Dr. Albert Mohler discusses the New York Times article on “transgender” children and also interviews Rabbi Bruce Ginsberg, cantor for the Congregation Sons of Israel in Woodmere, NY, regarding the controversy within conservative Judaism over interpretations of Scripture regarding homosexuality.

Click HERE to listen.

Excerpted from When the Gender Line Isn’t Clear?, by Dr. Albert Mohler, published Dec, 2006:

As a society, we are falling (or diving) deeper and deeper into gender confusion. A considerable percentage of the policy-making elite has bought into the ideology of fluid gender and absolute self-expression. Once that idea takes hold, the reality of cross-dressing kindergartners becomes inevitable.

This is where the Christian worldview runs into direct collision with the new sexual ideologies. Christians see the reality of biological identity as a gift–one important way the Creator has told us who we are and how we are to glorify Him with our lives.

Continue reading at Albert Mohler…

Excerpted from Houston Police Commended for Accommodating Trans Cop, by Eric Ervin, published Aug 11, 2006, by the pro-homosexuality Houston Voice:

…Frye said [Sgt. Jack/Julia] Oliver was issued a new police identification card presenting her as a woman.

(See article for photo.)

…Oliver, who is a 24-year veteran with [Houston Police Department], held a press conference in June at Frye’s law office and announced her plans to undergo sex-reassignment surgery. At the time, Oliver said she had been receiving female hormone treatment for four and a half months.

“I didn’t choose to do this, it’s just how I feel,” she said. “It’s a lot of stress to keep that (male) façade and that mask up.”

…The police officer was once married and has five children who range in age from 18 to early 30s. The children have asked to be kept out of the media, and Oliver said she wants to respect their request.

Continue reading in Houston Voice…

Excerpted from Transgender Teachers Growing In Numbers, published Nov 23, 2006, by the pro-homosexual news source 365Gay:

For nine years, he was Mr. McBeth, a substitute teacher who kept things moving along in the classroom and filled in ably when the regular teacher was out sick.

And then one September, he was Miss McBeth.

The sex-change operation William McBeth underwent in 2005 roiled this rural, conservative area when she applied to be rehired as a substitute in Eagleswood Township. Parents packed a school board meeting last winter, some decrying what they termed an experiment, with their young children as guinea pigs; others supported her right to be who she is and work at what she does best.

But then a strange thing happened a few months later: When McBeth was up for a job at a different school in the area, no one protested. In fact, no one voiced an opinion at all when she was hired.

About 20 transgender teachers are working in classrooms across the country, but more are in the process of “transitioning,” experts estimate. That opens up a host of issues the teachers – and their employers and students – have to deal with.

…David Nielsen, a librarian at Southwest High School in Minneapolis, began living as a woman in the spring of 1998 and came to school one Monday as Debra Davis.

…72-year-old William McBeth…had a sex change operation in May 2005, after a long process of psychological evaluation, hormone therapy and electrolysis.

[Photos of McBeth are posted with the ABC News story dated Mar 3, 2006.]

She said she erred by not keeping her certification as a substitute teacher current while she was out of work during the surgery. That required her to reapply, and set the stage in February for a contentious school board meeting in Eagleswood, a community near Atlantic City. One parent, Mark Schnepp, took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper urging parents to oppose the hiring.

Continue reading at 365Gay…

The “transgender” lobby is using the identical tactics as the “gay” lobby in their push for acceptance. The saddest part of their agenda is their encouragement of gender confusion among children, the “T” in the “GLBT youth” equation. Stay tuned as our society continues its descent in the name of diversity and tolerance.–Peter LaBarbera

Excerpted from Soap Introducing Transgender Character, by David Bauder, published Nov 26, 2006, by Associated Press:

In a story unusual even for a soap opera and believed to be a television first, ABC’s “All My Children” this week will introduce a transgender character who is beginning to make the transition from a man into a woman.

The character, a flamboyant rock star known as Zarf, kisses the lesbian character Bianca and much drama ensues. The storyline begins with Thursday’s episode of the daytime drama.

There have been a handful of post-surgical transgender characters in television shows, including a college professor in the 2001 prime-time CBS series “The Education of Max Bickford” and a model in the short- lived ABC soap opera “The City” in 1996, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. Showtime’s “The L Word” currently features a character changing from a woman into a man.

“All My Children” was looking for something new, and knows its audience is always interested in anything to do with sexuality, said Julie Hanan Carruthers, the show’s executive producer.

…GLAAD and some transgenders were brought in as consultants in shaping the character, teaching the producers when it is appropriate to call a character “she” even before surgery, she said. Damon Romine, a spokesman for GLAAD, said he hasn’t seen the show yet but feels people involved were genuinely interested in telling the story with dignity. Emotions are so close to the surface in soap operas, and this story can serve a purpose by showing what transgenders go through, he said.

“I think it’s groundbreaking and breakthrough television for daytime to put a spotlight on transgender people and tell their story,” he said.

Continue reading at Breitbart…

A Breakpoint Commentary by Chuck Colson, published Nov 21, 2006:

Well, it may finally be time to send for the guys with the white coats to wrap me up and cart me off.

It used to be, in the old days, that the biggest decision new parents had to make was the name of their baby. The one thing they didn’t have to decide was the kid’s sex—that decision had been made for them, all they have to do is take a peek. That would be that.

Well, not any more, at least not in New York City.

You see, under a proposed Board of Health rule, “people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates.” They would need only to provide “affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex.” They would also have to promise that “their proposed change would be permanent.”

The proposed rule isn’t aimed at people who have had “sex-change surgery.” They are already permitted to do this. Instead, it’s directed at people who “had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years . . . ”

Read those words carefully: adopted and especially gender, instead of sex. It is a big hint that there’s some major postmodern mischief at work here. “Sex” is what scientists call “binary”: You either have an XX (that is, female) or an XY (that is, male) chromosome.

But if nature can’t be twisted and shaped to suit our ideological predilections, words, especially in the hands of postmodern vandals, can be. If the goal is to separate “anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman,” then the use of the word gender is a must.

You see, “transgender” activists can get away with saying that gender is just “socially constructed” and more than “the sum of one’s physical parts” because gender is a word that most people don’t regularly use.

Substituting an obscure word, in this case, gender, for the more common one, sex, is intended to confuse and obscure. It’s the kind of verbal tactic George Orwell, in “Politics and the English Language,” compared to a cuttlefish squirting ink to confuse its predators.

Of course, what makes this squirting necessary is the denial of the obvious: “Living as a woman,” whatever that means, no more makes you a woman than hiding a pot of gold makes you a leprechaun.

These verbal parlor games may wow them in the faculty lounge, but nature is unimpressed. They remind me of the hoax perpetrated by physicist Alan Sokal. He submitted a paper to a leading postmodern journal filled with postmodern gibberish like “physical ‘reality’ . . . is at bottom a social and linguistic construct.”

After the paper was published, he revealed the hoax, that it was all gibberish, adding that those who believe that physics really is a “social construct” should test their beliefs from his twenty-first floor window.

Christians should not be shocked at any of this. Romans 1 tells us that God’s truth is made plain in creation, and to deny this truth—in this case, “male and female created He them”—is to exchange the truth for a lie, which Paul illustrates by an example of men lying with men, in other words, rejecting their God-given gender, which is a challenge to God’s created order. Well, today we have renewed that old lie—that we can create ourselves the way we want, and peeking doesn’t make any difference.

(Additional resources are offered on the Breakpoint site.)

The following is merely an excerpt from Nightmare at Franklin, by Tom Mountain, published Nov 8, 2006, by Newton Tab; we encourage you to continue reading the full story…

Emer O’Shea knew something was wrong the minute she picked up her daughter from Franklin Elementary School. The third-grader was normally very perky upon seeing her mother and new baby sister, but this time she glanced at her mother without indicating what was wrong, except to say that the school’s social worker had visited the class. But Emer soon heard from another parent about what had happened in her daughter’s class that day, and she was both stunned and mortified. The next day her young daughter finally opened up with a question that would baffle most parents of an 8-year-old child, “Mommy, is it possible for a man to have an operation to become a woman?”

Transgenders and transvestites. These were the topics that a staff member at Franklin School in West Newton chose to teach to a class of third-grade children. The school’s social worker described to the children that some men like to dress up as women, and yes, some men even have operations to change into women.

The opportunity for this “teachable moment” – the kind that Superintendent Jeff Young likes to portray as merely responding to some child’s “random questioning” – occurred when the social worker was describing various families outside of the traditional mommy-and-daddy norm and showed the class a picture of a woman with two children, asking what they saw in the picture. A child then raised his hand to tell her (are you sitting sit down for this?) that he thought the picture was of a man who had a sex change operation and was now a woman. Apparently, the child’s own father was undergoing such an operation (which he/she has since completed).

The social worker then elaborated on this “teachable moment.” But this wasn’t just any social worker employed by the Newton Public Schools. This was Laura Perkins, former board member of GLSEN, the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network; or rather, “Laura Perkins, MSW, Franklin School and the Newton Early Childhood Program,” according to the GLSEN Boston Conference, where she hosted a seminar in which the “Rationale for integrating GLBT (Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender) issues in the early elementary years will be presented” and “classroom lessons demonstrated.” (See 5C.)

As a result of this particular “classroom lesson,” Emer’s daughter was petrified. For an 8-year-old accustomed to a child’s world of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, the little girl had nightmares, and explained to her mother she was scared that her baby sister could turn into a boy.

So Emer did what any normal responsible parent would do – she demanded an explanation from the principal, Cynthia Marchand (617-559-9500). She and several other parents from this class met with the principal who, according to Emer, responded defensively and fully backed her staff member.

Emer then went to Superintendent’s Young’s office with her concerns. She handed Mr. Young a written description of what happened, whereupon the superintendent promised to respond to her soon. He didn’t. So after three weeks, she called to make an appointment. As Emer described it, Mr. Young remarked that the Parental Consent Law didn’t apply to this situation because, he claimed, the topic of discussion was not planned for. He concluded that it was really just “a teachable moment.”

Continue reading at TownOnline…

Excerpted from Hawaii Elects Nations Highest-Ranking Openly Transgender Official, published Nov 8, 2006, by Associated Press:

Kim Coco Iwamoto, a 38-year-old attorney, did not tout her gender status in the campaign but has advocated for transgender youth and related issues. She came in third Tuesday in the competition for three seats on the 14-member board, which governs the islands’ 285 public schools.

Iwamoto would be the highest-ranking openly transgender person elected in the United States, said Denis Dison, a spokesman for the Victory Fund, a Washington-based group that tracks lesbian, gay and transgender candidates and helps fund their campaigns.

Continue reading at Fox News…