Truth-as-identity is not appealable beyond the assertion of identity. Unfortunately, there isn’t much we can do to change this trajectory in the short term. Both Biden and his Education Department deserve condemnation for federalizing the issue. Yet as Trump’s Education Department made clear in 2017, they believe the issue of whether schools should accept the claim that a person can choose his or her own sex is to be decided by states and local school districts. The political solutions thus range from “adopt transgender orthodoxy at a moderate pace” (proposed by the Democrats) to “adopt transgender orthodoxy at a slower pace” (Republicans). Both eventually end up in the same place—the entrenched establishment of transgender orthodoxy.

The Story: The Department of Education’s new rule’s expanding protections for LGBT+ students could lead to punishment for those who disagree with transgender orthodoxy.
The Background: On April 19, 2024, the Department of Education released a 1,577-page document issuing its final regulation under Title IX, intended to clarify sex discrimination by educational programs receiving federal financial assistance. Title IX is a federal civil rights law passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any education program or activity that receives federal funding.
Key points of the final regulations include:

Clarification on Title IX’s definition of sex-based harassment and expanded scope of sex discrimination protection, covering stereotypes, pregnancy, sexual orientation, and gender identity
Mandatory responses from schools to sex discrimination incidents
Required supportive measures for affected individuals, ensuring access to education and fairness during grievance procedures
Enhanced protections against discrimination based on pregnancy and related conditions, including specific accommodations like lactation spaces
Reinforcement against retaliation towards individuals exercising their Title IX rights
Support for the rights of parents and guardians in the grievance processes of minors
Prohibition of discrimination against LGBT+ individuals, aligning with the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County

This last element is likely to be most significant. In the landmark case of Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on sex, also protects individuals from discrimination based on his or her sexual orientation and gender identity. In this Title IX final rule, the Department of Education incorporates the Bostock decision’s reasoning, expressly prohibiting discrimination and harassment based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics in federally funded education programs.
One issue not addressed by this regulation is transgender athletes. At a briefing on the regulation’s release, education secretary Miguel Cardona said separate guidance on transgender athletes is forthcoming.
“The Department recognizes that standards for students participating on male and female athletic teams are evolving in real time,” Cardona said. “That’s why we’ve decided to do a separate rulemaking on how schools may determine eligibility, while upholding Title IX’s nondiscrimination guarantee.”
The new regulations will not apply to religious educational institutions. Such institutions controlled by a religious organization may claim an exemption from Title IX provisions that conflict with their religious tenets. The religious exemption in Title IX applies to educational institutions or entities controlled by religious organizations and not to individual students or employees exercising their religious beliefs.
The final compliance deadline for schools and colleges to implement the new regulations is August 2024.
Why It Matters: In 1997, Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and founder of First Things magazine, proposed Neuhaus’s Law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”
He meant that when orthodox beliefs are treated as optional within a church or group, they’re tolerated only conditionally. The orthodox are allowed to hold their beliefs (e.g., that a person’s gender is determined by biology) but cannot assert that their views are normative for everyone. Over time, a new liberal orthodoxy arises (i.e., that a person’s gender is determined by chosen identity) that’s intolerant of the old orthodoxy. This new orthodoxy is based on experiential truths (“I feel, therefore I am”) and identity politics rather than on doctrine, tradition, revelation, or even biological reality.
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For so long the Spirit worked in hidden ways among a chosen few; now He openly demonstrates His power, working powerfully in the lives of many and helping the church to grow as a kingdom of faith and love and holiness that one day will fill the earth. He does all this in the name of Christ — on His behalf, for His glory. The Spirit inspires joy, peace, righteousness, and the witness of the love of God in our hearts. He labors among the followers of Christ with the joy and abandon of a hind let loose.

The night on which He was betrayed, Jesus spoke to His disciples about the dawn of a new day that would be heralded by the Holy Spirit’s coming to dwell in them (John 14:17). Jesus says in John 16:8, “When he is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” [This article is the substance of an address given for the Philadelphia Conference of Reformed Theology (PCRT), 2010, in Sacramento, California and Greenville, South Carolina. I wish to thank Ray B. Lanning for his assistance on parts of this article.]
This new day is the period of time in which God the Holy Spirit dwells in believers and the church in the full measure of His divine Person and in abundant demonstration of His divine power. Sent by the Father and poured out by the Son, the Spirit’s commission is to sanctify believers to be members of Christ, dwelling in them and applying to them what they already have in Christ, namely, the washing away of their sins, the daily renewing of their lives, and all the other benefits purchased for them by Christ’s redemptive sacrifice on the cross.
Ten days after Christ’s ascension to heaven, the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples gathered in Jerusalem on the feast day of Pentecost. Christ had prepared the apostles for what would happen to the church. So now, as the sound of a mighty, rushing wind filled the meeting place and tongues of fire appeared to hover over every head, believers knew that they were being filled with the Spirit. They began to speak in many languages, “out of every nation under heaven.”
The prophetic words of Christ were being fulfilled: the church was baptized with the Holy Spirit, and her members received power from on high. The age of the Spirit had begun! To understand this phenomenon, let us examine the age of the Spirit from three perspectives: the Spirit’s work in prior ages, the Spirit’s work in this present age, and the Spirit’s work particularly in revival.
The Spirit’s Work in Prior Ages
A superficial reading of the New Testament might lead some to conclude that the presence of the Spirit in the church and in the world was something new. The same mistake is often made regarding what Christ calls “the new covenant in my blood.” It is easy to separate the New Testament from the Old and conclude that a great gulf exists between the two. Some Christians speak of Pentecost as “the birthday of the church,” as if there were no visible church in the world prior to that time. Worse yet, some speak of the Jewish church of the Old Testament as something radically different from the Christian church of the New, as though each had nothing to do with the other.
That is simply not so, for the person and work of the Spirit are introduced to us already at the dawn of time. The earth was shrouded in darkness and a flood of great waters, but Moses tells us, in Genesis 1:2, “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The verb “moved upon” can be translated as “hovering” in the sense of shaking or fluttering, like a bird hovering over its nest. In fact, Deuteronomy 32:10–11 uses the same verb when it speaks of an eagle hovering over its young, tending to their every need. In His capacity as “Lord and Giver of Life,” the Spirit was fully present and active at the beginning to enact the astonishing results demanded by the various creative “fiats” of God. Psalm 104:30 says, “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.” In particular, the Spirit filled the earth, the seas, and the dry land with all kinds of living things. We may thus speak of the biosphere, or realm of life and living things that cover the earth, as the great creation of God the Holy Spirit (cf. Job 26:13).
In our creation, the Spirit was also present as the “Breath of Life,” or the breath of God that proceeded from the Father and the Son. When breathed into the nostrils of the divinely sculpted but lifeless form of man, the Spirit transformed a creature of dust and earth into a living being (Gen. 2:7). Job 33:4 says, “The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life.” Thus we owe our life and the life of every other living thing as much to the power and creativity of the Holy Spirit as we do to the hand of our Maker and Father in heaven.
Man is a created being and therefore has no life in himself. He cannot beget himself, nor can he generate or sustain his development to maturity. He cannot keep himself alive or deliver himself from the power of death. For all this we must depend upon the grace of God, and, in particular, upon the work of the Holy Spirit. When God withholds His grace, we decline and die; when He sends forth His lifegiving Spirit, we and all living things are quickened again and flourish by the same power that gave us life at the beginning (Ps. 104:30).
So wherever there is life, the Holy Spirit is at work. David lived in a world pervaded by the presence of the Holy Spirit, for he says in Psalm 139:7: “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” But the Spirit is more than power. As a person, He possesses the intelligence and the wisdom of God. As the source of “all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works,” He is at work in the minds and hearts of human beings everywhere. All valid insights into the nature of things, philosophical or scientific; all skills, whether manual, mechanical, or creative; all discoveries, inventions, or works of art; and everything that blesses the life of mankind reveal the presence and work of the Holy Spirit throughout history. The Spirit distributes gifts of statesmanship and craftsmanship that extend beyond man’s natural capacity.
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However much we who love Jesus may want to, we don’t get to redefine the words of Scripture to make them more palatable. We don’t get to embrace various ideologies that lead to a view of the person that destroys and then throws it away. We can’t take our own ideas of goodness and impose them over what God has already said is good. We can’t do that because we will have to answer to our Sovereign on the last day when he returns again in power and great glory. While Christians in the West may enjoy the benefits of a pluralistic society that grants them the freedom to worship without fear, they are nevertheless constrained by the True Shepherd to the painful wilderness of obedience. 

The Church Year is drawing to a swift close and the final Sunday, Christ the King, is upon us. Besides being a moment to sing some glorious hymns, it is also a fitting hour to make a most essential declaration–that Christ is the ruler over the world, over time, over nations and kingdoms, but most of all over every plan and inclination of every person.
It is a most comforting certainty for Christians that, if Christ is King, while of course it matters what the governments of the world do, it also doesn’t matter. Twitter may fall to the dust, Trump may get his account back, the price of gas may go up even higher, Congress may enact any kind of law, but none of it unthrones the Lord nor nullifies the truth that the God of Jacob is our refuge.
Lest we become too comfortable, however, because Christ is King, it absolutely does matter what Christians do and say. It is the Church—not the world—whose concerns and anxieties are shaped by Christ being King. If you’re scrolling for depressing signs of dark times, look at what Christians are saying and doing.
Which makes this particular piece by David French—a person I have studiously avoided on the internet for fear of failing in winsomeness—all the more bad. It is titled, “Pluralism Has Life Left in It Yet: The Respect for Marriage Act, and the harmony between religious liberty and LGBTQ rights.” After discussing what happened before and after Obergefell and what it all means, French writes this:
The bill doesn’t give either side everything, but it still contains crucial provisions that can comfort (almost) everyone. First, it states that “no person acting under color of State law” can deny “full faith and credit to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State pertaining to a marriage between 2 individuals, on the basis of the sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin of those individuals.” In plain English, that means if your marriage was legal in the state where you’re married, then government officials from other states and localities can’t refuse to recognize the validity of that marriage on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin. And what of religious freedom? The bill does two important things. First, it declares that “[n]othing in this Act, or any amendment made by this Act, shall be construed to diminish or abrogate a religious liberty or conscience protection otherwise available to an individual or organization under the Constitution of the United States or Federal law.” This is an important provision and distinctly different from the Democratic approach to the Equality Act, which limited the reach of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. In other words, the bill explicitly diminished religious-freedom protections under federal law. The Respect for Marriage Act does no such thing.
I wandered around Twitter, looking for what other people think about the new law, and found this long fact check that paints a much gloomier picture for religious people. What impresses me about the piece by French, however, isn’t so much what he says about the law, but the sort of desultory tone with which he says it. After six years of moral teaching online about the failures of Christians here is nary an indication that what we might be facing is not a petty quarrel between two morally neutral sides. It is as if, to quote almost everyone on Twitter, French doesn’t know what time it is. It is as if the tenseness with which people across the ideological divide are warily considering each other has entirely escaped his notice. Thus, amazingly, he concludes the piece this way:
The magic of the American republic is that it can create space for people who possess deeply different world views to live together, work together, and thrive together, even as they stay true to their different religious faiths and moral convictions. The Senate’s Respect for Marriage Act doesn’t solve every issue in America’s culture war (much less every issue related to marriage), but it’s a bipartisan step in the right direction. It demonstrates that compromise still works, and that pluralism has life left in it yet.
As so many people online said in various pithy ways, tell that to that cake baker, or to all the people who lost their Twitter accounts for noticing that some people pretending to be women are actually men. Or rather, look at the way that denominations are splitting apart. Open your eyes to the ways that gender ideology eats up and destroys not only individual people, but communities and families.
If I hadn’t just spent the last three months going back through the archives imbibing an immense amount of Auron MacIntyre’s content I would have maybe—minus the bit about calling the American republic “magic,” an astonishing claim, given the last six years—taken hope from French’s idea that “pluralism has life left in it yet.” What was I supposed to do? Believe my lying eyes?
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