Saluting and Safeguarding Family

Good morning!

Family is the foundation of a stable society. Lawmakers who recognize this fact have recently made noteworthy strides in passing laws to try to protect it.

[BRIEF]

In Indiana, a law passed last month requiring public schools to highlight the Success Sequence: graduate high school, get a full-time job, marry and have children—in that order.

• Data show this sequence’s strong anti-poverty effect. Among millennials who followed all three steps, 97 percent were not in poverty by ages 28 to 34.
• The pattern holds across demographics: 96 percent of black and 97 percent of Hispanic millennials who completed the sequence avoided poverty.

Every government should promote this: It dramatically lowers welfare dependency regardless of family background or race.

Tennessee just designated June of this year as Nuclear Family Month—the same month that in recent years has been celebrated as “Pride Month” for sexual perversion.

• The resolution, passed April 9, defines the nuclear family as one husband, one wife and their biological, adopted or fostered children. It calls the nuclear family “God’s design” and recognizes this structure as foundational to child well-being, economic stability, and societal strength.

These measures rest on hard evidence.

• Decades of social science link intact, two-parent married households not just to lower poverty rates, but also higher educational attainment, reduced juvenile crime, and better physical and mental health outcomes.

Still—grouchy, rowdy critics predictably emerged. One Indiana state senator said teaching about marriage and family is “fraught with shame,” “a state-codified moral judgment.” An lgbt periodical condemned Tennessee lawmakers for “trying to exclude and intentionally harm some families.” Please!

For decades, American law has weakened and fractured families, and the bad fruits are all around. As Angelo Codevilla wrote in The Character of Nations, governmental antifamily policy and culture hurt society in many forms:

[T]he alienation of man from woman, of parent from child, of young people from the community through vice and crime, and, in the end, of young people from their own minds and souls. It is possible to make the case that escalating divorce rates, increased single-mother households, and even high rates of crime are the price we should be glad to pay for wider sexual and personal choices. It is somewhat more difficult to argue that the new post-familial American way of life is a step up in civilization ….

In an antifamily, fragmenting age, these policies remind us that societies thrive when they honor God’s design and champion marriage, responsibility and the two-parent home. Investing in dads, moms and children produces flourishing communities, one family at a time.

Iran War Update

• President Donald Trump is reportedly “unhappy with the latest Iranian proposal” for a peace treaty, Reuters reported yesterday. White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said the president has “been clear about our red lines.” The two sides appear deadlocked.
• Qatar is reportedly ending its support of Hamas. Sources speaking with the Free Press claimed, “Doha will no longer play the role of host and negotiator, and most of Hamas’s leadership has already departed the country.” This is apparently because of Hamas’s tepid response to Iran bombing Qatar in the war. Both Qatar and Iran were major sponsors for Hamas; this could push Hamas even closer to Iran.
• Hezbollah refuses to disarm, it announced yesterday. Israel has demanded Hezbollah’s disarmament as a precondition to withdrawing from Lebanon. Though there is technically a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, neither appears ready or willing to draw back.
• Israel lent the United Arab Emirates an Iron Dome unit, Axios reported Sunday. This was apparently to help protect the U.A.E. while it suffered the worst barrage of any country in Iran’s crosshairs. Axios’s sources said: “The countries have been coordinating closely militarily and politically since the war began.” The U.A.E. is quickly becoming Israel’s most important regional ally. Gerald Flurry said five years ago this will backfire for Israel.

Can King Charles Save the Special Relationship?

King Charles began a state visit to the United States yesterday, amid a major breach in the U.S.-UK relationship after the U.S. attacked Iran and Britain refused to help.

• President Trump has compared UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to Neville Chamberlain, and he’s said, “I’m not happy with the UK” and threatened “a big tariff on the UK.”

Nevertheless, Trump greeted King Charles warmly. The two, joined by their wives, were due to have tea together for half an hour in a carefully scheduled first day. They ran 15 minutes over and spent another 20 minutes touring a garden on the South Lawn of the White House.

• The apparent warmth is reminiscent of President Trump’s relationship with Charles’s late mother, Queen Elizabeth ii.

King Charles will speak to Congress today. The speech is expected to encourage the U.S. and UK, with their shared “democratic, legal and social traditions” to “come together” even when they don’t agree.

• He will say the 250th anniversary of America’s independence from Britain reminds the two nations that they have a long history of “reconciliation and renewal” and have created “one of the greatest alliances in human history.”

King Charles is right to want to fix this relationship. It is far more significant than he or the president realizes—as Herbert W. Armstrong showed from the Bible in The United States and Britain in Prophecy.

In July 2021, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote:

The division developing between our nations is a deadly weakness. It’s a weakness the radical left and especially Barack Obama have spent years creating and exploiting. …

People are creating and aggravating divisions within America and Britain—regarding race, class, politics and anything else they can think of. Now they are sowing divisions between these two nations. Splitting Britain and America apart from one another means that they cannot help each other. …

Many Bible prophecies show these trends will intensify. In a world this hostile, Britain, America and the Jewish nation of Israel need to stick together and to turn toward God. But they are splitting from God and from each other.

Can King Charles save it? Mr. Flurry has written repeatedly about the “rapid decline” of the British throne. That throne once unified the British Empire and Commonwealth. Some whispers of glory remain.

But long-term unity will not come through that throne. Instead, God has drastically changed the way He deals with this throne as He prepares for Jesus Christ to return and sit on it, as prophesied in the Bible and shown in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Read more about the prophecies specific to this throne in Mr. Flurry’s article “The Queen’s Funeral Shows the Power of the Throne.”

Anglican Leader Prays With Pope

Pope Leo xiv prayed with Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally at the Vatican yesterday in another sign of the ongoing reconciliation between the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England.

• Mullally—controversially—became the first female archbishop of the Church of England on March 25. The church leads the Anglican Communion, which has more than 100 million members.
• Her first foreign visit, an indication of her priorities for the church, is a four-day trip to Vatican City and Rome to “strengthen Anglican-Roman Catholic relations … and encourage ongoing collaboration at both global and local levels,” according to Anglican Communion News Service.

These two churches will reunite. Few anticipate this, but Bible prophecy forecast it 2,000 years before the Church of England broke away from Rome in 1534.

• On the visit, Pope Leo xiv said the two churches must use “every possible opportunity to proclaim Christ to the world together” and said “it would also be a scandal if we did not continue to work towards overcoming our differences, no matter how intractable they may appear.”

The pope referenced the two churches’ “continuing challenges.” Among these are disagreements over the Church of England’s ordination of female priests in 1992 and the appointment of a female archbishop in 2026. The pope’s comments made clear that the latter makes reconciliation even more difficult.

• Yet hosting Mullally, praying with her, and discussing overcoming their differences is consistent with something the Roman Catholic Church has proven masterful at across two millenniums: negotiating, compromising and ultimately incorporating and dominating a variety of non-Christian and non-Catholic teachings and practices, always under the authority of the bishop of Rome.

“[T]he Protestants are in the process of being reunited with the Catholic Church under the pope’s rule,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote in 2007. To see what the Bible prophesies about the future of Anglicans and other Protestants, read “Anglicans Submitting to the Pope.”

IN OTHER NEWS

Al Qaeda surges in Mali: Tuareg rebels working with al-Qaeda-linked jihadis conducted significant attacks against Mali’s ruling junta on Saturday. The rebels killed Defense Minister Sadio Camara with a car bomb and perpetrated other attacks on Bamako, the capital. They targeted Russian mercenaries employed by the junta and reportedly seized two major cities. Bible prophecy indicates that Russia’s influence in Africa will diminish and that radical Islam will spread through much of the region—until it is countered by Europe.

German chancellor: U.S. ‘humiliated’ by Iran: “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said yesterday. Speaking to a group of German high school students during a nationwide “EU Project Day” event, he said, “The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skillful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result.” Bible prophecy indicates that Germany is learning how not to fight Iran and will confront the Islamist regime and its allies with a much different strategy, producing a much different result.

Canadian anti-Semitism continues to break records: B’nai Brith Canada, a Jewish advocacy group, claimed in a Monday press conference that its count of anti-Semitic incidents in 2025 has broken records for the third year in a row. B’nai Brith recorded 6,800 anti-Semitic incidents last year, up from 6,219 in 2024. “Anti-Semitism has become so ubiquitous in our society that the word Jew is now commonly used as a slur to disparage and malign non-Jews,” said representative Richard Robertson. “Jewishness itself has become derogatory in contemporary Canada.” These statistics are a fraction of the increasing number occurring around the globe.

Assassination highlights larger trend of political violence: Cole Allen’s attempt to kill the U.S. president and other members of the administration at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday highlights a growing trend of political violence in America, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. It cites statistics from the Center for Strategic and International Studies showing domestic anti-government violence to be at its highest rate in more than 30 years, with the majority of perpetrators from the political left, for the first time in about 20 years. The Bible prophesies that America’s political violence will worsen further, to the point of erupting into civil war.