The liberal flagship Salon magazine has decided it doesn’t like Pope Francis anymore, ever since the pontiff came down hard against indoctrinating children in gender theory.
In his article titled “Pope Francis’ LGBT failure,” Salon writer Nico Lang compares the Pope’s “harsh words” against the gender ideology to those of “the right-wing extremists who have sought to prevent trans people from using bathrooms that correspond with their gender identity.”
The Cool Pope is “not so cool after all,” Lang quipped, just before comparing the Catholic Church to the Republican Party—apparently the meanest slur he could come up with.
The gender ideology claims that governments should require individuals to accept the “gender identity” of men or women who seek to live as members of the opposite sex. For example, new federal rules now urge punishment for K-12 students who refuse to use the female pronoun –‘her” — when referring a male classmate who dresses like a girl, or who do not want to share a bathroom with members of the opposite sex.
Lang notes that this past weekend, Francis referred to teaching gender theory in schools as “ideological colonization.”
During his short trip to the Caucasus, Pope Francis also called gender theory a “great enemy” of marriage, adding that the ideology of gender is part of a global war of ideas out to destroy traditional marriage.
In an extended, off-the-cuff speech in Georgia, Francis said that today we are witnessing a “global war to destroy marriage” in which gender theory places a key role, fighting “not with weapons, but with ideas.”
But although the Pope’s stern opposition to gender theory may strike Nico Lang as a novelty, in point of fact, it is nothing new.
For years the Pope has been an outspoken critic of LGBT agitators’ efforts to impose same-sex marriage on society along with theories of gender fluidity that divorce gender from biological sexual differences.
In March, Francis published an extensive teaching letter on marriage and the family called The Joy of Love (Amoris Laetitia), in which he underscored the unique roles of motherhood and fatherhood, and called same-sex marriage legislation the “legal deconstruction of the family.”
In that same text, Francis slammed gender theory for its denial of “the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman,” and for its dream of “a society without sexual differences.”
“An appreciation of our body as male or female,” he said, is “necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves.” Efforts to erase sexual differences based in biology are a symptom of a sick society that “no longer knows how to deal with it,” he wrote.
In the past, Francis has used even stronger language to denounce gender theory. In early 2014, the Pope called modern gender ideology “demonic,” and compared the teaching of gender theory to children with the educational policies of Hitler.
In his Salon article, Lang declares that the pope’s message on transgender “boils down the old canard that the Catholic Church has been using against gays and lesbians for decades: ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin.’”
The Pope’s ideas are “biblically inaccurate” and outdated, Lang insists.
If loving sinners and hating sin is a “canard,” at least the Pope has Jesus on his side—even if Salon is no longer a fan.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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