R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 46

It’s not working, Mr. President: The White House declaration of Transgender Day of Visibility backfires

You can’t make this up. Late last week the White House released a statement from President Biden proclaiming March 31, Easter Sunday, as the 2024 Transgender Day of Visibility. Biden bragged about his support for LGBTQ political goals and declared to the transgender community: “You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.”

An explosion of controversy quickly ensued, and the White House pointed to the fact that the president had also released an (extremely short) affirmation of Easter. When many Americans were shocked and outraged by the declaration of Transgender Day of Visibility—on Easter Sunday, no less—the White House responded that President Biden had recognized the transgender event every year he has been in the White House and that, though Easter moves on the calendar, the transgender celebration is regularly scheduled on the calendar for March. Just a coincidence, the White House insisted. Spokesperson Andrew Bates told ABC News: “As a Christian who celebrates Easter with family, President Biden stands for bringing people together and upholding the dignity and freedoms of every American.” He continued: “Sadly, it’s unsurprising politicians are seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful, and dishonest rhetoric. President Biden will never abuse his faith for political purposes or for profit.”

What Bates was selling is unadulterated nonsense (though he did score a point against former President Trump’s recent Bible promotion). Not even this White House could have missed that the transgender declaration was scheduled to collide with Easter. They don’t care. The Transgender Day of Visibility is more important to their election campaign. As for Biden, he uses his Catholicism as a cloak without acknowledging that he is a living contradiction of many official Catholic teachings—most importantly the Church’s absolute opposition to abortion.

But there is a deeper reality here that Christians must recognize. The White House action was an affront to Christianity and to morality, to be sure. And yet, we should pause for a moment to recognize that, despite best efforts of LGBTQ activists, the White House, and the cultural elites, it’s not working.

Surveys reveal that support for the transgender revolution is not growing, but receding. This is especially true when the question is children and teenagers, but it is extended to all ages. The transgender revolution is losing ground. Medical authorities in Britain, for example, decided to close the infamous Tavistock clinic that had provided some level of trans procedures for teenagers and young people. Country by country, medical authorities and governments are taking a step back from the kind of blank check that the Biden White House was celebrating. While in recent years much of the LGBTQ movement has moved forward without major opposition in the larger culture, LGBTQ authorities express open concern about what appears to be a decline in support for the trans logic.

There are surely many factors behind this recent pattern, but Christians should ponder one important fact with vast worldview significance. Pushing a Transgender Day of Visibility has backfired. It turns out that reality is a hard thing to ignore and that biology has a way of insisting on facts. The more Americans see the reality of the transgender claims, the more they have to decide if they can play the game of delusion and denial. One central lesson of this phenomenon is that a strategy of delusion and denial—even when driven by sexual and gender revolutionaries certain of their inevitable victory—isn’t working.

Or, to put it another way, the more the transgender movement insists on being visible, the more the truth is likely to show itself. Americans tend to be sympathetic to a delusion, but they are not buying into the idea that a transgender “man” is really a man or that a transgender “woman” is really a woman. They may try to play along for a while, but biology trumps ideology and the very real damage done to human beings in the name of the transgender movement is increasingly undeniable. Some of this is due to the “detransitioning” movement’s brave honesty, but the loss of support seems mostly tied to the failure of the transgender ideology to win the battle of the eyes and the battle against reality.

The idea of forcing cultural acceptance and overcoming moral objections by demanding “visibility” is part of the social activism of the LGBTQ revolutionaries. Activists and their ideological friends at intersection of ideology and political theory were certain that making LGBTQ identities more visible in society (on television, in popular culture, in schools, etc.) would lead to an inevitable acceptance of transgender identity claims. It isn’t working. President Biden may declare Transgender Day of Visibility, but he can’t make that visibility work as intended.

To put the matter bluntly, an increasing number of Americans realize that what they are being told isn’t true. You can declare war against anatomy and biology, but it isn’t going to end well. Different forms of cultural and legal coercion may be used to get people to deny what they see with their own eyes, but that is not a long-term strategy for success. The White House can declare this past Sunday (yes, Easter Sunday, insultingly enough) as Transgender Day of Visibility, but they can’t make visibility work for them.

One day soon, all of this—every bit of it—will be visible as the lie that it is. In the meantime, real bodies are being mutilated and real lives are being damaged. We know it’s the truth, and we dare not be complicit in a lie.

This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on April 1, 2024.

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Kamala at the death camp: The vice president visits an abortion facility and makes it a campaign stop

Vice President Kamala Harris went to Minnesota last week in order to make history, the White House claimed. She made history, to be sure. She became the first U.S. president or vice president to visit an operational abortion facility. Harris’s move becomes the latest forward advance of the Culture of Death. Now, a facility that exterminates unborn human babies becomes a background for a campaign event and the foreground for making abortion central to the presidential campaign—and at every political level.

Harris went to the Planned Parenthood center in St. Paul on a highly orchestrated campaign visit that also included the state’s governor, Democrat Tim Walz, and Rep. Betty McCollum, also a Democrat. Press reports tell us that the vice president was greeted at the facility by the chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States, as well as other staff related to the abortion center. Just to make the point clearly, the clinic stated that the vice-presidential visit did not interrupt the center’s services. Evidently, they didn’t even put abortion on hold. That’s so Planned Parenthood—and right in your face.

Harris delivered comments in the facility’s lobby, warning of threats to abortion rights nationwide. “These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous, and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” Harris said. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest.” She concluded: “We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

Well, Kamala Harris is a woman we can trust to worship unreservedly at the altar of abortion. While President Joe Biden is described as holding to some reticence about abortion rights, the reality is that Biden has assigned Harris the campaign responsibility of making abortion the winning issue for Democratic candidates in November. The party is even working to get abortion measures on the ballot in some states just to produce an electoral wave. The charade about Biden’s reticence on abortion is all an act. Biden is now the most pro-abortion president in American history. He wants it to be the winning issue for Democrats this cycle and he personally deputized Harris to run lead. Only the groveling press and party co-conspirators play along with the game.

A closer look at Harris’s comments at the facility is also in order. She dared to invoke traditional moral categories when she stated that opposition to abortion is “just plain old immoral.” Well, look at you, using that old-fashioned moral language. Of course, what is “plain old immoral” is the killing of unborn human beings in the womb. Harris was using the propaganda technique of language reversal, making moral truth stand on its head. Note also that she referred to “an individual” who might seek an abortion before turning to refer to those “individuals” as women once it was convenient to underline her message to women voters. Wow. It’s hard to keep all this language straight when you want to go after the women’s vote and the LGBTQ vote at the same time.

The vice president’s visit to the abortion facility represents a turning point in the campaign strategy and optics of the Democratic Party. Now that Harris, accompanied by Minnesota’s governor and a member of Congress, has made this campaign stop, such events will become standard fare for Democratic candidates. A wall has been breached and now any Democratic candidate who does not make a stop at an abortion facility will be considered out of step by both party activists and abortion advocates. That’s just how campaign strategy works. One day you “make history,” and next thing you know it’s just one more event on the way to Election Day.

Don’t miss what all this means. Kamala Harris did make history by becoming the first president or vice president of the United States to visit an abortion facility and affirm its deadly work. But the scariest thing is that it made few headlines. The New York Times put its report on Harris’s visit on page A16 of the print edition. The abortion industry of death will now just turn to the Democratic Party and ask: “What did you do for us lately?” You should shudder to think of what is yet to come.

Abortion is the willful death of an unborn human being. An abortion clinic is the engine of death turned into an industry of carnage. The clinic proudly stated that it was still “open and seeing patients” as the vice president spoke in the lobby. There was absolutely no acknowledgement of a baby at all. So far as the abortion logic goes, the baby is not a meaningful moral consideration. Get the abortion and get on with it.

Vice President Harris surely knows that her political future is tied to the re-election of President Biden. She also knows, even better than the rest of us, her chances of becoming president if Biden is re-elected. She intended to send a signal with her attention-getting visit to the abortion facility and her eager advocacy for abortion rights. She did send a signal. She and her party are dead-set on making abortion central to American culture. That’s why Kamala went to the death camp.

This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on March 20, 2024.

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