“You can’t minister to people at a distance, you need to get right down in the cheeseburgers with them. If you’re going to reach out to the homosexuals, you need to be there with them, making friends with them, loving them, without contributing or endorsing it. You’re just there. That’s where Jesus went. He would hang with people like that and be Himself. That was the difference. Rather than getting all absorbed, He always stood apart because He was Himself in that environment, in love. I think that’s what attracted all the sinners to Him. He was going to tell them the truth, He wasn’t going to insult or hurt them . . .
We just insult God’s intelligence to think that we’re the arbiters of all this good and bad taste. I think Christians in this country are really hung up on a lot of things, because it makes life easy and manageable.” - Michael Roe, “The Cream Rises”
News story, make sure you listen to the media file found in the middle of the article.
You listened to the file, right? Because it’s the first line in there that really made me want to blog about this. Using the appeal to fear is nothing new from the Religious Right which wants nothing less than freedom and equality for all, so long as it follows conservative Christian guidelines. The article made me think that they were overreacting, using some purple prose, maybe, but nothing really out of the ordinary. But then I went back, read it again, and this time I listened to that file. And this time, I had also just finished listening to Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s short story Elites on Escape Pod.
I suppose that appealing to a mother’s protective instinct is likely nothing new either, especially for an organization so overtly manipulative as Focus on the Family, but still, it bothered me. Aside from the fact that in our post-Columbine nation a grown man (in a dress or not) isn’t very likely to be able to simply walk into a school unchallenged, simply because a man does choose to wear women’s clothing does not make him a sexual predator and it is irresponsible of Focus on the Family to imply that it does. The fact that most transvestites are heterosexual seems to have escaped Dr. Dobson and his organization. The fact that most homosexuals are appalled at the actions of groups like NAMBLA seems to have escaped them as well. In fact a lot seems to have escaped them. Bruce Hausknecht, a judicial analyst for Focus on the Family, had this to say in the article:
“With SB 200, we no longer have two ’sexes’. We enter a brave new world with a myriad of ’sexual orientations.’ This bill, unfortunately, is in keeping with a national effort by ‘transgender’ advocacy organizations to accomplish an open-bathroom policy.”
I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, Bruce, but we already have a myriad of sexual orientations. Aside from heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals, we also have transvestites, hermaphrodites, and transgenders. Of course, the last of these is purely a societal view, and groups like Focus on the Family like to believe that anybody who does not fall strictly into the first has some sort of disease. And then we wonder why people seem to despise Christians.
It is in that light that I wish to pose this question to Focus on the Family (though even if I e-mailed it directly to them I wouldn’t expect and actual answer): just what facilities would you expect a hermaphrodite to use? If a person has genitalia from both sexes, which restroom should they then choose? Should they simply hold it until they got home or explode since they don’t fall into one of two generally useful but not entirely inclusive categories?
A different and better question that needs to be asked is precisely how this “tramples religious freedoms”. It’s a question I’ve asked of some of my more theologically conservative friends, and I’ve yet to come across a reasonable answer. This fearful attitude that the world is only one bit of legislation away from crushing the Church needs to go away. For good. After all, more so than this law, that attitude is unbiblical.