As we head towards St Andrews Day (a day when the Free Church holds a day of prayer for the nation) I want to spend each day this week thinking about the state of our nation and the church within it. There is much to pray for. We begin with the Transmania sweeping out nation.
“Quos Deus vult perdere prius dementat” (Those who God wishes to destroy he first makes mad”. This is supposed to have come from Euripides. Whatever the source we are seeing an outworking of that destructive madness in our society just now – and its a spiral that seems to be escalating downwards at an ever-increasing rate.
Take the following stories from this past week alone:
1)Gender Recognition Consultation Published –
9. There was also a concern that the proposals represent a general erosion of the identity or the rights of natal women. More specific concerns were raised that trans women would be eligible to take natal women’s places on all- women short lists, on the boards of public bodies, or for other employment, quotas or awards. Potential problems for the future of women’s sport were noted, including at both a professional and amateur level.
There you go women. You can no longer be referred to as women – you are a sub sect known as ‘Natal Women”!
2) Ordinary People Fight Back
The Times ran an article yesterday “Activists Challenge ‘Transgender Ideology’ Sweeping Schools’ which reported on the interesting and unusual case of the Haddington branch of the SNP questioning the government’s adoption of LGBT Youth Scotland’s advice to schools (advice which includes such gems as parents should not be told if a child wants to change gender). Of course the Haddington branch will be slapped on the wrists and told to shut up as the party damage limitation machine kicks in, and the feminist leader of the Haddington branch will be told to go back into the kitchen where she belongs and not bother her pretty little head with things she cannot understand! Yours truly was quoted in the article:
David Robertson, a former moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, said: “The Haddington SNP branch is quite right and brave to challenge the government’s wholesale adoption of the militant trans agenda. The advice in the guidance is harmful and totalitarian, and the adoption of the radical transgender agenda is an attack on women. It’s about time that others spoke up.”
3) Stonewall Continues Their Indoctrination and Intimidation
Meanwhile Stonewall continue their campaign. Staff in my local NHS have told me that in order to get a Stonewall award they are all to be lectured on Queer Theory and how to be pro-Trans. Will the NHS diversity programme allow a different point of view? Or would that be too diverse? The Telegraph reporting on the debate in Parliament and the way that Trans-activists shut down debate gave us this fascinating detail –
The BBC is, belatedly, engaging with this properly too. Woman’s Hour has this week been broadcasting conversations on different aspects of the sex-gender puzzle. Tuesday’s show was supposed to see Helen Lewis, a New Statesman journalist, debate with Bex Stinson of Stonewall, the biggest trans-rights lobbying group. But Stinson refused even to speak directly to Lewis, who has written about the potential conflict of interests between transwoman and those born female.
4) Our Civic Institutions have Been Captured by Trans Ideology
Brendan O’Neill as he so often does hits the nail on the head – There is no Such Thing as a Trans Kid –
It isn’t only the still small number of kids who are trans-diagnosed who are impacted upon by the transgender ideology. All kids are. The problem here is not some all-powerful trans lobby – it’s the unwillingness of institutions to withstand the transgender worldview. Schools are embracing the new religion of gender-neutrality and are encouraging their charges not to prejudge people’s gender and to believe that sex at birth is irrelevant in comparison with what you feel. The binary that has traditionally allowed children to negotiate an otherwise confusing world – between female and male, mother and father, girl and boy – is being erased, leaving kids socially bereft, uncertain, and re-engineered to think in the way the new elite thinks they should.
5) How Queer Theory Became University Policy – in this revealing article Michael Biggs, Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford shows the terrifying extent to which the McCarthyite tendency of Queer Theory activists has taken over – funded by taxpayers money dished out by ignorant, cowardly, virtue signalling politicians.
The establishment of an official doctrine on gender identity is an unprecedented threat to academic freedom. Sex and gender should be subjects for robust research and vigorous debate. Instead, scholars who query the new orthodoxy of queer theory are subjected to vicious harassment and intimidation. Almost all are women, and many incline towards radical feminism. The culprits are ultrawoke students—most do not identify as transgender but style themselves as ‘allies’—and some feminist academics. They can claim, however, that their aggression is licensed by university policy. After all, universities have granted one particular group extraordinary power to control intellectual discourse. ‘If a trans person informs a staff member that a word or phrasing is inappropriate or offensive,’ warns University College London, ‘then that staff member should take their word for it, and adjust their phraseology accordingly.’
6) The Arts Establishment (and the Church) Continue the Propaganda
**”The Traverse is proud to be presenting _The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven_ as part of our programme this December. We believe it is an important piece of work which speaks to one of our organisation’s core aims, to represent different world views and a variety of experiences.**
**The play’s writer and performer, Jo Clifford, is a Christian who attends church weekly – this work is a piece of devotion which draws on her extensive knowledge of the source texts. Jo is respected and supported by many faith groups and the piece has been performed in churches of many different denominations around the UK. Jo has even appeared on _Songs of Praise_ and is regularly asked to join academic debates and discussions, recently travelling to Cambridge University to address academics and students of a new discipline of theology, trans theology.**
The Traverse would not of course in one of their core aims to represent different world views and a variety of experiences, allow biblical Christianity to be represented on stage or let people experience that. But how depressing, if not surprising, that ‘faith groups’, Songs of Praise and Cambridge University are suggesting there is a ‘trans theology’.
7) Children are being abused and manipulated in schools and through social media –
And then there is the indoctrination and abuse going on in schools. Take this report from the Mail on Sunday –
The school where SEVENTEEN children are changing gender
By Sanchez Manning
AN astonishing 17 pupils at a single British school are in the process of changing gender, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Most of them are autistic, according to a teacher there, who said vulnerable children with mental health problems were being ‘tricked’ into believing they are the wrong sex.
The whistleblower says few of the transgender children are suffering from gender dysphoria – the medical term for someone who feels they were born in the wrong body – but are just easily influenced, latching on to the mistaken belief they are the wrong sex as a way of coping with the problems caused by autism.
Earlier this year, The Mail on Sunday revealed that a third of youngsters referred to the NHS’s only gender identity clinic for children showed ‘moderate to severe autistic traits’. It means that 150 autistic teenagers were given puberty blocker drugs which stop the body maturing.
The teacher says she felt compelled to speak out to protect pupils, many of whom she believes could already be taking the powerful drugs and may go on to have life-changing surgery. She believes schools and some politicians have swallowed ‘hook, line and sinker’ a politically correct ‘fallacy’ peddled by a powerful transgender lobby.
She has asked The Mail on Sunday to conceal her identity for fear of dismissal after almost 20 years as a teacher.
But in a shocking interview, the woman, who we shall call Carol, tells how: l She was advised to keep parents and other teachers in the dark if a pupil claimed to be transgender;
■ Older pupils at her school who changed gender ‘groomed’ younger, mainly autistic children to do the same;
■ One autistic teenager is soon to have a double mastectomy;
■ Pupils who say they were born the wrong sex mimic transgender YouTube stars who Carol believes are partly to blame for convincing vulnerable children they have gender dysphoria.
Or this report from the Telegraph – In 10 years, we’ll ask how we allowed the trans lobby to hijack childhood
When I ask whether it can really be true that children could be sent off to consult with gender clinics without the parents’ knowledge, she explains that, currently, “the confidentiality of a trans child actually trumps everything, including a parent’s right to know. And if a school believes a child is mature enough to understand the implications of what they’re doing, they don’t need parental consent.”
Added to this, “if a child comes to school and tells the teachers ‘my parents are anti-trans’, the school can call in social services and treat it as a safeguarding concern under emotional abuse. Theoretically, the child could even be taken away.”
In ten years, I believe we’ll look back and ask: how did we let this happen? How did we foist our own complex adult neuroses on children? How were we so blinded by PC ideologies? But before that, we’re all likely to ask ourselves and each other many more times: “Where have all the grown-ups gone?”
8) The Maddest Headline
And it shouldn’t have to.
The State of our Nation
These articles and stories are just a few from the past week. We are rapidly moving into a State where children are going to be manipulated and abused by the State system and anyone who dares to challenge this will find themselves threatened and ostracised. Someone asked me yesterday what can we do? We must not give in to this intimidation and bullying. If you are a parent then protest every time your school tries to indoctrinate your children. If you are a worker question every time you are forced into Stonewall indoctrination as your employer tries to show how ‘woke’ they are. If you are a politician – it’s time to speak up. You cannot go along with this State sponsored child abuse. If you are a pastor – make sure your people know what is at stake here. Do what you can in terms of offering advice in terms of reading. Make sure you are compassionate and helpful to those who are victims of this ideology.
I began with the saying of Euripides, let me finish with the saying of Paul from Romans 1;24 “God gave them over….”. I have no doubt that God has given us over to the foolishness of our own thinking. Our elites are leading us down the road to a madness which will destroy our humanity. Only when we remember our Creator will we be able to save the Creation – including ourselves.