Hank Hanegraaff: This is a special edition of the Bible Answer Man broadcast. My special guest is Joe Dallas. We’re going to be talking about a cover story in the Christian Research Journal titled “Of Bathroom Bills and Basic Beliefs,” transgenderism, homosexuality, and things related. I want to start out by talking about an the April 21, 2016 article from USA Today entitled “NBA Should Move All-Star Game from North Carolina Now” by Nancy Armour.
Armour states,
NBA commissioner Adam Silver reiterated Thursday that the All-Star Game won’t be played in Charlotte next February if hatred, bigotry and discrimination continue to be the law of the land in North Carolina…
…North Carolina lawmakers have shown no signs of budging from their hateful stance.
It is also pointed out by Armour that,
Bruce Springsteen, Boston and Pearl Jam have all canceled concerts in North Carolina in protest of the law. PayPal dropped plans for a global operations center in Charlotte, costing the state 400 new jobs.
If those public shamings weren’t enough to prompt a change of heart, no amount of “pretty pleases” by Silver and the NBA will, either.
In Armour’s opinion,
The best way to deal with bullies – there’s no other way to describe North Carolina’s small-minded lawmakers—is to stand up to them. With as popular as basketball is in North Carolina, home to both Steph Curry and Michael Jordan, the NBA pulling the All-Star Game would be the strongest statement yet that intolerance has no place in today’s world.
Armour’s bottom line is this: “North Carolina’s discriminatory law [HB2] is both hurtful and hateful.”
Think of all those words she used in one article: “hateful,” “hurtful,” “bigotry,” “discrimination,” “bullies,” “small minded lawmakers,” and “intolerance.” The rhetoric has ratcheted up on this subject, and I can tell you that there is not a day that has gone by in the last month wherein I did not read two or three front page news articles on this subject. All of that led me to ask Joe Dallas to write a cover story for the current edition of the Christian Research Journal, which is entitled “Of Bathroom Bills and Basic Beliefs.”
Joe Dallas has been on the Bible Answer Man broadcast many times. He is the Program Director of Genesis Counseling in Tustin, California. It’s a Christian counseling service to men dealing with sexual addiction, homosexuality, and other sexual relational problems. He is a member of the American Association of Christian Counselors. He’s author of some incredible books on human sexuality, including A Strong Delusion and the forthcoming Speaking of Homosexuality. Along with “Of Bathroom Bills and Basic Beliefs,” he also contributed to the same issue of the Journal another article that just fantastic: “Is Gay Christian an Acceptable Identity?” This is must reading for every Christian on the planet. As always Joe, it’s great to have you on the broadcast.
Joe Dallas: Hey, Good being here, Hank.
Hank: I want to start out with a very simple question. Is the issue at hand, the issue which I tried to set forth in the opening of the broadcast; is this a primary issue or a secondary issue?
Joe: That’s an important question because, Hank, if it is a secondary issue, why are we bothering?
I think that if we cannot be persuaded to change our position, as believers, the next tactic will get us to see that position as a secondary issue, which we don’t really need to stand firm upon. We would not break fellowship over say when we may or may not believe the Rapture of the church is going to happen, or over which gifts of the Spirit are available today. We would not call those primary issues.
I would argue that this is a primary issue for a number of reasons, the first being the very account of creation. Hank, we can’t get around this simple fact. To be human is to be sexual. To be sexual is to be male or female. To be male or female is to have an assigned sex given to us with our Creator’s foreknowledge. Those are foundational truths, when we try to alter them, we create madness, and candidly, just listening to you now describing the current scene, what other word could you use other than “madness”?
Hank: Joe, I kind of set this up at the opening of the show, but give us some kind of idea of what you’re driving at, what the subject matter is that we are underscoring in the broadcast, when you talk about “Bathroom Bills and Basic Beliefs.”
Joe: Yes. We’re taking about a couple of things simultaneously. We’re talking about transgenderism, Hank, which is a broad common term covering primarily the more technical term, transsexual. A transsexual is an individual we feels that he or she was born with the wrong body and is in fact a member of the opposite sex. A transsexual male will say, “I know I have the body parts of a male, but all my life, I have felt I am a woman.” That is a condition commonly called gender dysphoria. When a transsexual realizes he or she has that condition a decision has to be made. Either I am going to treat this condition as though it is a problem, which I need to manage and deal with, or I’m going to give into to it, and say the problem is my body not the condition.
Now, traditionally, Hank, we have believed that if someone believes they are in the wrong body the problem is their beliefs. Only recently have we come to begin believing as a culture that the problem is actually the body, and not the beliefs. There’s the rub, because as more people come forward and say “I demand the right to determine for myself what my sex is regardless of what my anatomy testifies,” there is concurrent with that a demand that the culture come into agreement with that assessment. So, more and more people who are saying, “I am female,” even though they have male parts, are also demanding that we refer to them as female and that reverence needs to extend it self even to which bathroom and shower facilities they use.
That is the crux of the controversy we’re facing, really on a national level, but, as you have said, specifically now in North Carolina. However, as you know Hank, President Barack Obama has sent out a letter from a federal position basically saying that schools will need to comply with Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination, and he is interpreting sex discrimination as discrimination against students who identify as transgender. What we are seeing a resistance to is the federal based move to force women and girls to allow males, anatomical males, into their showers or their bathroom facilities or vice versa, simply based on the male saying “I am a female, and that’s all I need to say.”
Hank: You point this out in the article, but there are people who are in very significant positions in our culture, like Governor Nicky Haley (South Carolina) and Charles Krauthammer (Fox News) who both contented that HB2 represents a fabricated problem?
Joe: Well, I wish they were right. I wish that I was overreacting. I wish that the millions of us who are concerned about this were overreacting. But, Hank, the problem has already shown itself, it’s not fabricated, it’s now historical. There are already a number of cases—which I’ve cited in the article we’re talking about, in this special edition of the Journal—cases which men have seized on this new opportunity to enter into women’s restrooms and changing rooms, and they are not transsexual men, they are simply males, because you really do not—in order to take advantage of these new laws—you don’t have to really be transsexual, all you have to do is say, “I am a woman,” and that gives you access into the women’s facility.
So, there are two reasons we’re concerned about this: One is the very real problem of sexual predators. We know they exist. We know that to some extent they will always prey on victims, but this gives them a “green light” like they never had before.
The second problem is the violation of a girl. The violation she will feel having to share toilet facilities or shower facilities with an anatomical male, whether that male is in any way physically violating her or not, she will feel violated by his presence because of what we would call “natural modesty.” We’re trying to rip natural modesty away from women and force them to accept communal showing and toilet use with anatomical males all for the sake of catering to a very minuscule percentage of the population which is making this demand.
For further related study, please see the following equip.org resources:
The Transsexual Dilemma: A Dialogue about the Ethics of Sex Change (Joe Dallas)
How Do Biblical Ethics Apply to Hermaphrodites? (Hank Hanegraaff)
(Blog adapted from the June 8, 2016 Bible Answer Man broadcast.)
I’ll miss Dancing with the Stars. Watching it was a weekly family ritual everyone in our home looked forward to, so our decision to stop leaves a void. It’s not a decision made out of moral piety because, after all, plenty of performers on that show have behaved in less than saintly ways, and don’t even get me started on some of the costumes! Nor am I afraid that, as a noted psychiatrist recently warned, young people will become gender confused by viewing a transsexual. (After all, the transsexual in question saw plenty of non-transsexuals as a child, which tells me gender identity isn’t seen then mimicked) And it’s not, as some have stupidly said, an act of prejudice or hatred to stop watching DWTS because of Chaz Bono’s participation. For the last time, disagreement and hatred are two hugely different experiences that ought never to be confused.