IVF Couple ‘Devastated’ By Sperm Mix-Up After Depriving Child Of Biological And Birth Mothers
The flippancy IVF demonstrates toward a mother's DNA by encouraging the use of surrogates and donor eggs turns women into 'interchangable body bags.'The flippancy IVF demonstrates toward a mother's DNA by encouraging the use of surrogates and donor eggs turns women into 'interchangable body bags.'Judge Blocks Charlie Kirk Family’s Request For Transparency In Hearing Evidence
The Kirk family argued that full transparency in this case is necessary to combat conspiracy theorists who continue to point fingers at anyone but the man who confessed to the murder.Democratic Socialists Who Failed At Life Are Weaponizing Envy To Destroy American Families
Let's stop letting perpetually miserable people define the moral terms of our lives. It's time to make generational ambition honorable again.Let Your Kids Grow Up Without A Homing Signal
By constant monitoring, we’re not just giving up freedom for temporary safety, we’re raising kids to think the surveillance state is normal.America’s birth defect did not define our destiny
A friend recently asked why so many Americans seem embarrassed by their own country.
The question came during the annual Fourth of July arguments about patriotism, flags, and whether America deserves to be celebrated. It reminded me of something the late Robert Woodson often said about America’s beginning.
Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship. That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.
Woodson acknowledged the contradiction at our founding: a nation proclaiming that all men are created equal while tolerating slavery. Others point to limited rights for women and other shortcomings present at the nation's birth.
What interested Woodson was not the diagnosis but the response. He compared America to a child born with a birth defect. Loving parents do not deny the condition or abandon the child because of it. They adapt, advocate, protect, teach, accommodate, and love.
They learn stewardship.
Caregiving taught me that lesson long before I heard Woodson apply it to a nation. During one particularly difficult season, a wise friend told me something that permanently changed the way I viewed caregiving.
“Your wife has a Savior. You are not that Savior.”
For years I had lived as though my job was to fix everything. If I researched enough, worked hard enough, and sacrificed enough, I could somehow force life toward the outcome I wanted.
Eventually I collided with a truth every caregiver must learn. I could not control the outcome. I was accountable for my stewardship.
That realization changed the way I looked at life and the world.
For years I believed life would finally begin after the next surgery, the next recovery, the next crisis, or the next milestone. Like many caregivers, I kept telling myself that if we could just get through this one thing, then we could finally get on with our lives.
Eventually I realized this wasn’t a rehearsal. This was my life.
RELATED: Sorry, socialists: The system isn’t the savior
When I stopped trying to get through life in order to get on with life, I quit treading water waiting for rescue and learned to swim.
The problems remained. My stewardship changed.
Too often we tell ourselves that happiness waits on the other side of some future event. If only this election goes differently. If only this grievance is resolved. Then we can finally live.
Stewardship asks another question. Not, “Why wasn't I given something better?” But, “What am I going to do with what I’ve been given?”
I’ve seen the difference between cultures that cultivate stewardship and cultures that discourage it.
Years ago, while helping establish our prosthetic limb outreach in West Africa, I worked alongside local technicians learning to build prosthetic legs for their own people. In one clinic, nearly every decision required approval from above.
One day I asked a technician a simple question. “What do you think?”
The puzzled expression on his face answered before he spoke. It wasn’t that he lacked intelligence. No one had ever expected him to own the decision.
America, at its best, asks that question every day. What do you think? What will you build? What responsibility are you willing to carry? That expectation lies near the heart of the American experiment.
America’s founding principles created room for reform because the nation’s founding documents proclaimed truths many of the founders themselves failed to live fully. Those same principles later became the standard by which Americans challenged slavery and expanded civil rights.
The story of America is not one of perfection. It is one of stewardship.
RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion
Of course, stewardship is not the only response to a defect. Some people learn from it. Others exploit it.
Every family caring for someone with disabilities eventually encounters people more interested in the diagnosis than the person. Nations experience something similar. America’s original contradiction has served both as a call to greater fidelity and as a tool for those seeking power through perpetual grievance.
Woodson understood the difference. One path produces stewardship. The other manufactures resentment.
I love this country not because it is flawless, but because it repeatedly calls each generation to measure itself against ideals higher than itself.
When I look at my grandchildren, I hope they inherit a nation that prizes freedom, embraces responsibility, rewards merit, and teaches that life is shaped more by stewardship than by grievance.
What if we stopped waiting for the perfect election, the perfect apology, the perfect reckoning, or the perfect outcome before deciding to engage faithfully with the country we have? Imagine the gratitude, creativity, service, and responsibility that would follow.
Parents of children with disabilities understand this. Caregivers understand this. Love does not require perfection. It requires stewardship.
That seems like a good way to care for a family. And it seems like a good way to care for a nation.
Fatherhood under attack: Allie Beth Stuckey calls out media's latest hit pieces on dads
This past Father’s Day weekend, an article on fatherhood in the New York Times went viral.
However, it wasn’t about a great father. It was about a woman who transitioned and calls herself a father.
“You might be thinking, ‘Really? In the year of our Lord 2026, this is what the New York Times is talking about? I thought we were over this madness. I thought we realized and successfully stigmatized roping kids into being sources of affirmation for gender delusion,'” BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says on “Relatable.”
The headline reads, “To my daughter, my gender was never complicated.”
The article contains cartoons to help describe the relationship between “father” and daughter, including one where the daughter asks, “How long did you have breasts for Dad?”
“What a tragic, tragic line for a child to utter. The daughter is later shown at school with friends where a friend says, ‘You can’t grow a beard. You’re a girl.’ And the daughter responds, ‘My dad did, and he was a girl,’” Stuckey explains.
“And this is supposed to prove that this is super simple. Or maybe it proves that it is so delusional that a child who still believes that there is a fat man that can circle the universe in one night, fit down their chimney, and put presents under the tree like that. They believe it because they believe all kinds of fantastical things,” she continues.
But the New York Times isn’t the only publication to do the opposite of celebrating fatherhood.
“There was also this piece in the Toronto Star: ‘A modest proposal: Why it’s time to abolish Father’s Day,’” Stuckey says, pointing out that the article is a bit of a “bait and switch.”
In the article, the author laments the pressure put on children to buy gifts, claiming that the real gift is quality time.
“If your problem is materialism, that's one thing. Or you just think it’s, you know, a made-up reason to buy Hallmark cards, that’s fine,” she says, adding, “But the title, we need to abolish Father’s Day, or we need to abolish Mother’s Day, another thing that I’ve heard in the past due to some undue burden that’s just perpetuating this idea that celebrating fathers and positive fatherhood is not something that we need to do.”
Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?
To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
The new kid in the waiting room
The receptionist asked me to verify my date of birth.
I gave her Gracie’s.
For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.
She glanced down at the chart in her hand and then back at me with a puzzled expression. Before she could say anything, I caught myself.
“Oh ... that’s my wife’s birthday.”
After 40 years as a family caregiver through surgeries, appointments, hospital admissions, medications, insurance forms, and enough medical paperwork to clear a small forest, I had automatically answered with the date I have given thousands of times before.
This time, however, I was the patient.I was at the cancer center for imaging and treatment planning in preparation for radiation therapy for prostate cancer. Thanks to routine screenings and excellent physicians, it was caught early. The prognosis is excellent.
Still, it felt strange.
I have spent most of my adult life in hospitals because of someone else. This time, they called my name.
Looking around the waiting room, I realized I was easily the youngest man there. That does not happen to me very often anymore. Later, one staff member told me most of their patients are in their 70s and beyond. Sometimes, they see men in their 60s like me, and every so often someone in his 50s.
For this visit, I was the new kid.
I took a chair off to the side, careful not to intrude on this fraternity of men who seemed to know the ropes. They reminded me of the old men who gathered at Nick’s grocery and gas station near my childhood home in rural South Carolina. As a boy, I would stop in for a soda and candy bar while they held court around the coffee pot, solving problems that ranged from weather and crops to politics and church business.
The subjects changed from day to day. The cadence never did.
Men of a certain age possess a remarkable conversational gift. They can begin with trout streams and end with urologists without anyone noticing where the turn occurred.
RELATED: Caregivers should not have to lie to prove compassion
True to form, this conversation drifted toward prostate cancer, treatments, and the assorted indignities that accompany aging. One fellow described an examination during which the sheet covering him slipped.
Before he could react, the nurse matter-of-factly told him, “Don’t worry. If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll kill it.”
Such is the sort of thing you expect to hear in a cancer clinic in Montana.
The men laughed.
I raised an eyebrow and thought, “How comforting.”
But I still laughed.
Soon enough, they called me back. The technicians positioned my legs, explained the process, and slid me into a machine that looked remarkably like something from an old “Star Trek” episode. If memory serves, it resembled the device that kept Spock alive after somebody stole his brain.
After the instructions were complete, they eased me into position and left the room.
A few minutes later, one of the technicians returned looking slightly sheepish.
“We have a bit of a challenge.”
“Do tell,” I replied.
“There’s a gas bubble.”
The expression on my face evidently communicated that I was not following.
She delicately clarified.
“It’s in ... you.”
“Oh.”
I considered several responses, including one with my outstretched index finger that would have made my four brothers proud and the medical staff considerably less appreciative. Fortunately, decades of maturity prevailed.
“What do you recommend?” I asked.
“Maybe take a walk and see if anything happens.”
So there I was, strolling through the halls of a cancer center, trying to solve a problem that five boys growing up under one roof would have regarded as entirely manageable without professional consultation. At times, our household rivaled the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles.”
The problem was that they had instructed me to drink a substantial amount of water beforehand to achieve the proper imaging. Solving one problem too enthusiastically threatened to create another.
Men over 50 approach certain situations with caution for good reasons.
Eventually, however, everything worked itself out.
Ahem.
The imaging was completed, the planning was finished, and in a few days, I will return to begin treatment.
As I left, I noticed the bell hanging in the hallway. I have seen bells like that before. Patients ring them when treatment ends.
Lord willing, I will ring that bell myself within a month.
RELATED: The song that lets sorrow tell the truth
Driving home, I thought about those older men in the waiting room. None of them appeared eager to be there, but neither did they seem intimidated by it.
They knew where to park. They knew where the coffee was. They knew which jokes were worth telling.
In short, they knew the territory.
Eventually, if you stay on any road long enough, you stop asking for directions and start giving them.
One day, perhaps sooner than I would like to admit, I may be the guy telling stories to the new kid who walks through the door — even if the story involves a gas bubble that needed to be walked off.
For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.
Prostate cancer is often called a silent disease.
Mine was.
Fortunately, silent does not have to mean deadly.
Hello Fresh's unappetizing 'Pride' ad exposes the sordid truth about gay 'marriage'
This month, Hello Fresh ran a Pride-themed ad campaign that seems far removed from the assurances many Americans heard during the same-sex marriage debate. Remember? "My marriage won't affect your marriage." "What consenting adults do in private is none of anyone's business."
Many voters who supported same-sex marriage believed these assurances, understanding it as a request for legal recognition, not the beginning of a broader cultural project that would eventually permeate corporate branding, workplace policies, schools, and popular culture.
Ordinary moms and grandmas just wanted their gay relatives to be happy. They were assured that redefining marriage would be harmless.
But here we are, almost exactly 11 years since the Obergefell decision, and the most popular meal-kit delivery service in the country has brought gay sex out of the bedroom and right to the kitchen table.
'Bottoms up'
Now, I don't want to write about this any more than you want to read about it. But the unfortunate truth is that we can't afford to ignore it, no matter how distasteful we find it. Because if you and I won’t talk about these things on our terms, be assured, the sexual revolutionaries will talk about them on theirs.
So here is the ad Hello Fresh posted on Instagram: “We know eating isn’t always a top priority this month. We respect that. But for those of you who are … prepping … we have an extensive lineup of high-fiber recipes available. Happy Pride.”
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the term “prepping.” In Megan Basham’s delicate translation: “For those not initiated into the sexual practices of gay men, let me help decipher what 'prepping' means. HelloFresh is saying that their product is useful for clearing out the rectum of feces in preparation for sodomy. Yes, that’s what it means.”
The company later added a discount code: BOTTOMS UP.
This tasteless Hello Fresh “Pride Month” campaign delivers your food with a side dish of unappetizing sexual innuendo, whether you ordered it or not.
Hardly harmless
What ever happened to that “gay marriage” deal about the privacy of the bedroom? Many people accepted that bargain in good faith. Ordinary moms and grandmas just wanted their gay relatives to be happy. They were assured that redefining marriage would be harmless.
I was a campaign spokeswoman for Proposition 8 in California, the ballot initiative that defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. I was involved in the marriage debates from Prop 8 in 2008 all the way to 2015 and the Obergefell decision. I distinctly remember that many leaders of the pro-marriage effort made a conscious decision not to talk about gay sex.
“The gay marriage campaign is not about ‘gay.’ It’s about ‘marriage.’” This strategy suited a lot of us, including me. We didn’t want to talk about gay stuff at all, much less gay sex.
We wanted to talk about the meaning and purposes of marriage, how marriage attaches mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. We wanted to talk about how redefining marriage would inevitably redefine parenthood.
We feared that mentioning gay sex would gross people out. We didn’t want to offend the good, decent people who don’t want to talk about any sex in public, much less gay sex. We figured the first side to bring it up would lose.
RELATED: Trans is the natural progression from ‘gay marriage’
Sanitizing sodomy
But there was a downside to this strategy. It allowed the gay lobby to sanitize the sexual activities of two men. The public was never asked to think about what gay men actually do together. Grandma could picture her grandson cuddling on the sofa with his boyfriend, listening to showtunes.
I recall giving a talk at Stanford. In response to a question about “marriage equality,” I asked the student, “Is there any sexual act that would equally consummate the marriage of a male couple and a female couple and a man-woman couple?”
The student thought for a minute. This was a new thought for her. She probably couldn’t imagine anyone getting married who hadn’t already performed the act that normally consummates a marriage, long before they walked down the aisle.
She finally said, “Well, marriage doesn’t necessarily have to be a sexual relationship.” This is a tacit admission that there is no “equal” way of consummating these “marriages.”
Intrinsically sterile
Maybe avoiding “gay” was a good tactic at the time. But the marketing geniuses at Hello Fresh broke the tacit deal: What happens in the bedroom doesn’t stay in the bedroom. It was wishful thinking to believe that it would.
Decent people prefer to keep a discreet lid on discussions of sex. Unfortunately, the sexual revolutionaries — be they gay, straight, nonbinary, or whatever — can’t shut up about it.
The marital act between a man and a woman can bring forth new human life. The combination of oxytocin and vasopressin during sex creates bonds between the man and the woman.
Neither babies nor bonding are part of the gay sex equation. Gay sex is intrinsically sterile. Gay sex is gross.
There: I said it.
But don’t forget who brought it up first.
The secret to being a patient, present father? It's in my basement
Every year on Father's Day, I'm reminded of how grateful I am for my family. I'm also reminded of what helps me to remain grateful: that little oasis of tranquility just down the basement stairs — my home office.
I love my office. I also need it.
I try to get my wife to take advantage of the office. I tell her she can use it whenever she likes, but she never takes me up on it.
It's very simple. If I can't get my work done, I go crazy. I can't get any work done without an office. Therefore, in order to remain sane, I need an office.
Mobile threat
I tried not having one about six years ago when it was just my wife, my son, and me in a little ranch we rented one block over. I had my desk set up in the corner of the living room. I had two computer displays, which, kind of I guess, created a little barrier or faux-wall separating myself from the couch and the television on the other side of the room. It worked, barely, but it was better than nothing.
Then, our firstborn starting walking. And talking.
Fortunately, we moved around the same time. The first thing I did in the new house was to make an office.
RELATED: Greetings from my favorite vacation spot; it's closer and cheaper than you may think
Notes from underground
The new house is small too, with the same layout as the old one: three bedrooms and one bath on one floor. But the new house also has a basement that is about 50% finished. On the east end of this basement, there is a separate room, complete with its own bathroom and a solid door you can actually close.
The floor had been painted red probably 25 years ago. When we moved in, it was chipping and ugly. The walls were covered with equally old wallpaper that ended halfway to the ceiling. People did that in the '80s and '90s a lot. I remember because my mom did it with one of our walls when we were growing up. The bathroom was just as bad. Same red paint, same flowery wallpaper, same '80s horror vibe. But the walls were drywall, and there was a ceiling too — drop in the bathroom, drywall in the main room.
As soon as we finished moving the last box into our new place, I got to work rehabilitating the '80s horror show downstairs.
I ripped the wallpaper down over the course of a few days. I repaired the holes with putty. I painted the walls and ceiling bright white and the floor dark gray. I hung a big mirror in the bathroom, bought a shower curtain, and set two imitation stained glass pieces of plastic film over the small windows. These fake stained glass inlays are pretty cheeseball and not ideal, but it’s better than looking at the weeds through the window up near the ceiling.
I laid a big rug down in the main room and smaller ornate ones around on the still-exposed concrete. I installed a dimmer on the light switch, replaced the old door knobs with new ones, moved in my desk, tables, bookshelves, lamps with warm bulbs, stereo and speakers, microphones, cameras, and everything else that I use for work.
Hole for one
That was six years ago, and since then, I have spent too many hours to count down in my little subterranean sanctuary. Every year, I make it a little nicer. I hang some more photos, organize a little better, buy some more lamps, and try to keep my desk cleaner.
My most recent improvement came in the form of some Oasis lamps, which are advertised as providing warm ambient light. I’ve got four in my office set on “candle mode,” and I can confirm the light is both ambient and warm. It feels nice and light in here despite it being in the corner of a cold basement.
I try to get my wife to take advantage of the office. I tell her she can use it whenever she likes, but she never takes me up on it. I don’t think she likes the basement that much. I understand. The rest of it is kind of a hellhole. The kids play down there a lot, and more often than not, I find myself stumbling over toys and puzzles on my way to my hallowed little haunt of soft lighting and soft music.
A quiet place
We’ve got a small house and three homeschooled kids who use their imaginations instead of iPads. It’s a chaotic environment to say the least. I hear the yells outside the bathroom window, which is near the deck, and I hear the running across the floor of the living room from my desk directly below.
I think what gets to us as parents is the slow grinding down of our patience over the course of the day. It’s also that our stuff is always going missing or something is always being broken. It’s the constant questions and it’s the feeling like we have no space to ourselves anymore.
This is why dads have notoriously taken so long in the restroom and probably why moms take so long when they go to the grocery store by themselves. They are just trying to get some peace and quiet.
That is why I need an office. And while my workspace in the basement isn’t much, it has come a long way since 2020, and it’s more than enough. It’s a little peace and quiet.
Libs Freak Out Because Evil Trump Admin Embraces ‘Fetal Personhood Ideology’
If the left really wants to be the rhetorical protector of the innocent, then it should stop whitewashing IVF as a scientific procedure that only affects mindless cells, and start calling IVF embryos what they really are: human children.Today's top stories
www.theblaze.com
thefederalist.com
www.theblaze.com
www.theblaze.com
www.theblaze.com