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Welcome to the Family Beacon, your source for news and commentary on life, family, and religious freedom in Minnesota and beyond! You now have three ways to get our updates: by watching our podcast on YouTube or Facebook, or listening to it on Spotify or other platforms, or by reading our top stories below!

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On the podcast: Getting Answers from an Abortion Clinic

Join Moses Bratrud and Grace Evans for the 2nd episode of Minnesota Family Council's Family Beacon podcast. We called an abortion clinic - listen to the podcast to hear how that went!

Make sure you subscribe for new episodes every Friday, so you can cut through the noise, get the facts, and stand for TRUTH in our culture.

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Minnesota Family Council Investigates Discrepancy in State Abortion Numbers

Featured on the podcast

Whole Women’s Health was one of the largest providers of abortion in Minnesota, at least until 2020. For at least six months in 2020, the state of Minnesota’s abortion report showed that Whole Women’s Health committed zero abortions.

Eagle-eyed pro-life activists, including Pro-Life Action Ministry’s Brian Gibson, quickly realized that couldn’t be true. After all, pro-life activists were outside Whole Women’s Health every day last year - they knew women had entered the premises to receive abortions.

Abortion reporting is taken seriously in Minnesota, with the potential of financial penalties for a late or inaccurate report. So did Whole Women’s Health fail to report accurate numbers? Or did the state garble the report?

I wanted to get information straight from the source, so I called Whole Women’s Heath. After a long day, I was finally able to get Jackie Dilworth, Director of Marketing and Communications for the abortion chain, to pick up the phone.

She admitted that there had been a “reporting error” and that corrected numbers had been submitted to the state of Minnesota. With a little prompting, she even revealed to me the corrected number: 1,256 abortions. Only 137 are listed on the states’s abortion report, meaning there are more than 1,000 missing abortions.

This is a difference between a record low for abortions in Minnesota, as we reported earlier, with 9,108 included in the states’s report, and an increase over 2019’s total of 9,910. Abortion in Minnesota has once again crossed the 10,000 mark. With the real totals now revealed by Whole Women’s Health, we now estimate that the state’s total for 2020 was 10,227.

Minnesota Family Council Responds to Star Tribune on CRT

Below is our response to the Star Tribune’s recent claims on critical race theory in Minnesota schools. The article in question remains unaltered as of this writing.

To the editor,

Critical race theory is controversial because it makes race and racial oppression the central fact of American identity, threatening to divide Americans by color just as profoundly as Jim Crow-era legislation once did. This is the root of its deep unpopularity in the American electorate, and the reason why GOP operatives are making it a “wedge issue” in advance of the 2022 elections.

Moreover, critical race theory is not only found in academia. It has made its way even to local schools. How then can Star Tribune’s Briana Bierschbach state in the July 18th issue of the paper that “Critical race theory is not being taught in Minnesota's K-12 classrooms?” (“GOP teeing up critical race theory for midterms in Minnesota, across the nation”, July 17, 2021) The paper must clarify or retract this statement to avoid creating a false impression in its readers.

To give only three examples of CRT in Minnesota classrooms, in late June, Minnesota Public Radio reported on critical race theory in Pequot Lakes Public Schools (“Inside one Minnesota school district’s battle over an equity training program,” MPR News, June 30, 2021), and in September, MinnPost reported on educators in Saint Paul Public Schools stumbling over themselves to embrace it (“How Minnesota school leaders are advancing equity work in a shaky back-to-school environment,” MinnPost, September 11, 2020). Even more recently, an op-ed appeared in the Star Tribune only a few days ago by a social studies teacher from Robbinsdale, Bill Boegeman, who lays out in detail how he brings critical race theory to the classroom (“What critical race theory looks like in my social studies classroom”, July 16, 2021)

To be sure, advocates of critical race theory do not often accept the term as readily as Boegaman has done. Instead, they play a shell game, dubbing their efforts “equity training programs,” (Pequot Lakes Schools) or “anti-racism efforts” (Saint Paul Public Schools), and accuse their opponents of fogging the issue when they point out that these things are textbook critical race theory.

Virginia Parents, School Board Reject State's Radical Transgender Policies

Image via WCYB News

Parents and school board members in Russell County, Virginia rejected the Virginia Department of Education’s radical transgender policies in a unanimous vote last Friday. The policies were enacted by the VDOE after the Virginia legislature passed a bill mandating the change. However, as the Family Foundation of Virginia has pointed out, the policies required by the legislature present an unconstitutional attack on freedom of religion, free speech, parental rights, and the privacy and safety of students. The Family Foundation is also part of a lawsuit challenging the VDOE’s unconstitutional policies.

VDOE’s model policy would allow students to access restrooms and locker rooms on the basis of their “gender identity” rather than their biological sex, require students, teachers, and staff to refer to students using their “preferred pronouns,” disregarding any religious objections they may have, and event encourages schools to conceal information from the parents of students who are struggling with gender dysphoria and help students “transition” behind their parents’ backs. At a Russell County Board of Education meeting last month, parents pointed out that these policies are not rooted in science but are “a mandatory promotion of a sexualized agenda.”

The VDOE’s model policy violates the First Amendment by requiring students, teachers, and staff to use “preferred pronouns” of students who identify as members of the opposite sex. Under the policy, failure to do so would be considered harassment, meaning that anyone in the school who holds to a biblical view of sexuality and chooses not to violate their conscience by using pronouns that are not consistent with the truth of a person’s biological sex would be viewed as violating Virginia’s anti-bullying policies.