Source: Amy Notes (ID702)
Author: Howard, Amy (ID633)
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Content id: 27134
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2015-01-01 - 0000-00-00
Supreme Court granted the right to define our identity
"Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy penned the majority opinion in the landmark decision heralded by gay activists from coast to coast, writing that: 'The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to REVIEW COPY define and express their identity'."
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Introduction to It’s Not Like Being Black
Date Created: 2024-05-20 18:30:07
Source: It’s Not Like Being Black (ID 703)
Author: Baucham, Voddie (ID 635)
Content_id: 27132
Introduction to 'It's Not Like Being Black'. We are living in crazy times. Biological men are competing and winning against biological women in high school,1 college, 2 professional sports, 3 and the Olympics.4 We are constantly warned about the dangers of toxic masculinity, but when a biological male MMA fighter fractured the orbital bone of a biological female during an officially sanctioned REVIEW COPY event,5 we responded with a wink and a nod because he identified as a woman. And to add insult to injury, there have even been trans contestants crowned in beauty contests! 6 Not only can the newest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court not answer the simple question “What is a woman?”7 but neither can college professors, doctors, or psychologists who are deemed to be at the top of their field.8 In fact, it’s gotten so weird that now state governments are being forced to define the word, as Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt did in August 2023 through an executive order.9 The worst part of all of this is the fact that, in our upside-down world, if you see anything wrong with all of this, you’re the crazy one! If you doubt that men can become pregnant, some women have penises, and infants suffer from gender dysphoria, you’re the uneducated, simple-minded, evil, and dangerous one whom society needs to fear. You may think all of this happened overnight. I assure you, it didn’t. What we are witnessing now is the result of a long series of ideological shifts, court decisions, political maneuvers, and educational strategies whose aims still have yet to be fully realized. And at the heart of much of the change is the idea that the battle for the rights of so-called “sexual minorities” is the latest front in America’s civil rights struggle, stemming from a single lie that took root in our culture: “Sexual orientation is no different than race.” This lie came to a head in 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—the case that overrode every existing state law and constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy penned the majority opinion in the landmark decision heralded by gay activists from coast to coast, writing that: The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to REVIEW COPY define and express their identity. The petitioners in these cases seek to find that liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms and conditions as marriages between persons of the opposite sex.10 (emphasis mine) While many Christians and political conservatives saw Obergefell as the end game in the leftists’ agenda, activists saw it as a stepping stone. It is no coincidence that we have witnessed a proliferation in issues related to sexual minorities since Obergefell. Whether it’s the explosion of transgenderism, the proliferation of sexually explicit materials in schools, drag queen story hour, rebranding pedophiles as “minor-attracted persons” and the attending push to include them in the “sexual minority” group, or the introduction of such outlandish identities as “furries,” the post-Obergefell landscape has produced a dizzying array of people taking Kennedy up on his suggestion to “define and express their identity.” For those of us who follow Christ, the moral decay is more than enough to cause alarm. However, there is a more pressing issue at hand: Obergefell set the stage for new “tension in the debate regarding sexual orientation anti-discrimination and religious freedom.”11 What this looks like, argues University of Massachusetts law professor Jeremiah Ho, is a battle between “the autonomy of sexual minorities to be who and what they are, and the autonomy of those whose religious beliefs may not have accepting views of sexual minorities being who they are.”12And that battle has already begun in earnest. In a June 2023 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Victor Madrigal-Borloz, a Costa Rican attorney who at press time was in residence at the Harvard University Law School, recommended that the United States “refrain from justifying with religious narratives any act of violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.”13 REVIEW COPY That means no one can use or quote from the Bible to address sexual sin. Madrigal-Borloz went on to add that government authorities should “prevent and investigate such acts and ensure the accountability of perpetrators and the provision of effective remedies for damages.”14 This is dangerous rhetoric! This is a declaration of war on the God of the Bible and all those who worship Him. “He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the LORD” (Proverbs 17:15). If we buy the lie that sexual proclivities and preferences are equivalent to race; if we believe that the fight for the rights of “sexual minorities” is the final frontier in the struggle for civil rights, we are not only opening Pandora’s box, but are insulting whole swaths of people who have fought legitimate civil rights struggles. I am a black man, a descendant of slaves. I was born in South Los Angeles and have spent the last eight years living and serving in Africa. Anyone looking at me can see that I am black. I don’t “define and express my identity” as black. I was born black, and I will die black. So allow me to state one thing here that we’ll spend the rest of this book unpacking: Whether you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, trigender, multigender, twospirit, furry, queer, demiflux, otherkin, or as a mermaid, a British Columbian wolf, or an avian-human hybrid:15 Not one of those things is like being black.