What the wiser political heads have said is that biological sex -- the physical condition of being male or female, should determine which bathroom you head into on I-95 if you have to make a pit stop to excrete nitrogenous waste, and that what is stated on your birth certificate should determine what bathroom you go to if the tourist bus you're on parks for a few moments at a rest stop.

Now, if you are not quite sure what sex you are, I suppose you could always ask a friendly North Carolina state trooper to help you, presuming of course that in dropping your pants, he does not arrest you for indecent exposure.

No matter, the four horsemen of the sexual apocalypse (the four Episcopal bishops) have decried the "bathroom bill" as a "hasty enactment" that will have ramifications for equality in that state and beyond. (They never said if "beyond" might include eternity.)

The bishops complain that the Bill prohibits them from fulfilling their own baptismal covenant promise "to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being," arguing that "The practice of discrimination by a state or institution limits, even prohibits, us from respecting the dignity of another human being."

So, one's vow to uphold clearly sinful behavior in the name of a "baptismal covenant", trumps Scripture, which recognizes only one form of sexual behavior as legitimate, namely marriage between a man and a woman. All other sexual expression is called sin.

One wonders what a Ryle, Cranmer, Hooker, a Calvin, Luther or Wesley would make of such an understanding of baptism as these four bishops have made of it. One denomination noticeably not supporting the overwhelmingly liberal religious establishment in NC is the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has clearly maintained its position against the push for gender identity rights, with Pope Benedict XVI proclaiming in 2012 the "profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious." Apparently not to the Episcopal bishops of North Carolina who now believe that sex change (not to be confused with gender change) should not exclude one either from an Episcopal pulpit or entrance into the Kingdom of God!

Trent Horn, a young Roman Catholic convert, had the audacity to say that the "bathroom bill" was not hateful bigotry, and said this; "Let's suppose the law is amended so critics get their wish: a person is allowed to use any public facility, including restrooms and locker rooms, on the basis of gender identity and not biological sex. Now, what do we do about section 14-190.9 of the North Carolina penal code? It says, "Any person who shall willfully expose the private parts of his or her person in any public place and in the presence of any other person or persons, except for those places designated for a public purpose where the same sex exposure is incidental to a permitted activity . . . shall be guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor."

"If a man exposes himself to two boys walking home from school, he would be guilty of indecent exposure (and possibly other crimes, since his victims were minors). If he exposes himself in the process of changing in a male locker room, he would not be guilty, since that occurred in a "place designated for a public purpose where the same sex exposure is incidental." But if he waltzed into a female locker room and changed in front of a group of girls or women, he would be guilty of indecent exposure. How does his guilt change if the man says he identifies as a woman?"

This is not a mere hypothetical example. A few years ago a group of teenage girls came across 45-year-old Colleen Francis exposing "her" male genitals in the sauna of a public locker room. Whether the possessor of male genitals identifies as a man or as a woman, the women in the locker room were still exposed to the sight of male genitals, and that is what justifies indecent exposure laws. How does the fact that the possessor of male genitals may think he's a woman, or the king of France, or any other distortion of reality, change that reality? It doesn't of course. Not now, not ever.

Recently we have seen celebrities and businesses, and now state and local governments refuse to do business with North Carolina because the state passed a law regarding bathroom privacy. The Los Angeles City Council has banned the city government from doing business with North Carolina, alleging that the law creates a "climate of violence." Bruce Springsteen canceled his North Carolina concert because of the alleged oppression of trannies, though one is hard pressed to find a single such case of "oppression" on police blotters. This has not deterred lawmakers in the state who are standing firm on their convictions.

"Let's be clear," writes Robert Munday, former Nashotah House president, "the law has nothing to do with being "anti-LGBT" and doesn't incite violence against anyone. As long as you go to the restroom that corresponds to your biological sex (the way it has been for, you know, like forever), no one has to know or care whether you are LGBT, WXYZ, or have a long-hidden fetish for Bactrian Camels. NOBODY CARES!!!

"But we do care when someone goes into whatever restroom a person claims to identify with and starts sexually molesting others--including children. Yes, we care A WHOLE LOT about that!"

Munday maintains that this is a public safety issue. "It is not the law that is inciting violence. When perverts start abusing children in California and other states that refuse to pass laws protecting children and insuring bathroom privacy, you will see violence from outraged parents. Plenty of it."

We should not completely redefine concepts like male and female with language so ambiguous that it will inevitably lead to, in the words of the radical feminist Donna Haraway, "the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender."

Gender identity is written into creation, it is binary and one of the reasons Johns Hopkins University will no longer perform sex change operations.

Johns Hopkins psychiatrist, Paul McHugh and a deeply committed Christian said it is starkly, nakedly false that sex change is possible and says that gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery. He said this after 40 years at the university as a distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry.

"At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970's. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of "transgendered" among young and old."

"But the meme--that your sex is a feeling, not a biological fact, and can change at any time--marches on through our society. In a way, it's reminiscent of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, The Emperor's New Clothes. In that tale, the Emperor, believing that he wore an outfit of special beauty imperceptible to the rude or uncultured, paraded naked through his town to the huzzahs of courtiers and citizens anxious about their reputations. Many onlookers to the contemporary transgender parade, knowing that a disfavored opinion is worse than bad taste today, similarly fear to identify it as a misapprehension," writes McHugh.

"The basic assumption of the contemporary parade: the idea that exchange of one's sex is possible. It, like the storied Emperor, is starkly, nakedly false. Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All (including Bruce Jenner) become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they "identify." In that lies their problematic future."

The four Episcopal bishops have no business trying to redo what God has created as "male and female". It is written into creation and later affirmed by Jesus himself.

If they think that embracing transgenderism will encourage people to join the church, they only have to look at the disastrous consequences of Gene Robinson's consecration, the cost to TEC in massive litigation, and the birth of the Anglican Church in North America as a counterpoint to know that is not going to happen. The whole transgendered issue is just another pseudo sexual blip that will cause further disembarkations from the dying Episcopal ship. TEC has no one to blame but itself.

END