Townhall Review | Commentaries

A new gender bill in California has passed both chambers of the state legislature and is awaiting signature from Governor Gavin Newsom.

Assembly Bill 957 is a direct assault upon parental rights, threatening parental custody if a parent is judged by some court to be inadequately supportive or even enthusiastic of a child’s gender identity or expression.

The actual text of the bill makes it clear. When considering child welfare, I quote: “the health, safety and welfare of the child includes … a parent's affirmation of the child's gender identity or gender expression.”

Gender expression can mean almost anything.

It’s hard to imagine legislation more truly radical than this and more truly destructive of the family.

It really is a full assault upon parental rights, which is a full assault upon parenthood, which is a full assault upon the family, predicated on a full assault on marriage itself. 

And yes: I meant every word of that, exactly in that sequence.

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President Donald Trump was interviewed by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press last Sunday—and the interchange was instructive on many levels, including Welker’s biases and distortions, stating that Democrats do not support late term abortions.

But this is literally the Democratic Party’s position on abortion. They oppose any time—or gestation-limit—on abortion.  

But President Trump needs to get this right, too.  At one point in the interview Trump said he supported state flexibility on abortion laws. He also called the human heartbeat legislation in Florida “a terrible thing” and “a terrible mistake” while he would not state where he would put limits, or if he would sign legislation with limits.

President Ronald Reagan wrote that “We cannot play God; It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not.”  That is what the Democrats do. If Donald Trump wants to receive the trust of the pro-life community, as he earned before, he’ll have to be much more clear and much more decisive.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has changed the Senate’s dress code. Senators—but not staff or visitors—can now dress however they please on the Senate floor.

There are more urgent issues than whether John Fetterman can vote in his gym shorts and hoodie. But standards like dress codes matter.

What people wear reveals how they see themselves and their role. When Fetterman votes in the Senate, he represents the people of Pennsylvania — and of the U.S., too. 

Being a senator is about more than personal branding.

Almost everyone agrees there are too few standards of any kind left in America’s civic life. Our elected leaders should be trying to raise these standards, not lower them. By telling senators it’s acceptable to do the nation’s business in gym clothes, Chuck Schumer disrespects his office and the public trust it represents. 

In doing so, he diminishes us all.

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Did you know last Sunday was Constitution Day? …Marking the 236th anniversary of the US Constitution’s signing in Philadelphia. 

You could be forgiven for missing it…

On Pepperdine’s Malibu campus, we celebrated by welcoming Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik who gave a spellbinding talk on the deep connections between the Old Testament and America’s founding. He noted something very unique about Americans: we are people of the written word, a people with a shared commitment to a set of ideas. 

The first printing press arrived on our shores in 1639. From the Bible to political pamphlets to the Federalist Papers to the Constitution itself, Americans have always put down our shared commitments in writing—to be discussed and debated.

Take a few minutes this week to read those written words of the Constitution. 

It’s a very American thing to do.

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Like a small, sinister figure from a recurring nightmare, there he was, back on TV. Anthony Fauci, patron saint of COVID hysteria, popped up on CNN recently to insist, against all the evidence, that masks work.

Confronted with a review of 78 high quality studies finding masks were useless for Covid, Fauci had no good answer. He insisted on the efficacy of masking nonetheless.

Here’s what Dr. Fauci and others like him should understand. We’re not doing that again. No one is going to force little children to mask up, damaging their speech and social development. No one is going to tell Americans they must cover their faces, like anonymous drones in some authoritarian dystopia.

Fauci said a lot of things that weren’t true — that masks were imperative and that COVID came from a wet market. He’s caused untold suffering yet escaped all accountability. His time is over.

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Blue state politicians are finally feeling the pain of illegal immigration. New York City mayor Eric Adams has been one of the loudest complainers, claiming his city will have to cut up to 15 percent of its budget to pay for the influx of migrants.

The Biden administration has taken notice. It’s now floating a “Remain in Texas” policy. This would mean illegal immigrants would have to wait in Texas until their asylum screening.  

Of course, you’d have to ask: if the Biden administration can effectively “wall in” the migrants just above Texas, why couldn’t it do so just below, and have them “Remain in Mexico”?

But then you might start to suspect this commonsense plan would deprive Democrats of new clients for an expanded welfare state, or stymie their new scheme for turning Texas blue. 

But you’d hate to be that cynical.

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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a stinging rebuke to the Biden administration. The court found that the administration's pattern of pressuring social media companies to censor politically disfavored content violated the 1st Amendment. 

Musk opened the floodgates when he bought Twitter and released the records showing almost daily coordination between government and social media companies. When the feds and mega tech companies team up against a Stanford epidemiologist such as plaintiff Dr. Jay Bhattacharya for speaking the truth, it’s time to fight back. 

The lawsuit led by Missouri and Louisiana AGs, and The New Civil Liberties Alliance, assisted by an amicus brief from the Alliance Defending Freedom, successfully prevailed over a pattern which amounts to one of the worst violations of First Amendment law in American history. 
 
Congratulations to the plaintiffs, their counsel, but most of all to the American people, whose First Amendment rights were vindicated. 

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The California legislature just passed a bill requiring that a child’s choice of his or her gender identity shall be taken into consideration in custody cases. If a parent does not agree with the child’s views, the courts are to take that into account when deciding whether or not parents are fit to keep their own child.

Not only is this an assault on the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children, it is an ideological power-grab of the state over and against family autonomy, an ideological interruption of natural child-rearing, and a disorientation of adult responsibility and vulnerable youth maturation—putting temporary childhood excitations over and above responsible adult guidance. The state, in other words, is now becoming the parent over tender, ideological, life-altering decisions.

If Governor Gavin Newsom signs this bill, which is likely, he will shred thousands of years of natural right, natural law, parental authority, and, yes, sanity. 

Just when we thought California could not sink further…

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Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham elevated herself above the US Constitution last week in suspending the Second Amendment in parts of New Mexico. Lujan Grisham had declared a gun violence emergency in Albuquerque and suspended all rights to keep and bear arms outside the home for thirty days. 

This is an act of tyranny. Governors operate under authority granted by both the federal and state constitutions, not the other way around. Lujan Grisham took an oath to uphold both, but then declared that oath to be “not absolute.” In doing so, Lujan arrogated all power into her hands and stripped American citizens of their civil rights.

Now comes the question: Will state legislators will follow their oaths to uphold and defend the US constitution?  The only political defense against an executive that seizes such power is impeachment and removal. New Mexico’s state legislature is dominated by Democrats, who now have to decide whether to defend the Republic and their own legislative authority – or circle wagons around its tyrant. 

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“For the first time in Gallup polling, only a minority of adults in the United States belong to a church, synagogue, or mosque.”

That’s a quote from Nicholas Kristof—a man of the left—writing recently in the New York Times, interacting in his column, with a new book entitled “The Great De-Churching.” The authors argue, and I quote: “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.” 

That's quite a claim.

The book emphasizes the sociological aspects of the decline in church attendance and church membership. Another writer speaks of belonging but not believing—that is belonging to a church but not believing what the church is teaching.

What we’re seeing is that those who don’t really believe are no longer belonging. They’re pulling away.

The point is this: The tighter the secular pressure comes, the more we’re going to find out who was just belonging, but not believing. Once theological beliefs become sufficiently scandalous, well, the belonging becomes quite untenable if you don’t believe.

We ought not to be surprised.

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