Donald Trump rolled out his executive order on religious liberty last week to great fanfare, with a Rose Garden ceremony including many evangelical luminaries in attendance. And yet his order did not touch at all on the greatest threat to religious liberty in our nation’s history, the agenda of LGBT activists to force everyone in America to accept sexual deviancy or else.
The conflict between homosexuality and religious liberty is a zero-sum game. One side wins, the other side loses. Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of religious liberty. A pledge to protect religious liberty that does not include a pledge to protect people of Christian faith from the onslaught of the rabid homosexual activists is essentially meaningless.
At the very same time President Trump was issuing his stripped-down religious liberty order (he attacked the Johnson Amendment, which is toothless, and the abortifacient mandate in ObamaCare, a battle that has already been fought and won), the president allowed the yammering, demanding and hate-filled voices of homosexual activists to shred his own pick to be the next Secretary of the Army.
Mark Green, a state senator from Tennessee, has a strong military record as a war hero and a flight surgeon and was the medic for the special operations team that captured Saddam Hussein. He is eminently qualified to lead the Army.
Except for one thing: he shares God’s view of human sexuality. And for that, Trump has allowed him to be vilified, demonized and cashiered from public service without even a feeble attempt to come to his defense. This at a minimum raises serious questions about whether President Trump is going to be the defender of religious liberty he wants us to think he is.
The homosexual activists ran Green out of town because he believes that honest mental health professionals will tell you that transgenderism “is a disease.” This is indisputably true. Johns Hopkins, which once pioneered sex change operations, abandoned the practice in the 1970s because it was doing more harm than good. A tragic 41 percent of individuals who go through the surgical mutilation that is required for a full transition commit suicide. Even the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, not part of the vast right-wing conspiracy, warns transvestites/transgenders that they are at elevated risk of substance abuse and depression. This is not a trend any rational nation should embrace if it cares about the mental health of its citizens.
Until 2012, the American Psychiatric Association characterized transvestism/transgenderism as a mental disorder. Because of severe political pressure, not scientific findings, the APA dropped the “disorder” nomenclature for the euphemistic “gender dysphoria” label. But the facts remain unchanged: transgenderism, from a mental health standpoint, is dangerous, harmful, and tragically results too often in self-harm. Any American who truly cares about people will oppose the normalization of this mental illness.
Green also ran afoul of the left by giving a lecture in which he used science to defend creationism and for warning about the threat that Islam poses to the West. He should be praised for both views rather than exiled from public service. What good is it to have religious freedom if the moment you exercise it, you are punished and driven into exile?
If Donald Trump could not find a way to stand up for Mark Green, he is no true defender of religious liberty. If he will not defend his own pick for military leadership against what lesbian writer Tammy Bruce calls the Gay Gestapo, of what use will he be in the pitched battle over First Amendment civil rights for people of Christian faith?
As Martin Luther was credited with saying, “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
The bottom line: President Trump flinched. He will not be, his religious liberty order notwithstanding, America’s defender of the faith. He has chosen sides on the only religious liberty issue that matters today, and he has chosen poorly. {eoa}
Bryan Fischer is host of the two-hour weekday “Focal Point” program on American Family Radio.
This article was originally published at AFA.org. Used with permission.
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