Almost three years after the world-changing COVID-19 pandemic began, the New York Times finally accepted reality Tuesday.

This op ed, which can be read in its entirety here, included this:

When it comes to the population-level benefits of masking, the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as “misinformers” for opposing mandates were right. The mainstream experts and pundits who supported mandates were wrong. In a better world, it would behoove the latter group to acknowledge their error, along with its considerable physical, psychological, pedagogical and political costs.

Don’t count on it. In congressional testimony this month, Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called into question the Cochrane analysis’s reliance on a small number of Covid-specific randomized controlled trials and insisted that her agency’s guidance on masking in schools wouldn’t change. If she ever wonders why respect for the C.D.C. keeps falling, she could look to herself, and resign, and leave it to someone else to reorganize her agency.

That, too, probably won’t happen: We no longer live in a culture in which resignation is seen as the honorable course for public officials who fail in their jobs.

But the costs go deeper. When people say they “trust the science,” what they presumably mean is that science is rational, empirical, rigorous, receptive to new information, sensitive to competing concerns and risks. Also: humble, transparent, open to criticism, honest about what it doesn’t know, willing to admit error.

The C.D.C.’s increasingly mindless adherence to its masking guidance is none of those things. It isn’t merely undermining the trust it requires to operate as an effective public institution. It is turning itself into an unwitting accomplice to the genuine enemies of reason and science — conspiracy theorists and quack-cure peddlers — by so badly representing the values and practices that science is supposed to exemplify.

This was exactly the point that many of us made in opposing mask mandates from the beginning of the pandemic.

Continue reading →

The Church supported the Respect for Marriage Act because it protects religious freedom and provide other protection to churches, Elder Oaks clarified in a talk today.

Speaking this morning, Elder Oaks pointed out that many Church members are unsure why the Church, long opposed to same-sex marriage, supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which codifies same-sex unions.

While the Respect for Marriage Act codified same-sex marriage in federal law, the act also provided needed protections for religious expression. “Putting such protections in the federal law was a big step forward,” said President Oaks, a former Utah state supreme court justice and professor of law at the University of Chicago. 

He explained that the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges had already established a federal right to same-sex marriage in the United States.

The focus of the Church’s efforts in support of the national Respect for Marriage Act “was not on same-sex marriage, but on ensuring the act contained the necessary protections for religious freedom,” he said, adding that at the time the act was adopted, “the Church publicly reaffirmed our Church doctrine approving only marriage between one man and one woman.”

Marriage bills previously proposed in Congress made no attempt to protect religious freedom, said President Oaks. “The Church came out in favor of amendments that added religious freedom protections to the proposed Respect for Marriage Act,” he said. “The amended bill was signed into law, but its overall effect was misunderstood because many news stories focused on only the part of the act that affirmed same-sex marriage.

Continue reading →

This story is so depressing that I caution about reading this. If it is any help, remember that as Latter-day Saints we believe that Jesus will come and clean the world of tragedies like this one.

Also, remember that the prophets were forewarned about this day and as guardians on the watchtower they gave us the Family Proclamation which says regarding this issue:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the
image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of
heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and
destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual
premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

A woman who worked at a pediatric gender clinic has revealed what really happens at these clinics. Her post is here.

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

Continue reading →