GENDER ABSURDITY: A nation, led by pop culture, descends into chaos
- Dr. Harry Reeder: The sexual revolution an ‘all-out assault’ on our culture
- British government resignations signal problems
- What Alan Dershowitz’ shunning says about snowflake culture and intolerance for debate
- Why the Supreme Court’s labor union decision is a win for freedom and education
- Parents denied access to public school sex education materials is shocking government overreach
- Leadership crucial in the church, life
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- Should sex offenders be able to adopt?
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- Is Alabama-founded PCA church encouraging gay people to identify by sin?
- Alabama pastor to the suicidal: ‘Banish the thought of destruction. It’s not the answer’, ‘Many’ of us want to help
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- Alabama pastor’s analysis of immigrant parent-child border separation controversy
- James Comey echo of J. Edgar Hoover — amassing power, declaring himself moral authority in FBI
- Historic North Korea Summit explainer and backstory
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- Where do you turn when your church strays from your faith?
- Unreal — Medical how-to book for counseling ‘religious’ women that abortion is okay
- Remembering RFK
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- Planned Parenthood ignores crime in singular pursuit of death culture
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- Reflections from Israel — and how it has changed in the past 30 years
- How to think about ‘aging pastors’ and ‘scarcity’ of millennials in ministry
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- Oh boy … Americans don’t think they sin very often
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- Why Trump was right to move embassy to Jerusalem
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- Why it’s crucial that parents examine college faculties
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- A pastor’s perspective on Alabama Attorney General’s ‘Faith Forum’ at Briarwood
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- We must not sacrifice consistent morality for political pragmatism
- Why do Christians call Christ’s death ‘Good Friday’?
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- States are trying to criminalize the free speech of those seeking to protect unborn life
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- Care about free speech? Keep your eyes on Supreme Court dealing with California abortion law
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- Reasons for pro-lifers to rejoice — and double-down — on abortion issues
- How to debate with decorum … and why profane, vulgar arguments reveal weak arguments & minds
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- Blaring Bannon coverage begs question: What’s happened to journalism?
- Call to Christians: Engage in politics & evangelism out of love for neighbor
- New York City votes to fine Biblical counselors for gender dysphoria therapy
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- Is it pointless to make New Year’s resolutions?
- The top 11 news, faith and culture headlines of 2017
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- Tax reform explained: How it helps our culture, our families, our economics
- Advent and Christmas, ever wondered what’s the difference?
- Reformed Christians have lost one of their great theologians, pastors
- The 2 ungodly reactions to politics, current events that Christians must avoid
- Want our trust? The 7 things an elected official MUST do to gain it
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- Where the death culture leads: Lawsuits over disabled children who ‘should’ have been aborted
- What’s at stake in the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision
- How to put Trump’s U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem in historical and biblical perspective
- Pastor Harry Reeder: There is hope and a way forward for the Matt Lauers in our lives
- Pastor Harry Reeder: If Supreme Court gets Colorado cake baker, same-sex marriage case wrong, it will be culture tipping point
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Liberal ‘Christianity’ is antithetical to Christianity
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Abortion industry ‘doulas’ try to normalize killing of unborn, but we know abortion is not normal
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Trump’s judicial nominee list shows his commitment to originalists and constitutionalists
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Some evangelicals disagree, but here’s why it’s good to emphasize church celebrations during Christmas
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Our military is weakening and here’s why we need it strong
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Why would we be surprised when culture lives out sexual sin it has promoted for years?
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Churches must stay on-mission as evangelists, not cultural acceptance-seekers
- Pastor Harry Reeder: The Museum of the Bible is a great idea…provided we don’t worship the Bible
- Harry Reeder on sexual reckoning: Our conscience tells us ‘something’s wrong here’ even while our culture promotes sin
- Reeder: We have to be honest despite history rewrites– Pilgrims gave thanks to God
- Reeder: It is ‘absolutely ludicrous’ to think a mother’s absence in crucial first 3 years has no effect
- Reeder: Australian same-sex marriage survey a ‘profile in cowardice’ not courage
- Reeder: Believers ‘speaking up’ made real difference in adoption tax credit provision
- Reeder: Secular culture wants more than ‘tolerance’, insists upon abortion and sexual anarchy ‘celebration’
- Reeder on Roy Moore chaos: ‘Do the next right thing’
- Reeder: Here’s what Christians should say when traditional marriage views are labeled ‘bigotry’
- Reeder on church leaders not meeting privately with the other sex: ‘I’ll take the criticism….I learned it from Billy Graham’
- Reeder on LGBTQ campus activists: ‘They don’t want to debate what a marriage actually is. They want to silence those they cannot answer.’
- Yes, it’s ridiculous there’s a new religion dedicated to AI….but here’s why it matters
- Feeling any Christmas guilt? Here’s the type you should ignore and the type you should face
- Reeder on Tuesday’s elections: ‘To see this as a referendum on Trump is overstating it’
- Two terminally-ill patients who refused assisted suicide to help others & show life’s sanctity
- Lots of older pastors, not many young ones — what’s going on?
- Commercial Surrogacy: The objectification of child-bearing
- Elitist ‘gender-isn’t-real’ culture has descended into sophisticated imbecility
- Chaplain who refused marriage retreat to same-sex couple is up against elite culture enforcers
- Sen. Booker’s grilling of Pompeo prime example of ‘religious test’ to exclude evangelical Christians from office
- GENDER ABSURDITY: A nation, led by pop culture, descends into chaos
- How culture rot happens: Unthinkable –> Laughable –> Thinkable –> Accepted
- How Christians should submit to the government’s law
- How to avoid going ‘wobbly’ on the truth
Listen to the 10 min audio
Read the transcript:
LAW PROPOSED FOR NEW BIRTH CERTIFICATES WITH “X” AS GENDER
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, I want to take you to a couple of news stories, one out of Fox News and the other out of World Magazine. The Fox News story reports that a New York City proposal would allow people born in New York City the option to choose a third gender on their birth certificates. This would allow adults to go back and change their birth certificates from male or female to the new “X” category.
DR. REEDER: New York and California seem to be the arbiters of pop culture movements. Pop culture is the product of the various dynamics of the society, all the way from shows that are produced to the jokes that are funny, to the books that are written and the songs that are sung. Therefore, now we’re going to have a culture in which you can’t just look at people and say, “Well, that’s he or she,” because now we have said that people can self-identify.
Clearly, the confusion and loss of objectivity in this post-modern world and the absence of any categories of any accuracy and common sense based upon truth — not only ethical absolutes, but created absolutes — simply by observation like, “That’s a man,” or “That’s a woman.” “No, I may have the biological apparatus of that, but I’ve decided I am not that. You have to then set aside any common sense in your life and accommodate the chaos that I have selected in my life.”
WHAT HAPPENS TO THIS TYPE OF CULTURE? IT UNRAVELS
Well, that leads to the unraveling of a culture. Where does that come from? Folks, that comes from just basic reality that we have lost sensibility in the issue of origins. Atheistic, Darwinian evolution has now brought us to the point that there is no creator who has sovereignly made us in His image, male and female; has sovereignly instituted certain dynamics such as the sanctity of work, the sanctity of rest, the sanctity of sexuality within the sanctity of marriage.
All of that is dismissed and now we are right back to two books in the Bible: The Book of Judges and the other is the Book of Ecclesiastes. In the book of Judges, it repeatedly says that, “Everyone did what was right in their own eyes,” and that, of course, leads to a lifestyle that’s affirmed and developed by Solomon in his book of Ecclesiastes. A culture in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes becomes a culture of two things: chaos and vanity and the word “vanity” means emptiness — confusion and emptiness.
PENNSYLVANIA CASE IGNORES STUDENTS’ PLEAS FOR PRIVACY
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, lest anyone think that this is just related to what the latest song is talking about, it’s actually entered into our court system. Two courts, one in Pennsylvania and the other in Virginia, disregarded students’ pleas for privacy in public school locker rooms and restrooms. The judges avoided making any distinctions between the sexes and ruled transgender students should be allowed to use the sex-segregated facilities that affirm their gender identity.
Only four minutes into one of the oral arguments in Pennsylvania, Circuit Judge Theodore McKee stopped plaintiff’s attorney, Randall Winger, and forbade him to use the word “sex” and “opposite sex”. He said, “When you use the word ‘sex,’ you complicate the discussion. It’s not that simple. That’s why I use the term ‘transgender boy or girl’ to try to get around that problem.”
DR. REEDER: And then you’re going to have to come up with more adjectives and more adverbs. “I’m not really a transgender boy; I’m a transgender X.” “Oh, by the way, I’m not really transgender; I’m pangender.” Therefore, the alphabet, LGBTQ+ has now become LGBTQIA+. It continues on ad infinitum, ad absurdum.
POP CULTURE SHOULD NOT MAKE LAWS FOR OUR LAND
Legislative initiatives such as what’s happened in New York both reflect the pop culture and add to the pop culture and then that shows up in judicial rulings that are not based upon constitutional law of a locality or a state or a nation, but they’re based upon pop culture. That judge’s comments, as nonsensical as they are, do make sense if you embrace the cultural anomalies you see today.
We have now a pop culture that says you are not what God made you; you are what you want to consider yourself. “Every man does and is and embraces what is right in his own eyes.” The only thing is, you can’t say that anymore because you can’t use the word “man”. Now you’ve got to use the word “every entity” is what they say they are in their own eyes.
LACK OF PRIVACY, MODESTY AND BOUNDARIES IS MARK OF PAGANISM
In the very court case that you’re talking about, people are trying to get security in privacy and modesty in a public facility. We did a program yesterday on my trip to Israel. One of the things I do is I take people to the ruins of Bashan. Bashan was a Canaanite city that became an Israeli city or a Jewish city when Joshua came into the land, but never fully occupied and, therefore, remained in the hands of the Canaanites, heavily influenced by Egyptian pharaohs who had a control of the trade route and the Romans finally conquered it.
I take people right beside the theater to the public facilities and then I made the comment, “One of the marks of civilization is a public facility but you will notice there is no male or female in this public facility.” Now, on the one hand, there was a public facility — that’s the mark of a civilization is that the government, for general welfare, will make a public facility, ingenious public facilities, by the way, with even running water and how it was put together — but there was no privacy. Why? A pagan world and life view.
Then, when Christianity comes, you not only have the matter of a public facility that makes available things to people in the necessities of life, but now privacy and modesty is given. Now we have, in our descent into a pagan world and life view, you’ve got rulings from these very courts where students have come and said, “I want to go to a locker room and a bathroom where I don’t have to share it with someone of the ‘opposite sex,’” and, in the presentation, they’re told you can’t even use the language “opposite sex”.
CONFUSION LEADS TO DICTATORSHIP
What’s at loss? Privacy, modesty. What will happen from that? Chaos, confusion, molestations and all other things — the door’s wide open for voyeurism and everything else that, used to, we did not have in the sensibilities of a culture and the sanctities of that culture, including the sanctity of true privacy. Isn’t it interesting that we claim privacy to advance the right of the killing of an unborn child, but we will not affirm privacy for someone to be able to have modesty and security in a public facility?
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, as we continue to go down this road, what’s the ultimate outcome?
DR. REEDER: Everything’s going to become meaningless. Without objectivity, you can’t have liberty. You’ve got to have something that is objectively true in order to have true liberty. Liberty without objective truth is nothing more than anarchy and every man does what’s right in his own eyes. Court systems scramble to affirm what every man does what’s right in his own eyes and people cannot live with confusion, emptiness and chaos. That leads to dictatorships and that leads to somebody rising up and saying, “Hey, I can bring order to this confusion.”
Whenever you lose the absolutes, then you lose true liberty. We have a home and we have about 20 yards in our backyard, and then there’s a cliff on the other side of that. Well, when my grandchildren come over, they come and play in the backyard and Cindy gives them about 5 yards and that’s about it, because she doesn’t want them to go off the edge of the cliff. However, if I put a fence up, now they get the full 20 yards.
That’s what objective true law does — it’s built on ethical, true absolutes and it puts the fences up and that’s what gives full and true liberty, liberty that’s within the boundaries of what is true and what is absolute and what is law.
When you have an atheistic world and life view, then there are no realities and there is only what exists by virtue of chance and mutation. Therefore, humanity says, “We’ll make it what we want to be instead of we will conform to what God has revealed that it is,” and that leads to emptiness and that leads to a way of life that no one can accept, which means it creates a culture in which dictators become welcome and flourish.
Dr. Harry L. Reeder III is the Senior Pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.
This podcast was transcribed by Jessica Havin, editorial assistant for Yellowhammer News, who has transcribed some of the top podcasts in the country and whose work has been featured in a New York Times Bestseller.
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Birmingham-Southern College did not respond to a request for comment. Yellowhammer News has inquired with the Attorney General’s Office regarding the legality of BSC’s guidelines and will provide updates accordingly.