Beyond Religious Liberty: Being Heard Today

Transcript (edited for readability).

But I'm going to try to be somewhat more concise, which is another way of saying shorter, so that I can save more time for Q and A. And feel free during the Q and A to ask about any of these sessions. That was the AV guy's way of getting everyone to come in. Thank you.

All right, so what I want to do is say, in this last session, there has been a lot of emphasis in the past five years or so on religious liberty, with the HHS mandate, the Little Sisters of the Poor, Hobby Lobby, Baker, Flowers, Photographer. It seems like many groups in their kind of political engagement focused only on religious liberty. And I want to push back on that a little bit, because I don't think we want to only be concerned about religious liberty. I think religious liberty is important. It's vital, it's important, it's essential. But it's not sufficient, right? So religious liberty is necessary, but it's not the only thing that's necessary.

And so I want to do four things. First, say a little bit of where we find ourselves right now for people of faith, of orthodox faith, as a political cultural movement. What's happened? Second, I want to talk about some recent Supreme Court victories on religious liberty, say why they are important, but why they're not enough if you want a well-functioning society. Then I just want to say a little bit about the role for government. And then fourthly, I'll mention a few things to do.

So first, where do we find ourselves? This is how I read the past 50 years of American life. We've seen secular progressives advance the sexual revolution through aggressive government mandates. That's more or less, on the issues that we've been talking about this morning, what has happened. So a movement that claims merely to want personal freedom, to quote, "live and let live," it first will repeal laws that it claims limit its personal freedom, then it will use government to subsidize its preferred choices, then it'll use government to mandate that other people affirm their personal choices, and then finally, it'll use government to punish anyone who disagrees with their personal choices.

So judicial activism in the name of personal freedom, 49 years ago, overturned every law in the country that protected unborn babies from abortion. It created a right to abortion. The right to abortion then became a demand for government-funded abortions. Then it became a regulation forcing the owners of Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortion-causing drugs as part of their healthcare plan. Now it's a movement trying to punish pharmacists who won't dispense abortion-causing drugs.

Judicial activism in the name of personal freedom redefined marriage, and now we see bakers, florists, photographers, adoption agencies in courtrooms. The trajectory here is that an underlying worldview captures government to first promote it, then uses government to force other people to promote it, then uses government to silence any dissent.

Now, religious liberty, these wins that we've had, they are important. It's good that we got an exemption from the HHS mandate for the owners of Hobby Lobby and for the Little Sisters of the Poor, but that mandate still exists, even after the previous administration. All they could do was enlarge that exemption. They weren't actually able to get rid of the unjust mandate to begin with, right? The government shouldn't be in the business of telling private businesses that they have to pay for abortion-causing drugs, because no one should pay for abortion-causing drugs, because no one should be taking abortion-causing drugs. You can see what I'm getting at.

And so I'm not encouraging us to give up on religious liberty. I think it's important that we litigate these cases, that we speak out in support of religious liberty, because religious liberty is a real, authentic human right, a real natural right. And before it's a human right or a natural right, it's something given to us by our Creator. It's a pre-political right, in that sense, that it's God's will that we not use coercion to impose God's will onto other people. The only religious actions that are acceptable to God are voluntary religious actions. And so you need spheres of liberty, space in order to respond to God, right? So in a Christian understanding, God does the initiating, we only are responding to His grace. And that sounded very Lutheran of me, right? Good for a Catholic, right? But it's true. I mean, that's the reality here. We want to have political freedom in order for people to be free to respond to God, in conscience.

And that means we're going to have to disagree, right? Some of us are Lutherans, some of us are Catholics, some of us are Christians, some of us are Jewish, et cetera, et cetera. And as a political matter, the state's going to create space for people to come to their own conclusions in conscience about what they believe to be the truth about God, right?

So religious liberty is important, but it's not enough. And here's why. I want to give you three short reasons why it's not enough. First, religious liberty doesn't protect people who aren't religious, but hold many of the same moral beliefs that we hold and hold many of the same concerns. Atheists who are against abortion shouldn't be forced to perform abortions or pay for abortions or promote abortions, right? That's not going to be a religious liberty argument, though, because for them, it's not a religious conviction. It's a natural law conviction.

Second, religious liberty doesn't protect other goods that are threatened by bad policy, right? A bad healthcare law, a bad education law, doesn't just threaten religious liberty, but it threatens whatever the underlying issue is, right? The gender unicorn is not first and foremost a religious liberty problem, although it would be good to exempt religious households who object to the gender unicorn. First and foremost, the gender unicorn is an educational problem, right? Because it's not the truth about the human person.

And that leads to the third thing, that religious liberty arguments don't respond on the merits to whatever the disputed question is. So if the disputed question is one about abortion or about marriage or about gender identity, and you make a religious liberty argument, you're just saying, right, whatever the truth of the matter is, I want an exemption, I want freedom. Whereas if you engage on the merits of abortion or marriage or gender identity, you're actually engaging the fight where it needs to be engaged as well. So we need to do both, and I'm not suggesting either/or, both.

Okay, so that's more or less where we find ourselves. Second, four recent Supreme Court wins for religious liberty. These are this past Supreme Court term and the prior one. I want to briefly discuss those, explain why they were good wins, why they matter, but also why they're not enough, because there were some commentators suggesting, look, we can just count on the Supreme Court to protect our religious liberty, even if the rest of law and public policy is going to hell in a handbasket, right? That's not going to be sufficient.

All right, first, there was the Espinoza case. The Espinoza case was a school choice case. The state had an anti-Catholic Blaine amendment. Blaine amendments were passed at the time saying we're going to prohibit government funds from going to sectarian schools. And at the time, the sectarian schools were understood as Catholic schools, because the public schools were largely Protestant schools. Now they're being used to just prohibit any funding from going to faith-based schools. So what started out as kind of an anti-Catholic-motivated state constitutional amendment — the Blaine amendment was never passed at the federal level — is now being used simply to create a secular litmus test. So this was a school choice program where it said you can use a voucher to attend a secular private school, but not a Christian private school. The Supreme Court struck down that state Blaine amendment as applied to school choice funding. And so what it said is that you don't have to have school choice funding, but if you do have a school choice funding program, you can't then deny the funds to students who attend faith-based schools. That's an important win, right?

Second — or, they're a third win — the Little Sisters of the Poor were at the Supreme Court last year. This was a case where the Trump administration had protected the Little Sisters and other faith-based groups, and then the state of California and the state of, I think it was Pennsylvania, had sued the Trump administration saying that they did not have the authority to protect religious liberty. And the court said, yes, they do, right? This was an Obamacare mandate. It was a mandate that came out of the executive branch of the government. And so now the executive branch of the government can at least fix a religious liberty violation. So this gets into kind of separation-of-powers-type stuff, who has the authority, but the executive branch of the government has the authority to broaden a religious liberty exemption, was the bottom line there.

Third, the same day as the Little Sisters case, there was the Our Lady of Guadalupe case. As the name suggests, a Catholic institution, Catholic school. And the question here was, did secular employment law apply to a Catholic school when deciding who's going to teach in the school? And what the court said was that the constitutional provision known as the ministerial exception applies not just to ordained clergy. You can think of like, well, it's a ministerial exception, that would just apply to ministers, and by ministers, we mean people who minister at the altar. No, the court said, it's anyone who functions in a ministerial capacity, and that would include, in this case — I believe it was a grade school — that would include grade school teachers. Because what are you doing when you're a grade school teacher? You're teaching kids how to pray, you're teaching them what it is to be a Christian, even if you're the math teacher or the English teacher. You're embodying the Christian way of life. And so, of course, schools need to have freedom to hire teachers who are going to support the mission of the school. I mean, why did parents save up and sacrifice? You know, they're paying taxes for the public schools, but then they're also paying their own money to send their kids to private Christian schools because they want a different type of teacher, a different type of education. And so, again, this is an important win, because it protects the freedom of faith-based schools to make staffing decisions in accordance with their mission.

All right, last case to mention this term at the Supreme Court, the Fulton case. It's named for Sharonell Fulton, a foster mother in the city of Philadelphia, who was told she could no longer work with Catholic Social Services, because Catholic Social Services was mean and evil and bigoted because they wouldn't do same-sex fostering. This case went up to the Supreme Court. And what the Supreme Court said is, it didn't overturn Employment Division v. Smith, which many religious liberty advocates were hoping it would do. But what it did say here was that, look, you have a — this was a unanimous win, by the way, a 9-nothing rebuke to the city of Philadelphia — saying, wait, you have other exemptions to your so-called nondiscrimination policy, but you're refusing to grant a religious liberty exemption, and therefore that fails the constitutional test. All right, so let me — and that's important, because what this means is that at least for the time being, the Catholic foster care agency in Philadelphia is back up and running, right? And that's a good, good outcome.

All right, so why aren't they enough? First, take the school choice case. As good as it is to say that when school choice programs exist, you can't discriminate against faith-based schools, the vast majority of students still attend the government-run schools, and most of the states don't have school choice programs. And so we need to be, one, concerned about increasing school choice programs so that more people have financial assistance in sending their kids to school. The funding should follow the student, right? And so whether the student wants to go to a government-run school or a private Christian school, the parents should be making that decision, and then the funding for education should be following the decision that the parents make on behalf of the student. Our current model is entirely statist, where the state-run institutions get funding, even if the parents and the students want to go to other institutions, right? So one is that we don't yet have sufficient school choice programs. But then two, the majority of students still attend public schools. And so a religious liberty win for school choice does nothing for the students who will be indoctrinated with the gender unicorn, students who are having boys who identify as girls use their bathrooms, their locker rooms, compete against them in sports, et cetera, et cetera. So it's important that we have equality when it comes to government funding for education, but it's not going to do enough, because school choice funding doesn't exist everywhere, and even where it does exist, many parents don't avail themselves of it.

Second, the Little Sisters mandate case. First, it's unjust that that mandate still exists. I had mentioned this briefly earlier. The federal government should not be in the business of mandating immoral forms of medicine, right? And the mandate here — what did the owners of Hobby Lobby object to? They objected to the four drugs and devices that could cause an early abortion. The fact that we still have a federal law saying that healthcare plans have to do that is an unjust law for everyone. Second, this mandate is likely to come back. The day after, Joe Biden, who was at that point a candidate for the presidency, said, if I am elected, I will restore the Obama-Biden policy that existed before the Hobby Lobby ruling. All right, so two things to note there is that Biden doesn't understand that he can't reinstate the policy that existed before the Hobby Lobby ruling, because he lost, right? I mean, the Supreme Court struck that down. So if he reinstates it now that the court's even more conservative than it was back then, it's going nowhere. He can't overrule the Supreme Court. But what he could do is reinstate a policy that overrules the Trump policy, right? Because of the shift in the executive branch of government, which is simply to say that it's highly likely that the Little Sisters of the Poor are going to be back in court. And for many people, especially faith-based civil society leaders, they're not interested in being litigants, right? They're not interested in being plaintiffs. The process is part of the punishment for them. When you talk with the baker, the florist, the photographer about what the past five to ten years of their life has been like, it has not been good for them, right? Because their vocation was to make beautiful flower arrangements, to bake and then decorate beautiful cakes, to run a wonderful adoption agency. It wasn't to have their name dragged through the mud for a decade in all of the most prominent media outlets to litigate for their freedom to run their business or their charity in accordance with their beliefs, right? And so the fact that this process will continue is itself unjust.

Next, I want to jump ahead to the adoption agency case. Justice Alito points out — you know, it was a unanimous decision, but the cost of the unanimity, right, the chief got the three liberals to vote because it was a narrow ruling — is that if the city of Philadelphia was to say, fine, no exemptions at all, then their policy would be constitutional according to the logic of the ruling. Now, it looks like, if you count the tea leaves, there are five votes on the court to overturn the Smith decision. And so Alito's point was that, why don't we just do it now? Why do we have to keep litigating for this? Why can't we just, as the justices, say what the Constitution actually requires? So that's one part, that the process could continue. My hope here is that a 9-nothing win is actually symbolic enough that the mayor of Philadelphia says maybe we should just leave the Catholic adoption agency alone. One of the facts to point out here is that there are 30 foster care agencies in the city of Philadelphia, only one of them doesn't do same-sex foster placements. So again, why do you have to harass the one foster care agency that doesn't do same-sex placements when the other 29 do? Other fact worth pointing out, no same-sex couple had ever gone to the Catholic foster care agency, because they knew that Catholics don't do this. So there wasn't even a complaint. It was that the mayor of Philadelphia had heard that the evil Archbishop of Philadelphia still believed in the truth about marriage, and so then he said, we should see if the adoption agency is running in accordance with the bishop's beliefs. And then he actually said, why can't they be more like Pope Francis? I mean, it's actually one of the quotes on the record. Pope Francis is not in favor of gay marriage, by the way. Last thing to point out is that it's still unjust for those children, that the other 29 foster agencies will place them with two moms or two dads rather than with a mom and a dad, right? So we're still, even with a religious liberty win, we haven't done anything on the underlying issue of what do widows and orphans deserve.

All right, and then the last ruling, the ministerial exemption ruling. It's great for that faith-based school that they can hire teachers that embody the faith, but that same year, we got the Bostock decision from the Supreme Court. And many people were saying, look, you put these two things together — it's great, it was the employment provision, nondiscrimination in employment, that said sex now extended to gender identity. What will this mean for the workplace when it comes to healthcare benefits, when it comes to various practices of employees, restrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, dress codes, et cetera, et cetera? And not all of those are going to be protected by a ministerial exception, because, for example, Hobby Lobby — none of their employees are ministers, as far as I can tell. The ministerial exemption might protect the First Lutheran Church's school, but it's not going to protect a business being run by a member of the First Lutheran Church, even if that business owner wants to run his business in accordance with the truth on these issues.

And this is going to happen in all these areas: health, education, housing, medicine. Once you say that the word sex reaches into gender identity, and it's discrimination on the basis of gender identity if you don't treat people in accordance with their gender identity when it comes to their housing, when it comes to their healthcare benefits, when it comes to education considerations — what does that mean? It means endless litigation.

So what do we see now? There are high school track athletes who are suing their school district in — let me see if I can remember the state now — it's Connecticut, two high school female athletes. I believe it's lost 11 championships to two boys who are identifying as girls. The Hope Center, it's a homeless shelter in Anchorage, Alaska, is being sued by the city of Anchorage because they wouldn't allow an intoxicated male to spend the night in the battered women's shelter. He showed up around midnight, and the director of the center caught a taxi and sent him to the male shelter. He then sued, saying, I identified as a woman, and I had a civil right under the Anchorage civil rights ordinance to be treated in accordance with my gender identity. And imagine what this homeless shelter is like. Take all the pews out of the church and place a cot every three feet. It's not like a night at the Ritz-Carlton. The people are sleeping within arm's reach of each other. And you can understand why battered women, some of whom have been victims of sex trafficking, human trafficking, et cetera, et cetera, wouldn't want to have a male sleeping within arm's reach, right?

All these things, whether it's housing — and another thing to point out, California earlier this year, Governor Newsom announced that they were going to allow the prison system to be conducted according to gender identity. And within the first six months, I think it was something like five women had asked to be transferred to the male jail, but 300 men had asked to be transferred to the women's jail. And already there, I believe this is correct — I need to double-check this, but the article that I had read said that already there is a pregnant female inmate, right? And so these are consequences. And I don't care whether that woman is religious or not. What happened to her was evil and unjust, right? I mean, in this case, the homeless shelter happened to be a Christian shelter, but even if it wasn't, right, this isn't primarily a religious liberty concern. It's about privacy, it's about safety, it's about equality for the athletes.

It's also about safety. I mean, track doesn't have, you know, physical risk, but imagine it was basketball, and you're going up for a rebound, and the person opposing you at the basket is a high school boy who identifies as a girl. This is why women's rugby won't allow men who identify as women to compete in women's rugby. They understand that the physics of physical collision is such that men who have taller bodies, longer wingspans, denser bones, and larger muscles — this is going to be a nightmare. This is why we don't have co-ed collision sports. That's a safety concern. We also don't have co-ed competition sports. We'll have co-ed recreational sports, but we don't have co-ed competition sports. The Olympics — you just finished watching the Olympics — it was male and female Olympics, because the bodily differences make a difference when it comes to athletic competition. So there's an equality, a fairness concern. There's a safety concern, there's a privacy concern. And this matters for everyone. Those high school female athletes, whether they're religious or not, it was unfair that they lost to those men.

Lastly, it's also a good medicine concern. Those two 13-year-old girls that I mentioned in the previous lecture — I have no idea if they were religious or not. It wasn't a religious liberty violation that they had double mastectomies performed on their bodies. It was a bodily integrity violation, right? They had irreversible damage performed on their bodies.

And so this is getting me into the third part of this talk, which the second part does conclude that. That's why religious liberty is important, but it's not enough, right? Religious liberty doesn't engage on the debate about privacy, safety, equality, or simply good medicine.

And so the third part, which is, what's the role of government? How should we think about what it means to be a faithful citizen? And I'm going to try to be ecumenical in this section as well. How should we think about our engagement in the public square? And here's a common touchstone: Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from the Birmingham Jail. He says, a just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in terms of Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that's not rooted in eternal law and natural law. MLK also quotes Augustine in his letter from the Birmingham Jail. Luther's understanding of natural law is entirely in keeping with this, right? I don't think this is an area where Catholics and Lutherans would disagree. The idea is that all justified human lawmaking is going to have its ultimate foundation in the eternal law, the moral law. A man-made code that doesn't square with — either you can name it as the natural law or creational ordinance — it's an unjust law. And then we can debate whether or not we should obey it, under what circumstances is civil disobedience appropriate. But the first step should be that we want to see our man-made laws square with the natural law, square with the eternal law, square with the moral law.

And there's no neutrality on these issues either. So somebody was like, oh, look, we should just be neutral. Either the law will allow a doctor to remove the breasts of a 13-year-old girl or it will not. There's not a neutral — you know, I'm neutral on double mastectomies for 13-year-olds. That's not an option, right? You're either in favor of the law allowing it or you're in favor of the law prohibiting it, but you can't say I'm in favor of the law being neutral on it. Either the legal definition of marriage is the union of a man and a woman, or it's the union of any two consenting adults, or it's the union of any group of consenting adults. But there's no neutrality between those options, right? Oh, the marriage debate, I'm in favor of neutrality, marriage neutrality. Like, what is that? Oh, I think the state should be neutral on the abortion question. Well, no, either the unborn child is a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore it has a right to life, and therefore abortion is the unjust killing of a being made in the image and likeness of God, and therefore it should be illegal. Or the unborn child is a clump of cells, or the unborn child is a human being but somehow doesn't have a right to life, or the unborn child is a human being with a right to life but somehow the autonomy of the mother trumps the dignity of the child, right? But there's no neutrality on these questions, right? You can't say I'm morally neutral or the law should be neutral. And that also means that as citizens, we shouldn't say that we're neutral on these questions.

We also shouldn't say, well, I don't care what the law says so long as I'm exempt from it, right? So, you know, have pro-choice laws, but just exempt Lutherans For Life from the pro-choice laws. You know, have pro-gay-marriage laws, but exempt Lutheran charities from the laws. Have gender ideology laws, but exempt other Lutheran-run businesses, right? It's not going to be a sufficient outcome. Because what do we want to see? We want to see public policy, human law, protect human dignity and promote human flourishing.

So, to give you a summary of this, this will touch on the previous two lectures. When a man-made law violates the natural law — I mentioned that bad ideas have consequences, bad ideas have victims — an unjust law also has consequences. So what have we seen when we look at the consequences of the past 50 years of the sexual revolution? Millions of unborn babies who have been killed. Millions of children who have grown up without their dads. Millions of women who have been used and abused by bad boyfriends and ex-husbands. Millions of men who are addicted to pornography, living in their mom's basements playing video games. I mean, this has been bad on everyone you could look at — the children, both born and unborn, the women, the men. The sexual revolution has not been good. And none of those things that I just mentioned are religious liberty issues. We're talking about the right to life. We're talking about the right to have a mom and a dad. We're talking about the right to be treated with respect and dignity with respect to our sexuality.

And now we have a new challenge. You know, on top of everything I just mentioned, is that we have a generation of young people who feel alienated from their bodies and who are being encouraged by the culture to identify as gender queer or gender ambidextrous or gender fluid, and then to take puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, et cetera, et cetera. There's an essay that I wrote that I had to take something out of. Originally, I included a hyperlink to a doctor who said, you know, for people who are — what is the right term — not gender ambidextrous, maybe it is, no, gender ambidextrous, that is correct, the correct term. For people who are gender ambidextrous, I can do surgery to preserve your existing genitalia and add the opposite sex's genitalia. And then I took out the link because I was like, I don't want people seeing those. I mean, he had pictures of this. But that's what's going on, right? And again, there's not going to be neutrality there.

And then so the question is, is the law going to protect human dignity and facilitate human flourishing or not? And it's when the law gets those things wrong that we then have the religious liberty violations. If the law didn't protect a right to abortion, we wouldn't have religious liberty violations with respect to abortion. If the law hadn't redefined marriage, we wouldn't have religious liberty violations for people who don't support the legal redefinition of marriage. If the law doesn't get gender identity wrong, we won't have religious liberty violations there either.

Okay, last part of the talk, and then we'll have some time for Q and A. What do I think we need to do in terms of the public square? I think we need to engage in the political process, meaning that, you know, elections have consequences, and we should be engaged in that process. We should be looking at good executive action, meaning the executive branch of government should be putting out good regulations. We should have good judicial branch of government lawsuits, right? Sometimes we're going to have to sue to defend both our religious liberty rights, but also — I think those two high school track athletes in Connecticut are very courageous, because they're suing their school district. Actually, they're suing the entire state to protect the equality for future female athletes, right? And that's a traditional branch of government. And then also, we need the legislative branch of government, right? The parents who have been going to these school board meetings, that's quasi-legislative, insofar as a school board is voting to make policy. But then you can think of this as the statehouse, you can think of this as the Congress. We need to be engaged in all of those levels.

But then, look, politics alone isn't going to be sufficient. This is where, for those of you whose primary vocations lie with the church, there needs to be sound preaching and teaching on these issues. The lack of clarity coming from the pulpit — and this is probably less of a problem in your churches than it is in mine, and as it is in other Protestant denominations — but the primary vocation from the pulpit is to be truth-tellers, right? And many people shy away from these questions. They don't want to — so they're not necessarily proactively teaching falsehoods, they're just going quiet. They don't want to talk about it because it's controversial. An encouragement here is, sound preaching is efficacious, and people in the pews want to be both instructed on these issues and know that their pastor is in this with them. One of the things that has been incredibly frustrating to me is to hear parents saying, my priest or my pastor never talks about this, and I'm spending all of this time at the school board meeting trying to push back on this bad policy, and I'm getting no encouragement, no support, no assistance from my pastor, right? And so the encouragement there is that I think that there's a huge role for the church in equipping the saints to then do their vocation, which might be in the public square, in the civic arena.

But then lastly, I think that this is an intergenerational question, which means our long-term defense is actually going to be living out the truth on these issues. I think about all the things that we've talked about today. If Christians got married and stayed married at the rates that were occurring before the sexual revolution, just think about how different our country would be. I mean, sadly, when you look at the social science on cohabitation, on abortion, on divorce, on non-marital childbearing, Christians are only marginally different than non-Christians. Too many people in the pews have bought into the sexual revolution, right? And so that means that we're going to need both the preaching, the teaching, but then I think even more importantly, the formation and the practical assistance in living this out. And then I think living it out actually becomes our biggest witness to the world, that people are going to say, you know, what is it about that family, that they have all of the same struggles, all of the same anxieties that we have, and yet there's a certain amount of joy and serenity with their family life? I think the family is the domestic church. If we can get this right, it is actually an evangelistic tool. It's an asset in our arsenal.

All right, and so with that, I finished early this time, which means we have more time, because I realized we didn't get any questions for that first session. So the floor is open.

Great, I know we've got one question down. Oh, great, pastor's got it. Good.

I work for a large employer, and I've seen a lot of these things come in through diversity and inclusion. After the inauguration, they added equity. How do I respond with a positive Christian witness?

That's a really difficult question, because depending on who your large employer is, it might be a losing battle, in which case the best advice might be not to get fired until you find a new job. I mean — and I'm just being — because I think one thing to be realistic about is that for certain large corporations that have drunk the Kool-Aid on this, the only outcome of you raising any objection in that corporate culture is that you won't ever receive another pay raise or promotion, and you may at some point be disciplined. All of a sudden your evaluations will come back negative, when they have been positive — you're not a team player, et cetera, et cetera. And given that, I don't want to caution — I don't want to advise people to behave in ways, if they're the breadwinner for the family and you have wife and kids dependent on you for livelihood, you don't want to be too cavalier in this. All of that said, I do not think you can or should do anything that in and of itself is immoral in order to keep your job, right? And so if part of the diversity, equity, inclusion training that they're making you do requires you to say things that aren't true, I think you have to draw a line there, acknowledging that it may very well result in employment consequences. Because again, I don't think that we can, even for the sake of keeping our job, fail to bear witness to the truth, or even worse, actively say things that are untrue. That's probably all I can say without knowing more of this situation. But I do think this is something that many faithful Christians are going to have to face, especially when they work in larger corporations that have gone woke. There are certain religious liberty protections under federal employment law. Religion is a protected class under Title VII, and so you might have a claim there, but even if you win your court case, you're still going to be treated as persona non grata, right? I mean, this is where, again, the process is part of the punishment. Even if you sued and won, you still probably would be better off looking for another job. You know, get your payout, but then go find another job, because you're just not going to be flourishing there. You're not going to be happy there.

So, I have a question about gender identity, and how that applies not only to church and school, but what about it in the home? So, for example, let's say that we have a — my daughter has a party for girls. And there's a boy who identifies as a girl and he wants to be invited for the sleepover. You know, I'm not going to allow that, but how's the law going to apply to that? Where does the law come into the home in that way?

Great question. I mean, I think that as a legal matter, you have more or less absolute authority in terms of what friends get to come over to your house for a sleepover. So I think as a legal issue, that's fairly cut and dry. The law can't force you to allow a boy who identifies as a girl to do a slumber party in your girls', your daughter's bedroom. I mean, I think as a practical matter, this is going to be something that more and more parents need to navigate. Because we don't want to — I mean, I'm thinking out loud on this, and it's really complicated, because on the one hand, you don't want your, especially young children, to be confused about these issues. You need clarity, especially with young people, about the truth of our embodiment as male and female. Simultaneously, if there is a student struggling with gender dysphoria, I want them being friends with your family. Because my guess is that if you're coming to this conference, you're going to give that family some good advice. And so it's both of those things simultaneously, keeping them in tension. What I've told people is that if you have someone struggling with gender dysphoria, who would you rather they talk to if you're not going to be in their life, right? And so we want to remain in the lives of people struggling with gender, especially when there's a student struggling with gender dysphoria. If you can be giving advice to the parents, if your child can be befriending the person — but also, depending on the age of the student, not every young person is capable of that. And I don't want — I'm thinking, as a relatively young father, I don't want my kids being placed in a situation that they're not equipped for. And so I think the median answer to your question about the overnight sleepover — no, a boy who identifies as a girl is not sleeping in my daughter's room for a slumber party. The larger question is, how do we, especially as a Christian community, navigate the tension of, we want to form our own kids in the truth, but we also want to be there for people who we could minister to and counsel when their families are in these delicate situations? And then I just think it's going to be a matter of prudence and wisdom of how do you apply both of those things in any given concrete situation.

We have a question over here.

Your statistics on transgender suicide were helpful and show how the abstract push for things doesn't work out in reality. I wonder if we have statistics — if we do, you don't hear them in the mainstream media — on gay marriage since the Obergefell decision. They got the availability, the opportunity to do it, but we never hear about cohabitation rates without getting married, we don't hear about divorces and things like that. Are there any studies that shed light on how it's working out in reality?

Yeah, so it's a great question that I would like to know the answer to myself, because there have not been — so my understanding is that as an immediate matter, after the Obergefell decision, there were some people who rushed to get marriage licenses, and then since then, there really hasn't been as much demand, because it was, as I mentioned at the very end of that first lecture, the legal redefinition of marriage wasn't the end goal. It was part of a larger cultural project for the normalization of same-sex relationships and the elimination of any criticism. And so it would be very interesting to know what are some of the statistics, and how long. Because another thing that's kind of counterintuitive at first is that same-sex female relationships are the shortest-lived of all relationships. So think about a male-male relationship, a male-female relationship, and a female-female. The female-female is the shortest-lived. And people think it's counterintuitive at first, because, well, wait, women are so good at relationships and emotion and blah, blah. And it's like, yes, and that's exactly the problem when you have a double-female relationship. It's actually really hard for both to be emotionally satisfied, right? So just think about, if you have college-age students — did you ever hear a high school or a college-aged boy say, oh, I broke up with my girlfriend, she wasn't fulfilling my emotional needs? That's not the typical reason that boys break up with girls or guys break up with women, right? And so it's the double-female relationship, which tends to be the shortest-lived. The double-male relationship tends to be the most promiscuous, not because gay people are more promiscuous than straight people, but because men are more promiscuous than women, and a double-male relationship exacerbates that underlying tendency. So again, it's not that there's something about lesbianism that leads it to be short-lived, but that double-female relationship leads it that way. Women file the majority of divorces, for example. So when it's double-female, short-lived; double-male, more sexually open; again, because the double-male — the male-female tends to balance those two tendencies, right? Purely as a social science aspect. And so again, I would like to see some more studies conducted on this. And I can guess some of the reasons why it's not as interesting of a topic for people to be studying right now as it was when they were manufacturing a lot of really shoddy studies in support of same-sex marriage.

Just quickly in reference to that, some reading I did a few years ago said that the average gay relationship is about a year and a half. Now, that wasn't — maybe not an extensive study, but what I wanted to comment on was my observation, and maybe your insight on it. The beginning of your third presentation, you said, the left repeals laws, it limits personal freedom — which it has. But what we've been seeing in the last seven months is that the left is limiting personal freedom in many realms. What a huge contradiction.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of those philosophical contradictions that I had mentioned in the previous talk, of like, you know, they want freedom for me and conformity for thee. And so the idea is that Bruce should be free to be Caitlyn, but you should not be free to say that Caitlyn is still a male, is still a man, right? I mean, that's the tension here. And I just think that this is the reality, that there's not going to be neutrality on many of these questions, right? The law's either going to say that Caitlyn is a woman, or the law is going to say that Caitlyn is still a man. And even if you engage in a legal name change, you haven't engaged in an ontological change, right? And I don't see a third alternative, right? It's going to — the law's either going to get this right, do it based on biology, or it's going to do it based on self-identity.

The transgenders getting treatment and basically not allowed to have anybody dissent — and I'm wondering if it's extended yet to the home, like what social services — I've read anecdotal reports of kids getting removed from parents' homes.

Yes, yeah. Someone asked a question earlier — I forget which session it was — and he said that he was from Cleveland, Ohio, and it was in Cleveland that the first case of this happened, which I was shocked by, because I figured it would be California, Massachusetts, New York. I wasn't thinking it would be Ohio. But parents lost custody of a 17-year-old girl because they didn't want to place their own — put her on testosterone. And the court system assigned custody to the grandparents, who were more — I mean, weirdly, because you would think grandparents would be more opposed, but they were more in favor of a gender transition. And then if I remember correctly, the facts were that before the child could go on testosterone, there would need to be another court hearing. And then I think after she turned 18, it was no longer a legal issue, because at that point, you reach the age of maturity and the patient makes the decision for herself. But this has happened.

There was a federal law called the Equality Act that said every child in the foster care system nationally would have to be treated in accordance with their gender identity when it came to their housing in the foster care system and when it came to their medical care. And one of the arguments that I made when the Equality Act — this was a new provision, it wasn't in previous versions — the Equality Act has never become law, but it has passed the House of Representatives this year, and it's deadlocked in the Senate right now. Amazon stopped selling my book the week before the House voted on the Equality Act, because I was such an outspoken critic. I mean, I honestly — the reason, the book's three years old. They sold it for three years. The timing of when they stopped selling it, in the manner in which — it was obvious that they were trying to discredit me the week before a major vote in D.C. But one of the arguments that I made was, I said, wait, if this is what equality and justice requires for foster kids, why doesn't it also require it for every other child? This is the stepping stone, right? This is the nose of the camel getting under the tent. Once we've established in law that foster kids must be treated in accordance with their gender identity, on what grounds do we say that other kids should not be treated on the basis of their gender identity? And so this is going to become an issue. You know, for right now, the question from up front, the parent gets to decide who sleeps where. But if your state goes bad on this, and the state says we're passing a law saying that minors must be affirmed in their gender identity, that will have huge consequences for parental authority, parental rights, healthcare, housing, education, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, I'm curious, on the topic of religious liberty, what would it take in our country for it to become illegal to publicly say what the Bible says? Will the Bill of Rights have to be repealed, or are there other avenues?

So I think that — so long as the First Amendment is in existence, and for the foreseeable future, the composition of the courts — I mean, to Trump's credit, not only did we get three really, really good Supreme Court justices, but he took lower court appointments seriously. And so I have friends who are now federal judges, people who on all of these underlying issues are right where we are. And there were hundreds of people placed on the district and the circuit court level. And so I think, so long as, if Clarence Thomas just keeps living for a few more years — because right now I think it's Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer are the two oldest justices, and so obviously who gets to appoint their successors will reshape the court. But again, only so much, because right now we have a 6-3 court. It's more like a 3-3-3, but two of those threes are more or less on our side. All of which is to say, I do not think the literal proclamation of the gospel, the literal reading of scripture, will ever be prohibited. And I think in general our free speech law — so in addition to the free religion, our free speech law is pretty good. That said, that might be the limit, though, right? So it may very well be limited to, yeah, you can say that from the pulpit, or you can say that, but you can't run a school in accordance with it, or a business in accordance with it, or a homeless shelter in accordance with it, or a hospital in accordance with it. And that's why, for the purpose of this talk, I wanted to kind of highlight that if we only focus on the religious liberty or the freedom of speech, we might be vacating other playing fields where we very much need to be engaged.

I mean, suicide statistics — a suicide threat is sort of the emotional blackmail that people use. But I was confused. You were saying it's 41% of people with gender dysphoria will attempt suicide, and then once they transition, they're 19 times greater than normal population, or —

Yep, yep. Okay. And just to specify that even more, it's, of adults who identify as transgender, 41% will attempt suicide at some point in their lives. And so that's slightly different. You had used gender dysphoria. Not everyone with gender dysphoria identifies as transgender, because some people experience gender dysphoria but they know full well that, like, I'm a man, but I don't feel comfortable as a man, and they seek help to feel comfortable again. Some people with gender dysphoria say, oh, that must mean that I'm a woman trapped in a man's body. Or some people — I mean, this is also a very common phenomenon — I have gender dysphoria, I know I'm a man, but I want to identify as a woman because I think that's my greatest pathway to happiness, because I don't feel comfortable as a man. This is why, historically, they use the language of a man who identifies as a woman. You talk to some people who have transitioned, and they will be very honest: yeah, I'm a man, but I wasn't feeling comfortable living as a man, and I thought living as a woman would make me more comfortable. So that's why that one nuance between people with gender dysphoria versus people who identify as transgender. And then the other — so that's 41% will attempt suicide at some point. And then the other statistic, it's people who have had sex reassignment surgery, 19 times more likely than the general population. So that's the comparison group there. And then people say, well, maybe it would have been even worse if they didn't have the surgery. And that's where that other study that I mentioned is particularly important, because it's showing that, look, after surgery, there was no sign of improvement on the underlying metrics that we look at, and in fact, two of them got worse. And so then the way I think about this is, what other condition do we think that a 19-times-greater likelihood of death by suicide is an effective treatment for the condition?

Is there a statistic for the before-transitioning, what — or how many times higher are people who identify as transgender, their suicide rate?

I don't know what, offhand. But my sense is that it would be lower, simply because if that other population-based study from two years ago is accurate, showing that both hormonal and surgical transition didn't improve outcomes — then if suicide ideation and suicide attempts were things that they tracked. And if I remember it correctly, it was psychiatric hospital visitation, psychiatric doctor visits, and then different psychiatric metrics of health. So it would be counterintuitive if actually the suicide rate was higher and then it went down but everything else got worse. Although, I mean, it's logically possible. Yeah, and I just don't remember off the top of my head.

Thank you so much. We'll let you come down from the mount as we give lunch instructions.