Weekly Roundup: Trump Arraignment, SBC Misogyny, and Resources to be a Trans Ally
Brad and Dan begin by discussing the reactions to Trump's arraignment in Miami - from congresspeople calling for war, to Kari Lake talking about 75 million Americans with guns, to megachurch pastors exhorting their congregations to emulate religious terrorists. Brad points out that the anger over Trump's arraignment coincides with the rise of anti-trans rhetoric - from Trump himself to the KKK.
In the second segment, Dan provides a long list of ways to learn about trans issues and how to become a trans ally. A list of the resources can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14jp1y8Kj0bxeeY2NHWY3yRhORKx6M_3-/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=115399197961662580538&rtpof=true&sd=true
In the third segment the hosts discuss the vote in the SBC to exclude any congregations with women serving in the role of pastor. Dan links this to the sinister ways that purity is used as a virtue. Brad provides a history of women in pastoral roles in the SBC and shows why this is not a new issue. More here: https://theconversation.com/how-women-in-the-southern-baptist-convention-have-fought-for-decades-to-be-ordained-161061
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, here today on an early Saturday morning with my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and Brad and I, as it turns out, have all the realities everybody else does, so we're running a few hours late here.
Yeah, we usually record on Fridays, but that just didn't happen.
My daughter's daycare had a bunch of kids with COVID, so that was shut.
And then I had various backup plans, you know, like mom and grandma, mother-in-law type plans, and none of that worked.
So anyway, all that meant that yesterday I got to hang out with my daughter all day, which was fun, but did not Record the weekly roundup.
So here we are today.
Anyway.
All right, Dan, you're back from Greece.
You're back in the swing of things.
Summer is happening.
It's Father's Day.
Do you...
Like, do you have a Father's Day tradition you want to share?
What's Father's Day?
Our biggest Father's Day tradition is forgetting to plan anywhere to go out to eat and then trying, like, four different places that are all full or closed.
Like, that happens every Father's Day.
We wind up like going to four places.
So by then it's like, yeah, I guess we'll go to Panera because, you know, I'm a middle-aged guy.
And like, that's, that's, that's, that's high scale for us.
I just broke Brad.
I would be disappointed if it was any other way.
Like, if you had some elaborate plan every Father's Day where you, like, went paragliding or something.
I don't know.
Yeah, if it was totally planned out, I'd be actually disappointed.
I'm much more happy envisioning you driving to one cafe and then to Benny's Diner and then to Greta's Cafe and then being like, well, we'll just drive through.
We'll go to the drive-thru of Panera.
We're like, we'll go to the Father's Day.
We'll go to the hibachi place.
Oh, nope, nope.
They're not open this weekend for some reason.
Now we'll go to the barbecue place.
Nope, they're closed.
We'll go to like the steak place where I kid you not, the power was out.
They didn't know why, but they're like, the power's out.
So our kitchen's closed.
Yeah, so Panera, it was.
So yeah, I live on the edge, Brad.
The edge of banality really is where I live.
The back, behind the scenes footage of this show is juicy.
I just want everyone to know that.
It's a mix between MTV's Real World, MTV's Cribs, and the Real Housewives of New Jersey.
It's a lot.
So anyways, maybe someday we'll release the tapes.
You know, not until we're dead because we don't want too much scandal.
All right, here we go.
Let's talk about a couple of things today.
One is the reactions to Trump's arraignment in Miami.
And then we're going to take a little bit of a different tactic than we used to than the normal friends.
And that is you're used to us giving you the bad news.
We want to provide just a list of ways you can support trans Folks, including trans kids.
And so we're going to be doing that here in the middle of the show.
And then we're going to finish with something that just has to be talked about.
And that's the Southern Baptist Convention and its vote to expel churches with women pastors.
So, Dan, let's jump into the reactions to Trump's indictment and and subsequent arraignment.
We talked a little bit last week, but I just wanted to go through these because I think it's worth noting.
So Trump's arraigned And there's no mass violence.
There's no, we don't have another January 6th.
So I think there's probably people in your orbit who are like, oh, what's the big deal?
And see, nothing happened.
And I think it's worth sort of stepping back and asking ourselves, where are we right now?
And I think one of the answers is that we live in a country where one of our former leaders took highly classified information and allegedly including that that included national security information, nuclear capabilities and so on of our country and other countries. nuclear capabilities and so on of our country and other And then when he was indicted, we had to prepare like the Miami law enforcement had to prepare because there was a threat of something like mass violence.
So that is the country we live in.
OK, I think that's I think that's something to think about.
That's kind of where we are now as a country.
But then, Dan, let me go through some of the reactions that we were not able to do last week because they had not come out yet.
So one of them, I'll just start.
There's a there's a lot.
I'm going to go through a bunch.
One is Carrie Lake.
Who is probably going to be running for Senate.
If you want to get to Trump, you're going to have to go through me and 75 million Americans just like me.
And most of us are card carrying members of the NRA.
That's not a threat.
That's a public service announcement.
So she's careful at the end.
She's like, it's not a threat.
It's a public service announcement.
And this is what Jeff Charlotte always says.
You cloak it in sarcasm or a joke or something else, and it doesn't seem to be serious.
She's basically saying there's 75 million of us with guns.
Watch out.
Many of you, I'm sure saw the, the tweets or heard about them at least from various representatives.
Representative Clay Higgins got the most attention because of his tweeting, basically military jargon and military expressions in order to kind of say to his followers, be ready.
It's, we're getting to a time when paramilitary activity will be necessary.
Representative Biggs tweeted that we're now in a war phase.
It's an eye for an eye, which is a whole thing.
And Christmas, who is a megachurch pastor, talked about how Muslims, Dan, have been more successful in their attempts to gain power because they're willing to die.
I mean, here's what he was saying, and this is incredibly, there's so much wrong with what he's saying, but he's basically saying, Muslim terrorists, Islamic terrorists are successful in gaining power for their cause because they're willing to not only die, but to commit acts of terrorism.
So what about you Christians?
Where are you at?
Jason Raper talked about how there's a need for Christians in every single office across the land.
Ali Alexander of Stop the Steal fame.
Said this, if we don't have law, we shouldn't have order.
I want to come back to that in a minute.
Fox, I'm sure some of you saw this.
I had a cry on that said, I never know how to say that, Dan.
Cry on?
Try on?
Cry on, I think.
Anyway, whatever.
Somebody will email me.
They always do.
And they said that Biden is a wannabe dictator who just had his political opponent arrested.
There are other things that have happened now.
I could go through more.
Actually, I'll go through.
I'll go through a couple more.
Reich wing watch.
Trump supporters call for genocide of all Democratic voters, torture and mass executions of anti-Trump politicians after the grand jury indictment.
OK, this is on various social media sites that they found this.
There's a whole bunch of quotes here.
If they steal the election again, why are we talking about anything but dragging the political elite out of their homes and setting them on fire?
There's more.
I don't actually really want to say them because they're so graphic and disgusting.
So I'm not going to do it.
But there's talk about rope.
There's talk about fires and ovens and things like that.
So.
I want to go back to Ali Alexander, Dan, and then I want to connect this to some other things that happened this week that are, I think are really important.
So Ali Alexander says, if we don't have law, we shouldn't have order.
So he's basically like, uh, what happened with Trump is, is beyond the law.
It's just basically, uh, Biden arresting his political opponent.
And I want to just notice a slight difference between this and other social movements in the country, and then I'll throw it to you.
When Martin Luther King Jr.
is helping to lead the civil rights movement, he talks about unjust laws, laws that are not just, should not be obeyed.
Okay?
And so his argument is this, the law is not just.
We need to change the law because the goal is justice.
Right.
The goal is not necessarily law.
The goal is justice.
And laws enable us to enforce and build and cultivate a society where justice is something we're striving for.
OK, so if you have somebody who says, hey, we're going to protest or we're going to do a sit-in or a boycott because the law is not just, it's unfair.
That's one sentiment.
What Alexander is saying, what Alexander is saying is, if we don't have law, we shouldn't have order, meaning the goal is law that enforces our order.
And I've said this before on this show, right?
The goal is not justice or fairness or equality.
The goal is a law that imposes the vision on our society that we want.
If we don't have that, We should not have order.
We should be disorderly.
We should be, and you're seeing from the other voices I've quoted here, we should be perhaps violent and unruly in that way.
So that's a difference I think that's worth noticing.
I have a couple more things I want to say, but I'll throw it to you.
What do you think?
I think that's a really important difference.
And I think you kind of hit it on the head with that.
I think the other piece of this, again, people cringe at the F word, fascism or authoritarianism, and say that it's too extreme.
But the logic of this is that Trump, by definition, can't have done wrong.
Whatever he does, it can't be wrong.
Would it have been wrong if Hillary Clinton did it?
Sure would.
We're still hearing that.
We're still hearing a less incendiary response from, say, mainstream right-wing figures like people in the GOP, in the Senate, in the House, places like that.
It's still the, what about Clinton?
What about Hillary's emails?
What about, what about, what about, what about?
What about Biden?
Biden had documents.
What about Pence?
Pence had documents.
We talked about this briefly.
They didn't try to obstruct justice and so forth.
But the point is, for them, it's wrong if Hillary Clinton does it.
It's wrong if Biden does it.
It's wrong if Pence does it.
But if Trump does it, It's not.
Why?
Because he's Trump.
That's the logic of authoritarianism, right?
So to your point, we have laws that enforce our order, but who defines that order?
For millions of Americans, all those Americans that Carrie Lake's talking about, it's Donald Trump.
And if Donald Trump says something, does something, by definition, he is above law.
He is the originator of law.
He is the one who imposes order, not the one who is subject to it.
And this is an idea that goes back in Western thought all the way to, you know, the Magna Carta, this idea that, nope, sorry, political leaders are under, they're under the law as well.
And so this is a really fundamental thing that's being challenged here.
The other piece of this, if we turn to like that more measured response, the response that's supposed to sound more grown up, the Jim Jordan talk show response, and this is something for people to pay attention to, is The people who are not just on Twitter screaming, they know that Trump, this is a really damning indictment.
Bill Barr, who of course spent years enabling Trump and has, I guess, been trying to rehab his credibility since then, said that if half of this is true, he's toast or something along those lines.
But people should also pay attention to this.
Many of them are not denying that Trump had the documents.
It's now back to the, no, he declassified them.
Yes, we have him on tape saying that he hadn't declassified them and that he couldn't anymore because he's not president.
Yes, we know that there was a formal process to declassify, which leaves a paper trail, right?
It's why all these forms that we spend our lives filling out exist.
So there are paper trails of everything, proof that we did certain things.
None of that exists, but they're still following the claim that he did this, which I think is the softer version of what you're saying, right?
But Trump didn't follow the policy.
Trump didn't do that.
Yeah, but he's Trump.
And so somehow he's above this.
He's beyond this.
And yeah, and the double standard is more than palpable.
If this was Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama under investigation.
There's not a chance that we would have all these angry people talking about how this is just his political enemies out to get him.
So I think it's worth like, like, again, thinking about Alexander's, Alexander's quote here, if we don't have law, we shouldn't have order.
So it makes you stop and think and it makes you stop and think in ways you don't often think about government.
Why do we have government?
Is it for order?
Is that the end goal?
A lot of us would say, no, government's supposed to help people flourish by creating a more just society.
That if we actually come together in a communal agreement and have laws and policies and regulations, we will have something that is more like a fair and free and an open society where human life can flourish instead of living in something like the Wild Wild West or the Lord of the Flies or whatever.
What I hear you saying, Dan, and what I'm putting forth, too, is that for many of them, the goal is order.
If we are in charge, if our guy Trump is at the top and he's putting things in place like we want them and hurting the people that need to be hurt to do so, that's the goal, right?
So you all see the difference.
Now, I want to link this to something that is going to lead to what we're going to talk about in the second segment, and that is The fact that I think this go around, and if you ask me what's different right now in 2024, from 2016 to 2020, I think there's a couple of differences.
I think Trump is more marred and scathed than ever.
He is feeling the heat.
Georgia, New York, and Mar-a-Lago cases, the classified document cases, they're all breathing down his neck, okay?
There are people starting to say, like Bill Barr, and I think Bill Barr's in some way just trying to pump up DeSantis a little bit, I'll be honest.
Bill Barr's Catholic.
I don't know.
There's a lot of ways to think about what he's doing there.
But Bill Barr and others are like, yeah, Trump might be too damaged and too this and that as a candidate.
OK.
The difference, though, that is catching my eye in this Pride Month is what Trump says after he is arraigned.
Actually, he's indicted a week ago.
So a week ago, he says this.
It's amazing how strongly people feel about that.
That meaning transgender folks.
I talk about cutting taxes, people go like that and he kind of waves his arms like, oh, who cares?
I talk about transgender, everybody goes crazy.
Five years ago, you didn't know what the hell that was.
So think about what Trump just said out loud, right?
Always saying the quiet part out loud.
If I talk about taxes, everyone's like, yeah, cool.
Yeah.
Cut my taxes.
Sounds great.
If I talk about trans folks, you all go crazy.
You're angry and furious.
You give me a standing ovation.
You lose your mind.
Okay.
I could do a whole nother 20 minutes on how they've envisioned trans people just by existing as out of order.
I think we've done that on this show.
If you're interested in it, go and listen to the back episodes, the weekly roundups.
Search our website, straightwhiteamericanjesus.com and find that.
What I'd rather do though, Dan, is this.
I really feel like what they have found in trans people in the trans community is the bogeyman that is motivating them this time.
Okay?
A lot of people have pointed out that if you change The wording from Nazi propaganda back in the day from Jewish and you just fill in the word trans, it sounds a lot like what you hear from Matt Walsh.
It sounds a lot like what you hear from many of the talking heads on the right.
That the propaganda is basically identical if you just trade out Jewish for trans when it comes to the contemporary discourse and the Nazi discourse.
And this is not an accident.
So Rolling Stone has a good piece that reports that talks about this issue.
And one of the things that they quote is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.
And you all, many of the Family Research Council is an evangelical organization that is vehemently anti-LGBTQ, including vehemently anti-trans.
Well, one of their researchers hit on something a couple of years ago, 2017, that I think has really become the plan for this election cycle.
Here's what Meg Kilgannon said then.
Trans and gender identity are tough selves.
So focus on gender identity to divide and conquer.
If we separate the T from the alphabet soup, we'll have more success.
Dan, I just want to hover there.
If we separate the T from everything else, we'll have more success.
That's exactly what Trump was basically saying.
Hey, if I talk about transgender folks, you all go crazy with anger.
If I talk about other stuff, you kind of whatever.
That's his next big hit.
That's the big hit on the right.
And I just want to give a couple more examples.
There were KKK flyers in Kentucky left on people's cars and doorsteps that were anti-trans.
So the KKK, one of America's first terrorist organizations, historically anti-Black, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic.
What's on their flyers today?
Trans folks.
So on the ground, in real time, this is happening.
There were, uh, folks in Glendale, California.
Glendale's like 10 miles, five miles from Hollywood.
Okay.
Glendale's like right in the valley there.
There were like physical altercations between parents over LGBTQ issues in a curriculum this past week.
How do you get into those issues?
How does all that start?
Talking about trans people.
Starbucks has decided not to display any Pride merch, any Pride symbols, anything.
They have taken it down.
Again, if you had just said, I want you to take Pride stuff down because of gay people, You've said it many times in the show, Dan.
That's past.
It's gone.
That issue is not the way that they can get people excited.
But if you say trans folks are groomers and pedophiles, then you can get Starbucks and Target and everyone else to take down their pride merch and their pride symbols and basically cow to the bigots and the wannabe fascists, right?
So what I'm driving at here, Dan, and I'll throw it to you, is just Yes, there's a reaction to the Trump indictment and arraignment that is super scary and we have to keep an eye on.
I also think that if you want to know how Trump and the American right, and Trump just being, as we've said many times, the head of a snake, right?
That the persecution and violence against trans people is the way forward for them.
They have found the bogeyman that they can actually point to and get people Scared and angry and ready to commit vigilante violence going forward.
So anyway, thoughts on this before we take a break and then talk about what to do about it.
Yeah, so you're right.
We talk about this a lot.
I've read about this in the Canopy Forum.
We've talked about it here.
My book, Queer Democracy, I talk about this, that the right basically lost the culture war on things like marriage equality.
General acceptance of gay and lesbian people, right?
And I say this all the time, please don't mishear me.
Don't hear me saying that life is great if you're gay, that life is great if you're bi, that you don't face discrimination.
You do, right?
But trans and gender non-conforming people have not They've not been as culturally present.
They've not been as culturally visible is what I mean by that.
There isn't the same amount of acceptance.
People can remember.
I can remember, Brad, what it was like going to church when I was in my teens, when I was in, say, grade school or something.
And it was it was it was gay people.
That was that was the big, as you say, the bogeyman at that time.
And it has shifted.
Right.
It took a long time to shift.
The shift in some ways was rapid, but in some ways took a long time.
And that lack of familiarity broadly, much more broadly within culture, is part of what I think allows this to fester the way that it does.
We'll talk more about that after the break, but I think that there are people who just don't know much.
They don't know what they don't know, and so they fall prey to those who do, those for whom it's very calculated.
You know, and people don't think about this oftentimes when it's Uncle Ron at the barbecue spouting off what he's spouting that there are researchers in the background.
It's the equivalent of market research saying, Oh, you know what?
If we target this group, we're going to win votes.
We're going to get people on board.
We're going to be able to take those people who won't vote.
To take away marriage equality or won't support somebody who wants that, even though that's still part of the GOP platform.
It's still part of lots of religious organizations, views and so forth.
But if we target this group, we can do that.
And I think a lot of people don't realize how much they have fallen prey to basically marketing analyses.
And I think you're exactly right.
I think that for lots of reasons, if we talk about proper order, Trans people are perceived as a threat in lots and lots of ways.
I think there's no greater threat to a kind of toxic patriarchal masculinity than somebody who was assigned female at birth who identifies as male, who occupies that space.
There's nothing scarier to people who want to be able to categorize everybody and make sure they're in their proper social place.
Than people who occupy bodies that maybe can't be categorized, or that don't fit where they think that they should fit.
And it stirs a visceral reaction, and that lack of cultural familiarity feeds into that, and you get this really potent mix.
So I agree.
It has become, and this is how you can tell, and you're highlighting this, when the KKK is talking about it, and Trump's talking about it.
There have been recent, I think it was CNN had a thing, you know.
This wasn't secret or anything, but they went back and looked and they're like, Trump used to brag about having trans women participate in Miss Universe.
Like that was Trump before he turned into Trump the political figure.
It was Trump before he figured out that he had lots of people to stand and cheer for him if he was anti-trans.
It has become the issue that comes up and it doesn't matter what the topic is.
It doesn't matter what policy we're discussing.
It doesn't matter what Politician we're discussing, it's the card that will always be played by those on the right.
And that, to me, is one of the signals that is playing exactly the role that you're highlighting, that it is the card.
It's like the wild card that can be played every time to get votes, to shut down conversation, to sometimes win people over who might not agree with you on immigration.
They might not agree with you on marriage equality.
They might not agree with you on taxes.
But they get squishy and nervous when you start talking about giving hormones to kids because that sounds scary.
We don't know what that is.
And so, OK, maybe you're right.
Maybe I'll give you a hearing.
Maybe you're right about these other things, too.
It's it is kind of the magic elixir right now for the GOP.
Yeah, I agree with all that, and that's why I want to just stay on this and in the next segment, talk through that.
So let's take a break and we'll we'll keep going right back.
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It's not like I asked for the job.
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I've got a radio host who is making up conspiracies about me, a dude actually shooting at me, and an unhinged president threatening me.
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All right, Dan, so I want to throw this to you, but let me just say one thing, and I disagree with everything you said there before the break, and I think that what you said is the way that this is making traction, and I just want to stop, and I want to ask you that if you're listening to think about this, because I think there are ways that a lot of folks who are
Normal, everyday Americans trying to raise their kids, trying to get to work, trying to pay their bills, trying to somehow make it in a time that feels really hard with the pandemic and climate change and want to be authoritarians and fascists in our midst.
It's not an easy time.
I think a lot of folks have arrived at a place where if someone is gay, someone is bi, someone is lesbian, they don't flinch.
That's part of their landscape.
Yeah, my cousin and my colleague and my friend and my neighbor, they're all, you know, there's a gay person.
This is just my nervous system and my body is just like, yeah, that's totally kind of a normal experience for me.
Okay?
So when you talk about, hey, if you're gay, you're a pedophile, your ears go up and you're like, no, that's wrong.
I'm not.
I won't stand for that.
You can't say that.
When it comes to trans and gender non-conforming folks, non-binary folks, I think that is a little less trained and a little less normalized and a little less just part of the landscape for people.
So I think what happens, Dan, and this is just dovetailing on what you just said, is that the willingness to say something, the willingness to be the voice in the room who doesn't allow that kind of rhetoric or joking, to be the person who says, I'm actually going to support a cause that helps trans people, trans children, whatever.
There's a lack of willingness there, because as you say, there's a lack of familiarity and a lack of understanding.
They don't know.
What does it mean for children to have hormone therapy?
Is it something that can be reversed?
Is that going to lead to damaging effects?
Is this something that we should be wary of?
If a five-year-old says, I like dinosaurs, and then they also say, I don't want to be a boy anymore.
I want to be a girl.
Is that the same thing?
So I think there's a reason.
There's a vulnerability here in the political discourse.
And so I want to throw it to you as somebody who can help us understand some of those questions and then also point us to places that people can get involved and be helpful when it comes to being an ally to trans folks and especially to thinking about trans kids.
Yeah, so you and I were talking about this, Brad, and talking about we hear from a lot of people who feel overwhelmed by the anti-trans legislation and anti-trans activism and so forth, and people who have been in spaces and places where they felt that that wasn't present, and then they're finding out that it is, and it's on the rise, and asking what they can do, how they can take action.
So we sort of wanted to think about this.
I'll let folks know in the show notes, there'll be a link to a resource sheet that I put together.
It's not exhaustive, but it has some websites.
It has some books and sort of places to start.
I'm going to talk about those over the next few minutes here, but it's a lot of information to throw out.
So if you're driving around or like you're working on something or you got kids in the background, you're like, Oh my God, Dan just listed six books.
Why don't like.
Just go to the show notes and that'll be there.
Or you can email me danielmillerswage at gmail.com or you can contact contact Brad or us through any of the mechanisms for reaching us.
We'll be happy to get that information to you.
But part as I was thinking about this, Brad, that I was thinking about a couple of things.
One, I was reminded of this saying, and I may not get it quite right by somebody I was talking to the other day.
And they said, if people you care about are getting hit by rocks and you're not, you might not be standing close enough to them.
And what struck me about that is when we talk about trans issues, it can't be an issue just for the trans community and not even the whole LGBTQ plus community.
Transgender is something different from sexual orientation.
It is distinct and there's lots of overlap.
And those communities often have lots of solidarity because they've experienced some of the same things.
But they're not identical.
Most people aren't trans or gender nonconforming.
That's one of the reasons why a lot of people don't get it.
If you've grown up and when you were born, they looked at you and said, Hey, it's a boy.
And you just always felt like a guy.
You've never, you've never questioned that.
You've never felt weird about that.
It's maybe hard to understand people who do, but if it's going to change, if we're going to contest it, it's going to have to involve allies as well, not just members of the community.
And the question is, how do we do that?
How do we be allies?
And one of the biggest things that I'm going to talk about here is we have to be the resource.
I truly believe that there are the Family Research Council people in the world who do the research and find out what will track and what will play and how they can score political points.
There are the Ron DeSantis' and others in the world who I think know full well that they are harming people and saying things that are not true.
And that's their aim, is to harm people and say things that are untrue.
I also think there are a lot of people who just don't know.
It may make them feel uncomfortable, but they don't know enough about it to say something.
Or they're just afraid.
We've used the analogy before when somebody makes that kind of racist joke and everybody laughs and you feel uncomfortable about it, but you're nervous about being the only person in the room who says something or doesn't like it.
Or somebody makes that joke where, I don't know, they do a racist imitation of somebody's accent.
Or they tell a misogynistic joke or something.
We've talked about that you have to be the one who's willing to raise the issue.
And so this is the thing, the first step for people is you have to be the resource.
Most people have not met somebody who's trans, or they didn't know that they met somebody who was trans.
And so all they hear is what happens on social media, or what happens on Fox News, or what their grandparents say, or what their parents say, or their friends, or their pastor, or whatever.
And so if we care about these issues, we have to be educated enough ourselves to be the resource that people can encounter when we can say, well, actually, that's not how it works.
So I wanted to start with like, like little things that people can do.
And because they're not that little, uh, this is part of, of allyship.
One of the things that happened, I think, Brad, for people who are gay and lesbian and bi is it became more culturally ordinary, right?
People may not remember way back.
It feels like the dark ages when you had like the first gay kiss on network TV and people freaked out about it or, you know, whatever.
It became more culturally ordinary.
One of the ways that these things become culturally regularized is when they're not just part of that community.
So participate in Pride events.
Go to Pride rallies.
Just go and watch the parade.
Sign up for the 5k run if 5k runs are a thing that you do.
Just be there.
And certainly if you're queer, certainly if you're trans, be there.
But if you're straight, you're cisgender, if you're whatever you are, go there and be a part of that.
Add pronouns to your emails.
Do the email signature that says what pronouns you use.
Why?
And I get this question all the time, Brad.
People are like, well, I pass as male.
I use he, him pronouns.
Why would I put that?
Because what it helps show is that maybe you wouldn't.
Or that everybody chooses to use particular pronouns or not, and it helps make it, again, just a regular part of discourse.
One that is a hot-button issue for some people, use they as your standard pronoun.
Instead of he or him, just try to use they for everybody.
Like when you don't know what somebody is, or I'm watching Taekwondo, I have a kid in Taekwondo, and some other kid is like doing something, and I'll say, wow, they're really good.
I'm trying to use the they pronoun.
Why?
Just to regularize it so it can take some of the venom away from that when people don't like it.
Wear the pins, put on the bumper stickers, do those kinds of things.
And I think sometimes people who aren't part of the queer community are afraid to do that because they'll think that they're sort of claiming something that they're not or they're claiming to occupy an identity space.
I don't think that's the case.
I think that being able to show your solidarity for a group, being able to show that you support them and And that you affirm them is really key.
So I think that these are really small things, but I think that if enough of us do them, they're not just small.
And then the other one is this.
We talk, Brad, a lot about the proverbial Uncle Ron and what to say and things like that, but anticipate some of those conversations, learn some of the basic moves, know what some of the things that people are going to say are and how to counter them.
For example, Here's a standard one.
Transgender ID is a mental health illness.
It's a mental illness.
It's a mental health category.
It's not, right?
Something called gender dysphoria is a mental health category.
We've talked about this before, and it gets complicated.
But gender dysphoria is the anxiety that comes when you are not affirmed in the gender you perceive yourself to be.
And the big fat book called The DSM that tells mental health professionals how to diagnose things is really clear that gender identity or gender nonconformity is not pathological, right?
Some books about this, and again, the show links will talk about this as well, but a couple that are really useful.
There's one, if people are interested in this, that's probably the most basic.
It's called Transgender 101, A Simple Guide to a Complex Issue.
It's by Nicholas Teich.
Really great book that gives examples of these kinds of things.
It's a little more technical, but if people are interested, Queer Democracy, my book in the first chapter, I talk about what gender dysphoria is, what it isn't, how it plays out.
There's a book, a really good book for everybody's trans selves.
It's a big fat book that talks about almost every aspect of transgender identity and life.
It talks about child rearing.
These books talk about basic terminology.
They explain what trans identity is.
They talk about things like what transition is and what hormones are and what use they are and different things like this.
Great sources of education.
We'll go through some websites and things in a few minutes, but that's the first one, right?
Is when somebody says it's a mental illness, it's not.
Second one is this, when somebody says, well, I don't trust the medical establishment, right?
It's the medical establishment that's telling us this.
It's the medical establishment that's telling us that this is something we should accept.
Just throw out this.
You trust the medical establishment when it's your grandma's cancer that they're talking about.
When it's your dad's heart problem, you're happy to talk to the medical establishment.
When it's your kids, and maybe we're not talking about vaccines, but when it's your kid who breaks an arm, or has some viral infection, or has the flu, you trust the medical establishment.
People say, I don't trust those mental health professionals who want to make everything about you feel good.
We did, during the pandemic, record numbers of people finding out that they needed to sit down and talk with somebody and understand their own feelings and their own emotions and their own bodies and their own nervous systems and what they were doing.
Just come at somebody with that, right?
Show them the ways that they do trust that establishment and say, why wouldn't you trust them with this?
Because as I've said lots of times, the links to this are also in those notes.
American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Association of Pediatrics, they all affirm gender-affirming care for youth.
They all have statements opposing Anti-trans legislation and laws, right?
Another sort of fact-checking kind of thing.
Here's one.
I know a lot of our listeners are not avid Bible readers.
Some of you are, but I know we have a lot of people who have been deconstructing and things like this, and that's not your cup of tea.
But I also know from our listeners, from the people that I coach, that we have a lot of people in our lives who are So what do you do when somebody says, well, the Bible says there's two genders, right?
Creation story, you got Adam and Eve, male and female.
Ask them about Philip.
Ask them about Philip and the eunuch.
And if they say, what are you talking about?
Tell them a story in Acts, because there's this story in Acts where one of the apostles named Philip encounters somebody who's a eunuch.
And what's a eunuch?
I'm not going to go in the whole history of eunuchs, but in the ancient Near East, not in Israel, but in sort of other cultures around it, you have these categories of people who were castrated.
And usually, sometimes they were slaves, sometimes they were government officials, sometimes they were servants of different kinds.
But they were castrated to make them into a non-gendered person.
They were considered neither male nor female.
And over time, those other cultures encountered Israelite culture and Hebrew culture, and they become a population in Israel.
And under lots of aspects of Jewish law, they were considered unclean and impure because they weren't male or female.
So, in the early Christian movement, in the Book of Acts, and if you've ever sat in a sermon about the Book of Acts, Brad, I know you have, I have, it is the most kind of evangelical storyline there is.
They will say the whole Book of Acts is all about the inbreaking of the Christian community and how different it is and how revolutionary it is and the free grace that God offers and so forth.
And they're right!
The book of Acts is full of stories about people who are considered unclean or impure who are acceptable to God as Christians.
And in the story of Philip, he encounters a man who's a eunuch, and this eunuch is reading the Hebrew Bible, and he says he doesn't understand it.
And so Philip explains it to him, he explains to him about Jesus, the guy comes to accept him, and they pass some water, and he says to Philip, here's some water, why shouldn't I be baptized?
And Philip says, no reason at all, and he baptizes him.
Powerful story about the inclusion of somebody who is neither male nor female explicitly being brought into the Christian community.
So throw that out to your friends who want to say, well, what about the book of Genesis?
Say, well, what about the book of Acts?
Let's talk about the eunuchs.
And finally, those are all things you can do.
As I say, those are the learning the moves, because this is what happens, Brad, I think, is a lot of people, they hear these things and we get caught flat-footed, right?
We've all had those conversations where we wish we'd said something, like, or we think of some great line later on.
This is a way to just be ready.
Be ready for the Uncle Ron.
Read some books, go to some websites, educate yourself, learn what the advocates for trans rights have to say, and prepare yourself.
So the last thing I'm going to say is just throw out some more information because the other piece of this is, if one side is education, the other side is support for advocacy groups.
So the first and biggest, probably most well-established queer advocacy group is GLAAD.
Just Google GLAAD, you'll find them.
They will accept your donations.
They have local groups and regional groups.
It's also a tremendous resource.
If you go to GLAAD, if you do GLAAD.org slash transgender, they have a long list of different transgender advocacy groups.
Information sites, sites that can walk you through, if you're new to this, to like, I don't even know what trans means, or Dan, you've said cisgender a bunch of times, I don't know what that means.
Or Brad, you said gender fluid, I don't know what that means.
They can walk you through all of those terms, all of those different understandings that can also lead you to other kinds of support groups.
The Human Rights Campaign, HRC, if you've ever seen the bumper stickers people have, the little blue square with the equal sign, That's them.
That's HRC, Human Rights Campaign, another of the best known, most respected education and advocacy organizations.
Again, go to their website, hit resources, it will walk you through a whole lot of different kinds of resources they have.
As well as, this is one of the things that I really like about HRC, I use this in my courses, they have sections about religion on their website.
They have a section where you can click on every major American denomination and it will tell you their position on LGBTQ inclusion.
If you're a person of faith and I talk to people who are and you're like, I can't stay where I am, but my religion still matters to me.
Where do I go?
I have a queer kid or I'm an ally or whatever.
It's a great resource for finding out where you might go to find faith communities that support what you support.
Another organization is the Trevor Project.
The Trevor Project is specifically aimed at trans and gender non-conforming youth.
It's also a crisis organization.
They have crisis hotlines.
It's really moving and disturbing and also profoundly important that if you go to their website, the first thing it has on the front is to tell you that if you hit escape three times, it'll drop the website in case your parents come in.
Sorry, Brad, I get pretty emotional about that.
They need that, but it's a website.
Again, lots of information, lots of resources.
All of these places will take your donations.
Lambda Legal is a queer, mostly like a legal organization that will, they're involved right now in fighting some of the anti-trans legislation, anti-discrimination stuff.
Lambda Legal and GLAAD both provided free resources for us to help change our daughter's pronouns and to hire an attorney to do that.
And then other ones that some folks might know of, the Transgender Law Center is exactly what it sounds like.
It is the largest trans-led legal activist organization in the U.S.
So if that's your thing, it's not just the, what do I say at school boards, what do I say to people around me, what do I do to try to fight anti-trans legislation?
Or maybe if you're like me, you live in a state that's pretty trans-affirming, How do you fight the battle in places like Texas or Florida, right?
These are the organizations that do that.
And then some that others will know about the American Civil Liberties Union.
The state of Indiana, I just read yesterday, a judge put a hold on the state law banning minor medical care for trans minors.
The ACLU is the organization representing the plaintiffs in that case.
And then finally, the last website or web resource I'll throw out—again, it's not everybody's cup of tea, but if you have people in your life who it is—the Reformation Project.
is an organization that is theologically pretty conservative, theologically traditional, but fully LGBTQ plus affirming.
And if you have people in your life who are the, but the Bible says people, they have lots of resources, videos, books, pamphlets, arguing that in their view, the Bible actually requires full LGBTQ inclusion.
And they Have resources pointing all of that out for people who are maybe unfamiliar with that.
So those are some of the resources.
If you want to do something, check out those websites.
Go and see the resources that they have.
The last thing, I've mentioned a couple books.
I want to just throw out a couple more that are worth knowing about.
One that's really good, especially if you're concerned about trans youth, trans and nonconforming youth, is a book by Linda Gromko called Where's My Book?
Again, it's a great resource if you're like me and you're like, I'm a book nerd and I like books better than websites.
It'll walk you through everything from basic terms to what is gender identity?
What is sexual orientation?
How do they relate?
When people talk about transition, what does that mean?
What is social transition?
What is medical transition?
What happens with minors?
How do I support youth?
On and on and on.
Finally, I think the last book I'll throw out here is a book by Susan Stryker called Transgender History, The Roots of Today's Revolution, that really lays out the history of the trans movement and trans people.
This is really good because, Brad, you mentioned this before, people have questions.
They say, well, my kid likes to play with dinosaurs or likes princess movies.
Does that mean they're trans?
And most people now would say, well, that's just silly.
One of the things Stryker talks about is laws that were on the books in lots of states that criminalized quote-unquote cross-dressing.
If you were a woman and you wore pants, you could be arrested.
If you were a man and you dressed too effeminately, you could be arrested.
In my view, it's not a long step from some of the things that DeSantis and others are advocating now to something like that, where we're not talking about, you know, competitive disadvantages in athletics.
We're just saying to be a girl, you need to dress like a girl.
You need to do girly things and so forth.
So that's a lot of stuff, throwing that out there.
Again, we're going to have a link to the show notes.
People can probably tell I get pretty worked up, amped up about this stuff.
A lot of great resources.
I can't emphasize enough that I think the biggest thing for people is to educate ourselves the best that we can to be allies or to be advocates for our communities.
Because that's where people are going to encounter it, right?
People who are in favor of trans exclusion, they're not going to listen to straight white American Jesus.
They're not going to listen to a lot of other things, but they will encounter you being able to say, well, actually, that that gender transition doesn't mean that.
Or, you know, social transition for a kid who's not in puberty, it just means they cut their hair a certain way and dress a certain way.
That's what, quote unquote, social transition is.
That's it.
We have to be the resource.
And again, If we're real allies, the two things that I say to people is, number one, we have to listen.
We have to listen to the community.
We can't be straight people telling gay people how to be gay.
We can't be cis people telling trans people how to be trans.
We have to listen But then we have to be willing to help take the same hits that they take, to stand up, to stand with them, and to make it a part of our culture that's as accepted as anything else.
So Brad, that's a lot.
I throw it your way.
Thank you for the time.
Again, we'll have links to all those resources in the show notes.
So I just want to close this before we take a break by saying you may not consider this your issue.
You may think that actually when people bring up trans folks, trans kids, trans communities, it doesn't, it doesn't lead for you to feel a swell of sympathy, a swell of hurt for those folks when they're persecuted, when the laws are put forth, when the, you know, when the KKK is leaving flyers on people's cars and doorsteps.
And I would just ask why, if you have arrived at a place when you see the various ways that BIPOC people in the country are marginalized or treated unfairly and you feel in your bones that that is something that's not right and you want to do something.
Whenever it was, if you are cis straight person, realize that you needed to be angry when somebody said something derogatory about gay folks or lesbian folks.
When someone brings up trans folks, when they bring up trans communities, individuals, etc.
If this is something that you don't feel, I just want to ask why.
And I want to just challenge you.
Why not take a minute, go to the show notes and read something you haven't read before and say, what do I really think?
Because I think there's a way, Dan, that the strategy is not only to activate people to be opposed to trans equality and representation, but the goal is also to Count on the idea that many people who are not necessarily anti-trans or not necessarily going to protest Target or Starbucks because of products or pride celebrations, then What they're counting on is, well, you don't care enough to actually oppose this.
You're confused about the trans issue.
You're confused about trans people.
You're confused about what it means to transition and therefore you're scared of it.
You're not going to look into it and you won't oppose us when we go all out and commit violence and marginalization tactics and so on.
So I just want to close with the reminder that this week Donald Trump Set out loud that the trans issue is the one that gets his base the most riled up and the KKK left flyers on people's windshield that were not targeting black or Jewish or Catholic people but trans people.
So if you're wondering what you would do.
In a time when a group is being targeted violently, I think this is the time.
And there are many issues we could talk about, but one of them that is at the forefront of our thinking on this show is about trans people.
So we're just going to challenge you.
Go read something you've never read.
Go look into something you've never looked into when it comes to all the things Dan talked about.
All right, let's take a break and briefly we'll come back, talk about the SBC and jump out of here.
Be right back.
All right, Dan, so real quick, just going to spend five minutes on this, but this week, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to expel churches that have women as pastors, and that includes Rick Warren Saddleback Church.
I'm not going to sit here and sing the praises of Rick Warren.
Rick Warren's done some things that I think are positive, but on the whole, just talking about LGBTQ folks and His church, not one that is affirming and so on.
So I'm not going to sit here and say, oh, it's such a travesty because, you know, that's my favorite church or something.
However, it is notable that the Southern Baptist Convention, which is bleeding members and churches, is willing to kick out a church that has like 20,000 active members and like 85, I don't know the number of total members, but it's 20,000 members active right now.
And they're willing to eject that church from the convention.
So that's notable.
They also had an amendment that made it so you cannot be a pastor as a woman in any case, including like the children's pastor, which is traditionally a role where you've seen women in leadership in many, many churches across the country, including the Southern Baptist Convention.
I just want to point people to, and I'll put this in the show notes because we don't have enough time to go through it in depth, but a piece at the conversation by Susan Shaw, who's faculty at Oregon State.
And what Susan Shaw talks about there is that this is not a new issue.
And Susan Shaw herself was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1993.
Susan Shaw goes through in this piece, the ways that women fought for ordination going back to 1964.
How in the 70s there was a movement of women who formed coalitions and organizations that were for women being ordained and supporting ordained women.
She goes through the fact, Dan, that there were like 500 women who were ordained in the Southern Baptist Convention going back to the 80s and despite a conservative Attempt to oust them, that they continue to be ordained, and women continue to go through seminary, and so on, and so on.
There have been hundreds of women in ministry in the Southern Baptist Convention going back 50, 60 years.
So why has the controversy re-emerged?
There's a lot there, and I'll encourage you to read the piece, but one thing, Dan, I want to just ask you to do for us is something you haven't done in a while, and that's to help us understand how fundamentalisms Are modern phenomena, meaning that when you see a fundamentalist reactions, like in 2023, the Southern Baptist Convention.
Taking this hard line stance.
So our colleague, Sarah Malzahner, pointed out on social media the other day that after years of controversy of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, there's this resolution now that if you are a Southern, if you're a sexual abuser, you can be ejected from your pulpit.
You can also be ejected from the pulpit if you're a woman.
So Sarah's like, the two categories are those who abuse women and women.
Nothing scarier than anything regarding a woman in the pulpit, right?
Dan, why are fundamentalisms modern things?
When people think of like the Southern Baptist Convention, and I unfortunately read a lot of tweets and stuff about this from conservative theologians the other day, what they're arguing is this.
Women not being in leadership, that's biblical.
That's how it's been for 2000 years.
We're just going, we're just following what we should be following according to scripture and tradition.
And I think you and I would say, no, this is, that's such a not true story.
And in fact, what you have here is a reaction to modernity.
Like this is a modern reaction.
It's not something that's timeless.
It's actually you reacting against something and calling it timeless.
So, can you just help us understand, in this case and in every case, how fundamentalisms are modern?
Yes.
To me, there are two dimensions to this.
Maybe two senses of the word modern.
One just means sort of contemporary, meaning And this is the point that you just highlighted.
People say, this is how it's always been.
It's biblical.
Just the piece of the conversation I was like, even in the SPC, this isn't how it's always been, right?
Like the lack of historical awareness, the kind of being caught up in the moment and then projecting something into the past.
That's very much contemporary.
That's very much of contemporary concern.
I think that's, that's one element of saying that it's, it's modern.
I think the other, and that ties in with that piece that you have, that it's also a reaction against Modernity, right?
Against shifts in modernity and so forth.
And so, yes, fundamentalisms will always appeal to some past purity, but that purity of the past is often a modern construct.
It's very rarely something that if you go and do the historical research, you look at and you find it as clearly and explicitly articulated or lived out as they describe it.
This isn't the place for it, but there's a long-standing debate about whether or not there were, in fact, female pastors, female apostles, and so forth.
Hall, the same guy that everybody thinks is famous for saying that he wouldn't suffer a woman to speak and hold authority over a man and so forth, also refers to some women as apostles, which was the highest level of religious authority in early Christianity.
So that's one piece of it.
The other piece of it, for me, ties in with modern Movements of ideological purity.
And here within fundamentalisms, I would put forms of Soviet communism.
I would put forms of Islamism.
I would put forms of, yes, American fundamentalism.
And part of what it is is this Ever-increasing desire for purity that just kind of turns more and more and more inward.
And what you often see, if you study the history of modern political movements based on purity, what do they do?
They devour themselves, right?
You see this in China, Chinese communism.
You see it in Soviet communism.
You see it in the U.S.
during the McCarthy era.
You see it, I think, on the right in the U.S.
now.
And you see it in religious fundamentalisms, where you will have this thing that says, well, no, we need doctrinal purity.
Cool.
We settled that.
That happened in the SBC with the so-called fundamentalist takeover as kind of a response to some of that stuff in the 70s and so forth.
But then that wasn't enough.
Up until 2000, the Southern Baptist Statement of Faith didn't affirm or say explicitly that pastors had to be men.
That wasn't added until 2000.
We needed to purify further.
Oh, guess what?
That's still not enough purification for us.
We need to purify further.
So now in 2023, we're going to have amendments making it easier to expel churches with women as pastors.
They also passed a resolution affirming women fulfilling the Great Commission and that pastors should equip women in the congregation for the work of ministry.
We're going to have them do that work, but not acknowledge it or give them those titles and so forth.
That's another piece that for me, this is why I worry about efforts at doctrinal purity all the time or political purity or ideological purity, is because it always turns into this kind of cycle that eats itself.
We see that in religious fundamentalisms.
And for me, it's a very modern phenomenon, as you say, that maps onto religious fundamentalism and political fundamentalisms as well.
And the last point I'll say about that is we see where the real interest of the SPC is as they put so much more energy into this than they are with the issue with clergy abuse.
And there's been a lot published about that this week as well.
Last word on purity for me, and I know you've talked a lot about this in your writing, Dan, is that if you think about purifying something, what you're saying is I'm taking out all the stuff that infects it or that makes it something that's impure, right?
The process of purification is taking out what you take to be things that have infiltrated a space or a substance or whatever, and so that you have something that is 100% the same.
That's purity.
Purity is sameness.
And so whenever you have a movement to purify, you have a movement to exclude.
Now, sometimes that might be good.
We can think about excluding hate or excluding racism or excluding fascists from certain things, but In this case, when we think about exclusion, we're talking about we need to purify, meaning we need to exclude because we're scared.
We're scared of what this could mean to change.
Anyway, we could talk for another three.
I'm going to stop.
We've been going for an hour and it's time to be done.
Reasons for hope, Dan, here we go.
My reason for hope is a nice piece in Politico about Representative James Tallarico, who is the state rep who basically stood up to the bill that was going to put the Ten Commandments, that will put the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Texas.
Somebody who is deeply Christian and yet is able to articulate why Christian nationalism is un-American.
And I really hope that there are others that will follow this possibility model that he's putting forth and argue in the public square in that way.
There are many, don't get me wrong, organizations, but we need more elected representatives doing that.
So anyway.
All right.
What's your reason for hope?
I was torn between a couple, but one that kind of struck, got my attention was DeSantis trying to pick another fight with the College Board.
This time about an AP Psychology course because, what, it has a section on LGBTQ plus issues.
Why am I hopeful?
The College Board seems to maybe have learned something and grown a backbone since the AP African American African American history course, they stated very clearly that they will not modify the course.
They won't remove that content that has been taught for something like 30 years, that it wouldn't meet college standards if it doesn't talk about those issues.
And they also said that they will not be modifying other courses.
And they explicitly referenced mistakes that were made.
I think that's their words with the African American studies course.
So I took some hope in that, in the visibility of that, and that this doesn't turn into something that just eviscerates those courses.
Some other things this week, but that was one that kind of caught my attention.
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