My name is Bernadette Cudzilo, I am a Roman Catholic, wife, mother and grandmother. I work for a non-for profit healthcare accrediting company.

On November 8^th this year I will cast my vote for Donald Trump.

Trump was not my first choice in the Republican primary, but he was the majority’s choice. I feel we should support the democratic process and he was chosen. Yes, I am disappointed in the leadership of the Republican Party. I feel this election year will change it forever! People are not satisfied with what is happening in America; what is happening to our freedoms.

My decision to vote for Trump was influenced by several factors, including Donald Trump’s stand on pro-life. Remember that it was Bill Clinton who allowed partial birth abortion. Obama, an Illinois senator, supported this legislation. If Hillary Clinton is elected, this will only perpetrate the evil of abortion. Both Clintons were involved in supporting partial birth abortion: how can you be more against pro-life than aborting a baby at 8 months? This is the most horrific attack against innocence! I can only say that you must choose Trump if you are pro-life.

Also, Trump is correct about what makes a country. First, you have to have borders and, second, you must protect these borders. Like most Americans, my family is here because our grandparents left their homeland to come here for a better life; but they came here legally. What is going on in Europe confirms that when you have open borders, you don’t know who is coming and why they are coming.

I know that Trump’s temperament and language can be offensive, but he is not a polished politician. We must look beyond the image which is painted by the media and look at the essence of the individual. None of us are sinless and many would fail if we were put under such scrutiny by those who are against us.

Hillary Clinton is not a defender of woman. Today, she says every woman has a right to be believed when she has been sexually assaulted, but when Bill Clinton was assaulting women, she called them trailer trash and stood by her man. Why weren’t these woman allowed to be believed? I read the book, Crises of Character, written by a secret service agent. She has two faces and never really shows her true self.

Trump and Clinton are very different. Hillary Clinton, prochoice … Donald Trump, pro-life … Clinton, open borders …Donald Trump, controlled borders … Clinton, pay-to-play big government … Donald Trump, smaller federal government … Clinton, government economic stimulation …Donald Trump, business to grow the economy … Clinton, enrichment by selling favors … Trump, wealth through growing a business …Clinton, 100,000 Syrian Muslim refugees into the U.S.A. … Trump, concern for the 3% Syrian Christians who are being martyred.

There is only one choice for me, Donald Trump.

If you haven’t made a decision as to who you are going to vote for, please, consider voting for Trump because he will protect your freedoms.

In our continuing series “Women Vote,” we interviewed Marjorie Dannenfelser. Dannenfelser is the president of Susan B. Anthony List, a national pro-life political organization. ~ Editor

Q. Have you decided for whom you are going to vote on November 8?

 Yes, I will be voting for Donald Trump.

Q. Was this a difficult decision for you?

When the race came down to two, there was no question of whom I would support. Donald Trump is a convert to the pro-life issue, as he has explained. Converts do not always use the same words as longtime activists, but they do speak with passion and conviction when faced with the reality of the horror of abortion.

Q. What factors most influenced your choice?

In this election we’re not voting for the most virtuous candidate, or the one with perfect character. As with every election, policy commitments are what will chart the course for the future. Each candidate’s approach to the Supreme Court will, far and away, have the most important implications for our nation’s future. That’s why policy is the main factor to consider when choosing whom to support.

Q. Which policy most concerns you, specifically?

Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump’s pro-life commitments have gotten increasingly stronger. He’s pledged to defund America’s #1 abortion chain Planned Parenthood, advance and sign into law the Pain-Capable bill, and protect the Hyde Amendment. Most importantly, he’s pledged to appoint pro-life Justices to the Supreme Court.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has promised the abortion industry she will be their advocate. She has doubled down on her support for abortion on-demand, up until the moment of birth, paid for by taxpayers. There is not a single unborn child she would protect from abortion.

Q. Many women have been offended by comments made by the candidate Trump about women, Mexicans and immigrants, What do you think of his temperament and language?

I cannot and will not defend many of the things Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail. His comments about women were horrifying and triggering for women and girls who have been victims of sexual assault and harassment. Similarly horrifying is Hillary Clinton’s treatment of the women who came in and out of her husband’s life, whom she sought to blame, shame, and ruin.

Q. Many women have been offended by behaviors of the candidate Clinton toward her husband’s lovers, including Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and others and towards people who have and do work for her, such as Secret Service agents? What do you think of her temperament and language?

Hillary Clinton has ignored, belittled, and defamed the women injured by her husband. She even defended a child rapist, and was caught on tape laughing at how she had helped him escape punishment. Her treatment of women is indefensible. In the face of two candidates like this, policy must be the deciding factor in considering whom to vote for.

Q. Many women are concerned with pro-life issues, especially recognizing the humanity and rights of the fetus. Which candidate do you find closest to your thinking on this issue. Why?

Donald Trump is, without question, the only pro-life candidate. He has pledged to defund the nation’s largest abortion business, Planned Parenthood, appoint pro-life Justices to the Supreme Court, advance and sign into law the Pain-Capable bill to end late-term abortion after five months, and to protect the Hyde Amendment which bars taxpayer funds from being used for elective abortion. Hillary Clinton is the abortion industry’s candidate. Planned Parenthood is spending $30 million to help elect her. In return, she’s pledged to always “have their back,” and to open wide the gates of taxpayer funding of abortion by repealing the longstanding Hyde Amendment and expanding abortion on-demand without limits.

Q. Are there other differences between Trump and Clinton which you view as fundamentally opposed?

Hillary Clinton has reduced to almost nothing the centrality of faith in day to day life. She has said that deep seated religious beliefs and cultural codes need to be changed.

Q. Is there anything else you’d like to say to women who are discerning how to vote on November 8?

I am hopeful that our first female president will embody values that we can be proud of as Americans and as people of faith. Being involved in politics at both the national and state levels, I am confident that the right woman will come along soon. There are many active, passionate women serving today in elected position – women who value the dignity and rights of the unborn. I look forward to supporting a pro-life female president in future elections. 

Susan B. Anthony List and its connected super PAC, Women Speak Out so far have spent more than $18 million in the 2016 election cycle, knocking on more than one million doors in battleground states to defeat Hillary Clinton and maintain a pro-life Senate. SBA List pursues policies and elects candidates who will reduce and ultimately end abortion.

My name is Vicki Evans and I am happy to be sharing with you how I discerned my vote for the Presidential election next week. I’m a CPA and have run a small business for decades. I’m also a pro-life activist with an advanced degree in bioethics.

I have watched our country’s ethically treacherous path accelerate under the Obama Administration.  I have dreaded Hillary Clinton’s rise as first female presidential nominee in this already ethically perilous environment. Her extremism on issues like abortion puts her completely out of touch with women on the ground. In her view of feminism, “reproductive rights” define women.

We are about so much more.

Labeling Hillary a hypocrite would be an understatement. She “plays the woman card” when it’s useful. Her every decision and stance is politically calculated. When it comes to having actual empathy for women, she does not. Her viciousness towards Bill’s paramours remains notorious. Today, that viciousness extends to all women, women like me, who do not share her extreme pro-abortion convictions. Like all other pro-life women, I fall into her “basket of deplorables.”

Similarly, in the pursuit of her personal goals, Hillary has blithely risked national security and ignored the rule of law. The Clinton Foundation has been involved for years in million-dollar “pay-to-play” transactions with foreign countries, many of which have no regard for human rights. Her email scandal appears far from over.

Compared to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump is fresh air. We need a populist candidate to stop the tide of political elites dictating our moral beliefs. I am confident that Donald Trump will roll back the extreme social policies of the Obama Administration – which would become even more radical under a Clinton Administration.

I know many are offended by Mr. Trump’s comments. However, I am offended by the political correctness that is required in today’s society. As an employer, I’m offended that ObamaCare requires employers, including religious ones, to facilitate no-cost contraception to their employees. I’m offended that our religious freedoms are fast becoming a thing of the past and that conscientious objection is now called discrimination. I’m offended that government regulations have reached into our schools to dictate bathroom use and that the federal government is intent on obliterating states’ rights by forbidding any curtailment of funding for Planned Parenthood, effectively ignoring its trade in fetal body parts. I’m offended that Hillary Clinton has now set her sights on forcing taxpayers to finance unlimited abortions both here and abroad.

Deciding to vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence was not a difficult decision – they propose much that I believe in and offer hope for a nation in moral decline.

No candidate is memory has released a list of specific pro-life judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Donald Trump released two such lists. It’s safe to say that, beyond appointments to the Supreme Court, a President Trump would stop packing the circuit courts and courts of appeals with liberal judges intent on creating social policy.

No other candidate has ever promised to repeal the Johnson Amendment and return First Amendment rights to our pastors, allowing churches to more fully participate in the public square.

I see Trump as being honest and probably too forthright for his own good as a candidate. I live in the real world and I have heard much worse than Trump’s crude remarks – such as being called a bigot to my face for believing in marriage between a man and a women.

Please get out and vote, and vote for Donald Trump! Don’t let our children grow up in a world without ethics and our basic freedoms.

This post begins a series profiling how individual women voters discern their choice on the 2016 Presidential ticket. Please feel free to comment and question and join in the discussion. (Comments are monitored so they do not appear immediately. Please see the Policy on Comments.) ~Editor

Greetings All. My name is Cathleen Gillies. I am a Catholic wife, mother, bond salesman and pro-life advocate.

On the 2016 Presidential ticket, I have decided to vote for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. I’d like to share the reasons for my decision with the readers of NewFeminism.co.

This decision was not particularly difficult for me personally. While I recognize that he has come across as rude and brash from the beginning, I felt that Donald Trump was laying the truth on our nation. I feel that he is standing up for all the people the ruling class holds in contempt: people of faith, the working class people and the people who live in the heartland of our nation.  Theses people, who include me, have been taken for granted and ignored by both parties.

I love that Trump is not afraid to call Christmas, Christmas.

As a Catholic and a pro-lifer, I am very concerned about religious liberty and life issues.  Although I’m not 100% certain what Trump is going to do, I definitely know what Hillary Clinton’s plans to do and this SCARES ME.

I’ve been impressed by Trump’s small, human gestures Trump sent a personal note to my husband’s cousin after learning that his mother and our cousin’s mother were born in the same hospital. This is not the blustering bigot the media tries to present.

I am convinced that the media takes Trump’s word and language out of context. To me, he comes across as teaching people to “please grow up and let’s talk real.” I appreciate this.

I also personally met and greeted Hillary Clinton who left me feeling cold.

Clinton represents to me the biggest hypocrite – she lies and attempts to cover up who she is, where as with Trump what you see is what you get.  He’s refreshing.

Pro-life issues remain a primary concern of mine. We know that Trump has been a pro-life crusader in this election and we know that Clinton knows that an unborn child is a human being but says these children have no rights at all.  From Clinton’s track record we know she pushes pro-abortion agenda. Donald Trump he’s provided a list of potential Supreme Court nominees who are all pro life.

He is not anti-immigrant but he will stand up to follow the laws that protect our nation from people who want to break the laws and or attack us.  Our current administration is failing to do this.

For all of his vanity and showman ship – I get the feeling that he is a patriot at heart and cares about his country.  I can’t say this about Hillary Clinton and her dealings with selling the government to people who paid her Clinton Foundation money. Foreign countries that funded the foundation now have direct access to the US government.  This angers and scares me – because these countries don’t share my values especially since the countries hate women and children.

I don’t consider Hillary Clinton trustworthy. I’ll take my chance with Donald Trump.

I ask all my fellow sisters in Christ to Pray. Pray. Pray.  For Catholic women, please join me in confession, Mass and Rosary.

Recently I was asked to comment, as a New Feminist, on my friend Marjorie Campbell’s post “Trump the Guy”. As someone who has strong opinions on the type of leader I feel America needs right now, I agreed to read and see how one of my colleagues in the New Feminist movement might feel about the leader of the GOP hunt for the party nomination. As I read her post I’ll admit I was honestly surprised to see Campbell attempt to personalize a man who she herself outs in her first few paragraphs as someone who is capable of making obscene and degrading comments about women. How can someone who openly admits that a candidate has publicly rated women based solely on their appearance find enough redeeming qualities to give what appears to be support for them as a candidate? Well, honestly, I don’t think she was able to do that.

When I began reading Campbell’s post, I expected it to evolve into a strong rallying cry for New Feminists to unite and teach our daughters to expect more from their male counterparts. I expected an honest assessment of why this man might appear appealing initially to some women, but then a firm reminder that we as complentarianists expect a level of respect and equal dignity to be given to the opposite sex at all times.

Campbell took a strange and unexpected turn however when she calls attention to the fact that Trump is enjoying a lot of support from women, particularly women with little education. To me it is would go without much investigation that his female supporters would be poorly educated, as women with higher levels of learning tend to have higher self-confidence and higher expectations of men.  In a Gallup poll released in December, Trump had the lowest net favorable rating out of all the candidates among college-educated Republican women. In that same poll it was summed up that “Trump is not that popular in general among Republicans, but has a particular image problem among women and those with college and postgraduate degrees. Looking at this from a different angle, Trump clearly has his greatest appeal to Republican men — and, in particular, to Republican men without a college degree.” It would seem that the poorly educated women are likely voting alongside their poorly educated men.

Instead of acknowledging the limitations that can come along with lack of education, Campbell focuses on this demographic of uneducated women and uses them as representative of the majority of women. She states that the “small contingent of activist women” who are offended by the type of “guy talk” that is typical of Trump have “always been a minority, [however.]… Many of these women don’t like men. They don’t live with men; much less love a man as a primary component of their lives.” I couldn’t disagree more strongly with this as my own experience, and the experiences of most women I spoke with about this confirmed that we happily married heterosexual women expect a far higher level of behavior from our men, and that we are deeply offended by Trump’s comments. And I certainly do not think we are the minority contingent Campbell is referring to.

Campbell posits that the majority of women are not offended by what Donald Trump is saying and then goes on to say the reason is because of cultural white washing on gender differentiation. “For many of us men-loving females, especially those of us who live with working class and alpha males, Trump’s language is more than familiar; it is even intimate. We understand it, because we understand guy talk. It does not scare us.”

And that right there scares the hell outta me! If the majority of American women are OK with being rated on their looks, with being disrespected as wives, as employees, and as professionals then I am afraid that the New Feminist movement has a lot more work to do than I initially realized. This has nothing to do with men attempting to assert masculinity in a culture that has moved toward gender neutral status (that is another topic completely that I would be happy to continue discussing), but it does have everything to do with a narcissistic man playing on the insecurities in the average person for his own gain.

Campbell attempts to humanize Donald Trump by using a “guys will be guys” sort of approach and says that Americans are not turned off by his often crass comments because we are familiar with the type of man that Trump is. She says that many of our fathers, brothers, and husbands act just like him in the privacy of their homes and she puts forward that most Americans are not offended by this sort of man because we know them to be good natured underneath their obviously crusty exteriors. So because the average man has not lived up to the calling of authentic masculinity, we are supposed to embrace a man that epitomizes all the familiar bad qualities of the broken men we love?

Donald Trump is not merely just a guy who likes to kick back with his friends and embrace his “masculinity”. He doesn’t just like to have a beer and talk a little trashy with his buddies and rate a pretty girl that happens to walk by on Guys Night (which I would argue has nothing to do with authentic masculinity). No, his misogyny is a much higher level of degradation of women. And if we can’t see the difference between his actions and the smutty words of the men in our own lives, then we have drunk the Kool-Aide called Self-Denial, America.

What was not mentioned in “Trump the Guy” is that Trump’s misogynistic tendencies go much further than his foul mouth and personal life. Along with his dirty comments on Howard Stern and his divorces due to self admitted extramarital affairs, Trump actually has several business ventures that speak to his willingness to objectify women and profit off them. In August of 2013, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino became the first casino in Atlantic City, N.J., to have an in-house strip club.  Until this past month, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump had a 10-percent ownership stake in that same Atlantic City casino and hotel, which also hosted a convention dedicated to the production, sale and promotion of hardcore pornography. The eXXXotica Expo occurred at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino & Resort in both April 2014 and April 2013.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the connections between the underworld of strip clubs, sex trafficking, pornography, and prostitution. It is a world that Trump is comfortable in and knows how to navigate. In March 1990 he even posed for the cover of Playboy magazine—next to a model wearing only his tuxedo jacket. Bottom line: Donald Trump has profited directly from the exploitation of women. I don’t think many of us would think of our hardworking fathers, brothers, and husbands when we think about a billionaire profiting off the sale of women’s bodies through the sex industry. But he does. Donald Trump is nothing like the hardworking blue-collar men that many of us are acquainted with, and to think otherwise is to fall victim to the fabulous marketing his campaign managers have used to endear him to frustrated voters.

Perhaps some voters are drawn to his candid, crass talk because they are tired of the political correctness that is required of presidential candidates. And maybe they do find some sanity in his noting differences between the sexes. I can understand how the effects of Feminism’s obsession with gender neutrality has gotten under their skin and they might just appreciate someone calling a woman beautiful, but what Trump is doing is NOT an effective response to the gender white washing that is currently in vogue. He is not calling women beautiful as his equal counter-part, but rather as a sign of his power.

What Campbell fails to call forward is that all gender differentiation should be done with respect for the beautiful strengths of the opposite sex. What Trump does repeatedly in his public comments, business decisions, and personal life is reduce the beauty of women’s contributions to the world down to their physical appearance. When he speaks of a woman of class like Princess Diana, he has to degrade her memory by saying she was “hot” and that he “could have slept with her”. A man with any sense of the equal worth of woman to him could not say such a callous stupid thing when looking at the accomplishments of the late Princess of Whales.

And so I disagree with my colleague. I do not know or recognize any of the men in my life when I see Donald Trump. He is not endearing, or clever, or innocently awkward. He is a dangerous misogynist that knows how to raise up a frustrated electorate. He is a business man who looks out for Number 1. He uses and exploits people for profit. He is NOT the model for the type of man who respects women or truly cares about our rights as mothers, as daughters, as sisters, as wives. A vote for Donald Trump is a backwards vote for the progress of New Feminists everywhere.

Americans need to understand that the endgame of the LGBT rights movement involves centralized state power—and the end of First Amendment freedoms.

I am one of six adult children of gay parents who recently filed amicus briefs with the US Supreme Court, asking the Court to respect the authority of citizens to keep the original definition of marriage: a union between one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others, so that children may know and may be raised by their biological parents. I also live in Canada, where same-sex marriage was federally mandated in 2005.

I am the daughter of a gay father who died of AIDS. I described my experiences in my book: Out From Under: The Impact of Homosexual Parenting. Over fifty adult children who were raised by LGBT parents have communicated with me and share my concerns about same-sex marriage and parenting. Many of us struggle with our own sexuality and sense of gender because of the influences in our household environments growing up.

We have great compassion for people who struggle with their sexuality and gender identity—not animosity. And we love our parents. Yet, when we go public with our stories, we often face ostracism, silencing, and threats.

I want to warn America to expect severe erosion of First Amendment freedoms if the US Supreme Court mandates same-sex marriage. The consequences have played out in Canada for ten years now, and they are truly Orwellian in nature and scope.

Canada’s Lessons

In Canada, freedoms of speech, press, religion, and association have suffered greatly due to government pressure. The debate over same-sex marriage that is taking place in the United States could not legally exist in Canada today. Because of legal restrictions on speech, if you say or write anything considered “homophobic” (including, by definition, anything questioning same-sex marriage), you could face discipline, termination of employment, or prosecution by the government.

Why do police prosecute speech under the guise of eliminating “hate speech” when there are existing legal remedies and criminal protections against slander, defamation, threats, and assault that equally apply to all Americans? Hate-crime-like policies using the terms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” create unequal protections in law, whereby protected groups receive more legal protection than other groups.

Having witnessed how mob hysteria in Indiana caused the legislature to back-track on a Religious Freedom Restoration Act, many Americans are beginning to understand that some activists on the Left want to usher in state control over every institution and freedom. In this scheme, personal autonomy and freedom of expression become nothing more than pipe dreams, and children become commodified.

Children are not commodities that can be justifiably severed from their natural parentage and traded between unrelated adults. Children in same-sex households will often deny their grief and pretend they don’t miss a biological parent, feeling pressured to speak positively due to the politics surrounding LGBT households. However, when children lose either of their biological parents because of death, divorce, adoption, or artificial reproductive technology, they experience a painful void. It is the same for us when our gay parent brings his or her same-sex partner(s) into our lives. Their partner(s) can never replace our missing biological parent.

The State as Ultimate Arbiter of Parenthood

Over and over, we are told that “permitting same-sex couples access to the designation of marriage will not deprive anyone of any rights.” That is a lie.

When same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada in 2005, parenting was immediately redefined.Canada’s gay marriage law, Bill C-38, included a provision to erase the term “natural parent” and replace it across the board with gender-neutral “legal parent” in federal law. Now all children only have “legal parents,” as defined by the state. By legally erasing biological parenthood in this way, the state ignores children’s foremost right: their immutable, intrinsic yearning to know and be raised by their own biological parents.

Mothers and fathers bring unique and complementary gifts to their children. Contrary to the logic of same-sex marriage, the gender of parents matters for the healthy development of children. We know, for example, that the majority of incarcerated men did not have their fathers in the home. Fathers by their nature secure identity, instill direction, provide discipline, boundaries, and risk-taking adventures, and set lifelong examples for children. But fathers cannot nurture children in the womb or give birth to and breast-feed babies. Mothers nurture children in unique and beneficial ways that cannot be duplicated by fathers.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that men and women are anatomically, biologically, physiologically, psychologically, hormonally, and neurologically different from each other. These unique differences provide lifelong benefits to children that cannot be duplicated by same-gender “legal” parents acting out different gender roles or attempting to substitute for the missing male or female role model in the home.

In effect, same-sex marriage not only deprives children of their own rights to natural parentage, it gives the state the power to override the autonomy of biological parents, which means parental rights are usurped by the government.

Hate Tribunals Are Coming

In Canada, it is considered discriminatory to say that marriage is between a man and a woman or that every child should know and be raised by his or her biological married parents. It is not just politically incorrect in Canada to say so; you can be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, fined, and forced to take sensitivity training.

Anyone who is offended by something you have said or written can make a complaint to the Human Rights Commissions and Tribunals. In Canada, these organizations police speech, penalizing citizens for any expression deemed in opposition to particular sexual behaviors or protected groups identified under “sexual orientation.” It takes only one complaint against a person to be brought before the tribunal, costing the defendant tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. The commissions have the power to enter private residences and remove all items pertinent to their investigations, checking for hate speech.

The plaintiff making the complaint has his legal fees completely paid for by the government. Not so for the defendant. Even if the defendant is found innocent, he cannot recover his legal costs. If he is found guilty, he must pay fines to the person(s) who brought forth the complaint.

If your beliefs, values, and political opinions are different from the state’s, you risk losing your professional license, job, or business, and even your children. Look no further than the Lev Tahor Sect, an Orthodox Jewish sect. Many members, who had been involved in a bitter custody battle with child protection services, began leaving Chatham, Ontario, for Guatemala in March 2014, to escape prosecution for their religious faith, which conflicted with the Province’s guidelines for religious education. Of the two hundred sect members, only half a dozen families remain in Chatham.

Parents can expect state interference when it comes to moral values, parenting, and education—and not just in school. The state has access into your home to supervise you as the parent, to judge your suitability. And if the state doesn’t like what you are teaching your children, the state will attempt to remove them from your home.

Teachers cannot make comments in their social networks, write letters to editors, publicly debate, or vote according to their own conscience on their own time. They can be disciplined or lose any chance of tenure. They can be required at a bureaucrat’s whim to take re-education classes or sensitivity training, or be fired for thinking politically incorrect thoughts.

When same-sex marriage was created in Canada, gender-neutral language became legally mandated. Newspeak proclaims that it is discriminatory to assume a human being is male or female, or heterosexual. So, to be inclusive, special non-gender-specific language is being used in media, government, workplaces, and especially schools to avoid appearing ignorant, homophobic, or discriminatory. A special curriculum is being used in many schools to teach students how to use proper gender-neutral language. Unbeknownst to many parents, use of gender terms to describe husband and wife, father and mother, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and “he” and “she” is being steadily eradicated in Canadian schools.

Which Is More Important: Sexual Autonomy or the First Amendment?

Recently, an American professor who was anonymously interviewed for the American Conservativequestioned whether sexual autonomy is going to cost you your freedoms: “We are now at the point, he said, at which it is legitimate to ask if sexual autonomy is more important than the First Amendment?”

Under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian citizens were supposed to have been guaranteed: (1) freedom of conscience and religion; (2) freedom of thought, belief, opinion, and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication; (3) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (4) freedom of association. In reality, all of these freedoms have been curtailed with the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Wedding planners, rental halls, bed and breakfast owners, florists, photographers, and bakers have already seen their freedoms eroded, conscience rights ignored, and religious freedoms trampled in Canada. But this is not just about the wedding industry. Anybody who owns a business may not legally permit his or her conscience to inform business practices or decisions if those decisions are not in line with the tribunals’ decisions and the government’s sexual orientation and gender identity non-discrimination laws. In the end, this means that the state basically dictates whether and how citizens may express themselves.

Freedom to assemble and speak freely about man-woman marriage, family, and sexuality is now restricted. Most faith communities have become “politically correct” to avoid fines and loss of charitable status. Canadian media are restricted by the Canadian Radio, Television, and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which is similar to the FCC. If the media air anything considered discriminatory, broadcasting licenses can be revoked, and “human rights bodies” can charge fines and restrict future airings.

An example of legally curtailed speech regarding homosexuality in Canada involves the case of Bill Whatcott, who was arrested for hate speech in April 2014 after distributing pamphlets that were critical of homosexuality. Whether or not you agree with what he says, you should be aghast at this state-sanctioned gagging. Books, DVDs, and other materials can also be confiscated at the Canadian border if the materials are deemed “hateful.”

Americans need to prepare for the same sort of surveillance-society in America if the Supreme Court rules to ban marriage as a male-female institution. It means that no matter what you believe, the government will be free to regulate your speech, your writing, your associations, and whether or not you may express your conscience. Americans also need to understand that the endgame for some in the LGBT rights movement involves centralized state power—and the end of First Amendment freedoms.

Dawn Stefanowicz is an internationally recognized speaker and author. She is a member of the Testimonial Committee of the International Children’s Rights Institute. Her book, “Out From Under: The Impact of Homosexual Parenting,” is available at http://www.dawnstefanowicz.org. Dawn, a full-time licensed accountant, is married and has two teenaged children.

This piece was originally published by The Witherspoon Institute.

How I found myself talking with young adults about hookup culture, dating, and relationships is still a bit mysterious to me, but one thing I know for sure si that about 10 years ago I started to sense a genuine loneliness amount the otherwise bright, involved, connected, and accomplished students at my university.

When I asked about their lives—not just about their academic lives, but about their personal, moral, and spiritual lives—what troubled and saddened me more than whether or not they were having sex (though that certainly concerns me, no doubt), is how little sex and sexual intimacy even mattered to them. Still today, not only do many of them think that sex is “no big deal,” they usually display little hope that it will ever amount to all that much. They are deeply ambivalent about sex having any significant meaning, and in the context of their mostly ironic culture, they are wary of being duped by grand claims about intimacy, sexual or otherwise. As they say, it’s all “just a thing.” And they have plenty of evidence from their own lives, the lives of their families and friends, and from the wider, sexualized culture to prove it. But when I started to really pay attention to what young adults were saying and doing in their hookups, dating, and relationships, I found what I would call a low- level, grinding despair.

I spotted that despair in a Q&A session following a talk I gave a number of years ago in a residential hall lounge packed full of first-year students about six months into their first year of college.

A student thanked me for my talk on hookup culture and said that she wholly agreed with my critique of it. She went on to say that this was all well and good, but what she really needed to know was how to go about making herself not care while she was partying and hooking up, because, well, that was just how things went.

Her voice broke a bit as she asked the question and the room became really quiet with the question just hanging in the air. I was dumbstruck. She silently but openly wept as I eventually responded that I would never, ever want to make it easier for her not to care about another person and or to ask so little for herself, body and soul. She seemed completely emotionally exhausted. I must admit that though I get questions like this all the time from young adults, each time I am left a little breathless by it.

When I talk about hooking up, dating, and relationships now, I do so in all sorts of venues and to all sorts of audiences, from large crowds in auditoriums to small groups in residence hall programs. And for the most part, I don’t talk all that much about sex, because I find that what really concerns young adults—what really scares them, what fascinates them, what moves them—are not really questions of sex but rather questions of intimacy. In the midst of their ubiquitous posting and twittering and snapchatting, despite their seemingly constant connecting through all modes of social media, the students I meet speak overwhelmingly about feeling quite disconnected, lonely, and fundamentally not known by others. This isn’t the death knell of relationships, of men or of sex, as some authors have recently claimed, but it certainly seems to signal a crisis of intimacy. So what is it then that is missing in the lives of these young adults and how can we help them, and ourselves, find what is lost?   .

Clearly, intimacy is not an easy notion to understand. Its meaning is broad and wide-ranging and it is often only recognized in its absence. While we regularly reduce its meaning to the closeness of a sexual relationship, there’s little doubt that intimacy characterizes other relationships in our lives, those of parents and children, siblings, and good and caring friends. Isn’t intimacy with God what we are striving for in a prayer life? It strikes me as helpful to pose the question: What are we doing when we are being intimate with another person, and why is that being intimate?

Common to all of the intimate relationships in my life is one central and abiding fact: that I have the distinct feeling that I matter to the other person. In those relationships, others who love me—my parents who are my biggest fans and like me more than I probably deserve, family members who’ve known me through all of the awkward moments of my life, friends who have been with me through bitterly sad and tremendously joyful times—share in my cares and concerns because I matter to them. And I in turn am willing to try to enter into the meanings and values of their lives and take their cares and concerns on as my own, not as facts and data, but as something meaningful and moving, because they matter to me. This may seem overly simplistic, but I find it helpful when talking with young adults about intimacy to ask if they notice these patterns in their different relationships—success and failures alike.

Do you feel like you matter to your friends, your roommates, your older brother, your girlfriend or boyfriend? If so, how is that shown to you? Do you know how to show someone else that she truly matters to you? How do you know if you truly matter to him? How would you know? What do you do when it becomes clear that you don’t matter to a person you love?

These are sometimes very painful questions to ask and answer. Young adulthood is when most of us first begin to recognize how very much is riding on our closest emotional ties. And it’s a lot. It is also often when we discover how devastatingly precarious some of those emotional ties can be.

When I talk to students about their fears and desires and ask them to think about what they long for most in their lives, they assume that their desire to be loved and to be truly known by someone else will happen in marriage. While that will be true for most of them, I also ask them to consider the different kinds of love and closeness they have in their lives now. In most cases, young people can identify at least one friend who fits the description of Aristotle’s “Friend of the Good,” the highest and best type of friendship depicted in his Nicomachean Ethics. This type of friend comprehends what is good in me, brings more of that out in me, and wants the best for me. But truly wanting the best for someone involves knowing and seeing who she really is, not merely who she is for me. To have and to be a friend like this activates our ability to be moved by someone else, to allow the meanings of my life to be changed and transformed by someone who wants what is good for me, which is perhaps not fully known to me. Intimacy that is found in friendships like this allows us to glimpse the best parts of ourselves and brings those parts into the light. It also builds in us a capacity for seeing the good in someone else and for letting the good in us be seen.

As JPII rightly surmised and wrote about beautifully in his Theology of the Body, intimacy involves truly being seen by another. This seems really right to me. It is in the gaze of someone who thinks I truly matter, who wants to value what I value, who desires what I truly desire, who wants to understand what I mean when I speak and act, that I begin to be recognized and known in the way I really long for. To be held in a gaze like that is the way of love that God wants for us, because it is the way that God loves us.

In the lives of young adults, this isn’t easy to come by. Everyone has her own set of needs and worries, and the pace of keeping up and getting ahead means that really stopping and seeing another person or being seen demands so much time and asks perhaps too much of us. But again, intimacy is keenly felt in its absence, and young adults suffer its absence tremendously. What haunts them most is not the dismal job market, not their ballooning student loans, not the skyrocketing cost of living in most major American cities. What haunts them most is not ever being seen, or recognized, or loved by anyone beyond their own family circles. In worse cases, their fear is not mattering to anyone even within those most important first circles. In the very worst cases, there is the darkness of feeling that you do not matter even to God, that you are not held by God.

To be intimate with someone is to be held—to be held in the gaze of someone who really sees me, to be held up by a friend when I falter, to have my hand held as I go through a moment of grief or joy or beauty, to be held responsible by those I admire for the good and bad I do in the world, to be held in the arms of someone who wants the best for me, and then also, in the words of a friend who prays for me often, to be held in the light.

I have seen students thrive when they find themselves held by someone in a way that lets them know that they matter and that they are seen and known and loved. I have sat and listened as young adults tell me about people in their lives—a friend found in a small faith community, a parent who finally sees the adult instead of just the child, an unexpected mentor, a classmate who challenges them to “the more” on a service trip, a girlfriend or boyfriend who makes them feel smarter and funnier and more lovable than they thought they were—who have helped them find better parts of themselves that they never imagined they would find. These are wondrous moments to witness. It is where flourishing is found.

Finally, I don’t know about you, but even on a good day at Mass when I’m knee-deep in the prayerful rhythm of a liturgy, I get all tangled up in the newly worded response,  “I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof.” Because of my entanglement there, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and it seems to me to be about the intimacy we long for with God. Asking Christ to enter under my roof reminds me that intimacy marks the difference between living next to someone and dwelling with them—letting another person truly enter into my life, to move my cares and concerns and to be moved by his. When you dwell with someone else—a friend, a spouse, Jesus—your reality becomes a shared reality and you make the horizon of that person’s meanings and values your own. You also let your meanings and values be carried and shaped by someone else. It seems to me that this is the answer to the question, what am I doing when I am being intimate? To the further question, why is that being intimate? Well, when I ask my students about intimacy in their own lives, they usually default to a popular Facebook adage: “It’s complicated.” Let me tell you, you’ve got that right. ■

This article is reprinted with permission from Kerry Cronin.  It originally appeared in the Spring 2014 C21 Resources, a publication of The Church in the 21st Century, Boston College.  Cronin is the coeditor of this C21 Resources and has emerged as a “relationships guru,” speaking to student audiences on such topics as “The Imperfect Art of Dating” and “Sex and the Single Student.” (photos not included in reprint; the original article with photos is available online.) Visit: www.bc.edu/c21relationships to watch C21 videos featuring Kerry Cronin: “The Imperfect Art of Dating,” “Rules of the 1st Date,” “Love that Transforms: How the Resurrection Challenges Us,” “The Problems with the Hook-Up Culture.”

Until February 15^th 2013, women were invited to share their abortion stories on CNN Ireport. The picture below is a screenshot of a CNN Ireport user who goes by the name “TheProChoiceMom.” TheProChoice Mom left a series of derogatory comments on abortion regret testimonies posted on CNN’s website.  Why would a woman, a mother – who claims to support choice – lash out at other women who publicly express regret that they once chose abortion?  The slogan at TheProChoice Mom twitter site reads “Showing America Pro-Choice DOESN’T mean Pro-Abortion!”

In my recent interactions with pro-choicers, I have noticed a pattern in women referring to themselves as a “pro-choice moms”:

1- They have one child born before or after they had an abortion (telling people that their child is “raised pro-choice”).

2- They had an abortion for “medical reasons” including genetic disease diagnosis, severe morning sickness, depression, anemia, cysts and arthritis pain.

3- They are angry at anybody who says that abortion hurts women, especially post-abortive pro-lifers.

4- They assert that abortion saved their life and anybody who says otherwise cares more about “non-sentient fetuses than women”, “would want to see them dead” and “deprive their born child from their mother” (quoting from ProChoiceMom).

5- Some of them had an incomplete miscarriage that required a D&C procedure and they call it an abortion.

Let me share a few reflections on this pattern.

It is always a tragedy to lose a child but let us be clear: having a D&C after a miscarriage does not constitute an abortion. Pro-lifers have no objection to the removing of an already dead baby. Many people are misinformed about abortion and, sometimes, we are not even talking about the same thing. Some believe that allowing medical treatment for an incomplete miscarriage = being “pro-choice”.

What causes this misinformation? I think it is the prevailing narrative that abortion = removing a fetus. not killing, not destroying; just “removing something that is too small to be human and alive”.  I have written publicly about my post abortion experience and regret, so I hear from a broad range of people. Last year, after sharing how abortion affects women, I received this Tweet:

Also, my general impression is that some women are told to have an abortion – as their only or best option – by misguided doctors. In this sense, women are sometimes denied health care for treatable conditions, or the opportunity to consider truly viable “other options”. I think we should worry about that trend.

We could speculate on the feelings behind venom-spewing pro-choice moms on the Internet, but, to quote the Letter to the Ephesians, we are up against principalities and powers. This is not a war of pro-life moms versus pro-choice moms. This is a spiritual battle and anybody’s heart can be changed. We have to discern when to speak (always share the truth in love) and when to be quiet. Let us keep all the pro-choice moms of the world in our prayers and trust that eventually, anger will subside and truth will prevail.

Béatrice Fedor is a pro-woman, anti-abortion, anti-violence advocate. The mother of three, she was raised in a culturally Catholic family in France; embraced liberal feminism, atheism and humanism. She has served as a trade union leader, taught a creative writing class and authored an unpublished book of poetry. The scar of her abortions moved her to search for God, and by His Grace, she has found peace and healing. She joined the Silent No More Awareness Campaign in 2008. “Neither do I condemn you” John 8:11. This post is edited and reprinted from her blog 400 Words for Women, the post originally appearing at http://400wordsforwomen.com/2013/02/09/on-pro-choice-moms/.

Wadjda
Director: Haifaa Al Mansour
Starring: Reem Abdullah, Waad Mohammed, Abdullrahman Al Gohani

Saudi Arabia is a country where cinemas don’t exist and women are hidden behind black veils. Yet this month a film has come onto the screens in France, Wadjda, the first-ever fiction film made in Saudi Arabia – and the director is a woman.

As a child, the eighth in a family of 12 children, Haifaa Al Mansour had watched many movies on the home television. She says: “My father was a lawyer and a poet, and to have some peace and quiet he brought home video cassettes and we were able to watch Bruce Lee, Indian films from Bollywood and Disney cartoons. We especially loved Snow White.”

Her parents gave the same education to all their children, boys and girls, and Haifaa went  to Cairo to study comparative literature at the American. Back in Saudi Arabia, she worked for a petrol company, at first giving English classes, but was moved to the communications department where she learned to make videos.

Haifaa decided to use her new-found abilities to make a documentary on the life of women in her own city and in the desert. “For Women without Shadows I met old women who were very shy, never having been to school. And others who were younger, and had been able to go to school, but they suffered from much stricter segregation than their mothers.”

In 2006, this documentary was shown at international festivals, and one day also at the American Embassy, where Haifaa met her husband, an American diplomat. Later, she was able to study cinema for a Masters at Sydney University while her husband was posted to Australia.

Back in her home country, now 38 years old and the mother of two children, she decided to make a film “to show what it’s like to be young and a woman inSaudi Arabia. The heroine, Wadjda, is a mix of myself, my school-friends and my nieces,” she says.

Permission was given to film in the capital, Riyad, but a woman cannot be seen working with men in the street, so for outside scenes Haifaa directed the actors sitting in a van and using a walkie-talkie.

Wadjda is not a crusading film, but an intimate, often funny story which brings us close to a band of schoolgirls coping with strict limits on their freedom. The heroine, like many another 11-year-old, dreams of having her very own bike.

The main character is played by Waad Mohammed, dressed in jeans and trainers under her long black abaya, for she is just at the age where she must wear a veil in the street. We are privileged to witness a tender relationship with her mother, Saudi actress Reem Abdullah. Because women are not allowed to drive, this elegant and intelligent woman is dependent on the whims of an illiterate driver to be able to go to work.

Girls are not allowed to ride bikes either. But Wadjda keeps her target always in view, earning and saving whatever money she can get, and often, after school, passing by the shop where the bike she dreams of owning stands wrapped in plastic.

Then her school announces a competition for the recitation of verses of the Koran, with a prize of money for the winner. Wadjda begins to practise, and we Western viewers learn the intricacies of the Arab psalmody, sung by the school girls.

Many other stories are interwoven into the scenario. When Wadjda won the prizes for Best Arab Film and Best Actress in Dubai, some people from Saudi Arabia were able to see the film.

“What struck my own sister, who is very religious, was that the film shows the ‘real life’ in our country. On the TV we usually have only soap operas where heavily made-up women are seen in huge American-style apartments.”

In one scene, Wadjda accompanies her mother who wants to buy a new dress for a wedding. They find a beautiful red evening dress, but to try it on they have to go down the street to the public toilets where Wadjda sits on the washbasin and watches her mother put on the beautiful gown. As always in the film, there is no explanation, but we guess that there are no facilities for women to try on clothes in the shop. The mother has to make the best of the cramped space in the toilet to change, and looks at herself in the cracked, dirty mirror. There is a silent complicity between the mother and daughter, and a stark contrast between the bright beautiful red dress and the heavy black abaya that covers the mother from head to toe.

The way Haifaa found the funding for her film is a story in itself. “No-one thought it was possible to make a film, so no producer wanted to give me any money.” Finally, it was a member of the Saudi Royal family who financed the film. Prince Al-Walid bin Talal saw the documentary Women without Shadows and decided to help with the production of Wadjda.

“Some members of the Royal Family realise very well that we will have to end the segregation between men and women. Of course, it’s very slow. But King Abdullah has just named 30 women as members of his Council.” Women will get the vote in 2015, but only for municipal elections.

And they still must not laugh in public, nor let their face be seen by a man.

If this film comes near you, go to see it. It’s a gem.

Mary O’Neill Le Rumeur writes from Angers in France where she lives and teaches English.  This article is reprinted with permission from MercatorNet where you can access a video with the director and clips from the movie.