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Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Remember: Pay Little to No Attention to Current National General Election Presidential Polls

According to Real Clear Politics, in spite of the economy and everything else going well in the United States of America, almost every current national poll has President Trump trailing a hypothetical Democrat opponent. Whether Biden, Sanders, Warren, or even Buttigieg, Bloomberg, or Klobuchar, President Trump trails them all in nearly every poll. As of this writing, the latest general election national poll by CNN, IBD/TIPP, Emerson, Fox News, Quinnipiac, and SurveyUSA has President Trump behind almost every possible Democrat candidate.

In 32 different matchups from the six polling agencies previously mentioned, President Trump leads in only two scenarios. Again, as of this writing, the latest IBD/TIPP national poll has Trump beating Warren 47% to 46% and the latest Emerson poll has Trump beating Buttigieg 51% to 49%. According to these polls, even democrats who have since dropped out of the race were beating President Trump.

The latest SurveyUSA national poll (at the end of November, 2019) had Kamala Harris beating the current President of the United States 47% to 42%. At the point Harris dropped out of the race, the Real Clear Politics average had her at plus six over President Trump. Out of 42 polls reported by Real Clear Politics—from June of 2018 until November of 2019—Trump topped Harris only six times. Again, remember that this is a candidate who couldn’t even outlast Julián Castro and Marianne Williamson.

Of course, the lesson here is the 2016 Presidential election. At this point in the 2016 Presidential election, up until Election Day on November 8, 2016, Hillary Clinton led Donald Trump in the vast majority of polls taken. By my count (using a spreadsheet), as reported by Real Clear Politics (RCP), there were 221 polls taken in 2016 that polled Clinton vs. Trump for U.S. President. Donald Trump led in only 26 polls. Twenty-six out of 221. That’s over 88% of the polls that showed Clinton beating Trump.

Often, the race between Clinton and Trump was shown as a complete blowout in favor of Hillary. From January of 2016 through April of 2016, there were a dozen polls that showed Hillary up by double digits. A March 2016 Bloomberg poll had Hillary up by 18 points!

Similarly, at this point in 2016, until Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race, virtually every poll had him leading Donald Trump. From January of 2016 until June of 2016 when Bernie dropped out, RCP reported 28 polls on Sanders vs. Trump. Of those 28 polls, Trump polled ahead of Bernie only once. At the time the polling ended (when Bernie dropped out of the race), the RCP average had Sanders topping Trump by over 10 points!

Again, the race between Trump and Bernie was often shown to be a YUUUGE blowout in favor of Bernie. Of those 28 RCP polls, 22 of them had Bernie on top by double digits. Twelve polls had Bernie up by 15 points or more. The same Bloomberg poll that had Hillary topping Trump by 18 points showed Bernie beating Trump by 24 points!

When it comes to polling, Rush Limbaugh was and is exactly right. As he noted near election time in 2016,
Don’t forget, there is an undeniable truth in politics, and it is this: Polling data is used to shape public opinion. Polling data… Whether it’s presidential races or anything else, if it’s a poll, it is being used to make news. Polling has become the mechanism by which the media can write their own stories, can set their own agenda, and make it look like they’ve got nothing to do with it. The polls have these reputations of independent, nonpartisan, bipartisan, uninterested in the outcome… 
And I want…to remind you again that all of these polls are being used to suppress support for Trump. They are being used to encourage people to abandon Trump. They’re being used to encourage Trump to abandon his campaign. Their purpose is to dispirit and depress everyone and convince as many people as possible that it’s over, that Trump is a buffoon and has no chance whatsoever, all of it’s a waste of time, they might as well concede now and you might as well concede now. That’s the purpose of it.
I’ve long realized well—as no-doubt now do many other Americans—that national polling and the results of the Electoral College are two different things. However, it is interesting to note that, along with all of the other polling nonsense in 2016, about two weeks out from the election, a Reuters/Ipsos “states poll” showed that “the most likely outcome” electorally speaking was “326 votes for Clinton to 212 for Trump.” This “commanding lead” gave Hillary a “better than 95 percent chance of winning.” It was a 99% chance of Hillary winning if one wanted to believe Princeton scientists (who used state polls to arrive at their number).

As we all now know, the “commanding lead” for Hillary turned into a 306 to 232 (304 to 227 due to “faithless electors”) electoral victory for Donald Trump. And the dismay at the loss of their 95% hopes quickly set in for democrats, as did the move to undo the results of the 2016 election.

I would only trust the polls that are two weeks or less out from the election. As Rush put it, “Those are the ones you really look at, because they are the polls their reputations will be staked to, and every polling unit at the end of a campaign wants to be trusted and reliable, they want to be shown to be right.” Whether or not one can trust the polling agencies, one certainly cannot trust the media who reports on them.

After Trump’s 2016 victory, one would think that the polling organizations and the media would’ve learned their lesson. Yet, less than a year after the 2016 election, an analysis by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group revealed that pollsters were back “churning out biased and misleading poll numbers.”

The Daily Caller reported,
“I do know inherently there is a Democratic bias in the polls. And most of them will deny it” says Raghavan Mayur, an independent pollster who is president of TechnoMetrica, which leads the polling operations at Investor’s Business Daily… 
Democratic pollster Patrick Caddell agreed with Mayur, saying “there was a couple of days of shock. And then they moved on because what they could not do is to get to the bottom of their own polling bias.” … 
When polling the public, most mainstream firms “overloaded for Democrats, underloaded for Republicans and conservatives,” said Francis Coombs, managing editor of Rasmussen Reports. 
John Zogby, another independent pollster, also told TheDCNF he sees significant Democratic polling bias. 
“I am a liberal Democrat, but I always felt that other polls oversampled Democrats and undersampled Republicans,” he said.
“Democratic” bias in the polls coupled with an overwhelming liberal bias in the media means that one should certainly pay little to no attention to most every poll between now and mid-October, and absolutely no attention to mainstream media reports on polling, from now until the end of time.

(See this column at American Thinker and LifeSiteNews.)

Copyright 2020, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Sunday, January 26, 2020

It’s Time for More Christians to Get “Sexually Explicit”

Writing about sexual morality in the mid-twentieth century, C.S. Lewis concluded that the world’s “great relaxation and simplifying” of the rules of modesty, or standards of propriety, while not necessarily a bad thing, presents this “inconvenience:” “people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and [thus] we hardly know where we are.”

Lewis goes on to point out:
There is no getting away from it: the old Christian rule is, “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.” Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is [remember, “now” was the mid-twentieth century], has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong.
Of course, Lewis was—and is—right. Note that our sexual instinct has gone so wrong that Lewis’s clear declaration of Christian sexual morality—published in one of the greatest works of modern apologetics, Mere Christianity—is now, in the early twenty-first century, somewhat insufficient. This is because the God-haters, and those otherwise devoted to a “theology of self,” have now perverted the oldest institution in the history of humanity—marriage.

In other words, we are today so far removed from the “same standard” when it comes to matters in the sexual realm that many in the world today have little to no idea “where we are” on marriage. If he were writing or speaking today, Lewis would need to clarify that, by “marriage,” he means the biblical definition of marriage. Tragically, this would be the case even if his audience were church-going Americans.

No other issue today has so divided Christendom than matters concerning homosexuality. Even the Roe v. Wade decision—which, in 1973, legalized abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy—did not so quickly or so decidedly corrupt Christians, Christianity, and the church as has the evil LGBT agenda.

As recently as just over a decade ago—2009—U.S. states were 31 for 31 in their rejection of same-sex “marriage.” Whenever an electorate was given a choice, by an average rate of more than two to one—67.5% to 32.5%—American voters said no to same-sex “marriage” and yes to marriage as defined in Scripture.

As I noted at the time, the rejection of gay marriage occurred not only in conservative states, but in some very liberal ones as well, such as Maine, California, Oregon, and Hawaii. Purple states such as Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada have also soundly rejected gay marriage. Barely over a decade ago, across the U.S., from the Deep South to the Northeast to the Midwest to the West coast, Americans united behind biblical marriage.

According to Pew Research Center, in 2004, Americans opposed same-sex “marriage” by a margin of 60% to 31%. By 2019, those numbers had been almost exactly reversed. According to Pew, Americans now support same-sex “marriage” by a margin of 61% to 31%. Gallup polling shows similar trends on same-sex “marriage.” According to Gallup, in 1996 Americans opposed the legalization of same-sex “marriage” 68% to 27%. By 2019, Gallup showed Americans supporting same-sex “marriage” 63% to 36%.

How did this happen? How was there such a vast reversal on homosexuality and marriage in such a short period of time? Several things were at work in order to get millions of Americans to abandon long-held views on marriage: an organized and determined LGBT agenda, a vast and like-minded media, like-minded federal judges, the Democrat Party, and most tragically, churches unwilling or unequipped to fight for the truth on these grave issues.

It is a common misperception that churches—and Christians in general—spend a lot of time talking about sex. Last year, Decision magazine—a publication of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—reported that,
The Bible is very clear in its teaching about two of the most controversial issues we face today—homosexuality and abortion. According to researcher George Barna, 90 percent of pastors recognize that the Bible speaks to these issues. But fewer than 10 percent are actually teaching what the Bible says about them!
Given the rampant sexual sin in our culture—much of it leading to death (abortion, disease, and the like)—and the significance of marriage—the lifetime union of one man and one woman—one would think that pastors, Sunday school teachers, church youth leaders, evangelists, Christian media, Christian politicians, Christian celebrities, Christian parents, and the like, would give great time and effort to telling the truth on what are undoubtedly some of the most important moral issues of our time. Sadly, I believe this has not been the case, and it’s time for this to change.

Now, perhaps more than at any other moment in history, it’s time for Christians to be explicitly—even graphically—clear that the only rightful place for sex is within marriage. This is especially the case when it comes to our young people. Christians must be explicitly clear that marriage is only the lifelong union of one man and one woman (as revealed “in the beginning!”). Christians must be explicitly clear that any deviation from these truths—whether homosexuality, “shacking up,” fornication, pornography, etc. is sin.

These truths must be loudly and plainly proclaimed in pulpits, classrooms, living rooms, board rooms, legislative houses, and the like. Decades of shying away from telling such truths is one of the biggest reasons why we are where we are on sexual matters in our culture. It’s not just the media, the courts, corporations, and much of our government who have become agents of the enemy in this fight. Even the church itself has fallen to corruption as the result of sexual sin.

The Methodist Church sits on the verge of a massive split because so many Methodists are completely lost when it comes to sexual sin. Many other denominations and individual congregations have recently seen similar splits over sexual sin. As C.S. Lewis’s fictional demon Screwtape taught us, this is what results when fewer and fewer Americans are willing “to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized, sin.”

When the church becomes so corrupted, there’s no doubt that even further corruption awaits the culture. Not long after many so-called Christians embraced same-sex “marriage,” America soon descended even further into the pit of sexual sin. Along with debating what is marriage, truth-loving Americans now have to debate and defend the truth on who is a male and who is a female!

As a result of the evil “transgender” agenda, in a matter of only a handful of years we have seen males take trophies from females, men and boys invade women’s and girl’s bathrooms and locker rooms, people facing prison, fines, or job loss because of the supposed misuse of pronouns, government schools embracing “transgenderism,” government libraries hosting “Drag Queen Story Hour,” corporations promoting “transgender” lies, the demand for tampons in men’s rooms, state taxpayers forced to pay for “transgender” surgeries (dozens of democrat-led states now force this ignorant evil on taxpayers), and so on (for a comprehensive list of such evil, see here).

Again, where is the church on this grave matter? I’m sure that most Christians never imagined that they would have to defend the truth about something a child can be made to understand, but this is where the world is, and we must meet it there, with the truth. To my fellow believers, I say, properly equip yourselves, and get in this battle!

(See this column at American Thinker and LifeSiteNews.)

Copyright 2020, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

The “Transgender” Endgame

While listening to the Rush Limbaugh show this past Monday, I heard guest host Todd Herman interview an Australian pediatrician and professor on the issue of gender dysphoria and children. Near the end of the enlightening interview, in which the good doctor detailed the “serious and irreversible damage” done to gender dysphoric children given radical surgeries and hormones demanded by the perverse LGBT agenda, Mr. Herman asked the important question, “Why?”

I don’t recall the exact wording of Mr. Herman’s question, and RushLimbaugh.com does not provide a transcript for guest-hosted shows, but it was something along the lines of: Why have so many decided that the solution for children—children!—suffering from gender delusions is disfiguring surgeries and/or dangerous hormone treatments? The doctor didn’t have a good answer ready, but I think I know who’s really behind this evil and what the endgame is here.

First of all, let it be noted the lightning speed in which we’ve descended down this wicked slope. With nothing in science or morality to back the notion that “gender is a spectrum” or that one can actually “transition” from one sex to another, in less than a decade we’ve gone from the foolish and evil notion that marriage is whatever we define it to be, to sex (gender) is whatever we define it to be. And as is the case with same-sex “marriage,” children are again victims.

Not only children, but parents of vulnerable and deceived children are victims, as well. In early 2019, in Public Discourse, the journal of the Witherspoon Institute, five mothers anonymously published their concerns over their supposed “transgender” children. The first mother wrote,
I was shocked when my thirteen-year-old daughter told me she was really my transgender son…Where did she get the idea she was transgender? From a school presentation—at a school where over 5 percent of the student body called themselves trans or nonbinary, and where several students were already on hormones, and one had a mastectomy at the age of sixteen…

I took her to a gender clinician seeking expert guidance. Instead, he accepted her new identity and told me I must refer to my daughter with masculine pronouns, call her by a masculine name, and buy her a binder to flatten her breasts. He recommended no therapy, and there was no consideration of the social factors that obviously affected her thinking. I was directed to put her on puberty blocking drugs… 
I have nowhere to go for proper help. Therapists are actively trained and socially pressured not to question these increasingly common identities. In Washington, DC, and many states with so-called conversion therapy bans, questioning a child’s belief that she is of the opposite sex is against the law. 
…Parents like me must remain anonymous to maintain our children’s privacy, and because we face legal repercussions if our names are revealed. Parents who do not support their child’s gender identity risk being reported to Child Protective Services and losing custody of their children. In New Jersey, the Department of Education officially encourages schools to report such parents.

The other mothers detail similar horrors. They talk of children running away from home because their parents refused to use the “proper pronouns.” One mother details how the state of Oregon allowed her daughter,
at the age of seventeen, without my knowledge or consent—to change her name and legal gender in court, and to undergo a double mastectomy and a radical hysterectomy. 
My once beautiful daughter is now nineteen years old, homeless, bearded, in extreme poverty, sterilized, not receiving mental health services, extremely mentally ill, and planning a radial forearm phalloplasty (a surgical procedure that removes part of her arm to construct a fake penis).
Make no mistake, as is the case with mass shooters, as deacon Jack Wilson recently reminded us, what we are dealing with here is not mere mental illness. This is evil—pure and simple evil right out of the pit of hell. We will not win this fight unless it is dealt with as such.

As was the case with same-sex “marriage,” this is another opportunity for those who want to rule their own world to thumb their noses at the laws of the Law Giver. The legalization of same-sex “marriage” was never really only about giving homosexuals the opportunity to “marry.” It was also always about sticking it to Christians and Christianity. In other words, as was the case with same-sex “marriage,” this is a war against the truth—especially when it comes to matters in the sexual realm.

As I’ve often noted, marriage is the oldest institution in the history of humanity—older than God’s covenant with the nation of Israel, older than The Law, older than the church. Marriage is one of the earliest truths revealed by God. If anything is true, marriage as the union of one man and one woman is true. No doubt having the U.S. Supreme Court—along with certain lawmakers—pervert such a long-held truth emboldened those who hate the truth.

Thus we shouldn’t be surprised that the next step for the wicked LGBT agenda is full social and legal embrace of “transgenderism.” After all, if a culture can be made to pervert something as foundational and long-held as marriage, why not target elementary biology? After all, in Scripture, one of the few things that precedes marriage is the fact that “God made them male and female.”

Thus, to stand against the idea that male and female are immutable, irreversible facts is to strike another blow against the idea that there’s such a thing as absolute truth to which we are all beholden. Note how far the radical left has already gotten with their perverse “transgender” agenda. Some of America’s largest medical associations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have been duped into supporting the evil “transgender” agenda. Likewise, state and local lawmakers along with many school districts across the U.S. have decided that gender is “fluid” and anyone—including the parents of children—who says anything to the contrary must be brought in line.

Of course, much of Hollywood is fully on board with this wickedness. Even dictionaries (that’s right, more than one!) have bought into the lies of the “transgender” agenda. If not for the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the U.S. military (of course, led by then President Barack Obama) would’ve continued their foolish embrace of “transgender” soldiers.

This “transgender” wickedness is another reason why Donald Trump was elected and why he continues to get support from those who love the truth. The sad, sorry fact is the Democrat Party is fully on board with this evil. Virtually everywhere the “transgender” agenda has taken hold, democrats rule. The onslaught will continue unless truth-loving Americans stop it. Otherwise, another moral domino will fall, and the left will move onto their next cause and target. 

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2020, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com