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Although they are very rare, cancers of the appendix are on the rise, a new study finds.

An analysis of a National Cancer Institute database found that compared with older generations, rates of appendix cancer have tripled among Gen X and quadrupled among millennials, according to the report, published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

“There is a disproportionate burden of appendix cancer among young individuals,” said the study’s lead author, Andreana Holowatyj, an assistant professor of hematology and oncology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center.

Holowatyj’s earlier research was “the first to show that 1 in every 3 appendix cancers is diagnosed among adults younger than age 50,” she said in a phone interview. “That’s compared to 1 in every 8 colorectal cancers diagnosed among adults younger than age 50.”

Still, appendix cancers are extremely rare: According to the National Cancer Institute, they occur at a rate of 1 to 2 per million people in the United States a year.

To see whether rates of the cancer had changed over time, Holowatyj turned to the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results program, which includes data from nationally representative cancer registries that cover about 45.9% of the U.S. population.

Overall, there were 4,858 cases of appendix cancer from 1975 through 2019.

When the large proportion of patients diagnosed between ages 18 and 49 is combined with the new finding of a generational rise in Gen X and millennials, it’s “important that we find the causes underpinning these statistics in order to reverse this trend and reduce the disease burden,” Holowatyj said.

The new study further confirms that there is a trend toward younger and younger patients from recent generations being hit with gastrointestinal cancers, said Dr. Andrea Cercek, a medical oncologist and a co-director of the Center for Early Onset Colorectal and GI Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

In particular, rates of colorectal cancer in younger adults have been rising for several decades. The cause for the rise in such GI cancers needs more research.

“It’s likely that there are environmental causes, which include exposures to food, water and micro plastics or lifestyle or dietary changes,” said Cercek, who wasn’t involved with the new research. “You can’t really pin it down to one thing or another. It’s likely multiple factors causing this rise after 1945.”

The appendix is a small pouch that hangs off the large intestine on the lower right side of the abdomen. A blockage can lead to infection and inflammation, called appendicitis, which needs emergency treatment.

Unlike other cancers of the GI tract, appendix cancers aren’t easily found because they’re not as easy to see on abdominal scans and won’t be picked up by colonoscopies, said Dr. Deborah Doroshow, an associate professor of medicine at the Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. “So it’s not easy to detect or screen for them.”

In fact, Holowatyj said, about 95% of appendix cancers aren’t spotted until after a person has appendicitis and the appendix is removed and examined by pathologists. As a result, the cancers tend to be at a late stage with poorer long-term prognoses, she added.

Doroshow, who wasn’t involved with the new study, said it’s important for patients and their doctors to be more aware of subtle symptoms. Symptoms such as changes in energy level, a new persistent pain or unexplained weight loss in a young person shouldn’t be ignored, she said.

“If a person is feeling that something is not right it’s always best to get an opinion,” Doroshow said. “We’ve diagnosed young people with cancer whom other health care providers had not taken seriously because they were young.”

Women and people of color may find they need to advocate for themselves, she added.

Doroshow said people shouldn’t be worrying about every single abdominal pain. Rather, it’s persistent pain that would be a concern.

In the early stages of the campaign, Republicans seeking to unseat Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff in one of the key races of the 2026 midterm elections are leaning heavily into attacks over transgender athletes in women’s sports.

Two GOP-aligned groups launched ads on the issue in recent weeks. And GOP Rep. Buddy Carter hit the airwaves with an ad prodding Ossoff on the issue soon after launching his campaign.

Republican candidates and campaigns have frequently leaned on culture war issues in recent years as a way to excite the base and frame Democrats as out of touch, particularly in red-leaning states. And they’re even more emboldened after President Donald Trump bombarded then-Vice President Kamala Harris with an onslaught of ads that attacked her support for transgender people during the 2024 election.

But while Democrats are gearing up for a difficult re-election fight for Ossoff in a state Trump won narrowly in 2024, they think the issue will be drowned out by voters’ concerns about the economy, particularly Trump’s handling of it. Even so, it’s an issue for which Democrats lack a consensus about how to respond to GOP broadsides, as prominent members of the party grapple with whether to embrace protecting the transgender community as part of their values, deflect the question, or come out against including transgender athletes in women’s sports.

Ossoff is the only Democratic incumbent defending a seat in a state Trump won last year, making him far-and-away the top target for Senate Republicans. Still, some Republicans admit that Ossoff will be difficult to beat, particularly now that Gov. Brian Kemp decided not to seek the seat.

The early Republican criticism of Ossoff points to the Democratic senator’s vote on legislation in February that would make it a Title IX violation (jeopardizing federal education funding) for states to allow transgender women and girls to participate in female sports. The bill failed to get the 60 votes it needed to advance in the Senate.

One Nation, the nonprofit aligned with Senate Republicans’ main super PAC, has spent at least $400,000 airing an ad reminiscent of a key tagline from one of Trump’s anti-Harris ads from last year: “Man-to-man defense isn’t woke enough for Ossoff, he’s playing for they/them.”

Carter’s opening salvo of ads included a spot touting the congressman’s MAGA credentials while a person purporting to be a transgender woman holds sports trophies and stands in front of a transgender pride flag talking about how Ossoff has been an ally to the community.

Asked about the GOP criticism of that vote, Ossoff campaign communications director Ellie Dougherty told NBC News in a statement that “American parents don’t need federal bureaucrats confirming our children’s genitalia,” a reference to how a state might enforce the mandate in the Republican bill.

Scott Paradise, who managed Republican Herschel Walker’s losing Senate campaign in 2022, told NBC News that Ossoff’s first Senate run in 2020 provided a “perfect storm” that allowed Ossoff to position himself as a “centrist” by narrowing his focus to “bread-and-butter issues.”

“If he’s talking about the economy or he’s talking about moments where he has stood with the right — whether it’s Middle East, to the extent he has on immigration — it’s easier for him to muddy the waters. But this is such a black-and-white issue in a center-right state” that allows Republicans to try to frame him as out of step, Paradise said.

Polling broadly shows the American public doesn’t support transgender women playing in female sports. Last month’s NBC News Stay Tuned Poll, powered by SurveyMonkey found that 75% opposed it and 25% supported it. Other national polling has found similar trends.

That’s one reason why Trump’s campaign focused heavily on the issue in ads, arguing that Harris was outside the mainstream and pointing to her past support for gender-affirming treatments for prison inmates. After the election, Democrats have disagreed over whether the party’s position on transgender rights, particularly in women’s sports, cost them electorally.

Asked about the attacks last month during an interview on “Political Breakfast,” a podcast hosted by Georgia’s public radio affiliate, Ossoff said the big early spending is a signal to him that “demonstrates the national GOP understands the strength that I’ll be bringing to this re-election campaign.”

The Democrat called Republicans, particularly GOP political consultants, “obsessed and preoccupied with this issue.”

Thinking ahead about “top of mind” issues for voters in 2026, Ossoff added, will it be “whether or not federal bureaucrats are investigating the sexual biology of adolescent athletes? I don’t think so,” he added.

Amy Morton, a Democratic strategist in Georgia, elaborated that she believes the midterms will instead be a “referendum on the economy” and Trump’s handling of it, emphasizing the Democratic attacks on the GOP’s broad policy bill that’s working its way through Congress.

“They’re going to continue to lean into that issue because they don’t want to talk about the issues that are really impacting Georgians,” she said, adding, “They made a strategic decision to wrap their arms around Donald Trump so there won’t be a degree of separation between his failure as an executive and their failure.”

A Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Raphael Warnock’s successful re-election in Georgia in 2022 added that, like their former boss, Ossoff’s high-profile elections have helped to define him in the state, making them skeptical that a GOP attempt to brand him as extreme will stick. They added that while Warnock’s 2022 Republican opponent, Herschel Walker, leaned heavily on social issues during his unsuccessful bid, Kemp won comfortably with a very different message on the same ballot, showing how a campaign can focus on the issues it wants and leave others to the side.

“You saw Brian Kemp run an extremely disciplined race on the economy. You were hard-pressed to get Kemp on the record about abortion in 2022 — the man was laser-focused on small businesses, jobs and the economy. That was the consistent message you heard out of Brian Kemp. You compare that to Herschel Walker and, you can do the math: 300,000 votes,” the Democrat said.

But the economy was also a top issue in the 2024 election, and Trump and the Republican Party still managed to turn their attacks on trans issues into a memorable tagline that stuck with some voters. That’s why one national Republican strategist told NBC News that the attack isn’t a “replacement” for a cogent economic argument, but “part of the equation.”

“It’s an issue that obviously had a massive impact in 2024. The Trump campaign’s ‘Harris is for they/them’ ad is one of the greatest ads of our generation in that it’s so simple and was so effective,” the strategist said.

Ads about transgender participants in women’s sports can run “on top of: Oh, he also voted to help ensure that illegal immigrants get government-paid health care and he voted against the Laken Riley amendment in 2024 before it was convenient,” the strategist added.

While the transgender sports attacks are drawing headlines, both sides have been running ads focused on spending in Washington, too. Democrats have attacked the GOP’s policy bill working its way through Washington, and Republicans hit Ossoff for backing former President Joe Biden’s signature spending bill in 2022.

Tharon Johnson, a Georgia Democratic strategist who worked for Biden’s 2020 campaign in the state, agreed that Republicans are “going to be hard-pressed to make Jon Ossoff into this radical,” in part because of his work both in office and on the campaign trail.

And while he believes the situation Harris found herself in last year isn’t the same one Ossoff finds himself in now, he said Democrats can still draw a lesson from it: “Respond sooner, and more effectively.”

So far, Ossoff’s response has been to stay focused on the economy and try to frame the debate as about local control.

After law enforcement officers spent days scouring a remote section of Washington State for a father accused of killing his three young daughters, the local sheriff leading the manhunt turned over the search to federal authorities, officials said Monday.

Since last week, the search for Travis Decker, 32, has covered hundreds of square miles by air, land and water, the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release, and the department reached the point “where we need to rest our local resources.”

“Our command staff continues to be engaged with the search command while we give our teams time off to rest and recuperate and be ready to rejoin the search for, and capture of, the suspect,” the sheriff’s office said.

The sheriff’s office remains the lead agency on the criminal investigation into the deaths of Decker’s three daughters, Evelyn, 8, Paityn, 9, and Olivia Decker, 5, the department said.

The girls were found dead June 2 near a campground east of Seattle after Decker failed to return them from a visitation three days before. An arrest warrant accuses him of first-degree murder and kidnapping.

An autopsy completed Friday attributed the girls’ cause of death to suffocation, according to Monday’s release. A detective previously wrote in an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant that they had bags over their heads and had been zip-tied.

Two bloody handprints were found on Decker’s white pickup, which was found near the girls, and one of the blood samples recovered from the scene belonged to a man, the department said. Another blood sample was non-human.

The department said additional DNA and fingerprint analyses are being conducted.

Authorities said they have collected a large amount of evidence from the scene, along with Decker’s dog, which was turned over to a local animal rescue.

Authorities previously described Decker, a military veteran and active member of the Washington State National Guard, as a longtime outdoorsman known to go “off-grid” for months. The sheriff has warned people with cabins in the area to lock their doors and leave their lights on at night.

The affidavit shows that Decker’s ex-wife, Whitney Decker, described her relationship with her ex-husband as cordial and said he’d never previously failed to return their children. A parenting plan imposed by a court last year required him to seek mental health treatment and domestic violence-anger management counseling but he had not done so and refused to sign the plan, according to the affidavit.

Since the girls were found dead, Whitney Decker has called for reforms to the Amber Alert system, which sends out text messages to all cell phones in the area of missing children but was not used after she told authorities that her ex-husband had violated their parenting plan.

A spokesman for the agency that manages the system, Washington State Patrol, has said that a request for an alert from local authorities did not meet strict criteria required by the federal program.

The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Department of Government Efficiency access to Social Security Administration data that includes sensitive personal information of millions of Americans.

The decision comes as the federal government sought a stay, or temporary suspension, after a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to that data in April. The nation’s highest court granted an emergency application from the Trump administration to lift that injunction; the case is expected to proceed in lower courts.

In its decision, the Supreme Court concluded the Social Security Administration may give DOGE access to agency records while the case plays out “in order for those members to do their work.”

Both the White House and the Social Security Administration called the Supreme Court decision a victory. In a statement, White House spokesperson Elizabeth Huston said it will allow the Trump administration to “carry out commonsense efforts to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse and modernize government information systems.”

Likewise, Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano in a statement said the agency “will continue driving forward modernization efforts, streamlining government systems, and ensuring improved service and outcomes for our beneficiaries.”

Yet others expressed grave concern in reaction to the decision, including Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, advocacy groups and plaintiffs in the case against DOGE and the Social Security Administration.

“This is a sad day for our democracy and a scary day for millions of people,” said the coalition of plaintiffs including American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the American Federation of Teachers; and the Alliance for Retired Americans, who are represented by Democracy Forward.

“This ruling will enable President Trump and DOGE’s affiliates to steal Americans’ private and personal data,” they said, while vowing to “use every legal tool at our disposal” to prevent the misuse of public data as the case moves forward.

Millions of Americans’ sensitive data at stake

The dispute focuses on how much access DOGE should have to Americans’ personal data.

The plaintiffs filed an initial complaint in early March, stating the Social Security Administration had “abandoned its commitment to maintaining the privacy” of the sensitive personal information of millions of Americans under DOGE’s influence.

The Social Security Administration collects and stores some of the “most sensitive” personally identifiable information of millions of Americans, ranging from seniors to adults to children, the complaint notes.

When applying for a Social Security number, the agency requires the disclosure of place and date of birth, citizenship, ethnicity, race, sex, phone number and mailing address. It also requires parents’ names and Social Security numbers.

But the agency is also privy to other personal data, including personal health information, the complaint notes. That includes:

• driver’s license and identification information
• bank and credit cards
• birth and marriage certificates
• pension information
• home and work addresses
• school records
• immigration and naturalization records
• family court records
• employment and employer records
• psychological and psychiatric health records
• hospitalization records
• addiction treatment records
• records for HIV/AIDS tests

The Social Security Administration also collects tax information, including total earnings, Social Security and Medicare wages and annual employee withholdings.

DOGE has not only accessed the agency’s sensitive and protected information; it has also publicly shared it, according to the complaint. The actions of the defendants, including the Social Security Administration, DOGE and leaders including former head Elon Musk, have deprived Americans of privacy protections guaranteed by federal law and made their personal information vulnerable, the complaint alleges.

In her dissent, Jackson, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, notes that records show “DOGE received far broader data access” than the Social Security Administration usually allows in fraud, waste and abuse investigations. Typically, those investigations start with high level, anonymized data, with more access to more detailed information only granted as necessary.

Justice Elena Kagan also dissented in the 6-3 decision.

“The government wants to give DOGE unfettered access to this personal, non-anonymized information right now – before the courts have time to assess whether DOGE’s access is lawful,” Justice Jackson wrote.

While litigation is pending, the government has asked to temporarily suspend the lower court’s temporary limitations on DOGE’s access to Social Security data, she noted.

“But the government fails to substantiate its stay request by showing that it or the public will suffer irreparable harm absent the court’s intervention,” Justice Jackson wrote.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday he is suing the Trump administration for deploying hundreds of National Guard members to Los Angeles over the weekend, a move he called “unlawful.”

Bonta said President Donald Trump’s move to federalize 2,000 members of the state National Guard on Saturday in response to protests of the administration’s immigration actions was unnecessary and an “infringement” on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s authority.

The suit will seek a court finding that Trump’s order was illegal, he said.

“The president is trying to manufacture chaos and crisis on the ground for his own political ends. Federalizing the California National Guard is an abuse of the President’s authority under the law – and not one we take lightly. We’re asking a court to put a stop to the unlawful, unprecedented order,” Bonta said.

Bonta also argued that the move took crucial resources away from wildfire season.

The White House had contended the move was necessary to combat “lawlessness that has been allowed to fester” in Los Angeles, referring to clashes and confrontations between federal agents carrying out immigration raids and protesters.

Newsom had said there was no need to deploy the National Guard, and that Trump took the drastic step out of a desire for a “spectacle.”

He also accused Trump of trying to “manufacture a crisis.”

“He’s hoping for chaos so he can justify more crackdowns, more fear, more control,” Newsom said in a post Sunday on X, where he also urged protesters to “stay peaceful.”

After receiver Stefon Diggs got himself into a bit of controversy, he’s been with the team to end the club’s offseason program — including at minicamp this week.

Head coach Mike Vrabel was asked about Diggs and how he’s done in the building on Monday.

“Good. I mean, he’s tried to figure out where everything is and what his role is, making sure that as we add those situations — the third down, the no-huddle, the red zone — that he’s staying up on it,” Vrabel said in his press conference. “He’s working hard in his rehab and when he can — there’s certain drills he can be out there and certain drills he won’t be. But I think he’s engaged and I like his energy.”

That’s about all the Patriots can ask for inside the building, as Diggs continues to rehab from a torn ACL suffered midway through the 2024 season.

In eight games for Houston last year, Diggs caught 47 passes for 496 yards with three touchdowns.

When Tyrese Haliburton hit what would be the game-winning shot with 0.3 seconds left in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, the flashpoint moment obscured what was otherwise a relatively quiet performance for the Indiana Pacers star, as he finished the opener with 14 points and six assists.

In Game 2, which the Pacers lost 123-107 after trailing by double digits for most of the night, there were no late heroics by Haliburton to save what was another so-so effort.

While Haliburton’s winner will forever be etched in Finals lore, it also can’t be used to hand-wave what’s been a significant issue for Indiana, which has trailed for the vast majority of the first 96 minutes of the championship round: Haliburton needs to play much better if the Pacers are going to win the series.

In his first two games against the Oklahoma City Thunder, Haliburton is averaging 15.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and 6.0 assists. Alarmingly, he’s also averaging 4.0 turnovers (compared with 1.6 during the season), and he hasn’t attempted a single free throw.

On Sunday, he scored only 5 points through the first three quarters on 2-of-7 shooting.

Haliburton’s scoring and assists are both down compared with the regular season, and especially compared with the rest of the playoffs. And after turning the ball over only 10 times in six games of the Eastern Conference Finals, he’s nearly matched that total with eight so far against the Thunder.

“Defensively, they have a lot of different guys who can guard the ball, fly around,” Haliburton said after Game 2. “They are really physical. I think I’ve had two really poor first halves. I just have to figure out how to be better earlier in games. But kudos to them. They are a great defensive team, but watch the film and see where I can get better.”

One issue for Haliburton has been his inability to create for himself and his teammates via driving into the paint.

In the regular season, Haliburton averaged nearly 11 drives a night, forays into the teeth of the defense that would often lead to good offense for Indiana. In the conference finals, Haliburton averaged closer to 13 drives per game and shot 57.9% from the field when attempting a field goal on such plays, while also never turning the ball over.

Against a long-armed and athletic Thunder defense with fewer weak points to attack, Haliburton is under nine drives a game, with a total of no assists and six turnovers.

“They were the best in the league during the year at keeping people out of [the paint],” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said Sunday. “They are great at it. We have to find ways to get in the ball in there, and you know, it’s just there are so many things that have to go right on a set of two possessions to get the ball into the heart of their defense.”

While Haliburton is not the kind of takeover scorer say, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is for the Thunder, he is unique in the way he is able to create offense for his teammates. But unlike in previous rounds of the playoffs, Haliburton hasn’t been able to find mismatches to attack in order to scramble Oklahoma City’s defense.

In the conference finals, Haliburton averaged 17.3 potential assists a game and created 27.0 points a night on assists. Against the Thunder, he’s dropped to 14.0 potential assists while creating only 31 points total through two games.

“I feel like in the first half we were just moving the ball on the outside and I don’t think we had a single point in the paint in the first quarter, if I’m not mistaken,” Haliburton said about Game 2. “Our offense is built from the inside out, and we have to do a better job getting downhill.”

He added: “We know that the paint is our emphasis and the paint is our friend. The more that we’re able to attack the paint, usually better things happen for us.”

Earlier this year, a key collusion case filed by the NFL Players Association regarding certain veteran quarterback contracts resulted in a 61-page ruling. The outcome was a mixed bag for both sides. And the document continues to be hidden from view by the league and the union.

And we’ve decided to continue to push for its release.

Beyond the fact that the public has a clear interest in any and all questions regarding a sports league that millions religiously follow and state and local governments routinely subsidize, the members of the NFLPA have a right to know. The document has not been shared with them.

It also hasn’t been given to at least two of the three players who were the focal points of the case — Giants quarterback Russell Wilson and Cardinals quarterback Kyler Murray. (We don’t currently know whether Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson did or did not receive the document.)

It’s one thing for the league and the union to refuse to let the media see the document. It’s quite another to conceal it from the members of the union, including the members who were most directly impacted by the case.

We nevertheless will keep pushing for its release. We’ve asked both the league and the union for the document. And if the answer is no, we hope to get a semi-plausible explanation for that from both parties.

It won’t keep us from continuing to push for its release. We all have a right to see it. Especially the members of the NFLPA. Especially those who were at the heart of the case.

Southern Baptists meeting this week in Dallas will be asked to approve resolutions calling for a legal ban on pornography and a reversal of the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval of same-sex marriage.

The proposed resolutions call for laws on gender, marriage and family based on what they say is the biblically stated order of divine creation. They also call for legislators to curtail sports betting and to support policies that promote childbearing.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, is also expected to debate controversies within its own house during its annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday — such as a proposed ban on churches with women pastors. There are also calls to defund the organization’s public policy arm, whose anti-abortion stance hasn’t extended to supporting criminal charges for women having abortions.

In a denomination where support for President Donald Trump is strong, there is little on the advance agenda referencing specific actions by Trump since taking office in January in areas such as tariffs, immigration or the pending budget bill containing cuts in taxes, food aid and Medicaid.

Remnants of the epic showdown in Dallas 40 years ago

Southern Baptists will be meeting on the 40th anniversary of another Dallas annual meeting. An epic showdown took place when a record-shattering 45,000 church representatives clashed in what became a decisive blow in the takeover of the convention — and its seminaries and other agencies — by a more conservative faction that was also aligned with the growing Christian conservative movement in presidential politics.

The 1985 showdown was “the hinge convention in terms of the old and the new in the SBC,” said Albert Mohler, who became a key agent in the denomination’s rightward shift as longtime president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Attendance this week will likely be a fraction of 1985’s, but that meeting’s influence will be evident. Any debates will be among solidly conservative members.

Many of the proposed resolutions — on gambling, pornography, sex, gender and marriage — reflect long-standing positions of the convention, though they are especially pointed in their demands on the wider political world. They are proposed by the official Committee on Resolutions, whose recommendations typically get strong support.

A proposed resolution says legislators have a duty to “pass laws that reflect the truth of creation and natural law — about marriage, sex, human life, and family” and to oppose laws contradicting “what God has made plain through nature and Scripture.”

To some outside observers, such language is theocratic.

“When you talk about God’s design for anything, there’s not a lot of room for compromise,” said Nancy Ammerman, professor emerita of sociology of religion at Boston University. She was an eyewitness to the Dallas meeting and author of “Baptist Battles,” a history of the 1980s controversy between theological conservatives and moderates.

“There’s not a lot of room for people who don’t have the same understanding of who God is and how God operates in the world,” she said.

Mohler said the resolutions reflect a divinely created order that predates the writing of the Scriptures and is affirmed by them. He said the Christian church has always asserted that the created order “is binding on all persons, in all times, everywhere.”

Southern Baptist views more politically viable today

Separate resolutions decry pornography and sports betting as destructive, calling for the former to be banned and the latter curtailed.

At least some of these political stances are in the realm of plausibility at a time when their conservative allies control all levers of power in Washington and many have embraced aspects of a Christian nationalist agenda.

A Southern Baptist, Mike Johnson, is speaker of the House of Representatives and third in line to the presidency.

At least one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, has called for revisiting the 2015 Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. Other religious conservatives — including some in the Catholic postliberal movement, which has influenced Vice President JD Vance — have promoted the view that a robust government should legislate morality, such as banning pornography while easing church-state separation.

And conservatives of various stripes have echoed one of the resolution’s call for pro-natalist policies and its decrying of “willful childlessness which contributes to a declining fertility rate.”

Some call for eliminating Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission

Some preconvention talk has focused on defunding the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, which has been accused of being ineffective. Ten former Southern Baptist presidents endorsed its continued funding, though one other called for the opposite.

A staunchly conservative group, the Center for Baptist Leadership, has posted online articles critical of the commission, which is adamantly anti-abortion but has opposed state laws criminalizing women seeking abortions.

The commission has appealed to Southern Baptists for support, citing its advocacy for religious liberty and against abortion and transgender identity.

“Without the ERLC, you will send the message to our nation’s lawmakers and the public at large that the SBC has chosen to abandon the public square at a time when the Southern Baptist voice is most needed,” said a video statement from the commission president, Brent Leatherwood.

A group of Southern Baptist ethnic groups and leaders signed a statement in April citing concern over Trump’s immigration crackdown, saying it has hurt church attendance and raised fears. “Law and order are necessary, but enforcement must be accompanied with compassion that doesn’t demonize those fleeing oppression, violence, and persecution,” the statement said.

The Center for Baptist Leadership, however, denounced the denominational Baptist Press for working to “weaponize empathy” in its reporting on the statement and Leatherwood for supporting it.

Texas pastor Dwight McKissic, a Black pastor who shares many of the Southern Baptist Convention’s conservative stances, criticized what he sees as a backlash against the commission, “the most racially progressive entity in the SBC.”

“The SBC is transitioning from an evangelical organization to a fundamentalist organization,” he posted on the social media site X. “Fewer and fewer Black churches will make the transition with them.”

Amendment to ban churches with women pastors

An amendment to ban churches with women pastors failed in 2024 after narrowly failing to gain a two-thirds supermajority for two consecutive years. It is expected to be reintroduced.

The denomination’s belief statement says the office of pastor is limited to men, but there remain disagreements over whether this applies only to the lead pastor or to assistants as well. In recent years, the convention began purging churches that either had women as lead pastors or asserted that they could serve that role. But when an SBC committee this year retained a South Carolina megachurch with a woman on its pastoral staff, some argued this proved the need for a constitutional amendment. (The church later quit the denomination of its own accord.)

The meeting comes as the Southern Baptist Convention continues its long membership slide, down 2% in 2024 from the previous year in its 18th consecutive annual decline. The organization now reports a membership of 12.7 million members, still the largest among Protestant denominations, many of whom are shrinking faster.

More promising are Southern Baptists’ baptism numbers — a key spiritual vital sign. They stand at 250,643, exceeding pre-pandemic levels and, at least for now, reversing a long slide.

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