I wrote before about the proposed House bill, the Student Nondiscrimination Act of 2010.

The bill was clearly motivated by a radical agenda; now, we have the chance to see what that bill might lead to, should it pass.

A similar bill (LD 1196, “An Act to Extend Civil Rights Protections to All People Regardless of Sexual Orientation,”) has been law in Maine since 2005, and questions are now being asked about whether the bill goes too far in its attempt to "protect" the rights of transgender students.

Here are the fruits of Maine's legislative labor (bold mine):

New guidelines under consideration by the Maine Human Rights Commission designed to clarify the rights of transgender students in Maine has sparked a passionate debate over what some feel are impractical or abhorrent new requirements for public schools.

The commission’s proposed guidelines … state that transgender students are guaranteed access to public school bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams based on whatever gender they consider themselves to be.

That means a boy who identifies himself as a girl is by law allowed to use girls bathrooms, locker rooms and participate on girls sports teams, or vice versa. Being “transgender” means having a gender identity that is opposite a person’s biologically assigned sex at birth.

Various moral, ethical, and practical issues aside, there are also questions regarding the commission’s broad power to interpret the vague law in any way it sees fit.

If the current Congress approves the comparable Student Nondiscrimination Act of 2010, who is to say that a commission appointed by President Obama wouldn’t interpret and apply the law similarly?

Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, and possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, spoke this weekend at CPAC.  He outlined his four conservative principles:

1. God is in charge, a position Pawlenty conceded might not be politically correct, but was good enough for the Founding Fathers and should be good enough for each and every one of us.
2. We can't spend more than we have, a point which he's talked at length (and received some pushback) on before.
3. People spend their money differently when it's their money, a point he used when talking about his health care ideas.
4. Bullies prey on weakness. Pawlenty said his message for President Obama on this was: "Mr. President, no more apology tours, and no more giving Miranda rights to terrorists in our country."

Pawlenty has begun to display an interesting mix of social and fiscal conservatism, appealing to both the religious and tea party wings of the conservative movement. He has trumpeted his work on balancing Minnesota’s budget, as well as his policy views on health care, in effort to shore up his fiscal credentials.

This article was written when Pawlenty was considered for McCain's VP spot, and describes Pawlenty’s social conservatism as appealing to the Evangelical base.

Here, Pawlenty discusses his 5 steps to health care reform.

Pawlenty will also be headlining a Susan B. Anthony List banquet held in late March.

Much hype has been made over the newly introduced House bill, the Student Nondiscrimination Act of 2010. We can take a look at the facts behind the bill to try to gain a deeper understanding of it.  Implicit in the language of the bill are broad assumptions about the manner in which schools are to handle sexual orientation and gender identity issues.  Some of Congress’s findings:

(1) Public school students who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT), or are perceived to be LGBT, or who associate with LGBT people, have been and are subjected to pervasive discrimination, including harassment, bullying, intimidation and violence, and have been deprived of equal educational opportunities, in schools in every part of our Nation.

(2) While discrimination, including harassment, bullying, intimidation and violence, of any kind is harmful to students and to our education system, actions that target students based on sexual orientation or gender identity represent a distinct and especially severe problem.

The mainstream American view differs – parents believe they should be able to discuss these contentious issues privately with their children.  Especially when questions of morality exist, as they do here, parents reserve the right to educate their children according to their own values.

In fact, the bill does not represent Americans and their principles. The sponsor and all 65 of the cosponsors are Democrats, proving the highly partisan nature of the legislation. Americans should evaluate this partial list of groups who endorse the bill:

American Civil Liberties Union, Gay-Straight Alliance Network, GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders), GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network), Human Rights Campaign, National Center for Lesbian Rights,  National Center for Transgender Equality, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund, and Transgender Law Center.

Clearly, this bill comes from a radical sector of the country, trying to impose its own view of the educational system upon all Americans.

Editor's note: A spokesperson for the White House also expressed support of the bill.

On February 8, President Obama’s faith-based office narrowly voted to recommend that churches wishing to use federal funds for social services be forced to set up separate non-profit corporations to handle those funds.

The White House’s Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships is the successor to former President Bush’s own faith-based office.  This vote has been recognized as a step in a different direction that President Bush originally intended the office to take, and puts the office’s future motivation and purpose in question.

Associated Baptist Press reports the details released by the office’s blog:

"The President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships voted 13-12 to endorse the recommendation that federal officials “should require houses of worship that wish to receive direct federal social service funds to establish separate corporations as a necessary means for achieving church-state separation and protecting religious autonomy, while also urging states to reduce any unnecessary administrative costs and burdens associated with attaining this status."

The tally was announced on the White House faith-based office’s blog Feb. 8. The minority voted instead to recommend that separate incorporation not be required "because it is not always the best means to achieve these goals, and because it may be prohibitively costly and onerous, particularly for smaller organizations, resulting in the disruption and deterrence of effective and constitutionally permissible relationships."

APB makes the point that although some religious groups do have separate corporations, “President Bush argued that the requirement was one of many unnecessary barriers preventing small religious charities providing effective social services from expanding their programs.”

In APB’s estimation, the work of President Obama’s office is in direct opposition to “the centerpiece of [Bush’s] domestic policy [which] was to change federal laws and regulations that required such separate incorporation so churches could participate in grant programs.”

In the end, it comes down to a battle between those who believe that government and religious groups can work together to promote the common good, and those who believe in a high wall of separation between church and state.

Religious conservatives and moderates tend to support President Bush’s view that government ought to utilize existing church infrastructures, which have already been designed to reach out to the poor and needy. Religious liberals and secularists tend to view this approach negatively, seeing it as another attempt by the intensely religious to use the government to promote their views.

Conservatives, who argue that their institutions can work with government to achieve results desired by all, can point to a newly released study showing that the plurality of volunteers in America do their work through religious organizations.

The Washington Post writer David Waters, in his Under God column, claims that the disagreement between liberals and conservatives over religious issues means that the concept of a faith-based office has been a failure.  He says:

"The Obama administration's efforts to build a multifaith consensus on government funding of faith-based social services is commendable, but ultimately doomed. Conservative religious groups will never compromise on the hiring issue, and progressive religious groups will never be satisfied with the Bush-era status quo.

The real problem with the faith-based initiative -- under Bush and Obama -- is that it's a fundamentally flawed concept. The federal government and U.S. religious groups serve two different masters. The government serves taxpayers, religious groups serve God. When it comes to distributing and overseeing the use of federal tax dollars, government overrules God."

This sentiment comes in anticipation of the next round of discussion for Obama’s faith-based office, the issue of publicly funded faith-based groups hiring based on religious grounds.  He rightly sees this as an issue that conservatives will fight for, and then makes the conclusion that the Obama administration should abandon the faith-based initiative completely.

Instead of despairing over the situation, those afraid of faith in the public square need to recognize the contribution that religious organizations have made to the common good.  To quote the White House office’s website, it is possible “to form partnerships between the Federal Government and faith-based and neighborhood organizations to more effectively serve Americans in need.”

These secular ideologues also have to be realistic.  The only way for government to transfer the funds it has to the people that need them is to utilize existing infrastructure – and religious groups accomplish this in a charitable, yet non-threatening manner.

LifeNews reports:

A recent Planned Parenthood report pushing sex and abortion for children is drawing more fire from pro-life advocates. Now, Catholic League president Bill Donohue is attacking the document because he says it rips Catholicism and promotes "sexual engineering" by "smearing religious conservatives, especially Catholics."

The new report, titled Stand and Deliver," sees the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) demanding that governments, religious institutions and society at large provide "comprehensive sexuality education" for children as young as ten years old. According to IPPF, as "young people are sexual beings," it should be self-evident that "sexuality education promotes individual well-being and the advancement of broader societal and public health goals."

... IPPF says that “The taboo on youth sexuality is one of the key forces driving the AIDS epidemic and high rates of teenage pregnancy and maternal mortality.”

Bill Donohue explains that religious "taboos have been historically effective in keeping out-of-wedlock birthrates and STD rates low" - and that it is Planned Parenthood's expanse of its sexual agenda that has caused the rates to go up.

The traditional values that most Americans, whether religious or not, hold dear, are the ones that work. Planned Parenthood's do not.

A recent study, featured in a journal published by the American Medical Association found that abstinence education has been effective in reducing teen sex, while comprehensive sex education has not.

This is an important study for backing up the argument for abstinence education, which follows the logic that a reduction in teen sexual activity leads to a reduction in teen pregnancy.

The Heritage Foundation's blog, The Foundry, has more:

The study found that a short eight-hour abstinence program reduced sexual activity among youth by a third.  Despite the brevity of the abstinence training the effects lasted a full two years after students left the classroom. ...

In contrast, study found that alternative types of sex ed failed.  “Safe sex” programs (which promote contraception only) and “comprehensive sex ed” programs (which teach both abstinence and contraceptive use), had no effect on teen sexual behavior.  These programs neither reduced teen sex nor did they increase contraceptive use among teens, which is their major emphasis.

... These new findings—that abstinence education reduced teen sex, without causing any adverse decline in contraception use, while “safe sex” and comprehensive sex ed programs failed to reduce teen sex or increase contraceptive use—seriously counter the ineffectiveness claim made by opponents of abstinence education.

[Read the blog post for the full story]

[Read the findings of the study here, in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.]

Mr. Whittle is majoring in political science at American University, and is interning for APP.

Thomas Peters posted an article yesterday saying that "the Obama White House [predicts] a $1.6 trillion budget deficit for FY 2010."  Now the New York Post is featuring an analysis from Brian M. Riedl, calling this "the most bloated budget ever":

Obama has offered a budget that does nothing to address the nation's serious short- or long-term fiscal problems. Indeed, it makes them worse. By doubling the national debt over pre-recession levels, he'd push America toward a tipping point -- where rising debt levels will become too large for global capital markets to absorb. This could trigger a financial crisis, an interest-rate spike and gigantic tax hikes.

... This time around, Congress should give priority to the interests of beleaguered taxpayers -- and future generations -- and reject Obama's budget.

[Read more here.]

Riedl's analysis goes beyond the practical problems of increasing deficit and debt levels, and makes a moral evaluation of the situation.  He is addressing true American principles, channeling Thomas Jefferson's view that "the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Mr. Whittle is majoring in political science at American University, and is interning for APP.