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Tim Graham
Tim Graham is executive editor of NewsBusters and host of the NewsBusters Podcast. His career at the MRC began in February 1989 as associate editor of MediaWatch, the monthly newsletter of the MRC before the internet era.
The line between radical activism and “mainstream” journalism has been obliterated, especially when it comes to the “LGBTQ+” lobbyists. The war on traditional Christianity is on. It was splashed all over the front page of the July 25 USA Today.
The headline above the photograph was “Christian transgender man says fighting LGBTQ+ discrimination has increased his faith.” The big headline underneath was the trans-man’s quote: “This is what I was supposed to be doing.”
“Zayn Silva” was refused admission to a Christian seminary in New York and is part of a lawsuit trying to destroy any religious exemption for schools who hold true to Biblical teaching. On the libertine left, it’s believed God often cruelly ‘assigns’ people the wrong gender at birth.
The large color photograph is Silva sitting in front of a stained-glass window at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, where ‘he’ is an elder. They call themselves ‘intentionally inclusive’.
But it goes deeper than that. The “LGBTQ+ Fellowship” page on their website includes a video titled “Queer Mary, Trans Christ”, showing a ‘queer trans pastor’ reading passages about ‘the cross-dressing Jesus’ in ‘false eyelashes’ from the book Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics.
There is a word for this theology: heresy. But the word never surfaces in our secular press as they seek to undermine traditional religion in all its forms. Forsaking God is the objective.
The outfit gaining all this free publicity in USA Today calls itself the “Religious Exemption Accountability Project”, which is misleading. It’s a Religious Exemption Obliteration Project. Their website explains they “advocate for human rights, while shining a light on the dangers and abuses of a major educational pipeline of white Christian Supremacy”.
There’s one nod to the religious-liberty counterpoint from Gregory Baylor of Alliance Defending Freedom. Baylor said some religious schools could have “very different perspectives”, but these lawsuits “are trying to diminish those choices”. In other words, activists like Silva can find a nominally Christian school that’s ‘intentionally inclusive’, but the lawsuit route is more appealing.
USA Today summarized its official disdain in the subhead: “Counterargument: Lawsuits threaten religious ‘choice.’” There can be no ‘diversity’ of opinion. The new orthodoxy is secular and leftist.
On the same day USA Today campaigned on the front page, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a more balanced story on the battle inside the United Methodist Church, where a significant sliver of churches are leaving. NPR reporter Jason DeRose interviewed minister Glen Haworth, complaining the Methodists were “drifting from what he calls traditional biblical teachings” on homosexuality and marriage. “What he calls” is NPR’s subtle method of wanting to deconstruct the Bible.
NPR’s opposing view came from Grant Hagiya, president of the Methodist seminary in southern California, Claremont School of Theology. He clearly set orthodox Christians on edge by suggesting the LGBTQ view is for “justice, something he believes even a medieval theologian could support”.
Hagiya claimed Thomas Aquinas “would say that if a law is unjust, it’s not a law. Laws are human-made. And they can be wrong, immoral. And we believe that this is true of this particular case of exclusion.” What Aquinas actually wrote is, “An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.” The libertines are at war with “eternal law and natural law”.
‘Justice’ in the eyes of the left is defined as bending the arc away from the Bible (and the Torah and the Koran) and creating a new God that believes exactly what the left believes, a malleable deity who evolves exactly as the left evolves.
