It could be worse ...

What do I mean it could be worse (this time)? Well, you could have read the following in the Lutheran, but it is in its ECUSA counterpart.

Below we have a bewilderingly mixture of bad science, half truths and no-good theology:

"Beyond gender categories
Let’s focus on our experiences of God"

by Jennifer Phillips
Section: Active Voice
5/1/2005

“In Christ … there is not male and female.”
The concept is not new, and yet it has taken until the 21st century for the beginnings of a world consensus that women and girls merit equal status, education and dignity as men and boys: a watershed change in human outlook.

Another such change has just begun: the recognition that human beings are not tidily divided into male and female, but inhabit a spectrum of sexual and gender identities that result from a combination of genetic, physiological, environmental, social and spiritual factors.

As a medical center chaplain in the early ’80s, I listened to the stories of individuals whose sex and gender identities intersected with their experiences of illness or accident. Some were born with ambiguous genitalia (and some of these had physical gender assigned by surgery in childhood, others not.) Some had disease or trauma that greatly changed their genitals. Some had chromosomal differences that blurred the genetic boundary of male and female. Some experienced themselves as “transgendered” -- an identity then only beginning to find a name and description -- as having one physical gender and another inner gender.

Many were gay or lesbian. Some identified themselves as bisexual. Some cross-dressed, straight or gay. Some were pained greatly by their identities; others were at peace and astonishingly well-adjusted despite the ostracism and scorn they experienced. Many had established deep, intimate relationships despite their differences from what I had grown up thinking was the “norm.” To have the privilege of hearing about these lives and spiritual searchings close-up filled me with awe and reverence for the complexity and strength of human beings.

After eight years of hospital work with such marvelous human beings, I could never again experience the world as split into two categories, male and female. Nor could I write off these different lives as simply “damaged” or “anomalous.” They represent a hefty minority of humankind, across all cultures."

Read the rest?