She Wasn’t Trans…
MADISON, WISCONSIN – DECEMBER 16: A police officer stands guard in front of Abundant Life Christian School on December 16, 2024 in Madison, Wisconsin. According to reports, a student and teacher were shot and killed at the school earlier today, and the suspected shooter was found dead at the scene. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In the hours after the tragic school shooting in Wisconsin yesterday, social media went into overdrive.
I’ll just cut to the chase as I don’t feel like “word smithing” through a pile of excrement.
Comment after comment by people who self identified as Christians immediately labeled the shooter as being transgender.
In Christian culture war land, that would explain everything, I guess.
The truth is that she wasn’t transgender.
She was a child.
She was a child warped beyond belief by a broken family and societal disconnection.
She was dead to the world before she took innocent life and then her own life.
“She believes in Jesus now”…har, har, har…
Jesus wept…
I’ve thought about this all morning.
I’ve never even been so much as inconvenienced by a gay person or a transgender person.
I will die with (and maybe from) the scars inflicted by people in the name of Jesus.
The church is supposed to be a hospital where one is healed from family and social issues by the love from a new family modeling Jesus.
It’s not…it’s almost as dangerous as an American public school…
He keeps weeping…
Now that we know she was a straight kid we’ll find other answers as to why… and they will all be lies as well…because we don’t want to admit that our society is broken at the most fundamental levels.
Thankfully, we’ll maintain the right to keep and bear arms…cause our kids may be coming for us…
This is nauseating.
I wondered how long it would take before
this tragedy was politicized. Sadly, not very
long.
Disgusting.
I agree.
“I’ve never even been so much as inconvenienced by a gay person or a transgender person.” Same here
“I will die with (and maybe from) the scars inflicted by people in the name of Jesus.” Also same here
Why are some “christians” so quick to jump to conclusions, and then to spout them as fact?
Captain Kevin,
I don’t think Christians like to admit that we are prone to the same sins and problems as anyone else. I have some friends whose young adult son staged a prank at his school that was both sexual and totally out of norms for any educational institution. His parents raged at the school claiming that their son was being discriminated against-except the school has a no-prank policy and his son had signed off on that when he entered the school. They set up a web site, tried to get support from church members (write your congressman!), and I watched it all in horror. They just couldn’t admit that their perfect son was a difficult young man with problems. It finally blew over, but I was embarrassed to admit to anyone that I knew the family. We look for excuses when we can’t face up to the fact that Christians are as fallible as the next person, or we try to convince ourselves they were never Christians at all. We may be saved, but we are still flawed. God help us all when we fail to recognize that. The alternative is to grow in grace, be accountable to someone, and take our lumps when we sin. (Said son has never returned to school, and seems to be totally disconnected from the church and his family).
The shooter was as crazy as an outhouse rat.
Plain and simple.
No way around it.
Michael,
Thank you for posting this!
I have also NEVER been treated poorly by ANYONE who identifies as LGBTQIA2S, but the number of times I have been mocked, called a f*ggot and treated as unworthy by other guys, including professing Christians just because I was given an unusual name by my beloved parents is beyond my ability to count. Thankfully I was told by my folks to just spell my name slowly to the mockers which shut them up. In my early career I chose sales & marketing, then went into the digital musical instrument field, pioneering MIDI, sampling, teaching how to remix and bringing state of the art Digital Audio Workstations to stores, studios and producers across seven Western states which was a purely joyous adventure!
I will forever be thankful to all from Roland, Akai and Digidedign who gave me the opportunities in my life journey!
Linn, good way to put it. I’d have to agree.
Sometimes, people ask me how I can feel safe in a crime-riddled city like mine. My answer is always the same. I don’t watch the news so I am blissfully ignorant of the things I cannot control. The news is a constant drivel of fear-mongering misinformation. Whenever I see a news story about something I know about, it is mangled and twisted. So, I ignore the noise and live a simple life minding my own business. I Thess 4:11-12
I left social media because I don’t have to be upset about everything that happens. Online guarantees that someone somewhere will be a braying jackass about every topic imaginable. There is no “Christian” voice out there that uniformly says the right things or does the right things about everything.
Sometimes, you don’t have to care about things you cannot sort and have no role in. That is the thing about a Christian blog you seem to have to care about everything everywhere at all times. You seem to have to speak to everything.
You don’t.
In this realm, the noise is insufferable. In the last 4 years, I have survived by finding small, meaningful things to do with actual people and limiting the noise dramatically.
Pastor Dread
Dread,
There is a lot of wisdom in what you said here.
I’ve cut down my news input considerably…I read the Dispatch in the morning along with Axios and grab some local news from what’s left of the local paper.
Sometimes I end up seeing things I ought not see, despite my best efforts.
Often this is because someone messages me with something they are concerned about and I feel duty bound to look.
This one concerns me…the general public seems to think that the reason for their problems are sexual deviants and immigrants….these are mainly distractions while the oligarchs rob us…
I have a theory…American history can be put into eras…the revolution, the dropping of the nuclear bomb, the Kennedy assassination, and Covid…the unhealed Covid scar will be the undoing of the nation.
Good response my friend. As the most insane member of this community I just needed to reflect upon how I hold the shreds together.
We have empathy derangement. We cannot care about all these things.
I cannot say too much about how Eucharist and “remembering” his sacrifice by putting it at the forefront of my mind heals my conscious thought from the terror of life.
Therein is sanity — attempting to apprehend that for which WE have been apprehended. Hmm I must re-exegete that thought.
Adieux Dread
Dread,
You would do us all a service if you wrote up those thoughts on the Eucharist…
I think you have a point about empathy…I’m trying to narrow the things I care about into broad categories so the details don’t kill me…
empathy derangement leads to ‘thoughts and prayers…’
Christians who feel the need to label someone as trans when something violent or tragic happens simply aren’t thinking–thinking that Christians have mental illness, broken homes & relationships, are prone to sinful thoughts and conduct, can easily be deceived and mistaken, don’t have all the answers, that Jesus will deliver them from all evil, and so on. Christians in America have their head in the sand and are addicted to easily digested ‘answers’ that are stupidly shallow. They don’t read, reason, or demonstrate curiosity beyond reels and tic tok. Tough times aren’t coming; they’re here.
Once tragedies were tragic… Now tragedies equal politics… We are well on the way of having our empathy stripped from us.
As more details come out, her home life was horribly dysfunctional. She had really severe world views as well, extrememly misanthropic.
She wasn’t trans?
Why are fundagelicals so obsessed with human sexuality?
Saint Paul explains:
“All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” 1 Corinthians 6:18
Respectfully Xenia, over the years, I have learned to take Paul with only so many grains of salt.
I believe every word Saint Paul wrote.
“I believe every word Saint Paul wrote.”
If you can determine definitively, which of the 13/14 epistles Paul wrote every word, you are way ahead of New Testament scholarship worldwide…
Well, Paul seems to have been consistent with the Jerusalem Council in his sexual theology. I Co 10 appears to be a clear commentary on the instructions given concerning Gentile inclusion. The real obsession with sex belongs to Western culture. We are saturated with sexual seduction in every direction. No human generation has had to deal with more debauchery than the present Babylonian captivity.
How strange to read here that St Paul is not trustworthy, and neither is the Great Tradition’s canonical ascription to the Pauline corpus. As for me, I will continue to depend upon the canonical Pauline corpus as an unparalleled critique of culture ancient and modern.
Kyle Harper, has helpfully written about Paul’s utilization of the word porneia to deal with both idolatry and immorality. Further, the early church utilized the word to bundle together all of the sexual practices outside of Christian marriage and ultimately to prevail in a sexual revolution that liberated women, children, and slaves from the domination of Roman men of position and power.
Unfortunately, when it comes to idolatry/immorality, the church of today has to reckon with our failure. Like Israel, the chosen people to deal with the Adam problem, the church has to realize that the Adam problem is also our problem.
Still, speak up we must even as we confess our compromise.
There are a few things in view here…and they obstruct the main thing.
First, I have no issue with higher criticism that doubts Paul’s authorship of certain epistles…I think it needs to be examined carefully, as well as higher criticism of the canon as a whole.
I know that Duane puts a lot of weight on the churches moral traditions, as do I.
The main thing is the same thing I’ve been writing about for 25 years publicly…the church has forfeited it’s moral authority too many times for the culture to take its rebukes seriously.
Xenia has the moral authority to utilize Paul to bring a reasonable response to utterly dismissive comments. This blog has not become too noble for that.
Alan,
When you make an overarching definitive statement, it deserves to be challenged… That is not dismissive, it is called discourse…
I said “I” believe everything Saint Paul has written. That statement is 100% true.
Xenia,
In the subjective, yes; in the objective there’s room for questions…
There is room here for those with an inerrant view of Scripture.
There is room for those of us who don’t…because I bought the space… 🙂
The report on Matt Gaetz is out…Gaetz who recently spoke to a packed out crowd of Christian nationalists.
His budget for whores exceeds my living expenses for the last five years…praise the Lord and pass the condoms…
Sounds like Matt Gaetz may have been a victim of Higher Criticism.
I hold to the tenets of The Apostle’s Creed as non-negotiable parameters up-front and on the table
The rest of the stuff?
I pick and choose as I see fit and I temper it with reason and common sense.
Sorry to have offended some folks here with my comment regarding the apostle Paul.