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The Christian Post‘s managing editor Lillian Kwon has given us another piece referencing trans people where the conflation of gender identity and sexual orientation is made, entitled Christians Urged to Wake Up to Reality of GLBT Agenda. To quote from the piece (link added):
Dr. Michael Brown believes Christians have already lost the battle when it comes to public opinion on homosexuality and gender identity issues.Pro-gay books are being read in elementary school classrooms, teachers are being mandated to use gender neutral language, gay activists have been welcomed in the White House, and young evangelicals see no problem with same-sex marriage.
The piece continues:
“The definitions of male and female are being eroded but don’t sweat it because praise the Lord you had a lovely service last Sunday,” he said sarcastically. “Don’t let me disturb you with these trivialities.”Brown wants to awaken the conscious of Christians and bring them to a “divine reality” about what’s happening in America.
There is a need to reach out to homosexual men and women with compassion, he said, but at the same time there is “a gay activist agenda that we must resist.”
So the referenced Dr. Michael Brown highlights the following, which have everything to do with trans people and transyouth, and not much with teh homosexuals. Some of his concerns:
• … the Los Angeles Unified School District has a policy on “ensuring equity and nondiscrimination” for “transgender and gender nonconforming students.” The policy defines gender identity as “one’s understanding, interests, outlook, and feelings about whether one is female or male, or both, or neither, regardless of one’s biological sex.”
• In San Francisco, the school policy for restroom accessibility states, “Students shall have access to the restroom that corresponds to their gender identity exclusively and consistently asserted at school.”
And the policy for locker room accessibility states, “Transgender students shall not be forced to use the locker room corresponding to their gender assigned at birth.
Brown then summarized that “if Joey’s convinced he’s Jane, then he can use the girls’ locker room and restroom,” implying as socially conservative Christians often do, of course, that male-to-female people are public restroom predators. In this instance, Brown is implying that those predatores include elementary and secondary school transyouth.
In the article, Brown calls for compassion and understanding for gay and lesbian persons (even though he also says, regarding homosexuality, that it’s a moral responsibility of Christians to “expose darkness and to be a moral conscience and moral preservative”), but makes no such comment on compassion and understanding about transsexual people, transgender people, and people who identify as both transgender and transsexual. In other words, Brown apparently either considers trans people to really be gay people, or he doesn’t believe trans people deserve compassion and understanding.
My guess is that Brown considers trans people to be gay people. It looks to me that Brown joins a long list of religious right people who conflate gender identity and sexual orientation, lumping it all under the heading of “gender confusion.”
Perhaps it isn’t a side note that when Lillian Kwon writes about transgender people and issues over at the Christian Post, to me it appears you can be sure her piece is always going to be in some way agin’ ‘em. In the past she’s given us pieces — such as 2007′s Media Bias on Transgenders Raising Concerns, where she began that piece with the sentence…
Growing media coverage and portrayals of the transgendered life have led some Christians to raise the red flag on a movement beginning to go more public much like the homosexual one already has.
…And continued on in the piece to state about pending federal hate crimes legislation:
[More below the fold.]
Federal legislation on expanding hate crimes to include violent attacks against individuals on the basis of “gender, sexual orientation and gender identity” is currently being reviewed by the Senate. Christians have strongly voiced opposition to the expansion, arguing that the bill could silence believers who view homosexuality as sinful. That also applies to the transgender.
In that piece she quoted Dr. Robert Gagnon’s take on 1 Corinthians 6:9 about why transsexuality is sin — a scripture which has actually nothing to do with transsexuality and/or transgenderism.
Kwon also quoted Gagnon on transsexuality in Upcoming Film Follows a Transsexual’s Ordination Journey. From the last two paragraphs of that piece:
Robert Gagnon, associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and a conservative ordained elder of the PC(USA), argued in a 2007 paper that “transsexuality is in some respects an even more extreme version of the problem of homosexuality” as it is a denial of one’s own sex and “an overt attempt at marring the sacred image of maleness or femaleness formed by God.”“Jesus Christ, and not any innate human impulses, is Lord. Accordingly, persons who attempt to change their sex should be prohibited from becoming ordained ministers of the church,” he said.
Kwon has also given us pieces, such as Exodus Launches Initiative to Help Women Affected by Lesbianism, , and Pastors Test Expanded Hate Crimes Law, where in that last piece she highlighted Rev. Grace Harley:
“God loves the homosexual,” the Rev. Grace Harley of Jesus Is the Answer Ministries in Silver Spring, Md., declared.As someone who previously lived as a transgender (as a man) for 18 years, Harley testified that God set her free and can set others free from all kinds of sexual immorality, not just homosexuality. Jesus died on the cross so that you may be saved, she preached.
Offering a personalized version of the biblical passage Luke 13:13, she said, “Immediately she was made straight and glorified God.”
“I don’t just walk as a woman,” she noted, “but now I know the truth.”
It would be very journalism of Kwon if she actually balanced her pieces with quotes she solicited from trans people of faith.
But that said, Kwon and the Christian Post make it a habit of conflating gender identity and sexual orientation. When she and the Christian Post write about trans people and trans issues rally their Christian Soldiers with the subtle messaging of fear mongering. The fear mongering seems to always allude to the non-existent problem of transgender bathroom predators (where they can’t identify any cases of trans people — let alone people who are crossdressing and pretending to be transgender — who in predatory bathroom behavior, and then tie their public fears regarding transgender bathroom predation to the identities gays and lesbians. The behavior — the fear mongering — by these conservative Christians over an alleged transgender bathroom predator problem is at best unintentionally deceptive, and at worst intentionally deceptive.
And tying that fear of an alleged transgender bathroom predator problem to gay and lesbian people seems to me to be an intentional conflation of sexual orientation and gender identity/gender expression to support their Religious Right Agenda™. And too, at the Christian Post, that conflation can be traced back to their managing editor Lillian Kwon.
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12 Comments
Chrstians are all unconscious?
I think he either just claimed that to believe in Christianity is to live in a dreamland, or else meant “conscience”, which again, I would question whether any Christian in this man’s audience has, considering what their morality has driven “people of faith” to do in the past.
Oh bugger…
Apparently, he DOES know the meaning of the words. Maybe he used the words he meant to use after all, no malapropisms here.
Pig-ignorant fear mongeringWe’re all too used to the hackneyed crap about straight men pretending to be gay for whatever squirrelly reason. As tired as it is, it still fuels Hollywood movies. ”Oh, look–those guys have to pretend to be fags! What a scream!” Yeah, that happens all the time.
I’m sure we’re due for a new wave of similar stories about men pretending to be women so they can use the rest rooms and, um, smell the air fresheners or something. My gut tells me Adam Sandler may have such a project in development already. Because of course men do that all the time.
1 CorinthiansFirst Corinthians was a letter by Paul, who was somewhere off in Asia at the time, to the congregation he started in Corinth, Greece, which was falling apart at the seams with infighting. There were arguments over which of the various preachers around they should follow, sexual scandals and fights over who slept with who, intrusions of old pagan practices and fights over if they were appropriate, fights over kosher laws, fights over how to conduct Christian worship, fights over Christian theology, etc. Paul was clearly intending to get back there to try to patch things up, but it was going to take a while. So, he wrote his letter in an attempt to hold things together until he could get back. 1 Corinthians is a very purpose-specific letter aimed at keeping everything he built up in Corinth from falling apart until he could get there, and everything in it is written toward that end. So, it isn’t hard to deduce that the passage in question, 1 Corinthians 6:9, which reads,
was really meant to quiet the kinds of behaviors that were causing conflict. It wasn’t a commandment of God so much as a bandaid to deal with a crisis.
Now, if they’re going to hang so much importance on one word, “effeminate”, in one sentence in one letter from Paul (who was not Jesus and never met Jesus, despite his claims of devine visitations), why don’t they place as much emphasis on other passages from 1 Corinthians, like 1 Corinthians 4:6:
Or perhaps 1 Corinthians 5:12:
Their own scripture tells them to not over-interpret their scripture, and to not try to apply it to people outside of their congregations. In the end, isn’t that all we really ask of them?
If we’re going tp rely on 1 Corinthians, why not . . .1 Cor. 7:8-9 – which reflects the Pauline teaching on marriage, quite succinctly:
The point is, according to Paul, marriage for Christians is only for those who are unable to control their sexual urges. It has nothing at all to do with raising children and families, and everything to do with scratching the persistenr itch.
Good point, but…When you try to argue with them about their own religion, it never seems to get very far. I think the stronger argument is you can believe whatever you want, just don’t push it on me. Then the argument isn’t theological but ethical.
On further consideration.I posted my last comment quickly before rushing off to a meeting, but I think you touch on a very interesting subject. If you look at 1 Corinthians 7 which talks about marriage, it’s pretty clear that in Paul’s mind, marriage is about monogamy and satisfying sexual desires in a respectable way (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%207&version=NIV).
In other words, “I don’t believe much in marriage myself, but if you can’t keep it in your pants, you should probably get hitched.” My point being that, counter to what modern conservatives want to tell you, according to Paul (the authority they most often reference), marriage is not about having children, but instead about having sex. Yeah, children might be an accidental consequence, but they’re not important enough to be worthy of a mention. You get married to get laid, not to have kids.
Given that, arguments about marriage being restricted to hetero couples because marriage is about procreation coming from people professing Christianity starts ringing pretty hollow (as if they didn’t already).
Moral preservatives…do those cause cancer?
We’ve been hearing it in Bowling Green!Q — We have a cabal of fundamentalist fascists who challenged two ordinances in here Bowling Green, OH which were passed last year, adding all the federal and state protections down to the local level, and added gender/gender identity/gender expression along with physical characteristics and genetic information to the mix.
The opponents of the ordinances began to rear their ugly heads a few weeks ago, infesting the mails with a nasty mailer, claiming that transwomen would be “discriminating” against women by “invading their privacy” in the toilet, shower room and changing rooms.
What disturbed me the most is the fact the mailer referred to the four transwomen as men, and actually put quotation marks on their legal female names! This is how print media are supposed to do when referring to a pet’s name!
They’ve been spreading all kinds of vicious claims, and this past Friday night, brought in Matt “Bam Bam” Barber to spew his brand of lies, innuendo, and fearmongering.
The letters to the local paper have been filled with these baseless claims, all spread by religious fanatics under the delusion that their religious liberty trumps the Constitution!
I’m having a continuing dialogue with Dr B.This quote from the article is an accurate description of his beliefs:
He’s sincere. Wrong but sincere. I’m trying to educate him on the difference between Trans and Gay.
I’d never waste my time trying to do that with LaBarbera and co. The point is, Dr B is trying to do the right thing by his own lights. He has integrity, and is open to reasoned argument. He has some axioms we disagree on, but nothing too bad. I can work with that.
From Dr Brown:
I, er, wrote a long reply to that one. Pointing out that in fact, there has been no care, no charity shown to kids who are exceptional. We tried relying on goodwill and common sense of “christians”. It didn’t work. Hence the rules are needed. And much else.
Feel free to flame me on this for “consorting with the enemy” or whatever else.
But he’s no Bam-Bam.
Thanks – and that is actually a part of the point!And you know, I agree with your original point – that a strong(er)argument has to do with freedom of religion applying to us, too. Though it also makes sense for those who are among us, and who take the Bible as sacred scripture, to see that there are other ways of looking at the scriptures than the so-called literalists who pick and choose what they read.
I have found it to be very effective to use one’s opponent’s source materials (whether it be the Bible, or a stack of legal decisions in their brief), and find the things they didn’t notice that actually undercut their case and support my own.
When thay take a few verses out of context, or rely on a “squib” and don’t actually read the whole case, it actually helps me.