From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Pennsylvania’s highest court did not, however, agree with Republicans that provisional ballots should not be granted to people whose original mail ballots were too flawed to be counted.

Mail ballots submitted without a date will not be counted in Pennsylvania after all, the state’s highest court ruled Friday after a lower court declared they should be accepted.

The Epoch Times reports that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania Republican Party’s emergency request for a stay of a appellate court ruling two days earlier that the “free and equal elections clause” of the Pennsylvania Constitution required the Philadelphia Board of Elections to count a set of undated envelopes in a September special election for a state House seat.

While those envelopes did not directly concern the 2024 presidential election, if the ruling stood it would have had major ramifications for the race between Republican former President Donald Trump and Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris. Therefore, the justices made clear that the appellate decision “shall not be applied to the November 5, 2024 General Election.”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s election decisions have not all been favorable to Republicans, however; it previously ruled that Pennsylvania voters will be allowed to cast provisional ballots in the event of a problem with the mail ballots they already cast, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene Friday.

“The actual provisional ballots contain no identifying information, only a vote,” GOP attorneys argued, to no avail. “Once ballots are separated from their outer envelopes, there is no way to retroactively figure out which ballots were illegally cast. In other words, once the egg is scrambled, it cannot be unscrambled.”

Pennsylvania holds 19 electoral votes (down one from prior elections due to redistricting), and is believed by many to be a crucial swing state that could be enough to decide the election’s outcome. The RealClearPolitics polling average for the state places Trump in the lead at just 0.4 percent, while RaceToTheWH’s average has Harris ahead by a scant 0.3 percent. Trump won the state in 2016; outgoing Democrat President Joe Biden claimed it in 2020.

Election integrity has long been an issue in American politics, but the controversy significantly intensified when the 2020 presidential election was marked by widespread election irregularities and numerous allegations that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden against Donald Trump, bolstered by the dramatic expansion of voting by mail in the wake of COVID-19.

Twenty-eight states relaxed their mail ballot rules in 2020, contributing to a 17-million vote increase from 2016. In addition to mail ballots generally being less secure than in-person votes, four of those states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – changed their rules without legislative consent. Those four alone comprised 56 of Biden’s electoral votes, more than enough to decide the victor.

At the same time, attempts to prove the election had been stolen were undermined by judges who dismissed some claims on process issues without ever considering their merits as well as flawed legal briefs by election challengers and dramatic examples of “smoking guns” that never panned out. Nevertheless, the controversy did lead to 14 states tightening their election rules over the following two years.

Christopher F. Rufo

In a job posting for a security escort position at the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos, for example, applicants are told that “[t]he U.S. Mission in Nigeria supports Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA),” and that “[a]ll genders are welcome to apply.” Some two-thirds of the job summary is dedicated to DEI, as if U.S. security officers should be more concerned with gender pronouns than terrorist attacks.

The U.S. Department of State is charged with advancing American interests abroad through complex and delicate diplomatic missions, as well as maintaining the safety of those missions and the Americans serving them.

The institution’s lodestar should be the national interest, but under President Joe Biden, the State Department has demoted that critical objective in favor of a new global agenda: to spread radical gender theory to foreign nations.

The shift began at the top. President Biden and, in turn, the apparatus beneath him led America’s leftward charge on the world stage. Upon taking office in 2021, the administration used the previous year’s racial unrest as a pretext to issue a slew of executive orders and memoranda entrenching left-wing ideologies in all levels of the federal government, under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI.

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.

If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

The policy’s most visible expression was Secretary Antony Blinken’s 2021 authorization allowing American embassies to fly rainbow flags. This symbolic gesture was just the tip of the iceberg, however. Under Blinken’s leadership, State has woven critical theory into the fabric of America’s foreign policy. “I want to be crystal clear about this,” the secretary said upon appointing the agency’s first chief diversity officer in June 2021. “Promoting diversity and inclusion is the job of every single member of this department. It’s mission critical.”

To that end, Blinken spearheaded the adoption of an internal diversity plan that commits the department to hiring “a workforce that reflects the diversity of the United States . . . and implementing a comprehensive recruitment plan that targets underrepresented groups”; conducting a sophisticated “DEIA Climate Survey”; and, bizarrely, producing a “crowdsourced digital storytelling campaign” called #FacingDiplomacy, a self-flagellating chronicle of “the historic impact of discrimination in the Department.”

Material incentives ensure compliance with this official ideology: the “advancement of DEIA” is now considered “as an element for all employees as part of their job performance criteria, career advancement opportunities, and senior performance pay.”

The heart of the department’s effort, though, is not to increase adherence at home but to spread it abroad. State recruited a cadre of gender activists to entrench these theories into foreign policy.

One key figure is gender activist Jessica Stern, whom the president appointed as special envoy to advance the human rights of LGBTI+ persons. She was previously the executive director of OutRight Action International, helped to found the United Nations LGBTI Core Group, and was responsible for the first UN resolution to include the term “gender identity.”

Another key figure is Zakiya Carr Johnson, who stepped in as the department’s chief diversity officer earlier this year. Like Stern, Johnson also has a history of activism, having spent six years at a left-wing NGO in Brazil, as well as at other “inclusive” organizations, such as Atlantic Fellows, ODARA Solutions, and her own start-up, Black Women Disrupt.

These women are not figureheads. They aggressively press gender theory into foreign policy. Johnson, in particular, regularly promotes the State Department’s ideological agenda on social media, spotlighting her exchange with the Brazilian high representative for gender issues, meeting with the Chilean ambassador to applaud his “#FeministForeignPolicy,” or speaking at the Colombian embassy about “diversity” and “inclusion.”

The diversity agenda has been translated to the day-to-day operations at embassies around the world. Some embassies are even screening security positions for adherence to DEI. In a job posting for a security escort position at the U.S. Consulate General in Lagos, for example, applicants are told that “[t]he U.S. Mission in Nigeria supports Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA),” and that “[a]ll genders are welcome to apply.” Some two-thirds of the job summary is dedicated to DEI, as if U.S. security officers should be more concerned with gender pronouns than terrorist attacks.

Inside the embassies, gender has become a near obsession. State’s latest annual LGBTQI+ progress report lists countless present and future efforts across all foreign agencies to make the world safe for queer theory, from “Pride Events at Headquarters” to “Gender Equity in the Mexican Workplace.” Among these is a department-wide partnership with the Global Equality Fund, a public-private entity “dedicated to advancing and defending the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons around the world” that has directed funds to 116 “grassroots” LGBTQI+ organizations in 73 countries.

State itself asserts that U.S. diplomatic efforts should reflect progressive ideology. In a special report on “DEIA Promotion” by the department’s advisory commission on public diplomacy, State evaluates “how U.S. missions adapt existing programs to DEIA principles,” which are to inform “all aspects of the Department’s policymaking as well as efforts to address barriers to opportunity for individuals historically and currently burdened by inequality and systemic discrimination.” Realpolitik, in other words, should give way to critical theory.

These efforts raise a critical question: Does gender theory advance the U.S.’s national interests? The answer appears to be no. But that is hardly an obstacle for State’s gender activists. They want to hang the rainbow flag throughout the benighted parts of the world. This mission trumps all others.

This article was originally published in City Journal