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Supreme Court to Determine if Parents Have a Right
Topic: Children and Family
Source: CNN News
... to Opt Young Kids Out of LGBTQ Reading in Elementary School. The Supreme Court agreed Friday to review whether schools may read LGBTQ+ books to elementary school students without giving parents the ability to opt their children out on religious grounds. The lawsuit over a Maryland school district’s policy landed at the Supreme Court amid raging culture war fights about transgender rights and how much control parents should have over school curriculum. A group of mostly Muslim and Ethiopian Orthodox parents sued Montgomery County schools over the policy, arguing that it violated their First Amendment religious rights, and were seeking an injunction that would block the policy while courts considered their underlying First Amendment challenge.

SCOTUS Will Consider If Maryland Parents Can Opt Children Out Of Pro-LGBT Books
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The Epoch Times
The Fourth Circuit ruled against the parents last year, finding there was no evidence their constitutional rights were violated. The court granted the petition in Mahmoud v. Taylor in an unsigned order. No justices dissented, and the court did not explain its decision. The petition was filed on Sept. 12, 2024, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit turned away the parents’ request for an injunction to halt the Montgomery County Board of Education’s policy of promoting the books. The case goes back to November 2022, when the board mandated new “LGBTQ-inclusive” storybooks for elementary school students that promote gender transitions, Pride parades, and same-sex romance between young children.

Grooming gangs: the making of a scandal
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Spiked Online
How elite fears of social unrest and accusations of racism led the state to look away from industrial-scale abuse. Thanks to the numerous local inquiries and court cases, this much we do know about the grooming-gangs scandal. From at least the 1990s and likely long before then, criminal networks prostituted, raped and tortured thousands of young girls in towns and cities across the UK. And the authorities, despite being aware of what was happening, did very little to intervene. The sites of the abuse may differ – significant gangs have been identified and partially prosecuted in Bradford, Derby, Newcastle, Oxford, Telford, Rotherham, Oldham, Birmingham, Rochdale and many more places. But we know that the pattern of offending remains similar. Groups of men working in or around the nighttime economy target 11- or 12-year-old girls, often from challenging backgrounds. They pose as their ‘boyfriends’. They ply them with drink and drugs. Then over months and years they rape them. They pimp them out for sex with other men. They beat and threaten them.

Biden Makes Last-Ditch Pass at Interfering in College Sports
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Reason
Even if the Trump administration quickly undoes it, it’s a precedent for future administrations. On President Joe Biden's way out the door, his Education Department has thrown a wrench into plans for universities to pay student-athletes directly. The payments will almost certainly still happen, but instead of schools using the vast majority of the payments on athletes in big-revenue programs (i.e. football), the Education Department says under Title IX the payments must be "proportionate" between male and female athletes.

Prof says 'all hell broke loose' at Harvard after his study found no racial bias in police shootings
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Campus Reform
Roland Fryer recently detailed the extreme backlash he says he faced for releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing. Fryer says that colleagues told him 'Don't publish this,' warning that 'You'll ruin your career.' Professor Roland Fryer, an economics professor at the Cambridge, Massachusetts Ivy League institution, recently had a conversation with Bari Weiss of The Free Press during which he discussed the violent reaction to a study he published in 2016. [Ed: Fryer is a black prof.]

Parents group files civil rights complaint against DC schools
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Just the News
... for kids group open only to minorities. The group, Parents Defending Education, filed the complaint with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. A national parents group whose stated mission is to "reclaim our schools from activists" has filed a civil rights complaint against District of Columbia Public Schools, arguing a federally funded “empowerment” club created for young female students who identify as black and-or nonbinary is racially discriminatory because “only some students are allowed to participate based on their race." The group, Parents Defending Education, filed the complaint Jan. 6 with the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, asking that the office investigate an “Empowerment Club” in the school district, in the nation's capital. The grassroots group is asking the office to determine whether the so-called "Empowerment Club" violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in programs receiving federal funding.

NY teachers unions pump school spending to highest in the nation
Topic: Children and Family
Source: The New York Post
...at $36K per kid — yet they rank low in reading and math: report. New York funnels more money into its schools than any state in the nation — with only mediocre results to show for it, a withering report released Friday reveals. Spending on education has gone up — to a whopping $89 billion on New York school districts this academic year — even as both enrollment and test scores have plummeted, according to the analysis by the Citizens Budget Commission. The statewide average of spending per student came to an eye-popping $36,293, a 21% increase since the 2020-21 school year, the report by the budget watchdog group found.

Hospital Staff Failed To Treat Her Miscarriage, Then Accused Her of a Crime
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Reason
A new lawsuit alleges that, after failing to treat a placental abruption, medical staff conspired to have Brittany Watts arrested for her miscarriage. When Brittany Watts began bleeding at 21 weeks pregnant, she went to her local hospital seeking help. Instead, she was repeatedly denied treatment. When she miscarried at home, hospital staff accused Watts of deliberately harming her fetus, and Watts was eventually arrested and charged with a felony. While a grand jury later declined to indict Watts, she filed a lawsuit earlier this month, accusing hospital employees of fabricating evidence that she had harmed her baby and failing to properly treat her miscarriage symptoms.

San Francisco Settles Judicial Watch Taxpayer Lawsuit
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Judicial Watch
Shuts Down Discriminatory Guaranteed-Income Program Limited to Transgender Individuals with Preference to Biological Black and Latino Men Who Identify as Women; Agrees to Pay $3,250 in Attorney’s Fees and Costs. Judicial Watch announced today the City of San Francisco, in a 7-3 vote by the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco, authorized a settlement agreement in a taxpayer lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch against the City, agreeing to discontinue its discriminatory guaranteed-income program funded by taxpayer money in favor of transgender individuals with a PREFERENCE for biological black and Latino men who identify as women. The agreement commits the city to pay $3,250 in attorney’s fees and costs and not to create a new guaranteed income program with the same eligibility criteria.

Lawsuit alleges Vermont tracks pregnant women deemed unsuitable for parenthood
Topic: Children and Family
Source: AP News
Vermont’s child welfare agency relied on baseless allegations about a pregnant woman’s mental health to secretly investigate her and win custody of her daughter before the baby was born, according to a lawsuit that alleges the state routinely targets and tracks pregnant women deemed unsuitable for parenthood. The ACLU of Vermont and Pregnancy Justice, a national advocacy group, on Wednesday sued the Vermont Department for Children and Families, a counseling center and the hospital where the woman gave birth in February 2022. The lawsuit seeks both an end to what it calls an illegal surveillance program and unspecified monetary damages for the woman, who is identified only by her initials, A.V.

Oldham gang rape survivor blasts ‘appalling’ Labour plan
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Independent
...for local grooming inquiries and ‘rapid audit’. A woman who was raped in Oldham aged 12 has branded Labour’s new plan for government-backed local inquiries into grooming gangs as “appalling”. Samantha Walker-Roberts, who has bravely waived her right to anonymity, was gang raped in a house in Chadderton, northwest England, in 2006. Shakil Chowdhury was jailed for six years for the brutal attack but released on licence after three. Her other attackers were never caught. Last week the government, in particular Keir Starmer and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips, came under furious attack from right-wing figures, led by X owner Elon Musk, after it decided not to hold a national inquiry into the scandal.

Wed or I’ll shoot
Topic: Children and Family
Source: RT
Inside the criminal world where young men are forced to marry at gunpoint. The practice of kidnapping young people to get married has made a comeback in Bihar, India, highlighting high unemployment, a stagnant economy, and a rigid caste pyramid. The government job that should have been Avinash Mishra’s ticket to a better life has become his nightmare. The 28-year-old teacher from Munger, in the impoverished northern Indian state of Bihar, spends his evenings scanning the streets for unfamiliar vehicles and unknown faces, in fear that he could be kidnapped by his in-laws. “They want me to consummate a marriage that happened at gunpoint,” Mishra said in a trembling voice. “How can they call it a marriage when I was kidnapped and forced to perform rituals with a gun to my head?” Bihar is currently facing the problem of Pakadua Byah, or shotgun weddings, where a groom is kidnapped and forced to marry a girl at gunpoint.

Boy makes progress in US hospital
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Live Action
...after parents flee Canada docs who tried to end life support. A family had to flee their home country of Canada to save their son’s life, after doctors threatened to remove his life support and have his organs donated against their will. “We were able to bring him to New Orleans at Ochsner Hospital, which was amazing,” Tétrault said. Once they arrived, Harch said he was shocked to see Arthur’s condition, as the Canadian medical team had presented him as being near dead. “They were led to believe that they were coming to pick up a near-dead child, that this kid had no chance — nothing,” Harch said. “When they got there and saw the condition that he was in, which was not as severe as what had been described, it was an eye-opener that they see why this father and mother went to the extremes they did.” Arthur is now awake and alert, able to breathe on his own, and is regaining movement in his limbs. And Tétrault says it is the difference in medical care that means the difference between life and death for his son.

W Virginia Now Provides Religious and Moral Exemptions for School Vaccine Mandates!
Topic: Children and Family
Source: ICAN Legal Update
West Virginia’s new governor, Governor Patrick Morrisey, signed an Executive Order on January 14, 2025, formally providing the right to religious exemptions from mandatory vaccines for school children in his state—a historic feat following two ICAN-funded litigations. West Virginia now joins the other 45 states that recognize Americans’ inherent religious freedom

Reverse Biden Administration's Illegal Student Loan Giveaway
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: Real Clear Policy
The settlement represents a dangerous erosion of the separation of powers,,, Even in the waning days of the Biden administration, they are circumventing Congress and the rule of law to illegally forgive billions of dollars in student loan debt through the collusive class action settlement of Sweet v. Cardona. As one of his first acts on January 20, President-elect Trump should shut down this travesty.

What Trump Can Do ‘On Day One’ To Reverse The Spread Of Transgender Ideology
Topic: Political Correctness
Source: The Daily Caller
President-elect Donald Trump promised throughout his campaign to dismantle the transgender agenda by taking actions to protect women’s sports, remove gender ideology from schools and limit access to dangerous sex change procedures. On the first day of his second term, Trump has the opportunity to roll back the Biden administration’s four year attempt to weave gender ideology into the fabric of American institutions and government agencies, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to gender ideology, several policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

How the Women’s March lost steam
Topic: Women's Studies, Scholarship, and History
Source: Politico
More than a million people marched against Trump’s inauguration eight years ago. Just a fraction of that is expected to do so this time around. The Women’s March has lost its luster. The day after Donald Trump was sworn in for the first time, more than a million people took to the streets in one of the largest single-day protests in American history. It was a show of force and a rejection of what many felt was brazen toxic masculinity ascending to the Oval Office and the women-led protests came to define the early portion of Trump’s first days in office. But with his second inauguration in two days, this year’s demonstration is shaping up to be a diminished shadow of its former self. The smaller, quieter march is a reflection of the muted exasperation and a likely symptom of political fatigue that has settled in among anti-Trump forces that were once the driving force of American politics. Democrats are wondering how to reassemble a winning coalition that was once organized around opposition, with many pondering if they should just find a way to work with the figure they once called a threat to democracy itself.

Laken Riley Act Reminds Us: If a Law Is Named After Someone, It's Probably Bad
Topic: Violence Against Women
Source: Reason
Riley's murder was an atrocity. But the law bearing her name is a grab bag of authoritarian policies that have little to do with her death. There's a popular mantra among skeptics of government power that goes like this: If a law is named after a person, it's probably bad. Usually pegged to a victim whose story is genuinely tragic, and for whom compassion is warranted, such legislation often gives lawmakers license to enact authoritarian policies while using a bill's raw emotional packaging as both a shield from criticism and as ammunition to criticize those who don't get on board.

I See Dead Amendments
Topic: Women's Studies, Scholarship, and History
Source: Jonathan Turley
President Biden Issues Otherworldly ERA Declaration. President Joe Biden wants people to know that he sees dead amendments. Just before leaving office, Biden declared that we have a 28th amendment despite dying in the ratification process years ago. Not since the movie Sixth Sense has there been a more creepy moment. To paraphrase Cole Sear in the film, Biden does not see them in constitutional coffins but “Walking around like regular [amendments]. They don’t know they’re dead.” Neither does Biden.