How Do I Respond if I'm Asked to State my Pronouns?
Great discussion and suggestion around a topic du jour. Christian, you should not participate in their rituals. Be prepared to answer why you won’t.
#culture
#transgenderism
Sharks Are Lurking
We were at a local beach with our kids a few weeks ago. A weekend out, away from the stress of the world. My daughter, ever the friendly one, was playing with a young boy when I got a sick, deep in my stomach feeling. I approached the lad and asked, “Bud, what’s your name?” He responded, “My name is Ivy and I’m a girl. I can prove it, I have seven Barbies at home.”
Let us be clear, girls do not talk this way and Ivy was not a girl.
Not having encountered this kind of situation yet, I pulled my daughter aside and told her that she cannot call him a girl as this is a lie, but could call the young man Ivy. I allowed my daughter to continue playing with him, but we stayed close. All the interactions were strained and weird.
What I learned at home shook me to my core. My daughter told my wife that she was playing with the young boy and a group of children. They split up boys and girls to play a game. The boy then yelled at my daughter, demanding that she call him a girl or he wouldn’t play with her. He kept scolding her until she caved and said, “fine, you’re a girl!”
Parents. I failed. My gut said to get her away, to protect her, but my heart assumed that this boy wasn’t going to do anything while I was close. Unfortunately he had already done it before I realized what was happening. And I am furious.
This child was taught to manipulate other children. His mother was close by. My daughter felt violated, didn’t know how to tell us there. Didn’t understand why this boy was yelling at her.
This is the insidious part of transgenderism. It would be one thing if they lived their lives and let us live ours. But that isn’t how it works. They must force us to participate in their charade. But to participate is to bear false witness. To lie. My daughter knew this boy wasn’t a girl, but she wanted to play. That’s why we were at the beach. To have fun, to decompress. But this young child decided to prey on her, to force her to lie. And all she wanted was to play so he took advantage of that to force her.
Let me speak clearly, we have learned a lesson in my house. My guard is sharpened.
Parents, this is what is lurking below the waves. Be vigilant. They want you to speak their lies. To deny truth. And they dance in the streets chanting that they are coming for your children. Trust them when they say that. They are.
Christians Dare to Say
The Bible is without error. Do not hide, slink away, say only the safe things. That is what they want. That is what the culture wants. They want their ideologies to have supreme visibility and anyone that disagrees with it to capitulate and celebrate it. In the words of Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, we are focusing on “[banning] books touching on gender issues” but “dead kids can’t read.”
Celebrate it and don’t get in between us and your kids or your kids will keep dying.
We see you, we hear you.
But, Christian, dare to respond with biblical truth as the Word of God is perfect, authoritative, and without error. Boldly share and don’t let their threats of death scare you.
Senseless
Beyond that unfolding storyline was the urgent sense that some motive must explain this targeted attack on a school, including young children. […] Interestingly, CNN’s Laura Coates seemed to defend the search for a motive by arguing (quite correctly) that a motive is not justification for the crime.
[…]
Christians know that the hunger for a motive is explained by the fact that God made us in His image as moral creatures, and we cannot keep ourselves from the hunger to know some motive behind such a heinous crime. At the same time, we can learn of some motive only to realize that there is no merely rational answer to the darkness of the human heart. There is no way for us to know the depth of an individual’s depravity once a heart is committed to sin. Audrey Hale left behind a map of The Covenant School. Perhaps her dark manifesto will offer some map of her murderous heart. Even that will not answer all our questions.
[…]
But Christians know that the real urgency is six grieving families in Nashville. Christian moms and dads, with brothers and sisters, are living a pain no one else would dare to understand. In Nashville, there is a wounded community and a congregation that has experienced unspeakable loss. A Presbyterian pastor with his wife and their children are experiencing the death of their little daughter and beloved sister.
The world’s trouble erupts in Nashville by R. Albert Mohler Jr.
I am numb right now. I said somewhere last week that I felt like I was trying to stop a train. God, I pray this was enough to wake the world up that we have to stop the hateful, demonizing, us-vs.-them rhetoric. The children that died on Monday were my daughter’s age. I find some peace in that they are in Heaven now, away from the pain of this world, but I mourn all the more for these families and all the time they lost here. I pray they stay the course and follow them into the hereafter. A young sister cried out, “I don’t want to be an only child,” and my heart broke.
As I said on Tuesday, I could write many words. But words are seriously falling short right now. I trip and I just want to rage. There will be time for that, there will. But right now we mourn.
Jesus did tell His disciples that those who follow him would face trouble in this world. Big trouble. Heartbreaking trouble. Mind-bending trouble. But we must remember that Jesus went on to say: “But take heart; I have overcome the world.” Sometimes, remembering that promise is all that will get us through.
Culture Saturday: Good News and Hope for Detransitioners
One of the things you may have noticed about the new site— if you have been following me a while— is the content has been less politics- and culture-related over the last two weeks. Part of that was intentional. In migrating all the content, I got to add great features like tag pages and nested tags and similar posts.
These features gave me great insight into what my focus points have been and let me chart out where I want my focus points to be. For one, I want to write about what I do more. Web development, woodworking, etc. And I’ve done more of that in the last two weeks than I have in the last 8 years of this site. Another is music. I play a lot of music. Instruments and songs. Looking back at the Christmas songs over the years that have impacted me and why is great.
Ultimately, I am trying to share more evenly across many categories. I am writing a lot and saving drafts to publish later. I am coming to a sort of strategy. And culture and politics are part of that. The intersection of culture, politics, and faith is of particular interest to me and that leads us to Culture Saturdays.
Douglas Wilson, who you’ll find on my Blogroll, has been one of my favorite preachers over the last decade. Specifically, I love his willingness to address the cultural zeitgeists in a way that a shepherd should: wolves looking to kill his sheep need to be shot. That oft means uncomfortable conversations, especially in an age when tolerance is hammered with words that end in -phobia.
In an article last week, Douglas addressed a fictional— though plucked from the headlines real— young gal named Candace, who— after burning bridges to much of her family and friends in transitioning to living as a boy— has come full circle and is transitioning back after an encounter with Jesus. And there is so much good in this article, you need to go read it.
One of the temptations that comes to those who are seriously repenting is that they overshoot. In recognizing that their sin went far beyond the boundaries of God’s law, they assume falsely that their sin also went far beyond the reach of God’s grace.
The is so much importance on a proper understanding of grace. Heard someone ask the other day why “good things happen to bad people,” and I responded that if good things only happened to good people, good things would never happen. The grace of God to extend a hand is not conditional on the quality of the individual needing a hand, as then no one could qualify. While your sin has cast you very far from God, well…
[…] God’s grace does not live snugly in a little heavenly bungalow—God’s grace is a ranger, lives out in the badlands, and rounds up outlaws. God’s grace is a bounty hunter.
He’s coming for you.
But then, after He has apprehended the fugitive and brings him in, He surprises everyone by calling for the best robe, a fine ring, good shoes, and he orders that the fatted calf be killed. Then he tells the head servant to go hire a swing band. So your sin, however great it was, is no match for the kindness of God. This is something you need to fix in your mind now, and you need to make a point of hanging on to it. In Christ, God saves sinners.
Someone said the other day to me that what we see in the Bible is not Man trying to get right with God, but God trying to get right with Man. The reason we don’t see Man trying to get right with God— if you exclude all the many cases of exactly that in the Bible— is because we are totally depraved and consumed with sin. We cannot make a good decision if our lives depend on it, because our lives do in fact depend on it, and yet… Yeah. God is not, then, in fact trying to get right with us, but to get us right with Him. He is pursuing, He is wooing, He is trying to bring us home.
So the good news is that Jesus Christ died for sinners, and you qualify.
One of many reasons that I love Wilson. I listened to this article first as I was driving to work this week. I nearly spit my coffee all over the windshield with this quip. You qualify.
But we have to look straight at the nature of this good news, because there are two different kinds of good news, and we must not confuse them. […] But the second kind of good news does have prerequisites—and that is that there needs to be an antecedent understanding of the bad news. […] You receive news that the governor signed a pardon meaning that you will not be executed in the morning—but you need to have understood that you were going to be executed. Otherwise the good news makes no sense. Certain kinds of good news make no sense at all apart from the related bad news.
The threat of Hell is real. Wilson’s analogy of receiving a pardon but understanding that you were going to be executed is important. There is punishment for sin. A just God cannot allow there not to be. But, in mercy, He gives us a gift of Salvation and we must confess it, take up our cross, and follow Him. We get it for free in the sense that it cost us nothing— as there is no way we could pay the cost— but also it costs us everything. Surrender and follow. This can cost us jobs, family, friends, and so much more, but if we do not, the ramifications are eternally worse.
Many of our sins are socially complex. […] In your case, your sins were a player, but the whole thing was a group effort. There was the media propaganda. There was the social contagion of the other girls at your college doing this […] In other words, there was no shortage of sin, and plenty of sin to go around. You need to acknowledge the sins of all these other people as a theological truth, but then as a practical matter you must focus on your own sin, confessing that sin as though you were the only one at fault.
This is the addressing of the uncomfortable. Our culture is pressuring young people— children— to make life-altering decisions before they are capable of understanding the life-altering nature of those decisions. Folks that detransition are often faced with their new reality that their voices are changed forever, their reproductive systems— if they didn’t have them removed— will never function properly again, and worse. We are talking about the chemical castration of children at the altar of a societal god.
But. We are individually responsible for our choices, our actions, and without euphemism: our sins. We cannot just blame our sins on others. Others very well may have pushed us there, but we are responsible. And remember, in that responsibility and repentance we acknowledge the wages of our sin (Romans 6:23) while also receiving the grace and forgiveness that only Christ can provide.
Tyranny and Presidential Edicts
From Courtney Kirchoff of Louder with Crowder:
To use Obama’s oft used phrase, “Let me be clear” this is tyrannical. We have the executive telling STATE schools to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they deem appropriate for how they’re feeling that day. And not JUST bathrooms, but locker rooms, where boys and girls strip down and get naked. Your president, ladies and gentleman, has just issued a war on women.
Yes, I said it. The left, in an attempt to be all “inclusive” has just said women don’t matter. Our feelings of security and safety do not matter. Our privacy does not matter. Our gender, the left says, is merely a societal construct. This issue right here, transgenders in bathrooms, and transgenders being supported cart blanche, is ultimate proof modern feminism is a farce. It is a failure.
If you consider yourself a feminist and support this kind of lunacy, you no longer have my ear nor my sympathy.
If you are an American and do not see the tyranny of a President putting forth a “guideline” or edict with threat of removing federal funding from schools, you need to get educated on why this nation exists. Laws are created by the legislative branch, not the executive. Funding is controlled by the legislative branch, not the executive. The President is in breach of the Constitution and way out of line.
If They Disagree, Fine Them
If you don’t get on board and call them by whatever “gender” they wish to put on today, you should be fined. Because tolerance.