The Christians Of St. Tammany Parish: Straightening Up
Sunday, January 29, 2012 at 8:53AM | by Otter I know I’m a week behind the curve on this story, but I’ve had other things on my plate.
A Girl Scout troop in Colorado admitted a transgendered seven year old child. A controversy erupted, naturally.
Here in Louisiana, the parents of St. Tammany Parish on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain have decided to leave the local Girl Scout troop. The story implies that the troop has essentially collapsed.
St. Tammany Parish is a quiet, conservative, affluent, mostly (87.03%) white community.
I know these people. They are part of the local home schooling community, of which I’m a part. I have spoken with them and argued with them, and I have had to understand them for better and worse.
They are principled. They home-school in droves, they are temperamentally libertarians, and overwhelmingly vote Republican. They believe that people are born morally free, economically capable, and responsible for their own success in the world. They believe fervently in God, family, being good neighbors, the free market, the self-reliant individual, strong national defense, and weak national infrastructure. They believe in straight married sex, the direct experience of God through Jesus Christ, Japanese minivans, and Ford pickup trucks.
They are intelligent professionals, but anti-intellectual, mistrustful of anything that complicates their view that the Bible is a straightforward and authoritative guide to life and thought.
According to the local report, the local Girl Scouting parents on the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain believe that the issue is a skirmish in the culture war:
[St. Tammany Parish Girl Scout parents] felt Louisiana Scouting policy-makers should never have had to discuss the transgender issue in the first place. Cramond said when she first contacted Louisiana’s Scouting leaders to ask whether a transgendered child could be accepted into a local troop, she didn’t get the quick and unequivocal “no” she was hoping for….
Most parents of the 30 or so girls in the Covington troop are conservative Christians whose children attend the school. Others are home-schooled.
For [Girl Scout mothers] Cramond, Snure-Bryant and others, the Colorado incident dovetails with larger cultural concerns promoted on the Internet that Girl Scouting promotes liberal cultural norms on matters of sexuality.
It’s objectionable that this is seen as a cultural struggle, not one that comes down to understanding transgenderism, or understanding a transgendered individual and his or her struggles. For Christians such as these, toleration of transgenderism is a liberal choice, a permissive acceptance of a perversion of the Edenic ideal of maleness and femaleness that can and should be controlled in some way. At the very least, they feel that their children should be protected from having to think about it, free to grow up with a sense of sexual / gender “normalcy.” They will be shockingly unwilling to accept or even read the actual science about it.
For instance, the brains of the transgendered are structurally different from those of “normal” people. Their brain responses are somewhere between typical male and female responses: in other words, they cannot just “choose to be” male or female any more than you could choose to be a warthog, certainly not at the age of seven. These differences don’t stem from environment but are natural, intrinsic to the child.
What a strange battle for the Girl Scouting parents to have chosen. But how typical of a certain kind of paranoid ignorance masquerading as faith.
I know these people. They will wave off the science, insisting that they stand on the Bible and have a right to raise their children under the authority of scripture and in the clean environment of a straight, narrow, St. Tammany. Their understanding of maleness and femaleness comes from Genesis 1-3, and they will feel that their kids shouldn’t have to deal with anything more complicated than that: male and female made He them.
They do have that right, of course.
But it’s increasingly clear to me that their faith is a form of cowardice, not the faith of Jesus, Peter, or St. Paul.
If God objects to transgenderism, He should stop making so much of it. This is not a “fallen world,” an “immoral choice,” it’s about a child, probably a lonely one, born with a brain that is structurally different from that of most other children; there are some children like that in St. Tammany Parish. These same parents pay for programs for their own autistic spectrum kids, children born with brains that are out of the normal run. I know for a fact that they tolerate girls with autistic spectrum disorders in the Girl Scouts. But only some such abnormalities merit their toleration: the compassion has a limit.
I wonder what will happen if God ever judges the world, not for its sexuality, but for its compassion. Where will St. Tammany’s parents turn then?
Reader Comments (5)
Some believers seem to find an open invitation to judge hidden in the verse, "flee even the appearance of evil." This allows them to drive-by-judge people without ever making an attempt to understand or know them. There is no guilt associated with this behavior, only righteous indignation, the warm fuzzy feeling of being the party on the Lord's side, and the superiority they feel because a) they ain't like that, and b) they've been obedient to Jesus. This is especially true in the cases of people whose sexual identity make these "well-meaning" ("it's for the children"), narrow-minded Christians uncomfortable.
Christians far too often deem a thing as "evil" without making any attempt to look at the idea or person they have judged. This is our most abominable sin: our refusal to attempt real compassion under the guise of keeping our hands clean. I wish (but don't dare hope) that in these situations, we could learn from God's remark to Samuel as he searched for the king, "...the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh upon the heart."
I am from the Northshore, and I live amongst these people, and you have hit the nail on the head!
Daisy, if I'm reading you rightly, I would just add, "You might as well show self-righteousness for being male or white as for being clearly gendered." Of course there are those who are really pitying to those who aren't white or male.... I think every one of these parents might benefit from trying to really be the "opposite" gender for a few days and see how well they do at it. If it's not easy, they should lighten up.
Erin, good to see you again! One of the best students ever!
Miss you Dr. Otter. I always walk by your office, and it always tells me "HI."
You too, Erin. :( There's always a "hi" for you if you need one. :)