haunted South,” where Christianity was a cultural phenomenon but pretty much neutered in its effectiveness and power, as well as the cultural imagination of the elites of her time, who were inclined to dismiss anything distinctly Christian or southern.

The final session of our Short Course will be taught by Rev. Derek McCoy and will focus on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, specifically his approach to justice work and his work for reconciliation. Rev. McCoy has years of experience building urban coalitions to promote human flourishing. It’s fitting that this short course begins with Augustine and ends with Dr. King, who famously cited Augustine in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “an unjust law is no law at all.” And it was that appeal to that eternal truths of the universe to ground his cause that makes Dr. King’s work so different from the activism we see today.

By design, this short course will begin before the election and end after it. The temptation to be locked in to the chaos of the cultural moment, captivated by the minute-by-minute, ever-changing headlines of the day. Instead, our perspective must be tempered by the knowledge of the larger Story that Christians are part of, and how Christians in the past calibrated their understanding of what was true and good accordingly. What is true on October 20, when we begin the course, will still be every bit as true on November 17th, no matter how the election turns out: Christ is risen! Christ is Lord! Christ is making all things new.

Please join us, starting Tuesday October 20, for our next short course on “Augustine, Solzhenitsyn, O’Connor and MLK: How Four Christians from History Confronted Cultural Chaos.” The course is offered live via Zoom, with a time for instruction, followed by a time for questions and answers. All who register will receive a link to the recording and resources of each session, so if you must miss a live session, you won’t miss any of the content.

Come to BreakPoint.org to register today.

On July 1, the state of Virginia enacted the “Virginia Values Act,” which bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. A companion law requires employers to include coverage for sex reassignment and “gender affirming” surgeries in their health plans. According to the Alliance Defending Freedom, who has filed a pre-enforcement challenge, the Virginia Values Act requires “churches, religious schools, and Christian ministries to hire employees who do not share their stated beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity.”

Though the Act provides an exemption for religious schools “owned, supported, controlled, or managed” by denominations or churches, that exemption is severely limited. First, it’s limited to instances in which the curriculum “is directed toward the propagation of a particular religion.” In other words, a Catholic school could insist its religion teachers agree with Catholic doctrines but, as written, likely not its math and science teachers.

Second, the exemption applies only to religious groups that do not restrict their membership on account of sexual orientation or gender identity. In other words, a church that operates a school could require its teachers to be members of the church, but membership in that church cannot require adherence to historic Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage.

The Virginia Values Act runs afoul of current law in all kinds of ways. For starters, it ignores what the Supreme Court confirmed this past term about the “ministerial exemption,” which bars the application of anti-discrimination law in cases involving churches and their ministers. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School, the Court, under the U.S. Constitution, ruled that churches and other “religious organizations have the freedom to set their own internal policies and codes of conduct about life, marriage, and sexuality.”  Just a month after that ruling issued, the Virginia General Assembly and Governor Northam decided to ignore this freedom and the Supreme Court’s decision.

If the exemptions to the Virginia Values Act barely protects religious institutions, individual Christians in Virginia receive none at all. Which means that the Virginia Values Act violates Virginia’s own RFRA law, which clarifies that a “substantial burden” on a person's free exercise of religion is only legally acceptable if it meets two criteria. First, there must be “a compelling governmental interest,” Second, it must be “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”

In short, the Virginia Values Act, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom, violates the U.S. Constitution, the Virginia state constitution, and existing state laws. Other than that, it’s great!

So far, since the Virginia Values Act went into effect, the state has not taken action against any religious organizations or individuals. But, the Alliance Defending Freedom isn’t waiting for that to happen. On behalf of two churches, three schools, and a pregnancy care network, ADF has filed suit in state court. In addition, a federal suit was filed on behalf of a wedding photographer who is worried he will be forced to violate his beliefs or face the loss of his business.

According to ADF Senior Counsel Denise Harle, “The faith of many Americans inspires them to act for the good of their neighbors and also requires them to abide by its teachings… Our clients offer spiritual guidance, education, pregnancy support, and athletic opportunities to their communities because of the religious beliefs that motivate them. But Virginia’s new law forces these ministries to abandon or adjust their convictions or pay crippling fines. Such government hostility toward people of faith has no place in a free society.”

Time and time again, the Alliance Defending Freedom and other legal organizations are forced to go to court to defend the crystal-clear rights of religious organizations and individuals. Even more often, they are clarifying the rights of Christians in private appeals, clearly-worded letters, and open threats of litigation. I wish we weren’t here as a nation, but we are. As a Virginia-born native, I mourn the open hostility toward the unborn and to people of faith that now regularly pours out of the governor’s mansion.

Virginians must demand better from their elected officials.

The awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier has been heralded as an incredible step forward for women. For the first time, two female scientists have been honored for an accomplishment without being accompanied by a man.

Also being heralded is the incredible potential of Doudna and Charpentier’s gene-editing technology, CRISPR. Announcing the award, the Secretary-General of the Swedish Royal Academy of Science gushed, “This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life.”

Doudna has used similar language to describe CRISPR technology, stating “the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.” And, so far, congratulations and praise from fellow scientists includes predictions and speculations that CRISPR will offer humanity new potential to combat all sorts of illnesses and make the world a better place.

Not covered in all the press announcing the award is the danger that CRISPR poses us all. For the example, the incident in which a Chinese scientist uses CRISPR to edit the genome of embryos before implantation, a move that drew international criticism and gave the world a glimpse of just how this whole thing could go very wrong, was barely mentioned, if at all.

CRISPR has been likened to a computer mouse or pair of genetic scissors. One researcher described, “You can just point it at a place in the genome and you can do anything you want at that spot.” Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Still, the statement reveals the kind of hubris behind the drive to make this technology available, with virtually no ethical guidelines in place.

There seems to be this assumption that, of course, scientists and researchers will “play nice” with the power CRISPR offers. History, of course, tells us that it’s nearly impossible to resist the temptation to “play God” instead. And that never ends well.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London used CRISPR to edit 18 donated human embryos, supposedly to study “the role of a particular gene in the earliest stages of human development.” The Crick Institute team did everything by the book. Still, despite their best efforts, around half of the embryos contained what researchers called “major unintended edits.” “Major unintended edits” is newspeak for serious genetic damage, the kind of damage that can lead to birth defects or future medical issues, like cancer.

How did this happen when researchers were so careful to play by the rules? One genetics researcher put it this way: “You’re affecting so much of the DNA around the gene you’re trying to edit that you could be inadvertently affecting other genes and causing problems.”

If these sorts of problems come with researchers playing by the rules and acting out of good intention, what might happen when research is driven by greed or is done in some unregulated environment? Seeing the results from the Crick Institute researchers prompted one molecular biologist to call for “a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”

Now, a few months later, the Nobel Prize committee has put its official stamp of approval on the technology and its promise to “rewrite the code of life.” Absent regulations with real teeth, there will be no restraining order coming.

There’s an ironic connection here to historic origins of the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. He hoped and intended for his invention to be used for blasting rocks apart. Instead, it was used to blast people apart.

When Alfred’s brother died, a French newspaper, mistakenly believing that it was Alfred who had died, proclaimed “The Merchant of Death is Dead!” Appalled by the reputation his invention brought to him, Nobel established the Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize, hoping his legacy would be a better world instead of death and suffering.

By awarding the prize to the inventors of CRISPR, the committee is repeating Nobel’s history and turning his intentions on their head. Like dynamite, whatever legitimate potential CRISPR holds will operate alongside of even greater potential for harm. And, it’s not regulated anywhere near the degree that dynamite is.

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris discuss the vice-presidential debate, its tone, the issues addressed . . . and the fly. They also talk about the remarkable statement by Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas on how the Court's decision on same-sex marriage has damaged religious freedom. It's a problem, the justices say, "that only the Court can fix."

Also on today's episode: Netflix is indicted on child porn charges for "Cuties," and John and Shane's recommendations for the week: A new audio bible by actor David Suchet, and ... the Sabbath rest.

“The Ballot Initiatives of 2020,” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, BreakPoint

“WAP and ‘Cuties'” by John Stonestreet and David Carlson, BreakPoint

“Netflix Indicted for ‘Cuties,” Child Porn,” by John Stonestreet and Maria Baer, The Point

David Suchet Audio Bible – New International Version, available at Amazon

24/6: A Prescription for a Healthier, Happier Life, by Matthew Sleeth, available at the Colson Center online bookstore

Bible Project: Sabbath video

According to recent survey, nearly a third of self-described evangelicals do not believe that Jesus Christ is truly God. Arianism, as it turns out, is a heresy that plagues multiple generations of the church, not just the one of the third century.

Well, over and over the church has, in various times and ways, ruled that some beliefs are not acceptable alternatives within Christianity. Adherents are, in fact, outsiders to the faith. For example, nearly 100 years ago, in a book entitled Christianity and Liberalism, Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen argued, in an extensive scholarly treatment, that liberal Christianity was not a version of the one, true faith handed down once and for all to the saints. Liberalism was, he argued, a completely different religion from Christianity.

The Liberal Christianity of Machen’s day focused on a social-reform agenda, fueled by feelings and informed by secular thought, barely draped in religious language. The God it preached was not sovereign over creation and providential over the affairs of men; did not really come in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, who did not really perform miracles or physically rise from the dead. The Bible was not really the fundamental and decisive revelation of God, nor the final authoritative source for morality, but must be understood according to our evolving scientific knowledge and political agendas.

Today, there is also an effort to update Christianity, to adapt and re-form it according to the spirit of the age. From church pulpits to the Christian blogosphere, from once-reliable Christian publishing houses to the campuses of Christian colleges that are Christian in name only, from beautiful and historic churches decorated with gay pride flags and pastored by ordained ministers who “bless” abortion clinics to the “exvangelicals” who become self-styled spokespersons for “what Jesus would really say and do,” there is, in our day too, a Christianity that is no Christianity at all.

Devoid of the truth claims and moral teachings of historic Christianity, what is today called “progressive Christianity” is not another side of the same coin. It is a different religion founded on a different worldview.

Machen’s crucial insights were presented in a largely academic book written for a largely academic audience. Since the progressive Christianity of our day is far more populist than the liberalism of his, I am pleased that a new book, theologically robust and very accessible, is now available to address the ideas deceiving so many Christians. The book is titled Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity.

Alisa Childers grew up in the church and eventually became a member of the very successful Christian pop group “Zoe Girl.” Despite that pedigree, as she told my colleague Shane Morris on his Upstream podcast, she was completely unprepared when she learned her pastor was a skeptic, and confronted her with questions and counterclaims about the reliability of Scripture, the morality of the atonement, whether God answers prayer, or cares about our sexual choices, or even exists.

Flailing in doubt Childers went to work to find answers, studying Scripture, church history, great apologists for the Christian faith (past and present), and critiques of the claims of progressivism. In the process, she found that her beliefs had rock-solid foundations, and answers to the toughest questions. A “progressive Christianity” that denies the divinity of Christ, treats His incarnation and resurrection from the dead as myths, and reimagines human nature away from God’s created design and according to sexual libertinism isn’t just another take on the faith. It’s another gospel entirely.

Childers’s book Another Gospel is an incredibly valuable resource. Every week it seems, I talk with pastors, youth pastors, parents and grandparents watching the next generation buy into a false gospel and questioning the historic truth claims of Christianity. Using the framework of Childer’s story, Another Gospel provides a thorough, rigorous, and entirely readable take-down of progressive Christianity, and a reliable introduction to the non-negotiables of the Christian faith.

During October, we’ll send you a copy of that book, “Another Gospel,” with your gift of any amount to BreakPoint and the Colson Center. Come to BreakPoint.org to get your copy.

Presidential candidates get all the love. Just kidding. “Love,” of course, is the wrong word. What presidential candidates get is all the attention.

The presidency matters, of course, and voters should know as much as possible about the character, the party, the policies, and the likely people each candidate will bring to the highest office in the land. At the same time, for almost all of us, this election features incredibly important decisions all the way down the ballot. For example, Amy Coney Barrett might have a new appreciation for the importance of Senate races. Or, ask Colorado State Troopers if their lives have changed since a particular ballot initiative passed in 2016. Or, ask the parents of Loudon County (VA) school children if school board elections make a difference.

At a time when, as Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse observed in his book Them, ”our natural appetites for community, belonging, and meaning are increasingly being satiated by politics instead of religion, Americans are voting on a wider spectrum of issues. At the local level, our ballots decides more than just what taxes we pay, what resources schools receive, which roads are fixed, and the size of the police force. Today, our votes determine what behavior is incentivized by the state, what worldview is taught as fact in our schools, and in some places, which laws police will enforce.

More and more, state by state, these decisions are going directly to citizens, to be determined by ballot initiatives. For example, in 2016, after years of failing to legalize doctor-assisted suicide through the Colorado legislature, the issue was put directly before the people and decided on the ballot. More initiatives appear on ballots in presidential election years because more voters turn out for presidential elections.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nearly 110 ballot initiatives will be decided by voters across the country in next month’s election. Seventy-six involve making permanent changes to state constitutions.

While some are more technical or procedural measure, a handful have important cultural implications. In Colorado, a “yes" vote on Proposition 115 would prohibit abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy, putting an end to the more than 200 later-term abortions committed here every year. Opponents of Proposition 115 have argued that, at 22 weeks, the preborn are just “11 inches long” and weigh about a pound, as if the size of a human being changes whether or not it should be killed. Voting yes on Colorado Proposition 115 could save lives.  My fellow voters, not legislators, will decide.

In Louisiana, voters have an opportunity to amend the state constitution, explicitly declaring there is no legal right to an abortion or for state funding of abortion. Proponents call Amendment 1 the “Love Life Amendment.” Though it would not ban abortion outright, it could lay important legal groundwork for a ban in the future. 

In Arizona, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota, residents will vote on ballot initiatives to legalize either recreational or medical marijuana or, in a few cases, both. 

In Nevada, a ballot initiative called Question 2 would amend the state’s constitution and explicitly recognize marriage as a contract between any two people regardless of gender. South Dakota voters will decide whether to legalize sports gambling. Utah voters will consider the rather bizarre proposal to make the language of its state constitution “gender-neutral.” 

A somewhat confusing ballot measure in Washington State will directly impact the safety and well-being of school children. Back in March, the Washington State Senate voted to mandate comprehensive sex education for all public schoolers, starting in Kindergarten, with explicit conversations about sexuality and sexual behavior to start in fourth grade. Supporters said that, since kids are getting sex ed from the internet anyway, they might as well learn it in the classroom. The confusion is that passing Referendum 90 would approve the sex-ed mandate. So, Washington parents and anyone else who thinks 10-year-olds should not be taught a so-called “LGBTQ-inclusive” sex ed curriculum, should vote no on Referendum 90.

As the Washington State issue illustrates, it is essential for voters to learn about the initiatives in their own states and study the wording of each one carefully. For Christians who are American citizens, it is a way by which we can love our neighbors. For Christians who are citizens of Colorado and Louisiana, it is a way to love our preborn neighbors.

Some tough questions rolled in this week, two of them dealing with family issues. What's a Christian mother to do when her 12-year old daughter announces she's "a bisexual," and the non-Christian father wants to support the daughter in her "identity"? And one Christian couple has differing opinions of whether to implant or adopt out the embryos they created through IVF.

And then, when it comes to voting next month, how do we weigh the personal character of the candidates and the policies they support.

John Stonestreet and Shane Morris tackle these tough ones from a Christian worldview perspective.

Focus on the Family Counselling Consultation and Referrals

Andrew T. Walker on voting and character, Twitter

Biotethics: A Primer for Christians, by Gilbert Meilander

In 2001, President George W. Bush limited federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research to already-existing lines of embryonic stem cells. While it wasn’t a complete ban on the research itself, it did prevent any further federally funded destruction of human life, and instead prioritized funding for research into adult stem cells.

At the time, he was accused of everything from being on the wrong side of science to banning all stem cell research to standing in the way of miracle cures. A central issue of the 2004 election, Bush’s Democratic opponent John Kerry even promised to change the Bush policy, so Christopher Reeves would be able to walk again.

To be clear, President Bush did not ban stem cell research. He didn’t even embryo-destructive research, or the private funding of embryo destructive research, or the funding of embryo-destructive research by states. He did not even ban federal funding of research on stem cell lines created from embryos that had already been destroyed. He only banned the federal funding of stem cell research that required destroying new embryos.

President Obama, almost immediately upon taking office and by executive order, reversed Bush’s decision. Since 2009, the number of embryonic stem-cell lines approved for federally funded research has grown from 60 to 484. Embryos were destroyed to create those new stem cell lines, and our federal tax dollars paid for it.

Of course, even if all the wild dreams of life-saving treatments were realized by this research, it would not justify the taking of innocent life. Still, a decade later, not a single therapy has been derived using the stem cells from embryo destructive research. Dozens of therapies have been derived using the stem cells from non-embryonic sources, and well over one million patients have benefitted from adult stem cell treatments.

As it turns out, the promise that embryonic stem cells would be more effective because they have the potential to turn into a greater variety of cells, was simply false. What’s called “pluripotency” did not mean “more effective,” as was widely assumed. And that’s before a Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in turning adult skin cells into pluripotent stem cells. In other words, we are now able to derive cells with the same pluripotency as embryonic stem cells without destroying a single embryo.

Why then, has federal funding continued for embryo destructive research? Why has the current administration designated funding for the creation of one hundred and six new stem cell lines acquired from the destruction of embryos? Since 2017, between $250 and $300 million of federal tax dollars has been designated to embryo destructive research. The amount this fiscal year is projected to rise to $321 million. This isn’t what pro-life citizens expected from an administration that has been, in so many other ways, so pro-life.

In early September, 94 members of Congress joined Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) in a letter urging President Trump to “issue an Executive Order to end taxpayer funding” for human embryonic stem cell research.  “Ending federal support for [embryonic stem-cell] research,” the letter states, “would not reduce NIH’s lifesaving research by one dollar, but would instead free up scarce resources for NIH to put toward promising research on adult and induced pluripotent stem cells.”

The fact is President Bush got this one exactly right. President Obama got this one exactly wrong. Reversing his reversal on the funding of embryo-destructive research should’ve been among the first orders of business in early 2017.

Come to BreakPoint.org to see Senator Wicker’s full letter to President Trump. Then, contact the White House and your congressional leaders. Let them know we must stop funding the destruction of human life. 

Since 2015, World Rugby, the international governing body of a sport with a lot of hitting but little protective gear, has allowed biological males who identify as female to compete in women’s leagues. They were early adopters in what seems to be a growing trend of sports officials who pretend biological and physiological realities no longer exist in light of new ideas from social science and activist groups.

But they do. Canadian kinesiologist Linda Blade, writing at Quillette recently, summed those realities up this way: “male athletes are, on average, 40 percent heavier, 15 percent faster, 30 percent more powerful, and 25–50 percent stronger than their female counterparts.”  Especially in a sport like rugby, such physiological differences not only spell unfair advantages for the male athletes who choose to compete against females, they spell danger for the female athletes forced to compete against males. As one female player said, “I have to play or forfeit my place [on the team] even when I know its unsafe for me.” 

In the face of serious injuries and potential financial liability, World Rugby is now reconsidering its “trans-inclusion” policy. They are, according to the Quillette article, “the first sport to bring to the table experts on all sides of the eligibility issue, including sociologists, biologists, kinesiologists, and those with a background in human rights.”  And, word is, that World Rugby will propose a comprehensive ban on males competing in women’s rugby.

My old friend from Tennessee might say, “this ain’t rocket surgery, you know.”

Whether men should compete with and as women isn’t just a dilemma for rugby. Across the United States, female athletes in a number of sports, at the high school and college level, find themselves competing against biological males who are typically bigger, stronger, and faster because, well, they are males. The results of such “inclusion” include lost competitions, lost opportunities, and lost scholarships for female athletes.

Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler is seeking to address the issue once and for all with a new bill called the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.” Just recently introduced in Congress, the bill stipulates that allowing biological males to participate in girls’ sports violates Title IX, which bars sexual discrimination in schools that receive federal funding as a way of protecting female sports. Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma is another of the bill’s sponsors. “Permitting biological males to participate in women’s sports,” says Lankford, “rejects the very spirit of Title IX, which was intended to create an equal playing field for women and girls.”

So called “transinclusion,” especially in competitive sports, makes the playing field unequal. In Connecticut, for example, two boys who identify as female have won a combined 15 state track and field championships in just the last two years.

To be clear, it is unlikely this bill will pass into law. Still, it’s a necessary bill, even if it doesn’t. Loeffler and Lanford, as well the bill’s other co-sponsors Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), and Tom Cottom (R-Arkansas) are, by just introducing this bill, are forcing a debate that has been largely pre-empted by fear, intimidation, and a few selective stories. Also, the bill can serve as model legislation for states that wish to protect high school and collegiate female athletes.

And, to be clear, the bill is important simply because it reaffirms what is true: that biological men and women actually exist, are different but equal, but not interchangeable. It’s never ok for a government to peddle in things not true, especially on something as obvious and basic to our humanity as our given sex as male and female.

George Orwell famously said that, at times, the “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” That’s what Senators Loeffler, Lankford, Cotton, Lee and Blackburn are doing by introducing “The Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.”  Let your Senator know you support it.