BY Cecilia Nowell

 

At his first rally as Kamala Harris’s running mate Tuesday, Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, invoked an issue at the forefront of many Americans’ minds: the right “for our children to be free to go to school without worrying they’ll be shot dead in their classrooms”.

But Walz wasn’t always a fierce advocate against gun violence. The evolution of the vice-presidential candidate, who once boasted an A rating from the NRA, shows the growing relevance of gen Z voters, who’ve grown up amid a surge in mass shootings in the US and are enthusiastically backing Harris.

“Gun violence is the number one killer of our generation, meaning we can’t afford anything less than leaders who will prioritize basic gun safety,” Timberlyn Mazeikis, a gun violence survivor and volunteer leader with Students Demand Action from Minnesota, said in a joint statement issued by Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action supporting Walz yesterday.

lected to the US House of Representatives in 2007, Walz was long beloved by gun rights advocates. The National Rifle Association endorsed and donated to his campaigns, giving him an A rating. In 2016 Guns & Ammo magazine included him on its list of top 20 politicians for gun owners.

That wasn’t terribly surprising. Walz was representing a rural red Minnesota district and had grown up at a time and place where guns were popular for hunting – not mass shootings.

“I grew up in a small town, [so] I’d put my shotgun in my car, or at school or in the football locker, to go pheasant hunting afterwards,” he told Pod Save America last month. “But we weren’t getting shot in school.”

That all changed after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, he has said.

In a 2018 video March for Our Lives co-founder and Parkland survivor David Hogg reshared on X last month, Walz recounts his then teenage daughter Hope approaching him in the days after the shooting: “Dad, you’re the only person I know who’s in elected office, you need to stop what’s happening with this.”

“For me, it was both a reckoning and an embarrassment,” he told Pod Save America, recalling that the children killed at Sandy Hook elementary school would have been his son’s age.

Two weeks later, while campaigning for governor, Walz authored an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, where he called the NRA “the biggest single obstacle to passing the most basic measures to prevent gun violence in America”. He went on to say that he’d donated the $18,000 the organization had donated to his past campaigns and wouldn’t accept NRA contributions in the future. He noted that he was currently co-sponsoring a “bump stocks” ban and came out in support of an assault weapons ban.

As Minnesota governor, Walz has signed wide-ranging gun safety measures into law, most notably a 2023 law including universal background checks and a “red flag law” (which allows state officials to temporarily seize the firearms of someone a court has ruled may be dangerous to themselves or others).

This year, Walz called for Minnesota lawmakers to go even further, asking them to support measures that would require safe firearm storage, better reporting of lost and stolen guns, and harsher penalties for “straw buyers” (those who purchase firearms for others who cannot legally have them). Since then, he’s signed legislation that prohibits automatic weapon modification devices and collects data on gun crime.

Walz remains an enthusiastic hunter – something he’s emphasized in previous campaigns and makes him something of an everyman.

“There’s a vision to reduce gun violence with absolutely no infringement on those who lawfully own guns, to use them for things that many of us cherish,” he told reporters in Bloomington, Minnesota, last week.

Gun safety advocates have already come out in support of his candidacy, including the gun violence prevention organization founded by former congresswoman and gun violence survivor Gabby Giffords (who joined Walz in Minnesota in 2023 when he signed the state’s universal background checks into law).

“As governor, Tim did what others called impossible, passing background checks and extreme risk protection laws in Minnesota with a slim gun safety majority,” Giffords said. “It wasn’t easy, but he got it done with hard work and effective leadership. His work as governor has saved lives, and I know that will continue when he is vice-president.”

Harris’s campaign, which has already drawn great support from gen Z voters and gun violence prevention advocates, has called for an assault weapons ban, universal background checks and red flag laws. Last month, the NRA called her “an existential threat to the second amendment”.

That doesn’t seem to bother Walz. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s,” he tweeted last month. “And I sleep just fine.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/09/tim-walz-gun-control-stance

 

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BY Jo Bartosch

The church of trans dogma

The Church of England is now persecuting preachers who refuse to toe the line on gender ideology.

 

Religious persecution has made a comeback in the Church of England. This week, it was revealed that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Bishop of Derby, Libby Lane, had repeatedly misused safeguarding processes to prevent a chaplain from returning to his ministry.

The Reverend Dr Bernard Randall didn’t piss in the font or gamble away the collection-plate money. No, he did something far worse in the church’s eyes – he preached traditional Christian views to students at Trent College, a private school in Derbyshire, where he was the chaplain.

In 2019, Randall gave a sermon he titled ‘Competing Ideologies’, during which he reassured his young flock that they ‘are not obliged to accept someone else’s ideology’. In his moderate and well-reasoned speech, he reminded students that they were at liberty to listen to other points of view, whether on religion, Brexit or ‘all this LGBT stuff’, as he put it.

Randall went on to say it was not wrong to think ‘that human beings are indeed male and female’. He also suggested that, according to the Christian church, marriage is between a man and woman and that a dim view is taken of sex outside of wedlock. His words, which until recently would have been considered mainstream fodder for a CofE chaplain, triggered complaints from pupils, parents and staff members. Some even claimed they were nearly left in tears.

Notably, Randall’s sermon was given in response to his school’s embrace of a programme by Educate and Celebrate, a now defunct LGBT educational charity. This was the organisation that boasted of its mission to ‘smash heteronormativity in the classroom’. To this end, it encouraged kids as young as three to read books about questioning their gender. Randall, understandably, called into question whether any of this was in line with church teaching.

Educate and Celebrate brought this bizarre, radical trans activism to classrooms. Yet according to both the Bishop of Derby’s safeguarding staff and Trent College, it was Randall’s views that supposedly put children in danger.

Shortly after he gave his ‘Competing Ideologies’ sermon, Randall was sacked from his position. He was even reported to the government’s anti-terrorism watchdog, Prevent, by the safeguarding lead at Trent College. It was later acknowledged that Randall’s views did not make him a threat to national security.

Following an investigation by the church, Randall was exonerated for the comments he made during his sermon. But the Derby diocese’s safeguarding team, under the watch of Bishop Lane, still stopped Randall from taking any position as a vicar. In 2021, the diocese refused to grant him a licence to officiate without first going through a risk assessment, effectively banning him from preaching.

The diocese safeguarding team claims that the sermon itself was not the reason for this witch-hunt against Randall. Rather, it supposedly raised concerns about how he might ‘support someone who came to him if they were struggling with their sexuality’. But Christian Concern, which took up Randall’s case, maintains that Lane blacklisted him as a ‘risk to children’ because of his traditional Christian beliefs.

At this point, Randall was prepared to turn the other cheek and accept an apology. But when the matter was brought to the attention of Archbishop Welby in 2022, the turbulent priest was thrown to the lions. Welby has repeatedly refused to allow Randall to proceed with a misconduct case against Lane. This week, the Telegraph reported that one of the lead lawyers on the review into Randall’s case described his treatment as ‘plainly wrong’ and ‘egregious’. According to Christian Concern, he has not given a sermon or worked in church ministry since his ordeal began. To date, neither Welby nor Lane has had the humility or grace to apologise.

Senior church leaders have abandoned their parishioners, putting the worship of identity politics above spiritual and moral leadership. Perhaps this desperate pandering to queer idols is a misguided attempt to get more youthful bums on pews. If so, the church has woefully misread the needs of their prospective congregations.

The last thing that most people, especially young people, want right now is yet more radical woke ideology being shoved down their throats. The church has a real opportunity, despite its wet and woolly reputation, to be a genuinely unifying and moderate force. Unfortunately, it’s forgotten what it once stood for. Welby and Lane are now passively following the opinions of the bien pensant, rather than shepherding the flock.

Whether you agree with his views or not, Randall is a man of unshakeable Christian faith. He has been sacrificed by the leaders of his own church to appease the LGBT cult. In this, he is the ultimate modern martyr.

 

Jo Bartosch is a journalist campaigning for the rights of women and girls.

 

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/15/the-church-of-trans-dogma/

 

 

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