Oregon Judge Grants Man the 'Right' to Be Genderless. But Did She...Really?

Mainstream media outlets pride themselves on being the gatekeepers of the truth – not nutty ideologues like all those bloggers in their jammies. They are objective.

Or this is what they keep telling us.

Then I read this title on the NBC News website: Judge Grants Oregon Resident the Right to Be Genderless…and my eyebrow rises.

The article is a feature in a subsection called “NBC OUT.” The rainbowed banner suggests this is news catering to LGBTQ devotees, as all the titles seem to share that sad theme. A search for any subsection titled NBC BIBLICAL, or CHRISTIAN, or CHURCH, or even RELIGIOUS turned up nothing. But I digress.

This article is the sad tale of a man named Patrick Abbatiello (one must look elsewhere to find his actual name and sex), afflicted with broken feelings about his sex, who made those feelings a legal issue.

A situation like this might challenge any judge aware of the limitations of his role. Consider: what if someone tried to get the court to rule that he had three arms, or was a unicorn, or was not subject to the law of gravity, or was 800 years old? Surely no judge would enable such delusions.

Yet right now, one particular delusion has achieved a different status. So, the headline on this MSM site tells us, this judge granted [Abbatiello] the right to become genderless.

Except of course that the judge did no such thing.

I take it as axiomatic that no one can do what he cannot do. Not even a judge. No one can grant a right that cannot exist, a right that defies created reality. So no judge can grant the right to ignore the law of gravity, or to live a reverse chronology, or to draw a square circle.

So Patrick is still what God made him, as far as I can find reported: a man.*

“But the judge granted the right to be genderless,” someone replies. Except she did no such thing, for she could not. In such cases, what judges are actually doing are taking away rights.

For instance, no judge – nor any bank of judges – can grant the right of two men to marry. It’s an impossibility. What they do in all such cases, as we have seen, is take away rights. That is, they deny the rights of others to live according to created reality. No judge can grant Biff and Cletus the right to marry each other. So instead they negate the God-given right of others not to march in step with the delusion.

So when Biff and Cletus wish to force business owners to play along, the latter are denied their God-given rights to decline the invitation.

I suspect the same will unfold if this new spectacle spreads. The Patricks of the world will remain men or women, but everyone around them will be denied their God-given right to acknowledge reality. If a business or agency requires Patrick to pick “Male” or “Female” on a form, this judge’s ruling would seem to deny it that right.

What has happened, then? Patrick has not been granted the right to be neither male nor female. That cannot be done. Patrick’s maleness is an immutable, created given. Instead, others will now be denied the God-given right to treat him as what God made him.

This brings us to the great truth that our society keeps bumping its head against: we are not actually God; we just want to play Him on TV – and we want the whole world to be our TV show!

The reality is that God is God, creation is His, and it comes to us pre-defined. This is, as I explained in my first piece here, the most offensive truth in the Bible. God created the heavens and the earth, and in so doing He defined them. They do not mean what we want them to mean; they mean what God says they mean. They existed by His command (Psalm 33:6, 9), He made them all in wisdom (Psalm 104:24), and He still owns (Genesis 14:19) and rules (Psalm 115:3; 119:91) them all.

So, specifically, in creating our species, He created us male and female (Genesis 1:27). He still sees us as such (Matthew 19:4). To this, every cell in our body says “Amen.” No surgeon’s knife nor judge’s gavel can change that reality.

This ruinous drive we have to pretend that we are God had its birth in the Tempter’s lie (Genesis 3:5). We still grimly pursue that lie, and in that pursuit suppress every last witness to God’s truth and reality (Romans 1:18). So doing, we commit both spiritual and intellectual suicide. Its effects extend even to such undeniable truths such as our created sexuality (Romans 1:21-28).

This is why many moderns become infuriated even at such vapid theories as “Intelligent Design.” Why? That word: design! We hate it, we don’t want to think we’re designed by Another. We want to create our own reality—even our own sexuality, or lack thereof.

Powerless to force creation to cooperate, we find judges willing to issue decrees fabricating “rights” for us by denying God-given rights to others.

This is why the only course to wisdom begins with the fear of God (Proverbs 1:7; 9:10). We must do the very thing we hate: renounce our faux godhood, bow our knee to the Lordship of God. We must confess Jesus as Lord, and submit to His gracious salvation, reconciliation, and redemption (Romans 10).

We all have broken desires and maladaptive thinking. I do, and you do too. Salvation and wholeness do not lie in trying to force creation to adapt itself to our brokenness. They lie in reconciliation to our Creator, which we can find only through the person and work of Jesus Christ (John 14:6; Romans 3:21-31; 1 Corinthians 6:9-11; 2 Corinthians 5:17; Titus 2:11—3:7).

If you’d like to read how to know God yourself, I lay it out briefly in a very low-tech web page, and more fully in a book.

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*Nothing in this article refers to the statistically rare cases where there is genuine biological ambiguity.