Friday, May 13, 2016

What the Transgender Bathroom Debate Means For You


Excellent article today from Russel Moore, President of The Ethics and Religious Commission of The Southern Baptist Convention . . .

"Last night the New York Times reported that the Obama Administration would issue a decree directing every public school in the nation to allow bathroom access on the basis of self-identity, not biological sex. I’m quite aware of the White House’s place in our culture wars, and even I am surprised. If anyone had suggested in 2009 that the new President’s administration would seek to target children’s bathrooms for the sake of transgender ideology, the White house would have ridiculed it as a crazy conspiracy theory. So, for those suggesting that state legislatures seeking to define such questions were working on 'solutions without a problem,' well, here’s your problem. So why is this important, and what should the church do?

First of all, we should recognize what’s really happening here, and it’s much bigger than the symbol of the bathrooms. The Department of Education’s actions here mean that 'gender' itself in terms of admission for all colleges accepting federal funds is ultimately a matter of identification, not biological sex. The state here wishes to use its coercive power not simply to stop mistreatment of people but to rescript the most basic human intuitions about humanity as male and female. How, after all, does one win a culture war against one of the most basic facts of science and life: that there are two sexes? One does so by withholding the funds and recognition necessary to operate in public space, unless institutions get in line. Children, then, become pawns of the state for the state to teach what is ultimately a theological lesson, not a scientific one.

This, ultimately, won’t work. There are good reasons to put boys and girls in different bathrooms and locker rooms and sometimes sports teams, reasons that don’t impugn the dignity of people but uphold it. Sex-differentiated bathrooms and sports teams and dormitories for men and women aren’t the equivalent of, say, a terrorist Jim Crow state unnaturally forcing people apart based on a fiction, useful to the powerful, that skin color is about superiority and inferiority. Every human being knows that there are important, and necessary, differences between men and women. Without such recognition, women are harmed and men are coarsened."

Read the entire article here.

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