POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

The psychological problems among modern youth

We are told below that the recent rise in anxiety and depression among young people can be attributed to the increased use of social media. There is a case to be made that media generally have become more depressing. Great horrors are now more often reported in the news and they are more often accompanied by vivid graphics. But social media is a distinct subset of the media and we are told that social media in particular is a malign influence. Perhaps as a psychologist with a lot of publications in the field of anxiety and other psychological problems, I can be allowed to doubt that and suggest that there is another rather obvious explanation for poor mental health among young people

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The use of social media by the young is certainly notable and a very large part of modern experience. We have very little history to guide us about it, which makes it a handy whipping boy. But the idea that improved communication between people is bad is surely misanthropic and seems contrary to a lot of experience. POOR communication is normally blamed for a lot of things.

We are told that online bullying is now a big problem and I have no doubt that it is frequent and can severe consequences. But it is typical one-eyed Leftism to look at just one one half of a problem. At least the kid these days is physically safe when the bullying concerned occurs, whereas in a less wired world the kid would be outdoors somewhere being exposed to the possibility of physical bullying. Maybe a case can be made that online bullying is more harmful than physical bullying but no-one seems to have even tried to make that case and it seems intrinsically unlikely. Kids have always bullied one another and always will. And there have always been and still are severe consequences from some instances of it

So I think we have here in the attack on social media another case of something being suspected because it is popular, a familiar reaction from the Left, a reaction that is distracting our attention from the real problem

I think the problem we see has a rather obvious real cause: The long march through the institutions by feminism is now complete. From all sides the kids are now being told that their natural reactions are wrong. Masculinity is toxic and women should want careers, not families. How disorienting and confusing that must be! And disorientation and confusion is surely what we are seeing. From all sides kids are being told that they are wrong in their feelings. No wonder they are depressed!

And now we have transgenderism as an even more sweeping attack on instinctive sex roles. Kids are told that there is really no such thing as male and female. You can be anything you want and saying otherwise can get you seriously attacked. Just feeling clearly male or female is wrong and feeling ambivalent is highly praised. No wonder the kids are confused and disoriented! Confusion is thrust upon them

As usual, Leftist thinking is highly destructive and grievously so for kids growing up today

Is there any cure for that? Only Christianity is obvious. Transgenderism is firmly rejected in the Bible: Genesis 5:2 says "Male and female He created them ..." and alternative sexuality is also firmly rejected: "If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them". (Levitius 20:13). St Paul lifted the death penalty on homosexuality (Romans 1 & 2) but it is clear that the Bible favours traditional sex roles.

So it should be no surprise that Christians seem to be shielded from the pernicious effects of Left-dominated conventional thinking, They are routinely found to be in better mental health. The Nurses' Health Study demonstrated that those who attended any weekly religious services were 84% less likely to complete suicide compared with the never-attenders. Among Roman Catholics, those who attended once or more per week were 95% less likely to complete suicide than those who attended less frequently. So I am rather glad that I spent my teenage years in the grip of Christian fundamentalism

By Sophie McBain

At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.

Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm.

Haidt is a professor at New York University and frequently collaborates with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first to attribute rising rates of mental illness among gen Z (those born in the mid to late 1990s) to smartphones. Sceptics of this research sometimes argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, between climate change, rising inequality, global conflict and political perma-crisis. But Haidt makes his case persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, and collective crises don’t typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose. Instead, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and social media use is mounting.

The Anxious Generation ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools

The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent more than five hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn’t use it at all. This study alone isn’t enough to prove that social media causes depression (it’s possible that depressed people spend more time online) – but there’s more. Facebook was initially offered only to students at a small number of universities, so one study compared the mental health of students at institutions with Facebook with those who didn’t yet have social media – and found that Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness.

So why might “phone-based” childhoods have this effect? Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “forever elsewhere”. Teens are not only the most compulsive smartphone users – one 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online “almost constantly” – but they are also the most vulnerable, partly because adolescence is a period of rapid social and emotional development. Smartphones are “experience blockers”, Haidt writes: consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication. Social media encourages constant social comparison, and it can be unforgiving and cruel. These observations might sound old-fashioned, but they are also true. What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are.

One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events – or at least to coverage of them. Could the internet’s 24-hour news cycle, its emotional fever-pitch and the sharing of graphic frontline footage, be contributing to a permanent sense of threat? It has certainly distorted our perspective on current affairs, amplifying people’s sense of personal danger. As the Oxford climate scientist Hannah Ritchie observed in her recent book, Not the End of the World, death rates from natural disasters have fallen tenfold in the past century, but almost everyone thinks they have risen. It’s also clear that today’s defining crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, won’t necessarily deepen social solidarity in an era of filter bubbles and “alternative facts”.

Haidt’s theory that overprotective parents are contributing to the mental health crisis is much less substantiated than his research on phones. He argues that children are “antifragile”: like saplings that need to be buffeted by winds in order to grow properly, they need to experience setbacks to develop resilience. Mollycoddled kids become defensive and insecure, Haidt writes, starting to view ideas as dangerous and demanding safety from beliefs they find challenging. This is an argument he advanced in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans – and most of these rightwing activists are old enough to have enjoyed free-range childhoods themselves. I actually agree with Haidt that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, but he overstates his case.

The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification – all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions.

I felt a gnawing anxiety as I read the book, thinking not only of my three young children, who I’d like to keep away from the badlands of social media for as long as possible, but also of the uncounted hours I have spent on my phone, mindlessly scrolling. “There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” Haidt writes, paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn’t look at, all the people we didn’t speak to, all the thoughts we didn’t allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.

At the start of the 2010s, rates of teenage mental illness took a sharp upward turn, and they have been rising ever since. Among US college students, diagnoses of depression and anxiety more than doubled between 2010 and 2018. More worrying still, in the decade to 2020 the number of emergency room visits for self-harm rose by 188% among teenage girls in the US and 48% among boys. The suicide rate for younger adolescents also increased, by 167% among girls and 91% among boys. A similar trend has been observed in the UK and many other western countries. The American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes this mental health crisis has been driven by the mass adoption of smartphones, along with the advent of social media and addictive online gaming. He calls it “the Great Rewiring of Childhood”.

Children are spending ever less time socialising in person and ever more time glued to their screens, with girls most likely to be sucked into the self-esteem crushing vortex of social media, and boys more likely to become hooked on gaming and porn. Childhood is no longer “play-based”, it’s “phone-based”. Haidt believes that parents have become overprotective in the offline world, delaying the age at which children are deemed safe to play unsupervised or run errands alone, but do too little to protect children from online dangers. We have allowed the young too much freedom to roam the internet, where they are at risk of being bullied and harassed or encountering harmful content, from graphic violence to sites that glorify suicide and self-harm.

Haidt is a professor at New York University and frequently collaborates with the American psychologist Jean Twenge, who was one of the first to attribute rising rates of mental illness among gen Z (those born in the mid to late 1990s) to smartphones. Sceptics of this research sometimes argue that young people simply have more things to feel anxious and depressed about, between climate change, rising inequality, global conflict and political perma-crisis. But Haidt makes his case persuasively. Earlier generations have also grown up in the shadow of war and global instability, he points out, and collective crises don’t typically produce individual psychological ones, perhaps because they often engender a sense of greater social solidarity and purpose. Instead, the evidence linking mental illness to smartphones and social media use is mounting.

The Anxious Generation ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools

The British millennium cohort study, which followed 19,000 children born in 2000-02, found that, among girls especially, rates of depression rose in tandem with hours spent on social media. Girls who spent more than five hours a day on social media were three times more likely to become depressed than those who didn’t use it at all. This study alone isn’t enough to prove that social media causes depression (it’s possible that depressed people spend more time online) – but there’s more. Facebook was initially offered only to students at a small number of universities, so one study compared the mental health of students at institutions with Facebook with those who didn’t yet have social media – and found that Facebook increased poor mental health on campus. Five other studies have demonstrated a link between the arrival of high-speed internet and rising rates of mental illness.

So why might “phone-based” childhoods have this effect? Smartphones pull us away from our immediate surroundings and the people closest to us, rendering us, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “forever elsewhere”. Teens are not only the most compulsive smartphone users – one 2022 Pew Media report found that 46% of them are online “almost constantly” – but they are also the most vulnerable, partly because adolescence is a period of rapid social and emotional development. Smartphones are “experience blockers”, Haidt writes: consider how many enriching activities were displaced when young people began spending hours a day online, chasing likes, following vapid influencers, substituting the richness of real-life friendship with shallow online communication. Social media encourages constant social comparison, and it can be unforgiving and cruel. These observations might sound old-fashioned, but they are also true. What middle-aged adult doesn’t feel relief to have grown up before smartphones? Adolescence was hard enough without the threat of online humiliation, the possibility of quantifying, through engagement and follower numbers, exactly how much of a loser you are.

One avenue Haidt doesn’t explore, which feels like an omission, is that his critics might be partly right about teenagers feeling anxious and depressed in response to global events – or at least to coverage of them. Could the internet’s 24-hour news cycle, its emotional fever-pitch and the sharing of graphic frontline footage, be contributing to a permanent sense of threat? It has certainly distorted our perspective on current affairs, amplifying people’s sense of personal danger. As the Oxford climate scientist Hannah Ritchie observed in her recent book, Not the End of the World, death rates from natural disasters have fallen tenfold in the past century, but almost everyone thinks they have risen. It’s also clear that today’s defining crises, such as the pandemic and climate change, won’t necessarily deepen social solidarity in an era of filter bubbles and “alternative facts”.

Haidt’s theory that overprotective parents are contributing to the mental health crisis is much less substantiated than his research on phones. He argues that children are “antifragile”: like saplings that need to be buffeted by winds in order to grow properly, they need to experience setbacks to develop resilience. Mollycoddled kids become defensive and insecure, Haidt writes, starting to view ideas as dangerous and demanding safety from beliefs they find challenging. This is an argument he advanced in his 2018 book, The Coddling of the American Mind, co-written with Greg Lukianoff. In the years since, it has become painfully apparent that the groups most likely to treat ideas as dangerous are the ultra-conservatives who organise book bans – and most of these rightwing activists are old enough to have enjoyed free-range childhoods themselves. I actually agree with Haidt that children ought to be given greater freedom to play unsupervised, but he overstates his case.

The Anxious Generation is nonetheless an urgent and essential read, and it ought to become a foundational text for the growing movement to keep smartphones out of schools, and young children off social media. As well as calling for school phone bans, Haidt argues that governments should legally assert that tech companies have a duty of care to young people, the age of internet adulthood should be raised to 16, and companies forced to institute proper age verification – all eminently sensible and long overdue interventions.

I felt a gnawing anxiety as I read the book, thinking not only of my three young children, who I’d like to keep away from the badlands of social media for as long as possible, but also of the uncounted hours I have spent on my phone, mindlessly scrolling. “There’s a God-shaped hole in every human heart,” Haidt writes, paraphrasing the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. “If it doesn’t get filled with something noble and elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.” Maybe we ought to start thinking more about all the things we didn’t look at, all the people we didn’t speak to, all the thoughts we didn’t allow ourselves to finish, because we were glued to our stupid smartphones.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/21/the-anxious-generation-by-jonathan-haidt-a-pocket-full-of-poison

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Viagra might make you live LONGER, scientists discover - but they admit they've got no idea why

This is not a strong study methodologically but I would be rather pleased if there is something in it. I took Viagra with entirely satisfactory results for a number of years when I was younger and even a couple of times recently

Sildenafil, the powerful chemical that gives men erections, may have a 'beneficial effect on lifespan', French and Swiss researchers say.

Men prescribed the impotency drug were found to be 15 per cent less likely to die during the course of the study which examined 40 years of data.

The apparent life-extending effects were so clear that the team claimed the results 'warrant further investigation'.

Medical records of around 500,000 Brits were analysed in the study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed — the process that irons out any flaws in the methodology.

Armed with that data, experts at biotech start-up EPITERNA could see any potential health outcomes linked to certain medications.

Most of the 400-plus drugs they assessed, which included the antibiotic amoxicillin and the cholesterol medication simvastatin, had a 'negative' effect on lifespan.

For instance, the opioid painkiller morphine was linked to a 456 per cent heightened risk of dying during the course of the study.

The researchers, working alongside experts from the universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Toulouse Hospital, said this was 'probably due to the underlying negative effect of the disease the drug is intended for'.

Conversely, experts were unable to pinpoint the exact reason why the little blue pill might help people live longer.

However, they flagged recent studies which highlighted how sildenafil may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s, as well as heart disease, as being potential factors.

Similar longevity benefits were observed with atorvastatin, naproxen and estradiol, too.

Writing in their pre-print, the team said: 'These retrospective results warrant further investigation in randomized controlled trials.'

Researchers used data from the UK Biobank. Patients were aged between 37 and 73. Only 46 per cent were men.

They had to have been prescribed a drug for at least three-months for it to be included in the data, although it was unclear how often patients would be taking the medication.

Patients were matched one-to-one to a 'control' who had the same health conditions but not taking the same drug, allowing the scientists to compare any differences.

The researchers didn't detail the average period of years they followed patients for in the study.

While the researchers looked at multiple drugs, they only examined men prescribed sildenafil.

Researchers said it was impossible to determine if healthy people taking sildenafil would enjoy the same longevity-boosting effects observed in their study.

It also was not possible to determine why patients were taking sildenafil in the first place.

While famed as an impotence drug, sildenafil is also used by men and women who suffer from pulmonary hypertension — a type of high blood pressure in the arteries that supply the lungs.

The same process by which the drug increases blood flow to the penis also relaxes blood vessels in the chest to help treat the condition.

Scientists behind the study also said the dataset doesn't account for other factors which may have boosted a patient's life expectancy, such as diet or exercise.

Sildenafil became an over-the-counter medication in the UK in 2018.

The study comes a week after MailOnline revealed that popular erection pills such as Viagra and Cialis have been linked to more than 200 deaths in Britain.

None of the fatalities — all of which have occurred since 1998 — are proven to have been caused directly by the drugs.

Experts also insisted the pills are safe and many incidents could actually reflect deaths linked to sex in men with heart issues instead.

Men can buy sildenafil, and other impotence pills over the counter for as little as £15, tablets are also available online for as little as £1.30 per pill.

Millions of British men now take drugs to help impotency.

The latest NHS backed data shows 22million prescriptions for these drugs were handed out by GPs in England between 2019 and 2023, at the cost of £91million.

Medics already know drugs like sildenafil can be dangerous in some circumstances. For example, those with known heart problems are advised to avoid taking them.

Even leaflets handed out with sildenafil acknowledge cases of sudden death in men having taken the drug though it insists such cases are rare and mostly in men with heart problems.

'It is not possible to determine whether these events were directly related to sildenafil,' it also adds.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13224085/Viagra-make-live-LONGER-scientists-discover.html

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Detransitioner Explains How She Was Duped Into Transitioning

Detransitioner Camille Kiefel says that she and other victims of transgender surgeries “have been dismissed” by doctors pushing so-called gender-affirming care.

“I struggled with childhood trauma,” Kiefel told The Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan. “My best friend had been raped by her brother when I was in sixth grade.”

A detransitioner is someone who attempts to transition to the opposite gender, then realized that such an attempt is impossible, and “detransitioned.” Many of these individuals, such as Kiefel, say they were betrayed into irreversible hormonal and surgical procedures by doctors and therapists who ignore biological realities in favor of radical ideology.

“For me, it was being afraid of being vulnerable and wanting to protect myself,” she said, adding:

I just started to identify with the male characters in anime manga reading … trying to reject my female identity, dressing more masculine, trying to hide my breasts and my hips, so that men wouldn’t see.

Kiefel confirmed that her father’s stories of “how men his age talk sexually about girls my age … was what started me on that.”

“It was when I was 26 that I saw a ‘gender-affirming care’ therapist, and then started to believe I was nonbinary, and then I got surgery when I was 30,” she said.

“The crazy thing is that they transitioned me into a nonbinary sex, one that doesn’t exist in nature,” she said.

“This freeing idea, with being nonbinary for many people is, like … I can just be me, and I’m not sexualized,” Kiefel explained. It was an idea that she learned in women’s studies classes, adding:

The gender ideology really co-opted it. There was this idea that you can be a third sex.

“I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said. “I just really wanted my breasts gone.”

Explaining the approval process for getting a double mastectomy, Kiefel said, “The ideology says that you can be trans and have trauma. They’re not accounting for the people who are transitioning because of trauma … it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

She explained the affirmation she received for the transition, saying, “I actually told the gender therapist what had happened to my friend and yet … but they didn’t push back at all.”

“I dealt with all these physical health issues after the surgery,” Kiefel said, “and the doctors took me seriously at first, but then became dismissive when they thought it was psychosomatic fever.”

In the face of that dismissal by the doctors, Kiefel took matters into her own hands and began working with a naturopath.

“I started adding meat back into my diet and some other holistic treatments,” she said, “and all of a sudden, I was, like, ‘Wow!’ My mental health is getting better!”

“All I needed to do was address my physical health, but nobody was doing that because … you’re depressed. … [T]hey just pegged me as someone dealing with mental illness.”

When Olohan asked Kiefel about her contact with the surgeons after she realized the mistake, the detransitioner said, “I just don’t feel comfortable reaching out to those doctors” after having experienced a doctor who treated her like she was wasting his time.

“I think a lot of detransitioners have those feelings of, like, we’ve been dismissed. I know many detransitioners who have been told that this is part of their gender journey,” Kiefel said.

Many detransitioners are suing the medical establishment, accusing doctors and therapists of manipulating them into undergoing brutal sex-change experiments.

Olohan asked Kiefel, “What would you say to doctors and therapists who are considering being a part of these so-called gender-affirming surgeries and interventions?”

“Make sure that no one who is struggling with severe mental health issues should do any of these surgeries,” Kiefel said. “They need to get their mental health under control.”

“Particularly with women who have histories with sexual trauma,” she added, “there’s a lot of them who are transitioning … . It’s partially escapism and to protect themselves. “

Olohan stated, “It sounds like we need more medical professionals that want to help detransitioners.”

Kiefel agreed: “We do.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/21/wanted-my-breasts-gone-detransitioner-duped-transitioning/

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SPLC Uses ‘Terrorist Tactics’ to Silence Dissent, Religious Freedom Lawyer Says

Mike Farris, general counsel with the National Religious Broadcasters and the founder of Patrick Henry College, says the far-left smear factory the Southern Poverty Law Center needs to be “buried down deep.”

“It’s not that they’re left-wing,” Farris told “The Daily Signal Podcast” in an interview at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in February. “They hate the principle that you’re allowed to differ, and that is un-American.”

Farris, a lawyer who has been representing clients in religious freedom and free speech cases for more than 40 years, served as president of the nonprofit Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom for five years. In 1993, he won the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor of Virginia, though he lost the general election.

Farris recalls that when he started handling religious freedom cases, “I was probably among the first three full-time Christian lawyers doing this kind of work.” Now, there are four major firms and hundreds of lawyers representing clients.

He calls that a “source of encouragement” for him, but the opposition has also gotten fierce.

The SPLC, which began as a civil rights law firm representing poor people in the South and established a name for itself by suing Ku Klux Klan groups into bankruptcy, publishes a “hate map” that plots mainstream conservative and Christian organizations like ADF alongside Klan chapters, insinuating that they are driven by a similar form of hate. Amid a sexual harassment and racial discrimination scandal in 2019, a former employee said the SPLC’s “hate” accusations are a “highly profitable scam” to scare donors into ponying up cash. The SPLC has an endowment of more than $740 million.

“They don’t care about rights. They don’t care about America,” Farris says of the SPLC. “They care about using the progressive ideology to raise a ton of money and spend it on themselves. But they’re using it by terrorist tactics. You know, terrorist tactics wrapped in a little bit of velvet.”

In 2012, a terrorist used the SPLC’s “hate map” to target the Family Research Council, a Christian nonprofit in Washington, D.C. The council’s building manager foiled the attack by the terrorist, who later told the FBI he had planned to massacre everyone in the building.

The Family Research Council remains on the “hate map” to this day.

The SPLC claims that ADF is an “anti-LGBTQ hate group,” accusing it of having supported “forced sterilization” in France. Farris says that’s a “flat lie.”

“We wrote a brief in the European Court of Human Rights supporting the law of France,” the former ADF president explains. ADF supported France’s right “to make laws on the subject” of gender ideology, arguing “that there are areas that states get some freedom to rule, and there shouldn’t be one international standard for that.”

“The word ‘sterilization’ does not appear in our brief, ever,” Farris notes. “We never talked about it, and so somebody claims that the French law could be interpreted to force sterilization if [French people who claim to be transgender] wanted certain rights.

“We were not talking about the details of the French law, nor were we advocating that French law should be written in a particular way,” he adds. “We were just saying this is France’s choice, not the international community’s choice.”

“So, it’s a lie. It’s a flat lie,” Farris said.

He also noted that many defamation lawsuits against the SPLC end up dismissed.

“Most of the defamation cases that have gone awry against the Southern Poverty Law Center have been on the basis that what they were saying was opinion, rather than fact,” the former ADF president explained.

However, last year a federal judge rejected the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit. D.A. King, founder of the pro-enforcement immigration reform group the Dustin Inman Society, claimed the SPLC had reason to doubt the veracity of its claim that his organization was a “hate group”—because the SPLC had previously stated that King’s group was not a “hate group.”

“If we get the right case for defamation, I’m going to be the first one to sue them—where it’s so clear it’s a statement of fact and it’s false,” Farris pledged.

Of the SPLC, he says, “They deserve to go down, and they do hurt people.”

“I think that if [judges and juries] apply the defamation law correctly, they’re going to get buried someday,” Farris predicts. “When they get buried, they need to be buried deep.”

He also shared an anecdote that he found revealing.

At a religious freedom event, Farris said that if the State Department wants to support religious freedom, “the first thing we need to do is take down the rainbow flags we were flying at embassies all over the world, because the Christians in that country see that, and they go, ‘They can’t be for religious liberty if they’re flying the rainbow flag. Because the point of the rainbow flag is to crush Christianity.'”

He recalls a “lesbian Episcopal priest from Philadelphia” who told him, “All we want is to be celebrated by everybody.”

“They want to be celebrated by everybody. Why? Because in their soul, they know it’s, they feel the pangs of sin,” Farris says.

He emphasizes that conservative Christians should defend everyone’s religious freedom.

“It’s our conservatism that makes us stand up for the rights of everybody,” the lawyer says. “You know, I believe in the rights of Buddhists because I am a Christian, not in spite of the fact that I am a Christian, but because I am a Christian.”

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/20/un-american-splc-uses-terrorist-tactics-silence-dissent-religious-freedom-lawyer-says/