In the months and even years leading up to this year’s Rio Olympics, much of the news about Michael Phelps, as of this recording the nineteen-time gold medal swimmer, was bad. In September of 2014, he was arrested for driving while under the influence in his hometown of Baltimore.

It seemed that Phelps’ best days, both in and out of the pool, were behind him.

But that’s not how it turned out, and I think you can guess why.

As you probably know, Phelps carried the American flag during the opening ceremonies on Friday August 5. Then, as of this recording, he’s added three more gold medals to his impressive lifetime total, now numbering 21.

To put it mildly, both of these were unlikely less than two years ago.

As Phelps told ESPN, following his announced retirement in 2012, he struggled to “figure out who he was outside the pool.” In his words, “I was a train wreck. I was like a time bomb, waiting to go off. I had no self-esteem, no self-worth. There were times where I didn’t want to be here. It was not good. I felt lost.”

Like a lot of people struggling with similar feelings, he self-medicated.

In the immediate aftermath of that DWI arrest, he cut himself off from family and other loved ones and “thought the world would just be better off without me . . . I figured that was the best thing to do — just end my life.”

That’s when a friend came to his rescue: former All Pro linebacker Ray Lewis, whom Phelps considers a kind of “older brother.” Seeing the hopelessness and despair in his young friend, Lewis, an outspoken Christian, told him, “This is when we fight . . . This is when real character shows up. Don’t shut down. If you shut down we all lose.”

Continue reading BreakPoint – Michael Phelps is Driven: An Olympian Finds His Purpose →

Christians are sometimes accused of being “in denial,” especially when it comes to matters of sex. But after reading about a recent AIDS conference, I have to ask: Who’s really living in fantasy land?

At the recent UN international AIDS conference in South Africa, the actress Charlize Theron announced that HIV “has no biological preference for black bodies, for women’s bodies, for gay bodies . . . HIV is not just transmitted by sex,” she explained. “It’s transmitted by sexism, racism, poverty, and homophobia.”

Matthew Hanley, a Senior Fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center, writes at Mercatornet that while it was Theron who made these nonsensical remarks, they could have been made by almost any professional at the conference. When Theron says AIDS is not spread just by sex, “she means to direct attention away from sex itself, to minimize its primary role, and to shift ultimate [blame] anywhere else.”

“Statements like these,” Hanley adds, “sound less like medicine than a strand of Marxism—cultural Marxism.”  Marxism has “morphed away from the sphere of economics and into the sexual revolution,” he explains. This means that “every form of sex has necessarily come to be regarded … as equal; therefore . . . Nothing must jeopardize the truly radical assertion that there are no differences in the arena of sexuality . . . Objective hazards must be repackaged to conform to the value assigned to sexual behavior—which is something we don’t do for other public health matters.”

For instance, nobody says smoking cigarettes or drinking huge amounts of sugary drinks is healthy and normal–or distributes pills in schools to offset the effects of tobacco and sugar. Instead, we urge young people to avoid cigarettes altogether, and cut down on the soft drinks.  But heaven forbid we tell them to avoid sex.

The United Nations isn’t the only place we’re witnessing an absolute refusal to acknowledge that all sex is not equal when it comes to public health. Dr. Paul Church, a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, was fired from his position at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center last year for telling the truth about homosexual behavior: That, as Bryan Fischer writes at barbwire.com, it “leads to a higher incidence of HIV/AIDS, STDs, hepatitis, parasitic infection, anal cancers, and psychiatric disorders.”

Continue reading BreakPoint –  The Sexual Revolution and Cultural Marxism: Ideology over Public Health →