Newly seated Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy has already gotten busy improving his department, and America by ensuring the nation’s traffic policy protects and promotes families.

A new order issued by Secretary Duffy requires all DOT policies, programs and activities, as much as possible, to be determined and executed relative to their “benefits for families and communities.”

To this end, Secretary Duffy declares DOT “shall prioritize projects and goals” focusing on helping “families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

This is a profoundly wise federal policy development that Focus on the Family strongly supports.

Communities with higher-than-average marriage and birth rates are clearly some of the strongest communities in our nation because they are more likely to capitalize on the protective and life-enhancing benefits of marriage.

Decades of university-based social science and medical research consistently demonstrate that children benefit in every important measure of well-being when they are born to and raised by their own married mother and father.

Growing, healthy, thriving children are the future of our nation.

Focus on the Family and Trail Life USA, a church-based, Christ-centered alternative to the Boy Scouts, are partnering up to bring families a free resource breaking down the cultural challenges facing young men.

“By just about every measure of social well-being, young males are in crisis,” the organizations wrote in a joint statement, referring to statistics showing young men are:

• Significantly less likely to enroll in or graduate from college than women.
• Four-times more likely to commit suicide than women.
• Far more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol than women.

Young men’s social interaction has steadily decreased over three decades. Nearly half of surveyed teen males say they’ve never dated.

Most report having three friends, half of what their peers reported three decades ago.

Male participation in the work force has also decreased.

In 2022, economist Nicholas Eberstadt conducted a post-pandemic follow-up to his book Men Without Work, finding:

“In terms of work rates for the United States today for guys, we’re at about a 1937 level, even though we’ve got over 10 million unfilled jobs in the country.”

Years ago, the late radio talk legend Rush Limbaugh exposed the mainstream media’s penchant for coordinated messaging by stringing together soundbites echoing the same word or phrase uttered by dozens of national hosts concerning a particular topic on a specific day.

It was as if a talking points memo had been faxed or emailed from a single source. It very well may have been.

Well, as Ronald Reagan liked to say, “There they go again.”

It’s known as the “Illusory Truth Effect” — the idea that by repeating a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it, and sometimes even the people who are saying it.

The new phrase of the week is “constitutional crisis” and it’s being repeated over and over by liberal pundits upset with a wide range of efforts currently being employed to reform the government.

In fact, #constitutionalcrisis was trending on X Tuesday morning with tens of thousands of references to the phrase. Leading the charge is The New York Times, which despite its waning influence, remains the source for many radical talking points. In many ways, it’s the left’s bible.

To be sure, since being sworn in on January 20, President Trump has issued hundreds of executive orders and made many decisions that he and his team believe fall within his executive authority.

Garnering particular attention and significant angst from numerous camps has been the President’s efforts to cut government waste and uncover potential corruption.

The Founding Fathers knew that morality and religion are essential ingredients for free and healthy societies, particularly in constitutional republics.

Our nation’s second president, John Adams, in his 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia, wrote,

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

As Adams argues, religion and morality are necessary components in the absence of a strong, overbearing federal government.

Religion restrains, guides and regulates the conduct of the people, so the federal government doesn’t have to.

In our day, however, millions of Americans have discarded religion and its moral constraints altogether. According to a survey by the Discovery Institute, many leave because of ostensible conflicts between science and religion.

Nearly 40% of those surveyed who were raised as mainline Protestants, but now claim no religious affiliation, believe that “modern science provides religion is superstitious.”

Additionally, 31% say this belief is an “important reason” they became unaffiliated.