Many “conservatives” are only committed to conserving their own interests, nothing more. That’s why just as liberals have regressed into leftists, most conservatives have regressed into liberals. So don’t be surprised when most conservatives support gender theory, transgenderism, and public schools indoctrinating children with LGBTQ ideology in a few years. Most “conservatives” aren’t conservatives at all.

Most conservatives support Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill.” However, many of these supposed conservatives apparently support the bill for the wrong reasons.
Many conservatives do not care about protecting children from LGBTQ indoctrination, they only care about protecting children from leftist indoctrination.
Most “conservatives” today are heading toward the same direction as liberals and leftists—they’re simply progressing at a slower speed.
Christless conservatives hate leftism, not sin. We Christians shouldn’t forget that.
They are generally our political allies, but they are not our philosophical allies. Jesus said: “Whoever is not with me is against me.” (Matthew 12:30)
That applies to conservatives too. Leftists aren’t the only people who are against Jesus. Christless conservatives are against Jesus too. Therefore, Christless conservatives have more in common with leftists than they have with Christians.
So although leftists are a bigger threat to our soceity, Christless conservatives aren’t the solution. Actually, they are part of the problem.
Yesterday, Dave Rubin and the man he calls his husband announced they’re fathers of two children through surrogate mothers. Many supposed conservatives, including commentators and media outlets like Candace Owens, Prager University, and The Blaze—shared their support.
If you’re unfamiliar with Dave Rubin, he is a political commentator on his talk show, The Rubin Report. He occasionally refers to himself as a conservative, but he mostly describes himself as a classical liberal.
I actually admire Dave Rubin a lot. I mentioned The Rubin Report in an article about my top ten favourite podcasts two years ago. In that article, I said: “Dave Rubin is the most interesting podcaster I follow.”
His interviews with Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Larry Elder, Douglas Murray, and many more have been so helpful to me. His firsts interviews with Ben Shapiro and Larry Elder especially shaped a lot of my thinking on racial issues. The interviews encouraged me to do further research—research that strengthened my blog.
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This is gender ideology—the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as “gender fluid,” of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of “gender-affirming care,” it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground.

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”
“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”
“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”
“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”
“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”
“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”
The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son.
But at this point in the child-custody hearings, Ted couldn’t understand what the judge wanted from him. His soon-to-be-ex-wife, Christine, then an executive at the investment firm BlackRock, had already agreed to shared custody of their younger son; no one—not even this judge—seemed to believe that he was anything like an unfit father.
Ted isn’t a particularly devout Episcopalian, and he describes his politics as libertarian. He’s athletic, health-conscious, and takes a keen interest in his sons’ talents. He coached their baseball teams and researched conservatory programs for Drew, already an accomplished pianist. Just one year earlier, Ted had been one-half of a Bay Area power couple with high-status careers and precocious kids. Now, he was one-half of a contentious divorce, presided over by a judge who was referring to Drew as “they” and pressing Ted to accept that his 16-year-old son was actually a girl.
“And do you think that being transgender is a sin?” Judge Hiramoto asked, according to the transcript.
“No, of course I don’t think it’s a sin.”
“So you don’t think that it’s a sin. But you probably think that [Drew], if they are truly transgender, you would prefer that [Drew] not be transgender because in our society transgender people are the subject of a lot of discrimination. Would you agree with that?”
“I agree that transgender people suffer some discrimination and prejudice. I agree with that,” he said.
“I’m sort of going off the parallel experiences that I’ve read about or heard in family court or in family law classes for judges where gay children come out to their parents,” the judge said. “And sometimes it is difficult for the parents because they believe that the identity of being gay or lesbian, in their religion, is a sin. And then some people don’t feel that it’s a sin, but they say—they take a different angle, and they say, I just would prefer my child not to be gay or lesbian because they suffer so much discrimination in our society.
“So I’m sort of asking these parallel questions to see what is your—what I see in the papers is that you think that [Drew] is not truly transgender and that they are merely confused and—”
“He might be transgender,” Ted said. “He might be.”
“Okay. So if [Drew] might be transgender, it’s just to say they might.”
Ted realized his error and corrected himself: he had used the “he” pronoun because he remained deeply skeptical that the boy he’d coached in little league—the son he’d once seen crushing on a cute girl in his fifth-grade class—was actually a young woman.
“They might be,” Ted said. “[Drew]—they might be. Might be. We don’t know.”
While trying to keep an open mind about Drew’s gender, Ted was adamant to the judge that he did not want Drew to begin medical transition. In the 312 days since he had last seen his boy, Ted had done a lot of research on medical transition and gender dysphoria. He begged the court to consider research that suggested puberty blockers could impair cognition and diminish bone density. He knew that Drew, if administered puberty blockers along with estrogen, would be at high risk of permanent infertility. He wasn’t even sure that his son had gender dysphoria. He wanted to see his son—and he wanted this bullet train to slow down.
“It sounds to me that you would prefer that [Drew], when all is said and done, is just going through a phase. Is that a fair assessment?”
Ted evaded the question. Did he prefer that his son avoid a medically risky regimen that would render him permanently infertile and make him a lifetime medical patient? Wouldn’t anyone?
In the three years I’ve spent writing about families with transgender-identifying minors, the story of Ted Hudacko stood out as a case study of how gender ideology has infiltrated family law. It also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals’ fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists. At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable “gender identity,” knowable only to the adolescents themselves.
On June 24, 2020, following her discussion with Ted about the Queen of England hypothetical, Judge Joni Hiramoto granted Christine sole legal custody of Drew on a temporary basis and approved the shared legal and physical custody arrangement of their younger son. She assured Ted that her order was not yet permanent. Judge Hiramoto had decided to order the appointment of a minor’s counsel to investigate how the boys were faring before making any permanent decisions. She already had the perfect person in mind. “I actually know of one who was previously appointed by the court, by a different judge, on a case involving children that were allegedly transgender,” she said. That minor’s counsel was attorney Daniel Harkins.
Ted didn’t know it yet, but the appointment of Harkins would place the final nail in the coffin of his parental rights. Within just a few months, the court would definitively end Ted’s parental relationship. He would have no right to see Drew, no right to talk to him, no right to demand that Drew attend therapy with him, and absolutely no right to stop a medical transition already planned by the Child and Adolescent Gender Center of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.
And finally, the court also felt that Ted had no right to know that Judge Hiramoto had a transgender child of her own, whose gender transition she had publicly supported. No one disclosed this information to the parties.
Ifirst spoke to Ted in May 2021, after Judge Hiramoto—following the recommendation of minor’s counsel—had stripped him of all custody of Drew. Ted was leaning heavily on support groups just to get himself through the day. He compared himself to the morose Edward Norton character from the movie Fight Club, who attends multiple support groups to relieve his depression and insomnia. “I’m in six support groups,” Ted said, laughing a little at himself.
Ted estimated that he had spent only 75 minutes total with Drew in the previous 12 months. His wounds were raw. Part of him wanted to blast his story across America, but he also worried that he might lose any remaining chance to see his son again if he did so. He had dismissed his attorney, who had failed to restore any of Ted’s rights, notwithstanding $25,000 in legal fees. For four months, Ted had been representing himself in court, filing motion after motion, attempting to terminate the appointment of the minor’s counsel (denied), pleading the court for more access to his son (also denied). The man I spoke to was distraught, half in shock, like someone arriving home from work to find his house being bulldozed.
The whole notion that Drew might be transgender still seemed bizarre to Ted—a fantasy told about someone else, bearing no connection to him. Even his divorce still seemed more like a nightmare than waking life. Sure, Christine had been distant in their marriage for some time, Ted told me, but that was easy to explain: for more than a year, she had been distracted by tragedy. In 2018, Christine’s sister had been stabbed 23 times at her workplace by her own estranged husband, who had recently been discharged from an inpatient mental-health facility. Christine spent the next year shuttling from the Bay Area to upstate New York to aid her sister’s recovery and provide evidence to strengthen the district attorney’s attempted murder prosecution. For the sentencing phase of the criminal trial—in June and July 2019—Christine stayed on the East Coast with both boys.
Ted was then fully preoccupied with a grueling six-week project for Apple. He hadn’t slept well in weeks, he says. On a Saturday in August 2019, shortly after returning from upstate New York with the boys, Christine walked into Ted’s home office and announced both that she was leaving and that their son Drew was transgender. By his own admission, Ted became angry. He believed Christine must have talked Drew into this during their weeks together in upstate New York. Ted says he begged to have this conversation after he had gotten some sleep. But Christine walked out, taking the kids to stay with her at a neighbor’s house.
“Saturday, when she left, I was under the impression, mistaken impression, that, you know, she simply temporarily left,” he said. “You know, maybe going out to get some fresh air or to just get, you know, give us some space or maybe even have gone to see a movie. I just went upstairs. I didn’t get up till the following morning.”
Court documents reveal Ted’s struggles with the court-appointed minor’s counsel, Daniel Harkins. No part of his tragedy is more Kafkaesque.
Harkins met with both boys, interviewed Drew’s therapist and both parents, and conducted two 90-minute interviews with Diane Ehrensaft of the UCSF Benioff Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic. Harkins also did some research on Ken Zucker, the Toronto-based psychologist and gender dysphoria specialist whom Ted preferred. Harkins never spoke with Zucker.
Zucker is arguably the world’s leading expert on gender dysphoria. He oversaw the writing of the entry of the condition for the DSM-5, the most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. He also helped write the most recent final “Standards of Care” guidelines for the World Professional Association of Transgender Health. (New final standards are forthcoming.)
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Worship of God in the church is an act of faith. Worship and faith belong to children, and when these characterize their lives, starting at the smallest age, it is theirs for life. Worship of God in the church is not something that you graduate into once you mature, but the place where God forms the spiritual habits of even his littlest saints.

How do our kids stay Christian? Some version of this question has animated both scholarly and pastoral discussion over the last several years, especially as the great dechurching marches on unabated. This is not merely an academic question, but one that has kept younger parents anxious as they watch more and more of their peers turn away from the faith.
Of course, it is the Holy Spirit sovereignly acting as he wills that keeps people abiding in Christ. And of course, God who ordains the salvation of his children has also ordained the regular means of bringing about that salvation, specifically the word, sacraments, and prayer. But how should the church approach those gifts in regards to the discipleship of its children? And what steps can the church take to maintain its children’s faithfulness as they grow into adulthood?
Several recent works have provided invaluable insight into this dilemma, the most important of which is Handing Down the Faith: How Parents Pass Their Religion to the Next Generation (2021) by Amy Adamczyk and Christian Smith. Adamczyk and Smith looked at the religious landscape of North America over the last few decades and came to a simple conclusion: the communities that were most effective at handing down their religion were those that prioritized faith in the family home.
That might not sound earth-shattering, but it corroborated decades of sociological research showing that things like Sunday School, youth group, VBS, Christian camps, confirmation, and youth conferences are either minimally consequential to the maintenance of a child’s faith or in some cases actually counterproductive. Sociologists of religion have known for some time that these programs, while they feel nice, are led by earnest people, and have some anecdotal success stories, are ineffective for passing along the Christian faith. The British educational reformer Charlotte Mason commented in Parents and Children (1897) that Sunday School, then a recent innovation, was a necessary evil. Sunday School was created for parents who were unable to do their “first duty” of instructing their children in the faith and needed a substitute to step into that role for them. The church embracing this model led to decline in faith transmission.
Lyman Stone at the Institute for Family Studies recently demonstrated that secularization begins at home. This was also shown in a 2017 Lifeway study, by Stephen Bullivant in Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (2023), and by Jim Davis and Michael Graham in The Great Dechurching (2023). If kids born to Christian parents are to grow up Christian, they need to be raised as Christians by their parents. All of these books and resources provide parenting guidance. But where does this leave the church?
If secularization begins at home and parental investment is the primary indicator of a child’s future faith, what should the church do? How should it prioritize its resources, especially when many churches heavily invest in programs that, frankly, are ineffective in producing disciples?
Authoritative Parenting
Parents are far-and-away the greatest influence on children’s faith development and retention. Churches should overwhelmingly prioritize in their strategies and resource-allocation (i.e. staffing, programs, volunteer focus) reaching and discipling parents to raise godly children. This is, after all, what parenting fundamentally is: fathers and mothers teaching their children to grow in maturity as they imitate their parents who, in turn, are imitating Jesus.
It’s critical that parents teach the Bible and catechize their children in the articles of the faith, of course, but alone this is insufficient. Christianity is taught, not caught, but how it is taught affects whether kids hold onto it. Parents who successfully inculcate steadfast faith and love of God joyfully demonstrate the importance of their own faith on a daily basis.
Is the faith of parents sincere? Do they value and talk about their faith? Does it visibly inform their decisions? Does faith characterize their regular, daily behavior and conversations, or is it compartmentalized to worship services and being around church people? Do they acknowledge their shortcomings without hypocrisy? Do parents clearly love God? Do they delight in Jesus?
Adamczyk and Smith found parents whose faith is the warp and woof of their lives are the parents who pass along that faith. After all, that concept of a life of faith is what God commands in the Shema (Deuteronomy 6:4-9): The words of God will be on your heart, and you shall diligently teach them to your kids, talking about them around the house, when you’re in the car, when you’re getting ready for the day and preparing to go to bed. When kids truly believe that faith matters for their parents, they believe it should matter to them.
The danger for children is parents who believe and either don’t expect anything of their kids on the one hand, or are tyrannical and overbearing about it on the other. Adamczyk and Smith discovered that an authoritative parenting style is most effective at raising children to faithful maturity. This approach maintains high expectations for kids, but in a home and parental relationship that can be honestly described as “warm” rather than rule or discipline-oriented. Being loosie-goosey (they’ll figure out and make faith their own) or overbearing are equally damaging to a child’s faith. As Anthony Bradley is fond of pointing out, kids don’t rebel against joy.  
This is what Davis and Graham found in The Great Dechurching. The kids who held onto their faith were able to have conversations with their parents about faith that were sincere (the parents knew their faith and believed it) and humble (the parents were confident, not self-focused, defensive, or belligerent about the kids’ questions and hesitations about the faith). Parents don’t need to be geniuses or theologians, but should know what they believe, believe it, and be confidently humble.
The church can prioritize childhood discipleship first by encouraging parents to take the airplane-oxygen mask approach. Are parents being taught the faith so that they may have something to believe in themselves? Are parents being encouraged to be diligent in their own discipleship? Are they being given tools to teach and catechize their own children? Are they showing their kids that faith and worship matter into adulthood, not just as concepts, but as committed practices?
Second, is the church providing not only content to parents, but models? Throughout the New Testament the leaders of the church are exhorted to model following Jesus to their congregations. Parenting style is a non-negotiable requirement on pastoral and elder job descriptions. Are the leaders of the church modeling sincere, confident, and humble discussions of the faith? A joyous approach to kids? If the pastors and elders of the church are not doing this, the parents in the church will struggle to as well. Leaders need to model to parents, especially to fathers, warmth, firmness, joy, and patience and take proactive steps to teach that.
Third, is the church encouraging the formation of community and friendships among the adults of the church? Doing this helps ensure that faith is seen as a joyous (friendship!) part of life, not a burden. It provides a community to help encourage one another (keep that oxygen mask on) and communicates to kids that their parents take their own discipleship seriously. If parents take their own discipleship seriously, their kids will as well.
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