Given the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of our state and so much of our nation, we might ask, “Are we as conservative Christians in Illinois good for nothing?” It may feel that no matter what we do, our witness and work bear no fruit. But it does not need to be that way.

In a sense, many of today's conservative Christians have an inferiority complex. Just mention higher education, the mainstream media, or the political dynamics of any major city in the U.S., and you'll likely be met with a series of sighs and slow head-shakes about how rigged everything seems to be against conservative voices.

“America's Chaplain” and Illinois Pastor, Steve Lee, now has a GiveSendGo account to collect funds for his legal defense: www.GiveSendGo.com/ChaplainLee. We at Illinois Family Institute have been raising funds for him too, collecting tax-deductible donations at www.IllinoisFamily.org/Contribute and letting people designate to the Pastor Lee Legal Defense cause.

Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois Secretary of State, recently testified before a U.S. Senate Committee on the issue of how to determine what books belong in libraries and who determines what stays and what goes. Under questioning by Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), Giannoulias found himself at a loss for words after Kennedy read obscene passages from two controversial books, Gender Queer and All Boys Aren’t Blue, often found in public and school libraries.

Self-loathing is a peculiar and tragic phenomenon.  The Bible states that “no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it,” (Ephesians 5:29 NKJV), so there is something particularly ugly about radical feminists fomenting self-hatred in young women. The Bible is correct.  We do love ourselves, but a conflict arises when we see things in ourselves that we don’t like, even though those things may be phantoms of Leftists’ corrupted imaginations.

Some phrase origins are hard to pinpoint such as “dropping like flies.”  A story in the May 1902 edition of the Atlanta Constitution might have said it first, “I saw men and women rushing back and forth within the flames. They would run along, then came the choking smoke and they would drop like dead flies.” 

The Mosaic law is one giant picture book. Turn to almost any page and you'll find imagery teaching you about God. You'll find specifications for the priesthood illustrating Christ's mediation and showing how holy God is. You'll find records of the Israelites' many blunders into sin that show us just how serious our own blunders are.

Teacher union lobbyists and government employees work against every school choice bill and scholarship program they can; they reject the need for parental control over their children’s education. In doing so, they flatly dismiss the ability of parents to educate their own children or even to make viable decisions on their behalf.

The massive wave of illegal immigration coming across the U.S.-Mexico border is hitting Illinois and Chicago particularly hard, with authorities considering a plan to erect giant “refugee” tent cities to handle the influx. More than 1,500 migrants are currently staying in police stations across Chicago and ten times that many are spread across 16 shelters operated by the city.

The 1980 The Blues Brothers movie centered on a quest to raise property tax money to save an orphanage from being closed down. Though targeted by a homicidal mystery woman, Neo-Nazis, and a country western band, and relentlessly pursued by Illinois State Troopers, they repeatedly reminded themselves that they were on “a mission from God.”

Earlier this week, Governor Pritzker and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona visited an after-school program at Fairview Elementary School in Springfield. This was just one stop on Cardona’s five-state midwestern bus tour to promote the Biden Administration’s new “Raise the Bar: Lead the World” education agenda.

In 2006, a woman named Rozelletta Blackshire was arrested in Georgia and charged with criminal abortion and first degree cruelty to children. Why? According to police, she and her two cousins had forced her 16-year-old pregnant daughter to drink turpentine in order to force an abortion. Pregnancy should not be a threat to women.

Gender-affirming care is the current standard for dealing with any child who is gender non-conforming, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The primary proponent of that standard in the administration is Rachel Levine, the transgender Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services. Levin claims that any other approach endangers the welfare of the transgender child. He said: “There is no argument among medical professionals – pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, etc. – about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

In recent articles, we've addressed how the very presence of legal abortion in society disempowers women, and recent studies show that up to 70% of women who have abortions feel at least somewhat coerced or pressured into the decision. However, while boyfriends and family are common sources of this pressure, they aren't the only ones. The abortion industry itself—paragon of "choice" that it is—is sometimes guilty of pressuring women into abortion.

In the Bible, Judges 21:25, we read that when there was no king (authority) in the land of Israel, everyone “did what was right in their own eyes,” meaning lawlessness became the norm. Sounds like America today! Lawlessness is the antithesis of God, for He created order in the universe; and that order is beneficial! Mankind’s lawlessness originated with Adam and Eve’s sin in the Garden (“Whoever commits sin also commits lawlessness, and all sin is lawlessness,” I John 3:4 NKJV).