SocietyWatch
Canada tells officials to stop saying ‘mother’ and ‘father’
Canada’s government says front-line employees may no longer use the terms “mother” and “father” in official correspondence without asking first. They must use gender-neutral terms like “parent” when speaking to the public. This directive was published on March 21 by Radio Canada, the French-language agency of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Other forbidden terms include “sir,” “madam,” “Mr.,” “Mrs.” and “Miss.” Instead, Service Canada’s front-line staff must call people by their full names until they have asked them how they wish to be addressed.
This is the latest move by the Canadian government to elevate “gender identity” above biological sex. Last February, the Canadian Senate voted to make the country’s national anthem gender-neutral by replacing the word “sons” with the word “us.” Last August, the government began allowing Canadians to mark their gender as “X” on passports so they would not be limited to “male” and “female” options.
Most millennials don’t know what Auschwitz was
The Holocaust is something many Americans know nothing about. A survey published on April 12 by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany discovered that 41 percent of Americans and 66 percent of American millennials (those ages 18 to 34) do not know what Auschwitz was.
Auschwitz was the most infamous Nazi extermination camp in World War II. But young Americans are not learning the history about the Holocaust—or much of any other history.
Family distress and the overdose epidemic
Counties with high divorce rates and a large proportion of single-parent homes are plagued with drug overdose deaths, according to a study published on April 2 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The study mapped the 515,000 drug-related deaths that occurred across the United States from 2006 to 2015. It found that geography is less important in explaining overdose deaths than family breakdown.
“Average mortality rates were significantly higher in counties with greater economic and family distress and in counties economically dependent on mining,” wrote researcher Shannon Monnat. “Counties at the highest level of family distress (divorce/separation and single-parent families) had an average of more than eight more drug-related deaths per 100,000 population than counties at the lowest level.”
One of the primary reasons that drug overdose deaths are so common among those who come from a broken home is that depressed and lonely people often turn to drug-induced moments of fleeting euphoria. Heroin, opioids and other drugs can give a person a temporary high, masking the loneliness and pain their family problems cause. America’s drug addiction epidemic will only worsen until the nation embraces biblical family values.
The Alfie tragedy
Doctors in a Liverpool hospital turned off the life-support machine for 23-month-old Alfie Evans on April 23. Alfie had suffered from an undiagnosed brain condition that left him in a semi-vegetative state. He had survived on life support for more than a year. Alfie’s parents wanted to try experimental treatments available in Italy. But the decision was not left with Alfie’s parents but with a panel of doctors, backed by English courts and enforced by the government.
Alfie’s parents said that doctors decided there was no hope for him and that the life support should be removed and that when they disagreed, the hospital applied to the High Court to remove parental rights. The High Court judge stated that he would make a decision on what was best for the child and later ruled in favor of the hospital’s plan to allow the boy to die. The Court of Appeal, Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights all rejected the petitions of the parents. The government refused to let Alfie’s parents even take him home.
With Alfie confined to the hospital, doctors removed life support. Yet he did not die as expected. Alfie breathed on his own, but doctors refused to give him any water or food for six hours. He had a chest infection; they refused to give him any antibiotics. For five days, Alfie continued to live well past the doctors’ prognosis. In the early hours of April 28, still inside the hospital, Alfie died.
The British government blocked Alfie’s parents from taking him to Italy. This is the moral and cultural state of Britain today: authority over the lives and deaths of British children lies not with their parents, but with the government.
