The following is an excerpt taken from the new book “Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War,” by Jay Richards & James Robison (Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing).
When God created the heavens and the earth, He ended Day Six by speaking to Himself:
“‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.'” (Genesis 1:26–28)
Male And Female He Created Them
God creates each of us in His image. Yet we can’t fulfill His command to multiply and fill the earth without the difference of male and female. Why? Because it takes one fertile male and one fertile female to reproduce after our kind. It’s not just that males and females are different; it’s that we’re complements. When we come together in the right way, we’re much greater than the sum of our parts. One man and one woman can give rise to the entire human race.
Even without special revelation, everyone knows the following:
- There are men and women.
- Men aren’t women.
- Women aren’t men.
- Men can’t become women.
- Women can’t become men.
- It’s not possible to be a man but have a woman’s body or to be a woman with a man’s body.
Until recently, these six claims would have seemed trite. But we live at the shocking moment when our cultural elites deny them all and seek to silence those who resist. In what seems like a flash, “gender ideology” has overrun our schools, our media, our laws, the HR and C-suites of most corporations, the United Nations, and even many churches and synagogues. This ideology has deep roots going back centuries, but it has really picked up steam in the academy in the last few decades.
In 2015, so-called transgender people, such as Caitlyn (formerly the Olympic decathlete known as Bruce) Jenner, suddenly appeared on dozens of magazine covers. A few years later, a collegiate male swimmer, “Lia” Thomas — a male who “identifies” as a woman — won the women’s 500-yard freestyle in the NCAA Division I national championship.
A twenty-six-year-old man, Dylan Mulvaney, started acting like a parody of a 1950s teenage girl and instantly rose to fame with his picture emblazoned on cans of Bud Light. A male sex offender “identifying as a woman” was sent to a women’s prison, where he then raped a female prisoner. Meanwhile, the acronyms kept growing: LBGT morphed into LBGTQIA with a + added to keep the options open.
What produced the backlash from normal people was the assault on kids: Children have been bombarded with sexual content. Schools stock shelves with explicit porn, such as the notorious “Gender Queer.” Activists are teaching young kids to “queer” (that is, blur the boundaries of) reality at drag queen story hours at libraries nationwide. The popular Twitter feed, Libs of TikTok, contains videos of young children twerking and gyrating at drag shows in ways once reserved for dark adult bars.
And amidst it all, teachers and social media influencers are telling children they might have been born in the wrong body. Doctors are “treating” troubled minors with sterilizing drugs and surgeries. When word of this first got out, activists tried to pretend it wasn’t really happening. When that became implausible, they pivoted. Sure, it’s happening, they conceded. In fact, it’s great, and how dare you object, bigot!
Twenty years ago, everyone — left, right, and center — would have denounced such scenes. But overnight, approval became the litmus test for tolerance and taste. These are the worst ideas of our time—the mutant spawn of some nameless demon set free to roam the earth and devour our children.
Cover image: Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing
What Can We Do?
To escape this freak show, Christians, Jews, and everyone else on #TeamReality need to offer a better view of the human person — one that captures human beings in their fullness, body and soul. That means that, among other things, we must also defend basic biology. This battle will define our politics for the next decade at least. As we write this, one political party fully promotes gender ideology, while the other, with fits and starts, opposes it. The Biden administration has turned the federal government into the globe’s most powerful mission effort of the gender cult. Until that changes, we’ll play defense in Washington.
The red states can be safe zones, but we must fight in every nook and cranny — at school board meetings, in the workplace, with our investments and shopping choices. Every red state should protect kids from these medical procedures. They should also define “male” and “female” in state law, prohibit secret social transitioning in schools, purge gender ideology from school curricula, protect teachers and others from being forced to use fake names and pronouns, and reverse laws that allow people to change the sex on their birth certificate based simply on how they “identify.” Well-crafted parents’ rights bills can help here, and red states have passed several in the last few years.
We suspect the gender clinics will be sued into oblivion as more of their young victims come of age. But we can’t wait for that to happen. We need to fight gender madness as if our children’s lives depend on it. And even when the clinics close their doors, that will be but one victory in a larger battle to defeat a fanatical force that makes twentieth-century communism look tame.
Gender ideology attacks who and what we are. But it also marks an inflection point. We’re being offered a glimpse of the deadly path ahead. Either our culture will see it for what it is and reverse course — or it will suffer costs we can’t begin to imagine.
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This excerpt is taken from the new book “Fight the Good Fight: How an Alliance of Faith and Reason Can Win the Culture War,” by Jay Richards & James Robison (Regnery/Skyhorse Publishing). Copyright © 2024 Jay Richards & James Robison. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and executive editor of The Stream.
James Robison is the founder and president of LIFE Outreach International, a worldwide Christian relief organization, and the founder and publisher of The Stream.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.