Sexuality and Gender Issues

Discerning What Is Best
With Dr Rex Rogers

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Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 25 August 2020

Since 2015, Drag Queen Story Hour, DQSH, has been offered at public libraries for children ages 3-11. Local Drag Queens dress in their regalia and read stories to children, ostensibly for the purpose of encouraging a love of reading, self-love, and respect for others different from themselves.

DQSH events are now being scheduled across the country. Australia and the UK have their own versions.

The DQSH founder in the US, Michele Tea, launched the initiative because she felt local libraries were “heteronormative.”

As another leader described it, “The program strives to “instill the imagination and play of gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models.” In NYC, the purpose included being sure the queens could talk effectively about gender identity.

A Tennessee organizer said, “There is no hidden agenda or meaning behind it. We are not trying to breed drag kids.” But you’d be hard-pressed to believe that if you read DQSH’s own words.

Drag Queen Story Hour has its own website. They say its purpose “captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.”

Promoters of this immoral child sex abuse can be found in the mental health profession. One sex therapist said, “The real problem, as I see it, lies not in exposing children to the reality of diverse sexualities and gender identities—those who do not fit the typical definitions of masculinity or femininity—but rather not providing gender-nonconforming kids with other templates as they begin to sort out their feelings about who they authentically are.” For him, the real reason some people do not want these kinds of events to occur is simply their homophobia or misogyny, their desire to bully, or that somehow their masculinity is threatened. He believes Drag Queen costumes are no more harmful than Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and other Disney characters.

DQSH is unbelievable and offensive on the face of it, yet the events are being embraced by library directors and boards even in the face of sometime local opposition. One question is why do these professionals and boards believe this is necessary, appropriate, and good? Another greater question is why would parents send their little children to hear stories read by Drag Queens?

I do not hate Drag Queens or any other LGBTQ+ person. I don’t want to deny them jobs or their civil liberties as American citizens. I don’t endorse or support in any way the bullying and assaults some of them have at times endured. I don’t wish them ill and harm.

I do, however, strongly disagree with their moral choices regarding their lifestyle. The same way I disagree with heterosexuals who participate in affairs or adultery outside of marriage. In fact, I don’t believe one kind of sexual sin is any more egregious than any other kind of sexual sin. Sin is sin. Sexual sin is sexual sin.

I know the Church responded poorly to the early Gay Rights Movement, often with condemnation based upon truth but absent any love or offer of God’s forgiveness and reconciliation. But this does not change the moral truths taught in Scripture. LGBTQ lifestyle choices, Drag Queens included, are not something Christians who believe the Word of God can support much less promote.

Gender fluidity is a social construct, not biological sex. God created male and female (Genesis 1:26-27). There is no sexually, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically happy ending for LGBTQ lifestyles.

So, I see DQSH as a morally unwise, indeed immoral, development being foisted upon innocent little children incapable of processing any of it. Whatever the motive claimed, this is child abuse.

*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact me or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com/, or connect with me at www.linkedin.com/in/rexmrogers.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 25 August 2020

Sex education was once something parents shared with their children when they thought the time was right. Now it’s considered the province of public education.

But what’s being taught to children as young as 4-5 in Kindergarten is not simply, “Where do babies come from?” or what used to be called “the facts of life” or “the Birds and the Bees.” What’s now being taught is a long list of adult sexuality in graphic terms, re “sex positivity,” “sexual rights,” and “inclusivity.”

Sex education materials used in public schools, K-12, contain descriptions and pictures of anatomy including adult genitalia, the sex act vis-à-vis positions and practices, condoms and how to shop for them or lubricants, information about HIV and STDs, discussions of gender identity, gender expression, “harmful gender stereotypes,” and sexual orientation, the dangers of “heteronormativity,” how to give sexual consent, erections, orgasms, ejaculation, masturbation, tips on foreplay, how to “come,” how to “come out,” LGBTQ+, same-sex sexual activity, normalization of kinky and perverse sexuality, attacks on masculinity, femininity, and the traditional family structure, gender vocabulary lessons, i.e., third gender, trans, queer gender, non-binary, gender fluid, gender neutral, agender, bigender, two-spirits, anal sex, pederasty, sex trafficking, and non-conforming students, videos of how to pleasure partners, how to get secret abortions, BDSM (bondage, domination, sadomasochism), body fluid (urinating on each other) or blood play, fisting, various methods of intercourse, sex toys, same-sex role playing, and other sexual debauchery, all in the name of student sexual health.

One sex education book “teaches kids they can be a boy, a girl, both, neither, gender queer, or gender fluid, etc. and that adults guess a child’s gender based on body parts.”

As one school observer put it, “The LGBTQ movement demands that homosexual relationships be presented to children as good, healthy, and equal in every way to heterosexuality within man-woman marriage. Many sex ed developers and providers are all too happy to comply.”

Abstinence or marriage rarely appear in sex education curricula. Some states like California forbid the teaching of “abstinence-only” sex education, as opposed to “comprehensive” sex education curricula. States vary widely in what sex education is currently promoted or allowed. Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of sex education.

All this while some studies indicate failure rates as high as 87% for school sex education programs.This is why public school sex education can be more accurately described as sex propaganda.

Corporations are selling sexual propaganda too. Hasbro developed then retracted a troll doll that opponents said promoted pedophilia, a doll with a special button between its legs that when pushed caused the doll to giggle and even “gasp.” This was to be marketed to little girls.

It boggles the mind that any mature, sane adult, particularly parents on the outside and school professionals on the inside of education would endorse much less implement this kind of intentional sexual tsunami for American children and youth. But it’s happening in schools across the country and now state legislatures are getting into the act passing laws mandating this kind of “sex ed porn.”

Where are the parents? Why are they tolerating this? Even more, why are many of them embracing and endorsing it? What happened to schools being the place where students learned reading, writing, and arithmetic?

Surely it is not difficult to make a Christian moral case – “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality,” (Gal. 5:19) – against this kind of child and youth sexual abuse, because that is what it is. Children and even youth, though they are growing up in a highly sex-saturated culture, still are not prepared emotionally or otherwise to deal with this onslaught. Yet many parents, teachers, and politicians are energetically promoting immoral sex education in the false belief they are helping children toward sexual maturity and fulfilment.

Sex propaganda masquerading as sex education in public schools is now a central challenge of our times.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 29 June 2020

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) are the new frontier of cultural change in the United States.

And those in favor of advancing these ideas just got a rocket-boost from the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

With Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), SCOTUS ruled that same-sex couples were guaranteed the right to marry by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution. This 5-4 decision legalized a controversial political, philosophic, and religious behavioral question, effectively overruling religious liberty on this matter.

Since this time, LGBTQ+ groups have continued to work, lobby, or promote an expansion of what they consider essential rights in every sector of society. On June 15, 2020, LGBTQ+ got a victory handed to them, actually in fact a launchpad, by SCOTUS.

In Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), SCOTUS held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against discrimination because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In other words, the Court read SOGI back into the meaning of “sex” as written in the 1964 laws and with that move undermined the rule of law.

Despite Justice Neil Gorsuch’s verbal gymnastics in the majority opinion, SCOTUS put religious liberty on a legal collision course with SOGI.

This ruling is a landmark of the wrong kind, making SOGI—subjective and unverifiable identities, not objective traits—what the law calls a “protected category.” This will have seismic impact upon American culture, including, but far beyond, discussions about who uses women’s bathrooms, who participates in women’s sports, what pronouns corporations are forced to use, etc.

While this ruling will undoubtedly affect schools and universities, businesses, camps, youth organizations, daycare, and other workplace conditions or sex-specific facilities, it will also affect churches and Christian nonprofit organizations.

The Heritage Foundation said, “SOGI laws threaten the freedom of citizens, individually and in associations, to affirm their religious or moral convictions—convictions such as that marriage is the union of one man and one woman or that maleness and femaleness are objective biological realities to be valued and affirmed, not rejected or altered. Under SOGI laws, acting on these beliefs in a commercial or educational context could be actionable discrimination.”

“Currently, Title VII, a section of the Civil Rights Act, allows religious exemptions for faith-based organizations to hire with an eye to religious qualifications. Some have used this to argue that religious organizations can refuse to hire and/or fire employees who are LGBTQ if it conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs. However, because LGBTQ persons are now included under the “sex” category of Title VII, it is unclear whether these exemptions are still understood to permit religious organizations to discriminate on the basis of LGBTQ status.”

In an analysis the day after the decision, the ECFA said, “In pending and future employment litigation involving LGBT discrimination claims, the Court's decision in this case puts ministry employers in a defensive posture. As the Court has now interpreted the law, Title VII presumptively prohibits LGBT discrimination. Accordingly, religious groups with theological views that do not align with that interpretation will need to show that they are entitled to an exception under existing laws, such as the ministerial exception defense. The scope of that defense will be addressed by the Court in a separate ruling expected to be released later this month.”

You can bank on it that proponents will use this precedent to argue for approval of The Equality Act and likely make it an issue in the 2020 presidential election. One problem with this act is that it defines gender identity about as broadly, and ambiguously, as it can be defined, requiring only a subjective feeling or decision on the part of transgender individuals, and no legal name change, no surgery or hormone treatment, just a person’s self-assessment. The act recognizes no religious belief or conduct. The Equality Act specifically cites the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, indicating it cannot be used as a defense if people are charged with discrimination under this act.

SCOTUS’s Bostock ruling also will create enormous problems for sports, and specifically also for women’s rights. Since the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s the US has attempted to improve women’s access to social activities, most especially athletics. Now, how will women maintain their status if a man saying he is a woman can participate in women’s sports?

I’m waiting for more feminists and women athletes, like Martina Navratilova has already done, to point out that this trend is harming/destroying women’s sports, i.e. it’s hurting women unfairly, which was the essence of feminism. If this irrationality is about equity and non-discrimination, what about women and girls?

It is impossible to protect sex as a category, i.e. women, and also advance gender identity as a protected category. Same for women’s research in universities. If “binary” sexuality is no longer valid, then women’s studies is essentially defunct.

If biological sexuality is just a preference, just some social construct, isn’t the same true for the 58 Facebook sexuality categories now available? What makes one subject to change and the other inviolable?

American culture is confused, celebrating irrationality, and doing what’s right in its own eyes. Since politics is downstream of culture, SCOTUS did not lead but followed.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 29 November 2017

The famous are being fired, e.g. Bill O’Reilly, Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, apparently justifiably and long overdue. But I’m wondering about the suits in these corporations who are doing the firing. I guess Roger Ailes fits the latter as Fox News Chairman and CEO.

Point is, if an organizational culture overlooked such egregious behavior for years, likely more than just the famous were or are involved. When will they be held accountable?

And point is, we’ve found ourselves in a sea of allegations, which I do not doubt, drowning in what we mean. We all know what sexual harassment or sexual abuse is when we see it or hear about it, or do we? What are the moral and legal definitions and dividing lines, all of which seem to get lost in each news program panel discussing the latest guy to fall. I’m not by a long shot, for example, excusing "dirty" jokes or caddish behavior, but I do think these are different from abuse, assault, exposure, sex-for-promotion-propositions, pedophilia, etc. Meanwhile, we’re mixing them all together in our conversations.

The recent deluge of sexual harassment allegations got started with an October 5, 2017, New York Times piece detailing a list of sexual harassment and assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, then Kevin Spacey, followed by several other Hollywood figures. It seems this broke the dam and women finally feel enough comfort zone to tell their stories, including rape accusations against some of the rich and famous.

The United States Congress is now facing its own sexual harassment Waterloo. Yet to be determined is who was involved and how much public money was used to settle sexual harassment complaints. This follows sexual harassment allegations against Senator Al Franken and Congressman John Conyers.

Professional sports is not unscathed, most recently with high profile Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott suspended for six games due to domestic violence allegations. Many others in all sports, including gymnastics, are now under investigation.

Religion is not without its sexual harassment or abuse problems, from the Catholic Church, 1990 to 2010, to more recent problems among “conservative Evangelicals.” I know from my own experience as a longtime Christian organization administrator that our H.R. offices had to deal with male/female relationship boundaries and inappropriate behavior issues, so this is not just a Hollywood problem.

Not least among concerns is the sexual abuse allegations leveled over time by at least 15 women against then businessman, then candidate, now President Donald Trump. These have gone unresolved. President Trump has denied these allegations, saying they are the products of fake news, media bias or conspiracies, political smear campaigns, or are all just “locker room talk.”

One sidebar here: sexually inappropriate behaviors are not a partisan issue. Neither Republicans or Democrats have a clean record and neither party is much of an example about how to properly deal with moral or ethical breaches of its members.

Let’s pause for some delineations:

Sexual abuse can occur in several different ways: pedophilia or incest, sexual harassment, sexual assault involving force, e.g. rape or sodomy, domestic violence, exhibitionism or exposure, unwanted sexual touching, obscene phone calls or texts, and more. Sexual abuse is also known as molestation. When force is involved, it's called sexual assault. Sexual harassment can occur in many different forms in the workplace, much of it about power as much as sex.

In sports, some 90% of sexual abuse involves an older male and a younger female. All other possible age and gender combinations are represented in the last 10%. Likely this distribution applies throughout society.

The fact that sexual harassment allegations are pouring forth may be disheartening but they also might be looked upon as purifying. Finally, women are in a position to state their case and push for social change in how they're treated in the workplace and anywhere else they choose to go.

On a moral basis the way forward is clear (and should have been clear long before). Men and women should treat each other with respect. Men and women should not cross moral boundaries, i.e. not engage in sexually related references and conversations, and certainly not engage in sexually related touching outside the bounds of preferably lifelong, monogamous marriage. If men and women observed moral boundaries, most sexually related incidents, "mistakes," grievances, or crimes would be eliminated.

So the need is not for more anti-sexual harassment training, not for more sensitivity orientation, not for more legal definitions, not for more H.R. policies, not even, I think, on an individual level for “therapy,” but for a renewal of common sense, religiously-based private and public morality. We all need a moral code to live by, and to "fix" this national problem, we must start with the heart, not the mind or even the body.

^“What comes out of a person is what defiles them. For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” Mark 7:20-23.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 31 October 2017

images Following the now infamous Harvey Weinstein, we’re hearing calls for Hollywood organizations, including the Academy, to set up policies and protocols “to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” This is an admirable goal, if a day late and a dollar short. But I have a question, how exactly do you do this in an industry based upon moral relativism?

If an industry spends millions saying, “anything goes,” and then it does, on what grounds does it now condemn virtually any behaviors? And why do we believe policies generated in H.R., or therapy for that matter, will make the problem go away?

And lest we single out Hollywood and miss the greater problem, men in Sports, Military, Politics—on both sides of the partisan aisle—Business, Media, and even Religion have done and likely are still doing what Weinstein did.

In 2005, Access Hollywood caught then businessman-turned-TV-star Donald Trump on video tape, which later surfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. On tape, Trump said, "I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” He went on in this tape to make significantly more lewd remarks. He was referencing kissing and groping, along with conquest attempts, women without their consent. All this he later dismissed as just "locker room talk,” but the talk show host in the same video, Billy Bush, lost his job.

The Catholic Church was engulfed in the early 2000s (though other scandals occurred earlier) with a sexual abuse scandal that eventually reached worldwide proportions. Dozens of men accused priests of exploiting them when they were children in the church. Millions were spent in closed settlements and periodically similar sex abuse scandals continue to plague the Catholic Church.

In 2011-2012, the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal broke, badly tarnishing the reputation of Penn State University and legendary football coach Joe Paterno, who died at age 85 in January 2012, some said of a broken heart. Sandusky is now in prison, but the hurt among scores of young men and their families continues.

American professional sports, especially the NFL, has its own boatload of now seemingly regular sex harassment or assault or related domestic violence issues. Among the highest profile recently is Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliott. And even the U.S. military is plagued by sexual harassment and assault scandals, including at the highest ranks featuring “the swinging general” and “flirtatious” texts involving both married and non-married troops.

Since at least Francis A Schaeffer and others in the 1960s, some philosophers, theologians, or Christian pundits, including women, have warned us about moral relativism, the idea there is no right or wrong. This view sounded good to a culture that wished to throw off all restraints, especially sexual. But here we are in 2017 and we’re being overwhelmed by polarization, hyper-partisanship, crudeness, fake news, lack of integrity and character in “leadership,” declining free speech, racism, sexual harassment or assault...

None of what’s threatening us is a surprise. We’ve known all along that if we throw off moral categories what we have left is “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).

The solution is not TV psychologists. It’s not more stringent H.R. policies, though these may be needed. The solution is certainly not Democrat or Republican.

The solution is nothing short of a revival of public cultural consensus re the idea of objective truth—the idea right and wrong—truth—existing outside ourselves and that we all are held individually responsible and accountable. This comes first and foremost from the Bible, the Word of God, and secondly from the Church teaching moral principles, speaking the truth with love, but by all means speaking the truth without compromise.

The Word of God long ago specified how men and women should relate morally, socially, physically, and in terms of mutual respect. We don’t need new standards. We need a revival of commitment to old, eternal standards.

Without this renewal of belief in truth, meaning there is identifiable right and wrong, the centrifugal forces in our culture will continue to spin toward irrationality.

Details: Written by Rex M. Rogers; Published: 24 April 2012

So-called "gender issues" are synchronous, that is in time, with my adult life. I remember Women's Lib, bra-burning, and the ERA in the 70s. As I say this, I don't mean to imply that everything about these movements, actions, and legislation was wrong, bad, or misguided. In fact, I do not. But issues and movements tend to expand, sometimes beyond what the founders envisioned or even desired, sometimes to levels most would call extremes.

The phrases "gender issues" or "gender confusion" these days involves a lot of extremes well beyond the initial desire of reformers in the early 20th Century who worked to earn for women the right to vote and beyond what reformers in the late 20th Century wanted for women in equal pay for equal work, equal access, or simply equality in the marketplace of ideas, professions, and culture. Today gender issues involve what must be labeled sexual immorality at the least or perversion at the worst.

This video column scratches the surface of these issues with what amounts to an introductory comment:

This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Rex or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/RexMRogers.