Author, columnist, speaker
The Return of Common Sense and Sexual Sanity
By Robert Knight
Common sense is making a comeback.
It took a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, but licensed counselors will soon be able to help minor clients, at least in Colorado, recover their natural sexuality instead of being forced by law to steer their clients into sexual confusion.
The justices didn’t address the sheer immorality of such laws, under which thousands of kids have been subjected to cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and mutilating, irreversible sterilizations. The court was not asked to do so.
The plaintiff, Kaley Chiles, had urged the court to affirm her right to engage in talk counseling with her clients, making it a freedom of speech case.
The court agreed, ruling 8-1 that a Colorado law amounted to viewpoint discrimination since it prohibited her from counseling clients away from instead of toward LGBTQ behavior.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who famously was stumped when asked what a woman is, wrote a dissent. She insisted that while people can go gay or trans, they can never go straight. Ever. She is sure about it.
This would be news to countless people who know firsthand that it’s not only possible to change but that reparative counseling is a Godsend.
The Court’s ruling in Chiles v. Salazar came right after the International Olympic Committee concluded that women are entitled to their own sports events without facing bigger, stronger, and faster males who can hurt them and steal their medals.
In another common-sense move, the NCAA in February barred male athletes from competing in female events, complying with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump.
If this keeps up, we should expect an announcement soon from the National Academy of Sciences that gravity is still in effect and the earth is round.
About half of the states, all run by Democrats, have laws that say therapists may steer sexually confused kids into gay sex and transgenderism, but not away from it—even if the client wants that.
The statutes are framed as bans on “conversion therapy,” a term invented to cast reparative talk counseling in a negative light.
Even more dishonest are the terms “gender-affirming care” and “sex assigned at birth.” The first describes the exact opposite of what it does, which is to deny a person’s actual sex and instead promote a delusion.
The second term conveys the idea that no one is really born male or female but gets assigned a sex by a hidebound medical establishment. From this comes the fiction that gender is a state of mind that has nothing to do with biology.
All of this got mainstreamed thanks to the elite intelligentsia’s abandonment of common sense. Since the 1970s, denying reality has become the currency of the helping professions.
One guild after another, from the American Psychiatric Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics, caved to the LGBTQ activists’ pressure to stop believing their lying eyes and turn instead to approved fictions.
All professional groups not explicitly faith-based soon followed, with teacher’s unions leading the charge to indoctrinate schoolchildren.
By the time marriage was redefined to make either the bride or groom expendable, the social revolutionaries and liberal judges were ready to redefine sex itself. That’s when the transgender movement picked up the torch of the sexual revolution, saying, “It’s our turn!”
But it was a bridge too far, coming with more coercion, complete with pronoun mandates, the “right” of drag queens to read to children in public libraries, and parents losing custody of children that they refuse to falsely re-gender.
This issue is about much more than imposing a new sexual ethic. It’s about using government power to force people to lie, a dangerous abuse common in totalitarian nations.
The sexual revolutionaries got this far largely with unquestioned faux “scientific studies” like the Kinsey reports and cover from a legacy media pushing leftism in general, and the interests of the Democratic Party in particular.
Speaking of Democrats, they still haven’t gotten the common-sense memo or have decided to ignore it. They’re doing so even after the TV ad about Kamala Harris backing taxpayer-funded inmate sex changes proved devastatingly effective for Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.
Last December, 211 Democrats in the House voted against the Protect Children’s Innocence Act (HR 3492), which would have made it a felony for doctors or providers to perform surgeries, administer puberty blockers, or provide cross-sex hormones to anyone under 18.
Who could credibly oppose this?
Yet, even if it had been titled the Protect Kids from Dangerous Quacks Act, Democrats still would not have gone for it.
After the bill passed the GOP-controlled House with 216 votes, with only three Democrats voting yes, it died in the Senate, where Republicans abandoned it in the face of a threatened Democrat filibuster.
Some observers said that the GOP didn’t want to expend political capital on it. But think about Democrats forced to talk nonstop about protecting the right of quacks to experiment on kids. It might not come across to voters as good policy.
Neither would the Democrats opposing photo IDs for voting or proof of citizenship for new voter registrations. Surveys show huge majorities of Americans favor these election safeguards in the SAVE America Act, now stalled in the Senate.
Common sense seems to be breaking out on important matters.
It would be nice if it breached the don’t-rock-the-boat world of Congress’s upper chamber.
Illustration by Linas Garsys / The Washington Times.
Beware of the Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
By Robert Knight
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear appears to be readying for a presidential run in 2028.
The telegenic Democrat was on a speaking tour last year in early primary state South Carolina. In September, he has a book coming out entitled, “Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country,” a reference to Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan.
His publisher summarizes it this way: “By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, he believes we can start to heal as a country.”
Compassion and kindness are God-given, but I thought we were in the midst of healing from the nightmare of the Biden years, with its promotion of atheism, illegal immigration, sexual anarchy, and attacks on Catholics and pro-lifers.
Mr. Beshear, like Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger, identifies as a Christian and a moderate and gets priceless media cover while supporting the Democratic Party’s radical social and economic agenda.
In 2023, for instance, he tried to block a state bill protecting minors from “gender affirming care.”
The law prohibits doctors from subjecting gender-confused teens to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible, disfiguring surgeries.
The law also bans males from competing on girls’ sports teams. Most people think this makes sense.
Beshear insisted that such a law “would hurt kids and their families” and violate “parental rights.”
He claimed there was no evidence of widespread harm. To which I would say one butchered child is too many and that evidence of harm is voluminous, including the growing number of suicides and trans-related violence.
On the same day of Mr. Beshear’s veto, both houses of Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature overrode it. Naturally, a federal judge, Rebecca Grady Jennings, issued an immediate injunction halting enforcement. The case is still in litigation.
A year earlier, Ms. Jennings, one of President Donald Trump’s few clunker appointees, struck down a Kentucky law prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks and requiring medical oversight for abortion pills.
Gov. Beshear also vetoed that bill, and the legislature overrode him.
In South Carolina, which went for Mr. Trump by 30 points, Mr. Beshear emphasized his Christian faith while boasting that he was “a proud, pro-LGBTQ+ governor.”
This is a stance that ignores Jesus Christ’s clear restating of God’s creation of male and female and God’s marriage-based sexual morality from Genesis.
According to the Washington Post, Mr. Beshear said, “My faith teaches me that all children are children of God, and I didn’t want people picking on those kids.” How about protecting them from quacks who sterilize them and turn them into lifetime medical cases?
By the way, politicians love to haul out the term “children of God” like a magic amulet. The Bible says we’re all created in the image of God, but that we’re not children of God unless we believe in Him and submit to God’s authority. Until then, we’re on the other team, and I don’t mean the New Jersey Devils.
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name,” John 1:12 says. If we’re automatically children of God, we wouldn’t need to be, as Jesus said, born again.
Anyway, Mr. Beshear is not the only wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democrats have become quite adept at using Christianese and buzzwords to fool people. President Barack Obama often gave biblical scholars heartburn over his misappropriating Jesus’s words to justify sexual sin and confiscatory redistribution of wealth.
In Texas, state Rep. James Talarico is battling hard-left U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Like Mr. Beshear, Mr. Talarico touts his Christian faith while cleaving to a radical agenda.
“He delivers left-wing orthodoxy in centrist packaging and fights Christian nationalism with Scripture,” the Wall Street Journal explains.
If you’re a patriotic Christian, he’s talking about you and your family as a threat to America.
Much of his rhetoric revolves around Marxist class envy, such as, “Make billionaires pay their fair share in taxes.”
During remarks opposing a bill protecting kids from transgender treatments, he said, “Jesus never once condemned transgender people.”
Well, Jesus didn’t need to, and He welcomed all repentant sinners. The Hebrew Scriptures are crystal clear on sexual morality. Sexual confusion is the province of paganism, which historically often involved child sacrifice as well.
Any comparison to the pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ Democratic Party inferred by readers at this juncture may not be coincidental.
In a 2024 interview with MSNBC, Mr. Talarico said, “Christian nationalism is dangerous. … When politicians use the Bible to push division and hate, they’re not following Jesus; they’re using His name for their own agenda.”
This is classic projection, accusing your opponents of exactly what you’re doing.
At the University of Texas on Feb. 6, Mr. Talarico said, “I’m a Christian progressive. I believe the Gospel is inherently radical—it challenges the powerful, lifts up the poor, and calls for justice in every sphere of life.”
When progressives talk about “justice” they mean “social justice.” This is envy, disguised as compassion and politicized to enable governments to redistribute income and rewrite society’s moral code.
In the first six weeks of 2026, Mr. Talarico raised $7.5 million to Ms. Crockett’s $2 million, even though she still has a lead in polls. He has raised $20 million since September.
Will Texas, like Mr. Beshear’s Kentucky, fall for a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
Gov. Andy Beshear (D-Ky.) in Frankfort, Ky. on June 8, 2025. (AP photo in The Washington Times.