When it comes down to it, it’s the “absolutist” position (i.e., the truly pro-life position) that gets Maher’s “respect.” Maher and the absolutist understand each other, he thinks, because both of them understand exactly what abortion is. “They think it’s murder. And … it kind of is.” The difference between them, as he succinctly follows up, is that “I’m just OK with that.” There are 8 billion people in the world, after all. “We won’t miss you.”

Abortion is murder, and Bill Maher is OK with that. The comedian told us in so many words during a recent episode of Real Time. It’s not the first time he’s come out with something in this vein, but it’s becoming the most widely viewed. As he discusses the current debate over Arizona’s abortion law with two British journalists, one of them says she finds it “strange” that abortion has become a major election issue, when there are so many more pressing things for Americans to focus on. “Not if you believe it’s murder,” Maher says.
Maher is unimpressed with Donald Trump’s latest political tap-dance around the controversy, trying to take credit for the reversal of Roe vs. Wade while simultaneously making centrish noises. Trump wants to be seen as pro-life, but not too pro-life. TIME magazine has called the move “as insincere as it is smart.” Granted, there’s room for disagreement even among true pro-lifers around federal bans—Maher goes after a straw man when he jokes that leaving abortion to the states means “saying abortion is okay in some states.” (Murder in general is handled state by state, after all.)
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Let there be no doubt: It is the corrosive effects of lockdowns and the anti-racism education regime that best explain a generation of American students who oscillate between laziness and violent activism. Kids lost out on more than a year, and sometimes multiple years, of essential socialization and time in the classroom. When they were “educated,” they were exhorted to challenge authority and spit on the political, cultural, and economic inheritance bequeathed to them by their forebears. Moreover, the more students witnessed school authorities abdicate their responsibility, the more their activist, anti-authority mentality was reinforced.

The kids are not all right. The number of school shootings in 2020-2021 was the highest (93 in total) since 2000-2001, according to a recently released report by the National Center for Education Statistics. Other negative indicators also increased since the pandemic lockdowns: cyberbullying, student verbal abuse of teachers, student acts of disrespect for teachers other than verbal abuse, and widespread disorder in the classroom.
A separate federal study released in early July found that more than 80 percent of public schools reported that the pandemic had taken a toll on student behavior and social-emotional development, and that more than 70 percent of schools saw increases in chronic student absenteeism since the onset of the pandemic (and school closures). And about half of schools also reported increased acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff.

It’s not difficult to identify what might have triggered this new “pandemic” of student misbehavior. For an entire school year, if not longer, millions of American students went to a fully virtual learning environment in which it became easy to skirt the rules, avoid discipline, and still pass. Largely free from the structure and discipline of a school environment, many academically (and socially) regressed. Educators overwhelmed and frustrated by distance digital learning had difficulty teaching and motivating their students, and for many, burnout or apathy became the norm.

Lockdowns have been associated with all manner of problems in our nation’s youth, including declines in student mental and emotional health, motivation, social skills, reading proficiency, and general academic achievement. Some studies have found that students made little or no progress while learning from home. Lockdowns have also been correlated to increased child suicide rates.
This tracks with anecdotal information I’m hearing from those working in public schools in my native Fairfax County, Virginia. A high school athletic coach with more than 30 years of experience — including multiple state titles — recently told me that the most recent crop of players is the most arrogant, disengaged, and resistant to instruction he’s ever seen. He’s now contemplating retiring.
CRT to Blame Too
Yet I suspect it’s not only the (entirely unnecessary) lockdowns that are affecting students’ behavior and antagonism toward authority. For at the same time that lockdowns were beginning to have deleterious effects on students, another dramatic social crisis was already enveloping our nation’s schools: anti-racism curricula.

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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, January 30, 2022
Look for the person on the edge who doesn’t get included, have them around your table. Look for the person who is very much ‘in’ but gets overlooked, have them around your table. Look for the person who hosts all the time but never gets invited elsewhere, have them around your table. Look at your pastor and their family—have them around your table.

What do you do when you need to cook for 30 people for a Sunday lunch? In our house, you get the cauldron out.
Before you start reading out Macbeth and building a pyre, it’s a large steel preserving pan that the group of students from our church we feed most weeks have dubbed ‘the cauldron’. Or maybe you got stuck in the previous sentence, because cooking for 30 people for lunch after church is alien, or superhuman, or unimaginable. I get that.
This wasn’t a normal Sunday for us, we’re in a church near one of the University campuses and about a third of our church is students. At the start of term in a September we, like most churches near a University, host groups of new first year students in a number of homes. We were hosting a student lunch that week and for one reason or another the other homes that students were going to were unable to have them, so we were catering for an unknown number of students, hence the many pots of cassoulet bubbling on the hob.
Helen, my wife, is an excellent cook and more importantly actively enjoys feeding people. She’s in her element with the challenge of figuring out how to stretch our food to go further. She’s also never knowingly under-catered so on this occasion cooked for 45. Go big or go home, I say.
We had 19 students that week, which meant it also fed our mid-week group, and a family in the church whose kitchen was out of action, and another family the following Sunday, with some spare to go in the freezer for one of those days your home fills with hungry people you weren’t expecting.
I don’t expect everyone to do what we did that day, or to have the space in your home to even make it possible. Those mass groups aren’t my favourite anyway, I’d much prefer 6 or 8 sat around one table enjoying each other’s company and perhaps a bottle of wine. But the principle should be a lot more normal than it is.
I’d like to reframe two things as normal that are less normal in Christian culture than they should be:
Adding an extra mouth to a meal should be a skill we learn.
You meet someone at church that week who’s new and want to invite them back for food to get to know them a bit better? That’s difficult unless you’ve either cooked for a bigger number of people deliberately, which is a wonderful thing to do but does tend to leave you with a lot of leftovers, or you’ve learned how to stretch a meal.
We feed our ‘Life Group’ every week, which I think is how this sort of thing works best, they’re mostly students or new graduates. We have at times had some lads who can really put it away—the sort of thing where you wonder if they are intending to eat again that week.
Regularly feeding large groups can get expensive if you just multiply up what you might cook for two of you, so you have to approach the meals a little differently.
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