Dear Friends,
Welcome to The Church’s One Foundation. I trust you and your loved ones are having a splendid summer! If it’s as hot and sultry where you are as it is here in Indiana, don’t forget to keep hydrated!
My wife and I will be vacationing for several days over the next few weeks, and since today’s podcast thematically wraps up the previous half-dozen or so I’ve sent you, I’m going to dust off my one-person play from 40 years ago on John Wesley, A Heart Strangely Warmed, and send you select excerpts from the show on my next fortnightly podcast, which will be Wednesday, August 21. It’s vintage Wesley, and I’m praying that you, along with our many Methodist listeners, will enjoy this dramatic reading.
We’re now in 10 countries with a growing subscription base, so thanks for sharing! Keep me in your prayers. You remain in mine.
Blessing Upon Blessing!
D. Paul
Leave The Children Alone
In the middle of a volatile few weeks, from the assassination attempt on Donald Trump to President Biden stepping aside to the drag-queen parody of “The Last Supper” at the Paris Olympics, a controversial bill has been signed into law in California.
On Monday, July 15 (two days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump), the deceptively titled “SAFETY Act,” AB 1955, was signed into law by California governor Gavin Newsom, prohibiting schools districts from having to disclose “…any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent.” Not unlike the Newspeak of “gender-affirming care,” a euphemistic, benign spin has been put on this insidious piece of legislation, but, in truth, its implementation is disastrous for families, breaking the sacred bond of trust between parents and their children.
There is no wiggle room here, friends. The “SAFETY Act” has codified the policy—CA public schools cannot inform the parents of their child’s newly adopted gender identity, the only exception being if the child volunteers his or her approval. Adding insult to injury, the SAFETY Act Assembly Bill 1955 curtails the parents’ rights movements to challenge local school boards and severely limits their legal options, the law prohibiting any school employee from being punished who “supported a pupil” in his or her transition, granting immunity for a principal, counselor, or teacher who may well have put an innocent, questioning, and confused child on “…a path toward risky and irreversible hormones and surgeries.” (California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets from Parents, by Abagail Shrier, July 21, “The Truth Fairy” at: abigailshrier@substack.com).
In a parent’s worst Kafkaesque nightmare, this new policy is turning progressive California public schools into gender-promoting orphanages, the administration and staff abrogating the rights of the parents and fostering an intimate, private relationship with their children—intolerable under any other circumstances—and by virtue of its imbalanced dynamic, predatory in nature, if not pederastic. Hyperbolic, you say? Ms. Shrier, a prophetic and frequently censored voice on this subject since the publication of her book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, minces no words: The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out. Child predators follow a common playbook: target the victim, gain their trust, fill a need, and, crucially, isolate the child from her parents. For several years, this has also been standard California state protocol with regard to schoolchildren questioning their gender identities. On Monday [July 15], this scheme became law. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, friends, but such predatory behavior is not limited to the Catholic Church or the Boy Scouts. In an obscene age where “anything goes,” it is everywhere.
A complicit and somnolent Church would do well to heed Abigail Shirer’s wise warnings. Even Elon Musk, hardly some unhinged Christian zealot (though some might say unhinged), has judged the SAFETY Act, AB 1955, as the “final straw” for California families, tweeting, “The goal [of] this diabolical law is to break the parent-child relationship and put the state in charge of your children,” announcing he will shortly move his influential tech companies, Space X and X, out of California. Elon Musk is right: the State has become your child’s surrogate parent, which, as Shrier points out, “…includes having school-aged children participate in sexualized discussions and make identity declarations with school faculty,” even as the parents are left in the dark. God forbid that the tired cliche, “As California goes so goes the nation,” should become reality.
Throughout this demonic “takeover” of our children’s view on gender ideology with its hundred-and-one-flavors, the “caring,” “tolerant,” “love is love” Church has been hoodwinked by the sweet-sounding jargon of the gender activists, actually believing that a Holy God would be supportive of this gender-affirming care that has irreversibly ruined the lives of thousands of our precious children, far more destructive than the gender ideologues’ caricature of the uncaring, abusive parent. There is no administrator, teacher, or counselor who can care for a child more than his or her loving parent. It might make for a good movie-of-the-week—the zealous father or mother who terrorizes their daughter who now identifies as a boy and is subsequently kicked out of the house—but serious studies are now showing that this is by far the exception rather than the rule. For those of us who have been in traditional, Bible believing churches all our lives, such un-Christ like behavior is unrecognizable of any true Christian we’ve ever known. Without question, there are such cases—abuse perpetuated by so-called Christians and non-Christians alike—and they are inexcusable, but they ought not be exploited as evil “poster parents,” providing the agenda-driven, money-making, gender-affirming industry a convenient cause célèbre for indoctrinating our children’s minds and mutilating their young bodies.
Despite the staggering influence of lobbyists, NGOs, and the private funders behind this gender madness, there is growing evidence, as highlighted in Ms. Shrier’s article, that the tide of opinion is shifting: “England, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have, in recent years, warned the public of the risks of pediatric gender medicine, banned the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in children, or restricted their use to research settings.” May the progressive Church be so awakened, even as Shrier tells us that “In the past few years, moderates across the American political spectrum have awakened to the pernicious effects of gender ideology on children.” She references the definitive, “…Cass Review, published this year by one of England’s premier physicians, {which] noted the serious risks and specious benefits of pediatric gender transition. My own investigation,” Shrier adds, “published four years earlier, reached the same conclusions. The Cass Review also acknowledged that social transition is an active intervention that puts many children on an inexorable path to medical transition.” Rather than taking this “inexorable path” to transition, our emphasis should be on helping our children go through the stress of puberty, and after their hormones and emotions have settled down, allow them then, as young adults, in consultation with their families, therapists, doctors, priests, and pastors, to have a decisive word in whom they perceive as their “authentic selves.”
No sixteen year old, let alone a twelve-year-old child, should be at liberty to hide their “identity” from their parents and choose self-mutilation. Shame on those therapists and physicians who have facilitated such child abuse. There are reasons that England’s largest gender-affirming-care clinic, The Gender Identity Development Service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation in London, shut down its barbarous operations. And there are multiple reasons why young adults are detransitioning and suing hospitals and doctors that encouraged and pressured them into life-altering drugs and surgeries, particularly when the risks of waiting till they were eighteen or beyond were less than the risks of acting precipitously at such a young age.
The words of Christ keep coming back to me since the trans craze has become a pandemic among our children, particularly among our precious daughters: “Leave the children alone, and do not forbid them from coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14, Amplified Bible). Abagail Shrier’s condemnatory words are mild, I believe, compared to what might be the judgement of Christ: “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble” (Luke 17:2 NIV).
Knowing we serve a Jesus who “loves the little children,” if you are the parent of a child who has been identified of suffering extreme gender dysphoria, love that child, listen to that child, offer wise advice to that child, surround that child with the best relational, pastoral, medical, and counseling advice available, and surround that child with your prayers. And if necessary, remove your child from a hostile school district and consider homeschooling or a religious school.
Know this, my brothers and sisters in Christ: Your prayers will not go unanswered. Trust the promise found in Proverbs 22:6, ERV:
”Train up a child in the way he should go, and even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Amen
“The Church’s One Foundation Is JESUS CHRIST HER LORD!”
Podcast #32: "Leave The Children Alone"