Jesus in the Ladies’ Room

By now I’m sure all of you have seen one or more videos of Christians “witnessing” at Target. What this entails is one or more said Christians walking through the store usually with a bible in hand and shouting about “sin” and for people to flee Target before they are struck down by “god” due the policy they announced back in April about transgender people and the use of the bathrooms in their stores. In case you were under a rock somewhere the last couple of months, here is what Target had to say:

“We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity,” the retailer said in a statement to CNN. “Everyone deserves to feel like they belong.”

Radical, I know. In any case, the backlash was swift with the usual fear mongers seizing the opportunity to whip up their base and before long several videos of people shouting about Target’s “wickedness,”  “hate,” and shouting for all of us “sinners” to repent appeared online.

If you are like me, you probably have thought about what you might say or do if you were to encounter such a person in a store. Before I dive into that, it might be best to talk about the people who oppose Target’s transgender inclusive bathroom policy. It seems to me that people protesting this policy fall into one of two categories with a very large amount of crossover between the two groups.

The first group are people who are either uninformed or just plain bigoted. This group is made up of people that will often scare others by equating trans people with pedophiles or, if they are more subtle about their bigotry, they might say that trans people are fine but this policy will allow perverts to freely walk into bathrooms and use them as their own free peepshow. They like to promote and use myths, like the Target policy will put “our daughter’s at risk!” The key difference between this group and the second group is that they do not use religious reasons to oppose the policy. As such, the people that fall into this group are very easily dismissed or, ideally, educated by using facts. When the actual facts are brought to light they will either accept them and change their views or if they ignore the facts, they will just end up repeating the same lies over and over which will quickly become apparent to any reasonable person interacting with them.

Group two, as you may have guessed use many of the same arguments as group one, but they throw Jesus and “god” into the mix as a supposed morality based reason to support their bigotry. This is not as easily dismissed because of the fact that all religions are faith based and as such all things are equally “true.” What I mean by this is that when you use faith over reason, logic and evidence, you have left the natural world to rely on the supernatural. If you believe something, no matter what it may be, based solely on faith, you by definition have no actual evidence and without evidence pretty much anything goes. This puts you on footing with the 9/11 hijackers who believed that seventy two virgins awaited them in heaven or the members of the Hale Bop cult who believed that they were going to awake from their suicide on a spaceship hidden from us here on Earth by the comet.

What would ladies’ room Jesus do?

Before everyone gets their panties in a bunch let me state that there are certainly many good people who are Christians and will argue that Jesus was all about love. He was for the most part, and my beef is not with them, but with the others who want to focus on the parts of the Bible that they can interpret as supporting whatever bigoted view they hold, as in this case. As side note here, please do not just dismiss these people as not being “real” Christians or as not reading the Bible “right.” Remember that to them they are the “true” Christians and the ones who support LGBTQ people are the heretics. Since both use faith, neither side can prove their case.

So, I felt I had to look into what exact Bible passages were being used to support their supposed moral stance. There are two that jump out at me. I purposely selected one from the Old Testament and one from the new.

Deuteronomy 22:5 — “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God.”

While this can easily and reasonably be dismissed for a number of reasons, the most obvious one is that most trans people feel that they are wearing the “proper” clothing of their gender regardless of what it might say on their original birth certificate. Oh course, this would no doubt be ignored and I see many claims of mental illness along with skewing of facts to try and counter my point. A good example of this is, when pointing to the high suicide rate among trans people, they make the claim that it is due to mental illness or the supposed burden of our “sinfulness” rather the truth — which is that it’s assholes like that them are a major factor.

Romans 1 18-32 — Which in a nutshell talks about homosexuality being a sin and worthy of death. Romans 1 32 “Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.” A side point of interest, this is the only place in the bible where lesbianism is directly referred to (26-28). As we all know, gender identity and sexuality are not the same thing. That seems like a simple thing to grasp, but if they admitted this fact many of their arguments would become invalid.

Pretty much all of the other passages that supposedly condemn trans people are passages really about something else or are based on a misunderstanding of exactly who trans people are. As with all religious people these parts are cherry picked to support their position while totally ignoring other parts. For example, also in Deuteronomy is a passage saying you should not consume shellfish and yet I’ve never seen one of these lunatics with a megaphone in Red Lobster.

So, what would I recommend doing if you encounter one of these people? My personal thinking is that they are not really out there for any moral purpose, they are trying to get attention and prove what a “good” Christian they are to everyone. They don’t really care about facts, so trying to reason with them is likely out of the question. I’ve seen several videos with people confronting them or just yelling back at them. I don’t think that helps either as it just gives them more attention and makes life harder for the poor Target employees.

So what would I say to someone shouting their way through Target? Unless they indicated that they were open to an honest dialog on the subject, I don’t think there is anything I could say in that situation. Maybe after they got it out of their system they would be willing to talk. I don’t know and that all depends on the person. Perhaps in the end, as with many of the problems we face, the answer is education and letting people know what we are actually all about. Once someone knows one of us, it’s a lot tougher to pick up a megaphone and shout lies in the name of Jesus.

Tags: Christianity, featured, restroom wars, Target

Category: Transgender Opinion