The flame of wokeness – intolerance in the name of tolerance – wasn’t lit only recently.
It’s been smoldering under the flag of progressivism for the last 100 years or so.
“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1928.
Moral relativism was already making its long, slow march through the institutions that impart cultural values, including liberal church denominations.
By the 1950s, propelled by the severely flawed sex studies of Alfred C. Kinsey and the rise of the pill and the Playboy empire, the sexual revolution was in full swing.
Today, virtually every legal attack against a Christian-run or Christian-owned institution comes not from litigious, self-identified atheists but from sexual revolutionaries masquerading as victims of bigotry.
In Tennessee, a girl who “came out” as a lesbian in a social media post is suing a Christian prep school for the right to graduate along with the other seniors in her class. She claims that school officials told her she wouldn’t get her diploma and that they would alert prospective colleges about her behavior.
Officials at the school, Tennessee Christian Preparatory School, deny this and say the school has mailed her a diploma. They noted that a repost of her “coming out” message includes this: “I have some ruthless trump supporting ‘Jesus’ mfs on there.”
Does that sound to you like a Christian school grad in good standing?
As usual, this is about far more than one student challenging the powers that be. The final outcome will reveal a lot about the courts.
The Supreme Court’s recent record is checkered when it comes to enforcing the First Amendment with an even hand. The court did rule in favor of Colorado Christian baker Jack Phillips not being forced to bake a cake celebrating a same-sex ceremony.
And in May, the justices reinstated the censured Maine state Rep. Laurel Libby, who Democrats had silenced and prevented from voting for merely posting photos of a boy who had won a girls’ event.
However, the justices rejected an appeal this week from a Massachusetts boy banned from class for wearing a T-shirt that said, “There are only two genders.”
According to his petition, the boy wore the shirt after the school proclaimed that “sex and gender are limitless, based on personal identity, and have no biological foundation.” Only Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented and would have heard the case.
Free speech, it seems, has its limits when it comes to this issue. Bear in mind that Massachusetts schools have long encouraged students to wear LGBTQ pride clothing.
The situation is different in Tennessee. If the plaintiff gets her way, she will have used the public legal system to force a private institution to bend to her worldview.
Parents who shell out hard-earned money to send their kids to this school do so largely because it imparts their faith and teaches their standard of morality, which includes a biblical understanding of sex. If a student flouts the standard so publicly and suffers no consequences, the standard becomes meaningless.
Which is the whole idea. Progressive activists want to strip Christian institutions of their constitutional freedom to espouse their beliefs. By redefining biblical morality as a form of bigotry akin to racism, they deploy the powerful civil rights legal apparatus to punish dissidents.
It comes down to: Bend your knee to Baal or go out of business. Better yet, get up off your knees and start pushing what we’re selling. This is why leftists and LGBTQ activists have worked so hard for decades to gain influence within the church.
Years ago, they took over Ivy League schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown and Dartmouth, which began as Christian seminaries and are now bastions of wokeness. Many other elite colleges have joined the herd of independent minds.
A couple of weeks ago, Smith College, which was founded to educate women, awarded an honorary degree to Rachel Levine. A married father of two, Richard Levine decided in 2011 that he was really a woman and underwent various treatments.
The bespectacled bureaucrat with the long, curly locks was Pennsylvania’s secretary of health during the COVID-19 pandemic and was appointed by President Joe Biden as assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. He was also appointed as a rear admiral in the Public Health Corps.
Anyway, the Levine choice for a Smith honor is odd since he has championed biological men in women’s sports, pushed gender ideology, which has the effect of canceling women, and promoted government programs aimed at recruiting sexually vulnerable children, including girls.
As Tyler O’Neill wrote recently in the Daily Signal, “The ‘gender-affirming care’ Levine championed involves experimental hormone injections and surgeries, seeking in vain to make men appear female and vice versa. These interventions – God forbid we refer to them as ‘care’ – leave kids stunted, scarred, and infertile.”
I wonder what it will take 10 years from now to get an honorary degree from Smith?
As the culture war grinds on, it’s important to retain perspective. For that, we can return to Chesterton:
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
This column was first published at the Washington Times.
