What’s Going on with Tennessee’s ‘transgender law’ in the 6th Circuit?
Aug 3, 2023 by David Fowler
While eyes are focused on the upcoming special session on guns, the Biden family, Republican candidates for president, and the like, the biggest battle of them all is on trial in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. This is not hyperbole: the outcome of that trial could very well affect everything we think we know. I think you need to know why, and what I told the Court last week in a brief.
The battle being played out in the Sixth Circuit is literally of cosmic proportions. The context is the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law prohibiting the intentional disordering of a child’s otherwise healthy reproductive system to address a new phenomenon: gender dysphoria.
In a sense, though, transgenderism is not so much new as it is the logical extension of the unisex and denatured view of persons through the annals of time, known as homosexuality. “Transgendered persons” are simply the next evolution of an asserted reality about persons, mimicked by crossdressing and drag queen shows.
However, for reasons I will explain, a transgendered view of the person can only exist as a legitimate expression of human “identity” in a non-Biblical, materialistic conception of the universe.
Proof that Cosmology is the Issue:
The ACLU’s complaint provides the evidence necessary to demonstrate that the battle is between the cosmology given in Genesis 1 and 2 and that found in Genesis 3, in which Adam rejects God’s cosmology and makes himself the point of reference for good and evil. The evidence is in Paragraph 26 of the ACLU’s complaint: “There is a general medical consensus that there are significant biological roots to gender identity.” Notice where I placed the emphasis in the sentence.
Why the ACLU Makes a “Biological Roots” Argument
Strict materialists have always had a problem explaining the apparent independence of our thoughts from the material, biological organ called the brain. They must explain what strictly material cause prompts the material brain, strictly by means of cause and effect, to have thoughts of beauty, the good, love, and the like that are not themselves material. See the problem?
For the ACLU not to connect transgenderism/gender identity to “biological roots” is to allow a crack in their materialist cosmology; and from their perspective, God only knows what might rush into that crack.
Maybe thoughts about God would rush in. Or worse yet, the tri-personal yet ontologically one God (a Heavenly Father revealed by Jesus His Son through a work of the Holy Spirit).
For the ACLU, a personal God is the worst kind of God because God ceases to be an abstract idea and becomes relational in His being. That would have serious implications for them and their relation to God that can’t exist with a non-personal and non-relational conception of God.
The ACLU must insist that everything is biological—material—and just a chain of cause and effect without any supernatural, let alone divine, intersection.
They understand—even if Christians and political conservatives do not—that logically, as a matter of pure reason, there can be no “ought” or “should” in a just-there cosmos.
So, for them, the “ought” and the “should” must be a material cause as required by evolutionary thinking, and that is how they can aver, as they did in the same Paragraph 26, that “a person’s gender identity is a fundamental aspect of human development.” In other words, this is nothing but the next evolution of mankind; it just is.
What Has Happened?
Evolutionary thinking—the antithesis of the Christian cosmology of creation and its extended application called providence—removes any consideration of a given human nature from the legal equation and legal thinking about justice.
But the whole of human society across time has been predicated on a given human nature expressed as male and female. Legal systems are predicated on that understanding of human nature. The whole of family law is predicated on this understanding of human nature.
If transgenderism is true, everything in our social order that is structured on the basis of the givenness of male and female as generative beings is now false.
That explains why words like “birthing persons,” “sex assigned at birth,” and plural pronouns for singular persons must make their way into our vocabulary. New words are needed to express this new conception of reality and of the cosmos.
How the Battle is Being Waged
Unfortunately, as explained in a previous commentary, even many well-respected Christian organizations are foregoing in courtrooms and legislative chambers a substantive discussion about human nature and the implications of repudiating the understanding of human nature on which our society and legal system rest.
They are arguing about what the scientific studies show, but science can only quantify and manipulate data, not give it human meaning. This concession by Christians in view of the nature of the issue is to concede defeat, because it proceeds from the materialist’s frame of reference.
This is an argument that does not search for the cosmological crack that the ACLU is intent on preventing, and the crack that is needed to begin restoring a biblical cosmology.
Our Brief Engages in the Cosmological Battle
The brief I filed with the Sixth Circuit on behalf of the organization I lead, 29 other family policy councils, and The Hale Institute speaks directly to the ACLU’s denial of any human nature. It reminds the Court of the cataclysmic consequences to society and to law if male and female are no longer considered objective given reality that human (man-made) law does not create but precedes that law. This objective reality is a pre-existing type of law that a judge and legislator must take into consideration if by their pronouncements justice to persons is to be done.
Judging the Issue Rightly
Neither a judge nor a legislator can do justice to persons until he or she knows what a person is and what they are for, and that is what the court contest is about.
Our brief asserts that persons are objectively male and female and are such for the purpose of procreation. If law and its applied formulations by judges and legislators cannot countenance that objective reality, then it is game over. Justice for persons will be forever illusive.
Of course, Christians know that male and female are not simply “rooted in biology” but fundamentally rooted in the image of God. They should also know that nature without the ex-nihilo creator God behind it just is, and is meaningless; we can manipulate it all we want.
That thought, though, brings to my mind another justice consideration. I can’t help but wonder if transgenderism is the last opportunity God will give His people to speak up and deny that matter and biology is all there is. And stop arguing as if matter and biology is all that is.
Should professing Christians take a pass, I believe God’s disciplining justice is the justice about which they should be most concerned. He may choose to use the imposition of a denatured, unisexual nature into our controlling jurisprudence to find out who will continue to profess a fundamental of the faith—creation ex nihilo—when the materialists and dualists come for the last holdouts against their cosmology.
Of course, this latter idea only makes sense in a certain conception of the cosmos.
The cosmos is up for grabs. Which version are you for?
The battle being played out in the Sixth Circuit is literally of cosmic proportions. The context is the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law prohibiting the intentional disordering of a child’s otherwise healthy reproductive system to address a new phenomenon: gender dysphoria.
In a sense, though, transgenderism is not so much new as it is the logical extension of the unisex and denatured view of persons through the annals of time, known as homosexuality. “Transgendered persons” are simply the next evolution of an asserted reality about persons, mimicked by crossdressing and drag queen shows.
However, for reasons I will explain, a transgendered view of the person can only exist as a legitimate expression of human “identity” in a non-Biblical, materialistic conception of the universe.
Proof that Cosmology is the Issue:
The ACLU’s complaint provides the evidence necessary to demonstrate that the battle is between the cosmology given in Genesis 1 and 2 and that found in Genesis 3, in which Adam rejects God’s cosmology and makes himself the point of reference for good and evil. The evidence is in Paragraph 26 of the ACLU’s complaint: “There is a general medical consensus that there are significant biological roots to gender identity.” Notice where I placed the emphasis in the sentence.
Why the ACLU Makes a “Biological Roots” Argument
Strict materialists have always had a problem explaining the apparent independence of our thoughts from the material, biological organ called the brain. They must explain what strictly material cause prompts the material brain, strictly by means of cause and effect, to have thoughts of beauty, the good, love, and the like that are not themselves material. See the problem?
For the ACLU not to connect transgenderism/gender identity to “biological roots” is to allow a crack in their materialist cosmology; and from their perspective, God only knows what might rush into that crack.
Maybe thoughts about God would rush in. Or worse yet, the tri-personal yet ontologically one God (a Heavenly Father revealed by Jesus His Son through a work of the Holy Spirit).
For the ACLU, a personal God is the worst kind of God because God ceases to be an abstract idea and becomes relational in His being. That would have serious implications for them and their relation to God that can’t exist with a non-personal and non-relational conception of God.
The ACLU must insist that everything is biological—material—and just a chain of cause and effect without any supernatural, let alone divine, intersection.
They understand—even if Christians and political conservatives do not—that logically, as a matter of pure reason, there can be no “ought” or “should” in a just-there cosmos.
So, for them, the “ought” and the “should” must be a material cause as required by evolutionary thinking, and that is how they can aver, as they did in the same Paragraph 26, that “a person’s gender identity is a fundamental aspect of human development.” In other words, this is nothing but the next evolution of mankind; it just is.
What Has Happened?
Evolutionary thinking—the antithesis of the Christian cosmology of creation and its extended application called providence—removes any consideration of a given human nature from the legal equation and legal thinking about justice.
But the whole of human society across time has been predicated on a given human nature expressed as male and female. Legal systems are predicated on that understanding of human nature. The whole of family law is predicated on this understanding of human nature.
If transgenderism is true, everything in our social order that is structured on the basis of the givenness of male and female as generative beings is now false.
That explains why words like “birthing persons,” “sex assigned at birth,” and plural pronouns for singular persons must make their way into our vocabulary. New words are needed to express this new conception of reality and of the cosmos.
How the Battle is Being Waged
Unfortunately, as explained in a previous commentary, even many well-respected Christian organizations are foregoing in courtrooms and legislative chambers a substantive discussion about human nature and the implications of repudiating the understanding of human nature on which our society and legal system rest.
They are arguing about what the scientific studies show, but science can only quantify and manipulate data, not give it human meaning. This concession by Christians in view of the nature of the issue is to concede defeat, because it proceeds from the materialist’s frame of reference.
This is an argument that does not search for the cosmological crack that the ACLU is intent on preventing, and the crack that is needed to begin restoring a biblical cosmology.
Our Brief Engages in the Cosmological Battle
The brief I filed with the Sixth Circuit on behalf of the organization I lead, 29 other family policy councils, and The Hale Institute speaks directly to the ACLU’s denial of any human nature. It reminds the Court of the cataclysmic consequences to society and to law if male and female are no longer considered objective given reality that human (man-made) law does not create but precedes that law. This objective reality is a pre-existing type of law that a judge and legislator must take into consideration if by their pronouncements justice to persons is to be done.
Judging the Issue Rightly
Neither a judge nor a legislator can do justice to persons until he or she knows what a person is and what they are for, and that is what the court contest is about.
Our brief asserts that persons are objectively male and female and are such for the purpose of procreation. If law and its applied formulations by judges and legislators cannot countenance that objective reality, then it is game over. Justice for persons will be forever illusive.
Of course, Christians know that male and female are not simply “rooted in biology” but fundamentally rooted in the image of God. They should also know that nature without the ex-nihilo creator God behind it just is, and is meaningless; we can manipulate it all we want.
That thought, though, brings to my mind another justice consideration. I can’t help but wonder if transgenderism is the last opportunity God will give His people to speak up and deny that matter and biology is all there is. And stop arguing as if matter and biology is all that is.
Should professing Christians take a pass, I believe God’s disciplining justice is the justice about which they should be most concerned. He may choose to use the imposition of a denatured, unisexual nature into our controlling jurisprudence to find out who will continue to profess a fundamental of the faith—creation ex nihilo—when the materialists and dualists come for the last holdouts against their cosmology.
Of course, this latter idea only makes sense in a certain conception of the cosmos.
The cosmos is up for grabs. Which version are you for?
