Urgent: Male and Female Created He Them

[M]ale and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created, Genesis 2:4 (ESV).

If some in Congress have their way this week (The House is set to vote Thursday 2/25), the terms male and female will soon disappear. First, from the realm of bureaucracy that will continually push itself into our private lives, And second, from the hearts and minds of young people who will grow up learning a language, a way of life, that is blind to biology, scripture, and

In Newsweek magazine, Mary Rice Hasson describes the “Equality Bill.”

“The Equality Act is 31 pages long, and devotes thousands of painstakingly drafted words to prohibiting “sex discrimination.” In all those pages, however, the word “female” never appears.”

. . . .

“Under the Equality Act, ‘gender identity’ determines access to “public accommodations,” a category the act redefines to include just about everywhere. It mandates access to ‘a restroom, a locker room, and a dressing room’ among other gathering places on the basis of ‘gender identity.’ Translation: There will be no safe spaces left for females. Support groups for mothers or sexual assault survivors would be forced to accept any male who feels entitled to join (based on ‘gender identity’).”

You may wonder: Can that really happen? It can. And without urging some Democrats to vote no in both the House and Senate, it will.

The White House has already announced it concurs with the goals of the bill.

Niamh Harris explains that there will be no safe haven of religious protection.

“Religious institutions fare no better [than public ones]. Religious schools, adoption agencies, and other charities would face federal sanction for operating according to basic biology and mainstream Biblical teaching on sex and marriage. Outrageously, this act exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

We might well imagine that the act would end up in court within hours of passage. But there is oppression in that too. Litigation takes time and costs money. Just ask the Little Sisters of the Poor.

In the meantime, the doors of ministries would close. Many forever even if there is relief from the courts.

And that might be a big if.

I have a friend who was involved in the pro-life cause before 1973. I was still in high school

She battled against abortion before the Supreme Court issued the Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions. Decisions that legalized abortion until birth for any reason.

Until birth for any reason.

The decisions went far beyond what the pro-abortion side considered to be their wildest dreams.


“We thought we could count on the courts,” she told me shortly after I began my own pro-life efforts in 1979. I’ve never forgotten.

Around the same time I was reading a book whose title and author I’ve lost–but whose opening example has stayed with me all these years.

The author presented an expectant mother determining to never allow society’s gender preconceptions to affect her child. She would raise her child in an environment that would laud feminist ideals.

This child would not wear dresses, would play with both dolls and toy trucks alike. She would give the child a name that did not assume a gender.

She planned. She prepared.

Labor. Delivery. Birth.

The mother’s first words upon the arrival of the child?

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

Why, the author pondered, did she ask so eagerly and so quickly after denying the importance of gender for so long?

Because it matters. Our gender makes us who we are more than this mother had been willing to admit.

People are free today to be openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender.

But people must also be free, if they are to remain free, to live out religious convictions, to run ministries accordingly, and raise children with biblical principles in mind.

These freedoms are at risk.

And we may soon have to ask ourselves how to manage in a new dark night of oppression based on our conviction that men are men and women are women.

And that God made us that way.

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

More Murray on Our Too Rapidly Changing Culture

It was interesting to observe. A sociological experiment of sorts. We were at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. Our busload of people and several hundred others.

And just two bathrooms.

The driver explained to us that, because there were so many people and such little in the line of facilities, we were to just get in line together–men and women–and take care of nature’s callings as such.

It was a practical matter–how to move so many people faster. It wasn’t about ideology.

Yes, I was uncomfortable and found the experience unpleasant. But what surprised me most was that the most vocal complaints came from the younger women in our group.

They, of the generation who grew up with the most open views on gender and sexuality since Rome, were beyond uncomfortable. Horrified might be the word they would use. They weren’t prepared for such a change in their social practices.

In his book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, Douglas Murray–an openly gay liberal–puts forth his thesis that, just perhaps, Western Civilization is shifting too quickly, too sharply.

That happens, he says, when one side wins a battle–but the war continues.

“Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over,” Murray writes.

In his section on Transgenderism–entitled “Trans”–Murray tells three stories.

One is about a man who had felt uncomfortable in his body since childhood. After serving in the military, marrying, and fathering five children, he divorced his wife and became a woman. Once same-sex marriage became legal in the UK, the now trans woman remarried the former wife.

Formerly James, now Jan, felt “euphoria” post-surgery, and was convinced “I had done the right thing.”

Murray writes that the “four surviving children . . . obviously did not have the easiest time adapting to the change in circumstances, though they seem to have been as adaptive as anyone could be.”

That’s Murray’s best case scenario.

The story he opens the chapter with doesn’t end happily.

Murray tells the story of Nathan, born Nancy. As a young girl, Nancy felt the family favored her brothers. Nancy’s mother admitted she found her infant daughter to be “so ugly” that she never bonded with her.

Nancy eventually underwent surgery to become Nathan. But one year later, disappointment in the results drove the trans man to ask the state for euthanasia. The state complied.

Nathan’s mother said, “Her death does not bother me.”

The story prompts Murrays’ questions: “Are we sure that [trans] exists as a category? And if so, are we certain that attempting to turn somebody physically from one sex to another is always possible? Or even the best way to deal with the conundrum this presents?”

Some may say that Nancy/Nathan’s story is a straw man. A terrible example of family rejection and a striving to do anything to find acceptance–which apparently was not to be had.

Yet Murray has other stories. I’ll summarize one that best supports his thesis that today’s culture is moving too fast on this issue.

“James” was a teen when he discovered the gay/drag queen scene. He shared his sense that he was “in the wrong body” with his doctor at age 18. After three and a half hours–yes, hours–of therapy at age 19, James heard the clinician’s conclusion: “You’re trans.”

He then entered the NHS (British health care system) that would accommodate all his needs, beginning with hormones and culminating in surgery–every need except one that would question the diagnosis of trans.

It was a process that began with James living as a woman for two years. Then came the hormones, Next, would come the surgery that would finalize the transformation.

James–no female name provided in Murray’s retelling–would see NHS folks once every six months. During that time, no one questioned–or asked him to question–the diagnosis of trans.

Yet, James himself began to question as a point of no return approached.

One can take opposite-sex hormones only so long before an important effect becomes permanent. James would be irrevocably infertile.

“[The NHS] had treated him as someone with a condition that needed fixing. But online James sought–and found–contrary points of view. Through alternative media he discovered YouTube stars and others who were questioning the wisdom of his decision, including younger and hipper people than he had expected.”

James also had questions about his faith as a liberal Christian–“questions of God and design.”

He began to ask “what I need to do to be content with my body, not change my body.” No one at NHS had encouraged such thought.

The government’s philosophy about transgenderism had moved too fast–in only one direction–for James.

Murray’s voice is an important one for our day. It is a voice of reason calling us to the manned barricades that want to move us to a place of no return–without much consideration of the consequences as we go.

Murray calls us to hear what the changes are doing, not just for the “Jan”‘s who are happy with the results of social change–but for the Jameses who did not look beyond the NHS’s quest for one solution in time–for the Nancy/Nathans who found that solution insufficient to fulfill a lifelong search for love and acceptance.

Can we hear him? Or are we too late?

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Trying to Draw the Line that Won’t Stop Moving

In the wake of every modern social movement comes a moment when we think that movement has found its end.

For example, America and much of Europe have instituted same-sex marriage. Where else can the new social line go? Yet it keeps moving.

It shifts to a Big Brother effort to get everyone on board. To make us all believe the same thing about same-sex marriage, about white privilege, about the evils of the patriarchy that wields power unjustly, holding women down. Justice never happens because the line to fairness keeps moving.

In such times, it’s rare to find a book that, to mix my metaphors, puts a finger on the pulse of the constantly moving line in a way no other author has. We see the “great crowd derangement,” Douglas Murray describes, but “we do not see the causes.” He shows us the causes.

I usually wait to comment on books until I’ve finished reading them. But Murray’s book contains a message that is cogent, urgent–and surprising, considering its source.

The perspective in The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity is distinctly liberal but at the same time very conservative.

Douglas Murray is gay. He believes the line has gone too far. And there may not be a way to pull it back.

He is honest about his fear that “We face not just a future of ever-greater atomization, rage and violence, but a future in which the possibility of backlash against all rights advances–including the good ones–grows more likely.”

Murray says, “Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over.”

When Obergefell came down, I thought–albeit briefly–They have what they want now. We will stay in this place. We did not.

Instead, we see lawsuits over wedding cakes, photos, and flowers.

We see, as Murray puts it, that once the “boot is on the other foot” the victors treat the losers the way the losers once treated the now victors.

Murray implicitly makes a case for the Golden Rule and pulls back the curtain on the “gobbledygook” that has filtered into society from liberal academia.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read a secular book with more wisdom from someone whose worldview is so vastly different from my own.

I can’t wait to keep reading.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Nancy E. Head’s Restoring the Shattered is out in paperback! Get your copy here!

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. Restoring the Shattered is published through Morgan James Publishing with whom I do share a material connection. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

A Gay Man Living Christ in the Church

Some of us would say he struggles with same-sex attraction. It’s our way of avoiding the word “gay”.

But Greg Coles doesn’t avoid the word; he embraces it.

His book–Single, Gay, Christian: A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity–is beautifully written and raw.

When he realized–as an adolescent–that he was not attracted to girls, he prayed to God to make him straight. He continued to pray. Over the years, he dated girls.

He did not become straight. Continue reading “A Gay Man Living Christ in the Church”

No Brotherly Love in Philadelphia

“True it is, They that are born of the flesh, hate and persecute them that are born of the spirit.” William Penn, Chapter One, VII~
His statue stands atop the great structure in the center of Philadelphia–City Hall. William Penn understood what many of us are just figuring out. The world will never understand nor appreciate our deeply held, uncompromising convictions.
And their disdain for our views trumps even the appearance of compassion. A voice of false compassion casts aside victims unrelated to its intended target.
The Daily Signal reports that days after making an urgent plea on behalf of 300 homeless orphans of the opioid crisis, Philadelphia ended its placement relationship with Bethany Christian Services and Catholic Social Services. Because those agencies hold Christian convictions and will not place children with unmarried or LGBT couples, they can no longer place children at all.
In the Keystone State in 2015, more than half of the 16,000 kids in foster care had been removed from their homes because of “parental drug use.” Philadelphia ranks second in deaths by overdose out of 44 counties in the US with populations greater than one million.
The need is indeed great, and there are many, but not enough, ways to meet it. Continue reading “No Brotherly Love in Philadelphia”

America at War with Herself

I’ve been there twice. Once in the summer. Another time in March, spring break. For a tourist, it is the essence of peace. Or it was–until last week.
Charlottesville, Virginia, is now a place we will remember for hate.
The haters gathered to protest the proposed removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. Part of a series of removals eliminating Confederate monuments.
Communities began removing monuments and Lee’s battle flag–often considered the Confederate flag–after Dylann Roof’s slaughter of African American Christians at a Bible study in 2015 in South Carolina.
Beyond the protest of monument removal, Saturday’s rally was intended to “unite the right.” But there was more.
They came to shout their hatred for African Americans. They came to shout their hatred for Jews and LGBT’s and immigrants. Historically, they’ve hated Catholics too.
Saturday’s fiasco/riot resulted in the deaths of a counter-protestor and two state police officers. Numerous others were injured.
Some have argued that the monuments and the flag stand for freedom from an oppressive federal government. If that were ever true, it no longer is. The haters have co-opted symbols that once may have been innocent souvenirs from Gettysburg, Vicksburg, or Antietam.
No longer. No more.
Some will equate the hatred of Charlottesville with Christianity–especially conservative Christianity that does not agree with gay marriage. To do so distorts a faith that intends to speak only in love.
And haters who claim Christianity as their own–as many supremacists do–distort the faith. Their faith is in themselves and their hatred, not in a merciful God who seeks to redeem us all.
True Christianity rejects relative morality. A morality that tells us it’s okay to act on anger and hate and selfishness. To act on feelings rather than principles. The danger of relative morality is that it leads to a relative view of people.
It leads us to not see the value in everyone. It leads us back to a time we were at war with each other.
It has led us to now.


Photo Credit: Pixabay

Permissions: You are permitted and encouraged to reproduce and distribute this material in any format provided that you do not alter the wording in any way, do not charge a fee beyond the cost of reproduction, and you credit the author.

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the entities I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

 

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