When the Reverend Dr. Samuel Shoemaker passed away back in 1963, he was revered and remembered as a courageous cleric who didn’t shy away from controversy — and who didn’t hesitate to call out comfort-seeking Christians.

“The Church has, to a large extent, succumbed to the wave of materialism which judges everything by size and quantity, instead of character and quality,” he once warned.

Credited with helping inspire and set in motion Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Shoemaker was a fearless leader determined to use his influence and platforms to make a difference.

He once declared: “Religion is not meant to save us from trouble, but to save us from defeat.”

If Shoemaker worked overtime to influence and encourage Christians to take action, antagonists and agitators of Christianity work tirelessly to intimidate believers and discourage them from saying or doing anything of substance in the public square.

Advocates who object to expressions of faith in the public square regularly refer to the mystical, non-existent wall that is said to separate church and state. This unofficial doctrine dates to a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1802 to the Danbury Baptist Association.

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State,” he said.

The nation of Canada has one of the most expansive euthanasia regimes in the world, and it’s about to get even worse. Starting next month, unless the Canadian Parliament intervenes, Canadians will be able to kill themselves for the sole reason of a mental illness diagnosis.

Physician-assisted suicide was first legalized by the Canadian Parliament in 2016. Since then, 44,959 people have chosen to kill themselves via physician-assisted suicide as of 2022.

The nation’s Fourth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying discloses that there were 13,241 euthanasia deaths in 2022 alone. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program is growing at a shocking annual rate — with a 31.2% year-over-year increase in MAID deaths from 2021 to 2022.

According to Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, the number of euthanasia deaths in Canada likely increased to approximately 16,000 in 2023. That would bring the total deaths in Canada from euthanasia to over 60,000.

When the Canada Parliament first legalized physician-assisted suicide, it stipulated that Canadians must meet all three of the following criteria to be eligible for MAID:

• Serious and incurable illness, disease or disability.
• Advanced state of irreversible decline in capability.
• Experiencing enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.

Stories about males who identify as females are becoming so commonplace that mainstream media often ignores them.

But across the nation — and around the globe — more males are pushing girls and women off sports teams and off winners’ podiums.

In addition, these boys and men enter sex-segregated spaces, like showers, locker rooms and restrooms, violating women’s privacy and threatening their safety.

Here’s a roundup of five such stories, followed by some ways you can help to stop this growing trend.

In Massachusetts, a male, high school field hockey player, identifying as a girl, hit a ball so hard it knocked out a female player’s teeth.

Outkick reports:

“The ICONS X account, representing an organization dedicated to protecting women’s sports, posted the video and tagged NCAA President and former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, asking him to ‘listen to the screams.’”

In Toronto, Canada, a 50-year-old male has been competing in swimming events against young teen girls since 2019, the Toronto Sun reports.

Parents of young girls “put up makeshift towel-tenting apparatus so no one could see their daughters and they could not see the person with male anatomy changing with them.”

Pew Research Center reports that an overwhelming majority (78%) of young adults under age 30 believe it is wholly acceptable for unmarried couples to live together with no intentions of marrying.

Many people (48%) believe living together leads to more successful marriages, and a stronger majority (63%) of young adults think this is true.

Of course, this could not be more wrong.

Top academic research over the last several decades consistently shows the precise opposite. Cohabiting prior to marriage actually leads to much higher risk of divorce and less healthy relationships.

This is even more disturbing when we consider that over 75% of all marriages entered today are preceded by some form of premarital cohabitation.

Some of the most powerful recent research on the negative outcomes of cohabitation comes from Stanford University.

All things being equal, the Stanford scholars conclude “the couples who had cohabited before marriage had a substantially higher rate of divorce than couples who had never cohabited” and “the marriage stability disadvantage of premarital cohabitation emerges most strongly after 5 years of marital duration and remained roughly constant over time and over marriage cohorts.”

No, cohabitation offers no encouraging prospects of contributing to lasting successful marriage. Just the opposite.