By Scott Tibbs, January 7, 2015
It is always a tragedy when a young person dies, but the suicide of 16-year-old Josh Alcorn has struck a national chord and ignited a debate about religious freedom, parental rights and sexual identity. Alcorn was a teenage boy who wanted to live as a girl, and committed suicide when his parents disagreed with his choice.
When God created man, He did not create an infinite spectrum of genders. He created sex as a physical trait, not as a plastic identity. He created male and female, a binary system:
| So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. -- Genesis 1:27 |
Now, because we live in a postmodern age where we always want to discount a general truth by pointing to the exception (no matter how tiny that exception is) we should deal with the issue of hermaphrodites. (Also known as intersex.) There are people born with truly ambiguous genitals, so it is not obvious which sex that child belongs to at birth. However, hermaphrodites are a tiny percentage of the population, so trying to build a generic argument from a statistically tiny population has no logical merit.
Our culture is in full-on rebellion against God's sexual order and the boundaries God has placed around sex. We hate distinctions (especially as Americans) and we hate any restriction on our personal "freedom." The rebellion against God's creation of man as a creature with a binary male and female sex is just one more aspect of that rebellion. This is not new and we are not trailblazers. It is the same sin and rebellion that has been around for a very long time, which is why this commandment was included in the Mosaic Law:
| The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. -- Deuteronomy 22:5 |
But our rebellion has reached the point that it is not enough to simply be "tolerant" of those who are in rebellion against God's commandments. We must accept and endorse that rebellion, or there will be consequences. Dan Savage, the professional Internet troll who created the "Spreading Santorum" website, is now calling for Josh Alcorn's parents to be criminally prosecuted, as well as arguing they should lose custody of their other children.
We actually have "serious" pundits (or at least trolls seen as "serious" by the mainstream media) arguing that Christians who teach their children to live according to Biblical sexual morality should be persecuted by agents of the state and have their children kidnapped from their home by those same agents of the state. It is a frightening time, and it is only going to get worse as "tolerance" evolves into force.
Obviously, Josh Alcorn's parents were not perfect parents - because no such thing exists. There may be things that happened in his life that we do not know about. But teaching Biblical sexual morality to one's children and teens, expecting them to follow that morality and providing Christian counseling to help them overcome sexual sins is not, has never been and will never be child abuse. We must resist any and all efforts by the state to infringe on Christian parents' God-given right and obligation to "bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." (Ephesians 6:4)
