It is insane “that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the[ir] platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as ‘men aren’t women.’”
—feminist Meghan Murphy in November of 2018—
Key point: Facts do not matter to leftist operatives. Agendas do.
The earliest series of articles I published at Word Foundations is titled “The High Cost of Denying the Obvious.” I released “A Dead End,” the first article in that series, on July 31, 2015. I have summarized it as follows.
Our culture today celebrates those who deny their own biological gender and who seek to change it. According to Ben Shapiro, we are “mainstreaming delusion.” He’s right, and it isn’t just “transgendered” individuals who are paying a price for this—it’s everyone. The good news is that we who know the truth can help society get back on track.
Ironically, people who affirm the obvious are paying a high price for doing so. In fact, the price is so high many people who might otherwise declare the truth are remaining silent. Here’s what we must understand: The cost of denying the obvious is infinitely higher than the price for affirming it, but the benefits of affirming the obvious, though great, aren’t immediate.
Someone has well said that anyone can look at an apple tree and see apples, but it is a rare individual indeed that can look at an apple and see trees. We need men and women today who can look at apples and see trees, and who, because they can do this, are willing to pay the price for affirming the obvious for the long-term benefit of individuals and society at large. Remember the importance of looking at apples and visualizing trees; we will refer to it again at the end of this article.
Fast forward five-and-a-half years, to early 2021. Meet Rachel Levine, Joe Biden’s choice for Assistant Secretary of Health. Wikipedia states,
Rachel L. Levine (/ləˈviːn/; born October 28, 1957) is an American pediatrician who served as Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health from 2017 to 2021. She is a professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at the Penn State College of Medicine, and previously served as the Pennsylvania physician general from 2015 to 2017. She is one of only a handful of openly transgender government officials in the United States. President Joe Biden has nominated Levine to be Assistant Secretary for Health. She would be the first openly transgender federal official to be confirmed by the Senate.
On Tuesday, January 19, The Daily Citizen, a public policy news organization affiliated with Focus on the Family, tweeted the following.
On Tuesday [today], President-elect Joe Biden announced that he had chosen Dr. Rachel Levine to serve as Assistant Secretary for Health at the Department of HHS. Dr. Levine is a transgender woman, that is, a man who believe he is a woman. https://t.co/LwQwZMaZT6
Because of this tweet, Twitter subsequently blocked The Daily Citizen from its account. As of this writing, the most recent tweet displayed on the Daily Citizen’s Twitter feed is dated January 22, 2021. It is about Rush Limbaugh’s resilience despite his declining health.
On January 27, Focus President Jim Daly discussed what had happened on his blog.
In recent weeks, high-profile, outspoken individuals have been banned from social media, including former President Donald Trump and Mike Lindell, CEO and founder of My Pillow.
You can now add Focus on the Family’s The Daily Citizen to the list.
This past week, Twitter locked The Daily Citizen for an alleged rules violation, specifically that we had posted “hateful” content.
It’s simply not true. We did no such thing.…
It seems, according to Twitter, simply acknowledging biological fact is now “hateful.”
It seems, according to Twitter, simply acknowledging biological fact is now “hateful.”
—Focus on the Family President Jim Daly—
As we noted to Twitter in our appeal (we have since been denied), we were deeply puzzled as to why we’re not permitted to simply acknowledge the definition of what transgender women are – those born male who believe they are a woman, regardless of whether they have had opposite-sex hormones or surgeries.
The article itself [here is the article cited in the tweet] had absolutely nothing to do with Dr. Levine’s “trans” identification. It had to do with his fitness for the job based on his previous record.
Note that Jim Daly properly referred to Dr. Levine with the possessive pronoun his: “It had to do with his fitness for the job based on his previous record.” Everyone should be able to understand why Daly did this, but the left becomes apoplectic whenever anyone uses the pronoun of a person’s birth sex to refer to an individual who believes he or she is a member of the opposite sex. To the left, this is an unforgivable sin. Daly continued,
We’ve asked Twitter to explain what was wrong with our wording and even asked them how we might describe Dr. Levine to their liking. At this writing, we haven’t heard back.
Having already identified Donald Trump, Mike Lindell, and, of course, The Daily Citizen as targets of Big Tech censors, Daly went on to name in his post six more individuals (and he alluded to numerous others) the cancel culture has sought to silence. Then he issued this ominous warning.
And we’re only at the beginning of a coordinated effort to silence those of us with socially conservative convictions.
It should be noted that not everyone Daly named is a conservative. Even liberals who state factual information deemed consistent with “socially conservative convictions” are targeted and censored.
In a subsequent blogpost dated February 1, 2021, Daly again affirmed that hate was not involved in the tweet about Dr. Levine.
Our comments in The Daily Citizen were not hateful or politically motivated in any way. They simply reflected an understanding of gender that has been recognized and embraced for millennia. This view is not only supported by Scripture, but by centuries of biological science and a commonsense consensus of what it means to be male or female.
Although this view has fallen out of favor with the gatekeepers of big media, higher education, and big tech, it is a view that continues to be embraced and affirmed by millions of people around the world of every religious and political persuasion. From our perspective, it is the height of arrogance for Twitter to assume it has the right or reason to “ban” discussion of this nature.
Although this view [that maleness and femaleness are rooted in biological realities] has fallen out of favor with the gatekeepers of big media, higher education, and big tech, it is a view that continues to be embraced and affirmed by millions of people around the world of every religious and political persuasion. From our perspective, it is the height of arrogance for Twitter to assume it has the right or reason to “ban” discussion of this nature.
—Focus on the Family President Jim Daly—
Our friends at the Family Policy Alliance have reached out to many of our fellow laborers to offer a word of encouragement and amplify our appeal to Twitter. We’re grateful for this generous effort. In recent days, tens of thousands of people have expressed their frustration with big tech – and their confidence in the pursuit of free speech.
The efforts of the Family Policy Alliance [FPA] to reach “out to many of our fellow laborers…to amplify our appeal to Twitter” included the following tweet.
CENSORSHIP ALERT: Twitter banned @FocusCitizen from their platform. The crime? A tweet which identified Asst. Health Sec. pick Rachel Levine as a biological male. If stating the facts gets you banned, none of us belong here. @Twitter, we're wondering: #AreWeNext? RT to speak out! pic.twitter.com/Z1cUJrK0sZ
— Family Policy Alliance (@family_policy) January 29, 2021
FPA sounded the alarm in other ways as well. Here is the organization’s initial article from (dated January 29) informing its friends and supporters about Twitter’s tyrannical censorship; and here is an update, dated February 1. FPA’s effort includes a petition through which you can express your support for Focus on the Family.
Sign a petition in support of Focus on the Family here.
The Power of Words
It’s important to realize what is happening here. Twitter, other members of Big Tech, and the other big players in the cancel culture are not merely trying to censor views they don’t like; they also are trying to
-
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- intimidate and coerce people and
- change their minds.
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We must not underestimate the power of words. This statement — “Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world,” has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin by some and to Karl Marx by others. Of course, both used the alphabet (26 lead soldiers) and the words they form to leave a huge impact on their own and on future generations.
The Real Rub with Twitter and Other Big Tech Players
This isn’t just about influencing people, however; it’s about opposing God. As we have previously noted, the real target of the censors is God’s law — absolute truth. What more effective way to attack truth than by denying the biological realities that separate males from females and vice versa? Biology is clear, and so is Scripture: “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Again, the real goal, whether those involved in this effort realize it or not, is to refute what God has declared, about sexuality and about everything else:
Leftist radicals want to confuse people about what God has said because they want to destroy the liberty that is fostered when God’s law is the basis for morality and ethics in a nation. Without God’s law, liberty is not possible.
Twitter, Your Hypocrisy Is Showing!
There’s more! Despite its self-proclaimed crusade against hate, Twitter is being indifferent to the victims of child pornography. Formerly a “detective with the Metro Nashville Police Department,” Mike McCarty declared in an op-ed in the Christian Post dated February 2, 2021,
Twitter has spent the past year policing political opinions on their platform, most recently banning a post from Focus on the Family, all while sexual predators roam freely, posting and sharing child pornography.…
A recent lawsuit filed against Twitter, brings into question whether Twitter views child pornography as offensive or objectionable – a sad commentary considering they have no problem deeming certain biblical content offensive.
Sex traffickers masquerading as kids on SnapChat enticed a 13-year-old to share sexually explicit photos with online, although the teenager believed one individual was the recipient and that the recipient was another juvenile. Afterward, the “child was…intimidated into sending videos to stop the perpetrators from sharing the original photos with parents, coaches, schools, etc.”
McCarty continues,
The trap had been set for this 13-year-old as the sexual predators then posted a Tweet with the sexually explicit photos. It would be easy for Twitter to focus on this as a single incident. However, this tweet was shared 167,000 times and then retweeted more than 2,223 times.
The lawsuit also claims that Twitter profited from this tweet.
I do not see any evidence in this lawsuit that Twitter takes sexual traffickers and predators seriously. The mother of the 13-year-old victim reached out to Twitter on numerous occasions. She did everything she should – contacting police, schools, and reaching out anywhere she could for help.
Twitter was slow to respond; and meanwhile, Twitter users were viewing and retweeting the explicit photos. The lawsuit contends that when the media giant at last issued its official response, it thanked the mother for expressing concern but went on to declare the company’s review of the content did not uncover “a violation of their policies so no action would be taken.”
McCarty then issued this stinging rebuke of Twitter:
I cannot help but question how Twitter can review and remove individuals with politically objectionable viewpoints within hours but their response to child pornography took months and resulted in no action. That is until the mother was put into contact with a federal agent. The federal agent reached out to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the child pornography was finally removed.
Additional information about Twitter’s egregious actions, and inactions, is available in the article.
The Bottom Line
Here’s the bottom line. Don’t let Twitter fool you. Its policies, and its execution of them, reflect agendas that are anything but consistent with its positioning itself as a free-speech platform. While it’s true that Twitter is a private company, it and various other players in Big Tech, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, have effectively become the “public square” from which people present and receive information. Twitter’s denying its users free speech rights is un-American!
Thank God for Focus on the Family, Focus on the Family’s Daily Citizen, and the Family Policy Alliance, among others, who are willing to take the heat for affirming the obvious.
Despite the challenges confronting them now, they are working hard to make sure that the “apples” of free speech and expression are afforded to members of future generations. Will you stand with them?
Copyright © 2021 by B. Nathaniel Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture has been taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
top image credit: The Newseum‘s depiction of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution in Washington, D.C..
photo credit: Dr. Rachel Levine
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photo credit: Jack Dorsey
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