Taproot of Truth 1.0
by Virginia Armstrong, Ph.D.*
The Transgenderism Movement is “A form of cultural Marxism…an aggressive agenda to destroy Western traditions, values, and norms…one which is especially threatening to the Christian faith.” This assessment was offered by Princeton and Vanderbilt political science and law professor, Dr. Carol Swain, referring to Vanderbilt’s new “pronoun etiquette policy concerning transgenderism.” At that time, the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, American society in general had not even become clearly aware of the movement.
During that time period, the same conclusion was being reached by a variety of other leaders in American academia and churches: this movement is a societal danger of the greatest magnitude. In a premier 2015 conference on sexualism and transgenderism, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary, declared that, “We have underestimated the challenge that we’re facing [with the Transgenderism Movement].” As quoted by Andrew J. W. Smith, Mohler argues that the “transgender movement represents the cultural dilemma about gender and sexuality even more clearly than homosexuality. The moral revolution has expanded so rapidly as to put the ‘very existence of biblical Christianity’ into question.”
This rapid expansion since 2015 has now reached the courts, who have usurped the power as “arbiter of final truth” in these, and other, fundamental social issue battles. But the U.S. Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on whether transgender status is a constitutionally protected right. Therefore, it is critical that we in the Judeo-Christian community fully prepare ourselves to defend our worldview’s sexuality positions before the justices attempt to preempt control of this fundamental area of life and infuse it with humanistic rulings.
Litigation—which could lead to that disastrous result—is already moving through the lower courts. Thus, we must understand court decisions already rendered concerning this movement. The first heralded transgenderism case appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court was Gloucester County School Board v. G.G., by his next friend and Mother, Deirdre Grimm, a contorted series of administrative and judicial rulings stretching from 2015 to 2021. This case involved a female student wanting to transition to male in the Gloucester County [Virginia] schools and use male bathrooms, a usage prohibited by the Gloucester [Virginia] County School Board. Gavin Grimm (the student who transitioned to male) argued that the Equal Protection Clause of the U. S. Constitution, Amendment 14, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex, included as “sex” “gender identity, transgender status, and nonconformity to sex stereotypes." The Supreme Court (2021) ultimately refused to hear the case, leaving in place pro-transgenderism rights decisions by lower court judges.
But Grimm was influenced by the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in which the Court consolidated three lower court decisions—commonly referred to under one title as the Bostick case. One of the three involved alleged discrimination against a transgender employee by the Harris Funeral Home (Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC, 2020). The Court decided, six to three, for the employee Aimee Stephens, who presented himself/herself as male until 2013. At that time, he/she informed her Funeral Home employers that he/she intended to transition to male. The Funeral Home subsequently fired Stephens under company policy. The EEOC, representing Stephens and homosexual plaintiffs in the Zarda and Bostick cases, argued that this differentiation between transgender and cisgender employees violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protected homosexual and transgender people from “employment discrimination.” It is essential to note that this decision was based on a congressional statute (and one misinterpreted by the EEOC), not a Constitutional provision—which is supreme.
So the concerns expressed above by Dr. Swain and Dr. Mohler express the truth. Similarly true is their support for what we shall refer to as “sexual orthodoxy”—the Judeo-Christian truth about the transgenderism movement. In this series, “Taproot of Truth #1,” we shall analyze some of the most compelling arguments demonstrating the truth of the Judeo-Christian stance on sexuality, and offer additional arguments demonstrating the falsity of the Transgenderism Movement (TM).
As with the plant world, our Judeo-Christian “taproot” gives rise to additional—and more focused—secondary roots. In our metaphor, there are six such roots—each one representing one of the “truth tenets” or branches of the philosophy of a worldview. The Judeo-Christian position regarding each tenet is clearly superior to the Humanistic position.
These secondary roots, or truth tenets, are thus organized in this Study into six categories, each category focusing on one of the core concepts essential to a worldview and the evidence supporting that concept. This will allow for comparison of the two worldviews, Judeo-Christian and Humanistic, leading unarguably to the conclusion that American law and culture must rest on the Judeo-Christian worldview at every point.
NOTE
Each of these tenets is identified by a label that may initially sound overwhelmingly scholarly and beyond ordinary understanding.This is not the case! We academicians love big words; but many of our words, such the ones used below, have simple meanings that are understandable. Please do not be intimidated! Much of America’s Culture War is a “War of Words,” and we in the Judeo-Christian community are in dire need of a vocabulary lesson! Here, we define these truth tenets in a manner making them clearly applicable to law and the legal system.
The Six Tenets
The six tenets follow a logical order:
1. Ontology – the essence, inherent nature of a being, movement, entity, structure, etc.
2. Cosmology – the source of a being, entity, structure, etc.
3. Epistemology – the source, nature, apprehension, etc. of truth/knowledge
4. Anthropology – the nature, structure, etc. of man and human society
5. Teleology – the purpose/effects of a life, movement, activity, etc.
6. Axiology – the nature, source, definition, priorities, etc. of values
We shall analyze each tenet in some detail in individual upcoming issues of our Taproot Articles. But some of the most critical truths associated with each of the six tenets are summarized below - each summary including an application of that tenet to the U.S. Constitution and legal system.
1. Ontology
The Transgender Movement is an inherently religious ideology. There is no “separation of church and state” in the battles involving this movement, and the dangers to Judeo-Christian rights are increasing exponentially.
2. Cosmology
TM’s vigorous presentation of “sexual orientation” as being immutable, and the movement’s emergence as a necessary and inevitable response to “social injustice,” directly contradicts scientific and historical fact. The truth is that “sexual orientation and gender” are very new ideas in American history, being human constructs arising as a component of the larger radicalized thought system that erupted particularly on college campuses during the late 1960s. The movement has infiltrated American law and culture in subsequent decades as Humanistic elites (academicians, media moguls, anti-orthodox theologians/church leaders, etc.) have become zealous missionaries of this rewritten American history throughout the various realms of American life. Thus, TM has no claim to influence in American constitutional or legal life, being of such recent origins rather than long-recognized grounds for constitutional and legal interpretation.
3. Epistemology
TM purports to be factual in nature, but is, in reality, a collection of self-contradictory, disprovable value assertions. Central among these assertions are two fatally flawed arguments: (1) TM’s passionate assertions that Judeo-Christian thought is “dogmatically absolutist and dangerous,” from which TM draws faulty charges of “animus” against TM’s opponents. (TM is based as squarely on absolutes as any of the views it attacks.); (2) The closely related propositions attacking any concepts of “fixed categories” in sexuality. This denial enables TM’s advocates to falsely challenge as “discrimination" all differentiations (both legal and non-legal) based upon “sexual orientation", “gender preference,” etc., further threatening Judeo-Christian rights, and clogging the courts.
4. Teleology
TM’s purposes as a religious ideology are not to “protect and free the tiny marginalized and victimized minority of gender dysphoric people in America.” Rather, TM seeks to totally dismantle (deconstruct and destroy) all facets of America’s Judeo-Christian legal system, as well as its culture in general, and replace them with a radically new Humanistic America.
5. Axiology
TM employs as a central strategy of its war against America the elimination and radical redefinition of primary Constitutional principles and values, both substantive values (e.g., “liberty” and “due process of law”) and structural values (e.g., erasing the boundaries between levels and departments of government and intermediary societal institutions such as family and church). This bulldozing of foundational values clears the way for a militant, hegemonic, Humanistic central government to control every aspect of American life. This “new America” would bear little or no resemblance to the original nation which has survived and thrived under the Judeo-Christian worldview.
6. Anthropology
TM propagates and perpetuates a fundamentally flawed view of the nature of “man” by characterizing his sexuality as fluid, non-binary, and subjective – the individual having total autonomy to choose his or her gender from among a virtually unlimited range of possibilities. But the truth is that human sexuality is fixed – biological and binary. Contrary arguments render impossible legal order, or indeed any order in society.
These truths about sexuality and sexualism must be understood and articulated in every possible way by the Judeo-Christian community. An excellent step in that direction is embodied in the publication, on August 29, 2017, of [the Nashville Statement]. This brief, 14-point declaration was drafted and signed by a diverse coalition of over 150 Evangelical Christian leaders in support of orthodox sexualism. The Nashville Statement is a classic in content and style, stating clearly – but with love and compassion for homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered individuals – the case for sexual orthodoxy. This statement should be extensively utilized by our Judeo-Christian community in any debates on sexual confusion.
In upcoming issues of our Truth Articles, we will exam and evaluate TM from the
perspective of each truth tenet. Given these truths, the marching orders of the Judeo-Christian community are clear. These orders have been eloquently proclaimed by Oliver O’Donovan of the University of Edinburgh: “A Christianity which will bear witness to God’s Word in Jesus will be a speaking, thinking, arguing, debating Christianity, which will not be afraid to engage in intellectual and philosophical contest with the prevailing dogmas of its day.”
