Gender Confusion in California, Clarity in the Scriptures

Last month, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law the California Student Civil Rights Act, which adds “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the class of groups to be protected from “educational discrimination.”

Teachers and school districts have been prohibited from “giving instruction…[and] sponsoring any activity that reflects adversely upon persons because of their race, sex, creed, handicap, national origin or ancestry.” Educators are also prohibited from “sponsoring any activity that reflects adversely upon persons because of their gender identity.

The law leaves undefined precisely what sort of events or curricula might qualify as “educational discrimination” on the basis of “gender identity” or “sexual orientation.”

Such fuzzy-headed thinking on human sexuality and gender has been introduced into school districts in California by groups such as the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition (GPAC), an organization that was profiled in a four-part series recently on Gender Blog.

While the California legislation is troubling even on its surface, Jennifer Roback Morse of the conservative monthly The National Review and author of Smart Sex: Finding Life-long Love in a Hook-up World, gets right to the heart of the sad fallout for students in California and in other states where similar laws will surely be attempted in the future.

“Most disturbing,” she writes, “is that such legislation will cause struggles in the development of a healthy sense of gender in the vast majority of young people. Due to the flexible language employed, anything that looks remotely like gender stereotyping will run afoul of this law.” Further, she points out the reality that growing up as boys and girls is difficult enough without such “thinly-disguised thought-control laws” adding another layer of confusion from feminism and gay/transgender rights advocates.

“Most young people have questions about how to express their gender. What does it mean to be a man? What should a good woman do? These are questions with which all young people must grapple, and they are entitled to have some substantial guidance from adults. For far too long, we’ve been avoiding these questions out of fear of offending sensibilities. With this new law, California school teachers and school boards will have to fear the gay lobby, as well as the feminist establishment.”

Indeed, all young people do grapple with the appropriate ways to express and understand their gender and stand in need of substantial guidance. However, they are not going to find it in a culture entranced by postmodernity’s siren song of gender and sexual obfuscation.

Young people, indeed all people, will find such knowledge—what Francis Schaeffer famously called “true truth”— only in the Word of God, the storehouse of wisdom, wisdom that brings clarity such as “God created them male and female,” wisdom that demands that the only legitimate union between a man and a woman is a covenant union sealed by a holy God for a lifetime.

Scripture knows no such ambiguous language with regard to issues of gender and sexuality and again, God’s Word proves that its wisdom brings to nothing the so-called “knowledge” of the philosopher of this age.