Christmas, Family, and the Cost of Saying ‘No’ to Trans Ideology

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It's Christmas Day, and I'm sitting at my mom's house. It smells like the prime rib roast she's got cooking in the oven, and presents are under the tree. My boys are eager to open them, but we're waiting for some other family to arrive. We're watching 'Die Hard' on television (it's a Christmas movie, and I'll defend that position to the end).

Yes, I'm working—covering for Townhall in case some big news breaks today—but I'm with family. For most of my childhood, we'd spend Christmas Eve at my aunt and uncle's house, after the service at the Lutheran church where I grew up. We'd celebrate with good food and music. Those memories came back in sharper relief this holiday season because I recently learned that the Lutheran church closed last year, due to the crime-ridden neighborhood where it's located.

As Ed Helm's character said in the finale of The Office, "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them."

Over the last couple of years, the importance of being with family has become even more important. I have lost loved ones, and their absence is felt this time of year. People I know and love are grieving their beloved, departed family members for the first time, and it's never easy. Because I love movies and wrote their obituary, I also think of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele, or more accurately their children Tracy, Jake, and Romy, who lost their parents in a horrific act of violence at the hands of their brother Nick. Their family is shattered.

But death isn't the only way families are separated on the holidays. There's distance, work, and deployments. In some families, strife and estrangement keep them apart.

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In the U.K., Enoch Burke is also kept apart from his family this Christmas. Burke, a devout Christian, has for years refused to sell out to the radical trans mob, and will not refer to a student with "they/them" pronouns. For that crime of ungoodthink, Burke is behind bars, confined to a small cell for 20 hours a day.

We first told you about Burke in 2022, when he was jailed for his Orwellian thought crime. Burke was arrested for showing up at his school after being barred from his job for his infraction.

"I love my school, with its motto Res Non Verba, ‘Actions not words,’ but I am here today because I said I would not call a boy a girl," Burke said at the time. "Transgenderism is against my Christian belief. It is contrary to the scriptures, contrary to the ethos of the Church of Ireland and of my school."

In July of 2023, a poll showed that 44 percent of millennials believe that misgendering a person should be a crime, and Michigan was considering Bill 4744, which would make it a felony to do so. The First Amendment, which the Irish Burke does not enjoy, would make such a law unconstitutional.

Last year, Burke was jailed for a third time.

Burke has every right to resist bending the knee to this insanity. As I have argued elsewhere, the trans activist Left has to resort to such tyrannical, authoritarian tactics because they are denying reality.

And reality always, eventually, wins.

Burke's student is a boy. He will always be a boy, no matter how hard the U.K. government punishes people who acknowledge this reality.

In the meantime, the hypocrisy is glaring. The U.K. routinely lets Muslim and other Third World migrants off the hook for crimes — actual crimes like rape, assault, and murder — citing "cultural differences" and a failure to understand Western laws.

Guys like Burke get locked up, indefinitely, because they hold to their correct belief that a boy is born a boy and the state finds that intolerable.

Burke should be with his family today. That he isn't is an injustice that will one day be corrected.

In the meantime, say a prayer for him and all who are missing loved ones today.

God bless you all, and from my family to yours, have a very Merry Christmas.