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Jewish World Review August 2, 2005 / 26 Tammuz, 5765 The case for Judeo-Christian values: The challenge of the transgendered By Dennis Prager
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
From a Judeo-Christian values perspective, each part of GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered) liberation has problems — because Judeo-Christian values affirm the heterosexual ideal. But the last part of GLBT is actually the most troubling.
Most people do not understand why the transgendered threaten Judeo-Christian values. The cultural Left does, which is why "transgendered" is always included.
A transgendered individual is a person of one sex who dresses (or otherwise behaves) as a member of the other sex — actions that directly conflict with core Judeo-Christian values.
It is remarkable that activists on behalf of gay and lesbian acceptance always include the transgendered. What, after all, do the transgendered, who are usually heterosexual men, have to do with gays and lesbians?
The answer is that activists understand that their primary goal — equating same-sex sexual behavior with man-woman sex — can only be accomplished if other Judeo-Christian and Western sexual norms are also rejected.
That is why the very word "sex," when referring to male or female, has been changed to "gender." And society at large has accepted this linguistic change as if it were insignificant. The change on application forms, for example, from "Sex: M or F" to "Gender: M or F" has gone unnoticed. But it is a huge change. In the sexual activists' world, "sex" is fixed and objective; "gender" is fluid and subjective.
Thus, a man's genitalia and secondary male sexual characteristics notwithstanding, if he feels like expressing the woman in him, he should not only be allowed but encouraged to dress in public like a woman. Society should have no more say on whether a man should be allowed to wear a dress in public than what color tie a man should wear in public. That is why the Democrats in California passed a law that forbids employers from firing a man who cross-dresses at work.
Now, why is this important, not to mention opposed by Judeo-Christian values?
One of the major values of the Hebrew Bible, the primary source of Judeo-Christian values, is the notion of a divinely ordained order based on separation. What G-d has created distinct, man shall not tamper with.
As examples, good is separate from evil (attempts to blur their differences are known as moral relativism and are anathema to Judeo-Christian values); life is separate from death (in part a reaction to ancient Egypt, which blurred the distinction between life and death); G-d is separate from nature (see previous column); humans are separate from animals (see previous column); and man is separate from woman. Blurring any of these distinctions is tampering with the order of the world as created by G-d and leads to chaos. So important is the notion of separation that the very word for "holy" in biblical Hebrew (kadosh) means "separate," "distinct."
This helps to explain one of the least known and most enigmatic laws of the Torah, the ban on wearing linen and wool together in the same piece of clothing (sha'atnez). Linen represents plant life, and wool represents animal life. The two are distinct realms in G-d's creation.
"G-d created the human being, male and female He created them" is how Genesis describes the creation of man and woman. Blurring that distinction is playing G-d, and doing so in a highly destructive manner.
If a man gets a sexual thrill out of wearing women's undergarments in the privacy of his bedroom, that is not society's concern. It may be his religion's concern, and, religious or not, it may be his female partner's concern (one wonders how many women married to cross dressing men are pleased by the sight of their man in a bra and panties). But it is not society's concern, which is why anyone who cares about protecting the right to privacy should have been horrified by the American news media's reporting about the private cross-dressing habits of a nationally known sportscaster.
However, when a man does this in public, he has publicly blurred the man-woman distinction, and society has the right — and the duty, if it cares about Judeo-Christian values or simply cares about not confusing children as to sexual identity — to say this violates a norm that society does not wish violated.
The war waged by cultural radicals at universities, in state legislatures and in courtrooms against the very distinction between male and female is one of their most significant attempts to undo the Judeo-Christian foundations of American and Western culture. And they know it. That's why fighting to blur gender distinctions is so important to them.
Now the rest of society needs to understand why not allowing that to happen is so important.
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JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily radio show based in Los Angeles. He the author of, most recently, "Happiness is a Serious Problem". Click here to comment on this column.
© 2005, Creators Syndicate
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Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
