California's Children Need Protection and Family Restoration

California passed into legislation a unique bill that affects all children in schools across the state because it forces public schools to allow gender-questioning youth to choose whether they would like to use the boys or girls restrooms and locker rooms based on their felt "gender identity." Now signed by the governor, AB 1266 also lets students who believe they are the opposite sex participate in sex-segregated activities, including sports teams. The new law would apply to students in elementary, middle and high school.

This legislation leaves all other children without recourse.  While states have a duty to protect children from harm, it seems that California's legislators are disregarding the safety and privacy of the majority of children in exchange for accommodating an extremely small segment of children.  Among the legislation's concerns is also the disregard for the privacy of students who are not transgender or gender-questioning.  General law-making considers notions that are based on principle, rather than on exception.  Making law based on exceptional circumstances to the general rule never proves to be wise lawmaking, and in this case, it may be harmful to most children.  You can read more on this issue here.

Furthermore, last week a particular example of the effects of this new legislation became apparent.  Teen girls are very negatively affected. Journalist Lori Arnold writes this summary on the event:

            The hot topic in recent weeks at Colorado’s Florence High School hasn’t been about calculus, history, English, college admissions or who the Huskies would face on their Friday night football games. Instead, the big news has centered on a transgendered student who, born male but perceiving himself as female, has been using the girls’ bathroom. The situation prompted a parental complaint to administrators, who responded that the boy’s rights as a transgendered student trump the privacy concerns of his peers. “This is a nightmare scenario for the teenage girls—some of them freshmen—and their parents at this school,” said Matthew McReynolds, a staff attorney with Sacramento-based Pacific Justice Institute (PJI). After being contacted by a Florence High School parent, McReynolds sent a letter to Principal Brian Schipper and Superintendent Rhonda Vendetti outlining the privacy rights of students. “This is exactly the kind of horror story we have been warning would accompany the push for radical transgender rights in schools, and it is the type of situation that LGBT activists have been insisting would not happen.” McReynolds said officials at the school, located near Pueblo, warned the complaining students they could be removed from sports teams or be charged with hate crimes if they persisted in voicing their opposition to the policy.

Read her entire article here.  Legislative efforts are underway to reverse the bill.

Gender equality does not have to up children in danger, or kick them off their sports teams for hate speech by voicing safety and fairness concerns.  Find out more about Christianity and Gender Equality by reading "Christianity, Feminism, and the Paradox of Female Happiness" and "A Christian Perspective on Gender Equality."  Marriage and children are inexorably linked to rebuilding strength within families.  Legislation can be helpful to those goals, or unhelpful to those objectives, as this piece of lawmaking evidences.

Christian Teens and College Students Can Prepare for Family Restoration with April 18 "Day of Dialogue"

Focus on the Family is presenting a key opportunity to help equip and empower Christian high school and college students to respond in a loving, Christ-centered way when they encounter controversial topics in their public schools.

Many public schools are becoming more aggressive in promoting confusing sexual topics to kids. College students have also encountered one-sided discrimination, even to the point of getting bad grades on class assignments when they've expressed Biblical beliefs about marriage. This can often create a challenging situation for Christian teens.

But the good news is that when darkness increases, it creates an opportunity for the light of God's love to shine even brighter. That's why Focus on the Family has designed a national event--Day of Dialogue™--to equip students (age 13 and older) to express their Biblical viewpoint in a loving and redemptive way. Learn more about the event at DayofDialogue.com. If you have high school or college age students in your home--or you are a student yourself and have friends that are--we invite you to let them know about the Day of Dialogue™, happening on Monday, April 18, 2011.

The Day of Dialogue™ event encourages student-initiated conversations about the fact that God cares about every detail of students' lives, including their relationships, their sexuality and their souls. It challenges students to reflect the true model presented by Jesus Christ in the Bible--who didn't back away from speaking truth, but neither held back in pouring out His incredible, compassionate love for hurting and vulnerable people.

If you share this heart and vision for equipping Christian teens and college students, Focus on the Family encourages you to:

1. Let the teens and college students in your life know about the Day of Dialogue™ event and encourage them to sign up to participate. Students can sign up as an individual or a group at the registration page.
   
2. Students and parents are invited to "like" our Day of Dialogue Facebook® page and leave comments.
   
3. Invite your church pastors--especially youth ministers--to make announcements about the opportunity to participate in the Day of Dialogue to their high school and college groups, in addition to posting about it on their Facebook® page and church website.

For more information, you can e-mail studentvoices@focusonthefamily.com or call the Day of Dialogue phone number: 888-317-5611.

Juvenile Justice and Brain Development

A Sunday front page headline screams, “THROWING AWAY THE KEY ON TEEN OFFENDERS: DEBATE SWIRLS ON TREATING JUVENILES AS ADULTS IN VA. IS THE STATE GOING TOO FAR?” detailing stories of teens sentenced to decades of prison time for their various crimes. “More than 400 juveniles went to prison in Virginia from 2005 through 2009, according to the Department of Corrections.”

The story cites Dr. Steven Berkowitz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, who describes the transition from the rehabilitative model to more of a punitive model for juvenile justice, and refers to the growing evidence that brain development is not complete in adolescences until well past the age of majority. This effects judgment and decision making, giving some scientific grounding for some of the “enormous mistakes” that adolescents make. Could an understanding of juvenile brain development help families and courts to restore and rehabilitate juvenile offenders?

Ellen Lloyd, Regent University Juris Doctor 2011 Candidate, also a former juvenile probation officer and foster parent from Santa Fe, New Mexico, has pursued research in this area as it relates to juvenile law, following up on her University of Colorado undergraduate work in psychology where she focused on neurological and biological psychology, and her University of New Mexico Masters in Public Administration specializing in the management of government and non-profit agencies. She writes, "Although it has always been clear that children and adults are different, it has only been in the last twenty-five years that the understanding of these differences has passed from psychological theorizing to developmentally based understanding. With the advent of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology neurologists can now watch the brain function while subjects perform different tasks and their discoveries, while amazing, add credence to what every parent of a teenager already knew; kids don’t think like adults do."

Her work cites to Dr. Jay N. Giedd, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health who specializes in brain imaging, who has noted that:

Across cultures and millennia, the teen years have been noted as a time of dramatic changes in body and behavior. During this time most people successfully navigate the transition from depending upon family to becoming a self-sufficient adult member of the society. However, adolescence is also a time of increased conflicts with parents, mood volatility, risky behavior and, for some, the emergence of psychopathology. The physical changes associated with puberty are conspicuous and well described. The brain’s transformation is every bit as dramatic but, to the unaided eye, is visible only in terms of new and different behavior.

In Part I of her article, Lloyd takes a brief look at the history of the juvenile justice system noting the change in focus brought about by several landmark federal cases, all of which infused due process protections into a largely discretionary and ideally rehabilitative system. She notes that most recently in Roper v. Simmons the United States Supreme Court outlawed the juvenile death penalty based in large part on neurological research showing that adolescent brains are not fully developed in some important and significant ways. Part II examines crime trends with special attention to the age of the offenders as statistics show a consistent spike in offense rates for those between fifteen and twenty-five years of age. Part III explains this spike by examining, in fairly simplistic terms, the growth and development of the adolescent brain. "During adolescence important changes take place in the brain, especially in the pre-frontal cortex, which effect how juveniles process information and act and react within their environments." The article then turns to policy implications for the juvenile justice system, noting what programs are most beneficial and effective in juvenile probation and sentencing toward rehabilitation, while also making suggestions for "helping juveniles survive adolescence and, hopefully, stay out of the juvenile justice system entirely."

An understanding of juvenile brain development may indeed help families and courts to restore and rehabilitate juvenile offenders, and more adequately move into adulthood.

Read the entire article here.