Welcome to a Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Back in March, Chris Elston known as Billboard Chris, was detained in Australia for protesting the harm done to children in service of radical gender ideology.

And then in early June, he, along with Lois McClatchy Miller, a senior legal

communications officer for the Alliance Defending Freedom International, were detained in Belgium.

They were simply standing in a public space, offering to talk to anyone interested about the

realities of transgender treatments wearing billboards that stated, quote, children cannot consent

to puberty blockers, and, quote,

children are never born in the wrong body. Though they called the cops to ask for protection from

harassment, they were told to remove the signs or face arrest. After being detained and strip

searched, they were released without charge. A thought and speech has not always been treated this way in the West.

Because the West was deeply influenced by Christian consensus, citizens largely enjoyed the liberty,

to various degrees, to challenge dominant paradigms and ideologies.

That liberty is, based on what we are seeing in Belgium and Britain and in other nations,

on quite shaky ground from

both state and institutional pressures. In some places, just praying to yourself can be

considered unruly protest. Recently, Lila Rose of Live Action shared the story of Naomi Best,

a therapy student at Santa Clara University and ostensibly Roman Catholic school in California. As part of her

coursework, the university insisted that therapy students should view extreme pornography and share

their own sexual history. When she asked for the same exemption that's regularly granted to

Muslim students, the university refused. When she described what had happened to her in the pages

of the Wall Street Journal, Best was kicked out of the program. As she described what had happened to her in the pages of the Wall Street

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