Tag Archives: Gay Agenda

News

Sex abuse survivors discuss consequences of transgender bathroom laws

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

In this latest video from Alliance Defending Freedom:

The Daily Signal explains the new video:

Policies allowing a person who is biologically male to access women’s restrooms and locker rooms can create negative, unintended consequences, according to some sexual abuse survivors.

“The presence of a male of any variety, whether he’s somebody who identifies as a trans or not, whether he has deviant motives or not, that’s irrelevant to the reality that for survivors of sexual trauma to just turn around and to be exposed to that is an instant trigger,” Kaeley Triller, a sexual trauma survivor, said in a video created by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative, Christian legal organization.

The video explains from a first-hand perspective how unintended victims are the consequence of open restroom and locker room policies in place at some companies like Target and in schools, such as in Fort Worth, Texas.

[…]“People are afraid, and with good reason, because they’ve had experiences where they were in places where they were vulnerable and someone hurt them,” a woman named Autumn Bennett said in the video.

[…]Janine Simon, a sexual assault victim, shared her thoughts in the video.

“I’ve only been telling my personal story publicly for a few months,” Simon said. “I do it because I know there are so many kids out, there are so many kids out there already being abused. There’s so many kids out there that pedophiles, they’re just looking for a chance… We’ve just created a law that makes it easier for them to access their victims.”

[…]This year in Washington state, a man was reported to have undressed in front of girls in a women’s locker room.

“As long as the person says, ‘I identify as a woman,’ and they’re not doing something criminal like actually assaulting somebody, this rule gives them the legal right to be present,” Joseph Backholm, executive director of the Family Policy Institute of Washington, told The Washington Times in February.

And as I blogged before, the Obama administration, which is in the back pocket of the gay rights lobby, has ordered all the public schools in the nation to implement transgender bathroom access. Even if you pull your kids out of the public schools, you are still paying for the public schools to be run the way that the gay rights lobby wants them to be run. You can’t opt out of paying taxes to the Democrat Party.

Fort Worth, TX

What is scary is how this is even happening at the state and local level, in states that are supposedly conservative.

Look at this:

The public schools in Fort Worth — Fort Worth — are going trans-positive. Here’s a link to the new school policy, [UPDATE: Link corrected. Sorry! — RD] which is based on the new federal interpretation of Title IX. It’s in Scribd, so I can’t quote excerpts. Highlights include:

  • There doesn’t need to be a medical or mental health diagnosis involved. If a male student says he’s a girl, then he’s a girl, and vice versa.
  • Schools are instructed to keep the student’s asserted gender identity hidden from parents unless authorized to share that information with them.
  • School personnel are to consider themselves to be allies of a student undergoing gender transitioning. That means not telling their parents or guardians.
  • Transgender students must have the opportunity to participate in school sports as the gender they claim to be, though they are not guaranteed this as a right.

But there’s more. The Fort Worth schools are now compelling teachers and others to teach gender ideology to students. Highlights:

  • Teachers are no longer to call their students “boys” and “girls,” but to use gender-neutral language to refer to them, e.g., “students”
  • Classrooms are to “feature diversity” in their classroom materials

So, let’s recap: public school teachers and personnel in the Fort Worth Independent School District are now required by policy to instruct students that gender can be whatever you want it to be. And they are required to keep parents in the dark about their kids transitioning or presenting themselves as the opposite gender at school.

Not in Austin. In Fort Worth.

Where are the people in Fort Worth supposed to go to get their kids away from this? And where do they get the tax money they paid into the system back, if they do pull their kids out of these public schools?

My solution to this is to allow the victims of anything that follows from this to sue the public school administrators and the Democrat Party officials who put the policy in place, and make it very expensive for them. They understand lawsuits. But we’ll have to wait for a real conservative to be elected President before that happens.

News

NC governor files suit against Obama administration

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

NBC News reports:

North Carolina on Monday filed a lawsuit against the federal government in response to a letter from the Justice Department that gave the state until the end of the day to scrap a controversial law regarding access to public bathrooms or risk losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

Gov. Pat McCrory was given until Monday to notify the Justice Department that he would not enforce House Bill No. 2, which the federal government says limits protections for LGBT people. The measure has drawn a firestorm of protest from across the country.

The suit filed against the federal government, which lists McCrory and other state officials as plaintiffs, called the Justice Department’s position on the law “baseless and blatant overreach.”

North Carolina’s suit said that Title VII, which the Department of Justice said House Bill No. 2 violates, doesn’t recognize transgender status as a protected class. “If the United States desires a new protected class under Title VII, it must seek such action by the United States Congress,” the suit said.

McCrory had already indicated that he wasn’t going to back down, saying on Sunday: “It’s the federal government being a bully. It’s making law.”

[…]House Speaker Tim Moore said, “That deadline will come and go. We don’t ever want to lose any money, but we’re not going to get bullied by the Obama administration to take action prior to Monday’s date. That’s not how this works.”

[…]In letters, federal civil rights enforcement attorneys focused on provisions requiring transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond to their biological sex.

[…]If the federal government yanked funding, the 17-campus UNC system could lose more than $1.4 billion in public money.

[…]Another $800 million in federally backed loans for students who attend the public universities also would be at risk if it’s found that enforcing the law violates Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on sex.

A federal lawsuit against the state is also possible, the Justice Department said.

In America, we have set up a system where the states are supposed to have jurisdiction over certain things that the federal government cannot control. We call this idea “federalism”. And it is a major reason why we are more prosperous than other nations. We believe in pushing decision-making down to the lowest level where a problem can be solved, because then it will be solved efficiently. But apparently, the socialists in the federal government – whose salaries are paid by our taxes – have decided that they know best and must force their views down onto the states. And what view are they forcing? They want private businesses in North Carolina to be forced to allow men into women’s bathrooms.

Do we not have other more pressing problems for the Obama administration to solve? Perhaps they can work on the IRS targeting of conservatives? Or perhaps they can work on the $20 trillion dollar debt, which has doubled since the Democrats took over the budget. Or perhaps they can back out of their deal to give Iran nuclear weapons? Or perhaps they can investigate their trafficking of assault weapons to Mexican drug cartels? Or perhaps they can fix the small problem of the labor force participation plunging to 62.8%? Or perhaps they can repeal Obamacare, which is set to raise health insurance premiums again by double digits in the coming year? Or perhaps they can repeal Dodd-Frank, which did nothing to fix the mortgage lending crisis that was caused in part by the two authors of the bill? Or perhaps they can privatize student loans and defuse the $1.3 trillion student loan bubble? Or perhaps they can get to work on modernizing our military – particularly our aging ballistic missiles submarines and our decrepit intercontinental ballistic missiles?

Or they could just focus on pushing a gay rights agenda down onto North Carolina. This is what you get when you elect an incompetent clown for a President, I guess.

Commentary

Is Matthew Vines twisting Scripture to justify sinful sexual behavior?

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I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery
I have a key that will unlock a puzzling mystery

Here’s a post from Christian apologist Terrell Clemmons about efforts by gay activists to redefine Christianity so that it is consistent with homosexual behavior. This particular post is focused on Matthew Vines.

She writes:

In March 2012, two years after having set out to confront homophobia in the church, Matthew presented the results of his “thousands of hours of research” in an hour-long talk titled “The Gay Debate.” The upshot of it was this: “The Bible does not condemn loving gay relationships. It never addresses the issues of same-sex orientation or loving same-sex relationships, and the few verses that some cite to support homophobia have nothing to do with LGBT people.” The video went viral (more than three quarter million views to date) and Matthew has been disseminating the content of it ever since.

In 2013, he launched “The Reformation Project,” “a Bible-based, non-profit organization … to train, connect, and empower gay Christians and their allies to reform church teaching on homosexuality from the ground up.” At the inaugural conference, paid for by a $104,000 crowd-funding campaign, fifty LGBT advocates, all professing Christians, gathered for four days in suburban Kansas City for teaching and training, At twenty-three years of age, Matthew Vines was already becoming a formidable cause célèbre.

Terrell summarizes the case he makes, and here is the part I am interested in:

Reason #1: Non-affirming views inflict pain on LGBT people. This argument is undoubtedly the most persuasive emotionally, but Matthew has produced a Scriptural case for it. Jesus, in his well-known Sermon on the Mount, warned his listeners against false prophets, likening them to wolves in sheep’s clothing. Then switching metaphors he asked, “Do people pick grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?” The obvious answer is no, and Jesus’s point was, you can recognize a good or bad tree – and a true or false prophet – by its good or bad fruit. From this, Matthew concludes that, since non-affirming beliefs on the part of some Christians cause the bad fruit of emotional pain forother Christians, the non-affirming stance must not be good.

Terrell’s response to this is spot on, and I recommend you read her post to get the full response.

She writes:

Matthew Vines in particular, and LGBTs in general, appear to be drivingly fixated on changing other people’s moral outlook. But why? Why are they distressed over the shrinking subset of Christianity that holds to the traditional ethic of sex? Note that Matthew found an affirming church in his hometown, as can most any LGBT-identifying Christian. Affirming churches abound. Gaychurch.org lists forty-four affirming denominations – denominations, not just individual churches – in North America and will help you find a congregation in your area. Why, then, given all these choices for church accommodation, are Matthew and the Reformers specifically targeting churches whose teachings differ from their own?

One gets the sense that LGBTs really, really need other people to affirm their sexual behavior. Certainly it’s human to want the approval of others, but this goes beyond an emotionally healthy desire for relational comity. Recall Matthew’s plea that non-affirming views on the part of some Christians cause emotional pain for others. He, and all like-minded LGBTs, are holding other people responsible for their emotional pain. This is the very essence of codependency.

The term came out of Alcoholics Anonymous. It originally referred to spouses of alcoholics who enabled the alcoholism to continue unchallenged, but it has since been broadened to encompass several forms of dysfunctional relationships involving pathological behaviors, low self-esteem, and poor emotional boundaries. Codependents “believe their happiness depends upon another person,” says Darlene Lancer, an attorney, family therapist, and author of Codependency for Dummies. “In a codependent relationship, both individuals are codependent,” says clinical psychologist Seth Meyers. “They try to control their partner and they aren’t comfortable on their own.”

Which leads to an even more troubling aspect of this Vinesian “Reformation.” Not only are LGBT Reformers not content to find an affirming church for themselves and peacefully coexist with everyone else, everyone else must change in order to be correct in their Christian expression.

This is the classic progression of codependency, and efforts to change everyone else become increasingly coercive. We must affirm same-sex orientation, Matthew says. If we don’t, we are “tarnishing the image of God [in gay Christians]. Instead of making gay Christians more like God … embracing a non-affirming position makes them less like God.” “[W]hen we reject the desires of gay Christians to express their sexuality within a lifelong covenant, we separate them from our covenantal God.”

Do you hear what he’s saying? LGBTs’ relationships with God are dependent on Christians approving their sexual proclivities. But he’s still not finished. “In the final analysis, then, it is not gay Christians who are sinning against God by entering into monogamous, loving relationships. It is we who are sinning against them by rejecting their intimate relationships.” In other words, non-affirming beliefs stand between LGBTs and God. Thus sayeth Matthew Vines.

The rest of her article deals with Vines’ attempt to twist Scripture to validate sexual behavior that is not permissible in Christianity.

Vines seems to want a lot of people to agree that the Bible somehow doesn’t forbid this sexual behavior so that the people who are doing it won’t feel bad about doing it. If he can just silence those who disagree and get a majority of people to agree, then the people who are doing these things will feel better.

Well. I am a chaste man now in my late 30s. I have not so much as kissed a woman on the lips. There is no societal celebration for what I am doing, not even in the church. But you don’t see me complaining that people need to validate my choice to be chaste. And the reason is, that even if the entire world were against me, the morality of chastity is self-authenticating. It doesn’t matter how many people make me feel bad about what I am doing, I have the direct experience of doing the right thing. Being chaste allows me to love women upward by treating them like equal partners in the gospel, and expecting them to work for the gospel like any man would.

Matthew Vines is annoyed that we expect homosexuals to work through their same-sex attractions, abstain from premarital sex, and then either remain chaste like me, or marry one person of the opposite sex and then confine his/her sexual behavior to his/her marriage. But how is that different than what is asked of me? I have opposite sex-attractions (boy, do I!), but I am also expected to abstain from premarital sex, and either remain chaste, or marry one woman for life, and confine my sexual behavior to that marriage. If I have to exercise a little self-control to show God that what he wants from me is important to me, then I am willing to do that. I’m really at a loss to understand why so many people take sexual gratification as a given, rather than as an opportunity for self-denial and self-control. I am especially puzzled by sinful people demanding that other celebrate their sin – and using the power of the government now to compel others to celebrate their sin.

Believe me, I understand what it is like to be without a woman’s love and support. I started out with a cold, distant, selfish, career-oriented mother. I dreamed about marriage since I was in high school – I remember praying about my future wife, even then. No one that I know has a stronger need for validation and encouragement from a woman than I do. Yet if I have to let that go in order to let God know that what he wants matters to me, then I will do it.

My service to God is not conditional on me getting my needs met. And my needs and desires are no less strong than the needs of people who engage in sex outside the boundaries of Christian teaching. We just make different decisions about what/who comes first. For me, Jesus is first, because I have sympathy with Jesus for loving me enough to die in my place, for my sins. I am obligated to Jesus, and that means that my responsibility to meet expectations in our relationship comes above my desire to be happy and fulfilled. For Matthew, the sexual desires come first, and Scripture has to be reinterpreted in light of a desire to be happy. I just don’t see anything in the New Testament that leads me to believe that we should expect God to fulfill our desires. The message of Jesus is about self-denial, self-control and putting God the Father first – even when it results in suffering. I take that seriously. That willingness to be second and let Jesus lead me is what makes me an authentic Christian.

There is a good debate featuring Robert Gagnon and a gay activist in this post, so you can hear both sides.