Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Part I

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Enthusiast in Chief for the Transgender Revolution: President Joe Biden Calls Any State Restrictions of ‘Gender-Affirming’ Legally and Morally Wrong

The transgender revolution is coming for the entirety of American culture, but specifically for American children. And if you think that is an exaggeration, just considered that the transgender revolution has a new enthusiast in chief, otherwise known as the president of the United States.

In an interview given to a TikTok artist, just over the weekend, the president of the United States enthusiastically gushed about the necessity of hormonal and surgical treatments, so-called gender realignment surgery, or gender affirming surgery. That’s the Orwellian terminology that’s used here. And he did so while trying to shame states that have taken measures through the legislature with the support of governors to limit the use of hormonal and surgical treatments when it comes to so-called transitioning children and teenagers. Now, this is a huge cultural, ethical, political watershed in the United States.

As a Christian theologian, it is hard for me to come up with a more significant issue nor a more telling indicator of the future of our society. At this point, it’s abundantly clear we are talking about children and we are talking about the order of creation. That’s all. We’re only talking about the most basic interests and the most vulnerable people in our entire society. We’re talking about objective truth, we’re talking about what it means to be human, and we’re talking about the fact that the federal government is now seeking to intervene in this issue and in the administration of Joe Biden in a way that is enthusiastically and largely unrestrictedly pro-LGBTQ.

More on that in just a moment. But let’s look at the words the President actually said, and let’s also take a look at the context. Because this context is also amazingly revealing. Because here you have a TikTok artist who is a biological male, that is to say a man, who is identifying as a glittery girl, not only as a woman, but as a girl. And the president of the United States is playing along and doing so we might add in the White House.

The event was known as the Now This News Presidential Forum, and one of the participants was this transgender individual or non-binary known as Dylan Mulvaney, a former Broadway actor who has become famous on TikTok for a series called, “100 Days of Girlhood.” As one media source explains, this particular series documents his supposed transition to becoming a girl. Again, we’re not talking about transition merely to being a woman, but to a girl.

Now, just at first glance, let’s just remind ourselves of basic reality here, that reality is that no previous president of the United States could dared to have taken the political risk of inviting into the White House someone who is living out this active live public sexual perversion. Given that individual the credibility of a presidential interview and then gladly trumpeted his unrestricted affirmation of the fact that in this context, children and teenagers should have access to this kind of surgery. And its opposition to this kind of surgery the President described as immoral. Evita Duffy, writing for the Federalist also points out the fact that the president publicly, repeatedly, continuously claims to be a Roman Catholic. In his words, a practicing Roman Catholic, a regular practicing Catholic. But here you notice that as on the issue of abortion, the president of the United States, along with other major Democratic Catholic leaders, including Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House basically set themselves in 180 degree Diametrical opposition to the official dogma, doctrine and moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

As a Protestant evangelical Christian, I’ll simply say, they are setting themselves over against the entire authority of scripture and the very structures God has given us in creation itself. Now, keep all of this in mind when you understand that the President sat down for this interview and he knew the interviewer’s identity, and the interview began with Dylan Mulvaney, remember a man claiming to be a girl. He said, “Mr. President, this is my 221st day of publicly transitioning.” The President’s response was, “God love you.”

The president’s absolute affirmation was followed by Mulvaney question to the president about whether or not states should have the right to limit hormonal and surgical treatments when it comes to gender, transgender procedures in particular or so-called gender realignment or gender affirming procedures, when it comes to those who identify as non-binary. And the president simply responded with unbridled enthusiasm and moral clarity. Absolutely morally wrong, but moral clarity. “I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that,” said the president. “As a moral question and as a legal question, I just think it’s wrong.” Addressing states that have taken some of these actions. The president said, “The idea that what’s going on in some states, it’s just outrageous and I think it’s immoral. The trans parts not immoral. What they’re trying to do to trans persons is immoral.”

Now looking carefully at the transcript and at the record, it is clear that the president knew what he was talking about here. This is not a matter of confusion because the states that have taken the actions that Mulvaney ask about are states that have taken those actions on behalf of children and teenagers. There’s basically no confusion in this country as to the kind of legislation the president was being asked about.

And there certainly was no confusion in the president’s response. The president’s response was absolutely unqualified, absolute support and absolute demand for the fact that government get out of the way and then just pay for so-called hormonal and surgical treatments that are intended to affirm, and furthermore, to realign a body to a new gender identity. Or no gender identity, or anyone’s infinite permutational choice of what a gender identity might be. This is absolute insanity.

It would be insanity any place, anytime since the book of Genesis. It is insanity here and now. It is insanity now in the White House. And just ask yourself this question, Are there any remaining moral boundaries or limits if a president of the United States would invite into the White House and then sit down for an interview with a so-called TikTok journalist, a celebrity who is a biological male?

He is a man who is claiming an identity not only as a female, not only as a woman, but as a girl, in his own language, a glittery girl. This news story’s caught the attention of journalists on the other side of the Atlantic. Josie Ensor writing for a London newspaper the Telegraph tells us that even as Mulvaney has attracted this news attention, he has already attracted a great deal of controversy. Some of that controversy has been people who have accused him of infantilization for calling himself a girl rather than even calling himself a woman.

So you see the nonsense here and then the deeper nonsense, you see the rejection of creation and then the even deeper rejection of creation. And Mulvaney’s response to this was, “I think that’s rooted in transphobia. I think in womanhood, I get shamed a lot for liking pink and liking glitter. And I’m like, ‘Why does that bother you so much?'” The Telegraph also tells us that the American cosmetic retailer known as Ulta, had featured Mulvaney on a podcast which was, no, you get the irony here, supposedly centered on femininity.

And there were some actual women who felt that this was wrong, and using the language of critical theory, they accused him of appropriating womanhood. The response of Ulta, “We believe beauty is for everyone.” Now, frankly, I don’t know where we are and where we might possibly go as a country when this is the moral reality we are facing.

And even as there’s so many legitimate, so many urgent moral issues facing this country, the fact is that it is hard to exaggerate the basic rebellion against creation this represents. Now we have the White House, we have the President of the United States speaking this kind of moral insanity. And notice this is not just some kind of political posturing. He clearly would use every power of his office to try to bring about as much of this revolution as possible.

And that’s not just said as some kind of guess or inference. He has said this out loud. And of course, speaking out loud is why we’re talking about this story in the first place. But we also need to notice something else. I mentioned that journalists across the Atlantic have noticed this story. Let me tell you why that might come with a particular sensitivity when it comes to a British newspaper.

It is because the central medical establishment is now calling, if not a halt, then a tremendous slowdown in any kind of hormonal or surgical intervention when it comes to trans issues or gender confusion in children and teenagers. This is a huge issue. The Telegraph, the very same newspaper recently reported that the new proposals by the National Health Service say that the new clinical approach will “reflect evidence that in most cases, gender incongruence does not persist into adolescents.”

The official position of Britain’s national health service based upon a report that had been submitted to the British government is that the vast majority of children who are confused and teenagers who are gender confused return to their so-called birth gender as their identity, and the confusion is a transient phase. Just hear that language. A transient phase. By the way, there has been plenty of evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that for the majority of children and teenagers who reflect some kind of confusion at some point, that is indeed a transient phase.

Just try to reconcile that medically or morally with terms like puberty blockers and hormonal treatments and surgical intervention. And just keep in mind what kind of surgery we’re talking about here. But it is really important to recognize that in Britain, a matter of months ago, they announced that the National Health Service’s major clinic for adolescents dealing with these kinds of issues known as Tavistock was shut down simply because the government came to the conclusion that it could well be causing more harm than good in the lives of children and teenagers treated at that clinic for these very issues.

The current British protocol suggests “a watchful approach.” That would seem to make a great deal more moral sense than the kind of position that is now taken even by the major medical authorities in the United States. But it’s also a reminder of the fact that those medical authorities though, having brought so much good, so many good treatments, such an extension of life, so many good surgical procedures, they also have a great deal of moral baggage in that medical closet in the background. And a good many scandals in the past at professional medicine.

I think we as Christians understand that this transgender movement is going to represent another very sad immoral chapter in American medicine. But still Tavistock and the United Kingdom across the Atlantic, far less pressing to most Americans, far less depressing than the sight of the President of the United States being interviewed by a man who claims to be a girl in the White House, with the president gushing.

Part II

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Male, Female, or X?: The LGBTQ Revolution Coming to Social Security Administration Gender Boxes Near You

But next, we need to recognize that this kind of ideology also comes with policy, and thus, you had major newspapers report just before the weekend that the Social Security Administration will allow persons to select “the sex that best aligns with their gender identity in records.” That’s how the story is explained. In the New York Times, the agency’s language is chosen very carefully. As Eduardo Medina reported, the agency said, “It would now accept people’s self-identified gender identity of male or female, even if their identity documents show otherwise. And it’s exploring a future policy that would allow for an ex sex designation for people who do not identify as either male or female.”

Now, it’s interesting to note that the Social Security Administration have promised back in March that a new policy would be in effect by fall. Did it really take them all that much time to figure out the reality of say, two entries, male and female, and they’re simply going to let persons decide which one they are?

There are huge questions here. Decide for now for how long decide to retire under one sex having worked under another or gender. And then you look at the proposal that there could be a third option and just realize that means for now, our government is slow to get at this, but once the virus is caught, it tends to mutate and spread very quickly.

There could be a third alternative known as X. But then that raises another very ominous kind of question. If you have male, female and X, then why not just make everyone X? Why not just deny sex or gender altogether? Why not just make everyone a mere human being?

Now, again, Christians need to understand that as efficient as that might appear to be, it again is a rebellion against creation and it won’t work. It won’t work because it’s not going to work in the labor and delivery room where the medical authorities helping to give birth to a baby or a midwife in that context is going to turn to the father and the mother assuming that they are both there for this blessed event and then hold the baby up and say it’s an X.

But as much as that is a rebellion against creation, and as much as it won’t work just in how human beings operate, think and talk, it is however very indicative of the way a government can try to move once it is driven by the imperatives of ideology on the one hand and efficiency on the other.

That’s one of the big issues with the Social Security Administration. It costs money every time anyone makes a change. You go from male to female, from female to male, male, female, male, non-binary. You just go down all the lists. That’s going to cost the Social Security administration money. You can see where they would just come back and say, X just works for everybody. Let’s just go with X. It’s sort of like the Bolsheviks and the Communist revolution in the USSR who declared that there would be no longer any kind of sir and madam.

There would be no longer any mister and missus. And there would not be male and female. There would be simply comrade, comrade this, comrade that. But that really didn’t work either because even in the USSR, you did not have people running out into the street to tell their neighbors, “It’s a comrade.”

By the way, it’s also telling that at this point in the progression of this rebellion against creation, the Social Security Administration isn’t even going to pretend to ask for any kind of documentation. According to the statement from the government the administration is simply going to accept what people say, “Without needing to provide documentation of their sex designation.” In other words, we just surrender. But keep in mind what I mentioned on the briefing just a matter of weeks ago, and that is that in terms of policy, the State Department has announced that it is going to be covering such treatments, hormonal and surgical for overseas personnel deployed by the State Department and for their family dependents.

Now, that particular policy is not yet crystal clear, but there is no doubt that the State Department in terms of its public messaging and in terms of its internal policy, is also doing its dead level best to join this revolution as fast as they can get there.

Part III

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‘The Term ‘Queer’ is Exclusive’: A Debate within the LGBTQ Community Reveals How Moral Revolutions Require Ongoing Revolutions in Language

But next, we need to understand that revolutions in morality require revolutions in terminology. And here’s where we need to understand that the terminology for this revolution is itself continuously contested. So just a matter of a few decades ago, the conversation was about gay rights, gay liberation. But gay was a word that was intentionally chosen or at least adopted by homosexual men, and they adopted it as a way of identifying their culture, and they wanted to replace the word homosexual. The word homosexual was a technical term, and it’s one that by the way, was highly recognized in society, in psychiatry, and throughout the medical profession.

That was the word that was used, as Christian theologians and ethicists dealt with the morality of human sexuality. But the language was intentional to shift from homosexual to gay, but the focus was on homosexual men. And that’s when lesbians said, “No, we need our own term.” And of course, they adopted that from ancient Greek literature and the Isle of Lesbos in ancient Greek mythology.

And so you had lesbians and gays, you had homosexual men and homosexual women. But then of course you had the permutations into other so-called sexual minorities. And so you had the bisexuals, which by the way, were not generally accepted morally or politically by either the gays or the lesbians. But if you are trying to make political traction and you need to claim numbers, well then you’re going to want to include as many letters in your sequence as possible. And then there was of course the language when you had L and G and B or G and B and L, what is the sequence of those letters?

What might it be? And the argument was, well, the lesbians have called themselves lesbians for a longer period of time, and besides that, it is patriarchal for male homosexuals identified as gays to be the first letter. So we’ll put L first and then G and then B. But of course it expands, T transgender. And you’re looking at the fact that that terminology now is also contested.

And of course there is Q, which means, and this turns out to be important either questioning or queer. And that takes us to a very interesting piece that just ran in the New York Times by columnist Pamela Paul. The headline of this piece, let’s say gay. Now, this is an article that gives us a very keen insight into the debate within the LGBTQ movement about what should be the terminology chosen, which is most self-expressive.

And it turns out that some of the younger members of the LGBTQ community increasingly want to embrace and to advocate the use of the word queer and for Q in LGBTQ to represent not so much questioning, but queer.

Pamela Paul explains, “The word ‘gay’ is increasingly being substituted by or more broadly LGBTQ, which are about gender as much as, and perhaps more so than sexual orientation. The word queer is climbing infrequency and can be used interchangeably with gay, which itself not so long ago, replace the doer and faintly judgey homosexual.” Now, the reason I’m addressing this particular issue on The Briefing and in sequence with the others that I’ve discussed today is that I think it’s really important that we track the language and understand that the language is driving an ideology.

The language is actually fueling a revolution. So a shift in the language is something we had better notice. But there’s another very interesting aspect to this article because Pamela Paul is really not advocating for the increased use of the word queer. She’s actually saying, Let’s just go back to gay. And as she’s writing that, she makes the point that the word means some things to certain ears. It means something very different, has a very different connotation when others hear the word. She says, “The word can mean almost anything, and that’s the point.”

But at two different places in this essay, Pamela Paul makes another very revealing tell. She quotes comedian and writer David Sedaris as saying that the term was started by some humanities professor and slowly gathered steam. Later in the article, Pamela Paul writes, “Partly it’s the force of academic and institutional language, which has permeated the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. Another part,” she writes, “is generational. Gen-Zers, 21% of whom identify as LGBTQ according to Gallup,” she says, “they often use social media to frame the conversation, and this is one of those words that is taken on reinvigorated life in social media.” The big point I want to underline here is the role of academia and the fact that this kind of gender theory, or let’s just say again, it’s a form of critical theory that is addressed to sexuality, sex, and gender.

It is so influential that it springs out of academia, as Pamela Paul says, into the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. And those particular dimensions don’t affect everyone or every family in exactly the same way to exactly the same degree. But we’re absolutely fooling ourselves if we think that we and our families and our churches are immune from this kind of influence.

But we also need to understand that there are generational differences here. There are generations, and the younger you go in those generations, the greater is the vulnerability. The greater is the susceptibility to this kind of messaging coming from the influential worlds of the arts, Hollywood, publishing and fashion. And of course, you add to that the ubiquitous, transformative power of social media, and there you have it.

So that’s where we are as of today. Who knows where we will be tomorrow as the velocity of this sexual revolution picks up, and as we are confronted almost every day with something new that tells us we are in a brave new world indeed. When the White House becomes a platform for driving that brave new world, then you understand we are indeed dealing in alien territory in this country. And as Christians, Christian parents, Christian individuals, students on college campuses and elsewhere try to figure all of this out. We need to recognize that when the White House is captured by this kind of ideology, this kind of ideology is well on its way to becoming the established worldview of officialdom in the United States of America.

But perhaps it might also serve to remind Christians that it really does matter. Let’s just say it again. It really does matter who is sitting for what interview in the White House. Or even more fundamentally, who is sitting behind that big desk in the Oval Office in the White House.

You bet it matters.