📄The Areopagus Update – March/April 2021
“The most comprehensive assault on Christianity ever written into law.”
In the January/February edition of The Areopagus Update I wrote of “The Looming Deluge” in which “a ferocious cultural, moral and spiritual storm is brewing.” I warned that “This deluge will be more intense than anything we have ever experienced in the past. It will be an unrelenting assault on much of what we value and believe – everything from freedom of expression, religious liberty and the sanctity of life to the Constitutional rule of law.” Furthermore: “From all apparent indications, a Biden/Harris administration will make the Obama administration seem relatively moderate by comparison.”
In the article I noted that “The radical agenda will be propagated by an insidious coalition of neo-Marxist secular socialists and cultural liberals and their allies in the media, Big Tech, corporate America, the entertainment industry, the education establishment, labor unions, the trial lawyers associations, the open-borders lobby, environmental extremists, LGBTQ activists, and naive Christians.”
Little did I know at the time that Biden’s drive to radically transform America would start immediately after his inauguration and extend over the next five weeks with a flood of more than 50 executive orders, proclamations and memoranda that included everything from cancelling construction of the border wall, “restoring” the U.S. asylum system, ending “harsh and extreme immigration enforcement” and integrating illegal immigrants into the 2020 census to cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, suspending new oil and gas leases on U.S. lands, designating climate change a matter of “national security,” and rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. Oh, yes, there was also a January 20th executive order designed to “combat discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity” and another on January 25th to repeal the ban on transgender people serving openly in the U.S. military while also “expanding protection of LGBTQ people around the world.”(!) As expected, he also signed a memorandum on February 28 liberalizing government funding of abortion. I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.
Much of the foregoing agenda operates under the cover of “social justice.” Granted, the Bible has much to say about social justice, but biblical social justice has nothing to do with the kind of perverted “social justice” that the Marxist ideologues in the Democratic Party intend to impose on America.
Words and terms mean something – or at least they should. Some words and terms are particularly essential for the transmission of great truths and key knowledge. When their meaning is twisted and distorted to serve a disingenuous agenda, the results can be tragic. Socrates, history’s first great philosopher, knew this intuitively. Any serious pursuit of truth and meaning depends upon facts, logic, and rhetoric (the proper usage of language). The first principle of rhetoric is that words have objective meaning and should be used accordingly. This is imperative because dishonest people often twist and distort language so as to advance their goals. For example: recall that the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the USSR was Pravda – Russian for “Truth”.
As George Orwell demonstrated in his dystopian novels, Animal Farm and 1984, totalitarian leftists are masters of deceit when it comes to redefining key words and terms – everything from “love,” “fairness,” “compassion” and “tolerance” to “racism,” “hate speech” and “social justice.”
This is the subject of D.K. Matthews’ book, Seduced? a critique of “our confused and verbally chaotic culture.” According to Matthews, words are intentionally misused and redefined in a relativistic and cynical way so as to confuse people, distort the truth, and advance a political agenda.
What does all of this have to do with the controversial Equality Act that the House of Representatives just passed on February 25, 2021? In fact, there is a direct connection. In a free society such as the United States, terms such as “equality” and “justice” have traditionally meant equal opportunity and equal justice for all under the law. Only in authoritarian and totalitarian states is equality redefined as absolute egalitarianism, a purely utopian mirage because no two people are in fact “equal” in any respect.
Father Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, calls the Equality Act “the most comprehensive assault on Christianity, religious liberty, the right to life, and privacy rights ever packaged into one bill in the history of the United States.” According to Donohue, the act “is based on the idea that sexually challenged men and women – those who think that they can transition to the opposite sex – should be treated as if they were members of a minority race. [However,] there is no basis in either the natural law or the positive law for such a judgment: in no way is ‘gender identity’ analogous to race.”
The Equality Act has two major goals: (1) to amend the 1964 Civil Rights Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the definition of sex; and (2) to negate the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act by superimposing LGBTQ rights over religious rights.
The philosophy behind the Equality Act is flawed on many levels. For one, consider how “gender” has been redefined. The word no longer refers to any objective reality regarding one’s biological sex but is a purely subjective term related to one’s personal preference and feelings.
- Among the many provisions and consequences of the Act are the following:
- Homosexuals and those experiencing gender dysphoria would qualify for affirmative action status.
- Christian schools would be required to accept LGBTQ faculty and staff as well as students.
- Independent Christian organizations and ministries would be required to accept LGBTQ staff and employees.
- Men who identify as female would be allowed to compete in women’s sports and utilize women’s locker rooms.
- Students from elementary school to high school would be indoctrinated with LGBTQ propaganda.
Even many feminists and lesbians have come out in opposition to the Equality Act.
Do we need any further reminders that “elections have consequences?” More Christians and church leaders need to wake up and speak up. America’s moral sanity and our Constitutional liberties including religious freedom – are very much in jeopardy. As Bob Dylan wrote and sang decades ago, “The times, they are achangin’” – but certainly not for the better!
