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Five Anonymous Moms #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

In Their Own Words: Parents of Kids Who Think They Are Trans Speak Out

Parents like us must remain anonymous to maintain our children’s privacy, and because we face legal repercussions if our names are revealed. Parents who do not support their child’s gender identity risk being reported to Child Protective Services and losing custody of their children.

When a child says he is transgender, we are expected nowadays to accept and celebrate this announcement.
But there are many parents who are not celebrating. They are suffering in silence. They know their children were not born in the wrong bodies and that hormones and surgeries are not the answers to their discomfort and confusion.
Their stories are heartbreaking. Here they are, in their own words.
~ ~ ~
I was shocked when my thirteen-year-old daughter told me she was really my transgender son. She had no masculine interests and hated all sports. But as a smart, quirky teen on the autism spectrum, she had a long history of not fitting in with girls.
Where did she get the idea she was transgender? From a school presentation—at a school where over 5 percent of the student body called themselves trans or nonbinary, and where several students were already on hormones, and one had a mastectomy at the age of sixteen. In my daughter’s world—in real life and online—transgender identities are common, and hormones and surgeries are no big deal.
I took her to a gender clinician seeking expert guidance. Instead, he accepted her new identity and told me I must refer to my daughter with masculine pronouns, call her by a masculine name, and buy her a binder to flatten her breasts. He recommended no therapy, and there was no consideration of the social factors that obviously affected her thinking. I was directed to put her on puberty blocking drugs. I was falsely assured that these drugs were well-studied, and that they were a perfectly safe way for her to “explore gender.” I was told that if I did not comply, she would be at higher risk of suicide.
I have nowhere to go for proper help. Therapists are actively trained and socially pressured not to question these increasingly common identities. In Washington, DC, and many states with so-called conversion therapy bans, questioning a child’s belief that she is of the opposite sex is against the law.
I have been living this nightmare for over four years. And despite my best efforts, my daughter plans to medically transition when she turns eighteen later this year.
Parents like me must remain anonymous to maintain our children’s privacy, and because we face legal repercussions if our names are revealed. Parents who do not support their child’s gender identity risk being reported to Child Protective Services and losing custody of their children. In New Jersey, the Department of Education officially encourages schools to report such parents.
Meanwhile, the media glamorize and celebrate trans-identified children while ignoring stories like mine. I have written to well over 100 journalists, begging them to write about what is happening to kids. I wrote to my representative and senators, but have been ignored by their staff. My online posts about my daughter’s story have been deleted and I have been permanently banned in an online forum. As a lifelong Democrat, I am outraged by my former party and find it ironic that only conservative news outlets have reported my story without bias or censorship.
We parents are ignored and vilified, while our children are suffering in the name of inclusivity and acceptance. I hope that some open-minded Democratic lawmakers will wake up to the fact that they are complicit in harming vulnerable kids. I hope that they ask themselves this question: Why are physicians medicalizing children in the name of an unproven, malleable gender identity? And why are lawmakers enshrining “gender identity” into state and federal laws?
~ ~ ~
My daughter, at age fourteen, spontaneously decided that she is actually a male. After suffering multiple traumatic events in her life and spending a large amount of time on the internet, she announced that she was “trans.” Her personality changed almost overnight, and she went from being a sweet, loving girl to a foul-mouthed, hateful “pansexual male.” At first, I thought she was just going through a phase. But the more I tried to reason with her, the more she dug her heels in. Around this time, she was diagnosed with ADHD, depression, and anxiety. But mental health professionals seemed mainly interested in helping her process her new identity as a male and convincing me to accept the notion that my daughter is actually my son.
At age sixteen, my daughter ran away and reported to the Department of Child Services that she felt unsafe living with me because I refused to refer to her using male pronouns or her chosen male name. Although the Department investigated and found she was well cared for, they forced me to meet with a trans-identified person to “educate” me on these issues. Soon after, without my knowledge, a pediatric endocrinologist taught my daughter—a minor—to inject herself with testosterone. My daughter then ran away to Oregon where state law allowed her—at the age of seventeen, without my knowledge or consent—to change her name and legal gender in court, and to undergo a double mastectomy and a radical hysterectomy.
My once beautiful daughter is now nineteen years old, homeless, bearded, in extreme poverty, sterilized, not receiving mental health services, extremely mentally ill, and planning a radial forearm phalloplasty (a surgical procedure that removes part of her arm to construct a fake penis).
The level of heartbreak and rage I am experiencing, as a mother, is indescribable. Why does Oregon law allow children to make life-altering medical decisions? As a society, we are rightly outraged about “female circumcision.” Why are doctors, who took an oath to first do no harm, allowed to sterilize and surgically mutilate mentally ill, delusional children?
~ ~ ~
In August of 2017, our seventh grade daughter came home from sleepaway camp believing she was a boy. She had a new vocabulary and a strong desire to change her name and pronouns. We never anticipated that we needed to ask the camp if she was going to be in a cabin with girls who were socially transitioning to live as boys.
We suspect that our daughter assumed that since my wife and I are lesbians, and liberal in our politics, we would support this new identity. We may be lesbians, but we are not confused about biology. She tried to convince us with a very scripted explanation that she had always “felt” like a boy. But we had never once seen or heard from her any evidence of this “feeling.” We listened to her, gave her the space to talk about her feelings, and tried hard not to convey to her that we were utterly horrified by this revelation.
As we began to try to find information to make sense of this, we found evidence of a social contagion all over the internet. YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit supplied a how-to guide and handbook on transitioning, complete with trans stars like Jazz Jennings and Riley J. Dennis, many with thousands of followers.
We are in no way out of the woods. Some parents dealing with this issue view us as lucky because she is so young, giving us and her more time to work through her discomfort. Maybe we will be, but we are facing this ever-growing storm of a social contagion without any help from the mainstream media or the negligent FDA, not to mention the pathetic capitulation of our physicians and mental health professionals.
~ ~ ~
My daughter spent her childhood happily engaging in what one would call typical, girly activities, with no gender-stereotyping encouragement from us at all. Everything changed after she went to college.
The environment of her new city and university celebrated transgender identities. She began speaking to us by phone of being “non-binary,” which I naïvely took to mean something like bisexual. Anxiety and depression then overwhelmed her. She dropped out and moved back to our home town, where she resumed psychiatric care for preexisting mental-health conditions.
Her appearance, always feminine, changed dramatically. A shaved head, boys’ clothes, and obvious unhappiness were now her camouflage from the world. She went from non-binary to claiming that she was really a boy.
She parroted online advice: “I always knew something was wrong but didn’t have words for it until I started watching videos on Tumblr and YouTube. When I was little, I was afraid to tell you that I didn’t feel right.”
This narrative matched nothing about her past—but I was still naïve. Because her psychiatrist did not consider her to be transgender, I assumed she would be unable to get a referral for the testosterone she was determined to start.
I was wrong. In only one visit, and with just a little bit of blood work, Planned Parenthood will cheerfully enable young women and men to pursue their “authentic” selves through cross-sex hormones. All that’s needed is a few bucks and signing a form that the risks have been disclosed and understood.
That is the route my daughter took at the tender age of twenty, bypassing her psychiatrist altogether.
My husband wrote to Planned Parenthood, explaining her mental-health history and providing her doctor’s name and telephone number. Planned Parenthood’s lawyer wrote back curtly that they presume anyone over eighteen is capable of giving informed consent.
No matter what anyone thinks of Planned Parenthood’s other services, the fact that they will instantly prescribe powerful hormones with many unknown long-term effects—especially to people with underlying mental-health issues—should shock one’s conscience. People need to know that this is Planned Parenthood’s new line of business.
~ ~ ~
At the age of seventeen, after immersion on Tumblr and after two of her oldest and closest friends in high school declared themselves transgender, our daughter told us that she is “really a guy.” Her therapist diagnosed her as high-functioning on the autism spectrum. The therapist was also quite clear that we would “lose all control over the medicalization” once our daughter turned eighteen.
As a federal employee, I could not find health insurance that does not cover hormones for self-declared gender dysphoria.
My daughter is now twenty, has been on testosterone for a year, and has made an appointment for a consult about a double mastectomy—all this, even though she can’t legally buy an alcoholic drink. I can’t get any answers from doctors in response to my questions and concerns about the risks of these “treatments.” I get no answers from mental health professionals about what makes this treatment appropriate . . . or what makes my daughter different from those young women who are “no longer trans” and have de-transitioned, sometimes after being on hormones for years. Having to watch these adults enable my daughter to do this with no medical science to back it up is a scenario that I never dreamed any parent would have to face, at least not in the United States. But this is our reality now—a reality that the mainstream media won’t touch.

Doug Mainwaring #homophobia thepublicdiscourse.com

I'm Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage

While religion and tradition have led many to their positions on same-sex marriage, it’s also possible to oppose same-sex marriage based on reason and experience.

“I know in my heart that man is good, that what is right will always eventually triumph, and there is purpose and worth to each and every life.” These words, spoken by Ronald Reagan in 1991, are framed on the wall above my desk. As a gay man, I’ve adopted them as my own, as I’ve entered the national discussion on same-sex marriage.

I wholeheartedly support civil unions for gay and lesbian couples, but I am opposed to same-sex marriage. Because activists have made marriage, rather than civil unions, their goal, I am viewed by many as a self-loathing, traitorous gay. So be it. I prefer to think of myself as a reasoning, intellectually honest human being.

The notion of same-sex marriage is implausible, yet political correctness has made stating the obvious a risky business. Genderless marriage is not marriage at all. It is something else entirely.

Opposition to same-sex marriage is characterized in the media, at best, as clinging to “old-fashioned” religious beliefs and traditions, and at worst, as homophobia and hatred.

I’ve always been careful to avoid using religion or appeals to tradition as I’ve approached this topic. And with good reason: Neither religion nor tradition has played a significant role in forming my stance. But reason and experience certainly have.

Learning from Experience

As a young man, I wasn’t strongly inclined toward marriage or fatherhood, because I knew only homosexual desire.

I first recognized my strong yearning for men at age eight, when my parents took me to see The Sound of Music. While others marveled at the splendor of the Swiss Alps displayed on the huge Cinerama screen, I marveled at the uniformed, blond-haired Rolfe, who was seventeen going on eighteen. That proclivity, once awakened, never faded.

During college and throughout my twenties, I had many close friends who were handsome, athletic, and intelligent, with terrific personalities. I longed to have an intimate relationship with any and all of them. However, I enjoyed something far greater, something which surpassed carnality in every way: philia (the love between true friends)—a love unappreciated by so many because eros is promoted in its stead.

I wouldn’t have traded the quality of my relationships with any of these guys for an opportunity to engage in sex. No regrets. In fact, I always felt like the luckiest man on the planet. Denial didn't diminish or impoverish my life. It made my life experience richer.

Philia love between men is far better, far stronger, and far more fulfilling than erotic love can ever be. But society now promotes the lowest form of love between men while sabotaging the higher forms. Gay culture continues to promote the sexualization of all (viewing one’s self and other males primarily as sexual beings), while proving itself nearly bankrupt when it comes to fostering any other aspect of male/male relationships.

When all my friends began to marry, I began to seriously consider marriage for the first time. The motive of avoiding social isolation may not have been the best, but it was the catalyst that changed the trajectory of my life. Even though I had to repress certain sexual desires, I found marriage to be extremely rewarding.

My future bride and I first met while singing in a youth choir. By the time I popped the question, we had become the very best of friends. “Soul mates” is the term we used to describe each other.

After a couple of years of diligently trying to conceive, doctors informed us we were infertile, so we sought to adopt. That became a long, arduous, heartbreaking process. We ultimately gave up. I had mixed emotions—disappointment tempered by relief.

Out of the blue, a couple of years after we resigned ourselves to childlessness, we were given the opportunity to adopt.

A great shock came the day after we brought our son home from the adoption agency. While driving home for lunch, I was suddenly overcome with such emotion that I had to pull the car off to the side of the road. Never in my life had I experienced such pure, distilled joy and sense of purpose. I kept repeating, “I’m a dad,” over and over again. Nothing else mattered. I knew exactly where I fit in within this huge universe. When we brought home his brother nearly two years later, I was prepared: I could not wait to take him up in my arms and declare our kinship and my unconditional love and irrevocable responsibility for him.

Neither religion nor tradition turned me into a dedicated father. It was something wonderful from within—a great strength that has only grown with time. A complete surprise of the human spirit. In this way and many others, marriage—my bond with the mother of my children—has made me a much better person, a person I had no idea I had the capacity to become.

Intellectual Honesty and Surprise Conclusions

Unfortunately, a few years later my marriage ended—a pain known too easily by too many. At this point, the divorce allowed me to explore my homosexuality for the first time in my life.

At first, I felt liberated. I dated some great guys, and was in a couple of long-term relationships. Over several years, intellectual honesty led me to some unexpected conclusions: (1) Creating a family with another man is not completely equal to creating a family with a woman, and (2) denying children parents of both genders at home is an objective evil. Kids need and yearn for both.

It took some doing, but after ten years of divorce, we began to pull our family back together. We have been under one roof for over two years now. Our kids are happier and better off in so many ways. My ex-wife, our kids, and I recently celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas together and agreed these were the best holidays ever.

Because of my predilections, we deny our own sexual impulses. Has this led to depressing, claustrophobic repression? No. We enjoy each other’s company immensely. It has actually led to psychological health and a flourishing of our family. Did we do this for the sake of tradition? For the sake of religion? No. We did it because reason led us to resist selfish impulses and to seek the best for our children.

And wonderfully, she and I continue to regard each other as “soul mates” now, more than ever.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve found our decision to rebuild our family ratified time after time. One day as I turned to climb the stairs I saw my sixteen-year-old son walk past his mom as she sat reading in the living room. As he did, he paused and stooped down to kiss her and give her a hug, and then continued on. With two dads in the house, this little moment of warmth and tenderness would never have occurred. My varsity-track-and-football-playing son and I can give each other a bear hug or a pat on the back, but the kiss thing is never going to happen. To be fully formed, children need to be free to generously receive from and express affection to parents of both genders. Genderless marriages deny this fullness.

There are perhaps a hundred different things, small and large, that are negotiated between parents and kids every week. Moms and dads interact differently with their children. To give kids two moms or two dads is to withhold from them someone whom they desperately need and deserve in order to be whole and happy. It is to permanently etch “deprivation” on their hearts.

Rich Versus Diminished Lives

Sexuality is fluid for many, and much more complex than many want to acknowledge. Gay and straight activists alike pretend this isn’t true in order to fortify their positions. If they fail to maintain that mirage, fundraising for their organizations might dry up, as would the requests for television and radio interviews. Yet the “B” in the middle of “LGBT” acknowledges an important reality concerning our human sexuality.

Here’s a very sad fact of life that never gets portrayed on Glee or Modern Family: I find that men I know who have left their wives as they’ve come out of the closet often lead diminished, and in some cases nearly bankrupt, lives—socially, familially, emotionally, and intellectually. They adjust their entire view of the world and their role within it in order to accommodate what has become the dominant aspect of their lives: their homosexuality. In doing so, they trade rich lives for one-dimensional lives. Yet this is what our post-modern world has taught us to do. I went along with it for a long while, but slowly turned back when I witnessed my life shrinking and not growing.

What Now?

In our day, prejudice against gays is just a very faint shadow of what it once was. But the abolition of prejudice against gays does not necessarily mean that same-sex marriage is inevitable or optimal. There are other avenues available, none of which demands immediate, sweeping, transformational legislation or court judgments.

We are in the middle of a fierce battle that is no longer about rights. It is about a single word, “marriage.”

Two men or two women together is, in truth, nothing like a man and a woman creating a life and a family together. Same-sex relationships are certainly very legitimate, rewarding pursuits, leading to happiness for many, but they are wholly different in experience and nature.

Gay and lesbian activists, and more importantly, the progressives urging them on, seek to redefine marriage in order to achieve an ideological agenda that ultimately seeks to undefine families as nothing more than one of an array of equally desirable “social units,” and thus open the door to the increase of government’s role in our lives.

And while same-sex marriage proponents suggest that the government should perhaps just stay out of their private lives, the fact is, now that children are being engineered for gay and lesbian couples, a process that involves multiple other adults who have potential legal custody claims on these children, the potential for government’s involvement in these same-sex marriage households is staggering.

Solomon only had to split the baby in two. In the future, judges may have to decide how to split children into three, four, or five equal pieces. In Florida, a judge recently ordered that the birth certificate of a child must show a total of three parents—a lesbian couple and a gay man (the sperm-providing hairdresser of one of the lesbian moms). Expect much more of this to come.

Statists see great value in slowly chipping away at the bedrock of American culture: faith and family life. The more that traditional families are weakened in our daily experience by our laws, the more that government is able to freely insert itself into our lives in an authoritarian way. And it will.

Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, recently said, “I think you can have social stability without many intact families, but it’s going to be really expensive and it's going to look very ‘Huxley-Brave New World-ish.’ So [the intact family is] not only the optimal scenario … but it’s the cheapest. How often in life do you get the best and the cheapest in the same package?”

Marriage is not an elastic term. It is immutable. It offers the very best for children and society. We should not adulterate nor mutilate its definition, thereby denying its riches to current and future generations.

Chad Greene #transphobia thepublicdiscourse.com

In a recent discussion on Twitter, Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning), pardoned by President Obama after being convicted of espionage, argued that transgender “treatment” is necessary for the health of trans individuals, “because,” Chelsea stated, “not getting medical attention for trans people is fatal.”

Manning’s argument is anything but an isolated one. When seventeen-year-old Leelah Alcorn committed suicide in 2014, LGBT activists immediately jumped to blame his parents and society at large for causing the tragedy. Zack Ford of ThinkProgress wrote:

Leelah Alcorn’s death was a preventable tragedy. Here was a 17-year-old girl with full access to all of the information available in the 21st century about transgender identities, including many safe and effective ways to transition. But as she wrote in her own suicide note before jumping in front of a tractor trailer this week, there was no hope attached to those possibilities?—?no trust that it could, in fact, get better. She had given up on crying for help.

This, despite the young man’s parents support of his gender identity. He killed himself because his parents asked him to wait until he was eighteen to begin transitioning. They wouldn’t agree to pay for it earlier.

The argument can be summarized as follows. Without medical treatment (expensive surgery and lifelong hormone therapy), social acceptance, correct pronoun use, and open bathroom access, trans people will never be comfortable in their bodies or in society. Consequently, they are at a high risk for suicide, and it’s an injustice not to make these “treatments” available; the crime of killing trans people can even be laid at the feet of those who do not take these steps.

This argument, made by Manning, Ford, and so many others, is supposed to halt any criticism—or even querying—of gender theory, but it raises more questions than it answers.

The various liberal resources are shockingly equivocal as to what gender identity actually is. Gender identity is an “innermost knowing,” an issue of hormone imbalance, the result of a male brain in a female body, or a ‘transsexual’ brain, maybe an inherited characteristic, and many other possibilities, depending on whom you ask. According to some, gender is an inborn and permanent state; for others, a fluid awareness that might change by the day. How is it possible that a condition so insusceptible of consistent definition could be universally declared fatal without medical treatment?

Further, if transgenderism requires medical treatment, how can it form the basis of anyone’s identity? Trans people and their allies have, of course, insisted with great indignation that their condition is not an illness, but it is hard to see how this conclusion is to be avoided, if it’s insisted that it must be treated or else will be fatal.

Illnesses that require treatment do not constitute anyone’s identity. Being HIV-positive requires medical treatment. I do not identify as HIV-positive as though it made me an entirely new kind of person. It is a condition I need to treat in order to live and be healthy. How is being trans any different?

Aiming at Sex-Gender Alignment

The goal of most transgender individuals is to live as the opposite sex. If this were not true, there would be no concern about “access to health care” or medical necessity. If one could simply enjoy whatever gender identity felt the most appropriate at any given time, medical intervention would be merely cosmetic. So if we agree that people who identify as transgender desire to be the opposite sex to the best of their ability—arguing that internally they already are—then we must accept that the ideal state for all individuals is cisgender, where gender and sex align naturally.

In my experience, this assertion is viewed as hateful and intolerant. To suggest that people who identify as transgender desire to be “like everyone else,” “normal,” or—dare I say—“healthy” by aligning their gender and sex is to suggest a transgender identity is itself a state of error. But again, this seems to be what is presupposed by the argument that medical intervention is so vital that, without it, a person may commit suicide.

In order to achieve a healthy and mentally stable state, a trans person must have their gender and sex as closely aligned as possible. Why, though, does this require the physical sex to change in order to align to the perceived gender? Why shouldn’t the perceived gender be what changes?

It seems far more reasonable—and medically ethical and sound—to achieve this homeostasis by changing gender to match to the already established sex. A woman taking testosterone must continue taking testosterone, or else her desired masculine secondary sex characteristics will fade away (though if she has removed her ovaries, her body will not be able to produce estrogen and bring her female sex characteristics back). As many trans men prefer to keep their reproductive organs and become pregnant, this risk is even higher. The body’s aggressive and persistent attempt to return to a state, despite medical interventions to override that state, indicates that the state is “natural.” The body is being medically forced to adapt to conditions it is unsuited to experience.

If the ideal state is one of homeostasis, in which gender and sex are the same, then why would trans people dedicate their entire lives to forcing their bodies to adapt to conditions they cannot maintain on their own? It seems far more reasonable to recognize that the physical sex at birth is the standard by which internal perception should be aligned. Logically, wouldn’t a transgender person who suffers due to misalignment of gender and sex be equally as happy aligning his gender to his sex if the end result is that gender and sex are the same? Why is the only acceptable option to force, through dramatic physical deformity, the body to adapt to the mind instead?

We Need a Real Cure

Some trans advocates would presumably reply that sex should change rather than gender because sex can change, whereas attempts to change one’s gender usually end badly, but this response is unnecessarily pessimistic.

I have personally experienced gender dysphoria, and I explored transition in my early twenties. I am aware of the emotional struggle, and I am sympathetic to the sense of frustration and hopelessness. But I am also aware of the empowering realization that I alone control how I perceive the world. Even if I would prefer to be female, I understand that my body is male, and therefore the most effective and healthiest plan of action is to align my sense of gender to that unchangeable state. I have largely been successful, as I feel fully integrated today and am not only comfortable in my male body but find myself enjoying the pursuit of masculine physical progress.

An uncomfortable truth is that many surveys, including a 2011 Swedish study, indicate that suicide rates remain high after sex-reassignment surgery (the Swedish study reports that people who have had sex-reassignment surgery are 19 times more likely to die by suicide than is the general population); and the National Center for Transgender Equality reported in 2015 that 40% of people who identify as transgender have attempted suicide. The LGBT community actively fights such studies and suppresses the voices of people who, like myself, have chosen natural alignment or who regret transitioning. The medical community is currently uninterested in recognizing the inherent dangers and long-term impact of transition therapy and is equally unwilling to pursue study that may result in finding a cure or a resolution to the underlying issue. To suggest this is a medical issue needing to be cured is to be accused of proposing genocide.

But medical issues do need to be cured. If gender dysphoria is indeed naturally fatal without treatment, the only ethical solution is to find a cure that exposes the body to the least amount of risk. Obviously, this would be to correct the biological problem and/or address the psychological distress behind the dysphoria itself.

The LGBT movement has built a civilization around the validation of being “who you are” despite all efforts of judgment or persecution. Trans individuals often tell me they are now their “true gender.” Advocates like Zack Ford and others routinely demand that extreme social bigotry prevents the trans individual from living a full and happy life. But in the center of this storm of indignation and boasting of perseverance is the steady and quiet realization that these people are extremely insecure.

We cannot forget the real tragedy in all of this. People suffering from genuine mental anguish are being promised that with enough surgery, camouflage, social acceptance, legal protection, educational campaigns, and so on, they will finally feel whole as a person. Worse, they are told that the only reason they continue to suffer is due to the intolerance and hatred of those around them. The current method of addressing this concern is only making matters worse. Treatment needs to address the core problem.

Gerard T. Mundy #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

Fundie explains philosophical basis for "transgenderism"

Beyond the hubris, the case is one of classic philosophical illogic. The “first principle” that the transgenderist needs simply is not there, for a woman is not and cannot be a man. So in order to prove the faulty first principle, the transgenderist tries to “create” it, to make it appear to be true. The gender ideologue removes all evidence that conflicts with the transgender principle, surgically mutilating her body and pumping it full of testosterone—for her body, being a woman’s body, is not producing “enough” of that hormone naturally. Even then, the principle’s falsity remains all too evident, so the transgenderist must force others to agree that a woman is a man. For gender ideology, the truth is a great obstacle that must be attacked and destroyed.

Patrick Lee and Robert P. George #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

This is "scientific" proof that the soul exists.
It's very complicated, I don't understand what they think they're saying.
It looks like circular reasoning and presuppositionalism well blended together.

They start with dark ages philosophy, note that this philosophy has no place for modern science
thus proving modern science supports dark ages philosophy. Or something.
The article is too long to post, go to the link for the full explanation.

Here are some examples. The full article is more complete but not any more coherent.

Nor has neuroscience helped “all but kill off” the concept of a soul. It could do so only if it showed how thought could be reduced to neuro-processes. But many have pointed out the insuperable difficulties for such a reduction. Any argument advanced to support such a feat would logically undermine itself. For the point of the reduction would be to show that one’s thoughts are fully explained by the interactions of electrochemical processes operating according to physical, not necessarily logical, laws. But if one’s thought—including the reductionist’s argument itself—rests on such non-rational causes, it is undermined, since beliefs that are determined by non-rational causes, rather than reasons, are thereby made suspect. If my thoughts are merely the result of the electrochemical processes in my brain, then they are non-rational.

The proposed reduction of thought to neurochemical processes could succeed, however, only if the actions of the neural components, operating according to physical laws, determine the reasoning processes—that is, determine which conclusions one draws in an argument. On a reductive view of mental events, the premises (or the acts of accepting the premises) have the causal powers they do only in virtue of their physical properties, and so the logical laws—the relations among contents of thought just as such—will be utterly irrelevant. Thus, if thoughts are just neuro-processes, governed by physical laws, then the laws of logic are dispensable, and the physical antecedents of a thought (such as a conclusion) determine it regardless of the contents of those antecedents. But this renders the argument by which one defends the attempted reduction unworthy of acceptance. Thus, thought cannot be adequately explained by neuroscience alone.

Thus, some properties and causal powers of organisms belong to them as wholes rather than merely resulting from the sum of the properties and causal powers of their components, and so organisms are substantial entities rather than mere aggregates. But as complex substances, each organism must have a principle of unity making its components a single whole. This principle cannot itself be a concrete component; the resulting unity would not be a single substantial entity composed of parts, but one entity acting on others—an accidental whole, a mere aggregate. Nor can the source of unity be merely a relation accruing to those components, which remain what they are but acquire ordered relations to others. What is required is a factor that unifies the materials in order to make them one being, one substance, and makes the parts be what they are because of their place within that whole. It must be a principle of organization that is logically prior to and not merely the result of the causal properties of the parts. Such a principle is precisely what the Aristotelian tradition called a “substantial form.” In a living being, such a form is a soul.

One can of course rightly affirm many things without affirming the existence of a soul, but some of these affirmations cannot be made sense of without affirming a soul. One can agree that human beings are both animals and persons without first appealing to the notion of the soul—and one could even be derisive of that concept at the same time. But one can give no intelligible account of those affirmations of our nature as personal animals without the concept of a soul—as that term has traditionally been used and understood.

Moreover, while organisms are irreducible to the laws and properties of the chemicals and particles composing them, likewise the human person (as Sir Roger rightly suggests) is irreducible to the laws and properties of organisms. Human thoughts and choices cannot be fully explained by biological laws and properties: the dimensions of logic and morality are distinct and irreducible types of reality.

Glenn Stanton #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

This is an article about why lesbians get pregnant at a higher rate than straight women.
Author seems to think lesbians don't exist.

Second, do these identities we call “gay” and “lesbian” actually exist in the way we assume they do? They certainly exist as political or social identities. But in functional reality, that seems less clear.

Daniel Moody #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

This seem a bit disjointed because it's not the whole article. For the full undenieable proof that contraception causes transgender, follow the link.

John is snuggled up on his sofa watching television. In front of him he can see moving pictures accompanied by matching sound. The presence of the pictures and sound explains why the TV is made of the materials it is, why it is the size it is, why there is a volume button, and so on. Everything about the TV makes sense. Now, let us suppose John places a layer of insulating material between plug and socket. With the flow of electricity thwarted, no pictures can be seen and no sound can be heard.

If John curls up on his sofa again and regards this picture-less version of watching TV to be valid, then we can confront him with some questions: why is the TV constructed from those materials rather than, say, sugar? why is the TV that size rather than the size of a sugar cube? and why is there a volume button?

Will John be able to supply credible answers to our questions? No. Having accepted that the flow of electricity is irrelevant to the television’s nature, he will be powerless to defend the TV’s substance, size, and so on. In short, absent the flow of electricity, nothing about the TV makes sense. John may as well snuggle up in front of a cushion from the sofa.

To transfer the analogy to contraception, we first need to recognize that the human body points in two directions. Firstly, at the level of the individual, each of us as male or female points toward another sex. (That is: independent of what we are thinking or doing, the body itself is being heterosexual.)

But what happens when a layer of insulating material is placed between John and his wife, Joan? Well, if John regards this baby-less version of sexual union to be valid, then we have a couple of questions for him. Why does his wife need to be female? And why does he need to be male? Through a combination of time and the sheer weight of logic, John’s understanding of himself starts to disintegrate. If he thinks his body has nothing to do with the future, he will eventually need to accept that it has nothing to do with the other sex either.
This acceptance comes at an extortionate price. If John believes that his own sex is irrelevant to the sexual act he is performing, then he must embrace a second belief: namely, that his sex is irrelevant in all contexts. If a thing is deemed meaningless within the very context that defines its purpose, then that thing cannot be said to have any purpose at all. We are made of sex, so if the maleness of John has no meaning, then John has no meaning. This is the only logical conclusion available to him. Absent the flow of life, nothing about the body makes sense.

Upon losing sight of the fact that our embodiedness is inextricably tied both to relational identity and generations past and future, we must proceed to lose sight of two more things. Firstly, John needs to turn his back on the idea that there exists any objective reference point for sexual morality. Why? Because, in truth, marriage is the sexual right by which sexual wrongs can be known. If the use of contraception is not wrong, then an openness to new life is not right, and if marriage is not the right context for sex, then there is no right context—and, therefore, no wrong one. (Hence today’s insistence that the presence of consent is the only criterion for making a sexual act morally valid. The desire to do X justifies doing X.)

Secondly, John must abandon all possibility of locating meaningfulness in anything that flows out of the nature of the body. Meaninglessness cannot give birth to meaningfulness any more than starvation can give birth to a full stomach. If we have inwardly hidden the truth about our body, we must then destroy all external evidence of that truth. Our embrace of contraception compels us to hide the consequences of being made male and female. We must hide our babies.

Rice explains the link between contraception and tyranny in terms of the government filling a moral vacuum created by the acceptance of contraception. While I agree with his assessment, a second explanation is available to us if we add a fifth and final component to the mix, which is identity.

As is the case with law, the concept of human identity is a natural monopoly. It cannot have more than one owner, or else we human persons would have nothing in common with one another. If we suppose God no longer owns the patent for law, then—as Rice notes—ownership must have transferred fully to the state. The same must be true of the patent for human identity. Laws govern persons, and persons are subject to laws, so whoever owns either of the patents must in fact own both.

In requiring sex to vanish from law, abortion represents a paradigm shift in human identity: out with the old, given sexual identities of male and female, and in with the new, chosen “gender identities” of “male,” “female,” both, neither, and other. The problem with this claimed state takeover, of course, is that when we close our eyes, the world does not disappear. It just disappears from our view. The state cannot own human identity, since sexual difference is prior to the state—not to mention a precondition for the state’s existence. Yes, law can close its eyes to our embodiedness, but it cannot make our body disappear. The most the state can manage is to order us to mentally uninvent ourselves.

Without doubt, “transgender rights” are the manifestation of the tyranny produced by a claimed transfer of ownership of identity from God to the state; a deal, I submit, silently brokered by the legalization of abortion. The National Director of Priests for Life, Fr. Frank Pavone, famously stated that America will not reject abortion until America sees abortion. What I am trying to illuminate is that we are indeed seeing abortion but are doing so without realizing abortion is what is being seen. Within a legal atmosphere that denies the link between identity and givenness, we see the lawlessness of abortion at work whenever a girl is forced to shower alongside a male, whenever somebody is fined for using the right third-person pronoun, and whenever somebody is permitted to have his or her body mutilated to make it “fit” his or her mind.

Gender identity is a barrier placed between our natural identity and our legal identity. More accurately, it is a filter that prevents the truth of our body from entering law, allowing only our mind to pass through. What is that, if not the legal outworking of contraception?

Robert P. George #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

Could America Survive without Religion?

Can freedom survive in a society in which most citizens believe that human beings, who are supposed to have inalienable rights, are merely material beings inhabiting a universe of purely material and efficient causality?

virtue is one cultural condition of freedom, and it is necessary to the establishment and preservation of freedom’s other cultural conditions. Beyond that, there are other social goods—essential aspects of the common good of any political society—that require virtue among the people. When freedom degenerates into what the Founders called “license”—a counterfeit of true freedom—these goods, too, are placed in grave peril.

All of this may be common sense, but it was a sense that was by no means common when Adams and his fellow Founders launched what they themselves understood to be an “experiment” in republican government and ordered liberty. And it is a common sense that, as the conditions of contemporary intellectual life have made all too clear, can be forgotten. Indeed, it is a common sense that can be derided and mocked by people who regard themselves as too worldly, sophisticated, and enlightened to believe in things like morality and virtue. So in the face of modern nihilism (sometimes, paradoxically, masquerading as the most high-minded moralism) the defense of Adams’s proposition takes on a kind of urgency.

Reason itself, and experience, teach us not to pin our hopes on virtue ungrounded in, or unsupported by, faith in God. Washington, like Adams, believed that reason, given man’s fallen condition, was a bit too uncertain a trumpet, and that human passions of the sort that compete with virtues and lead us into error and sin are too powerful for reason to reliably prevail over them.

Washington and Adams were, to be sure, men of the Enlightenment—believers in the power of reason. And their Constitution was one that would test whether “societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” to quote Hamilton’s famous line from the first Federalist Paper. What’s more, they certainly did not believe, as many ignorant people today seem to believe, that faith is the enemy of reason. But they did believe in the power and importance of faith and, indeed, in the harmony of faith and reason, when faith and reason are rightly understood.

Matthew Kacsmaryk #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

First, the vast majority of Abrahamic religious denominations in America—Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim—continue to define marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman, accounting for over 100 million Americans.

Second, though politically potent in the short term, the analogy to interracial marriage is ahistorical and illogical. All of Christendom permitted interracial marriage until eighteenth-century slaveholders devised a political lie to suppress an inconvenient truth: one man and one woman can and do unite to create interracial children, so skin color is irrelevant to marriage.

Some southerners wrapped their racist politics in the rhetoric of religion, but an even larger coalition of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews brought an end to “racial purity” laws using direct appeals to shared religious principles. In fact, the very first case striking down an anti-miscegenation statute was brought by Roman Catholics who made religious liberty arguments against the state of California. Consequently, the “religious liberty equals racism” argument cannot withstand serious scrutiny.

Robert Oscar Lopez #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

I don’t have a silver bullet tactic for suddenly making low-information Americans aware that all the same-sex parenting propaganda—and more broadly our growing acceptance of non-traditional parenting—is really a cover for systematic abuse. My hunch, however, is that it might be time simply to drop all the masks, put away our strategies, and just state the uncensored truth.

Robert Oscar Lopez #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

Let’s be clear: I am not saying that same-sex parents are automatically guilty of any kind of physical, sexual, or emotional abuse to the children they raise. Nor am I saying that LGBT people are less likely to take good care of children.

What I mean is this: Even the most heroic mother in the world can’t father. So to intentionally deprive any child of her mother or father, except in cases like divorce for grave reasons or the death of a parent, is itself a form of abuse. (Though my mother raised me with the help of a lesbian partner, I do not feel I was abused, because I always knew that my mother didn’t intend for my father to divorce her.)

Adam J. MacLeod #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

[A fundie describes opponents of a proposed bill that would allow christians to discriminate against gays]

In Louisiana, a new bill has been proposed to protect those who have suffered unjust government discrimination. Opponents are demonizing the bill’s supporters and calling them names, misrepresenting the contents of the proposal, using scare tactics, and generally acting with fundamentalist zeal instead of dispassionate deliberation and rational discourse. They would deny to an entire class of Louisiana citizens legal protection from discriminatory acts, simply because members of that class do not share their own moral views.

Katy Faust #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

Dear Justice Kennedy,

June is nigh, and with it will come your ruling on the most contentious political issue of our time: marriage.

I write because I am one of many children with gay parents who believe we should protect marriage. I believe you were right when, during the Proposition 8 deliberations, you said “the voice of those children [of same-sex parents] is important.” I’d like to explain why I think redefining marriage would actually serve to strip these children of their most fundamental rights.

[...]

This debate, at its core, is about one thing.

It’s about children.

Government Should Promote the Well-being of Children

Children are the reason government has any stake in this discussion at all. Congress was spot on in 1996 when it passed the Defense of Marriage Act, stating:

At bottom, civil society has an interest in maintaining and protecting the institution of heterosexual marriage because it has a deep and abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing. Simply put, government has an interest in marriage because it has an interest in children.

There is no difference between the value and worth of heterosexual and homosexual persons. We all deserve equal protection and opportunity in academe, housing, employment, and medical care, because we are all humans created in the image of God.

However, when it comes to procreation and child-rearing, same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are wholly unequal and should be treated differently for the sake of the children.

When two adults who cannot procreate want to raise children together, where do those babies come from? Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right. When a child is placed in a same-sex-headed household, she will miss out on at least one critical parental relationship and a vital dual-gender influence. The nature of the adults’ union guarantees this. Whether by adoption, divorce, or third-party reproduction, the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents.

Making policy that intentionally deprives children of their fundamental rights is something that we should not endorse, incentivize, or promote.

Katy Faust #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

Children Have the Right to Be Loved by Their Mother and Father

Like most Americans, I am for adults having the freedom to live as they please. I unequivocally oppose criminalizing gay relationships. But defining marriage correctly criminalizes nothing. And the government’s interest in marriage is about the children that only male-female relationships can produce. Redefining marriage redefines parenthood. It moves us well beyond our “live and let live” philosophy into the land where our society promotes a family structure where children will always suffer loss. It will be our policy, stamped and sealed by the most powerful of governmental institutions, that these children will have their right to be known and loved by their mother and/or father stripped from them in every instance. In same-sex-headed households, the desires of the adults trump the rights of the child.

Have we really arrived at a time when we are considering institutionalizing the stripping of a child’s natural right to a mother and a father in order to validate the emotions of adults?

Justice Kennedy, I have long admired your consistency when ruling on the well-being of children, and I implore you to stay the course. I truly believe you are invested in the equal protection of all citizens, and it is your sworn duty to uphold that protection for the most vulnerable among us. The bonds with one’s natural parents deserve to be protected. Do not fall prey to the false narrative that adult feelings should trump children’s rights. The onus must be on adults to conform to the needs of children, not the other way around.

This is not about being against anyone. This is about what I am for. I am for children! I want all children to have the love of their mother and their father. Being for children also makes me for LGBT youth. They deserve all the physical, social, and emotional benefits of being raised by their mother and father as well. But I fear that, in the case before you, we are at the mercy of loud, organized, well-funded adults who have nearly everyone in this country running scared.

Six adult children of gay parents are willing to stand against the bluster of the gay lobby and submit amicus briefs for your consideration in this case. I ask that you please read them. We are just the tip of the iceberg of children currently being raised in gay households. When they come of age, many will wonder why the separation from one parent who desperately mattered to them was celebrated as a “triumph of civil rights,” and they will turn to this generation for an answer.

What should we tell them?

Janna Darnelle #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

[Janna Darnelle explains how her life was ruined when her husband came out as gay, divorced her, gained custody of the children, and married another man.]

My Children Deserve Better

Our two young children were willfully and intentionally thrust into a world of strife and combative beliefs, lifestyles, and values, all in the name of "gay rights." Their father moved into his new partner's condo, which is in a complex inhabited by sixteen gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late sixties and has a boyfriend in his early twenties. My children are brought to gay parties where they are the only children and where only alcoholic beverages are served. They are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers, and LGBT film festivals.

Both of my children face identity issues, just like other children. Yet there are certain deep and unique problems that they will face as a direct result of my former husband's actions. My son is now a maturing teen, and he is very interested in girls. But how will he learn how to deal with that interest when he is surrounded by men who seek sexual gratification from other men? How will he learn to treat girls with care and respect when his father has rejected them and devalues them? How will he embrace his developing masculinity without seeing his father live out authentic manhood by treating his wife and family with love, honoring his marriage vows even when it's hard?

My daughter suffers too. She needs a dad who will encourage her to embrace her femininity and beauty, but these qualities are parodied and distorted in her father's world. Her dad wears make-up and sex bondage straps for Halloween. She is often exposed to men dressing as women. The walls in his condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative positions. What is my little girl to believe about her own femininity and beauty? Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead, he is warping it.

Without the guidance of both their mother and their father, how can my children navigate their developing identities and sexuality? I ache to see my children struggle, desperately trying to make sense of their world.

My children and I have suffered great losses because of my former husband’s decision to identify as a gay man and throw away his life with us. Time is revealing the depth of those wounds, but I will not allow them to destroy me and my children. I refuse to lose my faith and hope. I believe so much more passionately in the power of the marriage covenant between one man and one woman today than when I was married. There is another way for those with same-sex attractions. Destruction is not the only option—it cannot be. Our children deserve far better from us.

This type of devastation should never happen to another spouse or child. Please, I plead with you: defend marriage as being between one man and one woman. We must stand for marriage—and for the precious lives that marriage creates.

Robert P. George, and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf #fundie thepublicdiscourse.com

[A quote from a letter urging hotels to stop offering pornography.]

Furthermore, we trust that you need no reminding of the fact that something’s being legal does not make it right. For example, denying black men and women and their families access to hotel rooms—and tables in restaurants, as well as other amenities and opportunities—was, for countless shameful years, perfectly legal. In some circumstances, it even made financial sense for hotel owners and operators in racist cultures to engage in segregationist practices even when not compelled by law to do so. However, this was deeply morally wrong. Shame on those who denied their brothers and sisters of color the equal treatment to which they were morally entitled. Shame on you if you hide behind legality to peddle immorality in the pursuit of money.

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