The Trump Justice Department sided in court Friday with a new Idaho law that prevents biological males who identify as female from playing on girls’ teams.

The new Idaho law, called the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, requires biological sex – and not gender identity – to be used in determining who plays on high school and college teams. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is challenging the law in court.

The Justice Department filed a Statement of Interest in federal court Friday defending the law, saying it aligns with the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause because it ensures female athletes are on a level playing field with males.

“The Equal Protection Clause does not require States to abandon their efforts to provide biological women with equal opportunity to compete for, and enjoy the life-long benefits that flow from, participation in school athletics in order to accommodate the team preferences of transgender athletes,” the Statement of Interest says. “Put differently, the Constitution does not require Idaho to provide the special treatment Plaintiffs request, under which biological males are allowed to compete against biological females if and only if the biological males are transgender.”

In Connecticut, two transgender athletes who are biologically male but identify as female won 15 state track titles.

The Justice Department brief points favorably to…

HYDERABAD, India, June 19, 2020 (Morning Star News) – His father away from home due in part to coronavirus travel restrictions, a 12-year-old boy in Uttar Pradesh, India heard relatives angry at his family for refusing to renounce Christ pounding on the door late last night (June 18).

“It was past 11’o clock in the night when we heard them banging on the door and shouting,” he said. “Five men along with my uncle were standing at the door issuing threats that they would murder my brother and me.”

His terrified mother in the Ram Ganga Vihar area of Moradabad told her two sons, the other age 20, to run to the police station for safety while she locked the doors and would catch up with them, said the boy, whose name is withheld for security reasons. They ran past her brother and the five other drunken men who were screaming threats, and she followed shortly afterward, said his mother, 42-year-old Molly James.

“My brother and sister have portrayed me as a bad woman in this Hindu-dominant neighborhood for accepting Christianity,” James told Morning Star News. “They have been trying to expel my family from the area for the past three years.”

Her husband, Anil James, works 116 miles away in Delhi, and the lockdown to contain the spread of the new coronavirus has kept him from returning home as often as he did before, she said.

“They took the chance to…

Christians should affirm the phrase “black lives matter” but reject the organization that penned the slogan, seminary president Albert Mohler Jr. says in a new column.

The president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary says the three words that have been embraced by Americans of every race and religion are “profoundly true” because “God made every human being in his image, which means every life on the planet, at every stage, matters.”

“[T]here are very real and urgent moral concerns about the lives and well-being of black Americans,” Mohler writes at ThePublicDiscourse.com.

But Black Lives Matter – the movement that was founded in 2013 and is behind BlackLivesMatter.com – takes stances that oppose biblical sexuality, Mohler writes.

The seminary president quotes the position statements on the movement’s website.

“We are guided,” the BlackLivesMatter.com website says, “by the fact that all black lives matter, regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status, or location.”

On transgenderism, the website says, “We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead. We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans…

Phil Vischer, the creator of the popular Christian animated series VeggieTales and the voice of the show’s character Bob the Tomato, offered a historical take on systemic racism in America in a new video.

Amid civil unrest over racial injustices in America, Vischer released a 17-minute video titled “Race in America” on his personal YouTube channel and on the Holy Post website in which he breaks down systemic racism.

With the abolition of slavery and the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Vischer argues that many may believe that we are living in a post-racial society.

“Heck, we even had a black president,” Vischer adds.

“So why are people still upset? We’re going to go through history and we’re going to look at some data,” the show creator starts.

Showing an image of two houses, he says, “These are two households in America, one is black, the other is white. Today the average black household has 60 percent of the income of the average white household, but only one 10th of the household wealth.”

Vischer went on to note various benefits of having higher household wealth, such as funding schools, launching small businesses, stabilizing loss of income and helping families survive unexpected divorce or unemployment.

“What’s amazing about this number is that there are lots of extremely wealthy African Americans: movie stars, pop stars. … And there are a lot of extremely…

A California church may have to find a new home after a federal judge upheld a city’s prohibition on houses of worship in a three-block stretch of downtown.

New Harvest Christian Fellowship in Salinas, Calif., has rented space along Main Street for more than 25 years and began looking for a new building when its services outgrew its current location.

The church subsequently bought a spacious building on the same street in 2018 with the intent to hold services there, but the city’s planning commission and then the city council denied the church’s request to use the building as a house of worship, saying a church at that location would upset the city’s goal of stimulating “commercial activity within the City’s downtown,” which has been in a state of decline. The city limited the church to use of the building’s second floor.

The church then sued, claiming the city’s position violated the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), which protects houses of worship from discrimination in zoning laws. Salinas is located east of Monterey and south of San Francisco.

On May 29, federal magistrate judge Susan Van Keulen sided with the city, saying it had not violated RLUIPA and that the church could have found other buildings within the city for its location.

Pacific Justice Institute represented the church and said it will appeal.

“This continues to be…

For a growing segment of our population, even saying the phrase “Father’s Day” brings up bad feelings and memories. For some, the phrase even opens up physical and mental wounds.

Author and speaker Bob Reccord is on a personal mission this Father’s Day to help people heal from these wounds.

Reccord spent the better part of 2019 researching and writing on the topic of “father wounds” for his new book, Ending the Cycle of Father Wounds.

Reccord, who is a sought-after speaker and former North American Mission Board President, is clear that dealing with father wounds is something that he has had to do in his own life.

“My mother passed away when I was 11 months old leaving me and my three brothers with an alcoholic father who gave us up for adoption.”

“You would think that would have been a good thing,” he continued. “But my adopted dad carried father wounds from his father, too.”

Reccord is clear that having a father wound isn’t always something that is visible. “What you see on the outside oftentimes masks what’s on the inside of someone.”

Many who are experiencing the wounds of the father may not even know it. When asked how someone can know if they do have a father wound, Reccord shares that the wounds often present themselves as internal conflicts.

In his book, Reccord encourages his readers to take a father wounds examination to find out what they are dealing with.

Reccord is…