As the assault on our nation’s cultural underpinnings continues, the latest attack against morality and sanity involves a choice of restrooms. If you’re a man, you can claim to be a woman and use the one where such use would in the past likely lead to your arrest. The same holds true for a woman who claims to be a man and prefers to use the men’s room. Many individuals who claim to have discovered that they have been wrongly assigned their gender identity have even submitted to medical procedures. They can deny who they are but they can’t deny nature.
It will surely upset advocates of the so-called transgender craze to hear an opposing view — one that says each person’s gender results from action completely outside of any human being’s decision. Gender arrives at conception and it marks an individual for life. No tinkering, medical procedure, personal desire, or government edict can legitimately change that.
In the first chapter of Genesis verse 17, one can learn of the Almighty’s launching of the human race. The holy book tells us in clear terms, “… male and female He created them.” From then until now and beyond, a new human being is either male or female from conception. Even before birth, the newly conceived human’s chromosomes have determined its gender. In our country, as in most others, a newborn infant’s gender will also be recorded on a birth certificate that will forever indicate that person as either male or female.
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The culture destroyers in the Obama administration decided that federal action was needed to protect the so-called rights of the transgender minority. The president sent a letter to every public school district in America telling the nation’s educators to allow students claiming a change in their gender to use whichever bathroom and locker room they choose.
The letter admitted that it “does not have the force of law.” It even employs the word “guidance” in place of the usual “must” or “shall.” Hence, it carries no obvious threat of federal punishments for those who don’t comply. But the possibility of withholding federal aid for balky school districts is real. And social pressures generated by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender minority (LGBT is their acronym) and their culture-destroying allies can be, and have already been, employed to force reluctant officials in various states and communities to change or simply ignore their local laws and standards.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act bans discrimination based on sex. So the culture-destroying commandos referred not to sex but to “gender identity.” And the individuals who desire to alter their gender identification are taking advantage of loopholes in the laws in some states where changes can be made in one’s birth certificate. They are, in effect, rewriting a legal document.
What would have been termed “madness” only several decades ago is now sweeping the country. It follows a Supreme Court ruling elevating same-sex marriage to legitimacy. Other attacks on our national culture include assigning women to combat roles in the military, killing an unborn child in the womb, and condoning entertainment that subverts morality. All of these assaults on our nation’s culture harm the collective sense of what has always been identifiably “American.” Our nation continues a descent into a new form of barbarism.
Regaining our cultural underpinnings can be accomplished. After all, slavery was once considered legal, even proper. But it was abolished. Allowing and even encouraging individuals to change their undeniable sex to their own choice of “gender identity” is dangerously absurd. It even amounts to shaking a fist at the heavens and saying, “Not Thy will but mine be done.”
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
