https://www.facebook.com/KeepYMCALockerRoomsSafe/?fref=nf

This country has fallen victim to progressivism on many levels, many vehicles are used to drive this agenda, and one that I have become closely involved with is the transgender movement. It seems on the surface to be about acceptance, or the right to use the bathroom, but as I have delved deeper into these types of issues, it has become clear that it is fundamentally something more.

I am what the transgender community calls “cisgender,” meaning my brain connects with my biological sex. I just call myself a woman.

I am also a lead in a group called Keep Locker Rooms Safe and we are working to repeal an ambiguous rule that was pushed onto the state by a group of unelected bureaucrats without consulting the public. This rule allows anyone to use the restroom of their choice. It prevents anyone from saying anything if a man is in the women’s locker room or bathroom. It restricts speech, and endangers the vulnerable. As open opponents of this rule, we are constantly subjected to threats, hate mail, attempts to discredit us, name calling, bullying, outright slander and accusations of hate toward trans people.

Desiring to cross lines, I spent an afternoon having coffee with two trans individuals who had asked to meet with folks who oppose this rule. I looked forward to hearing their concerns and fears and vice versa. The invite seemed sincere, a true desire to hear the other side, to perhaps come to some understanding of one another.

It wasn’t.

Demands were made of me. I was told that I need to renounce my support of legislators who have worked to repeal the rule (I won’t), I was told that I need to publicly say that transwomen are really women (they aren’t). If these demands were not met, this person insisted that it meant that I hate trans people. (I don’t).

I was told that I do not get to decide on the rights of a minority group (I am African American, ironically), I was told that the rights of the minority supersede the majority.

I was called paranoid, bigoted and transphobic (funny, there I sat with two trans people … pretty phobic, I suppose). I was told my safety does not matter, because, per some statistics a transgender person is supposed to be at greater risk of harm than I. I was told that they are at greater risk of harm than little girls who may be caught unawares in a locker room face to face with a grown man.

I was told that I am hateful because I do not want my child or sisters exposed to the genitals of the opposite sex. How dare I make choices for what I want my Child to be exposed to, and when?

The demands that I validate their reality, their “womanness” made me wonder about why they needed my validation. Is it because they know they are not, nor never can, truly be women?

This experience showed me the crushing narcissism of the trans movement, the dictatorial attitude of the trans agenda. It has nothing to do with going to the bathroom or locker room. It has everything to do with forcing EVERYONE to agree with how someone lives their life, up to and including subjugating my beliefs and comfort level and safety. I was now victim of the ultimate bullying; “if you don’t do or think or say this or agree with me, than you hate me and want to hurt me, so now I can justify hating and hurting you.”

It reaffirmed for me that progressive thought does not allow for freedom or growth or liberty. It is the bullying and hammering of one side demanding that everyone agree with them, their subjective reality, under point of gun. If I do not believe that a man who takes hormones and lives like a woman, is suddenly a woman, I am a bigot. Why must I bend to their will or be damned? Why should I pander to subjective reality? I’m done being bullied.

My position is that you live your life as you please, but if you infringe upon my safety or the safety of others, I draw the line. Where are we, as a country, going to draw the line?

Autumn Bennett,

Bremerton.

https://www.facebook.com/KeepYMCALockerRoomsSafe/?fref=nf

Coach Kennedy once again makes National Headlines because of his recent announcement to take on the Bremerton School District in Court regarding his termination because of his praying at the 50 Yard line .

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/local/coach-kennedy-files-official-complaint-against-bremerton-school-district-26f3e43d-3145-7fd7-e053-010-362457461.html

The past 60 years has seen a reverse in how religious freedom is defended , it is not defended in the courts as it once was . The recent debate in states about the religious freedom bills was seen as an attempt to discriminate against homosexuals , that is another debate but the Federal version was actually the act of a bi partisan legislature who agreed that religious freedom has been taking a beating as of late and needed support .

Lack of respect for religious beliefs today  is seen as persecution by some miss guided believers in my opinion , actually we are having a greater impact on our culture from secular world views today is the real issue . Academia sees itself once again in the age of enlightenment . This can appear as some one being against you if your views differ. Just as Traditional Marriage was never about being anti gay , supporting secular views being anti Christian is often not the case . Most people are not anti God , they really just don’t have God on their radar                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               . Since almost all  religious speech is denied according to our courts today it claims neutrality  because it discriminates equally .  I have noticed the longer this view has been accepted , the more hostile religion has become politically and the hostility of non religious views pushing agendas have become more uncivil also . Seeing religion as the opposition to their secular politics and world views has cause many people who may be normally just un concerned about religious beliefs see them as the enemy because of political resistance . . .

Often the sides seem to support religious discrimination by gay activists and those  atheists with a strong commitment to supporting freedom from religion .  Many are in the middle and just are neutral on the whole subject . Coach Kennedy supporters seem to be made of devout Catholics and Evangelicals . The Sun Newspaper has seen an incredible amount of people from atheist world views making comments .It has become a national issue .

I found myself supporting this coach , not because of the law but because of the hostility he is facing . The attacks are down right sadistic at times , and to offer a view contrary will result in religious beliefs being compared to ignorance and so much worse.   I read comments supporting the Human Right Conference and read the same person right after commenting on the Sun mocking this person praying . I see a dis connect in how we respect others based on the categories they are seen to be in . Those who claim free thought and logic I would think would notice this more . Almost as if  non belief has become a religion itself  and puts a veil over their eyes in looking at the issue clearly .   Seems the coach could be wrong but that should not necessitate a need to mock his sincerity or ridicule his religious beliefs . The District may be wrong , but obviously they were also concerned of other voices and controversy .

Religion needs to get out of politics and folks need to lighten up on the free expression of religion .

I pray out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your heart through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge~~that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16~19

Balanced On the Edge, Ready to Fall?

Discussion and news articles have, as of late, undertaken a debate that addresses a seemingly benign cultural trend in the west: “Is religion necessary to being ‘good’?” The Los Angeles Times rousing debate on Facebook asking this question quickly descended into malice, slander, and judging by the reckless threats messaged back and forth, which would have turned violent had the participants been face-to-face.

The dialogue definitely put a damper on viewers looking for an able defense of that “good” existing healthily apart from religion.

Experts du jour are waxing philosophical about the brave new world of objective agnosticism or humane atheism being a natural by-product in human evolution. Faith and belief in a god or creator is assertively diminished or even derided in schools of higher learning and in much of the current media culture.

While the debate over whether religion is essential to being “good” as the current society deems the definition to be, religious belief has certainly played a central role in history thus far.

Religion and faith has been the primary moral arbiter alongside philosophy in every society, both being used to address the inner man’s desire for, and examination of, a moral construct for the good of society.

Humanism and atheism asserts that goodness and moral care for fellow man is possible without objective truth in God or adherence to the tenets of a religion based on belief in a creator who dictates original truth. Since man makes up a belief in God, he is the one actually creating the moral concept of good and evil.

Cultural traditions of just what is “good” do have their sources, and what society determines as good or bad is the morality that affects and determines culture. Philosophically, the idea of “objective truth” has in the past provided the overarching security-providing framework of non-negotiables.

A universal truth outside man’s subjective nature offered moral certitude that every man could submit to and unite under. Now this concept has been roundly dismissed and diminished in academia and is no longer being taught as a determinate for moral constructs or boundaries.

After all, if there is no God and we are a product of random chance, then there is no objective truth outside obvious large ones; the sun rises in the east, etc.”Truth” is subject to man’s ever-changing whims.

The repercussions of accepting subjective truth as the new moral marker for mankind is predictable chaos. The unifying force of an agreed-upon moral truth has been replaced by a jumble of fractured truths; large-scale consensus deconstructed into small, ever-changing and often conflicting attempts at consensus. And that is the word to describe the self-willed chaos: deconstruction.

Deconstruction is underway, lamented by those original “me generation” deconstructionists who are now experiencing the remorse only someone sitting in the rubble of their own making can understand.

Educators, psychologists, and sociologists are now issuing dire warnings of social ruin that former sociologists and educators advocated as progressive ideologies not two decades ago. Western culture is now seeing a more serious fall-out of the change in perceptions of moral truth.

The concern with the breakdown of societal order has society questioning what is truth and what is moral as it translates to behaviors and how behaviors are being affected by the eroding structure. The changing ideas of morality in the minds where “knowing” (what is right and wrong) is not translating into “doing” (acting upon what you know to be right or wrong) as effectively as it has in the past when moral constructs were more universal and encouraged in developing humans.

Several studies examine this link and the variables involved with the connections between intention and behavior. Haidt (2003) defines moral emotions as those “that are linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent” (p. 276). Moral emotions provide the motivational force—the power and energy— to do good and to avoid doing bad (Kroll & Egan 2004).

A much more serious level of deconstruction has been achieved, and psychologists are rightly concerned. The connections between “knowing” and “doing” have been all but severed or are manifesting serious interruption in the relationship between emotion and action. Where once the examination was in levels of responses between emotion and action, there is now being noted an absence or critical disconnect.

Humans in western society are experiencing a loss of ability to make moral judgments of critical behavioral actions and, worse, a loss of emotional compulsion to experience empathy or understand it as a connecting emotion needed for positive societal function within groups.

To put it simply, there are no more moral standards understood or comprehended by an emerging group of youth and young adults in order to “know” and “do” in a way that maintains social order.

Is it too late? Spiritually speaking, never. Culturally speaking, maybe.  A vacuum has been created by the rejection of external and universal truth. It has not been filled adequately by subjective truth, and moral relativism has not only failed to stem the growth of the black hole that the next generation is being pulled into, it has grown it and deepened its pull.

As the peril sharpens and clarifies the need for a strong moral awakening, the Church, more than ever, needs to step up and share Her stable and unchanging morality based upon love. Love for mankind, a love that grows hearts, retrains minds, and re-establishes timeless truths that offer comfort, direction and a future.

Western society is at a critical juncture that Christ’s followers must, in obedience to His mission, “Be ready” as Paul said, “ in season and out, to give an answer for the hope that lies within” (I Peter 3.15). With western thought’s ideals of virtues now an unknown to many, it is critical that they be re-introduced into society with passion and force.

The challenge that deconstruction is creating to morality’s framework can only be answered now by the church. It is too far gone for frightened relativists to make right, and it is a golden time for the Church to flex her might in leading the way out of the decline and prevent a fall that need not happen.

If the modern Church only grasped the absolute power at her fingertips to transform the world (as the early Church seemed to understand), there would be no time wasted. The Church operates under the authority which has assured mankind that “the gates of hell will NOT prevail.”

She just needs to share it and do so by shouting out Christ’s love from the rooftops and on the street corners. The battle for the souls of men has never been more gripping, more violent, and more precious.