Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson

Penna Dexter
Hundreds of parents showed up recently to oppose a piece of legislation being considered in the California State Senate. The bill pertains to custody battles that involve transgender-identifying children. The version that passed the State Assembly in March requires judges to favor the parent who “affirms” a trans child in his or her gender identity over one who does not.  The bill moved over to the California Senate and recently passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party line vote.
Then, the bill’s co-authors upped the ante.
As if the bill’s bias toward the gender-affirming parent were not bad enough, before the vote in the Judiciary Committee, Assemblywoman Lori Wilson — who has a transgender child —and Senator Scott Wiener — who is gay — updated the bill’s language to make parents’ “non-affirmation” of a child’s gender identity a violation of the California Family Code’s standard for the health, safety, and welfare of a child. This means non-affirming parents could be subject to claims of child abuse.
The bill provides no definition of “non-affirming.” In each case, a judge would have to make the determination.
Over 100 California residents testified against AB 957. Only 17 voiced their support.
In her testimony against the bill, attorney Erin Friday said she’s the “mother of a girl who used to believe she was a boy. She said, “AB 957 is the first bill in the nation to codify into law that a parent who does not affirm the gender identity of their child is abusive.” She emphasized the danger, stating, “There is no nuance in this bill.”
Senator Scott Wilk, one of two Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, has served in the Legislature for 11 years and sees it increasingly putting government between parents and children. He says he believes this bill will result in “children being taken away from the home.” He warned parents: “If you love your children, you need to flee California.” 

Kerby Anderson
As Pride Month is ending, it is worth revisiting an event that took place on the South Lawn of the White House. President Biden hosted an event for families with LGBTQ kids. That is where the president announced he would appoint a “banned book czar.” This person’s job apparently is to encourage libraries to stock books dealing with sexual issues that I really can’t even discuss in much detail in this commentary.
David Harsanyi had a suggestion for the president. He argues that “if banned books are harmless, Joe Biden should read them to kids.” He even suggests that the president read to these young people on television. He even suggests that Jill Biden might be another person to read these books to impressionable young people.
Of course, he will not do this because the sexual descriptions of what boys and girls do to each other would be offensive. There are vivid descriptions of sexual organs and graphic descriptions of various forms of sex. If you want to follow the link, you can read what is in some of these books.
On my radio program, I reminded my listeners what some concerned parents did years ago at a shareholder meeting for music companies. They read some of the offensive and decadent lyrics of rap artists they represented. More recently, parents and even students have read excerpts from some of these books at school board meetings. In every case, the audience was shocked and music executives and school board members told them to stop.
It is easy to talk about book banning in the abstract. It is quite another to see and hear what is in some of these books. There is a reason parents and even some teachers and administrators don’t want sexually explicit books in the library. That is also the reason you will never hear that the president read these books to students.

Kerby Anderson
As Pride Month is about to end, it is worth considering who really has power in America. Earlier this month, Carl Trueman wrote about the LGBTQ Establishment, saying that Pride Month shows who really has power in America. The last four weeks validate his prediction made June 1st.
He is known for his bestselling book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. He has been on my radio program not only to talk about that book but his latest book, which is a shorter version of the first book. He documents the history of the sexual revolution and the philosophy behind it. That, of course, includes the rise of homosexuality and sexual politics.

He reminds us, “Even accounting firms, surely the most boring of institutions (and I write as the son of an accountant) feel the need to post rainbows in windows, affirm support for LGBTQ politics on their webpages.” He correctly argues that Pride Month is about the ownership of space and time and power. It is “an opportunity to erase from public view those who refuse to acknowledge that power.”
Pride Month “puts the lie to the notion that the LGBTQ community itself somehow represents the marginalized. Not at all. It’s the establishment.” After, the truly marginalized don’t have a month celebrating their existence nor do they have their own flag everyone is supposed to be flying.
Yes, there has been some pushback. But the fact that corporations and even baseball teams are willing to double down on promoting the LGBTQ agenda illustrates who owns the public space. Let’s stop the false claim of marginalization. Marginalized people don’t have their own month and their own flag. That’s the real lesson of Pride Month.

Kerby Anderson
A very important book written by Nancy Pearcey came out this week. The Toxic War on Masculinity is well researched and full of surprises. The first surprise is the claim that there is good news about Christian men.
The standard response from both the secular and Christian media is that biblical teachings about such topics as headship in marriage make Christian men more likely to commit abuse and pose major difficulties in a marriage. The problem with the social science research in the past is that it failed to identify two distinct groups of men: religiously devout vs. nominal evangelicals.
The first group (who attend church regularly) shatter the negative stereotypes. They are more loving to their wives and more emotionally engaged with their children than any other group in America. They are less likely to divorce and the least likely to commit domestic violence.
By contrast, the nominal Christian family men do fit the negative stereotype. They spend less time with their children. Their wives report significantly lower levels of happiness. And they are 20 percent more likely to divorce than secular men. Sociologist Brad Wilcox reports, “The most violent husbands in America are nominal Evangelical Protestants who attend church infrequently or not at all.”
Nancy Pearcey has a few suppositions for this difference. She observes that “nominal men hang around the fringes of the Christian world just enough to learn the language of headship and submission but not enough to learn the biblical meaning of those terms.” She believes they “cherry-pick verses from the Bible and read them through a grid of male superiority and entitlement that they have absorbed from the secular guy code for the Real Man.”
This is just one of the many insights you will discover in her new book on The Toxic War on Masculinity.

Kerby Anderson
Nearly half the state legislatures have passed laws requiring that only females can participate in girls’ and women’s sports. Some of these laws are being challenged in court along with court challenges in states that allow biological males to compete with biological females.
Gregory Brown is an exercise physiologist who documents the biological differences between men and women in sports. Many biological factors influence human performance, but “one of the most important factors that influences adaptations to training and performance in sports is sex, because sex influences every system and every cell in our body.”
A fair comparison between male and female differences in anatomy and physiology give males athletic advantages when compared to gifted and trained females of the same age. It is also true that puberty magnifies those sex-based differences. He lists those increased percentages in his article, and they are significant.
He also addresses the argument that hormone therapy decreases the biological advantages. For example, men have 30-60 percent higher muscle strength than women. Even after “undergoing testosterone suppression” the decrease in strength is less then 9 percent.
Sure, some women are taller than some men. Some women can run faster than some men. But the tallest women are shorter than the tallest men. The fastest men are faster than the fastest women. A blood test or a genetic test cannot determine a transgender identity. Biological sex is still present, and it is logical to assume the inherent male athletic advantages are still present.
This is the science that lawmakers, judges, coaches, and parents must accept. There are clear differences between men and women when competing in sports.

Kerby Anderson
What was the origin of the virus that caused Covid-19? We know the answer. Finally, the government is willing to state the obvious. Michael Shellenberger and others report that “multiple US government officials interviewed” now have identified “the first people infected by the virus.” When a source was asked how certain they were that these three scientists doing “gain of function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are “patients zero,” they were told 100%.
Jim Geraghty reminds us that the first report of the outbreak came in February 3, 2020. That Chinese report was written in part by two of the men mentioned in the US government report. Also, remember what happened when Dr. Li Wenliang tried to warn the international community? He was dragged into a police station and berated for “rumormongering” and for “publishing untrue statements.” A month later he died of the virus.
In previous commentaries, I have expressed my disbelief that so few in the media seemed even curious about the origin of a virus that killed 23 million people worldwide. I realize that those numbers may be inflated, but at least we can agree that millions died and most of the media seem incurious. And the Chinese Communist government got away with lies and suppression in part because there are too many American companies doing business in China.
Noah Rothman calls this the “scandal of the century,” and laments that there are no consequences. The Chinese officials locked down a previously accessible public database, altered its data to hide the origin of the virus, and then took it offline altogether. It appears that the Chinese Communist Party got away with the “scandal of the century”.

Penna Dexter
What happens when a Boston middle school holds a Pride Month Spirit Day complete with rainbow streamers, Pride banners and invitations to students and faculty to wear rainbow clothing in support?
In bright blue Massachusetts, one might expect that most kids would get onboard. But that is not what happened on June 2nd at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, a Boston suburb. As The Washington Stand reports, “Some students not only refused to bow to the rainbow idol, but also organized a counterprotest.” Groups of students wore red, white, blue or black, including face paint. They chanted, “U.S.A. are my pronouns.” Some of them got feisty and tore down decorations and ripped them up and stuffed them in water fountains.
The school’s principal, Cari Perchase wrote a letter to parents stating she was “extremely disheartened” by the protest. She complained that the protesting students “glared intimidatingly at faculty members showing pride.” She said celebrating students were shamed, causing some to remove rainbow stickers or cover up Pride messages on their clothing.
The Washington Stand’s Joshua Arnold observed that, the protesting “middle schoolers responded to peer pressure to celebrate LGBT Pride with peer pressure against celebrating LGBT Pride — and they succeeded.”
Principal Perchase’s letter prefaced her apology to Marshall Simonds LGBT-identifying students with this statement: “When one individual or group of individuals’ beliefs and actions result in the demeaning of another individual or group, it is completely unacceptable.” But, more than a few Marshall Simonds students do not buy into LGBT ideology. Doesn’t the school’s insistence that they celebrate Pride month “demean” them?
The Burlington Superintendent of Schools also sent out a letter. In it, he insisted. “We embrace everyone for who they are.”  Then he encouraged citizens to “join us in taking a stand against homophobia.”
To stand against oppressive, in-your-face contempt for traditional morality and simple biology is not homophobic. It’s courageous.  

Kerby Anderson
The American Psychological Association released a health advisory on social media. In fact, the report offered ten recommendations that involve various forms of monitoring, training, and technical adaptations to blunt certain adverse effects of social media.
James Spencer from the D.L. Moody Center was on my program recently to talk about the advisory and also to broaden the discussion about the place of technological advancements in our society. We talked about everything from social media to artificial intelligence.
He is concerned that these technology platforms have become an inevitable part of modern life, even though we know the problems linked to them. His family has taken steps to limit social media (very similar to the APA advisory) and found that some of the negative influences remain.
He also reminded us that this advisory is more than a decade after all the significant changes in social media were already implemented. “Twitter released the retweet function (2009), Facebook added the comments feature (2008) and “like” button (2009), and Instagram launched as a stand-alone platform (2010).”
As a society, we have engaged in a social experiment. The current advisory is too little, too late. He then reminds us how fast AI is coming into our lives. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in 64 days. It took Twitter five years to reach 100 million users.
Once again, we are moving at an increased rate and engaging in a social experiment. This time the social experiment is with AI without knowing any of the consequences. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another decade for an APA advisory on AI.
The obvious conclusion is for parents and grandparents to step into the lives of their children and grandchildren and limit these new technological advancements.

Kerby Anderson
A recent study, done by the Wall Street Journal, illustrates how dangerous social media platforms have become. Instagram is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook and was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
Working with two teams of specialized Internet researchers from Stanford University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the Wall Street Journal was able to find 405 sellers of “self-generated” child-sex material, which had 22,000 unique followers.
In case you are wondering, the promotion of underage-sex content violates federal law as well as the rules established by Meta. And the company does know it has a problem. A Meta spokesman said the company actively seeks to remove such users, taking down 490,000 accounts for violating its child safety policies in January alone.
Now, I have a question for you. Have you even heard about this? We are talking about a major social media company that is owned by one of the wealthiest individuals in America. You might imagine this would be a major story. I did talk about it on my radio program but haven’t heard much else about this issue. We will see if Mark Zuckerberg will be called before a congressional hearing soon.
The head of the University of Massachusetts Rescue Lab warned that, “Instagram is an on-ramp to places on the Internet where there’s more explicit child sexual abuse.” The Stanford researchers looked at other social media sites and concluded, “The most important platform for these networks of buyers and sellers seems to be Instagram.”
You might want to reevaluate whether you should allow your children and grandchildren to use the Instagram app.

Kerby Anderson
For more than a decade, policymakers have been discussing the problem of “food deserts.” I started writing about this issue three years ago because there are zip codes in low-income neighborhoods without a grocery store that can provide fresh and nutritious food options. Dr. Merrill Matthews recently wrote about this issue and was on my radio program to discuss it.
He reminded us that major food chains like Walmart, Kroger, and Whole Foods have announced they will be leaving some major urban areas. Of course, we have also seen that other retail outlets that don’t sell food (like Walgreens, Macy’s, Nike, and Old Navy) are also leaving those same crime-ridden areas.
The explanation is simple. These have become bastions of progressivism. Crime is on the increase because shoplifters and other criminals aren’t punished. Record levels of unchecked theft and crime make these stores unprofitable.
Let me add my perspective to his observation. Food deserts are a real problem, and wokeness and especially critical race theory make the program worse. In a recent speech, I gave in the Dallas area, I started with the economic fact that it takes $12 million to plant a grocery store in this area. And the risks are high given the limited profit margins. In two cities in which I have lived, the local grocery store went broke and closed.
When a food chain announces it will locate a grocery store, there are the inevitable charges of racism: white grocery chains will put local black convenience stores out of business. Once it is built, the food chain must hire law enforcement to stop shoplifting and smash-and-grab. Again, you hear the charges of racism. If only a few people are hired from the community, once again, you hear the charges of racism.
Food deserts are a real problem, but I suggest that the current political, economic, and cultural issues aren’t making it easy to solve the problem.

Kerby Anderson
Major financial firms use ESG factors in their investment decisions, and the Biden administration has promoted ESG investment rules. According to major media reports, attempts to remove these requirements have failed. But the latest legislative scorecard shows that the anti-ESG movement is succeeding.
ESG stands for environmental, social, and corporate governance factors which have been used to push a leftwing agenda without asking Congress to implement what some have even called a “woke ideological agenda.”
Two years ago, the Texas legislature passed a law that bars the state from doing business with financial companies that favor renewable-energy firms over fossil fuels based on environmental reasons rather than financial reasons. Legislatures in other states have followed suit. More than two dozen states introduced anti-ESG bills. So far, eleven states have passed laws and implemented regulations.
The CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation observed, “We’ve come in the last year and a half from nothing to having a quarter of the states passing stuff and half of the states engaging.”
You wouldn’t know this by reading articles in the mainstream press. A Washington Post article reported that the “conservative battle against woke banks is backfiring.” An article in another publication said the anti-ESG movement is full of hype but has “few big wins” in statehouses.
Now that Governor Ron DeSantis is running for the presidency, his Florida anti-ESG bill will probably get more attention. It prohibits the use of ESG criteria in investment decisions, government contracts, and local bonds. It also bars financial firms from discriminating against customers based on their religious, political, or social beliefs.
All of this suggests that the issue of ESG will become an important issue in the 2024 elections both at the national level and at the state level.

Kerby Anderson
Today is Juneteenth. You may know it as a recently declared federal holiday, but I have found that most Americans (outside of those who live in Texas) don’t know much about it, which is why I am talking about it today. Here’s a summary of the history
President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in 1863. But his action could not be enforced in many places in the South until the Civil War ended in 1865. That news didn’t travel fast because of the limitations of communications and an unwillingness of Southern leaders to proclaim it.
That news finally reached Galveston, Texas when Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops arrived in the city on June 19, 1865. Six months later, the 13th Amendment was ratified by Georgia, thus permanently abolishing slavery in America.
The next year on June 19, there was a celebration of freedom in Galveston. This included concerts, parades, and a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Other celebrations, often in churches, spread around the state as Black Texans moved elsewhere. It has been a paid holiday for state employees in Texas and many other states since the 1980s. President Biden signed the bill from Congress making Juneteenth a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.
Here are some key questions. How much do most Americans know about Juneteenth? For that matter, how much did you know about this federal holiday? Aren’t we missing an opportunity to educate Americans?
Unfortunately, most Americans don’t know much about many of the holidays like Memorial Day and the 4th of July. Juneteenth could be a teaching opportunity about human rights for churches and Christian organizations. Let’s not miss this opportunity.

Penna Dexter
In a postmodern society, as more and more people deny biblical and biological truth, a vacuum arises in which individuals come up with their own truth. Consider the transgender movement and its requirements. A person who claims a different gender from that in which they were born is saying, ‘I have my truth and you must accept it.’ We shouldn’t.
To “affirm” a person’s gender confusion may sound respectful, even compassionate. Former FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly thought so. She recently explained: “I was an early proponent of using preferred pronouns as far back as the early 2000’s. Of saying ‘she’ when I knew the truth was ‘he.’ It seemed harmless and I had no wish to cause offense.”
Broadcasting on FOX, and later at NBC, she supported trans people’s right to use restrooms of their choice. She employed their terminology: “gender assigned at birth,” “gender-affirming care.” She said, “I wanted to be supportive of those who were suffering.”
By 2020, Megyn Kelly had her own podcast where she interviewed female athletes and learned they are also suffering.  She says, “Competing against boys who claimed they were trans was dejecting and often near-impossible.”
Megyn Kelly has evolved in her assessment of the harms that result when a society bows to the transgender lobby: Harms to female athletes. Harms to gender-confused students and to parental rights. Physical harms from assaults by trans women on real women in bathrooms and prisons. Harms to the bodies of young people from medications and grotesque surgeries. She says, “for far too long, I failed to see the harm and therefore helped cause it.”
Megyn Kelly promises to no longer use preferred pronouns. She says, “I have resolved to base my conversations around gender on the same tenets that already govern my life: truth and reality.
Megan Kelly’s misguided compassion led her to accede to the trans agenda’s demands. It was destructive. Her reversal exhibits true compassion. 

Kerby Anderson
Amy Swearer is a legal fellow with the Heritage Foundation and has been testifying in Congress about crime and gun violence. She has been challenging progressive policies that begin with the assumption that the increase in crime is due to guns. She identifies four major reasons for the crime increase.
Refusing to prosecute and punish violent offenders is her first reason. She explains that most violent crimes (including crimes involving firearms) are perpetrated by a small and predictable number of offenders. One very effective way of combating violent crime is to focus on deterring and incapacitating these serial offenders.
A second reason for crime increase is due to releasing violent offenders under ill-conceived bail-reform policies. These changes in policy affect which criminal defendants will be released back into society while awaiting trial. Increasing the percentage of offenders eligible for pre-trial release endangers society.
Demoralizing and defunding police departments is also a significant reason for crime increase. Americans are significantly under-policed, especially in urban areas where many of the crimes take place. Changing regulations also hamstring law enforcement officers trying to do their job in the community.
A final reason for the crime increase has been the imposition of significant burdens on the Second Amendment rights of citizens. Progressive gun control restrictions prevent law-abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves. Almost every major study on the issue has concluded that Americans use their firearms to defend themselves and others between 500,000 and several million times a year.
Any serious debate and discussion about crime and gun violence needs to consider these four reasons for the crime increase.

Kerby Anderson
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel recently spoke about the “Diversity Myth.” Back in the mid-1990s, David Sacks and he wrote a book by that title about multiculturalism and political intolerance on campus. The first chapter focused on the decision by Stanford University to abandon the great books as other universities were abandoning the teaching of Western Civilization.
He concluded that three decades later that almost every point he made was right. Back then it was called multiculturalism. Today it is called woke, which fights for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The original cancer has metastasized.
He even thinks the title “diversity myth” has held up well. If you emphasize the word “diversity,” that means that diversity is not real. It is a fiction. There is no real multiculturalism, it’s just monocultural. If you emphasize the word “myth,” then you can dismiss diversity out of hand.
He also noted that the ideas of diversity, wokeism, and multiculturalism also prevent finding real solutions. Here’s the flawed logic. “Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness.”
Diversity may sound like a wonderful goal, but it doesn’t lead to concrete plans of action. It may make the proponents feel good, but it never really solves anything.

Kerby Anderson
Now that summer break has arrived, it’s worth taking a moment to evaluate student behavior in the public schools. An article in City Journal reports that “students nationwide have been filmed swearing at teachers, flipping over desks, and committing physical violence.” Bad behavior has been the rule for many years but has gotten even worse since the pandemic.
A 2022 EdWeek article reported that 44 percent of school-district leaders said they received more threats of violence from students now than in fall 2019, and that “two out of three teachers, principals, and district leaders” noted more misbehavior from students compared with 2019.
The pendulum swings back and forth. In the 1980s, school districts implemented “zero tolerance” discipline policies. This meant mandatory suspension and expulsions for behavior issues, especially if they involved threats of violence. Ten years ago, the federal government told school districts to remediate these policies because they were racially discriminatory. They were replaced with “restorative-justice” policies that minimize “exclusions” from school.
The obvious solution is to deal with any behavior in the classroom before it gets out of hand. But there are other obvious solutions like going back to grading policies based on merit instead of letting students retake tests.
Tracking is another issue. Students bored with a slow pace of learning are more likely to act out. Students who can’t keep up with a faster rate get confused and frustrated.
Another obvious solution is to ban cell phones from the classroom. They distract teenagers and are just one more class disruption. Many of the videos I have seen result from a teacher trying to take away a cell phone from a student.
Student behavior is getting worse. It is time for administrators, principals, teachers, and parents to act before school starts again.

Kerby Anderson
We are facing a significant mental health crisis with our children and young adults. Elizabeth Fisher Good persuasively argues that we can be “Protecting our Kids’ Mental Health by Protecting their Sexual Health.” The stress, anxiety, and depression they exhibit are due to more than a lack of personal connection.
She warns, “Our children are being targeted online like never before by those who only seek to use and abuse them.” She explains, “Predators pose as peers on their favorite social media apps or online gaming chatrooms, forming what feels like a real connection to our lonely and disconnected kids seeking affirmation and acceptance.”
She also explains the way these traffickers use established grooming techniques. “They’ll ask for innocent-sounding photos at first, pushing for more and more each time until suddenly our kids are now under the control of this person and feel they have no one to turn to for help.”
The statistics from the Internet are overwhelming. The best estimates are that probably half a million predators are online every day. That suggests that about one in nine children will receive an online sexual solicitation. And once predators have secured a sexual image of a child, they can digitally manipulate it. This is referred to as child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
One article from Psychology Today on “The Long-Lasting Consequences of Child Sexual Abuse,” explains that it doesn’t seem to matter whether the abuse is physical or virtual. The long-term impact is anxiety, depression, PTSD, personality disorders, and eating disorders. I might also point out that the consequences may take years to develop.
We are rightly concerned with the mental health issues facing children and young adults. To protect their mental health, we must also protect their sexual health.

Kerby Anderson
Back in the early 1970s, John Lennon wrote the song “Imagine” which was his vision of a future of global harmony. Jim Geraghty recently wrote about the culture war and corporate America. He encouraged us to imagine a future where businesses weren’t trying to be woke but instead catered to the needs of their consumers.
What brought about his comments was a headline in New York magazine that lamented that after the fiascos of Bud Light and Target, we were now entering a new era corporate caution. But he doesn’t see (nor do I see) any evidence of corporate caution. Here are a few things he thought we should imagine.
“Imagine a beer company that just wanted to make good beer and sell it to you. Imagine if that company wanted to sell beer to everyone but didn’t feel that its job was to make you more accepting of transgender individuals.”
“Imagine an everything store like Target that wanted everyone to shop there, but that had the good sense to realize that partnering with a brand that had ‘Satanist-inspired merchandise’ was not the way to win over shoppers in a country that is still roughly two-thirds Christian.”
“Imagine a sports team that declared everyone was welcome but didn’t formally and publicly roll out the welcome mat for the quasi-pornographic Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
He provides other examples, but you get the idea. It seems like every major company feels the need to lecture us about social, political, and cultural issues. In previous commentaries, I have recommended that companies stay out of the culture wars. Unfortunately, there are just enough progressive social warriors in some of these companies that they just cannot help themselves and eventually alienate half of their customer base.
I would love to imagine a world where corporations avoid lecturing us and merely produce goods and services. But I’m afraid they can’t imagine such a world.

Penna Dexter
One purpose of the National Religious Broadcasters Convention is to help Christian ministries, especially media organizations, figure out how to meet the challenges they face in getting their message out. This year, a key topic was the cancel culture and how to fight back against it.
In his keynote address at the opening session, Franklin Graham described how Samaritan’s Purse and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association have taken steps to deal with cancellations by service providers like banks and payment processors. He warned leaders of the organizations gathered in Orlando, Florida, that the Left’s efforts to deprive Christian organizations of their funding could destroy their work if they do not take action to protect against it.
The risk of being cancelled applies, not only to large media ministries, but also to smaller online news outlets, individual journalists, podcasters, and even everyday Christians posting comments on social media. For them, cancellation can range from lost opportunities for communication to loss of livelihood.
The Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody moderated a helpful panel.
Panelist Allie Beth Stuckey, host of the popular podcast Relatable, said cancel culture is the fruit of moral relativism. Standards are arbitrary and are constantly changing. Christians must reject this because we have the unchanging standards of God’s Word. “We have the right and responsibility,” she said, “to say that which is good, right, and true.“  She reminded the audience that, throughout history, the Church has been persecuted, but the gospel cannot be cancelled.
To a question about cancellation by social media outlets, syndicated radio host Dennis Prager responded that 45% of young Americans say, ‘I believe in free speech, but not hate speech.’ Mr. Prager says, “Hate speech is anything the Left disagrees with.”
The Left claims compassion as its motive for curtailing certain speech. Allie Stuckey calls this “weaponized empathy.”  She said, “Ruining an individual’s life for something they said is the opposite of compassion.”
Cancel culture is the opposite of freedom.

Kerby Anderson
Christians have always needed discernment, but we especially need to develop our skill at discernment in our confused world. One book I would recommend is: Why Bad Looks Good: Biblical Wisdom to Make Smart Choices in Life, Love, and Friendship. The author is Dr. Wendy Patrick. She is a career prosecutor with not only a law degree but a master’s degree and a doctorate in theology. Her book helps you avoid falling victim to the hazards of misperception that she has seen in courtrooms as well as in life.
For example, she warns about the deception of public perception. We live in a world where abnormal is portrayed as normal. It is easy to follow the crowd right off a cliff. That is why her chapter begins with 2 Corinthians 4:4 where Paul reminds us that “the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers.”
Another chapter talks about when bad appears beautiful. She has seen this in her experience in prosecuting sexual predators. That is why she begins that chapter with John 7:24 where Jesus admonishes the disciples to “stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly.”
Another chapter advises us to use discernment when bad sounds good. We live in a world where smooth talkers can convince us and our friends of ideas that are counter to biblical wisdom. We should also be alert to the dark side of praise. Psalm 55:21 warns us about people whose “talk is smooth as butter.”
Another chapter explains how to react when bad feels good. We live in a world that emphasizes emotion over logic and flash over substance. Ecclesiastes 1:8 warns that “the eye never has enough of seeing.”
If you want to improve your skill at discernment, I recommend you get a copy of her book.