St. Chrysostom’s, a progressive parish in the not-at-all-declining Church of England, is hosting “The Gospel According to Jesus Queen of Heaven,” a play written by and starring Jo Clifford, a male-to-female transsexual. The play imagines Jesus as a transsexual returning to earth in the present day. According to the orthodox Anglican blog Stand Firm in Faith, the local Anglican bishop has said nothing about this blasphemy. Watch the reimagined “Our Father” by Jo Clifford above, if you want a better idea about what the Anglicans at St. Chrysostom, and the Bishop of Manchester, support.
Meanwhile, in Canada, the progressive ruling party in Alberta has issued an exciting new policy for schools. Excerpt:
It used to be: “Heather has two mommies.”
Now, it’s: “Heather has two non-gendered and inclusive caregivers.”
That’s the language the New Democratic Party government in Alberta, Canada, is telling teachers and school administrators to use when adressing the adults with whom students are living. Out: “mother” and “father.” In: “parent,” “caregiver,” “partner,” whatever.
And God help you if refer to one of the little rascals as “him” or “her.”
Here’s the pertinent language from the rainbow-adorned “Guidelines for Best Practices” that the highminded-progressive NDP government issued last week:
School forms, websites, letters, and other communications use non-gendered and inclusive language (e.g., parents/guardians, caregivers, families, partners, “student” or “their” instead of Mr., Ms., Mrs., mother, father, him, her, etc.).”
The purpose of the guidelines, according to the text, is to create “learning communities” that “respect diverse sexual orientations, gender identies, and gender expressions.”
And that means that the kids, no matter how young or how old, get to pick their own gender and force everyone else in the school to abide by their choice.
The CBC has more details:
It should be up to each individual whether they use a washroom designated for males or females, according to the guidelines.
Specifically, the document states that students should be “able to access washrooms that are congruent with their gender identity.” …
As much as possible, the guidelines call for the elimination of separate activities for students based on gender.
The Catholic bishop of Calgary denounced these guidelines, but the province is going to compel Catholic schools to comply:
[Education Minister Dave] Eggen said discussions with school boards will continue and there will soon be meetings with Catholic Church leaders as well.
“Certainly I knew this wasn’t going to be easy, but important things are never necessarily easy to achieve,” Eggen told The Canadian Press Thursday.
“We’ll receive different opinions on this, but I always take it back to first principles, which is to protect and to focus on children, especially young vulnerable children in regards to gender identities. Once we do remind ourselves of those things, then it becomes clearer what has to be done,” he said.
Won’t somebody please think of the children! As usual, the propagandistic shibboleth of “safety” is invoked to steamroller the rights of the Church and Catholic parents to run their own schools according to their own beliefs. Americans, say it again and again: “Thank you, Almighty God, for the First Amendment.” There is no doubt in my mind that if not for the First Amendment, gay activists and their institutional supporters would eventually force these policies on religious schools in the US too.
Back in the UK, a private school for kids aged 11-18 is celebrating diversity by allowing students to claim whatever gender category they like. The Archbishop Cranmer blog comments:
Of course, God loves His creation, and, of course, that includes (without exception) the spectrum of hormonal beings who, whether by nature or nurture, are ‘fluid’ in their sexuality, or ‘non-binary’ in their identity. But in these schools, God (and/or nature) seems to have become subordinate to ‘welfare’ and ‘happiness’, which is defined not in terms of any transcendental or altruistic pursuit, but in purely selfish terms of sexual self-identity. Happiness is not to be found in personal sacrifice, selflessness, moral virtue or seeking the beatific truths of God: it is found in the hedonistic attainment of personal pleasure and natural desire, which resides most supremely in contemplating and then realising the act of sexual union with whomever, whenever and however one pleases.
We might leave autonomous, mature adults to decide these ethical matters for themselves: it is not for the Christian to impose his conception of holiness or orthodox morality upon the unbelieving world. But schoolchildren? Are they not to be taught to distinguish left and right (moral neutrality) from right and wrong (moral responsibility)? If they are to be taught that God’s goodness and their happiness consists in the self-contained indulgence of assertions of gender self-identity, then we are not only ordering the natural world of biology to suit the political agenda of a tiny minority, but redefining what it means to be humanly fulfilled and ultimately ‘happy’.
Steadily, the very essence of what it means to be male, female, and even human, is being destroyed. Nothing but chaos and will. You know exactly where this is going.
UPDATE: Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, speaks to what is so dishonest about the way we frame this discussion, in a passage criticizing the way certain concepts are deployed rhetorically to shut down discussion. For example, he says that there are a number of reasons why abortion should be legal, but “choice” is not one of them. In fact, “this kind of appeal trivializes the issue.” More:
[Choice] is a word which occludes almost everything important: the sacrificed alternatives in a dilemmatic situation, and the real moral weight of the situation.
And yet we find these words surfacing again and again, slogan terms like “freedom”, “rights”, “respect”, “non-discrimination”, and so on. Of course, none of these is empty in the way “choice” is; but they too are often deployed as argument-stopping universals, without any consideration of the where and how of their application to the case at hand.
We are watching the concept of fundamental categories like male and female dismantled before our eyes, with no debate about it, without consideration of what this might mean for present and future generations. It all gets pushed along under the concept of “safety” or “diversity,” or some other benign term used in an Orwellian way. As Taylor notes about how oversimplification makes it easier to overpower your opponents (“Four legs good, two legs bad!”), “Shallowness and dominance are two sides of the same coin.”