I just saw a commercial during a football game that inspired me, and then irked me. A young black girl is shown growing up in the Civil Rights era, watching the achievements of African American athletes, political activists, and religious leaders. Believing she can become anything if she sets her mind to it, she fights for acceptance in financial firms, eventually graduates with an MBA, and becomes a Wall Street executive. “You may trod me in the very dirt,” she says, “but still, like dust, I rise.”

It’s a great message. But halfway through this ad for the University of Phoenix, alumna Gail Marquis is shown marching hand-in-hand with LGBT activists and waving a rainbow flag. The implication is crystal clear: The fight of African-Americans for equal rights is the same one LGBT Americans are fighting today.

Unbelievably, this conflation between skin color and sexual orientation surfaced during the recent unrest in Charlotte, North Carolina. In an interview with historian Brenda Tindal, Public Radio International’s John Hockenberry suggested that protesters and rioters who took to the street following the police shooting of Lamont Scott were actually angry about—get this—the new transgender bathroom law!

Are you kidding me?

This kind of race-exploitation has infected even the highest levels of government. Back in May, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch filed a lawsuit against North Carolina to force accommodation on the transgender bathroom issue. “It was not so very long ago,” she then lectured the nation, “that states, including North Carolina, had other signs above restrooms, water fountains and public accommodations, keeping people out based on a distinction without a difference.”

It’s a line that has won the LGBT movement virtually endless mileage. Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of today’s equivalent of the Civil Rights struggle, or to be viewed like racists by future generations.

But the fact remains, the two issues are just not the same. And black leaders—many of whom fought for the right to be treated as equal human beings decades ago—keep telling us this.

Writing at the Charlotte Observer last summer, Clarence Henderson, the chairman of the North Carolina Martin Luther King, Jr., Commission, called it “insulting to liken African Americans’ continuing struggle for equality” to the LGBT movement.

“The language of ‘civil rights’ shouldn’t be hijacked to give privileges to the politically vocal while taking away freedoms” for everyone else, said Bishop Patrick Wooden at a gathering of black faith leaders in Raleigh. And Pastor Leon Threatt of Christian Faith Assembly in Charlotte, agreed: “Restrooms and showers separated by biological sex is common sense.”

Other African American leaders upset with the attorney general have pointed out something I told you here on BreakPoint recently: Research shows the vast majority of gender dysphoric children will later abandon those feelings, and transgender individuals who “transition” from one sex to the other frequently have second thoughts.

One of those folks is Walter Heyer. Writing at Public Discourse last Tuesday, Heyer insists based on his own experience that in contrast to race, “people are not born transgender. And those who “wholeheartedly believe that they need a sex change…often…change their mind and go back.” He adds that the emotional devastation of buying the transgender lie can take a lifetime to heal.

The Civil Rights comparison will continue to crop up, but we’ve got to vocally and repeatedly point out why it’s false. Sexual urges don’t determine who we are, and recognizing the fact that God created us male and female isn’t racism. It’s reality.

LGBT Is not a Color: Stop Hijacking Civil Rights

As John affirms, these two issues are not comparable. One is based on biological reality, the other is based on the shifting sand of personal choice. For more discussion, check out the resources linked below.

I fought for civil rights. It is offensive to compare it with the transgender fight.
Clarence Henderson | Charlotte Observer | May 19, 2016

Comparing HB2 with Civil Rights Movement ‘offensive’
Elaina Athans | ABC11.com | May 24, 2016

Born This Way is Shaky Science: The Truth Comes out of the Closet
John Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | August 31, 2016

Transgender Identities Are Not Always Permanent
Walt Heyer | Public Discourse | September 27, 2016

This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org

It seems that America is now locked in an endless loop of tension and violence. Many disaffected Americans are railing out at a government they see as being abusive and vindictive. Movements like “Black Lives Matter” have pitted some African-American (and other) citizens against police officers, in a vicious cycle of street demonstrations and police force.

In some ways, these tensions are not new, and can be traced all the way to the American Civil War, through segregation, the Civil Rights Movement up to today. Americans have always been deeply divided on issues of race, and equal rights.

Now, police are being targeted in random shootings by those who feel anger at what they view as a system of oppression and tyranny.

The question is, where will all of this end?

There are really two facets to this situation that must be explored if we hope to understand the roots of this predicament.

Racism and Prejudice

What very few people stop to consider is the roots of all so-called “racial” prejudice. As Bible-believing Christians, we believe that God “has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26). From one man, and one woman, all of the more than seven billion people on planet earth have descended. That makes all of us related by blood. We are all part of the same race: The Human Race!

Racial prejudice comes mainly out of evolutionary teachings. If you study the roots of the Eugenics movement, you will see that it is based in the view that some people groups are more highly evolved than others. Very few people know the full title of Charles Darwin’s ground-breaking 1859 book on evolution. It is called, “On Origin of Species, by Way of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”

Over 150 years of evolutionary teaching has saturated our culture, and has convinced many that we must struggle for the strongest races to survive. The solution to prejudice is found in the hope offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Not only are we all equal in creation, and therefore equal in value, the Apostle Paul declared, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28).

Anarchy vs. Totalitarianism

The other consideration in this situation is the age-old struggle between a desire for freedom from authority (on the one hand) and a demand for supreme authority by the State (on the other). This tension has always existed in every society. There is a rogue spirit in humankind that wants to be free from the bonds of restriction and law. But a lawless society, where everyone makes up their own rules (moral relativism), and where people’s passions run unchecked (hedonism), is not tenable. No civilization can bear up under the weight of an antinomian mindset (a believe that all law is bad).

When a culture begins to shake itself from moral law, it soon finds itself at the mercy of an ever-encroaching government that seeks to provide stability and regulation. The response to anarchy is always totalitarianism, and the response to tyranny is almost always rebellion, which leads to the cycle of more tyranny.

This situation is only remedied when people recognize that there is a universal moral law that exists outside of themselves, and to which they are all subservient. Once again, we find the solution to both extremes within the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The entire “Sermon on the Mount,” puts external law in the only place where it ultimately works; inside the human heart.

Until the evil of the heart is addressed, we are simply trying to put a cultural bandage on a proverbial brain tumor. No amount of political posturing will make bad people want to do good. It is only when the human heart is changed by love that we will hope to see citizens desire to do good, rather than harm, to their neighbor. It is only when we forgive, rather than seeking another eye or tooth in retaliation for harm, that we can end the vicious cycle of bloodshed and violence.

Ultimately, Christianity provides a totally unique remedy in the history of ideas. Every other worldview teaches that we must solve our own problems through human effort and initiative. Christianity, in contrast, presents us as the heart of the problem, not the solution. The Bible insists that it is only through humility and repentance that we will find healing for our own souls, and then be able to extend that grace and healing to others.

May God grant us that grace of repentance and humility as we seek to walk through the turbulent days that lie ahead.