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Opinion

Quebec’s ban on gender-neutral bathrooms in schools is good news

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6 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

When one school in Alberta decided to bring in gender-neutral bathrooms back in 2017, many students avoided them because, as any idiot knows, boys and girls generally feel uncomfortable doing their business in a stall next to a member of the opposite sex.

It is still sometimes surreal to consider what constitutes a news story in 2024. Imagine telling your grandparents, or even your parents 20 years ago, that it would be breaking news across the board — Global News, the Globe and Mail, the national broadcaster — that a provincial government had issued a directive … that bathrooms and locker rooms in schools be specifically designated for either boys or girls.

But yet here we are. On May 1, Quebec’s new rules banning the implementation of shared, “gender-neutral” or “all-gender” bathrooms came into effect, the result of a 2023 petition to protest the plan to make all bathrooms gender neutral at D’Iberville high school in Rouyn-Noranda. At the time, Premier François Legault commissioned Family Minister Suzanne Roy with creating an advisory committee to do research; recommendations are expected in the winter of 2025.

But Education Minister Bernard Drainville, perhaps realizing how ridiculous it is that an advisory committee needs to be created — and then needs a year — to determine whether or not teenage boys and girls need their own bathrooms, decided to go ahead and “correct the course,” citing the need protect young girls from discomfort and harassment. When the news broke that a Quebec high school in Rouyn-Noranda was starting work on gender-neutral bathrooms, Drainville decided to address the issue via directive.

The very existence of such a sane, common-sense directive reveals how insane our culture has become; mandating male and female bathrooms is not the sort of thing one used to have to do, explicitly. The directive also stipulates that any student wishing to use an individual bathroom must be able to do so. The directive, Drainville says, is needed. “It’s a question of well-being, privacy, and respect for private life,” he said.

The CBC, of course, promptly hunted down some LGBT activists who predictably oppose the policy. “(The directive) is not well balanced because it stigmatizes kids that are a bit different,” said Mona Greenbaum, co-director of LGBT+ Family Coalition. “We know that from all sorts of research that it’s very harmful for young people to not have their gender identity affirmed.” The most recent research, of course, is the UK National Health Service’s Cass Review, which in fact concluded that the so-called “affirmative model” is “very harmful for young people.”

Jennifer Maccarone, a frequently hysterical LGBT activist and Member of the National Assembly, serves as the Liberal Party critic for “the 2SLGBTQIA+ community,” also weighed in, stating that the directive contradicted a 2021 guide for schools published by the Ministry of Education that supported the idea of gender-neutral spaces. “Does the government still stand by their document?” Maccarone demanded to know during a news conference. Drainville’s directive is pretty clear, so it would seem the answer to her question is “no.”

It is because of folks like Maccarone that such directives are even needed in the first place. When one school in Alberta decided to bring in gender-neutral bathrooms back in 2017, many students avoided them because, as any idiot knows, boys and girls generally feel uncomfortable doing their business in a stall next to a member of the opposite sex. Lineups began to form outside the gender-specific bathrooms, and students trekked all the way across the school to avoid using the gender-neutral bathrooms. Girls even risked dehydration and bladder infections rather than use bathrooms with males.

Of course, none of that matters to Maccarone and the LGBT activists. Their agenda is far more important than the comfort and safety of students — especially girls. Their complaints, and their stories, are never even considered. Fortunately, it appears that saner heads are finally prevailing.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.

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Autism

RFK Jr. Completely Shatters the Media’s Favorite Lie About Autism

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The Vigilant Fox's avatar The Vigilant Fox

They say autism is rising because of “better diagnosis”—but RFK Jr. just blew that narrative wide open. He brought the hard data and dropped one undeniable truth the denialists can’t explain.

HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. appeared on Hannity Thursday evening and unloaded on the predominant autism narrative. It started with a bombshell reveal from Kennedy’s own childhood.

Hannity asked: “What was the number when you were a kid—and what do you think is going on?”

Kennedy replied: “There’s really good data on that.”

He pointed to one of the largest studies ever conducted—900,000 children in Wisconsin, published in a top-tier medical journal.

“It looked at 900,000 kids. It was published in a high-gravitas journal, peer-reviewed study, and they found the rate to be 0.7 out of 10,000.”

That’s less than 1 in 10,000. Today? It’s around 1 in 31.

Let that sink in.

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That’s when Kennedy sounded the alarm on what’s happening now—and why it’s so catastrophic. He said the rise isn’t just in frequency—it’s in severity.

“Two years ago, it was 1 in 36. The CDC data we released this week shows 1 in 31,” Kennedy said.

“The worst state is California,” Kennedy continued, “which actually has the best collection methodologies. So they actually, probably reflect what we’re seeing nationwide.”

“In California, it’s 1 in every 20 kids, and 1 in every 12.5 boys,” he explained.

Even worse, he said the numbers are likely underreported in minority communities. And for many kids, the symptoms are devastating:

“About 25% of the population of those kids with autism, about 25% of them are nonverbal, nontoilet trained,” Kennedy explained.

“They have all of these stereotypical behaviors, the head banging, biting, toe walking, stimming, and that population is growing higher and higher.”

“It’s becoming a larger percentage, so we’re seeing many more cases that are now linked to severe intellectual disability.”

He says it’s a glaring red warning sign—and it’s past time to start acting on it.

And this was the moment that Kennedy took a flamethrower to the media narrative about autism. He shattered the core excuse we’ve all been fed—that this epidemic isn’t real, that it’s just a change in how we count it.

He’s not buying it.

“The media has bought into this industry canard, this mythology, that we’re just seeing more autism because we’re noticing it more. We’re better at recognizing it or there’s been changing diagnostic criteria.”

But the scientific literature, Kennedy said, says otherwise.

“There is study after study in the scientific literature going back, and they decided that the literature going back says decades that says that’s not true.”

He then cited a major investigation by California’s own lawmakers.

“In fact, the California legislature… asked the Mind Institute at UC Davis to look exactly at that topic. They [asked], is it real or are we just noticing it more? The Mind Institute came back and said, ‘Absolutely this is a real epidemic. This is something we’ve never seen before.’

And he made it painfully clear:

“Anybody with common sense, Sean, would notice that, because the autism—this epidemic is only happening in our children. It’s not happening in people who are our age. And if it was better recognition, you’d see it in 70-year-old men.”

But we don’t.

And after laying out the data, dismantling the media narrative, and exposing the severity of the crisis, Kennedy concluded with a clarion call to get to the bottom of this epidemic.

That’s why he says it’s time to dig deeper—leave no stone unturned, and we may have answers sooner than you think.

“President Trump asked me to find out what’s causing it,” he told Hannity.

“And I am approaching that agnostically. We are looking at everything, we are going to do, we’re going to be very transparent in how we design the studies.”

To get real answers, he’s farming the research out to top institutions across the country—with full transparency from day one.

“We’re going to farm the studies out to 15 premier research groups from all over the country. And we’re going to be transparent about our protocols, about the data sets, and then every study will have to be replicated.”

The list of possible factors is long—and nothing is being ruled out, Kennedy explained.

“We’re going to look at mold. We’re going to look at the age of parents. We’re going to look at food and food additives. We’re going to look at pesticides and toxic exposures. We’re going to look at medicines. We’re going to look at vaccines. We’re going to look at everything.”

When asked how long it would take, Kennedy didn’t miss a beat.

“I think we’ll have some preliminary answers in six months. It will take us probably a year from then before we can have definitive answers because a lot of the studies will not go out until the end of the summer.”

For the first time in decades, someone is asking the hard questions—and demanding real answers.

This time, nothing is off-limits.


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Business

Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan Ramp Up Pressure On Google Parent Company To Deal With ‘Censorship’

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Andi Shae Napier

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan are turning their attention to Google over concerns that the tech giant is censoring users and infringing on Americans’ free speech rights.

Google’s parent company Alphabet, which also owns YouTube, appears to be the GOP’s next Big Tech target. Lawmakers seem to be turning their attention to Alphabet after Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta ended its controversial fact-checking program in favor of a Community Notes system similar to the one used by Elon Musk’s X.

Cruz recently informed reporters of his and fellow senators’ plans to protect free speech. 

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“Stopping online censorship is a major priority for the Commerce Committee,” Cruz said, as reported by Politico. “And we are going to utilize every point of leverage we have to protect free speech online.”

Following his meeting with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai last month, Cruz told the outlet, “Big Tech censorship was the single most important topic.”

Jordan, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, sent subpoenas to Alphabet and other tech giants such as RumbleTikTok and Apple in February regarding “compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts” with the intent to discover how foreign governments, or the Biden administration, have limited Americans’ access to free speech.

“Throughout the previous Congress, the Committee expressed concern over YouTube’s censorship of conservatives and political speech,” Jordan wrote in a letter to Pichai in March. “To develop effective legislation, such as the possible enactment of new statutory limits on the executive branch’s ability to work with Big Tech to restrict the circulation of content and deplatform users, the Committee must first understand how and to what extent the executive branch coerced and colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor speech.”

Jordan subpoenaed tech CEOs in 2023 as well, including Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Tim Cook of Apple and Pichai, among others.

Despite the recent action against the tech giant, the battle stretches back to President Donald Trump’s first administration. Cruz began his investigation of Google in 2019 when he questioned Karan Bhatia, the company’s Vice President for Government Affairs & Public Policy at the time, in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Cruz brought forth a presentation suggesting tech companies, including Google, were straying from free speech and leaning towards censorship.

Even during Congress’ recess, pressure on Google continues to mount as a federal court ruled Thursday that Google’s ad-tech unit violates U.S. antitrust laws and creates an illegal monopoly. This marks the second antitrust ruling against the tech giant as a different court ruled in 2024 that Google abused its dominance of the online search market.

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