On the front page of Saturday’s New York Times came the headline “Some Christians Seek Truce in the Gender Wars.” A better headline: “Some Christians Seek Surrender in the Gender Wars.” Online, the Times headline is trying to suggest that the surrendering Christians are still “conservative” somehow as they “create space”: Some Conservative Christians Are Stepping Away From the Gender Wars Far from the shouting, Christian therapists, writers, parents and their trans children are trying to create a space within conservative circles to acknowledge differences in how people experience gender. The overwhelming theme of this Ruth Graham article is that the conservative Christians need to “Embrace the Journey” away from traditional Christianity, to cite a group that’s prominently featured. The story began with the journey of evangelicals Andrew and Debbie James and their trans “daughter” and how they had to leave the church they were in. The Times pitched the war as “vociferous opposition” versus quiet, “earnest searches for understanding.” Apparently, the Left can never be "vociferous." They are "far from the shouting." Some Christians have fought against expanding gender norms with vociferous opposition to everything from drag shows to hormone treatments. In churches and Christian schools, transgender people have been mocked, kicked out and denied communion. Transgender young people from conservative Christian families have shared stories of being banished from homes and relationships, often with devastating effects on their mental health. In many ways, conservative Christians have become the face of the American anti-trans movement. But in the quieter spaces of church sanctuaries, counseling offices and living rooms, there are earnest searches for understanding. The story is almost unanimous with counselors and LGBTQ "Christians" pushing transgenderism against tradition. Mary Rice Hasson is the only nod to actual conservatism, surfacing in paragraph 26: “You can see something happening that’s shaping how we understand the nature of the human person,” said Mary Rice Hasson, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where she directs a program whose aim is in part to help parents “counter gender ideology.” Ms. Hasson, who is Catholic, described recent cultural shifts around gender as upending fundamental assumptions about the universe: “Can you trust your senses? When you see something, can you name it, does it have an objective reality? Or is there no truth?” Before that, Graham acknowledges where the Bible is clear about God's creation of male and female, but also goes looking for wiggle room:  Christian advocates for transgender people point out that the Bible depicts a surprising range of gender diversity without apparent judgment. Jacob, a patriarch of the nation of Israel, is described as a “smooth” young man who stays in the family’s tent and is favored by God over his more traditionally masculine brother, the hunter Esau. Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew that some men are born eunuchs. The Times sees their mission as leading the formerly conservative Christians like Andrew and Debbie James into a compassionate sense of confusion. The story ends like this:  Their worries now are about the political climate hostile to their daughter, and the fact that both their children have walked away from Christianity. For so long, “we were good little soldiers,” Mrs. James said. Now, “we live in the gray.”

The housing crisis continues to worsen in the U.S. and flatten young Americans' hopes of buying a home, but a new proposal being touted by President Joe Biden would actually make it worse, at least according to some experts. Housing affordability in the U.S. is at its worst level in 40 years, according to a report from Redfin. Higher mortgage interest rates, low housing inventory, and skyrocketing housing prices have forced more and more Americans to give up their dream of owning a home. A Redfin survey of homeowners and renters found that 64.2% of respondents said that the lack of housing affordability makes them feel negative about the economy. A majority, 53%, said that housing affordability will affect who they vote for in November, which likely hurts the incumbent president. While Biden acknowledged the housing crisis in his State of the Union address in March and claimed that Democrats were working to "bring housing costs down for good," one of his policy prescriptions is likely to make the situation far worse. 'Housing prices will increase and mortgage payments will increase.' Blaze Media spoke to real estate economist Ken Johnson, who explained why the president's plan would almost certainly lead to housing being less affordable, not more. The plan as outlined by Biden is to give first-time and repeat homebuyers a tax credit that amounts to $400 per month for two years in order to help them pay the mortgage. The Biden administration estimates the program could help as many as 3.5 million families in the middle class. "This is just providing money to a segment of the society that perhaps rightfully needs the extra funding, but it allows them to go out and bid more. That just means the government will be pumping money into the economy," said Johnson. "So some buyers will able to go out and pay more, and as a consequence prices will rise very quickly. It's going to be inflationary, and it's going to be inflationary in the face of high interest rates," he added. "What is going to happen is housing prices will increase and mortgage payments will increase." Johnson addressed the argument that the subsidy would target personal home buyers and give them an advantage over corporations and other companies that purchase single-family homes. "The problem is that the vast majority of home buyers are already individuals; it's going to be families, it's going to be households," he explained. "If you give everyone $400 to buy automobiles, then the price of automobiles will rise by $400. It will all be inflationary." Others agree with this assessment. "In a best-case scenario, this tax credit gives builders enough confidence to keep building," said Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale, according to SFGate. But, she adds, "without the supply boost, this tax credit could bring out more buyers, there aren’t more homes for sale, and home prices go up."Ed Pinto, the co-director of the Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute, added to the criticism. "Over the years, the government has done a great job at juicing demand but has failed miserably at increasing supply. This is especially true when housing supply is as tight," Pinto said, according to SFGate. Johnson also pointed out that the proposal runs counter to what the Federal Reserve Board is trying to do by forcing inflation higher when the Fed is actively trying to keep inflation from rising above a 2% rate while keeping unemployment steady. "We'll get there eventually, but this would not help, and it would work against the Fed mandates, quite honestly," he added. He went on to say that the Biden administration is banking on the proposal not passing and just wants to mollify the public into believing Democrats tried to do something to help the housing crisis. "I don't think this will pass," said Johnson. "Both sides make these kinds of electioneering promises that never pass. It's really a coin toss between the two parties as to which side actually has the better housing record."Is there any solution to the housing crisis? Johnson says the key to easing the housing crisis is simply building more housing units. "What would help more than anything else would be for the government to make it easier to build units that are for sale or for rent. We simply need to be able to build more units," he explained. While there are many obstacles to increasing housing, Johnson said previously successful efforts in doing so could be a guide for today. "We've solved these problems once before. In the decades after World War II, we came up with the Fair Housing Act and funded Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in order to fund mortgages on houses built to improved standards," he continued. "You know how people say homes aren't built the way they used to be? Well, it's true, because the old ones all fell down!" Johnson joked.He went on to explain that federal plans in the past had succeeded in increasing housing stock but that the current situation made it almost impossible to replicate. "If I could wave a magic wand, I think I would increase the number of major developers. In the old days before the last housing crash, we had tens of thousands of builders around the country. Okay, they're not there today. They're just not there today. So we don't have the ability to gear up and produce massive numbers and to be competitive, quite honestly," he continued. He said the federal government should focus on easing restrictions on developers and providing incentives for large-scale building. "Now all of a sudden, we have tens of thousands more of small builders that are out there, that could be competitive, and they could be more responsive to market needs. It certainly would help to be able to bring a home to to actual construction in a shorter period of time," Johnson said. "But, you know, that's a lot of wishful thinking right now," he added. "There's really nothing we can do in the short term right now, except for to encourage the construction of more properties, whether it be multi-family rentals or single-family residences. We just need more units." Johnson has concluded that Biden's housing plan was unserious at best and counterproductive at worst."This is simply an inflationary proposal," he said. "This was just a political promise that both sides know they won't actually have to deliver on." While many were hopeful that the Fed would lower rates in 2024 after inflation slowed, mortgage interest rates have remained stubbornly high. Without a magic bullet to ease the housing crisis immediately before the election, it is likely that housing will continue to be a thorn in Biden's presidential campaign. Blaze Media reached out to Biden's top economic adviser for comment but did not receive a response. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

I did not expect to encounter questions like this when writing a bioethics brief on gene manipulation back in 2015. When researching the ethically questionable uses of gene manipulation, I encountered a collection of scientists hell-bent on the quest for immortality, determined to use every tool in their arsenal to transcend mankind's current limitations.You would expect to find such sci-fi-worthy aspirations espoused by pseudo-scientists and fan fiction bloggers not by minds affiliated with the world's elite academic institutions — Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT, to name a few. These scientists called themselves "transhumanists" and were spearheading what was, at the time, a fringe movement despite their prestigious academic affiliations. Their chief aim is to facilitate humanity's evolution through modern technology into a "post-human" species, one that is unhinged from current human limitations, like weakness, ignorance, and, especially, death. At the time, Humanity+, the world's largest transhumanist organization, adopted Oxford professor Max Moore's definition of transhumanism as: The continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology.To mitigate the public backlash against Moore's eugenics-encroaching definition, Humanity+ has since qualified its aims to ensure that it, in fact, does not "advocate for the concept of immortality for elitists" but rather "for all humanity." Some may "rest assured," but I certainly don't. The historical and philosophical connection to eugenics is too close to ignore.Science as religion Similar to their 20th-century eugenicist predecessors, transhumanists are the latest iteration of Neo-Darwinists. The term "transhuman" was coined by the Darwinist and early transhumanist Julian Huxley, the brother of the "Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley. After World War II, Julian was appointed as UNESCO's first director-general. During his post, he partnered with Charles Galton Darwin, the cousin of the father of evolution himself, to explore how the new technology developed during the war to elevate humanity's evolutionary trajectory. It is no coincidence that both Huxley and Darwin were committed eugenicists. Their founding of transhumanism was the natural ideological progression of their eugenicist beliefs. Eugenics sought to create a super race through population control, abortion, and euthanasia. Transhumanism aims to create a transcendent race through technology not available to their eugenicist predecessors. Their aims are the same; they only differ in capacity. Huxley's 1927 book "Religion Without Revelation" gives insight into his future aims: "The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way — but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature."The ironic nature of transhumanism is that it appeals to a desire that is, in fact, deeply human: the yearning to transcend the human condition, which is as old as humanity itself. As the transhumanist philosopher and Oxford professor Nick Bostrom wrote:"The human desire to acquire new capacities is as ancient as our species itself. We have always sought to expand the boundaries of our existence, be it socially, geographically, or mentally."He's right. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Prometheus stole Zeus' fire. Ponce de Leon sought the fountain of youth. Humanity's main problem, as Nietzsche rightly diagnosed, is that we are "all too human." However, while most people have historically sought salvation in entities transcendent of themselves, transhumanists are determined to work out their own salvation through becoming transcendent entities akin to those found in holy scriptures. As the pop-transhumanist author Belinda Silbert wrote: "Responsible Omniscience; Omnipresence; Omnipotence AND Benevolence would be the totality of the sensory apparatus of the new human."When I first encountered the transhumanists in 2015, I was reminded of what was, at the time, the most recent "Amazing Spiderman" film starring Andrew Garfield. The villain, Dr. Curt Conners, attempted to heal his deformed arm by injecting himself with the isolated gene that enables lizards to regenerate their tails. When the experiment backfires and transforms Dr. Conners into a mutant lizard, he gladly disowns his humanity and makes the contentious claim:"I spent my life as a scientist trying to create a world without weakness, without outcasts. I sought to create a stronger human being, but there's no such thing. Human beings are weak, pathetic, feeble-minded creatures. Why be a human at all when we can be so much more? Faster, stronger, smarter. This is my gift to you."Max Moore couldn't have said it better himself. However, it’s critical to consider why this fictional champion of transhumanist values is the villain to the rest of us. If Max Moore is correct in his assessment that the "body is not sacred" but rather a "pure, random accident," the worldly salvation transhumanism offers may justify its questionable means. However, the visceral reaction to consider Dr. Conners the villain emerges from the implicit belief that there is, in fact, something sacred and dignified in being human. That is why strength, knowledge, and power unhinged from human dignity appear grotesque and become the inspiration behind supervillains. Is it any coincidence that superheroes often embody the same traits as their villains but only differ in their defense of human dignity? Transhumanists have become more mainstream and tempered in their language since I first encountered them nearly a decade ago. Still, their aims remain just as ambitious and morally fraught. Though they appeal to a profoundly innate desire to transcend the human condition, their movement, like their eugenicist predecessors, comes at the cost of human dignity. Is that a price we are willing to pay? Or will we, to paraphrase Julian Huxley’s brother, cry out for “God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness, and sin"? In short, will you still yearn to be human?

This is power politics, not law.

The president’s flip-flop on the war is a reminder that international commitments are only as strong as the character and interests of the people who make them.

More practical than controversial.

On the politics of the Ukrainian flag.

Does the presumptive Republican presidential nominee understand the magnitude of America’s challenge?

New York’s attorney general is suing pregnancy-resource centers for making women aware that it’s possible to reverse chemical abortions.