Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that you be not judged.”

John 8:7: “And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, ‘Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.’”

The United States was born of the proposition that only two things mattered in appraising others: character and accomplishments. Assessing other aspects would be unjust. It would promote tribalism and strife. In the eyes of the Constitution, there is only one race, religion, gender or sexual orientation: it is American. All other distinctions should be erased from politics.

Over the past several decades, however, transgender issues unrelated to character and accomplishments have surfaced in the United States. Is it a new form of tribalism?

In 1952, Christine Jorgensen publicly announced her transition from male to female. Why the publicity? Who cares? Did the transition change her character? Did it alter her accomplishments. Why didn’t she keep the transition private? Ordinary people do not advertise their heterosexuality.

The next year, the film “Glen or Glenda” debuted, with a promotional poster proclaiming, “I changed my sex!” In 1960, California chemist Virginia Prince launched the bimonthly magazine Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress; it published for the next 20 years. The film and magazine were retrogressive, tacitly asserting that what most mattered about people was their sex, not their character and accomplishments. Sex is 100% hormonal. Character and accomplishments are cerebral and define the human species as distinct from reptiles or lower life forms.

Education is too important to squander classroom time on “gender dysphoria” irrelevant to reading, writing, arithmetic and critical thinking. Civilization is more and more a race between education and catastrophe, and the latter is winning because education has been diverted into drivel. As an aside, as many as 94% of children who experience gender dysphoria eventually grow out of it.

A person whose self-identity or self-esteem pivots on sex in all its many moods and tenses is destined to wretchedness, i.e. philosophical emptiness.

What about drag story time? Libraries occasionally invite males dressed in women’s attire to read books to children. It is up to parents to put an end to such a distraction from electrifying and edifying books like Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology” or Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Do not let parents scapegoat librarians. Parents, not government officials (typically sociopaths lusting for power for its own sake), are primarily responsible for their children.

What about competitive sports? For starters, numberless people waste time on such infantile amusements; their time would be better spent on acquiring wisdom and practicing virtue. The depravity of the species is not mitigated by the Super Bowl or the Olympic Games. The latter have not deterred or redressed a single grisly injustice. Sports stars may accumulate great wealth, but they have sold their souls for a mess of pottage.

Biological males identifying as transgender have emerged victorious in athletic competitions against biological women on multiple occasions. Sometimes arguing over a straw is justified by fundamental fairness. For youngsters, winning trophies and medals is frequently necessary for self-esteem and ambition on the road to adulthood. Keeping a Chinese wall between men’s sports and women’s sports is required for a level playing field where hard work and true grit are equally honored. Permitting biological males to compete with biological females creates the same competitive distortions as when athletes (San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, for example) stoop to steroids to enhance performance.

How about sex changes for minors? That is an exclusively parental matter. Not a word or syllable in the Constitution confers on government the authority to supersede childrearing decisions of parents. Nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court sustained the right of parents to send their children to private schools, secular or religious, in Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925).

The facts are quite simple. An epidemic of tribalism has swept the country. Character and accomplishments have been abandoned as the touchstone for mature, enlightened and civilized associations and interactions between people. We are too quick to judge on criteria contrary to Matthew 5-7. We are at sea, and only the Bible can navigate us through the perils of Scylla and Charybdis.

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