In his great book, Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions
Demonstrating too well this principle in action comes a story that’s written like a story from The Onion rather than a serious news story. And yet here it is, a story where parents are keeping secret the sex (gender) of their child from family, friends, and the public. Consider the note they sent out to friends and family.
We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime (a more progressive place? …).
The parents wish to free their child from the shackles of oppression, including parenting, observing that
What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It’s obnoxious…
Here’s just a side note — yes, parents make a lot of choices for their children. That’s what parents do. We guide and aid the inexperienced youths on a path to mature adulthood (something this couple has decided is a responsibility worth abdicating). But here’s the thing, this couple isn’t raising their child in some sort of ideological neutral environment. What they are doing is making a choice about how they think their children should be raised (surprise, surprise, both parents are from “liberal” homes). And does anyone think they don’t make any choices, even weighty ones for their children? What foods to eat and what toxins to avoid? How to behave, how to not hit others? That it’s not okay to use the couch as a toilet?
What these parents think they are doing is taking the modern, liberal definition of gender as some arbitrary and changeable think, like hair color and carrying it forward. The problem is, your sex is not something you choose or move in and out of (you can have surgery that masks what you are, but change it does not). You’re either a man or a woman. The next thing to realize, which most people intuitively do (or rather, all people — some just forcibly suppress the obvious), is that men and women are different from one another. Genitalia is not the only thing that differentiates a man from a woman. We are different physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.
This is not equivocal with saying that men and women have different value or worth, because that’s not true. This is one area many of my Christian egalitarian friends get hung up on. To them, complimentarians “don’t think women are equal to men.” Point of fact, they don’t think women are the synonymous with men — but that’s another discussion. However, that distinction is wholly lost on the aforementioned parents, that they’ll go to any and all ridiculous extremes to avoid the oppressive expectations of society for men and women.
The parents plead,
Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!
But we cannot be whatever we want to be. Storm is or is not a woman, is or is not a man, is or is not a grapefruit. We can’t change who we are. To the parents, that’s not even a point of consideration, for even if one could not choose one’s sex, there is no teleology, no purpose or order or inherent functions in either of the sexes. They believe people are free to engineer themselves however they fashion or fancy. And, if you read the whole article, the disaster that it the worldview of these parents played out, is already taking an emotional tole on their older children. Because they forcibly reject the way the world actually is, they’re willing to adopt any and all manner of absurdities — and inflict cheerfully all the destruction, chaos, and confusion upon the precious children under their hands. They want to be free of any obligation, to recreate their children as they would have them be, and it’s horrific. It’s unconscionable.
And should we expect any different were Christianity true? See Romans 1.
Hat tip to Don Johnson for the article.
