The World and Everything in It: June 27, 2024

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like you.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Thank you for your generous support this month. And if you haven’t yet made your contribution, you can go to wng.org/donate.

BUTLER: Now, on with the program

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! Israel prepares for war in the north, months after Hezbollah’s rocket attacks forced towns to evacuate.

AUDIO: Winning and continuing on living in the north and in Israel is our only option.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Also, two Supreme Court decisions. And storm watchers in the U.S. prepare for an above average hurricane season. Plus, studying an often unnoticed part of our world.

SEARBY: Anytime we teach these kids to appreciate, name, and be very observant when it comes to birds, I'd say you're sort of delighting in God's creation.

BROWN: It’s Thursday, June 27th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

BUTLER: And I’m Paul Butler. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Mark Mellinger with today’s news.

MARK MELLINGER, NEWS ANCHOR: Presidential debate preps » President Biden and former President Trump are gearing up for their big showdown tonight: the first debate of the presidential general election.

Trump phoned into a campaign event at a barbershop in Atlanta Wednesday, where someone asked him if he thinks the CNN moderators will treat him fairly.

TRUMP: I think it would be very good for CNN, actually, in terms of its credibility. It’ll be interesting to see.

Meantime, Biden has spent all week preparing at Camp David, where he’s been engaging in mock debates with his team.

The Democratic president also picked up his highest-profile Republican supporter so far: former congressman and January 6th Committee member Adam Kinzinger.

In the ad announcing his endorsement, Kinzinger repeated a well-worn Biden campaign mantra, saying of Trump…

KINZINGER: He doesn’t care about our country. He doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself. And he’ll hurt anyone or anything in pursuit of power.

According to a new FOX News poll, 3 in 10 voters say tonight’s debate will be extremely important to how they vote.

It starts at 9:00 Eastern on CNN.

Mayorkas visits border in Arizona » Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says he’s seeing new success at the Southern border.

As he paid a visit to the border in Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, Mayorkas said President Biden’s tightened restrictions for immigrants seeking asylum are working.

In the three weeks since Biden’s executive order on asylum, Mayorkas says illegal border crossings have fallen more than 40 percent.

MAYORKAS: We are removing more non-citizens without a legal basis to stay here, nearly doubling the rate at which we are removing non-citizens directly from border patrol custody.

The Biden Administration was under pressure to do something… after a record number of migrant crossings at the border; about 2.5 million over the past year.

Supreme Court Idaho slip-up » The Supreme Court may be poised to allow so-called emergency abortions in Idaho – but you weren’t supposed to know that yet. WORLD’s Travis Kircher has more.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: A draft opinion was briefly posted on the Supreme Court’s website yesterday before it was quickly taken down.

That’s according to the Bloomberg news service which saw the opinion before it was removed.

Bloomberg reported that the high court sided with the Biden administration…voting 6-to-3 to temporarily allow so-called emergency abortions to take place. That’s while a lower court reviews the legality of an Idaho law protecting the unborn.

Currently, Idaho protects all unborn children unless the life of the mother is at stake.

But the Biden administration says a federal law requires that abortions be allowed in cases when a woman’s health is endangered – even if the underlying health issue is not life-threatening.

The draft opinion was unsigned and it’s not clear why it was posted.

The Department of Justice and the White House deferred comment on the draft opinion until the full opinion is officially released.

For WORLD, I’m Travis Kircher.

Gershkovich trial starts » The trial for Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has started in Russia.

Gershkovich is an American citizen who was arrested in Russia in March of last year on espionage charges.

Wednesday, White House National Security spokesman John Kirby reiterated those allegations are false.

KIRBY: I’ll state it again: Evan has never been employed by the United States government. Evan is not a spy. Journalism is not a crime and Evan should never have been detained in the first place.

Gershkovich appeared in court in a glass cage.

Journalists and two U.S. consular officers were briefly allowed into the courtroom before the closed-door proceedings began. It’s not clear what happened during yesterday’s two-hour session.

If convicted, Gershkovich faces up to 20 years in prison.

SOUND: [Bolivian leader call and response]

Bolivia coup attempt » Bolivia’s president, Luis Arce, leads supporters in chants of “Long Live Democracy!” after fending off an attempted coup.

Armored vehicles rammed the doors of the government palace, but Arce confronted the leader of the rebellion and demanded he withdraw his troops.

That insurgent leader, General Juan Jose Zuniga, is now under arrest. It’s not clear exactly what charges he’s facing.

Afterward…

SOUND: [Firecrackers and cheers]

Arce’s supporters celebrated by letting off firecrackers as he addressed them in Plaza Murillo.

They also waved flags and sang the national anthem.

Kenyan president cancels tax bill » Kenyan President William Ruto is canceling a new tax bill after protesters stormed parliament.

At least 20 people died in the melee as a result of gunfire.

RUTO: And listening keenly to the people of Kenya, I concede and therefore, I will not sign the 2024 finance bill.

However, President Ruto says the country must now come together to address Kenya’s financial challenges.

RUTO: How do we manage the affairs of the country together? How do we manage our debt situation together? How do we run through the budget with the deficits that now exist together?

Though he bowed to pressure, Ruto called the protests “treasonous” and vowed to combat such unrest, whatever the cost.

I’m Mark Mellinger.

Straight ahead: Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah. Plus, playing closer attention to ordinary birds.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday the 27th of June, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler.

First up: Israel prepares for another war.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said intense fighting at the southern border with Gaza is about to end and the military will soon be moving troops to the northern border.

For nearly nine months since Hamas’s October 7th assault, the better-armed terror group Hezbollah has been firing thousands of rockets and missiles over the border from Lebanon.

BROWN: Tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from northern Israel and are living in hotels, short-term apartments, and anywhere they can find room waiting to go back home.

What’s happening at the northern border and are changes on the horizon?

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: On October 8th, Yotam Detagani, his pregnant wife, and one-and-a-half-year-old son were at their home about a mile from Israel’s border with Lebanon.

YOTAM DETAGANI: I just asked my wife a simple question, if you start hearing loud noises of missile rockets or landing of missile rockets, will you be afraid?

She said yes.

DETAGANI: So I said, it's not worth it, even if nothing starts, let's just go for a couple of days.

They went to stay with Detagani’s in-laws in central Israel. Just days later, the government ordered the rest of the town to evacuate.

DETAGANI: We never, in our wildest dreams imagined that we'll be sitting in the end of June and with no idea of when and how we'll be able to go back home.

Even during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Israel did not order civilians to leave. That conflict ended with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. It called for a full cease-fire, for Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah, and for UN peacekeepers to enforce the agreement. Israel says Hezbollah has violated that agreement by amassing weapons just across the border.

SHUKI FRIEDMAN: Hezbollah is currently refusing to obey to the Security Council Resolution, therefore, it’s immediate threat for the Northern Israel.

Shuki Friedman is the Vice President of the Jewish People Policy Institute.

FRIEDMAN: The dilemma is whether Israel should attack or manage to get this target by negotiating.

Friedman says Israel is weighing the long-term elimination of a threat to its people against what it can accomplish militarily.

IDF says 314 soldiers have died since it started ground operations in Gaza. Troops are also fighting against terrorists in Syria, Iraq, and the West Bank. Friedman says between deterring militants and protecting their own state, Israel’s forces are stretched thin.

A recent court decision may help with military numbers. On Tuesday, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government must begin conscripting ultra-orthodox Jews. Military-aged men and women in this group were previously exempted so they could spend their time studying the Torah.

FRIEDMAN: The question of conscription to the army was about equality and was about fairness, and the fact that majority of the Israelis do serve in the army.

Beyond fairness, there’s a numbers problem. Freidman says about 66,000 men were exempt before the court’s decision…with another 13,000 added to that number every year. That makes ultra-orthodox communities the largest untapped source for recruitment.

FRIEDMAN: We need these soldiers to join to the IDF and enable us to protect Israel and join the battle.

But one of Israel’s biggest challenges comes down to military strategy. Two weeks ago, Hezbollah fired more than 200 rockets over the border in one of their largest barrages recently… and in April, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel. That’s the first time Iran has attacked directly. So far, the only offensive actions Israel has taken has been targeting Hezbollah generals in Lebanon. Otherwise, the IDF has stuck to defensive measures.

RICHARD GOLDBERG: But in the end of the day, Israel's not supposed to be a turtle. No democracy is supposed to be a turtle.

Richard Goldberg is a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He says that while Israel’s defense systems have kept most of the missiles from striking their targets, the IDF cannot survive if it only takes defensive action.

GOLDBERG: The reason to have these systems is to thin out the threat as much as you can, intercept as much as you can, and give your offense the time it needs to prepare for a major counter strike.

The Biden administration has said that it will only support Israel’s defensive action and will not provide weapons for a counter-strike. Goldberg says that puts Israel in an unwinnable situation.

GOLDBERG: Your offense is part of your defense, intrinsically. If you have no offense, if you're hamstrung, if you're hamstrung, you are a sitting duck. You're a turtle, just hoping that your air defenses work. And that's not sustainable, clearly.

Back in central Israel, Detagani and his family agree that something needs to change.

At first, they hopped from apartment to apartment, waiting to go back north. But Detagani says his now two-year-old son and three-week-old daughter need more stability. So this month they signed a lease on an apartment until August of 2025.

DETAGANI: We'll get through it. Winning and continuing on living in the north and in Israel is our only option. We don't have another option.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Up next, the Supreme Court handed down two opinions yesterday. Here’s WORLD Legal affairs reporter Mary Reichard:

MARY REICHARD: The first decision yesterday came down in Murthy v. Missouri. It’s a loss for those who challenged the federal government for pressuring social media platforms to remove posts it deemed false…particularly about COVID and the 2020 election.

A majority six justices across ideological lines said the challengers lacked standing to sue.

I called up the firm that represented four individual plaintiffs, New Civil Liberties Alliance. Lawyer John Vecchione:

VECCHIONE: It is not the end. The good news is this was just on standing for an injunction.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said the platforms had independent incentive to moderate content, aside from government pressure. She wants challengers to show more specifics… as to time and place of each claimed infringement.

Lawyer Vecchionne is skeptical:

VECCHIONE: The unreality of the opinion that all this government apparatus, which they admit was designed to get messages the government didn't like off social media, somehow had no effect. They were useless government actions, apparently. And you know, maybe there are a lot of useless government actions, but this one had results.

This case isn’t over, though.

VECCHIONE: We've got to go back. We've got to get more discovery. We have to lay out our timeline, and we have to bring this case forward so that even someone trying to protect the government and not the First Amendment rights of Americans won't be able to.

The second opinion released yesterday is a victory for the former mayor of Portage, Indiana who’d been convicted of bribery five years ago. Then-Mayor Jim Snyder had accepted $13,000 from a trucking company after it was awarded a lucrative city contract on Snyder’s watch.

Snyder argued it was merely for “services rendered,” like a tip, not a qui pro quo.

The court agreed on the basis of a vaguely written statute.

You can hear the winning argument in this comment from Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral argument in April:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: …when you put “corruptly” in, now you don’t know where the line is. You don’t know if the concert tickets, the game tickets, the gift card to Starbucks, whatever, where is the line, and so there’s vagueness. That creates the problem that there is here.

In dissent, liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan chided the majority. Quoting now: “Snyder's absurd and atextual reading of the statute is one only today's Court could love."

But the majority points out that Congress can fix this problem if it wants to.

Case remanded to comport with the decision.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Reichard.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Our next story this morning: warm oceans and the storms they create.

The Atlantic hurricane season is starting to stir up this month and it will last until late November. Meteorologists are predicting more storms than average. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin reports on what’s to blame…

NEWSCAST: Well dozens of counties in Florida have evacuation orders in place…

KRISTEN FLAVIN: Each year, people living along the Atlantic Coast evacuate their homes as hurricanes approach. But some head into the storms.

KEVIN DOREMUS: Every storm kind of has their own personalities, right?

Kevin Doremus is a hurricane-qualified aircraft commander… or a hurricane hunter. Every hurricane season Doremus and his team fly aircraft over and through storms to get meteorologists the most up-to-date and accurate data.

DOREMUS: The best analogy that we like to use is like riding an old wooden roller coaster through a car wash. It's kind of that rickety, bouncy feeling…it's a lot of that.

Meteorologists analyze mountains of data from those flights—tracking humidity, temperature, and wind speed—hoping to better understand tropical storms. The data also helps officials know when people should get out of the way of the storm.

NEWSCAST: So you can see there are five evacuation zones…

This year, Doremus and his team are gearing up for a busy tropical storm season.

RICK SPINRAD: And good morning to everyone…

Rick Spinrad is the administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—or NOAA.

RICK SPINRAD: NOAA is predicting an above-average 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.

In 2023, NOAA predicted 12 to 17 storms before the season started—a below average storm count.

NEWSCAST: This storm left a mark on Big Bend…

But by the end of the year, 21 tropical storms had formed over the Atlantic. That made it a higher than average season…though far below the 30 named storms of 2020.

RICK SPINRAD: The key this year, as in any year, is to get prepared…

This year NOAA is expecting 17 to 25 storms of tropical strength…that’s any storm with at least 39 mile per hour sustained winds. Meteorologists believe as many as 13 of those storms will turn into hurricanes.

Director of NOAA’s Hurricane Center Michael Brennan says there are a couple of reasons for the high prediction. The primary indicator is ocean temperatures:

MICHAEL BRENNAN: Warm ocean water is the fuel and the energy source for tropical storms and hurricanes as they develop.

And it’s not just warmer waters in the Atlantic that cause tropical storms and hurricanes for the gulf, panhandle, and east coast. Tony Lupo is professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Missouri.

LUPO: In the tropical Pacific, the sea surface temperatures will warm every two to seven years, and it's this phenomenon that we call El Nino, we feel that that's triggered by convection in the springtime in the Pacific, but also the earth’s annual trip around the sun.

On top of the current El Niño cycle, a natural disaster two years ago may also be playing a role…

NEWSCAST: And now this, Tonga officials are still working to assess the damage a day after that massive volcanic eruption near the island…

The water vapor plume extended 35 miles into the stratosphere. The event was the largest eruption ever observed from space.

LUPO: We've not witnessed something like this before, but with satellite technology now, we can pick those up.

When a land-based volcano blows its top it sends ash and gasses into the atmosphere—reflecting some of the energy of the sun back into space…lowering global temperatures. But water vapor plumes like the one in 2022 trap some of the heat in our atmosphere…keeping it from escaping into space. The result raises the temperature of the air and ocean surface. Climate change due to natural causes.

NEWSCAST: You get the plume eruption and high ash cloud and that can impact the weather and a hurricane season for months and months…

Two years later, Lupo and others believe that warmer Pacific ocean conditions may be due in part to that natural disaster…in turn, affecting the jet stream over North America…and finally how storms form in the Atlantic.

That may explain the current spike in tropical storms, but NOAA’s data goes back for decades and reveals a general increase in storm frequency since the early 20th century…and a steady increase since the 1990s…

The popular explanation is man-made climate change. But according to professor Lupo, there are more likely explanations.

LUPO: Satellite technology has improved greatly, and so some storms that wouldn't have been captured a decade ago are now being captured and counted in the numbers...

And he’s not alone in that assessment. One article on NOAA’s website asserts that the late 20th century increase in tropical storm frequency is primarily due to that “improved monitoring.”

NEWSCAST: Experts say hurricanes are getting bigger and stronger…

Advanced data collection does point to a changing climate…and that’s to be expected…the climate is not static. It varies greatly from the average year to year. The challenge comes in trying to figure out what’s causing it.

Even with better data—and lots more of it—climate models still can’t process all the variables and reliably predict future weather…as last year’s hurricane predictions from NOAA demonstrate. And that was just a few months out. Computer models that attempt to predict climate change a decade down the road are even more unreliable.

LUPO: We always hear that the sky is falling and that the temperatures are going to rise by some unprecedented amount or some scary amount, but when you look at the actual changes that have occurred, yes, it's warming, but it's not warming as fast as the models project.

SOUND: [AIRPLANE / SCIENCE GEAR AMBI]

As for Kevin Doremus and his hurricane hunter crew…they’re preparing for the next tropical storm, and will once again fly into it instead of away from it…And perhaps his data will further improve scientific models so that they can better reflect reality.

DOREMUS: …we have to because that's where the science needs us to be.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin. Mary Muncy and Paul Butler also contributed to this report.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Perhaps you’ve never wondered before how you ought to address an elephant, but a 25 year study suggests that Kenyan savannah pachyderms may have names they use for one another.

WITTEMYER: Elephants are highly social, highly vocal species…

George Wittemyer’s day job is a professor at Colorado State University. But he’s also a sound technician.

WITTEMYER: We undertook this study by recording elephants.

Researchers then played those recordings to elephants outside the herd.

SOUND: [ELEPHANT]

In this recording by Michael Pardo in 2021, an elephant pauses to listen, but doesn't call back. Researchers believe it’s because the message isn’t addressed to her. The study also found that at times a pack leader calls and the whole herd responds, but then at other times, everyone ignores her except one single elephant.

WITTEMYER: It's quite complicated…and we know that if we could get inside into what they're saying we could really get a new perception on how they think.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Might not be the best to know everything those elephants are thinking. Who knows what names they call the researchers who keep eavesdropping on their conversations!!

BUTLER: It’s The World and Everything in It.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 27th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: birding.

Most people don’t really notice birds. They’re just around. Pigeons. Robins. Sparrows. But one organization says there’s value in studying them and doing it up close and personal.

WORLD Special Correspondent Anna Johansen Brown has our story.

DECOURCEY: You got, is that the banded? This is the banded Downy. Okay, we're gonna do this one first.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: Leslie DeCourcey is looking for a pen. She’s rummaging in a plastic container with one hand, and gesturing with the other as she talks. But in that other hand, she’s also holding a bird.

DECOURCEY: Here's a little male Downy Woodpecker. Easy little buddy, easy. The way I'm holding him I know a lot of people think I'm choking him. I have my fingers around his neck and I'm supporting him against his back against my palm. I am not choking the bird.

The woodpecker is black with white speckles, and a crimson dot on the back of his head. He lies very still in DeCourcey’s hand. She finds the pen she’s been looking for and starts recording notes on a chart.

This is the first bird of the morning here at the Sagawau Field Science Center in Lemont, Illinois. The center does bird identification, tracking, and habitat reclamation, as well as educational programs—shedding light on this sliver of our world that so often goes unnoticed.

The day is blue-skied and breezy. Birds are darting past, settling on feeders that are strategically placed throughout the trees. And if you look closely, at different points around the feeders, you’ll see fine nets hung between metal rods. They’re called mist nets. They billow slightly in the breeze and they’re almost invisible. Especially to a bird focused on food.

STAFF WOMAN: The trick with these mist nets is so they do get tangled in the net. Of course, it does mean that we have to untangle them from said net.

One of the staffers is trying to untangle a Rose Breasted Grosbeak. The bird isn’t making it easy. He keeps jabbing at her hands with his broad, solid beak.

Lee Witkowski is standing by. He volunteers at Sagawau and teaches at Lewis University.

WITKOWSKI: You can see the bill on that is made for seed cracking. And he's trying to crack her thumb thinking it's a seed. So it can be painful.

The staff member is finally able to get the bird’s claws untangled from the fine threads of the net, though she’s not without a few battle scars.

STAFF WOMAN: And then so what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna put him in the bag. And so that calms him down.

She carefully places the Grosbeak into a white cloth bag and takes it over to Leslie DeCourcey for banding.

DeCourcey is a licensed bird bander. Each bird that comes into her hands gets a tiny aluminum band around its leg, with an ID number. She shares the bird’s information with the US Geological Survey. That way, if the bird comes back later or winds up at a different processing center somewhere else in the country, they’ll be able to track where the bird has been, and what it’s been up to.

DeCourcey has been taking data on the Downy Woodpecker.

DECOURCEY: Now we're gonna start looking at those feathers. [Blowing sound]

She turns the bird over and blows on its white belly feathers.

DECOURCEY: Okay, we see that little bare belly with these little wrinkles on it. So this little male has a brood patch.

That means he’s a dad with either eggs or hatchlings back at the nest.

DeCourcey takes more measurements and records all the data on a chart. Then she moves on to the next bird—an Oriole.

AUDIO: [Bird singing]

DECOURCEY: Orioles are one of those species that actually will sing in the hand…they're amazing.

As DeCourcey works, people start to gather around to watch.

One of the Sagawau volunteers leads birding walks through the surrounding forest, to see how many species they can observe in the wild. Everyone’s equipped with binoculars, but listening is also a key skill for birding.

SAGAWAU VOLUNTEER: Let's see if we can hear them. That's singing right now is a Tennessee warbler. The way that we like to identify their sound is it's like a sewing machine.

AUDIO: [Bird singing]

Peter Searby is the founder of the Riverside Club for Adventure and Imagination. He brought the Riverside students to Sagawau partly because he wants them to expand their awareness of nature.

SEARBY: Birding does tend to make you a much more observant person who’s I would call present. And it kind of gives you a sense of peace in the sense of like, I'm present in this moment, I’m not trying to go somewhere else. I’m just here. It's a contemplative hobby, for sure.

But more than that, he sees birding as a way of studying God’s fingerprints in the world around us.

SEARBY: Anytime we teach these kids to appreciate, name, and be very observant when it comes to birds, I'd say you're sort of delighting in God's creation.

Leslie DeCourcey says birds also serve an important practical function: Insect control.

DECOURCEY: The common grackle: you couldn't you couldn't go a block without seeing several of them in people's lawns…What were those birds doing? They were picking up insects, bringing it to their nestlings.

After the Downy Woodpecker is all weighed and measured and recorded, DeCourcey sets it free again.

DECOURCEY: Okay, would you like to let him go?

NOELLE: Wait, are you saying me? Yeah!

Or more specifically, she lets a spectator set it free. Monique Noelle came to Sagawau today to find out what bird banding was all about.

NOELLE: I really never imagined that she would say to me…like, do you want to release it and going like, you mean like actually hold the bird?

DECOURCEY: Put your hand underneath that. Okay, hold on. And then when you're ready, let him go. Just let him sit on your hands.

In a blink, the bird darts off into the trees and is gone.

Noelle says holding and releasing a tiny, fragile, wild bird like that was a bucket list item she never knew she had.

NOELLE: I carried a woodpecker! [laughs]

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown in Lemont, Illinois.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 27th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Up next, WORLD commentator Cal Thomas has some advice for the Supreme Court on a case it will hear next term.

And a word to parents, this story references medical procedures and young people.

CAL THOMAS: As if current Supreme Court cases were not controversial enough, the justices have accepted an appeal by the Biden administration “seeking to block state bans on gender-affirming care for minors.” The media declares the state bans “controversial” because they go against the favored position of liberal elites.

As with abortion and “climate change,” the way the media talks about this issue—and the information they chose to ignore—shapes public opinion. So-called “Gender-affirming care” is the preferred label…though “transgender health care” is another favorite mislabeling … but these terms are about as accurate as “reproductive rights” on that other issue.

Gender dysphoria is the medical diagnosis. Dictionary.com defines it as “a psychological condition marked by significant emotional distress and impairment in life functioning, caused by a lack of congruence between gender identity and sex assigned at birth.”

The only part I disagree with is “gender assigned at birth.” One is born male or female. In my opinion, anything else is psychological, as the definition states, or influenced by culture.

Minor children are prohibited from many things. We used to agree on boundaries for certain behavior, but the secular left has been busy since the 1960s erasing boundaries…except the ones they prefer.

As with abortion where the media rarely do stories about women who regret their decision, so it is with their coverage of “transgender youth.” One almost never reads or sees stories about people who have had gender-reassignment surgery and later regret it.

WORLD recently decided to find and interview some of those people. Admittedly they appear few in number, but by telling their stories it conveys information that especially young people should consider before experiencing the consequences of surgery, which include an inability to have children.

Ritchie Herron of the UK is one of several stories WORLD reported. Herron, who was born male, had surgery to change his body parts to mimic female ones. The article states: “Herron’s surgery lasted over twice as long as planned. Major blood loss required a blood transfusion. When he came to his senses days later, his surgeon wheeled over to his bedside with a bright procedure light and showed him the result. Herron gasped at the sight of the wound and was instantly flooded with regret.

“’When I finally got out of bed and stood in the full-length mirror I just broke down. It was horrible’…”

“Five years after his surgery, Herron is living life once again as a man. But the nightmare is hardly over. He suffers from serious complications related to the vaginoplasty and other treatments. His symptoms include pain, urogenital disorders, and sexual dysfunction. He is suing (Britain’s) National Health Service for the permanent damage done to his body.”

As WORLD reported: “National Health Service (has) confirmed it would no longer routinely prescribe puberty blockers for children with gender dysphoria. But many doctors have no qualms about such protocols. Files leaked from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and published on March 4th in WORLD revealed member doctors encouraging one another to prescribe transgender interventions to patients as young as 9 – including hormones and surgeries – even as some doctors expressed uncertainty. Currently, U.S. gender clinics rely on WPATH’s pro-transgender guidelines for treating kids.”

No minor child should be allowed to make such a decision and no parent should allow them to make it. Psychological and spiritual counseling have worked for others and like a lot of stuff teens and pre-teens go through, many will work their way out of what some critics have labeled a fad.

The Supreme Court should affirm state laws banning the procedure for minor children, and parents should seek help for any child experiencing gender identity issues.

I’m Cal Thomas.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Tomorrow: Another protestant denomination faces down LGBT issues…we’ll talk about it with John Stonestreet on Culture Friday.

And, a church that found homes for children in foster care We’ll have a review of Sound of Hope: The True Story of Possum Trot. Plus your listener feedback. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “Praise the LORD, Praise the LORD oh my soul. I will praise the LORD as long as I live. I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.” —Psalm 146:1, 2

Go now in grace and peace.

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