Schools, activists, media figures, and even major corporations such as Disney are busy promoting an ideology that not only embraces transgenderism, but essentially promotes it. And the end result of that promotion is permanently damaging thousands or perhaps tens of thousands of children.

It’s no secret that transitioning to something you are not is a fad.
By this I do not mean that nobody experiences genuine dysphorias that require treatment, and I freely admit that my experience and education are insufficient to the task of developing treatment plans for people who are genuinely suffering from what appears to me to be a serious mental health problem. Dancing around a bit more to cover myself, I will also emphasize that calling dysphoria a mental illness is not a slam or slander: mental health problems run in my family and they are serious conditions that need treatment.
Unfortunately, the science of treating mental illness is not especially good, and the treatments themselves have at times been cruel, destructive, and sometimes downright evil. Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz invented the Frontal Lobotomy and won the Nobel Prize for doing so. Countless people, including children who were deemed too disruptive, suffered from permanent damage to their brains because of a fad.
Tens of thousands of lobotomies were performed, at first only on those suffering from schizophrenia and severe depression, but later on patients with chronic headaches as well as criminals and even children as young as four years old. Beulah Jones was an adult when she underwent the lobotomy in 1953. Her granddaughter, Christine Johnson, describes what she was like after the procedure.
Ms. CHRISTINE JOHNSON (Beulah Jones’ Granddaughter): She was strange because she would do things like rock in place. She didn’t make a lot of sense when she talked. And she didn’t talk about the same things that other adults talked about. She was–childlike is probably the best description.
WEINER: That was the case with many lobotomy patients. A few were helped by the procedure; their delusions, for instance, were diminished. But many more were left in worse condition than before. Christine Johnson was astonished to learn that the inventor of the lobotomy, Portugese neurologist Egas Moniz, was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949. That legitimized the procedure in the minds of many doctors and led to a dramatic increase in the number of lobotomies performed around the world. Again, Christine Johnson.
Ms. JOHNSON: There were a lot of critics back then, but when he won the prize, they were all silenced. My grandmother was lobotomized in ’53. So I believe that if he had not been awarded the prize in ’49, that she and many other patients would have been spared the operation.
Schizophrenia, depression, chronic headaches, and children with behavior problems are all real and obviously it’s important to address the problem. Scrambling people’s brains is not the correct way to do so. Yet tens of thousands of people went through the procedure because it had a stamp of approval from doctors and the establishment.

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Much of evangelicalism in today’s America makes Christianity a kind of business transaction. I push the right buttons, and out comes a blessing or some positive outcome from God. It works kind of like a cosmic vending machine. This is not the gospel message. As the Apostles’ Creed concludes, you get the forgiveness of sins, the communion of the saints, and everlasting life, but not the absolute guarantee of immediate reward.

I am a Facebook user. Quite frequently I will see a post that says, “Type ‘Amen’ and in exactly two hours everything in your life that needs to be healed will be healed.” Under the comments section there will be a long string of amens. Or one will say, “Type ‘Amen’ and in one hour you will receive a miracle in your life.” My question is, a miracle from what or who? God? Zeus? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
One day back in the eighties I was driving and had the car radio on the Christian contemporary music station. The DJ was chastising his listeners for not giving more money when they passed the bucket around at Christian music concerts. He promised us that whatever we put in, God will return fourfold. Really? What about the illustration told by Jesus about the poor widow who gave her last two mites? Did she get a fourfold return? Was she even expecting it? What was the point Jesus was making?
Back in 2000 Bruce Wilkinson published a little book, The Prayer of Jabez. This refers to a brief passage, 1 Chronicles 4:10. It reads:
“Oh that you would bless me and enlarge my border, and that your hand might be with me, and that you would keep me from harm so that it might not bring me pain! And God granted what he asked.” 
It became a bestseller. Evangelical Christians were repeating the Prayer of Jabez like chanting a mantra, expecting a new car to appear in the driveway or some similar blessing. I remember sitting in an airport gate waiting area and a man to my left was talking to two women. He was telling them in an animated tone about the multiple miracles suddenly occurring in his life since he started praying the Prayer of Jabez.
I teach church history at African Bible College in Lilongwe, Malawi. I use as the textbook Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley. Towards the end of the book he makes the observation about Americans in the 1980s and 90s: “Unlike the rich young ruler in the Gospels, church attenders seldom asked, ‘What must I do?’ They were far more likely to ask, ‘What do I get out of this?’”
One remembers in the Book of Daniel the three young men about to be pitched into the furnace for not worshipping Nebuchadnezzar’s idol. They said God was able to rescue them, BUT IF NOT they still would not bow down (Daniel 3:17-18).
There is the story of Esther who was called upon by Uncle Mordecai to risk her life by going to the king uninvited in order to save the Jews. She says, “If I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).
In the Book of Job we see a man losing everything, and it was by God’s permission. He makes the statement, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15).
The Book of Habakkuk ends with: “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail, and the fields yield no food…yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” (Habakkuk 3:17).
Much of evangelicalism in today’s America makes Christianity a kind of business transaction. I push the right buttons, and out comes a blessing or some positive outcome from God. It works kind of like a cosmic vending machine. This is not the gospel message. As the Apostles’ Creed concludes, you get the forgiveness of sins, the communion of the saints, and everlasting life, but not the absolute guarantee of immediate reward. What is needed is for the church to forsake what I call voodoo evangelicalism and the attempt to manipulate God.
Larry Brown is a Minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and serves as Professor of church history, world history, hermeneutics and missions at the African Bible College in Lilongwe, Malawi.
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We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping) and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research and employment.

I recently resigned from my position as full tenured professor at the University of Toronto. I am now professor emeritus, and before I turned sixty. Emeritus is generally a designation reserved for superannuated faculty, albeit those who had served their term with some distinction. I had envisioned teaching and researching at the U of T, full time, until they had to haul my skeleton out of my office. I loved my job. And my students, undergraduates and graduates alike, were positively predisposed toward me. But that career path was not meant to be. There were many reasons, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:
First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?
Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.
All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.
Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.
Banaji’s continued countenancing of the misuse of her research instrument, combined with the status of her position at Harvard, is a prime reason we still suffer under the DIE yoke, with its baleful effect on what was once the closest we had ever come to truly meritorious selection. There are good reasons to suppose that DIE-motivated eradication of objective testing, such as the GRE for graduate school admission, will have deleterious effects on the ability of students so selected to master such topics as the statistics all social sciences (and medicine, for that matter) rely upon completely for their validity.
Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.
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