ORLANDO, Fla.—Parents whose children have been rushed onto controversial transgender interventions have confirmed the whistleblower’s reports on the St. Louis gender clinic, Sen. Josh Hawley told The Daily Signal just before he gave a rousing speech urging conservatives to defend America’s “ancient faith.”
“Listen, what that whistleblower said was that kids were given surgeries that, of course, permanently mutilated their bodies, drugs that sterilized them without their consent—these are kids now—and even worse, without their parents’ knowledge or consent,” he said in a Daily Signal podcast interview Wednesday before he spoke at the National Religious Broadcasters conference. “It is the most unbelievable series of reports and accusations. And we now have had parents come forward and say, ‘Yeah, that’s accurate.’ This has happened.”
Hawley asked many questions about following up on the report of the St. Louis whistleblower who drew attention to the gender clinic’s abuses.
“We need to know every kid who was victimized,” he added. “We need to know where the money is coming from. These clinics are popping up all around the country, and that money comes from somewhere. So, I want to know who’s funding it. Is it Big Pharma? Is it the federal government? Who is funding this attack on our kids that in so many cases is really … it’s a medical travesty, not to mention a personal and moral one.”
In the interview, Hawley also addressed the Left’s attacks on manhood, his investigation into a St. Louis gender clinic, and the debt ceiling debate.
“I think the worst attack on manhood is the lie the Left has told for years now, which is to be a man is to be ‘toxic,’ that to be a man is to make the world a worse place just by existing; that to be a boy, that there’s something fundamentally wrong with that,” he said. “We’ve got to turn that narrative around, because it’s a lie.”
Hawley also faulted Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., for refusing to take House Republicans’ proposal on the debt ceiling seriously.
“The president, he fiddled around for a hundred days, did nothing, offered nothing, and now we’re down to the wire. Whose fault is that? His fault,” he said. “The House has passed a debt ceiling increase. It’s the Democrat Senate that hasn’t passed one. The president still has no plan.”
Since this interview, Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., appear to have made progress toward a deal, but Biden had refused to negotiate for many weeks after the House passed its bill.
During his speech Wednesday night, Hawley raised the alarm about Democrats’ assault on America’s “ancient faith.”
“Their assault on the goodness of America is an assault on God,” Hawley, R-Mo., declared at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in the Wednesday evening speech.
Hawley outlined three major threats the Marxist Left poses to the United States—undermining God, the family, and the idea of nationhood. He urged the conservative movement to defend those three bedrocks of America.
The senator, who recently published a book, “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” warned that the Left is attacking the family in part by demonizing manhood. He also highlighted the assaults on parental rights.
Hawley condemned the Left’s assault on the very idea that the United States has the right to enforce its borders, saying that amounts to an attack on nationhood itself.
Most importantly, however, the senator slammed the Left for what he called an assault on God. He said the Left insists that “we shouldn’t talk about the Bible in school board meetings, let alone in schools themselves.”
“Again and again and again, they have assaulted what Lincoln called ‘our ancient faith,’” the Missouri lawmaker said. “That is the faith that today’s Marxists will not rest until they have overturned.” The Left’s claims that America is institutionally racist and fundamentally broken—a claim at the heart of critical race theory—amount to a rejection of the Judeo-Christian culture that built the United States, he said.
“We must speak for God. We must speak for the family,” the senator urged. “[President Joe] Biden thinks we will find unity in his new religion of climate change or the Left’s new religion of gender multiplicity.”
“Parents should raise their children, not Big Tech, not Big Government, not big corporations,” he declared. “If schools will not make available to parents the curriculum that your tax dollars are paying for, they need to sue.”
Hawley concluded his speech with the hope that the United States “might be a foretaste—just a little foretaste—of what heaven must be like.”
Listen to the interview here.
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