The 2024 United States general election is set to be held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.

Roughly 150 million American citizens will cast their ballots on or before election day. They will elect the 47th president of the United States, 34 U.S. Senators, 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and many state and local officials.

Voters in 10 states will also decide whether their state constitutions should be amended to include the so-called right to abortion.

When preparing to cast their ballot this November, readers should consider eight key issues, including:

• Judges
• Court Packing
• Religious Freedom
• Life

Christian citizens should consider a candidate’s character when voting, but they should also remember that a candidate’s policy reflects their character.

Andrew T. Walker, an Ethics & Public Theology Professor at Southern Seminary, recently wrote about the importance of policy in World.

“Policy — the type of policy that has real-world implications on others — may be a more accurate barometer of one’s deepest convictions that have a formative or deformative effect on character than even the words that come out of one’s mouth,” he writes. In other words, “Policy is character, too.”

Whistleblower Vanessa Sivadge testified in a Texas Senate hearing on Medicaid oversight last week, urging members of the Health and Human Services committee to investigate Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) for committing Medicaid fraud.

A former endocrinology nurse at TCH, Sivadge observed some patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria paid for opposite-sex hormone treatments with the hospital’s Medicaid plan.

Texas Medicaid and Medicare don’t pay for “sex changes” or opposite-sex hormones.

Sivadge shared her concerns at the hearing, which invited experts and members of the public to recommend ways Texas lawmakers could reduce Medicaid fraud, waste and abuse.

“The hospital’s transgender program treated patients for gender dysphoria solely with puberty-blocking and sex-change hormones that are not covered by Texas Medicaid,” Sivadge told the senators.

“But the hospital billed for them using false diagnoses for other disorders that the patients did not have.”

These alleged frauds include a TCH doctor diagnosing a gender-confused woman with testosterone deficiency and hypogonadism to get Medicaid to pay for her testosterone injections.

The good scholars with Institute for Family Studies (IFS) have given us another great article entitled “Reclaiming the Truth About Marriage.”

The author, a young woman, who has unfortunately experienced divorce in her family of origin and in her own marriage that died from her husband’s infidelity and abuse, calls on us to resist the lie that marriage is hopeless. She laments that “the sentiment that marriage is harmful to individuals has only grown in recent years.”

She adds, “Proponents of this anti-marriage culture claim that the institution of marriage is an antiquated idea, essentially useless to modern men and women.”

The author documents what too many of us have seen, that this sentiment is rampant across social media.

But as a young woman, she has not lost hope. And neither should we.

There are strong reasons to believe in marriage and its ability to give us a better life than singleness, serial dating and cohabitation.

First, while marriage rates have been sadly declining in America, so has the U.S. divorce rate. And most Christians marrying today have a very high likelihood of remaining relatively happily married for life. This fact should be a great encouragement.

Second, marriage continues to lead to demonstrably increased levels of happiness, as Daily Citizen has explained from cutting edge research.

Culture watchers can be forgiven for their weariness. Each day or week seems to bring with it a new outrageous and outlandish claim or development.

With a straight face, officials declare that late term abortions don’t happen, that innocent babies born alive after failed abortions don’t exist — even though the gruesome and grizzly facts suggest otherwise.

Even though women who have survived failed abortions travel the country, testifying to the brutality and coldness of the horror.

We read of girls forfeiting games rather than playing against males masquerading as females. We wonder what came of all the fierce and once outspoken feminists, especially as the majority now remain silent.

Language is now fungible, and gender-specific terminology is frowned upon or outright forbidden.  We’re told to use inclusive terminology: It’s “caregiving” instead of “parenting,” “bodyfeeding” or “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” please say “folks” rather than “ladies and gentlemen.”

Doctors are mutilating perfectly healthy bodies — but we’re told to describe it as “gender- affirming care.” There is nothing caring about permanently damaging the body of a confused person.

It’s total and complete wicked nonsense — and yet we’re commanded to salute and carry on as if it’s common sense.