Yet another Cissexist bisexual or “political lesbian” Radfem gets it wrong

Over on Facebook, my friend Zoe Brain pointed out an interesting but sad article this morning.

Someone named Bev Jo, as a “guest” columnist on the anti-trans Gender Trender blog, writes an essay entitled  Fighting the "Lie" of Trans, which summarizes everything that’s wrong with the cissexist POV on trans people adopted by many radfems based on the patriarchist birth-genital-essentialist position of the Roman Catholic Church, imported into radfem philosophy by the false spinnings of the twice-born Athenas, Catholic college-based professors, Mary Daly and her empire-building protégé, Jan Raymond.

On Facebook, while riding on the commuter train this morning, I summarized a response as follows:

The only time I ever lied about myself was when I was trying to assimilate in accordance with societal expectations. All the writer is doing is showing a particularly malicious, clueless, institutionalized pseudo-patriarchist cissexist POV no different from the cissexist birth genital essentialiam brought into Radfem philosophy by Catholic college professors, twice-born Athena fembots Daly and Raymond, who corrupted Radfem philosophy from the inside.

But sitting at the computer in my office after work, I decided to read and analyze Bev Jo's article a little more deeply.  I have just started reading Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology in an effort to better understand why Radfem philosophy took a cissexist turn, beyond the surmise that I've made based on my exposure to the writings of Daly's protégé Raymond.

Right in the beginning, Bev Jo tells us she is a Lesbian, and then proves she can’t be one!

She parenthetically claims

“Who women choose to love is a choice, not something as trivial as ‘sexual orientation.’”

That is a statement that can only be made by

(a) a woman with a bisexual sexual orientation who has a natural orientation that allows for such a choice, and who chooses to suppress her heterosexual side, or

(b) a woman whose natural sexual orientation is actually heterosexual, but who is so wrapped up in radfem philosophy that she rejects her natural orientation, suppresses it, and “chooses” to assimilate – for such as make that “choice,” the choice itself can be a cause for psychological imbalances.

So I don’t know what Bev Jo’s sexual orientation is, but she proves by her own words that she herself has no place in lesbian space, except perhaps to the extent that bisexual women are welcome.

So, having appropriated the identity of a Lesbian, she proceeds to assume the patriarchal authority to exclude others who have more right to Lesbian space than she herself does. This pseudo-patriarchy is not new, it has been a hallmark of Radfem cissexist thought since even before Mary Daly wrote her metaethics book Gyn/Ecology.

If anyone has made “death threats,” they are responsible for their own behavior. There is no excuse for oppressed trans women to make futile death threats against their oppressors. I am aware of an unfortunate use of violent imagery in a Facebook conversation by two trans advocates who should know better, but I am not aware of any actual death threats.

Bev then asks a rhetorical question about women’s reactions to “men claiming to be women.” I can only ask a counter-question – where are the men who are claiming to be women? I am a woman, I am a lesbian, and I was erroneously assigned male at birth, but I am not and never was a man, even though I spent years trying to live a lie and assimilate with societal expectations based on that erroneous assignment.

Bev Jo does not have a right to call me a man. I have more of a right to deny her right to call herself a lesbian, because he own words indicate that she cannot possibly be a real lesbian.

Bev Jo in her essay shows her amazingly incredible ignorance about transsexual women. She certainly has never met me, and it seems clear to me that she has never actually met a real trans woman. If the story she tells about her “stalker” is not made up, the person she describes does not fit within the parameters of being a trans woman.

She also does not seem to understand what it is like to be a girl, growing up in a situation where everyone expects you to be a boy. Unfortunately, those of us who have had that experience resent it when someone else takes our narratives and distorts them. I have already had the dubious “honor” of being quoted more than once on the “mansplainin’ transplainin’” site. One of those quotes was an explanation of how I felt when I was four years old in the 1950’s, from the perspective of being a four-year old. The people who run that site thought that my simple child’s-eye view of the differences between boys and girls, and my realization that I was being told I was with the wrong group, was quite amusing. I am sure they enjoy their cruel little laugh at my expense.

When Bev Jo describes how some women look (referring to them as “female impersonators”) she does not realize that there are many trans women who don’t need artifice. It would seem that she gets her ideas about what trans women are like by poring over the writings of the notorious Opus Dei psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, an eating disorders specialist who advised the Vatican abut trans issues. Her description is almost exactly what McHugh wrote:

McHugh wrote in a 2004 article entitled “Surgical Sex” in First Things:

“The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing;”

Bev Jo writes similarly:

“they look like drag queens with their heavy, ugly makeup, plucked unnatural eyebrows, garish costumes, etc.”

Bev Jo’s apparent reliance on yet another patriarchist source like McHugh is more evidence of the nefarious influence the Roman Catholic Church has exerted on radfem philosophy.

Bev Jo rejects those of us who have surgery, and she rejects those of us who do not or cannot have surgery as well.

Bev Jo has apparently not been exposed to the mass of scientific evidence that shows that trans women are not, and never were, men, regardless of whether we have GRS.

Bev Jo has shown herself by her words to be an agent of the patriarchy.

She even writes. “It’s a basic weapon of patriarchy to divide women.” And then she proceeds to do just that – making sure that there continues to be a barrier between cissexual women and transsexual women.

I know who I am. I know that the scientific research backs me up. I have developed self-confidence. I am a woman, I am a lesbian, and no pseudo-patriarchist cissexist radfem is going to steal my identity, just because they themselves don;t know what a woman is.

You’ll note I am not using the term “transphobia.” The better terms to use are “cissexist” and “cissexism.” The relationship, particularly that of the institutionalized variety cause by a lack of understanding of trans lives, is eerily similar to institutionalized racism – and just as white people have to work very hard to see institutionalized racism, cissexual people have to look very hard to see the institutiopnalized cissexism that permeates the society.

If not by virtue of being cissexist, how is it that the Roman Catholic Church and the Radfem philosophers are so totally aligned on the issue of trans women?

One thing Bev Jo gets right – the alliance between some Radfems and their fellow separatist TS separatists, is still a variety of cissexism. Just as radfem philosophy as it relates to trans women is pseudo-patriarchist, the position of TS separatists is a pseudo-cissexist imitation of the radfem position, which makes it pseudo-pseudo-patriarchist. The willingness of the TS separatists to oppress other trans women as a means to gain entry for themselves into radfem circles, is pretty disgusting.

Bev Jo wants to organize het women to join with radfems. Um, that strategy is probably a non-starter – particularly with what Bev Jo already wrote in the beginning of her article about straight and bisexual women.

One would think that women – all women, straight, bi, asexual and lesbian, cissexual and transsexual, ought to be able to get along.

Why should Bev Jo be strategizing at marginalizing the most marginalized women, just because we are different and not cissexual?

Bev Jo should know that the National organization for Women already supports trans women – maybe she should get a clue from them.

As to being in opposition to NAMBLA, I am surprised that is an issue. Even the gay men I know are condemnatory of NAMBLA, why should women hesitate to condemn child abuse?

Well, when we get to Bev Jo’s conclusion – even RuPaul would acknowledge that female impersonators are not women. But RuPaul identifies as a gay man, even though he does costume very well. RuPaul is not a trans woman. I doubt that RuPaul would want to be called a trans woman or a transsexual, or a transgender person.

On the other hand, if one were to watch the RuPaul Drag Race show, some of the people who work as “drag performers” actually *are* trans women – and while they are involved in drag culture they are often working toward transition.

It may be hard to tell the difference by looking at them, and Bev Jo has already shown that she can't tell the difference, but all anyone has to do is ask.

So, when Bev Jo asks for lesbians to put females and lesbians first, she should be inclusive of trans women who are lesbians.  The fact that she isn't?  That is very, very sad.

But when you start with false premises, as Bev Jo does, it is really difficult to come to a correct conclusion.

Radical Feminists: tied to social conservatism and the Catholic Church

The birth-genital essentialist movement in the United States is composed of an unlikely alliance of social conservatives (whether they be populists, tea-partiers, Republicans or fundamentalist Christianists, Jewists or Islamists), the Roman Catholic Church’s Magisterium, and the proponents of the kinds of “radical feminism” that derive their creed from the Roman Catholic-influenced teachings of Mary Daly and her protégé, Janice Raymond (both of them Catholic, with careers teaching at Catholic universities).


Birth genital essentialism denies the reality experienced by people who identify as transsexual or transgender, a reality that was denied by medical experts in the 1960’s, but a growing body of medical scientific research in the past seventeen is proving that transsexual and transgender people are not delusional members of the sex we were assigned at birth.

The unfortunate victims of this birth-genital essentialist coalition are the various members of the trans community. I hasten to add that the “trans community” is not actually a community so much as it is a diverse collection of people who share a single characteristic of not being cisgender.

Let’s limit ourselves for the moment, to simplify things, to those whose identities are consistent with those of the opposite sex. (at the end, we can re-include the more gender-diverse)/

I’ve just read an otherwise rather intelligent article entitled Feminism, sex and gender, by someone whose handle is "No Anodyne" at the “radfem Hub” site.

I thought it read very well until the writer started going off the rails because of the writer’s cissexual, or rather cissexist, blindness to those who are different.

Here is a particularly troubling excerpt:

The way this conflation [of sex and gender] happens is through the concept of “gender identity” — that is, the person accepts the gender role of man or woman, regardless of that person’s biology. A biological male can “identify” as a woman and a biological female can “identify” as a man. Remember that there is absolutely no scientifically-proven evidence that gender (man and woman, masculinity and femininity) has a biological basis. The only thing that is provable is whether someone is female with XX chromosomes or male with XY chromosomes and has the primary sex characteristics that almost always accompany those genotypes. (Intersex conditions do nothing to refute this. Just as the fact that a very small percentage of people are born without arms does not convince us that having arms is not a standard state for humans.)

What happens when we say that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman, is that sex is erased as a meaningful category for a legal basis for discrimination. If sex is the same as gender and gender is whatever an individual says it is, then there is no way to create laws that protect females as a biological sex.

The writer’s concept of “gender identity” is oversimplified and startlingly similar to the primitive conception expressed by some Republican members of the New York State Assembly when they were debating the passage of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act a couple of weeks ago.

Both the writer and these conservative Republicans have themselves hung up on the idea that “gender identity" means “a man” can just up and announce that today he’s “going to be a woman” and run into a women’s rest room so he can rape the female occupants.

However, that is just not the case. The person who asserts a gender identity that is that of the opposite sex often feels that way from the age of somewhere around four. After spending decades in trying to hide the true self beneath the façade, the individual starts transition. That is not some “man” just saying “I identify as a woman” without actually identifying as a woman.

The writer ignores 17 years of scientific evidence since 1995 that started with research identifying parts of the brain where trans women have the same neuronal density as cis women, and trans men have the same neuronal density as cis men, and has continued to the evidence of genetic predispositions explaining the mechanism by which a brain can develop along one sex’s blueprint, while the genital tact development follows the other.

Once we get out of the cissexual world in which gender identity, the 23rd chromosome pair and the genital tract development are all consistent, we have a tiny percentage of people who are different. Trans women are not and never were men. Trans men are not and never were women. Being trans is biologically-based, and the studies are there to prove it (and rather than list them again, just refer to the addenda to “My June 14, 2011 Letter to Dean Skelos on GENDA”essay posted to this blog on June 15, 2011. I recommend that the author read these scientific studies rather than assuming that the source for “gender identity” as an oversimplified concept involving a "choice" are the Roman Catholic Church, conservative politicians, or worse, the opaque and pretentious pseudo-academic writings by Judith Butler about gender as “performance.”

But the writer, starting with a false premise of “gender identity” that has nothing to do with the development of the brain and seems to be a matter of “free choice,” like deciding whether to have coffee or tea with breakfast, then goes on to ignore the fact that a small number of people are different and do not fit into the cissexual binary based on their birth genital tract development.  To the cissexist writer, people who are different are a tiny minority and just do not matter when it comes to the identities, rights, and feelings of the majority.

The blasé dismissal of “intesex conditions” as being relevant is a huge cissexist boo-boo on the writer’s part. Trans people with genetic and ontological differences should not be ridiculed, victimized and told that we do not belong where we belong, just because some cissexual woman feels that because she was born with a uterus, no one born without one can legitimately be a woman. (There is a “lite” version of that centered around the vagina that is used by some post-op separatists to differentiate themselves from those who are not “real.” To me, all they are doing is drawing a pseudo-cissexist bright line in a place where it accepts them, and only them, as an exception.)

The assertion that because the law might protect “gender identity and expression” that this somehow would have to replace “actual or perceived sex” as a protected class in human rights laws, is patently absurd. No one is replacing sex with gender. It’s either adding an added criterion for the class previously defined as sex, or adding a separate classification altogether. Nothing is taken away.

That idea that adding gender to human rights laws hurts sex as great a fallacy as the NOM position that allowing gender-neutral marriage will adversely impact opposite sex marriages. There is no connection.

Radical feminism needs to shake off its Catholic roots, and the error that has crept into feminist analysis.

Trans people, particularly trans women, were once  victimized by gender stereotyping as much as anyone else. And we still are victimized. In 1970, I was refused treatment for transsexualism because I was attracted to women – and the psychiatrist explained that “they wouldn’t cure me of one mental disorder to give me another.”

Others had to jump through hoops and convince their psychiatric gatekeepers that they were stereotypically ultra femme in order to get their surgery letters –the same psychiatrists (like Paul McHugh from Johns Hopkins) who later criticize the trans people for fitting into the stereotypes the gatekeepers insisted that fit.

Ultimately, neither transsexualism nor lesbianism is a mental disorder, though the psychiatric establishment is a little slow to acknowledge the former.

 
I get the fact that radical feminists want to transform themselves into the patriarchal ideal of reducing womanhood to being a walking, talking uterus, (the only difference being that the radfems rightly prefer to be walking, talking uteruses with a choice and control over their own bodies – that’s a good thing (having control over their own bodies, not the "walking, talking uterus" part!) and would still be there if they stopped oppressing my people.)

But womanhood is not that simple – how one identifies is based on our brain structures, and not our genitals or reproductive organs. A women with a hysterectomy does not stop being a woman.

In a comment, to the article, the author expands on the fallacies, stating that the trans argument is

“I FEEL like a woman therefore I AM a woman.”

That is partly true – the standard narrative dating back to the 1950’s for women born trans was that of feeling like “a woman trapped in a man’s body.”  But it ignores the modern science.  The reality is that we have women’s brains, at least in the relevant parts related to identity, and we have a male genital tract at birth.

The radfem comes back with:

“ there are females who don’t FEEL like “women” they FEEL like HUMANS, yet they ARE objectively females, so the trans argument is false for that reason alone”

There is no logical connection of one to the other. The fact that some people are weakly bigendered to the extent that they identify as a-gendered (neither male nor female, just “human”) is merely a different kind of identity. Nothing is refuted. There are also people assigned female at birth who identify as men and transition, they are men born trans and they were never really women at all.  We who are trans are WBT and MBT, and not M2F or F2M, (or the even worse radfem acronyms M2T and F2T, which reflects their erroneous birth genital essentialist-based assumptions).

She continues:

“ the socialization of females is important in our society, but that is what makes the discussion about GENDER important, but that has nothing to do with SEX (biological reality)”

With this, I’m getting gender as in “gender stereotypes” and “gender expectations based on sex assignment.” How much pain trans people go through as children because of the expectations based on the color of the blanket we were wrapped up in when we were born. Mid-life transitioners like me have to get a crash course in socialization – I think I was able to condense about 16 years into six months, but having had a daughter, I think I had a head start.  It's an important thought she has but not relevant to whether trans women are women - if we need help with socialization, it would be nice if help were provided rather than scorn.

She concludes the argument with

“ it is SEX, biological reality, that separates males from females. And it is not how we feel about that biological reality”

I agree that it’s about biological reality – but sex, and the biological reality of it is a lot more complicated and diverse for those who are intersex and trans than that XX XY genetic oversimplification, or the penis v. vagina oversimplification. Sex is not just the uterus v. the prostate. Some people, whether they are intersex in one way or another, including trans people, fall outside the stupid standard box.  And how we feel is often a reflection of that biolgical reality.

Those of us who do fit into the brain-based identity consistent with the opposite sex, ought to be allowed to socialize and be recognized on that basis. If there has to be a requirement that we no longer be reproductively capable with the OEM equipment, I can live with that, long term HRT does that pretty well – the one thing I can state with a certainty is that we are biologically different and never belong to the original sex. In a binary-based society, we belong with that opposite sex, or we need a special niche that hasn’t existed in Western culture since the rise of Christianity and the attempt to exterminate the gallae.

As to those I left out of the discussion at the outset - just like we have bisexual people, we have various kinds of bigender people whose identities, also highly likely to be biologically based, don't fit into the standard binary.  Just ebcasue they don't fit the binary assumptions does not mean we have to shoehorn them into the assumprions.  I may not fully uinderstand them, but I respect the fact that they are different.

Dismissing trans and intersex people because we are a tiny minority is cissexist oppression, and should be called out for what it is.

Until it can free itself of cissexist assumption about people who are not cissexual, the branch of radical feminism that rejects trans women only proves it is rooted in patriarchy and allied with the Roman Catholic Magisterium and conservative Christianists in an unholy alliance to oppress trans people for being different.

Until then, all the cissexist "radfemsplainin'" about  trans and intersex people is a lot like "mansplainin'" - explaining things to people who know exactly who we are, as if we didn't exist and don't count. I get it, but I don;t have to like it.

My sermon for Juneteenth, at Memorial United Methodist Church

The celebration of Juneteenth marked a milestone in the history of African American people in the United States. June 19, 1865 was the day that Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, where he read General Order #3 finally informing the slaves in the State of Texas that they were free, and implementing the Emancipation Proclamation made by President Lincoln on January 1, 1863.


And with the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15thAmendments, no longer would African American men each be counted as 3/5ths of a man, but only for the purpose of enlarging the impact of the votes of white men in slave states.

But who was left behind?

African American women.

ALL women.

In most states, still under the common law, marriage meant that “the two shall become one, and that one is the husband.” New York was one of a few states that had enacted “Married Women’r Property Acts, first in 1848, allowing married women to control their inherited property, and then in 1860, allowing married women to control their won wages.

But in many other states, women were given from the custody of their fathers, to the custody of their husbands – without rights, just like the “civil death” imposed on convcted felons.

The abolitionist movement had been almost evenly split on the idea of women’s rights.

So – when the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments were added to the Constitution, women were told, “you have to wait.”

Women worked on various states, securing the right to vote in some, and ecpanding the number of states in which they obtained legislative relief from the common law “civil death” for inheritances, and wages.

Finally, in 1920, Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote – 55 years after Juneteenth.

Women had parity in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – BUT that was a fluke. The last minute amendment to add coverage for women was added by a segregationist, who thought that by adding women to the Act, it would lead what he believed would be fellow patriarchist northern moderates to reject the whole bill.

We are seeing a similar act playing out in the New York legislature today – at the time I wrote this sermon, New York is on the cusp of possibly enacting an historic bill that would enlarge the connubium of marriage rights by making the freedom to marry a gender neutral one, rather than being one of requiring that the parties be members of the opposite sex.

I can think of a couple of similar occasions – when the Roman Republic amended its laws to provide for connubium between patricians and plebeians. Prior to that, patricians and plebeians could not intermarry.

In American history, for many years there were laws against racial mixing in marriage – though they were for the maintenance of some mythical “purity” of the “white race,” since interracial marriages were permitted as long as no party was white.

California was the first state to overturn its anti-miscegenation laws, but the culmination of the effort came when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Virginia’s law (as well as the laws of the remaining 18 states with such laws on their books) in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia (388 U.S. 1) case.

Today, there are yet other civil rights movements, and just as there was a situation in which the recognition of legal rights of women have lagged behind the rights of African American men, we now have a situation where the recognition of legal rights of transgender people are lagging behind those accorded to people whose sexual orientation is not heterosexual.

New York stands to be the sixth state to allow marriage rights to be expanded on a gender neutral basis – and this does provide rights to transgender people, too. But we were left out of the hate crimes law in 1999, and the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act was passed in 2002 without including transgender people in human rights laws.

Trans people are perhaps the least understood and most maligned minority in the United States. A recently published study, entitled Injustice at Every Turn, discloses the extent of the plight of my people. And yet, in debating the GENDA bill in the Assembly last week, Republicans were openly referring to it as a “:sexual perverts and predators relief act” in their remarks..

Celebration may be coming soon on marriage. And I will join in those celebrations, though my celebration will be muted, somewhat. As Frederick Douglass noted in his famous 4th of July speech in 1841, my time for celebration will not yet have arrived. And until my people are freed from the bonds of discrimination under the law, the idea of celebration rings hollow.

In today’s reading from Isaiah (Is. 61:1-2, 10-11), we see a foretaste of Juneteenth, and of the eventual recognition of the human rights of transgender people “The Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim freedom for the captives and release of prisoners.

And what does Paul (Gal.3:26-29) have to say? We are all one in Christ Jesus, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.

In the Gospel of John (John 15:9-17) Yeshua himself calls us friends, and not slaves or servants.

So when people proclaim in their ignorance that God hates gay people, or that transgender people are less than human, they do not know what they are talking about.

When people, including high ranking prelates in large churches, hold out against basic human rights for transgender people, and the right to marry for people who are different, quite frankly, they are not asking WWJD!

So – on this celebration of Juneteenth, when there is much to praise, much to celebrate, and much for which to give thanks, we should also pause and reflect on just how much farther we must go before the arc of history bends far enough so that justice for all can be rendered, and we can all be free.

Speaking at Heritage of Pride Rally: and looking back at history

No, you won't find me on the program, but Noah Lewis from Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF) was on the program, and graciously shared his four minute time slot with Patricia Harrington, one of the other plaintiffs in the birth certificate lawsuits, and me.

In my brief comments, I looked to the history of the New York City Pride Rally, particularly at a dark chapter eleven years ago when Jim Fouratt, a Stonewall veteran and Radical Faerie, used his time on the podium as a featured speaker to share his discredited views about transgender women, and then turned to the present, looking forward to the day when the laws and regulations actually catch up with the science.

Here are my prepared remarks:

Remarks by Joann Prinzivalli at Heritage of Pride Rally, June 18, 2011

Eleven years ago today, at the Pride Rally in Bryant Park, the featured speaker, a stonewall veteran, claimed that transgender women are only “gay men in denial” - those of us in attendance who knew better than that turned our backs on that speaker.

Transgender women, like me, never really were men even if we spend part of our lives trying to fit into societal expectations.

Having the government fix the birth certificate regulations to recognize the reality that we are different, and having my birth certificate corrected, will go a long way toward erasing the prejudice that comes from ignorance of the biological reality that scientific study has discovered over just the past 17 years.

While I started the lawsuit in 2009 on my own, and obtained a victory against the City on its motion to dismiss the case, I am grateful to TLDEF, and to Noah Lewis and the other lawyers who are moving the lawsuit forward.

My piece lasted about 40 seconds - but I thought it important to look back to the history.

But the history of the relationship of trans rights to the New York City Pride Rally has a longer, darker history.

In my brief remarks, I did not have the opportunity to go back all that way to 1973, when the late Sylvia Rivera was pulled off the stage at the New York City Pride Rally when she tried to speak.

According to one account of this episode, found in Martin Duberman’s book Stonewall:

“During the 1973 gay pride rally in Washington Square Park, Jen O’Leary of GAA [Gay Activists Alliance] publicly denounced Rivera for 'parodying” womanhood.' Lesbian Feminist Liberation passed out flyers opposing the ‘female impersonators.’”

According to one report, “Sylvia Rivera Talk at LGMNY (June 2001)” (transcript by Lauren Galarza and Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes) Sylvia, herself, recalling the incident, shared the following:

“I had to fight my way up on that stage and literally, people I called my comrades in the movement literally beat the shit out of me.”

Contrast that to what happened to Jim Fouratt in 2000 - when a large number of people, aware of his proposed comments, attended to portest by silently turning our backs on him during his speech.

And then yesterday, we made it to the stage - no one tried to pull us off. No one was calling us "female impersonators" or "gay men in denial." No one was denying our legitimacy.

We have a duty to future generations, to use whatever means are available to help the arc of history bend toward justice.

We have to educate, advocate, demonstrate, legislate, litigate - we must speak truth to power and pray that power will be used with love.

I'd like to think that somewhere, if there is a heaven, Sylvia is smiling today, as the work toward justice for the trans community continues.

Marriage v. Civil Unions, with a postscript on Trans Rights

On the issue of marriage v. civil unions – “separate but equal" is still as bad an idea as it was during the period in which the United States permitted racial segregation with that as the basis), I'd like to examine the whole "civil union" as an alternative to "marriage" basis.

The ancient Romans used a term matrimonium to deal with the marriage concept of caring for children (the first part of the word comes from mater - the Latin word for "mother").

They had a separate concept of connubium (a word from which the English term "nuptial" emerges) that dealt with the rules as to who one could marry. In the early Roman Republic, patricians and plebeians could not intermarry - they did not have the right of connubium with each other, regardless of whether there would be children in a relationship.

Opponents of marriage fairness, whether they are in complete opposition, or merely want to create a separate legal status for gays, are possibly confusing matrimonium with connubium.

The right to marry is an issue of connubium - and the civil term "marriage" does not have to rerefer to a combination of matrimonium and connubium. (And with marriage being permitted between opposite-sex octogenarians and infertile (and other) couples who might not have the desire to raise children, the connubium issue - who may marry whom, is paramount.

It could easily be argued that the state is primarily concerned with the connubium aspect of marriage with marriage equality bills.

Even though the matrimonium aspect is one that would more often affect opposite-sex couples because of the fact that babies often (but not always) come as the result of heterosexual sexual encounters, matrimonium also involves caring for and nurturing children – something that studies have shown that gay and lesbian couples can do as well as, if not better than, heterosexual couples.

Matrimonium is the part of the marriage equation that Roman Catholics celebrate as a Sacrament of Holy Matrimony." For Catholics, the *sacramental* aspect is the matrimonium - at the same time, the Church recognized the connubium aspect for those who, in addition to the sacrament, wish to celebrate a Nuptial Mass.

There is nothing in any pending bill for marriage equality, marriage fairness, or the right to marry, that has any negative or deleterious impact, on the matrimonium aspect of marriage. In fact, what marriage equality bills do is enhance matrimonium to benefit children who live in households in which the parents are a same-sex couple.

This will have a particularly great impact on African-American and Latina lesbian couples, who are more likely to be raising children from previous relationships, than any other demographic. (One can argue that opposition to marriage fairness is racist, and onewould be right, in that context).

Religious-based opposition to civil marriage equality is absurd – perhaps a slogan should be made of "Marriage Rights for all, not Marriage Rites for all" with a crucifix for the central T in Rites. Despite rhetoric coming from some circles, there is no requirement that religions that do not accept marriage except between members of an opposite-sex couple, would be forced to perform or sacramentalize same-sex unions.

Still, for those religions that would wish to celebrate marriages for same-sex couples, a sacramental rite for same-sex marriages (or for octogenarians or infertile couples) would not have to include aspects that relate to matrimonium - (I mention marriages for opposite-sex octogenarians way past their child-bearing years in this context - this would avoid the necessity for some of the questions relating to bearing children - I have seen Catholic ceremonies for the elderly in which the question is always asked.) Of course, if the couple does have existing children (whether related by blood or adoption to one or both of the parties), plan to adopt, or have plans for surrogacy or medical procedures ranging from artificial insemination to embryo implantation, a celebration of the matrimonium aspect would be just as welcome as it would be

As I have mentioned, from the *civil* side in the marriage equality bills, we're talking mostly about connubium - the right to marry. The matrimonium comes in only if there are children involved, wheher pre-existing, later adopted, or in the case of pre-menopausal lesbians, even naturally born (though perhaps not "naturally" conceived, though I would not refer to artificial insemination or other fertility treatment as "unnatural.")

Using a different term for the connubium of same-sex couples than that used for the connubium of opposite-sex couples is a bad idea.

Call it marriage. Period. The focus is on the connubium - and that is the *only* change that marriage equality laws make. Matrimonium does not change - if there are or will be children, than the family created by marriage, regardless of the gender of the couple, will benefit the children.

For Roamn Catholic thrologians, one might find support for the idea in an unexpected place – a 1930 Papal encyclical from Pius XI, that, while it does put primacy on matrimonium, does place a lot of value in other aspects of marriage - this encyclical could actually be rewritten with very few changes to incorporate Catholic theological teachings that could be applied to same-sex couples as well.

Casti Connubii is the name of the encyclical.

Here is an excerpt, from Paragraphs 24 and 25:

24. This mutual molding of [husband and wife] spouses, this determined effort to perfect each other, can in a very real sense, as the Roman Catechism teaches, be said to be the chief reason and purpose of matrimony, provided matrimony be looked at not in the restricted sense as instituted for the proper conception and education of the child, but more widely as the blending of life as a whole and the mutual interchange and sharing thereof.

25. By this same love it is necessary that all the other rights and duties of the marriage state be regulated as [the words of the Apostle: "Let the husband render the debt to the wife, and the wife also in like manner to the husband,"] not just a 50-50 proposition, but as each spouse giving 100% to the other, to express not only a law of justice but of charity.

NOTE: [Bracketed] portions to be deleted, Italicized portions are my gender-neutral replacements.

It's *possible* that one day, ancient texts will be rethought - after all, even our Declaration of Independence and other foundational documents are sexist - with the declaration that "all men are created equal" - at a time when married women were considered as "civilly dead" as any convicted felon, since in marriage under the common law, "the two become one and that one is the husband."

Today, we read men in that document as encompassing both men and women. Perhaps the day will come when old documents that relate to sex-specific marriage roles can be recast and reunderstood in a gender-neutral manner.

Many states have made their marriage and domestic relations laws largely gender neutral, even if many have not yet taken the final step of making the connubium also gender-neutral.

New York State is once again on the brink of recognizing the broadening of connubium to make it gender neutral.

Postscript: (Meanwhile in New York, the transgender community languishes, desperately awaiting Senate passage of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act (GENDA) – a bill which would serve to “catch up” the trans community on the issues of hate crimes (passed without us in 1999), and on human rights (passed without us in December 2002). GENDA passed in the Assembly this year one day before the Assembly passed the Marriage bill. While the Senate should take GENDA up immediately before marriage, that depends on the Republican leadership of the Senate, as to whether one, both, or neither bill will come up for a vote.

While making marriage laws gender neutral is a positive step for the trans and intersex communities as well as the members of the lesbian, gay and bisexual communities, the failure to enact GENDA will remain an indictment against the members of the legislature, and the governor, for not following through on this vital bill as well.)

When marriage equality comes to New York, and I fervently hope it does, if GENDA is not also passed, my celebration will be somewhat muted. Will the ardent advocates of marriage turn to help pass GENDA? Or will they disappear? And if GENDA does not get a Senate vote - when redistricting come in 2012, it would be my fervent hope that it would result in the election of 35 or 36 Democrats to the Senate - because once that happens, there will be no excuses left.

E pur si muove: A response to Keith Fournier’s lies and disinformation

Deacon Keith Fournier recently wrote an ignorant, inflammatory and inaccurate piece on transgender activism which was published at Catholic Online, entitled Exchanging the Truth of God for a Lie: Transgender Activists, Cultural Revolution

Fournier’s article is evidence of the continued resistance of the tradition-encrusted Roman Catholic Church’s to advances in scientific understanding that caused that Church to bring Galileo to trial for heresy, to condemn the more advanced (though still rather simple, cosmologically, as the Sun itself is not now understood to be the center of the universe, and is only a rather minor star in a peripheral spiral arm of a galaxy of over 200 million stars in a Universe that is staggeringly huge) scientific understanding of heliocentricity as being “false and contrary to Holy Scripture" because Galileo dared challenge the prevailing Church-accepted Ptolomaic geocentric theory of the solar system’s workings.

The Cardinals who condemned Galileo in their profound 17th century ignorance of the advances in cosmological science, pronounced in their decision that heliocentrism is “absurd and false philosophically and formally heretical, because it is expressly contrary to Holy Scripture” and that “The proposition that the earth is not the center of the universe and immovable, but that it moves (around the sun) and also with a rotational motion, is equally absurd, philosophically false and theologically erroneous.”

After a study of the Galileo trial that was commenced in 1979, on Halloween in 1992 Pope John Paul II finally issued an explanation, lifting the edict of Inquisition against Galileo, 359 years after the fact. While not actually apologizing, the pope said that

"Galileo sensed in his scientific research the presence of the Creator who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions."

Pope John Paul II pointed out at that time that the province of the Church is theology, and not science or astronomy. The pope indicated that the lack of modern scientific knowledge among the Cardinals on the tribunal,

"led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.”

And yet, Deacon Fournier, like many in that Church’s Magisterium, seems to have learned nothing at all from the serious error of those who put science on trial, and decided incorrectly.

Deacon Fournier is today in the same position of those 17th century Inquisition cardinals. He confuses his erroneous theological interpretation with Truth, he misstates and misinterprets the science and he ignores the evidence that explains the physiology of transgender people, the evidence for genetic predispositions and ontological development of brain structures along one sexed blueprint, while genital duct systems follow the other blueprint.

Instead, he starts with accusations that transgender people are the product of moral corruption, ignoring the moral corruption and mean-spirited attitudes that infest his church’s Magisterium. He misinterprets Romans 1 as a condemnation of homosexuality, rather than understanding that it is a condemnation of people who engage in sexual practices against their God-given natures while intoxicated during Bacchanalian religious rites. But why is Fournier beginning with a misdirected attack on homosexuality when the intended victims of his bullying are transgender people?

Does he not know the difference between sexual orientation and sex assignment, or with gender identity?

When Fournier erroneously declares that there are biblical references that must be ripped out of the Bible by those who maintain that “there is no reference to the rejection of homosexual practices in the Bible” - he is the one who has apparently ignored 1 Samuel 18, 2 Samuel 1 and many references in between, that relate to the marriage of David and Jonathan. In addition, he would have to rip out the often is interpreted story of the Men of Sodom – because a proper reading of that passage actually condemns Fournier’s own position, which, while wholly wrong, are consistent with the interpretive writings of Benedict XVI about things that “everyone knows” about Sodom, when he was merely Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and the head of the successor to the Inquisition, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

But Fournier iss supposedly condemning transgender people – so lets start with Isaiah 56, Matthew 19:12 and Acts 8 - all of which don’t seem to appear in Deacon Keith’s Bible – or he would understand that even Jesus knew about transgender and intersex people, and that we are special to God. Or he might ponder about the relationship between Genesis 1:27 and the secret name of God derived from reading the Tetragrammaton backward in Hebrew – which translates out as “He/She.” (This analysis is courtesy of Rabbi Mark Sameth of Pleasantville, who knows more about Jewish scripture than Deacon Fournier and any college of Cardinals combined.)

Fournier cites to the Reuters story about the lawsuits challenging New York’s birth certificate regulations. As I am the plaintiff in the first of these cases, I would suggest that he would do much better to refer to the actual legal documents and to the scientific materials that provide the basis for some of the challenge, rather than engaging in fanciful flights of illogic.

After quoting from the Reuters article, including a quote from me, he still does not have a clue, despite the words pointing him in the right direction for inquiry.
The next thing, Deacon Fournier starts some gibberish about the Australian Human Rights Commission recognizing “23 genders.” The ignorant article he first refers to cites to the Australian document – which does not identify 23 genders at all, but rather 23 terms for various gender identities on the spectrum of transgender identity that is in the gray area at the edge of the artificial binary that Western society imposes on the physiological sexual diversity in the nature of human beings. Those who accept the binary of sex as some strict “male and female” construct will shrug off those who don’t quite fit into their arbitrary definitions as abnormal, as “freakazoids,” or as delusional.

For Deacon Fournier’s edification, my best guess as to what “neutroi” might mean, is perhaps a weakly bigender identity that is the gender identity equivalent of asexuality. But that is not itself a “gender” if by gender Fournier means “sex assignment.”

Fournier is confused by all this, and he is in turn confusing apples with oranges – it is as if he is saying that some school board is no longer dealing with students as “boys” and “girls” but as” jocks, brainiacs, nerds, geeks, cheerleaders, skaters, outcasts, preppies, artsies, druggies, goths, gangstas, punks, rednecks, queers, etc.”

Interestingly, the Australian commission looks with favor on the language being considered by “the United States Senate” called “for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2009” which defines gender identity as:

‘the gender-related identity, appearance, or mannerisms or other gender-related characteristics of an individual, with or without regard to the individual’s designated sex at birth’.

The wording of the federal Bill has a number of advantages over the narrower Australian definitions that only protect people who identify as a member of the ‘opposite’ or ‘other’ sex.

I could go through a detailed history of how the American definition grew and evolved between 1979 and the present day – but I will leave that to another essay.
Of course, Fournier is too busy making things up about “23 genders” to actually find anything useful to discuss, at least until he gets really deep into his article.
Fournier attacks hormonal and surgical treatments that are used to help those transgender people who feel the sociocultural pressure to conform those parts of our bodies that can be brought into greater conformity with the artificial binary expectation of society.

Perhaps in a society that respected the diversity of natural sex as was common among many world cultures in ancient times and even more recently, before those cultures were exposed to western binary prejudices, there would be a cultural niche appropriate for those who are different. However, we live in a society that recognizes two sexes, so the accepted medical practice is to try to help transgenderr people conform more closely to the physiological norm for those whose brain development is similar to our own.

Certainly, the late iranian Shi’ite Ayatollah Khomenei actually understood more about transgender people than the Catholic Church – even though the mullahs who have followed him have twisted his fatwa on the subject to give gay people they plan to execute by stoning, an alternative, to subject themselves to transsexual surgeries rather than a painful death.

Fournier writes, without a clue as to the real science:

“Medical science confirms that our identity as male or female affects even our brains. In addition, even the physical appearance must be sustained by massive doses of synthetic hormones.”

In the first sentence, he gets a glimmer of the truth – yes, there are sexed differences in brains – but he ignores the science – that transgender people have sex-differentiated brain structures in the hypothalamus that conform to those of the other genital sex.

In 1995, in a peer-reviewed article in Nature, entitled A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality [Nature 378, 68 - 70 (02 November 1995); doi:10.1038/378068a0] the researchers involved gave us a first glimmer into transsexual brain structures.

This was confirmed in a follow-up study in 2000, entitled Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus, published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism Vol. 85, No. 5 2034-2041


But Deacon Fournier, as little as he understands the theology of transgender people (or gay people, for that matter) fails even more spectacularly to understand medical science. The first thing is that not all hormone therapy is by way of “synthetic” hormones. (He apparently does not know how premarin is manufactured, for example). Then he does not undertsand that synthetic hormonal therapies are used for a number of medical treatments – for example, one of the diabetes drugs that keep me alive every day is called Byetta, and it is a synthetic hormone derived from Gila monster saliva, which works as a mimetic for hormones secreted by the first two feet of the small intestine at the beginning of the digestive process and which stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin.

In rejecting surgeery for those transgender people who need it and can have it, he should also reject other life-saving surgery - perhaps he should forgo a needed triple bypass, because the intervention of a surgeon would violate his body as a temple of the Holy Spirit and interfere with God’s plan for his life and death. Applying this sort of “theology” to science is exactly what went wrong with the Galileo case – and Fournier is repeating history.

He also does not really understand the source of the “sub secretum” document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – it was issued first in 2000, and then circulated in 2002 to the bishops when it became apparent that none of the bishops had been asking their papal representatives anything about transgender people.

This document was leaked to Catholic News Service in February 2003 – and that is where a lot of the information available to the public about this document comes from.

It is believed that the source for mush of the erroneous information about transgender people in the sub secretum document came from Dr. Paul McHugh, an Opus Dei zealot whose area of psychiatric expertise is eating disorders, but who, as head of the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, shut down that institution’s sex reassignment surgery clinic. Much of the thrust of McHugh’s animus against transgender people comes from his severe lack of understanding of the facts – and his attack is on the discredited theories of the late John Money – an attack that Deacon Fournier continues. But the attack is misdirected, and is not against the actual science, but only at John Money's discredited ideas.

In addition to McHugh, another person thought to have been a source for the document was Urbano Cardinal Navarrete, a Spanish Jesuit most noted for being responsible for the enforced masculinization by the of the three persons of the Holy Trinity – Navarrete is thought to have been responsible for the invalidation of Catholic baptisms performed using gender-neutral references to the Trinity (example: Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier), rather than the traditional patriarchal masculine Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This pronouncement of masculine attributes of God is as ridiculous as the Church’s position on transgender people – but as long as they are sticking to theology for the adherents of their increasingly irrelevant and morally backward Church, that last is something that does not affect me, and as ludicrous as it is, there is no reason for me to do more than snicker at their patriarchist chutzpah, especially since I've since rejected the trinitarian doctrine and the divinity of that great Jewish teacher, the Rabbi Yeshua ben Miriam.

The place where the Church goes wrong on the science as it relates to transgender people is in its insistence on birth genital essentialism as a reaction to the unsound theories of John Money, and to certain aspects of feminism (though the Church itself is the source of the birth-genital essentialism espoused by some who style themselves radical feminist separatists based on Catholic-influenced doctrine passed to them by the late Mary Daly and her protege, Janice Raymond, the infamous author of The Transsexual Empire.

Fournier directs his attack without taking into account the individual’s personal biological, genetic and developmental factors that indicate that this birth genital-based assignment is incorrect.

In 2008, two separate studies from Australia established separate genetic predispositions for different kinds of transgender development.

In one study, the predisposition for those who develop with female-identified brains and male genital tracts was shown to involve a long androgen receptor gene:
Lauren Hare, Pascal Bernard, Francisco J. Sanchez, Paul N. Baird, Eric Vilain, Trudy Kennedy and Vincent R. Harley. Androgen Receptor (AR) Repeat Length Polymorphism Associated with Male-to-female Transsexualism. Biological Psychiatry, Advance online publication date 27 Oct 2008, Jan 2009 print edition

The other study,aimed at those who develop with male-identified brains and female genital tract development, was entitled A Polymorphism of the CYP17 Gene Related to Sex Steroid Metabolism is Associated With Female-to-Male But Not Male-to-Female Transsexualism by Bentz, Eva-Katrin; Hefler, Lukas A.; Kaufmann, Ulrike; Huber, Johannes C.; Kolbus, Andrea; Tempfer, Clemens B., published in Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey: December 2008 - Volume 63 - Issue 12 - pp 775-777
doi: 10.1097/01.ogx.0000338093.21452.0b

These studies, and the brain structure studies from 1995 and 2000, provide clues to the ontological developments that result in transgender people. While there is much additional study required, these studies make it possible to discredit the earlier understandings of transgender people that date back to 1965, in which transgender people were seen as merely delusional members of their initially-assigned sex, for whom any treatment is seen as merely palliative. It is the erroneous assumption at the root of the Roman Catholic Church Magisterium's position, and it is just as wrong as relying on the Bible to classify bats as birds merely because they fly, or whales as fish because they swim in the ocean.

Strangely enough, once one realizes that this misplaced genital essentialism is the primary issue with the Magisterium’s doctrine, it becomes apparent that things like Bishop Gregory’s quote about “canonical condition” can be made to make sense. Of course, it’s okay to see gender as fixed at birth, as long as we understand that it is the brain and not the genitalia, that is the predominant factor in the correct assignment. In addition, it should be obvious that even the Bible recognized some people as falling outside the male/female binary - the people classified as "eunuchs."

After all – my own situation is one in which I am asking the City of New York for a correction of the error made in my assignment at birth, as well as to conform my birth certificate with my other identity documentation. I am looking for a correction, not a change. There is a difference, one lost on Deacon Fournier.

Indeed, the Church’s position is and should be purely theological, and not scientific. He Magisterium should keep its theological noses out of the scientific arena and the medical science as it relates to who is properly assigned to which sex, unless it wishes to conform its theology to the prevailing science, and is willing to change that theology when the scientific understanding becomes more complete.

I am not calling for a right to “choose” a gender – I am calling for a legal right to correct my sex designation on a document that was erroneous at the time of my birth. And if the Church won't change my baptismal certificate, that's perfectly fine, since I have rejected their theology a while ago.

Deacon Fournier and his Church have a nasty habit of interfering in areas about which their Magisterium has no credible scientific, legal or cultural business. These include civil marriage, women’s reproductive rights in the civil arena (they can call whatever they want to be “sinful”), and the human rights, dignity and worth of transgender, lesbian, intersex, bisexual and gay people. The Church can deny us the priesthood, it can deny us the right to a sacrament of matrimony, but when it interferes in the civil arena in its gross, immoral and theologically unsound manner, they should expect pushback from those they oppress in their mean-spirited effort to impose their peculiar and backward morality on those whose moral compass actually points in the right direction.

Western Civilization became what it was in large part despite the resistance ot the Church, not because of it.

Thank the Arabs. Thank the Irish. Thank the Jews. Thank the Greeks and the Romans. Thank Thomas Aquinas, who more than anyone else was responsible for the Church accepting Aristotle, which allowed for a jump-start for the renaissance. Thank Martin Luther and Henry VIII, at least a little. Thank the scientists, engineers and inventors who brought the Industrial Revolution.

But the Church itself has done more harm than good over its lifetime, particularly when it acts in ignorant tradition-bound resistance to advances in science and to a kinder, gentler, superior morality. And rather than making me wait 359 years for a tepid apology, perhaps Deacon Fournier can start the ball rolling by apologizing now. But I won’t hold my breath or that. I would only hope and pray that the day comes when God will open his eyes, soften his heart and make him open up to the idea that at least some of the things he knows for sure about sex and gender may not be right 100% of the time.

Bryan Fischer wants Women to shower with Trans Men

Just this past week, I turned my attention to the American "Family" Association's Bryan Fischer, and showed that he is neither a real Conservative or a real Christian. Thanks to my friend Zoe Brain, I've just been exposed to more of Fischer's inability to understand sacred scripture or science, in a blog essay over at the American "Family" Association's "Rightly Concerned" Blog, entitled "Barney Frank: ENDA is about men showering with women."

Fischer starts out showing his inability to comprehend Christian sacred scripure. His first two very short paragraphs are an attempt at scriptural exegesis:

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27, emphasis mine).

According to both Scripture and biology, there are just two genders, two
and only two, male and female. Period.

The emphasis was Fischer's, but it may as well have been mine. And his conclusion is totally and completely incorrect.

First, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, Genesis 1:27 has an "and" and not an "or" connecting "male" and "female."

Second, this scriptural passage connotes that the very image of God is "male *and* female." All Fischer needs to do is read about the (allegorical, true, but this is a bigger point for a biblical literalist) creation of Adam. Adam was created in God's image, "male and female" in one being, and then split into two people. This does not mean that every person created by God is "split" in exactly the same way. From the perspective of scripture, transsexual people are created by God with natures that are different - not entirely male, and not entrely female. In a way, we're possibly more "God-like" than most people, though we are not "all male" and "all female" in the way that God's image and likeness is. For more on the image and likeness of God, and how this relates to the Name of God, I'd refer Bryan to Rabbi Mark Sameth.

Third, scripture contains references to people who are male, people who are female, and people who are "other." Those "other" people are called "eunuchs" in sacred scripture. Is Bryan saying that sacred scripture is untrue? That there are no people who are different?

Jesus Christ knew more about transsexual and intersex people that Bryan Fischer. We have one biblical verse in which Jesus mentions us, using the term "eunuchs" but that term is fleshed out. Let's look at Matthew 19:12, which together with passages from Isaiah and Acts constitute a triple reference that should tell Bryan that trans people are specially loved by God.

In Matthew 19:12, we hear the words of Jesus:

"for there are eunuchs which have been born thus from [their] mother's womb; and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs of men; and there are eunuchs who have made eunuchs of themselves for the sake of the kingdom of the heavens. He that is able to receive [it], let him receive [it]."

I've used Darby here, but I could have used any of the literal translations.

So let's examine Jesus' words more closely, since people like Bryan are incapable of taking more than a few words in at once and not making a jumble of them:

"for there are eunuchs which have been born thus from [their] mother's womb; . . ."

In this first phrase, Jesus makes it clear that He, unlike Bryan, understands that transsexual and intersex people are born different.

". . . and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs of men; . . ."

While this second phrase may refer to those who are castrated as punishment for a crime, or to make them sing as sopranos in the Vatican choir, or for those who entered into government service in China or the Eastern Roman Empire, it also refers to things like genital reconstructuin surgery, performed on some trans and intersex people so that they can fit more easily into the artificial societal construct of sex that is imposed on the diversity of nature, to match the way their brains developed.

". . . and there are eunuchs who have made eunuchs of themselves for the sake of the kingdom of the heavens. "

This third category of eunuch has from early Christian times been misinterpreted as referring to priestly celibacy, in a reaction to those Chriistians who took literally Christ's admonitions in Matthew 5:30 and 18:8, and Mark 9:43-45, and, like the theologian Origen, castrated themselves to avoid succumbing to their sexual urges. Paul of Tarsus offered marriage as an alternative to Christians who could not make themselves be celibate - teaching that Christians should be celibate, but those who cannot control their sexual urges should get married. For true Christians, based on Paul's teaching, getting married s an acknowledgment of an inability for the parties to sexually contain themselves. (of course, not everyone is a Christian, and not all Christians are faithful to Paul's teaching, but it is at least a rebuttable presumption that any married Christian is unable to control their sexual urges - otherwise they would have chosen to be celibate, like the Shakers.)

In actuality, the third category of eunuch in Jesus' words, is a reference back to Isaiah 56:4-5, in which the Lord says:

". . . Unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and hold fast to my covenant,

even unto them will I give in my house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off."

Jesus, a great scripture scholar, knew that God has a special place in God's own House for those who are transsexual and intersex.

We already knew that Bryan Fischer fails in his theological understanding of sacred scripture. I just wanted to make it absolutely clear that he is wrong about Genesis 1:27. There can be no doubt of this among reasonable minds.

Let's turn to biology, shall we?

We've clearly established that Fischer nows nothing about scripture; he apparently knows even less about biology.

His third paragraph is a gem:

"Pro-family advocates have from the beginning opposed the normalizing of transgenderism because it does gross violence to any rational view of human sexuality, and, even worse, will force women to share shower, bathroom and locker-room facilities with biological males. "

First, he mischaracterizes his cohorts as "pro-family advocates." That is an utter lie. He and people like James Dobson are about as anti-family as they come. The only families that they support are families like their own. They believe that families that are different are to be feared and hated. That is not pro-family, just like the National Organization "for" Marriage is not for Marriage but is against it.

Second, Fischer does not have a rational view of human sexuality, or biology. He fails to understand that nature is more diverse than society, and that there are people who do not easily fit into societal definitions of male or female. For people who hew to the narrow view of sex assignment, anyone who does not fit into that view perfectly is abnormal, deviant and pathological. It's also why people like Fischer conflate homosexuality, which is a sexual orientation, with transsexualism, which involves gender identity seated in the brain, and its relation to sex assignment. These are different issues, but the T is associated with the LG and B because we are all *different* from the sexuality expected by the majority, and as a result, elements within that majority feel no compunction about singling us out for persecution just because we are different in some way. Bullies like Bryan Fischer have no sense of morality or decency. They lie like snakes in the grass, and strike with their venom, their lies, and their deceit. They delight in whipping up of gullible and ignorant straight cissexual people into a frenzy of fear that is rooted in their fear of people who are not exactly like them, ghoulishly raking in their contributions to fight against justice and decency.

Human sexuality is diverse. It is society that imposes the two-sex view on nature.

If society insists that there has to be two and only two sexes, then society has to accommodate those who are different and do not exactly fit into the narrow view, in a reasonable way.

Forcing women to bathe with men is not reasonable. But THAT is what Bryan Fischer wants! He wants to force transsexual men to use women;s shower facilities. Because Bryan does not recognize genital reconstruction surgery as being effective, he wants men - men with beards, deep voices and male pattern voices, some of whom have larger penises than others, to shower with women, just because those men were born with a developed mullerian duct system and have or had uteruses.

Just because Bryan thinks of women as merely walking uteruses and sperm depositories, does not mean that such a viewpoint is universally shared. I am sure that when Bryan is not busy opposing reasonable treatment for trans people, he must be out there shaking jars of formaldehyde with fetuses at women going to see their doctors for medical treatment. His reduction of women to the mullerian duct system, as mere cows who exist for the purpose of bearing children to the men who think they own them, is shameful.

Then he wants to force women to share showers with trans men. Shame on him! There is no rational basis for his position. He apparently thinks that there are only transsexual women out there for him to degrade and abuse. He does not seem to realize that there are transsexual men, too - and that when he forces women out of the showers and locker rooms, he is forcing real men into those same places!

Bryan does not want those gullible and ignorant followers of his to know the truth - because if they knew the truth, they would realize just how ridiculous his position is. No - Bryan is relying on the idea that trans men will be too afraid to use women's facilities because they would be openly challenged by the women, even though Bryan insists that this is where these men belong.
What he really wants is for trans people to be relegated to the shadows of society and not be seen in the daylight lest we offend people who are afraid of people who don;t fit into their preconceived binary notions of reality.

The reality is that even under ENDA, women-born-female (WBFs) would not be forced to shower with pre-op/non-op women-born-transsexual, at the same time. Women who have, or still have, penises, would either have private showers in the women's area, or if there are only open showers, can be accommodated by way of "time-slicing" so they have access at different times from women who have an objection. Post-op women should not be subjected to any limitation.

When it comes to bathrooms, privacy is at the stall level. Pre-op and non-op women can and dod safely use public bathroom facilities every day without a problem. It's usually the butch lesbians who get hassled by other women in the bathroom because they sometimes get mistaken for men, depending on what they are wearing.

Bryan goes on to paint a distorted picture of trans people:

Transgenders are people who are so psychologically and mentally confused they think they are trapped in a body of the wrong sex.

So we are talking here about biological males - males in every single cell of their bodies, with every strand of DNA male to the core, males according to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” - who are convinced that they are women trapped in male bodies. Consequently, they want to act as women, dress as women, and use the same facilities women use, including bathrooms, showers, and locker rooms.

Do you notice how easily and quickly Bryan makes the inconvenient trans men disappear? That's because he wants to foist these men onto women in women's showers and other facilities.

But that isn't the primary point. Bryan shows he doesn't have a clue about science, much as he proves over and over again that he does not have a clue about Christian sacred scripture.

Trans women are not and never are men. Not even when they got the blue blanket in the nursery because the obstetrician saw an "outie" rather than an "innie." Just because many may have an XY 23rd chromosome pair does not make them male. There has been scientific research that shows that there is an SRY gene that is one of the primary blueprints for male development. There have been genetic situtaions that have been discovered that explain at least some cases of transsexualism. In the past couple of years, a gene has been found that results in a "long androgen receptor." This may explain some of the brain development of trans women as female, while the recepptors work well enough to cause the wolffian ducts to develop rather then the mullerian ducts. For trans men, a gene was found that causes testosterone to be processed much more efficiently - and thiscan have an effect on embryonic and fetal development.

Bryan does not seem to realize that the "default" blueprint for the human body is female, and that any male development is the result of deviance from that default. In essence, before sexual differentiation, embryos are, as the bible points out in Genesis 1:27, "male *and* female." They have the capacity to develop in either direction, depending on how the blueprint reads, and the construction process moves. Transsexual embryos/fetuses get some parts that develop along male lines, and some parts that develop along female lines. Other intersex embryos/fetuses have developmental differences that range from developing fully in accordance with the "opposite" blueprint - complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS) is an example, in which an embryos that would be classified as (unsing Bryan's words):

"males in every single cell of their bodies, with every strand of DNA male to the core"

develop phenotypically as female, because even though their bodies are full of testosterone, their cells have testosterone receptors that do not work. Remember, the default development is female, so that explains why the female form is used in the construction when the testosterone does not work.

Returning to trans women, or rather, fetuses that develop along those lines, the long androgen receptors may or may not be sufficient to cause female development in the brain or parts of the brain. The result is likely that not everyone who has this genetic feature will turn out to be a woman-born-transsexual. But enough of us do.

The studies do not claim to have found the only source of these developmental differences, but they point out the fact that who and what we are is biological and not merely psychiatric.

While the APA still classifies 'gender identity disorder" as a mental disorder, Bryan's take on it is pure prejudice and not scientific at all. The only reason for the mental disorder classification is so that trans people can get treatment. There are better models, medical models, that would be just as effective and less stigmatizing. The appropriate treatment, from the standpoint of a society that demands that there be only two sexes, is hormonal and surgical treatment to allow the trans individual to fit into society.

But Bryan and his ilk would have none of this - they'd rather have all trans people just commit suicide for lack of treatment, or push us off to the quacks who still practice electroshock and other "conversion" therapies that have been proven to be ineffective.

The only perversion I would not want to have people exposed to is Bryan's perversion of Christianity into something hateful and malignant.

Bryan quotes from Barney Frank, who, while a member of Congress, and a gay man, is no expert on transsexualism. Barney only showed in what Bryan quoted that even our allies need to be educated. But at least people like Barney Frank are likely to be educable, unlike bigots like Bryan, who perhaps should try electroshock therapy themselves to eliminate their harmful religious delusions. Not all religion is delusional, I hasten to add, and not all religious delusions are harmful. But when people like Bryan twist sacred scripture and science to fit their bigotry and prejudice and genuinely believe that they are right, they prove they are in serious need of professional help.

Incredibly, Bryan has to go back to 1999, when Rep. Frank was even less knowledgeable about trans people than he is now, to dig up his quote. In 1999, the first BSTc study was only four years old and was not widely known outside of specialized scientific circles.

Being gay does not make Barney Frank an expert on transsexual people, even now, but he's better today than he was in 1999, even if he still does not quite "get it."
And even in 1999, Barney was explaining that it was society that he saw as not ready to accept trans women as women. Things have changed - and those people who feel that way are increasingly in the minority.

Even most transsexual people ourselves are not experts on what it is that makes us tick - in part because we've all been educated in the same societal system that expects the sex binary to be a reflection of nature. We just know that the initial sex assignment was wrong. Once we realize that nature is more diverse, it's still difficult to let go of the societal expectations. Indeed, unless society changes, those who transition rather than trying to "gut it out" as something like "genderqueer" may have a better chance at coping with society, provided society meets us part way with reasonable accommodations.

So, when it comes to "protecting our wives and daughters," just remember that it's Bryan Fischer who is the one who really wants us women sharing the facilities with trans men. He just doesn't come out and say it openly, because it would scare away all those pretty donations that line his pockets.

--
ADDENDUM - August 30, 2010:

For those who want to know more about biological issues in the gray area that the "society" has historically ignored, and Bryan Fischer wants to continue keeping in ignorance, I suggest that readers take a look at numerous entries over at Zoe Brain's blog (you can find it in the column to the right).

Here are some examples of medical scientific studies that Zoe has provided information about:

http://www.facebook.com/l/c76ab;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18000096.

There's more in the comments at http://www.facebook.com/l/c76ab;aebrain.blogspot.com/2010/08/travel-issues.html
e.g. Frydman, R. et. al. (1988) Pregnancy in a 46 XY patient. Fertil. Steril., 50:813-814. Kan, A.K.S., et. al. (1997)

Two successful pregnancies in a 46, XY patient. Hum. Reprod.,12(7):1434-1435. Selvaraj, K., et. al. (2002)

Successful pregnancy in a patient with a 46, XY karyotype. Fertil. Steril., Aug.; 78(2):419-420.

A brief Epistle to Totustuos

Totustuos (nice Latin pun of a name/handle! Is he or she really "totally mine?" "All yours," literally - though perhaps short for JPII's motto) commented on my Blog essay: “Responding to the Manhattan Declaration” with the following:

“Robert George is truly a brilliant Philosophical icon of the 21st century. No liberals have ever challenge and won against his natural law argument. To all liberal gays, transgender, and other morphed humans, go straight and be save.”

I can certainly agree with Totustuos that Robby George is “brilliant” and is seen as a “philosophical icon” to his many followers, including many members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

However, with regard to any successes to a challenge to Robby’s “Natural Law Argument,” I would disagree. Robby usually sets up a straw man “liberal” who may be arguing philosophically in accord with utilitarianism or hedonism as a basis, rather than a “natural law” or “social contract” theory. In so setting up a liberal “straw man” as a hedonist or utilitarian, Robby proceeds to beat the imaginary "liberal" opponent thoroughly (but figuratively) senseless.

Robby doesn’t normally face challenges on his own natural law turf, against his concepts of “practical reason.” But that is exactly what he gets from me - and I don't think our correspondent Totustuos quite gets that.

Robby’s “practical reason” (his version of “natural law”) arguments fail, first because his idea of natural law is not derived from nature (but from nature, at best, viewed through a set of unwarrantedly-constraining blinders to eliminate natural diversity).

Second, his arguments fail because his reasoning, or rather, rationalization on the basis of false premises, goes further astray. This may be done blindly, because his rationalization process is flawed by virtue of prejudice that is sufficiently internalized and institutionalized so he truly believes that he is arguing from Reason, or malevolently, where he knows he is arguing from a grounding ind eep-seated prejudice, but either does not care or is working knowingly for an evil cause. I will presume the former ignorant blindness rather than the latter indifference or malevolence, since such a presumption is more charitable and collegial, but I will not rule out the latter motivations.

Augustine of Hippo brought both Platonic philosophy and a corrupt Manichean view of nature into Christian thinking. Sadly, Christianity was diminished by the concepts of Original Sin and the view that the natural world is somehow less than the spiritual one.

Aquinas made Aristotle safe for Christianity, and almost single-handedly ushered in a Christian respect for science (notwithstanding those "Galileo moments"), and the budding of the Renaissance and Industrial eras.

Robby George and his views represent a dead end, a turning away from right reason and a descent into barbarism – and he even knows it. When confronted by a reporter for the New York Times Magazine with possible criticism based on Martin Luther’s insistence that “reason was so corrupted that faith in the divine was humanity’s only hope of salvation,” Robby is quoted as acknowledging “This is a serious issue, and if I am wrong, this is where I am wrong.”

This is indeed exactly where Robby’s rationalizations are wrong. Beginning with a warped and unscientific understanding of the nature of nature, he builds his rationalized castles in the sand without foundation, convinced that his “practical reason” rationalizations are correct despite being blinded by and presumably not cosnsciously aware of his deeply-rooted prejudices.

To Totustuos, who refers to “. . . transgender, and other morphed humans,” it is likely that I may not get through with this message, because of the presence of the same sort of deeply ingrained, institutionalized, institutionally approved and authorized prejudice that warps the perception of reality to conform it to the already-warped principles on which the prejudice is built. Castles built in the same sand into which heads are hidden, waiting to be washed away by the waters of right reason.

Perhaps it is true that Robby George is brilliant, but brilliance alone is insufficient – one must also be correct. Brilliance was traditionally known to be the mark of the Archangel Lucifer – and tradition tells us what he did, and who he is – one reason I referred to Robby as Father of Lies in my earlier essay. Brilliant, but corrupted by his hubris as was his “brilliant” predecessor luminary, he and his flawed rationalizations continue unjustly persecuting me and my people.

Totustuos, to be saved, you may yet have to hug me, at least spiritually.

In pacem et iustitiam,

Joann Prinzivalli
Serva Servarum Deae

Responding to the Manhattan Declaration

A REAL Christian and Humanitarian Response to the Manhattan Declaration
Introductory Statement

The Manhattan Declaration was released from under some rock in New Jersey some time on November 20, 2009. It is reported to be the work of Christianist apologist Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence with ostensibly sterling academic credentials in law and theology.

As recently reported in the New York Times magazine, Robert P. George is the notorious board chair of the so-called “National Organization for Marriage” which opposes civil marriage rights for certain minorities, supporting instead special rights for the majority. He founded a group called the “American Principles Project” which opposes and attempts to undermine the principles under which the United States was founded, and which has sponsored a witch hunt of lies and innuendoes aimed at Kevin Jennings, an openly gay member of the Obama administration. He assisted in the drafting of a proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, to enshrine bigotry in the United States Constitution.

At Princeton, Robert P. George founded The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which opposes American ideals and is designed to subvert American institutions. While it invokes the name of one of the founding fathers, it certainly does not reflect Madison’s vision of American principles. He has also been a founder of the Witherspoon Institute. Robert P. George is reputed to have links to, or membership in, the shadowy Roman Catholic Christianist cult Opus Dei. According to Frank Cocozzelli, neither James Madison nor his “influential teacher at Princeton” John Witherspoon, would be happy with the association of their names with the subversive anti-American theories of government espoused by Robert P. George. Witherspoon and Madison actually opposed the idea of religious factions imposing their will on the American people that is championed by “Robby” George.

Robby? According to the article in the Times magazine, “Seemingly everyone from [Karl] Rove to Cardinal Rigali calls him, simply, Robby.” So, for the remainder of this proclamation, we shall simply refer to him by that familiar name.

Robby may be fairly called a Father of Lies, since his obviously tissue-paper thin rationalizations in the justification of prejudice and bigotry masquerade as being based on principles of “natural law” can be refuted point by point.

The first thing to point out are Robby’s appeal to Christians in the preamble as being “heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.”
The thrust of the Manhattan Declaration is to cloak opposition to justice, imposition of tyranny, and oppression of women and minorities, in a sheep’s mantle of appearances. His opposition to human rights and dignity will be made apparent in short order, but the Manhattan Declaration begins with soothing thoughts of justice and compassion to lull the minds of the easily duped into complacency. So now we turn to responding to the document itself.


A RESPONSE TO “THE MANHATTAN DECLARATION

NOTE: The text of the Manhattan Declaration is "quoted," while the response is in Regular type

Preamble

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God's word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.

On the other hand, unlike real Christians, Christianists have misused the message, the teachings and tenets of Christianity for nearly 2,000 years to persecute and crusade against those whose beliefs are different, to oppress women, to enslave minorities, to twist the Good News of the Gospels and use it to persecute and oppress people of different natures. Augustine of Hippo was not the first, but was one of the most prominent of these early Christianist hypocrites, mixing his Manichean and Platonic philosophical leanings with Christianity to create a toxic brew from which the Roman Catholic Church has not overcome.

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian
institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those
Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash
heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire's sanctioning of
infanticide.

Christianists should be cognizant of the Judaeo-Christian traditions and biblical teachings that associate the soul with the breath of life, and that recognized that the soul is not infused in a human being until it is born and has taken at least one breath, which Christian tradition has been embodied in the Anglo-American Common Law from time immemorial. They should be aware of the meaning of the Sacrament of Baptism, which in its traditional form of immersion is a recapitulation of the time spent in the womb, and then birth and a new first breath. They should recognize and speak to the truth that the rules and laws they support that are against women’s reproductive choices, including opposition to abortion rights and denial of access to contraception, are intended for the purpose of oppressing women, and not for the purpose of protecting the lives of human beings. They should recognize and admit the truth, that abortion was expressly permitted by Christian teachings well past the thirteenth century.

We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by
remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who
died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.

Real Christians will be aware that war and the death penalty are secular evils against which Christians should be willing to sacrifice their lives. The author and signers of the Manhattan Declaration elevate the value of human life in potentia over that of human lives in being.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not
only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture.

It was Irish Celitic Christian monks who preserved much, but it was early Islamic Culture that preserved the works of Aristotle, which were later incorporated into Christian thinking through the work of Thomas Aquinas, and that later, when Western culture started to flourish, Islamic culture withered because of its leadership holding arcane religious tenets to supersede the teachings of science, and which started an oppression of women and minorities.

It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and
17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated
anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led
by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in
that country. Christians under Wilberforce's leadership also formed hundreds
of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

It was Christianists who used the Bible to support the evil of Slavery – teaching that African slaves were the descendants of Ham, and condemned to be the servants of White slaveowners. There are Christianists today who would support evil practices such as racial segregation. We must be mindful of the preachings of many earnest white Protestant ministers in the 19th century who railed from the pulpit that the involuntary servitude of African Americans was biblically justified, referring to the slaves as “Children of Ham” and referring to the Genesis 9:20-27 story in which Ham’s descendants (Canaan and his children) are punished by God – to be the servants of the children of Shem and Japeth.

Yes, those white ministers of religion believed that Christianity endorses slavery - and their reliance on Genesis 9 shows that they were not limited to the teaching of St. Paul abjuring slaves to be obedient to their masters (Ephesians 6:5, Titus 2:9).

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully
fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which
made modern democracy possible.

The divine right of kings was a Christian institution and a way to keep the papacy as a force above the kings; it was the work of enlightenment philosophers at the edge of Christianity, and of Deists, atheists and others, who successfully fought to create the American Experiment. America is not a Christian nation, but a nation which supports and encourages a diversity of religious belief and expression, centered on a higher morality in the common public square than that encouraged by religious intolerance.

And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians
claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every
human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

The truth is that the women’s movement was a movement of women of all sorts of religious backgrounds and traditions. It was and still is the Christianist objective to maintain and preserve the institutions of patriarchal dominance over women. In the 1830’s and 1840’s and even now, as evidenced by much of Robby’s writing once stripped of the smarmy rhetoric, many ministers of religion opposed basic human rights for women, particularly married women, because altering the laws relating to marriage by giving women control over their own inheritances, or wages, or allowing women to vote, would destroy the sacred institution of marriage. After all, just as slaves were told by St. Paul to be obedient to their masters (see Ephesians and Titus citations above), wives were told to be obedient to their husbands (Titus 2:5).

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to
work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery,
bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of
other human rights causes - from providing clean water in developing nations to
providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and
gender discrimination.

Christianists such as the author of and signatories to the Manhattan Declaration have maintained a crusade against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people because they are different, and Christianists continue to oppress women. And how does Robby explain the Roman Catholic and Bush Administration policies that have crippled the fight against the spread of HIV in Africa? Not at all – caring for the victims may be compassionate, but halting the spread of disease would be a loftier goal. Abstinence education does not work.

Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called
to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the
human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling,
the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a
profound contribution to the public good.

Christianists like Robby George and his ilk, on the other hand, feel a call to oppress women, lesbian, gay and transgender people as a contribution to the blight of bigotry and prejudice that they surround with lip service to allegedly Christian principles. You will know them by their works.

Declaration

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered,
beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration,
which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking
to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God,
the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and
by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and
defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in
light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason
(which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very
nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and
non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues
we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s
conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

The preceding paragraph are flowery, nice sounding language that says that Christianists want to continue to oppress women by denying them reproductive health services, to persecute people whose sexual orientation or gender identity is different from what society’s majority expects, and to use their bigoted religious beliefs as a shield a pass for unlawful discriminatory activity in the public square. Marriage has been “redefined” over the years as society has evolved. Now that we have become more civilized, it is certainly a moral good to welcome previously despised ,ostracized and misunderstood minorities into fuller participation in the society as equals.

Because the sanctity of human life

Which the Christianists reserve only for unborn babies and not for those on death row or the victims of war, and which Christianists use as a code to elevate the “sanctity” of human life in potentia over the sanctity of human lives in being.

, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife,

Which Christianists assume means that marriage can’t include husbands and husbands, or wives and wives, because they believe only Christianists should be entitled to dignity and legal protection.

and the freedom of conscience and religion

which is all well and good, except the freedom of conscience means choosing professions that do not require a “conscience” decision, and the freedom of religion must not be limited only to the freedom of religion of Christianists and those who share their beliefs.

are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled
by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we
affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a
creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal
dignity and life;

by which, somehow, the author and signers of the Manhattan Declaration mean fetuses, to the exclusion of lives already in being.

2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the
creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to
be the most basic institution in society and;

Which should not interfere with marriage as also encompassing a conjugal union of man and man, or woman and woman; after all, David and Jonathan were married, right there in 1 Samuel 18, right? As to marriage being “ordained by God from the creation” – that is a matter of one sort of religious belief, and there are other legitimate views, some of which involve a correct interpretation of sacred scripture, and others which do not rely on Judaeo/Christian/Islamic traditions,

3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example
of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the
divine image.

Christianists believe that only they should have religious liberty – how about the religious liberty of Unitarians willing to marry gays? The author and signatories to the Manhattan Declaration make a hollow mockery of the very idea of religious freedom.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of
ecclesial differences to affirm our right - and, more importantly, to embrace
our obligation – to speak and act in defense of these truths.

No, Robby and his ilk are Christianists, joining together to oppress women and LGBT people.

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on
earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or
acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to
fail in that duty.

If they were truly Christians, they wouldn’t be making and signing this ridiculous Declaration. Remember that. And those of us who truly believe in religious freedom, pledge that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate *us* into silence or acquiescence. It is the duty of those of us who are Christian to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. It is the duty of those of us with other beliefs to maintain the freedom of our various and diverse religious beliefs in a diverse and multicultural society. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Life
So God created man in his own image, in the image
of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis
1:27

EVERY human being is created “male and female.” Every human being has the blueprints in every cell of their bodies, to build a male or female body. Many will develop as primarily male, and others will develop as primarily female, but still others have characteristics of BOTH. GOD’s true name is HE/SHE and the original Adam was fully male and fully female until he was separated into two people.

Yet Robby and the people who follow his thinking are among the worst oppressors of the transgender community.

From a real Christian point of view, those who claim to be Christian might do well to read the warm and welcoming words of Isaiah. Chapter 56, in which we learn, in verses 3-8:

3Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.

4For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;

5Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.

6Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD, to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant;

7Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

8The Lord GOD, which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him.

What most Christianists on the Robby George bandwagon don’t seem to realize, is that the biblical term "eunuchs" includes people who today would be called "transgender." And God loves transgender people, even if Christianists do not know how to love his neighbors who are strange and different.

Even the Lord Jesus knew that the term "eunuchs" includes a number of different kinds of people, when he is quoted in Matthew 19:12 as saying:

"12For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

Transgender people are "so born from their mother's womb." Misassigned a sex at birth, they spend their early lives being told they are something they know deep inside that they are not. Some transition early in life, while others continue their struggle into mid-life. Some will have surgical intervention, while others will not. Christians know that God loves transgender people and has a special place in heaven "in my (God's) house within my (God's) walls a place and a name . . . an everlasting name that shall not be cut off."

If Isaiah's and Jesus' own words are not enough, there is always Acts 8:

36And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?

37And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And the eunuch answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

38And the eunuch commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized the eunuch.

39And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing.

This story begins with the eunuch reading the Book of Isaiah, and already up to Chapter 53. The message is clear - here is a eunuch who, while already a eunuch, has accepted the kingdom of heaven and is baptized, and respected as a human being - something one does not see in the positions taken by many signers of the Manhattan Declaration.

These people do not even understand the biological sex is not solely resident in the genital duct development but includes the entire development of the bodily anatomy, including the brain.
Robby George, his several groups and think tanks, and many other misnamed and evil organizations slimily slither their anti-American agenda into the minds of Americans by clothing them in a wrapping of Christianity They are trying to seduce the American people into their Dominionist camp - trying to make America, which is a nation built and made great on the diversity of origin, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, into a third world nation cowering in the thrall of false prophets of twisted religion.

The only difference between Christianists and Islamists, is that where they control government, Islamists are already stoning to death people who are different. Christianists merely want to introduce some electroshock therapy and other "reparative" treatments, and perhaps pre-frontal lobotomies, to "treat" people who don't agree with his agenda.
So when these people cite to Genesis 1:27, they’re usually misinterpreting it as a support of the artificial division of human beings into two and only two sexes without a proper recognition of the diversity of reality. They are usually interpreting it as meaning there people are “either male or female” and not understanding that even scientifically, each human being has the blueprints in each of our cells that would support either developmental path, or various different anatomical situations that result in transgender and intersex realities. While the Manhattan Declaration does not directly address transgender and intersex people, it is only because we are not always on their radar screen.

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10

And one might wonder who is entitled to life “to the full.” Robby does not include women, for some reason.

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with
sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government.

First, public sentiment is irrelevant to the civil rights, religious beliefs, moral beliefs and privacy rights of individual women. Second, the Christianists still maintain an ascendancy in governmental ideology – as evidenced by gag rules and lack of funding. The principle is that majority rule should not be used to unfairly restrict individual liberty.

Let’s take a look at the history of Christian teachings on the subject of abortion – far from being “unchanging,” we see that they change with the times.

The Church’s early teachings on “ensoulment” and abortion are based on writings of Aristotle, Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – all of whom believed that “ensoulment” occurred several weeks after conception. Pope Innocent III, to whom one might ascribe “infallibility” (though there is the story of one Pope trying and condemning a deceased predecessor – try sorting *that* out), made it Catholic Church doctrine around the 13th century that abortion was permitted until fetal animation (called “quickening” - Aquinas posited that girl souls were implanted at 90 days after conception, while boys got souls after only 40.

Of course, this medieval and Aristotelian-based philosophical thinking ignored the majestic message of Sacred Scripture, in which the infusion of the soul (and the soul’s taking leave of the body) is inextricably intertwined with breathing – the soul itself involves the “breath of God” or “the breath of life.”

It was not until the 19th century that the Catholic Church started to change its position on abortion – and, of course, we have Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae that is largely responsible for the Church losing its moral compass on the ideas and concepts of ensoulment and what constitutes a human being. It is clear that all life, including human life, is a continuum, but a human being does not exist until birth and breath. Humanae Vitae prohibited Catholics from the use of any sort of artificial birth control.

It’s clear what the current the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy teachings are on abortion and birth control – I submit that while these may be binding on those Roman Catholics who accept the apostasy of the Church hierarchy in its misguidance of the flock, it is in no way appropriate for the hierarchy use its twisted religious morality to interfere with the constitution and laws of the United States and the several states as they apply to those citizens and inhabitants of the United States and the states who do not subscribe to this particular religious belief that is counter to the message of sacred scripture.

The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make
abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide
abortions at taxpayer expense.

And the decision to have an abortion is a personal moral decision for a woman, and a medical decision for her doctor. To do anything else is to oppress women. Period.

Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. The Supreme
Court, whose infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal
protection,

It may be sad that Congress can’t even seem to pass a health care bill that includes abortion funding; but Robby’s description of Roe v. Wade reflects a profound and willful ignorance of the nature of that decision – though Robby, as a professor of jurisprudence is most probably not ignorant at all, he is simply lying in the pursuit of his agenda.

The fact is that it is patently obvious to anyone with a modicum of reasonable intelligence and a lack of prejudice against women, that Roe v. Wade preserved the traditional English Common Law principle, which is based and deeply rooted in Christian Tradition, of “birth and breath,” while modifying it slightly to assert a state interest in potential life in the 3rd trimester, but not so much that it interferes with the health or life of the already-alive women in whom the fetus is a parasite.

continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental constitutional right,
though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions
on abortion. The President says that he wants to reduce the "need" for abortion
- a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and
widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring
waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for
abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and effective
pro-life laws

What Robby is saying in the preceding paragraph is that the creeps behind the Manhattan Declaration want more and stronger laws to oppress women and reduce them to baby-producing uteruses.

cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the
number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are
snuffed out prior to birth. Our commitment to the sanctity of life

Robby’s commitment to the sanctity of life clearly does not extend beyond birth – to Robby, life is only sacred while it is surrounded by a uterus.

is not a matter of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six
years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees of both major
political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John
Paul II described as "the culture of death."

Robby is one of the leading progenitors of the “:culture of death,” with his support and justification of aggressive wars waged by the United States in faraway countries, and his lack of opposition to the barbaric death penalty. Why does Robby do this? So he can rationalize his support of the evils of right wing philosophies by elevating them into a sort of moral good by way of rationalizations, not right reason.

We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect
and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized,
voiceless, and vulnerable among us.

What a nice sentiment – “protect” women. Protect gays, protect lesbians, protect transgender and intersex people – the most marginalized Americans, truly. But sadly, that is not what Robby means in his context.

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by
promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are
discardable.

Abortion is not killing – war and the death penalty are killing and DO create a culture of death – so why is NOT ONE SINGLE WORD IN THIS DECLARATION aimed at warmongering or capital punishment? BECAUSE Christianists, like the authors and signers of the Declaration, in the deep recesses of their twisted little hearts, want to be able to stone to death those of us who are different. Because Christianists, like the author (perhaps) and some signers of the Manhattan Declaration, are loony-toons who see current events as leading to the “Last Days” and are trying to make the idea of the Battle of Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began
with abortion has now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive
research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the
cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries.

So it looks like these creeps are also against scientific advances. Life is cheapened by wars of mass destruction with huge tolls in innocent human life, such as have swept the world several times in the 20th Century and continue to mar the 21st. It is not cheapened by abortion – in fact, there is proof that the quality oflife increases where babies are wanted babies, not where babies are forced on unwilling women.

The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to
include the taxpayer funding of so-called "therapeutic cloning." This would
result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the
purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues.

Embryos can’t be killed, they are not people, but merely human tissue that has a potential and a potential i n proper circumstances, for development into a human being - do not confuse the egg with the Chicken - one could invite Robby for a chicken dinner and serve him a pair of sunny side up eggs, asking him how he liked his pair of chickens. There is nothing morally wrong with these practices – and if the Christianists don’t believe in them, then they shouldn’t be using hospitals or getting medical treatment more advanced than a miracle faith healing anyway. Leave the advances in medicine to those of us who actually believe in medicine.

At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote
assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable
elderly and disabled persons.

End of life care should not mean needlessly prolonging a person’s pain. Christianists believe in prolonging suffering, do they? Perhaps Robby might like self-flagellating hair-short-wearing practices, but dying people should not be forced to suffer, unless that is their choice.

Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben ("life unworthy
of life") were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons
of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th
century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the
doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of "liberty,"
"autonomy," and "choice."

There is a huge difference between eugenics being foisted on people by a totalitarian or authoritarian government, and people choosing to end their own life with dignity at such time as their bodies are failing. Robby clearly thinks he can fool pwople into not understanding the difference. I am not fooled - is anyone else? (well, yes, ths signers of the Declaration, but even they know they are wrong.

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to
kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as
we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women
in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand
resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in
the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn
children.

Unborn children cannot be killed. They are not children until they are born - merely potential children. They are not yet ensouled, not yet lives in being, but only lives in potentia We see nothing in the Manhattan Declaration about the Death Penalty or the Waging of Aggressive Wars such as those being immorally prosecuted by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan as a substitute for rounding up and bringing to justice the criminals behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly
Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for
mother and child alike.

Christianists have never voted to fund adequate education and child care. For them, women are best left barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. They are more interested in the bottom line than in education, health or the welfare of children. Robert P. George was reported as advising Catholic bishops to “stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice.”

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have
been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of
government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do
so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to
defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot
themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and
the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make
clear. We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our
institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of
development and in every condition.

This is dangerous – Robby is calling for violence for the purpose of institutionalizing their belief in the oppression of women! Beware these wolves who clothe themselves in the skins of sheep. They don’t care about the lives of women, only the potential lives of fetuses. Their concern is only for oppressing woman, and forcing the dying to suffer, ostensibly so they can give up their pain for the souls in purgatory, or something like that.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are
witnessing cases of genocide and "ethnic cleansing," the failure to assist those
who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children,
the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and
young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps
necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these
travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the
human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry
and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for
biomedical research. And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of
love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

The author of the Manhattan Declaration is a tool of the Republican Party. Where abortion is not available, more children are abused and neglected, by parents who had them by accident and do not want them, see them as a burden and do not properly care for them. When abortion has been available, there has been a drastic reduction in violent crime that follows the availability by about a couple of decades – long enough for abused and neglected children born to unwilling parents to have grown up to lash out against a society that oppresses women and keeps them down, a society that ceases to care for children once they are born (take the Catholic Church in Massachusetts, only willing to run an adoption agency as long as they could take public money to do it), a society that wages aggressive wars without raising the money to pay for them, causing terrible economic repercussions. A society that fans the flame of the spread of AIDS by “teaching abstinence only” and opposing the distribution of condoms. A society that does not care for legitimate medical research because Christianists want more people to suffer. A society where Christianist Republicans place their warped version of Christianity at the head of the line – all other faiths must take a back seat to theirs,

Marriage
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24
This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33

And how about1 Samuel 18:1-4:

1 After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. 2 From that day Saul kept David with him and did not let him return to his father's house. 3 And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. 4 Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt.

And the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, in which Christians are called to celibacy, and that marriage is only for the morally weak:
8Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. 9But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 1 Cor. 7:8-9

In Scripture, the creation of man and woman,

Each human being is made in the image and likeness of God as male-and-female.
and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation.
Is Robby saying that it’s all about the sex? That sex (within marriage) is the crowning achievement of creation? Except for unicellular and asexually-reproducing creatures, even lowly creatures reproduce via sexual activity.

In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women
joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself.
Marriage then, is the first institution of human society - indeed it is the
institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation.

And what of the poor unmarried pregnant teenager whose boyfriend, who did not make her pregnant, marries her anyway so she would not be stoned to death, who journeyed to Bethlehem to give birth? According to the Roman Catholic Church, she was an “ever virgin” and never had any sex with her husband. To that Augustine-ridden Manichean-influenced Christianist theology, it is laughable for an adherent like Robby to ply these lofty words of mindless breeding as the highest and best human activity.

In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as "holy matrimony" to
signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ
in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself
blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Christianists only tell part of the story, as usual .

First, appealing to sacred scripture is fine for Christians – but marriage as “the crowning achievement of God’s creation?” Not according to St. Paul, who teaches that marriage is only for those who cannot contain themselves, Early Christian Fathers also taught that celibacy was a higher calling. (For that matter, the early Church Fathers misused scripture, such as Matthew 19:12 to indicate celibacy is a higher order of existence, but decrying an actual castration, as was done in many cases among early Christians – so much so that by the time of the Council of Nicaea, there was a prohibition against the ordination of eunuchs to further discourage the practice.)

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most
important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all
persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a
flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits - the spouses themselves, their
children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage
culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest
themselves.

So, marriage is good, and extending the right to those who are not heterosexual should also be good, right? But not according to the twisty turnings of the warped mind of Robert P. George.

Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades
a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country. Perhaps the most
telling - and alarming - indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Less than
fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our
society - and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the
out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average - is
paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration,
hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual
cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

Don’t blame gays for the failures of straights. The decline of marriage began with laws making divorce easier, laws that required men to pay for out-of-wedlock babies who were not voluntarily affiliated. Before the early 1950’s there were severe legal consequences for women who had sex outside of marriage and got pregnant – they had no “right” to child support. In the 1950’s, states started to try to make men obligated to support children born to women they had not married – this was the first blow against marriage.

The real answer is to make abortion easier to get so fewer unwanted babies are born. Make it so men can voluntarily affiliate, but do not force paternity on them outside of marriage. Create a culture in which all marriages are celebrated, and that despite Christian teaching encouraging marriage only for the weak-willed, promoting married life as a lifestyle for straight as well as gay people.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often
scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the
world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the
culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the
dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity
and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and
holiness of faithful marital love.

Wonderful – and by letting gays marry, and lesbians, too, that means that there will be less promiscuity, right? That would be a moral good. But not for Robby and his ilk.

We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the
institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce.
We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young
people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it
is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

That paragraph is better than most! Perhaps one of the few that stands on its own as a good thing. But then Robby goes right into his evil thinking and we lose the thread of good stuff . . .

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple
partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the
marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage
as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition
that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be
resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring
a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy
marriage culture.

This has nothing to do with straight people – marriage equality does not lessen the rights of straights to get married. Extending the right does not diminish the right for straights. As to multiple partner relationships, I am sure that the authors and signers of the Manhattan Declaration might bother to open their scriptures and find the number of multiparty marriages found all over the Bible.

It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is
all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way,
about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships
whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and
protection of life.

So, marriages are supposed to be arranged by peoples’ parents? If love is not supposed to be a part of marriage (what the author of the Manhattan Declaration decries as “romance”), then on what foundation should it be built? Should it be a forced financial arrangement in which women are subsumed into the patriarchal primacy of the husband so much that they become legally incompetent – under the English Common Law, “the two become one, and that one is the husband.” IS this the goal of the Christianists? To return to a “traditional” form of marriage as it existed before 1848 in New York, under which married women did not even have the right to their own inheritances or wages?

In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are
the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for
and benefits of the marriage covenant.

And there aren’t gays and lesbians with children? And since there are, there is no reason for the law to discriminate against their children if their parents want the protection that marriage allows them.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and
polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed
towards other forms of immoral conduct.

The LIES Robby comes up with - what can we expect from the Chairman of Maggie Gallagher's Anri-MArriage group's board of directors – first commingling things and calling homosexuality and polyamory “immoral conduct.” LIE, Robby, LIE. It is Patriarchal dominance that is immoral; marriage in which women are treated as property is immoral. Non-heterosexual people are not all polyamorous, and heterosexual people are not all monagamous. One can justify a moral form of polyamory if one wishes, too.

We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings
possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men
and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to
yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward.

There is nothing less wayward than having a libido. St Paul recognized that those who cannot maintain a celibate lifestyle should get married! But one does not see Christianists like Robert P. George pushing all but the weakest straight people to be celibate – no, to Robby, it’s all about heterosexual sex for breeding, isn’t it?.

We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are
sinners who have fallen short of God's intention for our lives.

I’m sorry, but this “culture of sin” is a Manichean problem that some Christianists still have to deal with – “Sin” is not what they think it is. And the idea that gay people and their natural sexual orientation are somehow sinful is rather distressing – the sin would be for them to act against their natural orientations. It is a Christian sin for straight people to experiment with gay sex, much as it is a sin for gay people to experiment with straight sex. God has a special calling for those who are not called to be heterosexual, or cissexual. There is a special place and a name in God’s House that is better than children.

We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and
forgiveness.

Robby George should speak for himself – it seems as if he wrote a speech on this topic for George W. Bush not so long ago, complete with the “we are all sinners” bologna. It’s just fine for Robby to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate with his Opus Dei cronies, but it is not fine for him and his friends to be flagellating others – so please keep your sins to yourself, and let us keep our sins to ourselves.

We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and
at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it.
Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of
sinners.

Robby characterizes us as sinners, by his definition of morality. Unfortunately, Robby and the Christianists don’t really get it – there’s nothing immoral or sinful about gay people in a loving committed relationship. Make it legal and bless it. Or allow the religious freedom to those who believe they should be able to! The morality of “making it legal” is incontrovertible – only those with an evil morality or who are under the sway of false prophets will oppose marriage equality.

For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our
destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander
from the path of virtue to "a more excellent way." As his disciples we will
reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

Maybe the Christianists should seek forgiveness for their own sins, rather than criticizing others – the whole mote and beam thing. They are so busy criticizing and demeaning those who are different, that they fail to understand any of the central message of Christian teaching. (Which isn’t, by the way, the whole death, resurrection and ascenscion thing, but is rather the idea that we should not put form over substance, that we should love our neighbors, even those who are strange and different.

We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us,
and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of
sexual morality and the nature of marriage.

I know, Christianists like Robby George don’t understand what the Bible really teaches. Those who understand sacred scripture and natural law can see the folly of his parody of reason. I do not believe that he is at all sincere – he is bright enough to understand exactly what he is doing and has done – but he is a slave to his deeply held prejudices, and he uses his God-given intelligence to rationalize a way to make it seem that the prejudice is justifiable. The fact is I do not view Robby George as being sincere – he disagrees with me, but his motivation is not sincere, it’s pure evil. Even if the oppressor is sincere, he is still the oppressor. While I may forgive him his sin, he must still repent to be saved.

Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard
their unions as truly marital.

They are. They are just as valid, and moral and should be as legal as Robby George’s marriage, though Robby George conflates marriage equality based on sexual orientation and gender identity with other things in an attempt to lessen them by association – same sex relationships are no more likely to be polyamorous as opposite-sex relationships.

Ask the wealthy Egyptian who submits to the Will of Allah – and has the maximum four wives allowed under his religious belief. Robby might wish to address the morality of this. Of course, Islam is not a wonderful example of a moral religion, not when many imams support stonings and executions of gay people.

They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the
sexual complementarity of man and woman,

Marriage is made possible by the willingness of two people to enter into a valid and binding exclusive contract of mutual love and support. For heterosexuals, there is “sexual complementarity” between a man and a woman. For gay men, there is a “sexual complementarity” between a man and a man, and for lesbians, there is a “sexual complementarity” between a woman and a woman. Robby George might benefit from reading Plato’s Symposium. Then again, he might not get it, since Plato is somewhat deep.

and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is
includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a
reproductive unit.

This is false, to the extent that it implies that the capacity for reproduction is a biological necessity for marriage – As I have pointed out, St. Paul teaches that Christian marriage is only for the weak of will. Reproduction is a side effect. The fact is that gay and lesbian people should be allowed to have the same sort of “comprehensive multi-level sharing” as their heterosexual brothers and sisters.

This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human
person, but truly part of the personal reality of the human being.

Don’t gays and lesbians (or transgender people) get to have our own personal realities?

Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds,
or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity
of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish
when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a
sharing of life at every level of being - the biological, the emotional, the
dispositional, the rational, the spiritual - on a commitment that is sealed,
completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses
become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling
together the behavioral conditions of procreation.

Except for the procreation-by-accident part, gays and lesbians can achieve the same sort of commitment on all levels – and in many cases children are involved, whether they come from a previous heterosexual relationship, are adopted, or are the result of in vitro fertilization or surrogate motherhood.

That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law,
consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of
infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and
structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.

Robby can write that in a world that is plagued by overpopulation and overbreeding, without blinking an eye. Perhaps the morality of a tiny desert tribe struggling for existence in the desert is inapplicable to billions of people on onne fragile planet. Yet the Roman Catholic Church will annul just about any marriage on the basis that the parties were not “ready” at the time, regardless of how many children they’ve had in the interim 20 or 30 years. And yet the Roman Catholic church will invalidate any marriage in which one of the parties turns out to be transsexual. Is Robby George suggesting, by the use of the term “consummated” in this context, that for heterosexuals it’s all about the sex?

Add to that the sheer exercise in pure rationalization Robby George uses to justify non-reproductive heterosexual relationships as involving “marriage” while not justifying non-heterosexual relationships. If natural reproduction is not a requirement of all marriages, then it necessarily follows that marriages that are not reproductively capable are both moral and allowed, regardless of the sexual orientation of the parties.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians,
believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one
woman is a denial of equality or civil rights.

It *is* a denial of civil rights – but Robby George and the Christianists have an agenda to oppress women within marriage, which means that if there is no woman to oppress, or if both parties are women, marriage does not make sense to them. But it makes sense to anyone whose mind is not twisted with prejudice.

They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm
would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer
upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the
status of being "married."

Putting it in quotes is insulting– if we put the shoe on the other foot, just how really “married” is Robby George to the woman he breeds with? If he must insult my relationship by putting it in quotes, why should his not be in quotes as well? To the extent that marriage is not available on an equal basis, it is an immoral institution for those who can partake of it because it is used as an instrument of oppression.

It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it?

And it does not.

On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of
marriage will not affect another cannot stand.

The argument stands pretty well, Robby. There should be only one kind of marriage – making artificial distinctions is what cannot stand – which is why only marriage works as supportive of equal rights.

Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that
the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not
only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity
for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers,
sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.

Let’s examine this carefully – Robby George’s twisted misuse of reason leaves him using the same sort of argument that comes from the people who liken marriage to relationships between adults and minor children, or animals, trees or inanimate objects.
The point is, the bottom line is that marriage should be a contract on informed consent between or among competent adults who are not under coercion and have no disability to entering into a valid marriage, Islam allows a man up to four wives. Patriarchal Hebrews did the same. There are still splinter Mormon groups that practice polygamy. Many Americans practice a form of polygamy known as “serial monagamy” where they have more than one spouse, only just one at a time (while paramours may be involved, too, they just don’t have legal recognition) – these are ultimately dishonest relationships that cheapen the institution of marriage. There are differing religious views that should be respected provided children and the incompetent are not harmed, and no competent adult is coerced.

Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as
lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships?
No.

Actually, YES!!! They would NOT have an adverse effect on other relationships. If the only reason for prohibiting marriage between close relatives is because of a fear of recessive genes being concentrated and the creation of birth defects, these are the same sort of “eugenic” concerns that Robby George abhors in other circumstances. But an “incestuous” marriage between consenting adults would not adversely affect a non-incestuous marriage – the incestuous couple would have to bear the burden of an increased potential for adverse birth defects, but many of these could be dealt with via pre-natal screenings.

The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law
may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and
influential.

The Christianists are the powerful and influential people who use the power of “majority rule” and use lying rhetoric to scare people into oppressing minorities – but people who really understand natural law, and the rights and freedoms of Americans, do not fear their power – Any real Christian knows that Robby George and the hard of heart Christianists who have signed onto his Manhattan Declaration, whose motivation is to harm LGBT people, will be numbered among the goats unless they repent what they do – and they would know it, too, if they were not ensnared in the web of falsehood that is a parody of natural law reasoning. The Christianists fear that as people become more civilized and less under their thrall, that they may soon no longer be able to hide behind the “majority rule” of oppression.

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a
marriage.

That is exactly the reason why marriage equality is necessary. Calling our relationships anything other than marriage lessens them, cheapens them, makes them lesser than those of the heterosexuals among us. Christianists only want special rights for the majority while they belittle and demean those whom they wish to victimize.

Marriage is an objective reality - a covenantal union of husband and wife -
that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice
and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.

Marriage is certainly an objective reality – a covenantal union, but not limited to a special right for heterosexuals.

First, not recognizing marriage equality is discriminatory against an oppressed minority. The genuine social harms are being imposed on my people, by people like Robby George and his ilk.

First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of
conscience is jeopardized.

Second, the religious liberty of those who DO believe in marriage equality is jeopardized. Religious liberty is NOT just for Christianists, but for everyone.

Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education
programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding
recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are
intrinsically non-marital and immoral.

Third, children should be taught in school that many of them are heterosexual and some are bisexual, homosexual, or asexual, and that all of these orientations are natural and equally good for those who have them – then leave it up to the Churches to teach it is wrong for people to act against the nature God gave them. Of course, some Churches will teach immoral doctrines that make some people less worthy than others on the basis of their sexual orientation – provided they keep their bigotry in their Churches and keep it away from the public square, they can be tolerated. Perhaps Christianist parents should be seen as abusive of their children if they keep them from being educated about the reality of life. Perhaps these people should not be allowed to keep the children they abuse in this way.

Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in
its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound
understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in
any society vitally depends.

Fourth, use that argument listed as “Third” in the Manhattan Declaration since a clear reading of it makes it work in favor of marriage equality! The common good of civil society is damaged when gay and lesbian relationships are treated as less than the special relationships for heterosexuals,

Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we
are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to
rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define
marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what
marriage is.

And limiting marriage to heterosexuals is a false proclamation. Live with it. The cure for heterosexual marriage does not include denigrating the marriages of non-heterosexual people.

And so it is out of love (not "animus") and prudent concern for the common
good (not "prejudice"),

Robbie is still lying - he knows or should know that it is purely out of animus, and prejudice, that he makes his false rationalizations.

that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of
marriage as the union of one man and one woman

Which means that the open bigotry of Robby George and his associates will continue, under a false mantle claiming to be “moral” but representing the corruption and evil of the Christianist whited sepulchres.

and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do
otherwise?

Robby George is clearly a Christianist, and not a Christian at all. So he can’t even honestly ask the question.

The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God's creation
covenant.

And St. Paul, right there in the Bible, clearly and unequivocably teaches that marriage is only for the weak of will – Christianity does not have the answer for civil marriage – there is too much that is contradictory in Christianist teachings. While fecund heterosexual relationships certainly have their place, they may at best only claim to be primum inter partes (first among equals) because the human race would cease to exist if there was no reproduction at all.

Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and
his church.

Robby George places his Christianist views ahead of the United States Constitution and the principles upon which the United States was founded. Considering that Christianity has been torn by schisms and there are many Christian churches, the “bond” must be a polygamous one between Christ and his Churches – unless Robby is going to be jettisoning his non Roman Catholic findamentalist friends. Only by cynical rationalization, can Robby George come to the false conclusions that he does in his parody of natural law.

And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the
church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever
sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is
marriage.

The fact is that it is the opponents of the Manhattan Declaration who are supportive of the inestimable treasure that is marriage equality. Perhaps Robby George should consider pulling back from the brink – if there is no justice, there should be no peace. And if the Christianists will sacrifice in their lust to oppress women and minorities, then those of us who love freedom can do no less than to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to support equal rights, and to oppose special rights..

Religious Liberty
The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21

If we understand the idea of rendering to Caesar, we should understand that what Robby wants if to have his understanding of God’s Will be substituted for the fairness and equality of the principles that provide the foundational structure of the American Republic.

The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and
arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development. The nature of
religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is
most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ.

Wait a moment – shouldn’t Buddhists have religious liberty? How about Jews? Is religious freedom reserved only for those who turn Jesus into God?

Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early
Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: "Did
God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror? Not
so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion is no attribute of God"
(Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4). Thus the right to religious freedom has its
foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human
person created in the image of God - a dignity, as our founders proclaimed,
inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right
reason.

Robby uses the term “right reason” without understanding the concept in the least. All he does is “wrong rationalization” while calling it right, and reason – or maybe he means right-wing reasoning.

Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from
religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one
should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons
of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or
to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is
true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

But when your religious freedom is used to oppress me, you have to leave it in your church, and keep it out of the public square. Robby’s religious freedom must have limits, or else it is only Robby and those who are fellow believers in oppression and patriarchal dominance who will have freedom.

It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn

You can’t kill that which is not yet alive.

, aged and disabled

No – it’s the right of the dying to die in dignity.

and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices,

Robby is clearly blind to Truth. What is immoral for him as a heterosexual male Roman Catholic involves acting against his nature, is different from that which is moral from me as a transsexual lesbian Unitarian (and recovering Roman Catholic), for whom it would be immoral to act against my nature. In the public square, morality must be tempered with mutual respect and the overarching principles of tolerance for the beliefs of others – limiting acting on individual morality where it harms children, or involves coercion or abuse of others. Regardless of Biblical teachings ,an unmarried rape victim should not be forced to marry her attacker. Persons caught in adultery should not be stoned to death in the public square (or anywhere else). People should be entitled to equality of opportunity in the public square, particularly when discrimination would otherwise occur on the basis of prejudice.

and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be
recognized and blessed by law - such persons claiming these "rights" are very
often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to
express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the
dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience
clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously
affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses,
and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain
cases, even to perform or participate in abortions.

If one’s religious beliefs and morality preclude proper performance of the job, the individual should see other employment that does not result in a moral conundrum. A physician opposed to abortion should not consider gynecology or gynecological surgery as a specialty. A pharmacist who can’t morally fill prescriptions for birth control pills should perhaps get a job in another profession. If one’s moral beliefs conflict with one’s job, the moral choice is to get another job.

We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious
institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with
activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the
judicial imposition of "same-sex marriage" in Massachusetts, for example,
Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of
helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal
mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic
moral teaching.

Another Robby George lie – one thst has been used over and over by his “National Organization for (really against) Marriage.” The TRUTH is that Catholic Charities chose to end its adoption placements because it did not want to use its own money, and the use of state funds came with strings attached, such as a law prohibiting discrimination. The LDS religion continues to provide adoption services in Massachusetts, it does not sponsor gay adoptions, and does not accept state funds.

In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital "civil unions"
scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it
declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and
operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions.

Yet another Robby George lie – this involved the abuse of a tax exemption for a secular place, not a church building, located on a beachfront where the tax exemption was conditioned on equal access. No one was forcing a non-inclusive Methodist minister to preside at the ceremony. And the tax exemption that was lost was only for the affected pavilion, though I personally believe that churches should not be exempt fromt axation, since a tax exemption should be seen as an encouragement and support of churches by government.

In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted
for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New
hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.

Stirring up one’s flock to stone the nearest gay person is something that should be prosecuted – except in Robbyworld, where it is okay to preach violence, abuse and murder against minorities.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in
respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership,
resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion.

As with any other freedom, there are reasonable limits - no freedom can be untrammeled else it devolve into mere license. When religion is used to oppress others, it cannot be freely exercised.

We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to
the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her
faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture
of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded.

Really? These developments exist to preserve the common welfare and culture of freedom – the limits on untrammeled exercise of a “freedom of religion” is clearly a question of examining the difference between true freedom, and license. Freedom of religion does not give Robby a right to stone me to death.

Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of
one's own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions,
for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society,
the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting
in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.1 Disintegration of
civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned against the tyranny of the majority – clearly Robby hasn’t read much of Democracy in America, either.

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey
those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the
duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws
are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or
otherwise immoral.

Then it is incumbent on us to resist the laws against marriage equality – it is incumbent on us to resist laws that oppress women and deny them their rights – it is incumbent on us to resist laws that oppress LGBT people.

The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the
common good; yet laws that are unjust - and especially laws that purport to
compel citizens to do what is unjust - undermine the common good, rather than
serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to
compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were
ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, "Judge for yourselves whether it is
right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking
about what we have seen and heard." Through the centuries, Christianity has
taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.
This may well be a principle – but one that is only morally used in the
defense of justice, fairness and equality.

There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious
conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a
Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing
Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws
elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose
ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings.

And the unjust laws that Robby supports, and the just laws that he opposes, degrade all human beings – no one is free until all of us are free. It is a horror that Robby dares quote Dr. King in support of his oppressive imposition of his "morality" on the world.

Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack
any power to bind in conscience. King's willingness to go to jail, rather than
comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any
edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions,

Robby does not have justice or the common good in mind when he preached bigotry. If a Catholic hospital accepts government money? Sorry. Operate it solely with private funds, and maybe the government might allow it to discriminate unjustly.

embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other
anti-life act;

Again – I can possibly consider support ing Robby’s right for Catholic institutions to refuse to participate in any of these things as long as public money is not involved – but not if they accept one taxpayer dime for any purpose.

nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual
partnerships,

Blessing, okay. Sure, if a church is a church for bigots, it should have the freedom to bless religious marriages, but should NOT have a right to perform a civil marriage.

treat them as marriages or the equivalent,

Whoops, this is where I have a problem with Robby. Civil marriage is different from religious marriage - it's perfectly all right for Robby or another bigot to not recognize my marriage as being real, as long as I have the right to believe that it's immoral for him to be breeding with a woman he thinks he is "married" to (especially a non-Catholic woman!) and contribute to overpopulation. If this is an employment issue, employees should be protected by the same laws. I can understand the possibility of exempting a church that hires only its own adherents. If the Catholic Church hires a Jewish housekeeper, she should be entitled to the same medical coverage she would get elsewhere, regardless of the Church’s position. If a Catholic hospital employs only Catholics, and treats only Catholics, an exemption should be allowable.
Hire a gay employee who has a civil marriage – they get the same benefit as other married people. Solution? Do not provide special benefits to anyone based on marital status, and the Church does not fall outside the law

or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and
immorality and marriage and the family.

There are limits to the “proclamation of ‘truth’” – incitement to violence should not be exempt.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under
no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.

Well, Robby should not force his version of God on the people – and shouldn’t force his intolerant and unloving version of God on me, or on my civil rights.

1Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

On Marriage, Transsexual people, and the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church

Robby George is a Roman Catholic, and has within his coterie of followers many bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. The following address that Church’s scriptural and logical errors.

The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church relating to homosexual and transsexual people (the latter available only in a sub secretum document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000, leaked to CNS in 2003) are not firmly rooted in sacred scripture, and the ''science'' used to depict these different people as ''disordered'' is junk science.
Before his papacy, Pope Benedict himself dismissively cited the story of Sodom and Gommorrah as follows ''Thus, in Genesis 19:1-11, the deterioration due to sin continues in the story of the men of Sodom. There can be no doubt of the moral judgement made there against homosexual relations.''*-*LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE PASTORAL CARE OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS – Homosexualitatis problema (Epistula de pastorali personarum homosexualium cura), October 1st, 1986, §6, par. 2- The Pope sees a different story than that written in the Book of Genesis. The story I read involves the suspicious, inhospitable men of Sodom, whose disapproval of and lack of hospitality for strangers from outside the city translated into a desire to gang-rape them and throw them out of town, the ancient equivalent of tarring, feathering and riding out of town on a rail.This was a very macho thing – to show strangers that the men of Sodom were ''real men'' and the visitors were ''less than women.''This misogynistic mistrust of people who are different, strangers in our midst, is not a characteristic of gay people, but of those who condemn them as ''sodomites'' – who are themselves the real sodomites!

There is a difference between an Aristotelian-based understanding of biology parsed through a scriptural lens, and the actual biological reality of God's creation. Biological sex in reality is not as simple as looking at the gross shape of the 23rd chromosome pair. If one delves into the genetic blueprint, everyone is created ''male *and* female'' which one can also see stated in Gen.1:27. Developmentally, we usually end up with one or the other sex, and this works with over 99% of human beings. The other less-than-1% have biology that does not easily fit into one or the other of the sex designations. It is the height of human folly to arbitrarily limit God.

Transsexual and other intersex people were created to be different. It is not their choice to be created the way they were, and I suspect that we exist as examples of the diversity of creation.

The theories of John Money as to the malleability of sex identity were discredited by Milton Diamond, not by John McHugh, who misadvised the Vatican on transsexuality leading to my frustration with the sub secretum pronouncement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000. We are indeed as God created us, but for those who are transsexual or intersex, that is ''other'' or ''both'' rather than ''either'' or ''or.''

Rabbi Mark Sameth of Pleasantville, New York, wrote something recently on a surprising disclosure of an aspect of the nature of God found by studying the Tetragrammaton, which dovetails nicely with Gen.1:27 - read YHWH backward and one gets HWHY, which reads (in English) as ''he/she'' - an epithet usually hurled at persons who are visibly different, but who are special to God (Is.56:5).

In Romans 1, often cited in condemnation of gay and lesbian people, Paul was being critical of pagan fertility (goddess cult) and Bacchanalic orgiastic practices, which led persons of a heterosexual nature to practice in their religious ecstasy behaviors that are against their natures as God created them. If one assumes a homosexual nature in those created by God with such a nature to be ''natural'' for that minority of God's creation, the passage could well be read as implying that we should not act against our nature as we are created.

An example: Jim, a gay Catholic striving to overcome his nature, marries Mary. He tries very hard to act against his nature, they even have children, but the marriage ends in divorce (and an annulment is granted) because his attempt to be ''straight'' has caused him to have psychiatric issues. Everyone has been hurt because Jim tried, but failed, to act against his nature. Indeed, had he gone into the marriage knowing his nature was homosexual (rather than buying into the idea that he could change his nature), one can argue that his getting married to Mary would be sinful.

Counseling gays into reparative therapy to make them try to act against their nature as they were created, is is not a good idea. Celibacy as an obligation for all who have a homosexual orientation is needlessly cruel and I would think it flies in the face of 1Cor.7:8-9. Paul indicates that celibacy is only for those Christians who can contain themselves sufficiently to live in continence. Those who cannot should marry rather than to fall into sinful behaviors. (Of course, that raises the issue of whether the Church should consider whether gays in monagamous relationships should be viewed as acting sinfully - I would think that God does not require us to do the impossible, and it is clear than not all are called to celibacy.)
This commentary of mine, of course, is a criticism of the current teaching of the magisterium.

Conclusion to this Response

The bottom line to the Religious Liberty argument professed by these Christianists, is that they are the only ones they think should have religious liberty. All others should have their religious liberty suppressed. How exceedingly obvious this is, and how sad.

For Robby George, whose appalling rejection of natural law is apparent from his writing, Reason is merely a tool of whatever prejudice strikes his fancy. True Right Reason is in favor of civil marriage equality, not opposed to it.

When he blames same-sex marriage for all the ills of heterosexual marriage, such as marital infidelity, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births, he makes no sense except through the lens of his prejudice.

Robby George wants to keep children ignorant, to keep women oppressed, and to discriminate against people just because they are different from him or have a different faith.

Robby George’s parody of Reason is proof of the corruption of his version of natural law, which is not based at all upon the reality of nature, but upon his prejudice. Perhaps he should return to Faith; even if that can still be twisted to suit his prejudice, as we know all too well.

Please join in condemning Robby George and those misanthropic misogynists who have promulgated and signed the Manhattan Declaration. They are hateful, abusive, intolerant Christianist bigots falsely claiming the mantle of Christianity to push their agenda of special rights and oppression. They have further hardened their hearts against all that is good and right and just, and showed the depth of the evil in their hearts.

And for those of us who believe in God, pray that God has mercy on their souls, lest they be numbered among the goats on the Day of Judgment.

In Peace and Love,

Joann Prinzivalli
Serva Servarum Deae