commentary: Gender Madness

The Wacky World of Gender Identification
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 03-Aug-19; Sermon #1500c; 11 minutes

Description: (show)

A media firestorm erupted over an interview in which actor Mario Lopez told interviewer Candace Owens that he rejected the practice of a child determining his or her gender. Parents, Lopez said, who allow their children to live according to their self-identified gender are setting a dangerous precedent. Even though Lopez, the father of three children, is a supporter of LBGTQ rights, the elite media vented their anger at his logical, common-sensical stance, consistent with orthodox biological science. The noun gender dates back to the 14th century and derives from the Latin term genus or "birth." At that time, it referred to the grammatical gender of nouns. The word soon became associated, by analogy, with the biological sex of a person or animal. Liberal thinkers in the latter half of the 20th century widened its meaning to allow for "cultural and social differences." In factoring in these differences, they have repudiated God's declaration establishing male and female at creation (and, by extension, birth). Some leftists have created 112 genders, according to Tumblr. This bizarre gender madness is a symptom of what was formerly known as craziness-simply being out of one's mind.




You may have heard of the recent social-media firestorm released when Twitter got hold of what Saved by the Bell actor Mario Lopez, now a host on Extra, said in an interview with conservative Candace Owens in June. He said, essentially, that parents who allow their children to live according to their self-identified genders are setting a “dangerous” example. To you and me, that sounds right—that something like that should have been said. Lopez is a father of three children, but he is also a rather avid supporter of LGBTQ rights. Yet even so, he might as well have been crucified by the oh-so-tolerant Left for saying those things. Candace Owens led into the pertinent part of the conversation like this:

A lot of weird trends come out of Hollywood and one of the weirder ones, for me, is this new trend where celebrities are coming out—and I know Charlize Theron did this a few weeks ago—in saying that their child is picking their gender. And this is strange to me, and they say, ‘Oh, I looked at my child, and my child was swimming in a bathtub and looked up and said, “Mommy, I’m a boy,’” and that’s weird ...”

Owens, who is fairly young—she's about 30—has experience as a nanny, says she realizes that children don’t always mean what they say: “I am trying to understand this new Hollywood mentality where they just think their children now have the mental authority and clarity [to make these decisions].” Here's where Lopez replied:

I am trying to understand it myself, and please don’t lump me into that whole [group]. I’m kind of blown away too. Look, I’m never one to tell anyone how to parent their kids obviously, and I think if you come from a place of love, you really can’t go wrong, but at the same time, . . . if you're 3-years-old, and you’re saying you’re feeling a certain way, or you think you’re a boy or a girl or whatever the case may be, I just think it's dangerous as a parent to make this determination then. ... It's sort of alarming. ... I just think about the repercussions later on. ... When you’re a kid ... you don’t know anything about sexuality yet. You’re just a kid.

Owens commented at that point that parents who support their children in this way are narcissists showing off their tolerance. To this, Lopez responded, “I think parents need to allow their kids to be kids, but at the same time, you got to be the adult in the situation. ... I think the formative years is when you start having those discussions and really start making these ‘declarations.’”

To my way of thinking, for these days now—I'm talking about 2019—what he said is fairly moderate. I am not going to totally endorse what he said, but for a guy who has been an actor his whole life to say something like this is fairly moderate. He is not way, way over on the left in these things. His words are certainly far more moderate than all this gender wackiness that is going on. His suggestion that parents need to be the adults in such a situation is absolutely right. Parents need to stand up and be parents. What the progressives, though, cannot stand is that he is right in the main—that he is right morally, he is right religiously, he is right scientifically, and in all other ways that matter. To them, hearing what he said, his "wrongness" resides in two things: (1) his lack of acceptance of their deviant ideas (they don't like people not to accept what they believe) and (2) his ignorance (as they see it) of their redefinition of gender. Notice I said "their definition," not "the definition." Were you aware that the common definition of gender is different from the Left’s definition of gender? (The dictionaries have now started combining them.)

To the common person, gender has to do with the two biological sexes, male and female. In fact, the word "gender" derives from Latin genus, which refers to birth. Your gender is what you were born with! How one was born was "gender," from genus. In 14th-century English, which is the earliest this word shows up in the English language, it began actually as a grammatical term, referring to classes of nouns designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter in some languages. It was grammar at that point. But pretty much at the same time, people began to use it as a synonym of a person’s biological sex. That has continued over the centuries since the 14th century to be how it is—we use "sex" and "gender" pretty much the same way.

Only recently, however—from about the mid-20th century—it has been hijacked by the radical left to refer not to one's biological sex, but to cultural and social differences between individuals, encompassing a far broader range of identities than the binary “male” and “female.” Notice the two words I used there: it is cultural and social differences. In layman’s terms, to them, one’s gender has nothing at all to do with sexual plumbing but only with a person’s thinking or feeling about the self. It is all inside their heads. In essence, a person’s gender is what the culture and social interaction has persuaded the person to become. It is a mixture of interior psychological problems and exterior pressure or persuasion. And so, it is fluid; it can change on a whim. It is not about truth. Gender today has nothing to do with truth or reality, but only self-expression based on conditioning and influence. Frankly, it is also based on the lack of any kind of standards from the parents. The parents have a great deal of responsibility in all this, and they are dropping the ball— having no standards at all, allowing the child to basically raise himself or herself.

In Genesis 1:27, God says that He “created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” By contrast—and there is really no comparison, because this just a modern thing—the blogging site Tumblr lists 112 genders. And they are weird! One was like "astral gender," where the person felt that his/her gender had something to do with cosmic whatever. Another one said that his/her gender was something about having to do with infinity. It was like two mirrors reflecting the same image. When you look at it a certain way, you could see all these mirrors and the reflections in them going on for infinity. That was his/her gender. What does that have to do with a person's gender? I don't know. But there was weird stuff. One person felt like he was boy most of the time, but sometimes he felt like a girl, but mostly a boy, and so he was one one time, and then the other. They had a name for it. It was just really weird, all these 112 genders. When you read the list, it becomes pretty clear that all this gender madness is a manifestation of various mental disorders. It is what we used to call craziness, what we used to call madness, what we used to call being out of your mind! We are, seriously, letting the inmates run the cultural asylum these days.

I feel for Mario Lopez. He was just saying what used to be common sense. Now he has apologized for saying it and repudiated his words, which I thought was said. He probably did it to save his job. Now it is politically incorrect to be a loving parent with standards and a firm grasp on reality. Yes, it has really come to this—this madness.

God help us be strong to face the even worse things that we are promised that will be coming as this age nears its end. Can you imagine?

RTR/aws/dcg












 


 
Close
E-mail It