Those who claim to be “trans,” say that being “trans” is their “reality” and that everyone should respect that. “Trans”-cultists fail to clarify, however, what kind of phenomenon they are referring to when they talk about their “reality.” As with all Leftist ideas about sexuality, terms must be defined and used consistently. Reality can describe one’s subjective, internal feelings or desires, or it can denote objective, immutable material phenomena. The use of the term “reality” or “real” with respect to subjective, internal feelings simply means that the person claiming to experience a feeling or desire actually experiences it. His desires could be good or bad, morally neutral or reprobate, consonant with objective reality or delusional. Accepting that a “trans”-identifying person’s subjective internal desires are real is a morally neutral act. For example, no one should have any moral qualms about accepting Bruce Jenner’s claim that his reality—used in the sense of describing his subjective desires—is that he is female. Everyone can justifiably accept that he really does desire to be female or thinks he is.

But there are other phenomena that the word “reality” points to: that is, objective material things, like Jenner’s biological sex. Jenner’s desire to be a woman and his attempts to conceal that he’s a man do not make his bodily reality female. And not even commitments to respect—which means to hold something in esteem—require others to treat Jenner’s biological sex as if it didn’t exist or weren’t important. Quite the contrary, commitments to treating others with respect require that we do not deny reality.

When “trans”-identifying persons try to badger others into treating their “reality” as if it were real, they are not saying they want others merely to believe they want to be or think they are the sex they are not. No, they are saying they want all others to treat their objective biological reality as if it were not real. They are claiming that respect requires all others to treat their phantasmical experience—that is to say, their rejection of biological reality—as if it were true.

When it comes to objective material reality, there is no “my” reality. There is only reality. Each person’s subjective desires—especially delusional or disordered desires—place no ethical obligations on others.  That means, for example, that others have no ethical obligation to use incorrect or newly invented pronouns that reflect a set of arguable beliefs about disordered desires. Reality—the real, extant, material world—includes the sexual embodiment of all humans. It is neither compassionate nor good to treat delusional desires as if they reflect objective material reality. Knowing what is compassionate and good depends on knowing first what is real and true—as opposed to “truthy.”

The truth is no man can know that he feels like a woman, because no man can know what or how a woman feels. How could he, given that no man has been a woman? Men who identify as women can only truly say that they assume their feelings are the same kind of feelings women have or that their feelings are like those they imagine women feel.

Many “trans”-cultists claim to know they are the sex they aren’t based on their interest in activities associated with the opposite sex. But that contradicts “progressive” claims that there is nothing intrinsically male or female about, for example, toys or clothing styles. “Progressives” claim the gendered associations that exist are arbitrary and culturally imposed. If that’s the case, then interests say nothing about intrinsic maleness or femaleness.

That’s not the only contradiction. “Trans”-cultists continue to look to hard science in a desperate quest to prove their metaphysical claim about their subjective, internal, non-material feelings. In the meantime, however, they put their faith in unreliable social science as their unreliable arbiter of ultimate truth.

And the culture suffers. Big Brother has outgrown his—I mean zir’s—already enormous britches and is foisting language rules on everyone, starting with government employees. Surgeons and sex-hormone manufacturers are making bank on the surgical mutilation and chemical sterilization of healthy children. Boys, girls, men, and women are being forced to relinquish their privacy in spaces where they undress and engage in bodily functions. The government has been enjoined to participate in fraud by providing falsified birth certificates and driver’s licenses to facilitate sex-“passing.” Women’s sports at all levels are being ruined. Parents are concealing the sex of their children—even from the children themselves. Adults are saying absurd things like “Women can have penises” and “Men can ‘chest-feed’ babies.” Children are being re-educated into believing that subjective, internal feelings about femaleness and maleness supersede in value and relevance biological sex, including in private spaces. The eradication of all public recognition of sexual differentiation is almost here.

Our ignorance of the incoherence and implications of the “trans” ideology along with our cowardice has already started us slip-sliding away, down that proverbial slicked up slope. And who are being hurt the most? Children as usual. And still we say nothing.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Which-Trans-Matters.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman; and Doug Wilson, who is a Senior Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho .

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Click here for more information.

The “trans” rebellion against science, nature, and morality is well underway, trampling under its jackbooted stilettos athletic achievement; academic inquiry; physical privacy and safety; speech rights; religious rights; association rights; children’s needs and rights; parental rights; and the bodies of boys, girls, women, and men. “Trans”-cultists want everyone to accept their faith-based assumption that immaterial feelings are more real and more meaningful than objective biological sex. Daily, news stories emerge that attest to the “trans” madness that pursues the impossible: de-sexing the entire the world.

It’s important to bear in mind that in the service of effacing sex, “progressives” manipulate language. “Sex” refers to the objective, biological categories (i.e., male and female) into which humans are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions. “Gender” is no longer synonymous with “sex.” “Gender” now refers to the arbitrary, socially constructed and imposed roles, conventions, interests, traits, and behaviors commonly associated with maleness or femaleness. And “gender identity” is the subjective internal and often fluid sense of being male or female, both, or neither.

The worst manifestations of this “trans” madness pertain to children—often the first victims of pernicious ideologies. One of those manifestations is the growing movement of parents raising their children to be “gender creative.” These parents conceal their children’s sex from the world, and often from close family and even the children themselves. Two of these parents are “Nathan” Levitt and her female partner, both of whom are women who fancy themselves men. These two women use the plural pronoun “they” when referring to their singular child “Zo” whose sex they conceal in order to prevent society from, in their view, imposing socially constructed arbitrary expectations on him or her, which, in their view, is damaging. Absolute autonomy to define even objective material existence is the driving force in their parental decisions.

Levitt, a registered nurse and long-time “trans” advocate, claims that

random people on the street… are incredibly invested in what gender our child is. That’s always the question, “Is that a boy or a girl?” And so often we will say to people, “We don’t know yet.”

Levitt is either being inconsistent or dishonest. Remember, in the socially constructed “trans” dystopia, “gender” and “sex” are different phenomena. Random people on the street are not asking about their child’s “gender” or its “gender identity.” They’re asking about its sex—which Levitt and her partner do, indeed, know. And their baby’s sex is as important as its humanness. In fact, biological sex is arguably the most important objective feature of every human being.

These foolish parents believe they are refraining from imposing an ideology whereas, in reality, they are imposing the belief that biological sex has no intrinsic meaning relative to, well anything, including even bodies. But, as reported by Alex Morris on the website The Cut, avoiding cultural indoctrination takes a lot of indoctrination:

Pronouns are likewise scrambled in books to give equal airtime to female and nonbinary heroes (one family tells me of reading the Harry Potter series using they/them pronouns for Harry). Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me. 

Morris reported that parents of “theybies” ask everyone in their social circles to use “they” rather than he or she. Parents of “theybies” ask that daycare workers who change diapers, keep secret the body parts they will see and that purportedly have nothing to do with maleness or femaleness.

Morris continued:

A common fear among gender-open parents, then, is that their family will be isolated, cut off from people for whom interacting would require just too much cognitive work. 

Yes, socially imposing doctrinaire science-denying dogma requires a carload of cognitive work, as well as a morsel of emotional manipulation and a smidgen of social stigmatization. Propagandizing biological sex out of the public consciousness is very hard work.

Writing on the CrossPolitic blog, Ben Zornes writes this about parents of “theybies”:

[T]hese “parents” feign to be “not choosing” to assign their child a gender, thus sparing it from the social pressures of conforming to being a boy or girl. But their not choosing is… itself a choice which their child has no say in. They have made a choice about what sort of gender values they want their child to have. They want their child to value autonomy when it comes to choosing its gender…. But autonomy is the fairy dream of postmodernism….

This child…. is growing up being taught that it can chart its own destiny, be its own sovereign. This humanistic worldview is the broad way which leads to destruction. The only way off this path is through repentance. Repentance, in this case, looks like embracing the sex which God assigned this child in its mother’s womb…. The real sorrow here is that these parents are tying the millstone of their own sexual rebellion to the neck of their precious toddler and sinking it into the sea of the diabolical madness of the GQBLT religion…. Their “not choosing” is a choice to place a vile temptation before this little one at every turn it makes. God will judge, and will not spare. Unless they repent of their own folly, and the folly they’ve introduced to their child.

Forty-one-year-old lesbian, “trans”-activist, and law professor “Dean” Spade offers a glimpse of where “trans”-activists would like to lead culture (To be clear, Spade is a woman who passes as a man and has relations with women.):

We’ve fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses or ovaries or penises should be understood to determine such things as people’s… proper parental roles, proper physical appearance… [and] proper sexual partners…. Our bodies have varying parts, but it is socialization that assigns our body parts gendered meaning.

Spade and everyone else who pretends to believe that the emperor in the peignoir is an empress should listen to biologist Colin Wright who wrote this for Quillette:

[S]ocial justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct. As a biologist, it is hard to understand how anyone could believe something so outlandish. It’s a belief on a par with the belief in a flat Earth.

…

[T]he most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry.

The formula for each of these articles is straightforward. First, they list a multitude of intersex conditions. Second, they detail the genes, hormones, and complex developmental processes leading to these conditions. And, third and finally, they throw their hands up and insist this complexity means scientists have no clue what sex really is. This is all highly misleading and deceiving (self-deceiving?), since the developmental processes involved in creating any organ are enormously complex, yet almost always produce fully functional end products. Making a hand is complicated too, but the vast majority of us end up with the functional, five-fingered variety.

What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Lastly, the claim that classifying people’s sex based on anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science” has itself no basis in reality, as any method exhibiting a predictive accuracy of over 99.98 percent would place it among the most precise methods in all the life sciences. We revise medical care practices and change world economic plans on far lower confidence than that. 

A relatively few brave professionals from the medical, mental health, and academic communities are stepping forward at great personal and professional risk to speak the truth about the “trans” ideology that seeks to eradicate recognition of the fact and meaning of sexual differentiation. Increasing numbers of doctors and scientists are trying to stop the socially contagious “trans” madness that, left unopposed, will effectively de-sex and bring incalculable suffering to the world. But as Wright explains, stepping forward is a risky endeavor:

Despite the unquestionable reality of biological sex in humans, social justice and trans activists continue to push this belief, and respond with outrage when challenged. Pointing out any of the above facts is now considered synonymous with transphobia. The massive social media website Twitter—the central hub for cultural discourse and debate—is now actively banning users for stating true facts about basic human biology. And biologists like myself often sit quietly, afraid to defend our own field out of fear that our decade of education followed by continued research, job searches, and the quest for tenure might be made obsolete overnight if the mob decides to target one of us for speaking up. Because of this, our objections take place almost entirely between one another in private whisper networks, despite the fact that a majority of biologists are extremely troubled by these attacks to our field by social justice activists. This is an untenable situation.

It is astonishing that so many sheep-like Americans believe or pretend to believe the “trans” ideology. We should no longer marvel in horror that the Holocaust or slavery happened. We should no longer shake our heads in disbelief that ideas as utterly evil and patently false as those that propelled the extermination of 6 million Jews or the brutal enslavement of men, women and children could have been embraced, tolerated, or acquiesced to.

The embrace of and acquiescence to evil, false ideas are taking place in our time, in our midst, before our open but un-woke eyes. And it advances through the same mechanisms that prior evil, deceitful ideas gained cultural ground, that is, through government-subsidized propaganda, bad legislation, bad judicial decisions, control of cultural institutions, and cowardice.

The “trans” ideology, an evil and patently false set of dogmatic beliefs is wreaking havoc on individual lives, families, and virtually all cultural institutions, and relatively few people are opposing it.

To be clear, I am not comparing the degree of evil intrinsic to Nazi beliefs or pro-slavery beliefs about racial superiority or the effects of those beliefs to the degree of evil intrinsic to “trans”-cultic beliefs or their effects. Rather, I am comparing the oppressive mechanisms by which these sets of beliefs achieve cultural ascendancy and the cowardly absence of resistance from those who should know and proclaim the truth despite the cost.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Trans-Madness.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman; and Doug Wilson, who is a Senior Fellow of Theology at New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, and pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho .

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!

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Written by Dr. Robert A. J. Gagnon 

In a blog post titled “‘Fairness For All’: Smart Politics, Or A Sellout?” (Dec. 13), Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative,  reports a defense of the recent decision by the boards of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) to support “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” “federal antidiscrimination law in exchange for religious liberty guarantees written into the same law.” The defense was made by “a prominent conservative Evangelical political strategist who works at both the national and state levels” and whom Dreher calls “Smith.” Rod himself professes to be unsure about the whole subject; an uncertainty that appears to be fueled by his usual belief that voting Republican changes nothing.

The substance of the defense is essentially born of naïve utilitarianism, overlaid with a veneer of high rhetoric about standing up for the “rights” of LGBTQ persons. In effect: We are losing the battle over human sexuality in the culture so, while we still can, let’s cut a deal with proponents of all things “gay” and “transgender” that gives us something in return. They will (allegedly) recognize our good will and then become favorably disposed to protect our “religious liberties” in both the short- and long-term.

The problem with the argument is that it amounts to a policy of appeasement with sexual extremists who advocate (from our perspective) a grossly immoral sexual policy and have never exhibited a “we’ll stop here approach” before. It is an appeasement that requires us to sacrifice our basic principles to get some statutory assurance that can easily be retracted by legislative vote after a full-court indoctrination surge, predicated on the new law, overwhelms remaining resistance. In addition, it is an appeasement that provides only the narrowest of exemptions for religious institutions while throwing under the bus the vast majority of Christians who work and live outside those institutions.

It requires us to sign our own persecution warrant by conceding on a federal level that homosexual practice, “gay marriage,” and sexual mutilation surgery are (as Houghton College President Shirley Mullen, who sits on the boards of both evangelical organizations argued in a position paper) “basic human rights.” Elevating these high acts of sexual immorality to the status of “human rights” in turn slanders reasoned moral arguments against such acts as virulent prejudice akin to racist views.

It gives jurists and legislators the ammunition they need to dismiss any remaining Evangelical resistance to a program of coerced indoctrination and enforcement as inconsistent residual bigotry rather than an instance of rational moral conviction. As Lydia McGrew has pointed out,

[T]his could sabotage any attempt to get an even clearer baker/florist, etc., religious liberty ruling from the Supreme Court in a subsequent case…. A *federal* law enshrining “public accommodations’ non-discrimination rules for sexual orientation could be just what would influence someone like Kavanaugh and possibly others to reverse course rather than going more clearly in the direction of the Masterpiece [Cake] ruling.

Once Evangelical “elites” support special “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” legislation they have conceded (whether they know it or not) that a man having sex with another man and a man subjecting himself to voluntary castration and adopting a female persona are honorable life decisions deserving full government promotion and support.

When the Czechs were compelled to give up the Sudetenland in the Munich Agreement of 1938 in exchange for a contractual assurance of German respect for their sovereignty, they gave up the most defensible and defended part of the country, relying solely on the “good will” of someone who had shown absolutely no previous interest in respecting territorial boundaries. LGBTQ advocates won’t be rounding us up in concentration camps to be gassed, to be sure. Yet they will continue to press for the elimination of every last vestige of “homophobia” and “transphobia” in society by every and any legislative and judicial means. By their own rhetoric they will still regard as hateful ignorant bigots on the level of the Klu Klux Klan, all the more given new federal “anti-discrimination” legislation from which we now seek immoral exemption.

Evangelicals who think otherwise are foolish in the extreme, giving our enemies the club with which to beat us and then taking them at their word that (for the moment) they won’t beat us with it. Then why give them the club in the first place?

According to Smith, “pluralism is about accommodating deep difference” and that requires Evangelicals to “accommodate sexual minorities” and to acknowledge the latter’s “rights.” It is evident already in Smith’s own language that he has given up the store. He has appropriated language of “minorities” and “rights” previously associated with the cause for African American civil rights and applied it to the “LGBTQ” agenda. By definition, then, any resistance to that agenda is “heterosexist” and “cis-sexist.”

Race is about an intrinsically benign, non-behavioral, and immutable facet of human existence. Don’t confuse rhetoric rightly used to support the cause of racial justice with rhetoric that promotes desires (however innate) to do things at fundamental odds with one’s biological design. Contrary to what Smith claims, it is not part of the “common good” to provide special rights for such behavior that will invariably lead to severe state indoctrination and attenuation of both freedom of speech and the free exercise of religion (whatever exemptions we are briefly granted in the law by LGBTQ powers for our detestable prejudices). Smith says that “gay people have a right to be wrong.” They already have that right. What they want is the right to compel others to do things that violate conscience.

Pluralism has its limits. Would Smith apply the same argument to Evangelical hostility against polyamory and adult-consensual incest (these too involve “sexual minorities” and questions about “rights”)? In a pluralist society must we eventually accommodate these “deep differences” too once there is a societal push for such acceptance? How could he possibly argue otherwise given the fact that moral logic predicates opposition to such behavior on a male-female prerequisite for sexual relations and the integrity of a biologically based sexuality, an opposition now surrendered in the public sphere?

Homosexual practice and transgenderism are not “run of the mill” sexual offenses. They are extreme sexual offenses that attack the very foundation of all sexual ethics. The CCCU and NAE want us to promote legislation that honors and protects such behavior and provides the legal reasoning for coercing acceptance in the whole population.

Smith even admits that LGBT activists believe that

Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 dealt a powerful blow to their hopes…. Now they have Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, and Justice Ginsburg aged and frail. LGBT strategists believe that the likelihood of litigating their way to preferred policy outcomes is low under this Court.

Then Smith argues that, despite this perspective, our cause is hopeless because Trump and a Republican-led Congress haven’t done everything in two years. He completely ignores the fact that we haven’t lost federal ground in the sexuality wars and are on the road to strengthening materially our position vis-à-vis the Court without having to surrender our moral convictions in the public sector.

Smith assures us,

I don’t think they’re doing it as a bad-faith stalling tactic.

How ridiculous. Every political example points in the direction that LGBTQ activists will continue their inexorable pursuit of stamping out homophobic and transphobic prejudice (so-called) by all means necessary. These Evangelical appeasers have the “innocent as doves” demeanor down but not the “wise as serpents” part. California moved from outlawing sexual orientation “change therapy” on the part of licensed clinicians for minors to five or six years later making a concerted effort to outlaw it for adults on the part of pastors where an exchange of funds is involved. LGBTQ politicians will push their agenda to the bitter end.

Once we abandon the moral conviction that homosexual and transgender immorality are not “human rights” requiring state promotion, we have no basis for opposing our further persecution. Bigots (in the thinking of LGBTQ activists) are not entitled to exemptions in the long run for a bigotry that harasses “sexual minorities” and induces suicide attempts. LGBTQ activists won’t think us to be any less bigoted because of our surrender. They will simply view us as conviction-less and unprincipled bigots who deserve what is coming to them.

Most galling of all is that Smith even cites the Golden Rule to justify his position:

In Smith’s view, in a pluralistic society like America 2018, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ is a good rule for religious liberty advocates and gay rights supporters alike.

Jesus didn’t formulate the Golden Rule to provide special legal protections for, and promotion of, immoral behavior. He formulated it to encourage us to act in the best interest of others rather than to engage in vengeful behavior as a response to wrongs committed against one’s self. Since no true Evangelical can possibly believe that self-dishonoring homosexual behavior and attempted erasure of one’s biological sex are positive goods in the best interests of the practitioners, no Evangelical can support the kind of legislation that the CCCU and NAE are now endorsing.

With this kind of reasoning on the part of Smith, it is little wonder that he wants to remain anonymous.

Robert A. J. Gagnon is Professor of New Testament Theology at Houston Baptist University. He has a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College, an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, and a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary. His main fields of interest are Pauline theology and sexual issues in the Bible. He is a member both of the Society of Biblical Literature and of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas [Society of New Testament Studies]. He is the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Texts and Hermeneutics (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001; 520 pgs.); co-author (with Dan O. Via) of Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003; 125 pgs.); and, as a service to the church, provides a large amount of free material on his website dealing with Scripture and homosexuality.

In stunning semi-secretive decisions motivated by fear of religious persecution, the boards of two major evangelical organizations, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU), have voted to pass motions that represent an unacceptable compromise with homosexuals and the science-denying “trans” cult. These two influential organizations passed motions that would ask the government to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as protected classes in federal anti-discrimination law in exchange for religious liberty protections that many people know would merely be stepping stones yanked out from under people of faith eventually.

According to World Magazine, in October, the NAE board unanimously passed its motion, titled “Fairness for All” (first discussed in Christianity Today in 2016), which asks “Congress to consider federal legislation consistent with three principles,” the problematic one which says this:

No one should face violence, harassment, or unjust discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity.

Of course, no one should face violence on the basis of any condition. So far, so good. But the rest of this principle is a theological, philosophical, political, and rhetorical mess. To illuminate the mess, here are a few questions for the Christian leaders who passed motions based on it:

1.) While this compromise may—for a short time—protect Christian colleges and universities, how might the religious liberty of ordinary Christians in, for example, wedding-related businesses, be affected if under federal law, homosexuality becomes a protected class?

2.) How are the terms “harassment” and “unjust discrimination” defined now? Could they be redefined or “expanded” later? Would a refusal to provide goods or services for the unholy occasion of homoerotic faux-marriage constitute unjust discrimination? Would opposition to co-ed restrooms and locker rooms constitute unjust discrimination? Would refusal to use incorrect pronouns when referring to those who masquerade as the opposite sex constitute harassment?

3.) Would those Christian leaders who voted for these motions have done so if, instead of the euphemisms “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” in which are embedded false assumptions, the motions had used plain-speaking or even biblical terms? Let’s give the Fairness for All statement above a less-sanitized whirl:

No one should face unjust discrimination on the basis of their volitional choice to exchange natural sexual relations with persons of the opposite sex for unnatural relations with persons of their same sex, or for choosing to appear as the sex they are not.

How would that more accurately phrased statement have sat with the Christian leaders?

4.) Unlike other protected classes that are constituted by objective conditions that are in all cases immutable and carry no behavioral implications (e.g., sex and nation of origin), homosexuality, bisexuality, and opposite-sex impersonation are constituted by subjective and often fluid feelings and volitional acts with moral implications. Therefore, what other conditions similarly constituted will eventually be deemed protected classes? Why should homosexuality be included and polyamory or Genetic Sexual Attraction (aka incest) excluded?

To fully grasp the magnitude of the potential effect of these motions requires knowledge of the size of the organizations that passed them. The NAE “is an association of evangelical denominations, organizations, schools, churches and individuals. The association represents more than 45,000 local churches from nearly 40 different denominations and serves a constituency of millions.”

The CCCU “is a higher education association of more than 180 Christian institutions around the world,” including Bethel University, Calvin College, Colorado Christian University, Dallas Theological University, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Fuller Theological Seminary, Gordon College, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Houghton College, Houston Baptist University, Judson University, Messiah College, Moody Bible Institute, Regent University, Taylor University, The King’s College, Trinity International University, and Wheaton College.

To be clear, we must not assume any of these colleges and universities supported the motion passed by the CCCU board. For example, Dr. Benjamin Merkle, president of New Saint Andrews College, which is a CCCU member, explained that “I’ve registered my opposition to this move, as have several other CCCU presidents.” 

While the CCCU and NAE boards capitulate to the Left’s relentless demand to have disordered sexual desires and deviant sexual behavior deemed conditions worthy of special protections, 75 prominent religious leaders oppose capitulation to such demands.

A document titled “Preserve Freedom, Reject Coercion” signed by religious leaders including Ryan T. Anderson, Rosaria Butterfield, Charles Chaput, D.A. Carson, Jim Daly, Kevin DeYoung, Tony Evans, Anthony Esolen, Robert A. J. Gagnon, Robert P. George, Timothy George, Franklin Graham, Harry R. Jackson Jr., James Kushiner, John MacArthur, Eric Metaxas, Al Mohler, and John Stonestreet explains why SOGI laws are dangerous:

In recent years, there have been efforts to add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classifications in the law—either legislatively or through executive action. These unnecessary proposals, often referred to as SOGI policies, threaten basic freedoms of religion, conscience, speech, and association; violate privacy rights; and expose citizens to significant legal and financial liability for practicing their beliefs in the public square. In recent years, we have seen in particular how these laws are used by the government in an attempt to compel citizens to sacrifice their deepest convictions on marriage and what it means to be male and female….

SOGI laws empower the government to use the force of law to silence or punish Americans who seek to exercise their God-given liberty to peacefully live and work consistent with their convictions. They also create special preference in law for categories based on morally significant choices that profoundly affect human relations and treat reasonable religious and philosophical beliefs as discriminatory. We therefore believe that proposed SOGI laws, including those narrowly crafted, threaten fundamental freedoms, and any ostensible protections for religious liberty appended to such laws are inherently inadequate and unstable.

SOGI laws in all these forms, at the federal, state, and local levels, should be rejected. We join together in signing this letter because of the serious threat that SOGI laws pose to fundamental freedoms guaranteed to every person.

In a recent interview, John Stonestreet used the recent firing of a Virginia high school French teacher for his refusal to use incorrect pronouns when referring to a “trans”-identifying student to illustrate the potential danger SOGI laws pose to Christians in the work place:

Every version of the Fairness for All proposals that I have seen would not help Peter Vlaming at all. In fact, it would put us on the wrong side of that…. Here you have a government employee working at a public school who serves the public interest that has already been defined by Fairness for All and SOGI legislation as including “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as a category of human being, and that basically sets Peter Vlaming up for failure.

It’s astonishing that time and again the experts—people like Ryan Anderson, Anthony Esolen, Robert Gagnon, Robert George, and Doug Wilson—who have been writing presciently for years on cultural/political issues related to disordered sexuality are ignored by those who spend far less time thinking and writing about them.

Shirley Mullen who is president of Houghton College and a member of the NAE Board, wrote that “the most viable political strategy is for comprehensive religious freedom protections to be combined with explicit support for basic human rights for members of the LGBT community.” What are the “human rights” of which members of the “LGBT” community are currently deprived? Near as I can tell, they are deprived of no human or civil rights. (Anticipating an objection, I will add that no man has a human or civil right to access women’s private spaces—not even if he pretends to be a woman.)

On his American Conservative blog, Rod Dreher quotes a pseudonymous friend called “Smith” who has been working behind the scenes for years on the Fairness for All compromise with “LGBT” activists. Smith argues that this compromise is necessary because conservatives—who have lost the cultural battle on sexuality—cannot count on either statutory or judicial protections of their free exercise of religion. But Smith revealed something more troubling:

[T]here really is a question of justice within a pluralistic society that conservative Christians have to face. We may sincerely believe that homosexuality is morally wrong, but at what point does the common good require that we agree that gay people have a right to be wrong?

First, since when do conservatives deny that “gay people have a right to be wrong”?

Second, since Smith isn’t really arguing that the common good demands that conservatives agree that gay people have a right to be wrong, what specifically is it he believes the common good demands of conservatives? In a consistently dismissive tone, Smith suggests that conservatives demonstrate an absolute rigidity but fails to identify the specific ways conservatives are being intolerantly inflexible and in so doing harming the public good. He seems to be suggesting that standing firm against SOGI laws—which put at grave risk religious liberty and constitute complicity with both moral and scientific error—is the issue that threatens the common good and on which we must capitulate compromise.

Smith continues:

If pluralism is about accommodating deep difference—if conservative Evangelicals are going to ask for accommodation of difference, then they can’t turn around and say in every single case when they are asked to accommodate sexual minorities, ‘No, we will fight to the death.’ That’s not pluralism if all you’re doing is protecting your own rights and saying error has no rights when it comes to you. Pluralism has to be seen by others who disagree with you as fair.

Yes, pluralism is about accommodating differences, but there are differences on which accommodation is impermissible for Christians. I doubt Smith would have made such an ambiguous claim about Christians who rigidly refused to compromise on the nature and intrinsic worth of enslaved blacks or who will not accommodate Planned Parenthood’s views of humans in the womb. The nature, meaning, and value of biological sex, marriage, and children’s rights are other issues on which it is impermissible for Christians to compromise, even if that inflexibility results in persecution.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/SOGI_Compromise1.mp3

End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, thanks to amazingly generous Illinois Family Institute partners, we have an end-of-year matching challenge of $100,000 to help support our ongoing work to educate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your tax-deductible contribution will help us stand strong in 2019!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

Thursday night, the school board of West Point High School in West Point, Virginia voted 5-0 to fire well-liked and well-respected French teacher (and Chicago Native) Peter Vlaming for his refusal to use incorrect pronouns when referring to a freshman girl who pretends to be a boy. Vlaming, a Christian, had agreed to use her newly adopted name and to avoid using pronouns as much as he could. Because of his faith, what he could not do is be complicit in a body- and soul-destroying fiction. According to the Virginia Gazette, the girl’s parents became angry “after an incident where the student was wearing virtual reality goggles and almost ran into a wall in the hallway and Vlaming shouted ‘don’t let her run into the wall.'” In his concern for the immediate safety of this girl, Vlaming accidentally used the correct pronoun, and the girl’s parents claimed “‘it is unhealthy for their child to remain in Vlaming’s class.'”

At the school board meeting, recently hired principal Jonathan Hochman made this astonishingly ignorant statement:

“I can’t think of a worse way to treat a child than what was happening. That was very threatening.”

Publicity-hound in sheep’s clothing, Nadia Bolz-Weber, former pastor of a fake church in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) denomination, is in the news again. Last August, Bolz-Weber made the news by proclaiming that “consumption of pornography” shouldn’t be shamed. In her view, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with watching “ethically sourced” porn as long as people consume it in moderation. Her defense of the moderate use of ethically sourced porn is that “People have viewed erotic imagery since we could scratch it on the inside of caves” and that “[o]ur bodies are wired” to respond to porn.

No argument there. Sin has been in the world since that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day in the Garden. Since then, our bodies have been wired to desire and respond to all sorts of sinful activities. That hardly seems a defense of engaging in them.

Now Bolz-Weber, who stepped down from the adolescently named House for All Sinners and Saints church (HFASS, get it, half-a**) is in the news for asking women to send their purity rings to her, which she is going to melt down and fashion into a golden vagina. Nothing says Christian love quite like mocking virginity in a vulgar piece of fake art.

She announced this campaign via Twitter:

I’m inviting women to mail in their purity rings for a massive art project. @SweetBirdStudio [Nederland, Colorado jewelry maker Nancy Anderson ] is collaborating with me to melt them into a sculpture of a vagina… join in and get your certificate of impurity!

This massive art project will take place at “The Makers” conference , a feminist conference that will take place at some secret location in Southern California with secret speakers in February 2019.

Though this project is offensive, it’s not surprising from Bolz-Weber who praises the bloody work of Planned Parenthood that makes bank on sexual promiscuity and the tiny inconvenient humans that are the disposable products of sexual promiscuity.

Obviously favoring the news over the pews, Bolz-Weber, the inked-up, obscene, viril-ish pastor proclaims herself rather than Christ and his kingdom to the world. Bolz-Weber is mother to two teens; married to Matthew Weber who is the pastor of Holy Love Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Aurora, Colorado; and describes herself as a “dyke.”

As reported in 2016, “about a third of her congregation are in the LGBT community”—and by “in the LGBT community,” the interviewer did not mean experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction but living a celibate life in accordance with Scripture. He meant a third of Bolz-Weber’s congregation affirms homosexuality in defiance of Scripture.

Bolz-Weber spouts the common “progressive” tripe that because Jesus spent time with the marginalized, the church should affirm homosexuality and opposite-sex impersonation. She conveniently omits the rest of the accounts of the time Jesus spent with the marginalized. He spent time with them—not chewing the fat, going to amusement parks with them as she does, and affirming their sin. He called them to repent and follow him, to deny themselves and take up their crosses daily, to live “no longer for human passions but for the will of God,” to put off old selves which belonged to former manners of life that were corrupted through deceitful desires,” to be renewed in the spirit of their minds, and to put on their new selves “created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

Bolz-Weber, who has two books on the New York Times bestseller list and a huge idolatrous fan base, has left her church but not her hellbound ministry. She is on a world tour of heretical churches to promote her newest book Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. In an interview, she expressed her goal for the book:

I want people who read this to re-think their ideas about sexual ethics, gender, orientation, extra-marital sex, and the inherent goodness of the human body. We are reaching for a new Christian sexual ethic that’s not based on a standardized list of ‘thou shalt nots,’ but on concern for each other’s flourishing, letting go of shame.

Bolz-Weber is not encouraging sexual holiness and letting go of pathological shame that derives from an inadequate understanding of or refusal to accept God’s forgiveness. Rather, she seeks to lead Christians to let go of biblical standards of sexual holiness and desensitize them to the work of the Holy Spirit that leads Christians to feel guilt or shame when they sin. Her devilish work is to eradicate conscience, so people are free to live lives of sexual sin. Her pursuit of hedonism marks a return to paganism.

While she claims she resigned in August because the church she built no longer needs her (a truer thing was never spoken), this suspicious mind speculates that it was either greenback pastures or the lure of being worshiped on a larger stage or both that led her to resign.

Unfortunately, she left her sheep to be led further astray by homosexual shepherd Reagan Humber who is a man “married” to drag queen “Fruit Bomb,” one of whose performances is of him bad-lipsyncing while performing fake abortions.

Leading people astray is Bolz-Weber’s business. She recently gave a Facebook shout-out to “my girl,” Rev. Emily Scott, a graduate of Yale Divinity School who is starting a new ELCA church in Baltimore, Maryland called “Dreams and Visions” where “false binaries are left behind” and “queerness is holy.”

Bolz-Weber admits to having been mercilessly bullied at school during childhood because of bulging eyes, a result of Graves’ disease, an immune-system disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until age 12. She attributes her “rage and cynicism,” and high school drinking and drug use to the bullying. This should serve as a cautionary tale to parents. If your child is being bullied at school, find a way to pull him or her out. Bullying can lead to all manner of emotional, psychological, social, relational, sexual, and spiritual dysfunction.

Pray for Bolz-Weber. Pray for healing and for an end to her ministry that undermines human flourishing and puts at risk the eternal lives of those who follow her. She leads them not to freedom but bondage.

And be vigilant. Watch for wolves stealthily creeping into your church. Some are harder to discern than Nadia Bolz-Weber.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Another-Wolf-in-the-Church1.mp3

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The New York Times has published an opinion piece by another young man who seeks to pass as a woman. In his essay, Manhattan, Illinois native Parker Marie Molloy tries futilely to mask the incoherence of his argument, which is that banning words passers don’t like from social media platforms is necessary to protect freedom of speech. His argument is composed of two dubious contentions:

1.) If language issues make passers feel really bad, they will choose not to speak, thereby undermining the free exchange of ideas, so conservatives need to get with “trans”-constructed Newspeak. In the mixed up, muddled up, shook up “trans” world, speech must be controlled in order to protect speech.

2.) There’s no point in debating the foundational questions regarding the meaning of biological sex, the relationship between sex and “gender identity,” and the meaning of language, so Americans should just move on to policy discussions.

What got Molloy all atwitter was public criticism of Twitter’s illiberal censorship, that is, its decision to ban “deadnaming” and “misgendering” on its allegedly open platform:

We prohibit targeting individuals with… content that intends to dehumanize, degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals. 

“Deadnaming” refers to using the names passers were given by their parents at birth or by their adoptive parents. “Misgendering” is a pejorative term invented to stigmatize the use of correct pronouns when referring to passers. In case anyone has forgotten, pronouns correspond to biological sex—not to subjective internal, non-material feelings about biological sex, maleness, or femaleness.

To be clear, Molloy is arguing for banning certain words in news media and on social media, and worse, he’s arguing for forcing everyone to speak certain words—words that embody, espouse, and imply acquiescence to a set of arguable assumptions.

Specifically, he wants to ban “deadnaming.” For example, he would want banned from social and news media the name “Bruce” when referring to the man who won the Olympic decathlon in 1976. Already Wikipedia is scrubbing facts from its biographies. While Wikipedia still “deadnames” John Wayne and Elton John, it omits the “deadnames” of Janet Mock, Jazz Jennings, and Kate Bornstein.

And Molloy wants to force everyone on social media and in the news media to use incorrect pronouns when referring to passers. Banning “misgendering” means mandating that people use incorrect pronouns when referring to people who seek to pass as the opposite sex. But banning “misgendering” would mean mandating mis-sexing. Oh what tangled webs….

Despite its evident belief to the contrary, the “trans” cult has no intrinsic right to revolutionize English grammar for the entire English-speaking world to make themselves feel better about their false beliefs or disordered desires about their biological sex. And normal people who reject the faith-based beliefs of passers have no moral or ethical obligation to use their Newspeak.

Twitter means serious censorship business with this new policy. Canadian feminist Meghan Murphy has already been Twitter-disappeared, which pleases Molloy because Murphy “regularly calls trans women ‘he’ and ‘him,’” and says, “men aren’t women.” Molloy believes no one should be allowed to publicly say that objectively male persons are not women.

Molloy describes his subjective, internal feelings about hearing others describe human reality truthfully, objectively, and accurately:

I find it degrading to be constantly reminded that I am trans and that large segments of the population will forever see me as a delusional freak. Things like deadnaming, or purposely referring to a trans person by their former name, and misgendering—calling someone by a pronoun they don’t use—are used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.

There is no right to be free from encountering ideas that we will find discomfiting—particularly in an open society committed to free speech. Molloy has a right to pretend he is a woman, and others have a right to acknowledge he is a man. He has a right to ask that others refer to him as a woman, and others have a right to refuse to speak lies. Molloy has no right to mandate that others pretend along with him that men can be women.

UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh points out the problems with pronoun diktats, which he opposes:

[W]hat if some people insist that their title is… “Your Holiness”?… [P]resumably the same logic that applies to gender-related self-chosen titles would apply to religion-related self-chosen titles. Both sex and religious discrimination are, after all, prohibited by the same laws…. The analogy [to “gender”-related pronoun mandates] would be if the government demanded that people have to be addressed using their own preferred race- or religion-linked titles—hypothetically, enforcing people’s demands that “you need to use the title ‘Sun Person’ when you refer to me, because I’m black,” or “you need to use the title ‘rav’ with me because I’m Jewish,” or “you need to use the title ‘friend’ with me because I’m a Quaker,” or “you need to address me as ‘thee’ rather than ‘you’ because I’m a Quaker.” 

While Molloy might find it degrading that others reject his faith-based assumptions about the nature, value, and meaning of biological sex, others find it degrading to be forced to pretend that his assumptions are true and good by being forced to use deceitful language.

Molloy muddies up the murky rhetorical waters even more when he claims that grammatically correct pronouns are “used to express disagreement with the legitimacy of trans lives and identities.” I can’t discern his meaning in the murk, so I’ll try to explain with clarity the real reasons grammatically correct pronouns are used.

Pronouns correspond to and denote objective biological sex, which has profound meaning. Sexual differentiation is the source of feelings of modesty and the desire for privacy when undressing and engaged in private bodily functions. Sexual differentiation is also foundational to marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. It is foundational to Judaism and Christianity. It is foundational to single-sex schools and competitive athletics. It is foundational to law enforcement and criminal justice, including prison assignments and public decency laws. It is foundational to health care. Sexual differentiation is real, and it matters. Using incorrect pronouns to refer to “trans”-identifying persons constitutes lying about an objective and deeply meaningful ontological reality. Using grammatically correct pronouns does not deny the existence of people who wish they had been born the opposite sex. It denies that they can be the sex they are not.

Molloy argues that those opposed to mis-sexing “see themselves as truth-tellers fighting against political correctness run amok.” He then ironically asserts that “voicing one’s personal ‘truth’ does just one thing: It shuts down conversation.” Did he hear himself?

Those who oppose incorrect-pronoun usage are not claiming “personal ‘truth.’” They’re acknowledging objective, scientific truth. It is Molloy who is voicing his “personal truth,” and quite literally trying to silence speech.

The ironies keep piling up. Next Molloy describes the absence of pronoun mandates as constituting a “content free-for-all” that “chills speech by allowing the dominant to control the parameters of debate, never letting discussion proceed past the pedantic obsession with names and pronouns.”

First, can there be better evidence that it is “trans”-cultists who have a pedantic obsession with pronouns than Molloy’s essay? Molloy demands ad nauseum which pronouns others must speak.

Second, Molloy’s argument here is a classic illustration of a question-begging fallacy. Pronoun-usage is the debate. To assert that everyone should just move on to the real debate assumes the proposed grammar revolution has been debated and settled. Just move on, you dominant conservatives, there’s nothing to debate here.

Molloy explains why he is reluctant to appear on television:

I wonder whether I’ll be able to discuss the day’s topic or whether I’m going to get roped into a debate over my own existence…. If this isn’t harassment, I don’t know what is.

How would this roping happen? Is Molloy suggesting that if a host or moderator were to use grammatically correct pronouns, Molloy couldn’t continue discussing the day’s topic? Why not? Would Molloy’s pedantic obsession with correctly sexed pronouns result in his refusal to discuss the day’s topic? If that’s what he meant, then he wouldn’t be “roped.” He would be tying himself up.

Molloy asserts that the use of grammatically correct (i.e., correctly sexed) pronouns constitutes harassment. But since mis-sexed pronouns embody moral, ontological, and political views, Molloy is implying that comity and respect require affirming all the beliefs and desires of others. Resist Molloy’s desires and stand guilty of harassment. Let’s add “harassment” to the growing list of terms the “LGBTQ” lexical pillagers have redefined.

Others view language mandates as harassment, and when fines or imprisonment is imposed for non-compliance, as has been done in New York City and California, the free flow of ideas is really impeded.

Molloy argues absurdly that,

Aside from the harm it does to trans people, it also impedes the free flow of ideas and debate, in the same way that conservatives often accuse student protesters of shutting down speech on college campuses. Sometimes, as the logic behind the campus speaker argument would dictate, we have to set parameters on speech if we want to actually have a debate on the issues.

By “it” in “it also impedes the free flow of ideas,” Molloy is referring (obsessively) to pronouns, suggesting that the refusal of television hosts to capitulate to his language rules—capitulation that would entail lying—is analogous to protesters shouting down speakers. Molloy says the use of pronouns he doesn’t like impedes the free flow of ideas and debates “in the say way” that drowning out speakers does. Really? In Molloy’s hypothetical television scenario, he chooses not to speak because he feels bad, whereas conservatives are trying to speak but being drowned out or disinvited.

Despite not establishing any points of correspondence between undesired pronoun-usage and screaming protestors or between his choice not to speak and conservative speakers’ inability to speak, Molloy goes on to say that what we’ve learned from these two (wholly different) scenarios is that we must set debate parameters. And the parameters Molloy thinks are not only just but necessary entail—you guessed it—acceding to Molloy’s begged question.

Molloy tries and fails again to construct a sound analogy. He points to an editorial in which Ben Shapiro argued that discussions about whether Trump’s actions or statements are racist are faulty if they start from the premise that he’s racist and, therefore, everything he says and does is racist. Shapiro says, “Perhaps Trump is a racist. Perhaps not.… But we can’t have a productive conversation that starts from the premise that Trump is a racist overall…. That conversation is about insults, not truth.”

Molloy responds,

Just as we can’t actually address the merits of any particular policy proposed by Mr. Trump if our focus is solely on the man himself, we can’t address the merits of policies that affect trans people if debate starts from the premise that trans people are and will always be whatever happens to be stamped on our original birth certificates. And as Mr. Shapiro notes, while there may or may not be truth to the statement that Mr. Trump is a racist, any discussion had through that lens will be “about insults, not truth.”

Molloy seems not to understand Shapiro’s point. Shapiro isn’t saying “Ignore the man. Just pay attention to his statements and policies.” He’s saying that presuming a character flaw—something we can’t know and is subjective—is unproductive. Evaluate instead, his statements and words.

The difference with the “trans” issue is that the premise Molloy wants us to elide is not an assumption about a character flaw. Being a biological male is a reality and saying so is not an insult.

The premise is a claim about the reality and meaning of an objective, constitutive feature of human beings and its meaning. The policies that Molloy prefers to discuss depend on answering the questions he wants to beg.

Molloy concludes by one last time implicitly begging readers to beg the question “Can men be women?” He introduces the Trump Administration’s possible clarification that the word “sex” in federal anti-discrimination policy refers to biological sex, a clarification that the “trans” cult ludicrously contends defines them out of existence. Molloy complained about the ensuing debate between “trans” cultists who oppose the change and conservatives who like it:

[T]he focus was almost universally on whether or not trans women are actually women and trans men are actually men. Rather than having a robust discussion about what practical effects a change to the Department of Health and Human Services definition of sex and gender might have… we found ourselves mired in the same stalemate.

Molloy desperately wants Americans to forgo a robust discussion of whether men can be women. He wants instead and only robust discussions of the practical effects of accepting his assumptions about biological sex. He acknowledges our responsibility as a “democratic public” to “hash out thorny policy issues,” but Molloy asserts we must set “guardrails for that conversation,” and those guardrails are based on his view that “trans”-identifying people are “not concepts, ideologies or philosophical questions to be pondered.” \

What a crock of sophistry. While people are not concepts, ideologies, or philosophical questions to be pondered, the choice to cross-dress, cross-sex-hormone-dope, mutilate healthy bodies, sexually integrate private spaces, and mandate grammatically incorrect pronoun-usage are justified by concepts and philosophical views that must be pondered and discussed openly and freely. Molloy might not want to discuss it, but one of the “practical effects” that is coming is the eradication of public recognition of sexual differentiation everywhere for everyone.

Don’t gobble up the baloney Molloy and his ideological compeers are serving to compel surrender to their cultural demands. And definitely don’t mis-sex people.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Baloney-Served-Up-by-Pretend-Woman.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; and Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman.

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!

A painfully honest and disturbing editorial by New York University PhD candidate Andrea Long Chu, a young man who longs to be a woman, recently appeared in the New York Times. Chu’s central thesis is that gender-dysphoric persons are entitled to surgery and that surgeons have an obligation to provide it regardless of their beliefs about what constitutes harm. In Chu’s skewed and revolutionary view, “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want…. [N]o amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.”

Chu, who has been taking estrogen and evidently had breast implants, is scheduled for “bottom” surgery on Thursday, November 29 and in this pre-op editorial admits what many “trans”-identifying people likely wish he hadn’t:

This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to…. People transition because they think it will make them feel better. The thing is, this is wrong…. I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levies of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen—effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers—enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it…. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

I won’t go through with it, probably.

Chu goes on to criticize opposition to the chemical sterilization and surgical mutilation of healthy and often very young bodies as “‘compassion-mongering,’” describing it as “peddling bigotry in the guise of sympathetic concern.” Apparently, Chu is unwilling to concede even the possibility that such opposition is motivated by genuine concern and sincere commitments to do no harm.

But harm is a concept that Chu inverts and twists in his effort to compel doctors to medically ravage the bodies of girls and boys, women and men. His confusing thicket of childish rationalizations for compelling doctors to concede to the “wants” of gender-dysphoric persons come down to these:

1.) Doctors shouldn’t be allowed to “gatekeep,” (i.e., to decide which treatment modalities will be prescribed for gender-dysphoric persons), because, Chu alleges, many doctors view “trans”-identifying persons with “suspicion and condescension,” and are motivated by “bigotry.”

2.) Doctors shouldn’t use the alleviation of suffering as a criterion for assessing treatment modalities, because some of the treatment modalities desired by gender-dysphoric patients will not alleviate suffering and may increase it.

3.) Allowing doctors to determine the best course of action constitutes an illicit dictatorial control over the bodies of gender-dysphoric persons and encourages them to lie by pretending that such treatment modalities will, indeed, end their suffering:

As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it….  [A]s things stand today, there is still only one way to obtain hormones and surgery: to pretend that these treatments will make the pain go away.

Chu wants what he wants, and any impediment—including the knowledge and expertise of doctors—to the satiation of his desire for self-negation is ipso facto wrong. This raises the question, does Chu believe his principles should be applied consistently to all medical and psychological conditions or just gender dysphoria?

Chu’s explanation that doctors are motivated by the goal of alleviating pain is myopic or incomplete. Many doctors believe the practice of medicine—both means and ends—is circumscribed by objective standards that determine the appropriateness of medical options. Those standards derive from objective measures of bodily health and wholeness. The goals are the eradication of disease, the restoration of proper form and function, and the alleviation of pain. The alleviation of pain is limited too by ethical principles. Most doctors won’t alleviate the suffering of those who identify as amputees by amputating healthy arms. Most doctors won’t treat insomnia with propofol. And many doctors won’t treat gender dysphoria by chemically sterilizing pre-teens, lopping off the healthy breasts of girls, and castrating boys.

Chu’s troubling editorial reveals the primacy of subjectivism in the “trans” ideology. Subjectivism is the philosophical belief that knowledge “proceeds from or belongs to individual consciousness or perception” and that “there is no external or objective truth.” Subjectivism is foundational to the “trans” ideology, which subordinates objective biological sex to subjective feelings about one’s maleness, femaleness, both, or neither. This exaltation of subjective experience is exposed in Chu’s implicit denial of the objective truth of his surgery: “Next Thursday, I will get a vagina.”

Chu is not getting a vagina. He will be getting a surgeon-constructed facsimile of a vagina. It won’t be materially or functionally a vagina. It will be composed of either the inverted skin of his penis and scrotum or a segment of his sigmoid colon. If skin from his penis and scrotum are used, his fake-vagina will not be self-lubricating as vaginal tissue is, and it may grow hair. If a segment of his sigmoid colon is used, his “vagina” may produce a smelly, mucus-y discharge, will be at risk for colon cancer, and will not have the sensitivity of an actual vagina.

Even while claiming he will be getting a vagina, Chu acknowledged that his body won’t see it as that: “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain.” His body will always recognize this gaping hole as the unnatural wound it is and will seek to close it unless Chu regularly inserts dilating stents.

Ironically, while Chu places his subjective, internal feelings at the center of his identity and bases his actions on them, like many other opposite-sex impersonators, he denies the same freedom to others. In fact, he believes his subjective desires place obligations on others. His subjective feelings about his sex require actions of others that deny their subjective feelings and beliefs about the meaning of biological sex and of harm. Chu seeks to force doctors to violate their moral convictions, ethical principles, and concomitant feelings in order to serve his “wants.”

Chu writes this about the real possibility that more and new forms of suffering may follow surgery:

The negative passions—grief, self-loathing, shame, regret—are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition.

While grief, self-loathing, shame, and regret are common experiences, it is nonsensical to refer to them as human rights. Chu seems to be suggesting that surgery and the ensuing suffering are not only human rights but also that they’re positive rights, which are rights that oblige others to do or provide something. Chu believes doctors, in violation of their own ethical convictions—convictions that are central to their identities—are obliged to provide services that will damage bodily functions and wholeness and may result in grief, self-loathing, shame, and regret.

In the mixed up, muddled up, shook up world of Andrea Long Chu, doctors will mutilate, treatment will harm, and men will be women. Isaiah writes, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20)

In his spiritually dark, inverted world, Chu seeks self-erasure and longs for woe:

Tragically I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/boy-ERASED.mp3

Save the Date!!!

On Saturday, March 16, 2019, the Illinois Family Institute will be hosting our annual Worldview Conference. This coming year, we will focus on the “transgender” revolution. We already have commitments from Dr. Michelle Cretella, President of the American College of Pediatricians; Walt Heyer, former “transgender” and contributor to Public Discourse; and Denise Schick, Founder and Director of Help 4 Families, and daughter of a man who “identified” as a woman.

The Transgender Ideology:
What Is It? Where Will It Lead? What is the Church’s Role?
Stay tuned for more information!

Almost anywhere you look, we’re being fed illusory notions that serve somebody’s interest.

Some of the deceptions are minor or even harmless.  Especially in show business.

Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. wanted to make it big as a folk singer, but figured that fans might be more receptive to “Rocky Mountain High” from a guy named John Denver.  Quite understandable from a marketing standpoint.

Maurice Joseph Micklewhite became the actor Michael Caine, deriving his last name from the Humphrey Bogart film “The Caine Mutiny.”  Mark Sinclair Vincent is better known as Vin Diesel, which helps drive home his status as an action film hero.

Alicia Augello Cook plays better as singer/pianist Alicia Keys.  Stevie Wonder was born Steveland Hardaway Judkins but gained his new name when he signed with Motown.  And so on.

For decades, some Jewish Americans and Italian Americans anglicized their names in order to fit into the WASP-dominated society.  The same went for many people with hard-to-pronounce or exotic-sounding names that were deemed a speed bump on their way to acceptance.   Some people still do it to afford their children greater opportunities than they had, a noble undertaking.

In recent years, however, we’ve seen an upswing in fake identities and fake definitions adopted for not-so-benign reasons.

The most obvious is the transgender identity revolution, in which men who think they’re women and vice versa insist that everyone espouse their sexual confusion or be treated like racists or anti-Semites.

In Canada, which is slightly ahead of the United States in enforcing ever-expanding legal claims based on sexual identity, a transwoman has filed complaints against 16 women at Vancouver-area beauty clinics who declined to give him a Brazilian bikini wax, an extremely intimate service.

Known publicly only as “JY,” the complainant told the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal that the women discriminated on the basis of “gender identity.” A lawyer for one of the women says the wax seeker demanded a $2,500 payoff but withdrew the complaint upon hearing that the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms had filed a challenge. The Centre’s website says the transgender complainant is still seeking damages from the clinic.

In May, a Muslim female spa worker was accused of discrimination in Windsor, Ontario for turning down a chance to wax a biological male transwoman’s private area. The complainant is seeking $50,000 for “immense harm to my dignity,” according to CTV Windsor.

In Fairfax County, Virginia, the Democrat-dominated school system has removed any reference to the biological sex of males or females from the sex ed curriculum. Children are taught that “sex is assigned at birth” and therefore subject to change. This makes it wickedly easier to steer confused kids toward identifying with the opposite sex.

Speaking of gender confusion, the Girl Scouts of America sued the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) for marketing to girls as well as boys.  The BSA has had a string of “firsts,” opening its ranks to homosexual boys, then homosexual leaders, then to boys who think they are girls, and finally to female girls (don’t laugh; it’s come to this).

The Girl Scouts, who long ago embraced the feminist notion that gender differences are social constructs, argue that their brand is harmed by the BSA’s watering down of, well, sex distinctions.   Did you know that the phrase “hoist by their own petard” came from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” and it means blowing yourself up?

Let’s go back to name change confusion.   In Texas, Robert Francis O’Rourke apparently felt that using his nickname of “Beto” as the centerpiece of his campaign helped him among Hispanics.  He came close to unseating Sen. Ted Cruz, so maybe it helped.  Owing to his socialist leanings and Kennedyesque stage manner, Beto remains the darling of the far-Left of the Democratic Party and its billionaire megadonors, who helped pump his war chest up to more than $70 million, or twice what Mr. Cruz raised.

Sometimes, deception depends on omission rather than commission.  The previous president’s supporters suppressed the mention of Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name.  Anyone who used it was accused of racism or insensitivity toward Muslims.

For years, the Left has skewed issue after issue by obscuring the truth with euphemisms.  Abortion became “choice” and homosexuality became “gay.”  Taxes became “revenue,” and spending became “investing.” Sexual acts, within or outside marriage, with or without affection, with or without an exchange of currency, became simply “love.”  Prostitutes became “sex workers,” practically an esteemed profession.   Illegal aliens became “undocumented immigrants.”

All this is in stark contrast to the Bible’s emphasis on honesty.

“For God is not the author of confusion but of peace,” we’re told in 1 Corinthians 14:33.

The one who exults in confusion has been at his craft since the dawn of creation.   He gets away with it and leads others to follow because he “masquerades as an angel of light.” (2 Cor. 11:14)

No wonder Saul Alinsky dedicated “Rules for Radicals” to Lucifer.

This article was originally published at Townhall.com

Chasco Middle School in Port Richey, Florida did what many presumptuous and foolish k-12 schools around the country are doing: The administration unilaterally decided to sexually integrate the boys’ locker room with no notification to either the boys or their parents. The boys, and shortly thereafter their parents, learned about it when an objectively female student who seeks to pass as a boy humiliated them when she entered the boys’ locker room while they were in their underwear. The boys immediately left the locker room and sought help from two P.E. teachers—Robert Oppedisano and Stephanie Christensen—who according to Liberty Counsel, “were powerless to respond, because administrators had placed a gag order on them, and told them that they could not answer the boys on these questions.”

To be clear, not even student and parental notification would make this unjust and foolish decision right. Providing no notification just made a lousy decision worse.

Liberty Counsel further outlined the outrageous nature of the Chasco administration’s decision:

Robert also objected to administrators’ order that he continue to walk into and supervise the locker room, despite a girl potentially being nude or undressed in that area. The administrators told him that the girl in question had “every right to use the locker room,” including the right to disrobe in the open locker area, and shower in its open showers, where Robert is required to periodically walk in and supervise. Robert will not knowingly place himself in a position to observe a minor female in the nude or otherwise in a state of undress. Now, Robert has been told by administrators that he will be transferred to another school as discipline for “not doing your job in the locker room.”

Now, as a result of the incoherent “trans” ideology, a male P.E. teacher could be fired for intentionally being in the presence of an undressed objectively female student if she’s satisfied with her biological sex and a male teacher could be fired for refusing to be in the presence of an undressed objectively female student, so long as she is dissatisfied with her biological sex. What if a male teacher is in the presence of a genderfluid objectively female student who, while changing clothes on a day when she’s “identifying” as a boy, suddenly “identifies” as a girl? Yikes.

Some questions for the Chasco Middle School administration:

• Do students have any right not to be seen partially or fully unclothed by students, staff, faculty, or administrators of the opposite sex?

• Should “trans”-identifying coaches be treated as if they were the sex they pretend to be? For example, should the objectively male swim coach who pretends to be a woman be allowed full access to the girls’ locker room? If not, why not?

• Do staff and faculty who believe it is profoundly wrong to see pubescent students of the opposite sex partially or fully unclothed have any rights?

• Why do we have any sex-segregated locker rooms and restrooms in public schools if objective biological sex has no intrinsic connection to feelings of modesty and the desire for and right to privacy when engaged in intimate bodily functions or changing clothes?

Ironically, while violating the physical privacy of children, the Chasco administration is trying to cloak its secret plan to sexually integrate private spaces by appealing to—you guessed it—privacy. But neither privacy policies nor laws prohibit the administration from notifying students and parents that the school has adopted—with no board vote—a new practice of sexually integrating locker rooms and restrooms and that boys and girls can expect that they will be sharing private spaces with persons of the opposite sex. (As an aside, I wonder how female faculty or administrators would feel if they were in their underwear in a women’s faculty locker room when without notification an objectively male colleague walked in.)

The brains behind this “trans”-cultic operation to violate the privacy of and humiliate students is Jackie Jackson-Dean who consulted with every pro-“LGBTQ”-advocacy organization she could find—including the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) government school indoctrination arm, ironically called “Teaching Tolerance.”

The weedy thicket of Dean’s recommendations include encouraging the school to participate in every pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), encouraging teachers to use incorrect pronouns when referring to students who masquerade as the opposite sex, and publicly praising teachers who affirm pro-“LGBT” orthodoxy (thereby implicitly shaming those who don’t).

Jackson-Dean’s Twitter account reveals she’s a hardcore, far-left pro-homosexual/pro-“trans” activist who loves the SPLC and opposes Brett Kavanaugh.

There’s an odd omission in her rainbow-adorned document. She neglected to mention this which comes right out of a document to which she links:

On the federal side, the Title IX regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Education allow schools to provide separate but comparable bathrooms, locker rooms, and shower facilities on the basis of sex…. While there is no definitive national legal authority on the issue, federal courts in non-school cases have recognized a fundamental right to privacy or acknowledged the legitimacy of safety concerns in cases involving individuals undressing, using the restroom, or showering in an area to which a member of the opposite birth sex has access. Moreover, a federal district court recently asked the question whether a university engages in unlawful discrimination in violation of Title IX or the Constitution when it prohibits a transgender male [i.e., a biological female] student from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for men on campus. The court concluded: “The simple answer is no.”

If adult coaches are required to be in the presence of partially or fully undressed students of the opposite sex who “identify” as “trans,” there remains no rational reason to prohibit adult coaches from being in the presence of partially dressed or fully nude students of the opposite sex who accept their sex. In short, the “trans” ideology has invalidated objective, immutable biological sex and its anatomical manifestation as having any relevance in separating humans in spaces where bodies are exposed.

I’ve tried to warn that the ultimate goal and logical outworking of the “trans” ideology is to eradicate all public recognition and valuation of sex differences. According to the “trans” ideology, all it takes to “identify” as the opposite sex is a declaration. No gender dysphoria diagnosis or experience of gender dysphoria, no surgery, no cross-sex hormone-doping, not even cross-dressing is necessary to identify as the opposite sex. Further, society is obligated to treat “trans”-identifying persons in all ways and in all contexts as the sex they declare they are. Therefore, a girl with intact breasts who identifies as a boy should be free to undress and shower naked with the boys, and a boy with an intact penis and testicles who identifies as a girl should be free to undress and shower with girls. A girl with intact breasts who identifies as a boy should be allowed to swim on the boys’ swim team wearing a boys’ Speedo. Male coaches who enter boys’ locker rooms should treat girls who pretend they’re boys and are changing no differently than boys who are changing.

So, now what would have once been too scandalous to even imagine is being or going to be required.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Chasco.mp3

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Some years ago I asked why, in light of the premises of the “trans” superstition, a 50-year-old man with Age Identity Disorder (AID) who identifies as a 17-year-old, has had “medically necessary” face and knee lifts and chemical peels, takes Human Growth Hormone, has had hair transplants that he styles into a pompadour with tapered fade, and wears camo joggers and hoodies couldn’t get a spanking new birth certificate and driver’s license with his authentic and deeply felt age marker. And why shouldn’t such a man be able to enroll in high school and date high school “peers” who must treat him as the age he identifies as? After all, there are no rational reasons for compelling society to pretend that men are women that wouldn’t similarly compel society to pretend that old men are young whippersnappers.

Well, peeps, the Age of Unreason and Deep Feeling is fully upon us.

Emile Ratelband, a 69-year-old Dutch “positivity guru,” is petitioning a court in the Netherlands to have his birth certificate changed so that it identifies him as 49 years old. Ironically, the judge, who presides over a court in a country that allows “trans”-identifying citizens as young as 16 to obtain falsified birth certificates, asked Ratelband, “how his parents would feel about 20 years of Ratelband’s life being wiped off the records.“ Hmmm. Does anyone ask teenage boys who masquerade as girls how their parents feel about having their sons erased?

Not to be deterred, Ratelband offered this frightening Nietzsche-esque response: “It is really a question of free will.”

#transaged #CanOfWorms.

From The Guardian:

Dutch man, 69, starts legal fight to identify as 20 years younger
Written by Daniel Boffey

A 69-year-old Dutch “positivity guru” who says he does not feel his age has started a battle to make himself legally 20 years younger on the grounds that he is being discriminated against on a dating app.

Emile Ratelband told a court in Arnhem in the Netherlands that he did not feel “comfortable” with his date of birth, and compared his wish to alter it to people who identified as transgender.

Ratelband said that due to having an official age that did not reflect his emotional state he was struggling to find both work and love. He has asked for his date of birth to be changed from 11 March 1949 to 11 March 1969.

“When I’m 69, I am limited. If I’m 49, then I can buy a new house, drive a different car,” he said. “I can take up more work. When I’m on Tinder and it says I’m 69, I don’t get an answer. When I’m 49, with the face I have, I will be in a luxurious position.”

Doctors had told him his body was that of a 45-year-old man, Ratelband argued. He described himself as a “young god”.

The judge conceded that the ability to change gender was a development in the law. “I agree with you: a lot of years ago we thought that was impossible,” he said. But he asked the applicant how his parents would feel about 20 years of Ratelband’s life being wiped off the records.

“For whom did your parents care? Who was that little boy then?” the judge asked.

Ratelband, a motivational speaker and trainer in neurolinguistic programming, said his parents were dead.

He also said he was willing to renounce his right to a pension to ensure there were no unforeseen consequences of his age change.

At the end of a 45-minute court session, Ratelband said: “It is really a question of free will.”

Ratelband’s lawyer, Jan-Hein Kuijpers, said it was high time for the reversal of age.

The public prosecutor in the court asked whether the ability to change a date of birth in the law would require health inspections in the future, to allow the state to correctly judge someone’s “emotional age”.

Kuijpers told the court: “There is also something like common sense, of course.”

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/New-Recording-3-1.mp3

Reading, writing, arithmetic and a new mandate for classrooms: LGBT history. It could be coming soon to government schools in Illinois.

The leaders of the transgender revolution revile the celebrated declaration, “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl,” when a baby is born. Transgender activists recognize that their revolution cannot succeed until doctors who deliver babies, or ultrasound technicians at women’s cliques, stop labeling babies as a specific gender. The announcement of a baby’s gender, however, still fills delivery rooms and doctor’s offices with excitement. I predict that this practice will continue.

Recently, an article ran in “The Ethicist” column of the New York Times Magazine. The ethicist in this case is Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah. The headline in the article asked, “Should I Go to a Gender-Reveal Party?” The questioner who wrote in for advice posed to “The Ethicist” the following scenario:

“A close relation is pregnant with her first child and is having a gender-reveal party. She is overjoyed with the addition to our family, as am I. However, I am adamantly opposed to attending the gender-reveal party because it violates my moral code. I have worked in activism for my entire professional life and, though I am cisgender, I have strong feelings about gender politics and equality. Gender-reveal parties, where parents and guests learn a baby’s gender together, violate my values because they reaffirm society’s gender binarism and inadvertently perpetuate the stigma against non-binary genders. I know I will never experience firsthand the challenges of being gender-nonconforming, but when I think about how I might feel, I would be very hurt knowing my parents had a gender-reveal party for me before I was born with my incorrect gender. I know the non-binary community faces much deeper, more urgent problems than this hypothetical situation, but even so, I have a moral aversion to helping affirm society’s gender binarism. Should I attend the party?”

This question represents just one more step towards cultural insanity. The questioner cannot fathom nor allow for a party where people celebrate politically incorrect labels like “boy” and “girl.” Such a party violates the moral code of the transgender movement.

Indeed, the moral unction behind this question is breathtaking. Scenarios like this come, not on the leading edge of a moral revolution. Rather, the moral revolution must have made significant gains before an ethics column in the New York Times Magazine begins to get letters with this kind of moral outrage at a gender-reveal party.

Christians thinking about this moral confusion must first stop at the vocabulary used in this article—particularly the word, “cisgender.” Using that term plays into the entire gender revolution. The term indicates that someone born a male is quite comfortable with being male. Even adopting the vocabulary, therefore, becomes an enormous problem because the vocabulary assumes that you accept the ideology of the transgender revolutionaries—that gender fluidity exists and that the gender assigned at one’s birth may or may not be factual. “Cisgender” signifies that you buy into the idea that all of humanity must be identified on a spectrum, with cisgender at one end and gender-nonconforming, or, transgender at the other end.

Secondly, Christians need to note the kind of moral outrage indicated in the question. The questioner, filled with indignation, lashes out at a set of parents who had the audacity to throw a gender-reveal party—a party that apparently does nothing more than perpetuate binary stereotypes. Indeed, according to this article in the New York Times Magazine, gender-reveal parties could damage relationships between parents and their transgender children who find out that mom and dad threw a party which revealed an “incorrect gender.” This argument asks the reader to make incredible leaps in logic and to possess an imaginative framework which obfuscates all reality.

But here’s the third thing we come to understand about this article: It tells us that the writers, editors, and publishers of the New York Times Magazine believe that these are the kinds of questions we should be concerned about and that we too should experience the confliction, indeed, the outrage present in the question posed to “The Ethicist.”

The question, by itself, poses enormous problems and reveals the erosion of any sane ethic. The answer to the question, however, reveals the extent of this moral erosion. Professor Appiah, who currently teaches at New York University, responds to the questioner by saying, “First, let’s distinguish between two different issues. One is what you’re calling gender binarism—the idea that everyone is naturally either male or female. The other is the fact that trans people will identify with a gender other than the one they were assigned on the basis of their bodily appearance at birth. You could be trans in that sense and still believe in binarism: to say that you were assigned the wrong gender isn’t necessarily to reject the idea that there are two.”

Professor Appiah’s answer takes an interesting turn when he writes that “celebrating the discovery that a baby is a boy or a girl need not in itself stigmatize trans or intersex or non-binary people.” Appiah went on to say, “A parent celebrating the coming birth of a girl could be someone who’d be perfectly happy if the child turned out later to be a boy or neither a boy nor a girl. Indeed, as it becomes easier to identify intersex people prenatally, you could one day imagine having a party that revealed that the child was neither male nor female. And people who do have a hard time dealing with gender-nonconforming people aren’t likely to have their minds changed by the disappearance of gender-reveal parties.”

At certain moments, it appears that a society inches its way right up to the edge of a cliff. At other times, however, you see an argument that sprints towards the edge and leaps right off. That’s exactly the direction Appiah takes his answer.

Appiah goes on to state, “If there’s a problem with these parties, it’s mainly that they encourage the idea that gender is fixed in the womb and by your body. Let’s call that biological determinism about gender. The science in this area is very much a work in progress. But, we already know that gender identification isn’t fixed by your sexual organs and that the social meaning of gender is informed by culture.” Appiah makes a generalized, unsubstantiated claim that rejects any argument that would question his premise. He says that “we already know that gender identification isn’t fixed by your sexual organs.” Appiah’s reasoning demonstrates how the sexual revolution, through moral coercion, creates a change in an entire mentality and worldview. Appiah’s argument enshrines the principles of sexual revolutionaries who make audacious and radical assertions based solely upon the authority of the gender revolution. Anyone who dares to disagree with this unassailable authority represents an antiquarian ignorance and bigotry which must be eradicated.

Again, effectively upping the ante of political correctness, Professor Appiah responds to this questioner by saying that “many aspects of gender are not… biological. You can’t necessarily read from people’s bodies what their gender means to them.” In other words, biological sex has nothing to do with gender identity.

Christians operating from a biblical worldview understand Appiah’s assertions as manifest nonsense. The morally important distinction between male and female is essential. Indeed, the biblical worldview clearly grounds the distinction as a vital component for true human flourishing.

Gender debates dominate the news these days, dumping with them an incredibly toxic level of madness. While Christians should experience alarm, they should also possess greater awareness of the determination that grips the moral and sexual revolutionaries. Articles like this one in the New York Times Magazine, and arguments like Professor Appiah’s, demonstrate the unceasing desire of the LGBTQ agenda to invert civilization itself. As relentless as they might be, the moral revolutionaries aim at insanity and position arguments as reality that have no basis in any scientific court or, for that matter, common sense. Indeed, as demonstrated in Appiah’s argument, the sexual revolution hinders any serious inquiry into sexuality and blatantly obfuscates fundamental questions about the “research” advertised to the public as the new law which must govern opinion, policy, and morality.

We live in a society that has set off a massive chain reaction of confusion. Christians, however, equipped with a biblical worldview and empowered by God’s grace, can clear up the confusion, address the insanity, and promote true human flourishing.

This article was originally published at AlbertMohler.com

We’re foolish if we ignore what’s going on in schools in other states, because cancerous ideas metastasize especially among change-agents (aka ideological lemmings) who use their taxpayer-funded positions to indoctrinate children. And boy oh boy did change-agents in Rocky Top Middle School in Thornton, Colorado out-do themselves in mainlining cancer cells straight into the veins of other people’s children. On Friday, October 19, the school invited a homosexual man who makes a living as drag queen Jessica L’Whor (get it, Jessica the Whore) to come talk and read to children on career day. You remember career days, don’t you? That’s when schools used to bring in people to share details about their respectable careers in order to inform and perhaps inspire children to pursue a career about which they knew little or nothing.

On Monday, after the Friday event and after parents discovered what their children had been exposed to, principal Chelsea Behanna—who should lose her job—sent a remarkable letter home to parents in which she said the following:

Last Friday, Rocky Top hosted our 2nd Annual Rocky Top READS! event, and it was a great success because of so many people!… In addition to highlighting the connection between literacy and a successful career, this event reflected the diversity of our community. We had a broad range of careers represented—emergency responders, elected officials, clergy, research assistants, tradespeople, journalists, professional athletes and even a drag queen!… All families in our Grizzly community are receiving this letter because a handful of people have expressed concern over the presence of a drag queen in our middle school. Jessica, the drag queen, began her guest session with an explanation of her career—as did all other guests. She explained that she is a performer who, though a man, portrays a woman for her performances.  Students were completely engaged and asked lots of great questions.

I take responsibility for not notifying families ahead of time and apologize for any stress this has caused you and your child. This year we used the same process as last year, sharing the schedule of speakers with staff so they could prepare students and plan for questions, but realize we cannot make it the students’ responsibility to share that information at home. Moving forward, a prominent step in planning for next year will be to share the guest list for all families prior to the event. Should you feel like any of the sessions are not appropriate for your child, you’ll be welcome to notify us and we’ll make alternate arrangements for your child during that time.

Here are nine things to note in Behanna’s remarkable letter:

1.) In breathless excitement, Behanna included “drag queen” in a list of respectable careers, perhaps hoping their respectability would rub off on the “drag queen.”

2.) Behanna included the go-to jargon of Leftists everywhere: “diversity.” Just slap the word “diversity” on any immoral and disreputable activity, and voilà, it becomes immune from moral assessment. But rational people who know that diversity simply means difference or variety also know diversity is not intrinsically good. Not all ways of making a living are worthy of respect, and surely Behanna knows that. What her decision to invite the Whor reveals is that Behanna has concluded there’s nothing immoral about cross-dressing or homosexuality and that Behanna has chosen to make decisions about what other people’s children should be exposed to based on her personal moral code. Not very respectful of the diverse views of her diverse community.

3.) Next we come to the tactic used by public school administrators everywhere: isolate and marginalize those parents wise enough and brave enough to criticize the presumptuous decisions of change-agents. Behanna said, “All families” were receiving her letter because (and here it comes) “a handful of people expressed concern over the presence of a drag queen in our middle school.” You see that? “All families” had to be burdened with the letter because of the handful of community cranks. This is a slight modification of the expression often hissed at parents by fake-smiling, condescending administrators in mock shock: “Oh my, YOURS is the only complaint I’ve received!” It’s a common rhetorical trick used to ridicule critics into submission, but it’s an odd tactic for “progressives” who claim to care about minorities.

4.) Behanna said the Whor began her session by explaining her career—“as did all other guests.” Do parents really want to have their children educated by people who make no distinction between the career of drag queen and the career of emergency responder or pastor?

5.) Behanna highlights that children were “completely engaged and asked lots of great questions.” Is the degree of “engagement” of 12-year-olds the criterion Behanna uses to determine the soundness or appropriateness of a speaker? Yikes. And what constitutes a “great question” to Behanna?

6.) Behanna does apologize but not for her loathsome decision. Nope. Instead she apologizes for not notifying parents ahead of time and for any “stress” her loathsome decision may have caused.

7.) Behanna’s next statement is both infuriating and cunning. She said, “This year we used the same process as last year, sharing the schedule of speakers with staff so they could prepare students and plan for questions.” Here she implies that classroom discussions took place, discussions that prepared students for the speakers, but notice, she didn’t actually say such discussions took place. She said they shared the “schedule of speakers with staff so they could prepare students.” She did not say that any or all teachers shared anything with students or prepared them for a the appearance of a drag queen. If any teachers did “prepare” their students, Behanna didn’t share what specifically was they said. To make matters more outrageous, Behanna then tacitly passed the buck on to children for not sharing with their parents the content of any prep work about the drag queen that took place—prep work that Behanna never actually said took place.

8.) Throughout the letter, Behanna refers to the Whor by female pronouns even though Behanna acknowledged he is a man.

9.) Behanna did not commit to reevaluating the criteria she uses to determine the suitability of speakers, nor did she commit to not inviting drag queens in the future. Rather, she said that in the future she would “share the guest list” with parents in advance and allow them to opt their children out of any sessions they “feel” are inappropriate for their children. No recognition on Behanna’s part that openly homosexual drag queens are inappropriate speakers for all children.

Ironically, Jessica L’Whor (that is, 25-year-old Zack Sullivan) introduced himself to the children as Ms. Jessica, because he thought his stage name “was not appropriate in a school setting.” So, his stage name is inappropriate in a school setting, but his cross-dressing career in homosexual clubs is appropriate?

WGN reported that the Whor “was invited by one of her fans, a Rocky Top student, to come to career day. All of the guests talked about their jobs and their connection to literacy.” This raises a number of questions: How does a middle school student become a fan of a drag queen? Did this student recommend the Whor or was it the student’s parents? To whom did the student or the student’s parental mouthpiece recommend the Whor as a speaker? Who specifically was involved in making the decision to invite the Whor and what criteria were used to evaluate his appropriateness? What is the connection between a career in cross-dressing in homosexual clubs and literacy? Oh, wait, silly me. Behanna said the Whor read a chapter in a book to kids.

Sexual anarchists are nothing if not tenacious. The Whor is no more daunted by the handful of critics than is Behanna. Fox News reported that, “[T]he negative feedback from some parents won’t stop her [sic] from speaking to kids, no matter the age.” The Whor said, “‘I want to go to more elementary schools because of this experience at Rocky Top.’”

Conservatives could learn a thing or two about tenacity in the face of opposition from these anarchists.

If in the service of diversity, inclusivity, kindness, acceptance, tolerance, and future career options, introducing children to an openly homosexual man who earns a living performing in drag at homosexual clubs—including X-rated clubs—is justifiable, then why not invite prostitutes, strippers, porn actors, and dominatrices to talk about their careers? I bet their careers are connected to literacy in the same way the Whor’s is. Come to think of it, why not have Whore Story Hours, Stripper Story Hours, and Dominatrix Story Hours for toddlers in our public libraries. What possible reason could school administrators or librarians offer for refusing to invite sex workers that wouldn’t apply to openly homosexual drag queens? Couldn’t sex workers teach lessons about the value of diversity, inclusivity, kindness, and tolerance just like drag queens do? School administrators and librarians couldn’t say sex work is immoral or age-inappropriate but performing in drag is not. Such a statement would expose the truth that our change-agents and public servants are making moral and ethical judgments without telling the public they are or telling them what criteria they use to assess morality, ethics, and age-appropriateness.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Jessica-5.mp3

Read more:

Trump Administration Stands for Biological Reality and Sexual Sanity

Stuff You Should Know About “Trans”-Cultism

55 Members of American Academy of Pediatrics Devise Destructive “Trans” Policy

Leftists Redefine Bullying

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-and, please-

The idea of two distinct sexes has been acknowledged as fundamental reality for thousands of years by billions of people, biology and every major religion.

The Trump administration agrees, which is why the Health and Human Services Department is circulating a proposal defining gender this way for purposes of interpreting Title IX of the Civil Rights Act:

”The sex listed on a person’s birth certificate, as originally issued, shall constitute definitive proof of a person’s sex unless rebutted by reliable genetic evidence.”   Further, the determination should rest “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

This means that when a baby is born, it’s still OK to say, “It’s a girl!” or “It’s a boy!” without having to ask the baby which sex it thinks it is.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s straightforward return to sanity has triggered a hysteria unseen since a majority of Americans had the audacity to say out loud that marriage is the natural union of male and female. The dystopic Left is apoplectic that anyone still dares to resist their distorted view of human sexuality.  They know that most people know better but are afraid to say so.

This is about much more than some people claiming to be the other sex and trying with the help of the media to rig the culture and legal system to their version of reality.  It’s a power struggle. The ruling elites aim to make us say that up is down, right is wrong, sweet is bitter and life is death.

Leading the charge, the Washington Post ran an editorial that said the HHS proposal, first reported by fellow cultural Marxists at the New York Times, was a “denial of reality” and based on “warped logic.”  Seriously.

Here’s more: “A brief conversation with a transgender person would cure most Americans of the notion that their expressed gender identity is a shallow preference, a phase or something other than a deeply held knowledge that their body does not match who they are.”

There’s nothing shallow about someone being so out of kilter with their own biology that they would contemplate surgical removal of otherwise healthy body parts.

The same people who accuse traditionalists of imposing their values on others insist that biology is meaningless.   But just because someone strongly believes something does not make it so.  Some people are afflicted with species dysphoria, in which they believe they are animals, a  “non-human species trapped in a human body.”  Are you going to believe them or your lying eyes?

There’s nothing wrong with treating transgender people with kindness.  We should all strive to live out Jesus’ admonition to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. But we need to oppose obscene developments like drugging children to delay their natural puberty in order to steer them into identifying with the opposite sex.  That is child abuse.

Here’s a welcome corrective from Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, who once favored sex-change surgery but now opposes it.

“I have witnessed a great deal of damage from sex-reassignment,” he wrote. “The children transformed from their male constitution into female roles suffered prolonged distress and misery as they sensed their natural attitudes…. We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.”

At the end of the cross-dressing 1959 comedy “Some Like It Hot,” Joe E. Brown is driving away in a speed boat with Jack Lemmon still dressed as a woman.  Insisting he wants to marry “her,” Mr. Brown hears Mr. Lemmon give a half dozen excuses until finally ripping off his wig in exasperation and declaring that they couldn’t marry because, “I’m a man!”

The cheerful Mr. Brown smiles and says, “Well, nobody’s perfect.”

No, nobody is perfect, which is why we need to approach people who are hurting with compassion while declining to become co-dependents in their denial of reality.

Robert Knight’s latest book is “A Nation Worth Fighting For: 10 Steps to Restore Freedom.”  This article was originally published at Townhall.com.