It’s astonishing that America’s first freedom—the most fundamental of all constitutionally protected rights—is threatened by cross-dressers and others in bondage to disorders related to sexuality. That which has made America great—a beacon of light to oppressed peoples around the world—is being dismantled by those devoted to sexual libertinism. The manifold deleterious effects of the rejection of biblical truth from the public square is transforming America into a place unfit for children, families, or a free and flourishing people. While political “leaders,” including GOP “leaders” cower in their corners if men in dresses look at them cross-eyed, those men in dresses gobble up the rights of Christians. Yum yum, eat ‘em up.

The newest salvo from a man in a dress comes from “Reverend” “Kalie” Hargrove, a man who now pretends to be a woman and who filed a Title IX complaint with the Office for Civil Rights of the Department of Justice (DOJ) claiming that Lincoln Christian University in Lincoln, Illinois violated his Civil Rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Mr. Hargrove was a student at Lincoln Christian University when he made the free choice to begin cross-dressing and pretending to be a woman. As a result, the Christian university told him he had to withdraw from classes or face discipline. Mr. Hargrove then filed his complaint.

Hargrove is being represented by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project (REAP), whose sole raison d’être is to sue Christian colleges and universities that receive federal funds in order to force them to abandon their biblical convictions in deference to those who worship sexual sin and who demand that all Christians do likewise.

Ain’t gonna happen. The wheat and chaff will be separated and the chaff burned up. The lukewarm church will be vomited out. And REAP will one day reap the whirlwind that it is sowing.

Here’s REAP’s tricksy bit of legal sophistry:

In August 2021, the University discriminated against Kalie Hargrove (Student A) on the basis of sex (gender identity) by directing her [sic] either to withdraw from classes or face discipline because she [sic] publicly identified as transgender.

REAP and Hargrove are citing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 as the basis for their complaint. Title IX prohibits discrimination based on sex. Title IX says nothing about “gender” or “gender identity”—which as sexual anarchists continually proclaim are entirely different from sex. In reality, the socially constructed, screwball idea of an “identity” based on subjective feelings about one’s sex wasn’t even on the cultural horizon when Title IX was written and passed.

As Ben Shapiro, Ryan T. Anderson, and others predicted, the boneheaded decision written by Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch in the Title VII case Bostock v. Clayton County made inevitable a conflict between Title IX and Title VII. Gorsuch decided that if employers don’t treat men who pretend to be women exactly as they treat women, then they’re guilty of discrimination based on sex. As legal scholars predicted and leftists knew, Bostock paved the way for legal attacks on both women’s sports and Christian schools that treat people differently in some contexts based on sex differences.

As I wrote in 2020 following Gorsuch’s janky decision,

The crux of the argument goes something like this: If a company that allows a woman who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work fires a man who gets breast implants and wears lipstick, stilettos, and dresses to work, the company has discriminated against him based on his sex and, therefore, violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

Ironically, Lincoln Christian University was founded by Earl C. Hargrove. So, a Hargrove heretic seeks to impose his socially constructed heretical theology, which is misshapen by his sinful desires, on a university founded by a Hargrove Christian.

“LGB” and “T” activists are using receipt of federal funds as a ruse to force Christian schools to deny the Word of God on matters related to sexuality and marriage. Don’t be deceived. They will next come after Christian schools that don’t receive federal funds. If wolves in sheep’s clothing can’t infiltrate Christian schools (and churches) and transmogrify their theological orthodoxy into heresy, they will use the courts to silence them.

Slowly incrementally leftists have been engaged in a long battle to eradicate all public recognition of sex differences. The ideological weapons central to this battle include the heterosexual revolution fomented by the perverse Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner, feminism, the homosexual revolution, and “trans”-cultism. Since this battle is at its core a spiritual battle, it also entails eradicating the church’s freedom to preach and teach. Leftists believe that identity defined by biblical orthodoxy must be subordinated to identity defined by disordered sexual appetites.

Every society has taboos and stigmas. Every society has shared public values and principles that shape culturally approved behaviors and conventions. Societies embed those values and principles in our laws, policies, civic practices, court decisions, classrooms, arts, and entertainment. These institutional incarnations of shared values and principles implicitly and explicitly teach what society believes is right or wrong, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. Currently, those who hold conservative sexual ethics are stigmatized, shamed, excluded, and bullied.

Further, there are no societies in which individual freedom in all areas of life is absolute and without limit. A society is not a collection of atomized individuals united by nothing other than shared geography. Rather, societies are group projects in which diverse peoples are united by ideas, principles, and values. The question before us is which ideas, values, and principles will we uphold and teach. If leftists continue to dominate all cultural institutions, we will enslave future generations to leftist ideas and values that are shaped by disordered sexual appetites, instead of freeing future generations by providing sexual boundaries consonant with reality.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Trans_LCC.mp3

Written by Jerry Newcombe

Dr. Richard Land once called our country, “the divided states of America.” How apt — especially when we survey the various responses to the coronavirus. They are lessons in liberty and lessons in tyranny.

To paraphrase what a friend of mine wrote me recently, “We have 50 real-world government examples of liberty or tyranny — 50 real-time experiments in whether state governments moved towards liberty (as in Texas and South Dakota) or absolute control (as in California, Michigan and New York).” As a resident, I would add: Florida’s leadership is doing a great job.

Churches Closed, Planned Parenthood Open

Nowhere can this contrast be better seen than in how the state authorities deal with churches versus how they deal with abortion, ordering churches closed while deeming Planned Parenthood and other abortionists “essential services.”

How fitting. In her classic book, Godless, Ann Coulter postulates that abortion is the left’s “sacrament.” The sacraments of the church are out. The left’s new sacrament is in. The most pro-abortion leaders are the ones who are most cracking down on real constitutional freedoms in their states. If a politician gets abortion wrong, they tend to get everything else wrong too.

This anti-religious spirit at work is exceedingly ironic because America was born as a religious nation. In the Mayflower Compact, the Pilgrims explained their reason for coming: “For the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”

Our First Amendment declares our first freedom — freedom of religion. The founders stipulated there would be no national denomination and there would be no prohibition on the “free exercise” of religion. They didn’t add, “except in times of pestilence.”

“No Pandemic Exception to the Bill of Rights”

Indeed, Attorney General William Barr sides with the churches (following social distancing guidelines, etc.) in this conflict. He said, “There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.”

But many of the left today have used the pandemic crisis to try and shut down a lot of religious services:

• The mayor of Kansas City, Missouri was demanding that churches hand over a list of anyone who attended any of their services. When Mat Staver and Liberty Counsel threatened to sue, the city backed down.

• The governor of Illinois postulated that church services may need to be banned for a year. This is the same governor who prohibited residents in his state from traveling — while apparently his wife vacationed in Florida.

• Overzealous administrators have sought to ban churches even from holding “drive-in” church services, which follow the mandates to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

If your church parking lot permits, holding a drive-in service is a clever way to worship the Lord together. Usually, the pastor would preach to the congregation in their cars though a low frequency on the FM dial in such services.

“A Lesson to Governors”

But even in the Bible belt, such as in Kentucky and Mississippi, some overzealous administrators have tried to shut such services down. First Liberty Institute has threatened lawsuits, and the cities have relented.

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial entitled, “Caesar, God and the Lockdowns,” in which they note, “A federal court ruling on religious liberty is a lesson to governors.”

The editorial talks about Maryville Baptist Church in Louisville, which held a modest Easter service — with some worshipers inside and others in the parking lot, hearing the service through a loudspeaker.

To harass the worshipers, notes the WSJ, “The police took down license-plate numbers. The church sued.”

A panel on the Sixth Circuit ruled in favor of the church: “It’s not always easy to decide what is Caesar’s and what is God’s — and that’s assuredly true in the context of a pandemic. … Why is it safe to wait in a car for a liquor store to open but dangerous to wait in a car to hear morning prayers?”

The Left-Right Divide in Leadership

A new report out of Chicago over the weekend shows the lengths to which the anti-God forces will go. Wirepoints observes that the mayor sought to punish a church, Philadelphia Romanian Church, to prevent it from holding services. They stated, “On Sunday morning the tow trucks descended — not just on churchgoers, but on residents and everybody else, and on a private lot used by parishioners.”

The pastor of the church said, “The mayor is inciting hate against the church which is very sad. A lot of our members risked their lives to escape Communism, only to find it germinating in 2020 under Mayor Lightfoot in Chicago.” Lori Lightfoot is so committed to abortion rights, she helped drive out of office one of the last Democrat, pro-life U. S. Congressmen.

Wirepoints adds, “It should also be a clarion call to the churches across the city as to how far the left will go to crush the faithful of all denominations.”

Freedom-loving Americans can look at a map of the country and see how those on the left versus those on the right are delicately handling the crisis. The abortion-loving, church-hating politicians stand in great contrast with their freedom-loving counterparts in the red states.

Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is a senior producer and an on-air host for D. James Kennedy Ministries. He has written or co-written 32 books, such as The Unstoppable Jesus Christ, American Amnesia: Is American Paying the Price for Forgetting God?, What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy) and the bestseller, George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Peter Lillback). Learn more at jerrynewcombe.com and follow him on Twitter @newcombejerry.