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The transgender agenda appears to have weaseled its way onto the ballot in two states, but voters may not know it. Hidden in the language of two proposed state constitutional amendments is a “right” to transgender medical interventions that would undermine parental rights and make children vulnerable to “treatments” that would leave them scarred, stunted, and infertile, critics allege.
Michigan’s Proposal 3 would establish a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom” in the state constitution. The proposal’s text says this “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care” (emphasis added).
The state’s Planned Parenthood chapter has disputed the claim that this amendment to the Michigan Constitution would have any impact on what it calls “gender-affirming care for minors.”
Vermont’s Proposal 5, which would add a new Article 22 to the Vermont Constitution, states “that an individual’s right to personal reproductive autonomy is central to the liberty and dignity to determine one’s own life course and shall not be denied or infringed unless justified by a compelling State interest achieved by the least restrictive means.”
Neither measure stipulates that the reproductive “right” in question applies only to adults above age 18, and neither says that it applies only to women or to abortion. Critics argue that the inclusion of sterilization in the Michigan list is deliberate, and that both constitutional amendments would enable courts to declare controversial transgender medical interventions a fundamental “right” for minors, excluding their parents from such decisions.
Michigan
Michigan’s Proposal 3 specifically mentions “sterilization” and says that “every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom.” Supporters have praised the measure for eliminating laws requiring parental notification in a minor’s abortion decisions, and opponents argue that the elimination of parental rights also would extend to transgender issues. One of the organizations that helped craft the measure told The Daily Signal that it would “have no impact” on transgender issues, however.
Organizations that support the amendment, such as the ACLU of Michigan and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan, state explicitly online and in a “Frequently Asked Questions” document that the constitutional amendment would “repeal parental notification of abortion for minors.”
“Proposal 3 is a constitutional amendment that would repeal Michigan’s parental consent laws, allowing children to have abortions and undergo gender hormone treatments without parental consent or knowledge,” Christen Pollo, a spokeswoman for Citizens to Support MI Women & Children, an organization opposing the amendment, told The Daily Signal. She noted the ACLU and Planned Parenthood documents.
“A constitutional right to ‘sterilization’ presumably includes a right to be sterilized to align one’s sex and gender identity,” John Bursch, vice president of appellate advocacy and senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom and a former solicitor general of Michigan, wrote in the Detroit Free Press. “It’s not clear that Michiganders support a constitutional right to cross-sex sterilization. But it’s certain that a majority would not support a 12-year-old girl’s right to sterilization without her parent’s notice and consent.”
“Regardless of what you think about gender reassignment, the notion that children would be able to undergo gender change surgeries or hormones without parental knowledge is an extreme policy that is not supported by good moms and dads in Michigan,” Pollo told The Daily Signal. “Yet that is exactly what Proposal 3 would allow for. And it should be no surprise that Planned Parenthood is pushing for this: they are now the second-largest provider of gender hormone therapy and have ad campaigns targeting children with puberty blockers.”
“If Proposal 3 passes, this won’t just be where they are headed—it will be a constitutional right,” she added.
A spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan contested these arguments, however.
“Proposal 3 would affirm the fundamental right to make and carry out decisions without political interference in matters relating to pregnancy,” the spokesperson told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “This includes decisions about birth control, abortion, prenatal care, and childbirth. Proposal 3 would have no impact on gender-affirming care for minors.”
“It is telling that Proposal 3 opponents are trying to make this ballot campaign about anything other than the actual purpose of the proposal,” the spokesperson added. “They know that the clear majority of Michiganders want abortion to remain legal and want women to be able to make their own decisions about birth control, pregnancy and childbirth. They know they can’t win on the facts, so they’re spreading disinformation. Proposal 3 would restore the rights Michiganders had under Roe v. Wade. It’s that simple.”
Although the proposal would restore abortion rights in Michigan, it arguably would go beyond Roe, which allowed states to restrict abortion after the point of fetal viability and impose constraints such as parental consent requirements.
“The bill could easily have been written to refer to abortion explicitly and exclusively,” Jay Richards, senior research fellow in religious liberty and civil society at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in response to the Planned Parenthood spokesperson. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)
“Instead, it refers to some ill-defined right to reproductive freedom,” Richards said. “The only reason to do that is to use the fight over abortion to expand into other jurisdictions of the social revolution. I would also note that many Planned Parenthood facilities dispense cross-sex hormones, so they have a financial stake in gender-transition procedures.”
Michigan’s Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, has endorsed the amendment.
“We have to vote yes on Proposal 3,” Nessel said at an October rally during which she opened up about her own experience.
After trying to get pregnant for a while, Nessel said, she finally conceived—triplets. Yet her doctor advised her that she would have to abort one of the babies to save the other two.
“I took my doctor’s advice. I had a procedure, and now I have two beautiful 19-year-old boys,” she recounted.
Pro-life advocates may counter the idea that Nessel’s procedure constitutes the same kind of abortion they would prefer to outlaw, but the attorney general used her experience as an argument, nonetheless. Neither Nessel nor the ACLU of Michigan responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the transgender implications of the proposed constitutional amendment.
Vermont
Vermont’s Proposal 5 is not technically a ballot initiative but the final step in amending the Vermont Constitution with the addition of Article 22. While the amendment does not include language regarding sterilization, opponents argue that its broad terms open the floodgates for transgender applications.
“I believe the course is clear. Article 22 is meant to purposefully open Pandora’s box and then bar future legislators from doing anything about it,” Matthew Strong, executive director of Vermonters for Good Government, an organization opposing the amendment, told The Daily Signal in an email statement. “Minor/children’s transgender issues is just one of many intended goals with this, and the extreme agendas in the school system are already hard at work on this.”
“The Legislature’s word choice makes the long-term goal very plain,” Strong argued. “By using the word ‘individual’ instead of ‘woman,’ it removes gender and age restrictions on whom this applies to. We allege that this constitutional amendment was written BY Planned Parenthood, FOR Planned Parenthood” (emphasis his).
Strong noted that the speaker of the Vermont House, Jill Krowinski, is a former vice president of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England. Neither Krowinski nor the Planned Parenthood affiliate responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.
Strong noted that Article 22 cleared two votes in each of the state’s two legislative chambers and its appearance on the ballot represents the final step of the process.
“It was rushed through during the pandemic and very few Vermonters knew about it,” Strong said.
State Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Washington County, a spokeswoman for Vermonters for Good Government and a critic of the measure, highlighted an exchange that took place as the Legislature considered the amendment.
“Even the proponents have stated that anything in terms of future interpretation will be ‘up to the courts’ —in this case, the Vermont Supreme Court,” Donahue told The Daily Signal.
She argued that “‘Reproductive autonomy’ is an ever-evolving term, not set in time and certainly not limited to what anyone claims it might mean today. Quite literally anything that is related to reproduction in any way is wide open to inclusion, and anything interpreted as a barrier to access to that right would be open to being found unconstitutional.”
“Courts do look for evidence of legislative intent when language is open to interpretation, and there was direct discussion about keeping it available to future health care interpretation and a specific choice to not place limiting language to specify direct enumerated rights,” Donahue added. “There is also clear intent about access for minors, including without parental consent or even notice. Because minors currently are protected in access to abortion (without parental consent or notice)—with limitations rejected by the Legislature in 2019—that would be used for equivalence to any other reproductive rights, including surgical ones.”
Donahue highlighted an exchange from January, in which state Rep. Carl Rosenquist, R-Franklin County, raised concerns about religious liberty and worries that the proposed constitutional amendment would “compel private health care providers to provide care that violates their moral or religious beliefs.”
State Rep. Ann Pugh, D-Chittenden County, a lead sponsor of the amendment, responded: “My understanding is [that] when rights are in conflict, we go to court. And that is the role of the courts to decide, or a judge.”
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Rosenquist was presenting “a conflict of rights,” Pugh said.
An ACLU representative agreed, saying, “Yes, that is the correct response.”
Proposal 5 “encompasses more than just abortion. It protects both women and men,” Vermont Solicitor General Eleanor Spottswood said. “The language of Proposal 5 is actually based on a long line of case law, protecting the rights to choose or refuse contraception, to choose or refuse sterilization, the right to become pregnant and the right to choose abortion.”
Spottswood added that “difficult cases where fundamental rights of different parties are pitted against each other are decided by the courts.”
Pugh defended the constitutional amendment as necessary to provide clarity.
“In this turbulent time, we must have clarity,” Pugh said in October, Vermont Business Magazine reported. “The lack of a definitive enumeration of reproductive liberty in Vermont’s Constitution, the threats to Roe v. Wade being weakened or overturned by a very conservative U.S. Supreme Court, and the cloud of multistate efforts to erode reproductive autonomy all build a strong case for [Proposal] 5.”
The state lawmaker noted that Vermont has “intentionally chosen not to limit or restrict” access to abortion. “We have long recognized that decisions related to reproductive health care and abortion are deeply personal and private, and are best left to a woman and her doctor,” she said.
Neither Pugh nor Spottswood responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment. Sen. Becca Balint, D-Windham County, and Sen. Tim Ashe, D-Chittenden County, the lead sponsors of the amendment, also did not respond.
Vermont for Reproductive Liberty, the campaign in support of the constitutional amendment, did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment on the transgender issue.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican, has endorsed the amendment.
“Vermont has a long tradition of supporting a woman’s right to choose,” Scott said in a prepared statement in July about the amendment’s proceeding to the November ballot. “These decisions are deeply personal and belong between a woman and her health care provider, free from government interference.”
“In Vermont, we solidified the right to choose in law, and now Vermonters have the opportunity to further protect that right in our constitution,” Scott said. “It is more important than ever to make sure the women in our state have the right to make their own decisions about their health, bodies, and their futures.”
Scott’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about transgender fallout from the amendment.
Analysis
Michigan and Vermont aren’t the only states with abortion-related measures on the ballot Tuesday.
Kentuckians will vote on a constitutional amendment expressly stating that there is no right to abortion. Montanans will vote on a measure declaring that infants born alive at any stage of development are legal persons.
Californians, meanwhile, will vote on a constitutional amendment stating that the state can’t “deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions,” including abortion and contraceptives.
Heritage’s Richards told The Daily Signal that the Michigan and Vermont ballot questions allow for expansive interpretation for transgender issues, while the California one does not.
“My sense is that the Vermont bill has precisely the same problems as the Michigan bill, and almost certainly intentionally,” Richards said. “Vermont just talks about ‘reproductive autonomy’ while Michigan talks about ‘reproductive freedom,’ which, as we’ve noted, almost certainly includes everything from taxpayer-funded contraception and surrogacy to gender transition procedures.”
Meanwhile, he noted, “California’s seems to be focused mainly on abortion and contraceptives. But there’s a reason that California can be more specific: The state has already passed a law making the state a magnet for teens seeking cross-sex hormones and gender-reassignment surgery. So the California Left has no need to sneak that in with vague wording in a bill presumably about abortion.”
Controversial ‘Treatments’
Transgender medical interventions for children have become a divisive political issue. Although transgender activists argue that children are more likely to commit suicide if schools and parents don’t encourage their transgender identities, it remains unclear whether affirmation and controversial medical interventions actually help students with gender dysphoria.
Medical interventions can have dangerous lifelong effects, even those that do not involve the surgical removal of healthy sex organs. So-called puberty blockers, for example, actually introduce a disease into a patient’s body, according to Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist in Rocklin, California. Hypogonadotropic hypogonadism occurs when the brain fails to send the right signal to the gonads to make the hormones necessary for development.
“An endocrinologist might treat a condition where a female’s testosterone levels are going to be outside the normal range,” Laidlaw told PJ Media. “We’ll treat that, and we’re aware of metabolic problems. At the same time, an endocrinologist may be giving high levels of testosterone to a female to ‘transition’ her.”
Cross-sex hormones also can have serious, long-term side effects, increasing the risk of osteoporosis and cardiovascular events.
The idea that minors, who can’t drink, vote, or serve in the military, can nonetheless consent to interventions that may leave them scarred, stunted, and infertile is rightly controversial. These proposed constitutional amendments may involve instituting broad rights that include minors’ access to such “treatments,” opponents argue.
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Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.