Frank Turek: Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Frank Turek: Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism

May 4, 2024

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose interview Christian apologist Frank Turek about the updated and expanded edition of his book "Correct, Not Politically Correct: About Same-Sex Marriage and Transgenderism". Why should the government favor natural marriage? How should we respond to arguments for same-sex marriage? How has same-sex marriage changed societies that adopted it? What are the risks of transitioning children?

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Show notes, outline and transcript: https://winteryknight.com/2024/05/04/knight-and-rose-show-49-frank-turek-same-sex-marriage-and-transgenderism

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview. I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

Welcome, Rose. So today we are delighted to welcome the guest onto the show, Dr. Frank Turek. I'm sure he needs no introduction.

I'll read a little bit for the people who haven't heard of him. Dr. Turek is the author or co-author of five books, including I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist and Stealing from God. As president of CrossExamine.org, Frank presents evidence for Christianity at churches, high schools, and secular college campuses.

He has also debated several prominent atheists, including Christopher Hitchens and Michael Shermer. Welcome, Frank. Hey, great being with you, Wintery and Rose.

Looking forward to talking about a real controversial issue that really shouldn't be controversial. Exactly. Yeah, we're grateful to have you here and looking forward to this conversation.

Today, we'd love to talk to you about the third edition of your book, Correct, Not Politically Correct, about same-sex marriage and transgenderism. So if I could, I'd like to just start off by asking you what motivated you to write this book. Well, I grew up in New Jersey and a friend of mine next door actually got into the same-sex homosexual lifestyle.

And initially his parents were, of course, concerned about it, but they wound up embracing it. And he died of AIDS at a very young age, just a number of years later. And at that point, I realized, you know, love doesn't require approval.

And unfortunately, in our culture today, we think love requires approval. You know, if you love me, you'll approve what I do. Now, every parent knows that that's not the case if you really think about it.

I mean, if you approve of everything your child wants to do, you're not loving, you're unloving. You're enabling kids to do stuff that if they're going down the wrong road is going to hurt them and hurt others. So you need to stand in the way of evil when you see it.

Now, how you do it, that's another question. But just to approve of what somebody wants to do isn't necessarily loving. Many times it's unloving.

And I love what Thomas Sowell said. Thomas Sowell is now 93 years old and says everything well. He said, when you tell people or he says, when you want to help people, you tell them the truth.

When you want to help yourself, you tell people what they want to hear. And too often we tell people what they want to hear because we don't want to take the blowback that we're going to get when they disagree with our view. And so what we wind up doing is we wind up telling people what they want to hear so we don't get any blowback.

And in that case, we're just helping ourselves. We're not really helping them. Exactly.

Yeah. And one of the things we really appreciate and admire about you is your willingness to take the blowback and to speak the truth, especially in this incredibly controversial issue. You know, when you share the story about your childhood friend in the book, it reminds me of a friend I had when I starting when I was about eight years old, just the sweetest, kindest, most adorable little boy.

And he grew up attracted to males and ended up moving to New York City. And he was drugged by someone who was attracted to him, wanted to have sex with him and killed in that way. And I just think of that sweet, sweet little boy.

And it breaks my heart. And that gives me compassion and the desire to speak out more on this issue. It's just really so tragic.

It is. And what we need to recognize is that we all have attractions we ought not act on. Every one of us does.

Whether there are attractions in a heterosexual direction, homosexual direction, now pedophilia is actually starting to be normalized because people say, well, they're attracted to them. So how can you say that's wrong? Well, I'm attracted to a lot of things I ought not do, not just in the sexual world, but when it comes to eating, when it comes to relationships, when it comes to money. I mean, I could be attracted in a bunch of different ways that I ought not act on that attraction.

And we need to realize that the principled restraint, or I should put it another way, the principled restraint of destructive desires is what we call civilization. If we don't restrain ourselves from some of our more base desires, we're not going to have civilization. That's well put.

Okay. So I read the book in preparation for this interview. And one of the things that stood out to me was the motivation of the people pushing for same sex marriage.

So you talk about same sex marriage and transgenderism in the book. We'll get to the transgenderism later. What was the most common motivation that you saw from the strong proponents of same sex marriage? Well, one of the most articulate proponents of it before it was imposed on the country by the Supreme Court in 2015 was Andrew Sullivan.

And Andrew Sullivan on many issues would be conservative, but being a same sex attracted man himself thought that same sex marriage would give approval to homosexuality and people who had that orientation like nothing else could. And he was right about that because the law is a great teacher. Many people think whatever is legal is moral and whatever is illegal is immoral.

So Sullivan knew long before it was imposed on the country through the Supreme Court that this would just confer social approval on homosexuality itself. And it turns out he's right that, you know, if it's legal, it must be okay. And we found the same thing on abortion, right? In 1973, most states had laws against abortion.

Most people thought it was immoral and wrong. 50 years later, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, now we have people saying, we're not only think abortion is a good thing, we're going to pay for you to have it. You can come to our state and we'll pay for you to get here to have it.

It's now become like a sacrament. Because people think whatever is legal is moral. And they thought that, oh, we've had this right for 49 years.

And now you're taking it away. Well, we're going to double down. We're going to say this is a good thing now.

Abortion is no longer safe, legal and rare. It's now a sacrament to the left. And that's what the laws tend to do.

When you're looking for validation, one of the best things you can get is to make what you're desiring legal. And then if you can get people to subsidize it, it's almost like everyone, even the people who disagree with you are somehow complicit and approving of what you're doing. That's right.

Yeah. Yeah. So how would you respond to the argument that same sex marriage is actually just about equal rights? I might ask the question, does someone who is attracted to minors, do they have the equal right to marry already? And the question, it depends on what you mean by that.

They already have the equal right to marry somebody who qualifies of the opposite sex who is of age. But we wouldn't say somebody that wanted to marry a minor doesn't have equal rights because we would say, well, it's not right to marry a minor. But everyone had the same rights prior to 2015 that they've always had.

And that is to marry somebody who is of age or the opposite sex. Nobody was denied that right. They already had equal rights.

What they wanted was a new right to marry somebody of the same sex. Right. Well, that's a new right.

They were not being denied any rights prior to 2015. And I would also point out that a right is something that the government recognizes. It's not something the government gives you.

Rights come from God. If there is no God, there are no rights. There's not only no right to same sex marriage, there's no right to natural marriage.

Everything's just a matter of opinion. And of course, our Declaration of Independence put it well when it said, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their government. No, it doesn't say that.

Endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And governments are instituted among men to secure these rights.

In other words, the government doesn't give you rights. The government simply secures the rights you already have. And when the government fails to do that, then you've got a bad government.

Or when the government tries to give you rights you don't really have, you also have a bad government. There is no right to marry somebody the same sex. Marriage is not something that we invented.

It's something that we inherited from the designer who designed us in such a way and knew that the way to perpetuate and stabilize society, which is the reason that the government's involved in marriage to begin with, is that you need to put a man and a woman together who can procreate and bring forth the next generation. And that can only be done in a consistent, persistent, and good way by a man and a woman. You can't do it with two men.

You can't do it with two women. You can't do it with a group as well as you can do it with a man and a woman. Yeah, exactly.

And so while you mentioned the interest and the role of the government, specifically talk a little bit more, if you would, about why the government should prefer natural marriage. How does that benefit the culture, anybody? Well, because the foundation of civilization is the biological two-parent family coming together and staying together to procreate and to bring forth the next generation of good citizens. That is how you have a civilization.

Same-sex relationships can't do that by design. They can't do that. Now, can they adopt? Well, of course they can adopt, but every man, or I should put it another way, every child deserves a mother and a father.

It's not the same to have two fathers as it is to have a mother and a father. It's not the same to have two mothers as it is to have a mother and a father. Now, can sometimes two of the same-sex do a good job parenting? I'm not denying that, but as a rule, that's not the way it works in nature.

It works in nature between a man and a woman bringing forth the next generation. And of course, a society needs to maintain a good birth rate and most countries in the West are dying because we're not maintaining our birth rate and same-sex relationships obviously don't help that. In fact, from a religious perspective and a civilization perspective, Muslims are out-populating Christians, not only because they tend to procreate more, but they tend to have more wives.

And so what's happening in Europe right now is at some point, the Muslims are just going to out-populate the Christians or the secularists. And as we know from history, whenever you get a, in most cases, whenever you get a Muslim majority, you get a lack of religious freedom and Sharia law imposed. So that's what we're looking at off into the future.

And then from an economic perspective, when you have a biological mother and a father coming together and staying together to bring up children, you have a better economy. Why? Because you don't need to bloat the government to take care of the ills that come from the broken family. You don't need all these social welfare benefits when people stay together and bring forth children.

So you can reduce government spending, you can reduce taxes and have a better economy, not to mention that the best environment for bringing forth children is the biological two-parent family on average. So everything works better when a mom and a dad come together, have children and stay together to bring forth those children. Excellent points.

Absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of studies have been done in recent years that demonstrate exactly what you're talking about, about how how children suffer the consequences of not having a biological mother and father and of not having a mother and father at all.

And it really is such a detriment on the whole to children. Such an important point. That's right.

Yeah. And look, if we don't have an institution that is designed to bring up children, which traditionally has been marriage, what institution is going to replace that? If you don't take care of the children to bring them up so they're good citizens, you're going to have a society that's ultimately going to fall apart. And we already see that happening.

I mean, our country itself is falling apart because how many kids, by the way, right now are born into broken families. And when they're born into broken families, they tend to do much more poorly in society. They commit the vast majority of crimes.

They wind up in prison more than than kids that come from two parent homes. They wind up less educated with less disposable income. Often they're there without jobs.

Often they tragically commit suicide at much higher rates. I mean, there's just so much evidence that keeping the family together, the biological two parent family is good for everyone. And same sex marriage actually hurts all that.

In the book, you have some chapters that were written before same sex marriage became law. And you make some predictions about what effects you would expect to see if same sex marriage became legal. So what were some of those predictions and which ones have come true? Yeah, well, unfortunately, they've all come true and I didn't want them to come true.

The first edition of the book was written in 2008. The second edition was written in about 2016 right after the Supreme Court decision. And the last update was just last year 2023 due to the transgender craze.

And here's some things I said prior to it being imposed on the country through the Supreme Court that we would have higher income taxes for marriage benefits and also take care of increased illegitimacy. We're going to have higher medical costs for social programs. We're going to have higher social security taxes.

That hasn't quite happened yet, but it's on its way. And pretty much social security is going to be insolvent. Higher health insurance premiums.

We've seen that preferential treatment to same sex couples for adoption. Public schools are going to be teaching LGBTQ. We see all that employers are going to expect that employees not just respect but celebrate same sex marriage.

We see that Christian churches and organizations are going to be pressured to accept and celebrate LGBTQ issues. And we've seen that. So tragically, many of the predictions have come true.

And you don't have to be a prophet to see this. Once same sex marriage becomes the law of the land, then everybody must bow their knee to it. And if you don't, you're going to be held out almost like a racist, which is what people are now called.

You're a bigot. You're a homophobe, right? All these all of these charges, which really have nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with slandering people. That's really what happens.

And tragically, it's because Christians have not been vocal enough about what we're for. And we're for the biological two parent family. And as you well know, when the Supreme Court decided that same sex marriage must be approved by every state, it wasn't really same sex marriage that came into being.

It was genderless marriage. That marriage is now somehow genderless. Well, if marriage is genderless, if marriage is merely just about the romantic interests of two parties, and of course, we might also deviate here and say, why two? Why not three, four, five or six? We see that coming down the road as well.

But if marriage is just about preference and the emotional attachment, the romantic attachment of two individuals, then what does marriage have to do with children? Well, if marriage, as I said before, is not the institution that protects children, which institution does? And it turns out there is no institution that protects children. So marriage has become genderless, which means the children ultimately suffer. And that's why the book, by the way, is called Correct, Not Politically Correct, because we're trying to be correct here despite the fact that people are going to get upset that we're not politically correct.

Right. So I think that point that you made about how same-sex marriage is removing the norms of traditional marriage. This isn't actually the first time that that's happened.

Previously, marriage was redefined to remove that norm of permanence with no-fault divorce. That's right. And what same-sex marriage does is it goes a step further and it removes the expectation of gender complementarity.

And you can actually look at countries that have legalized same-sex marriage earlier and see the effects of removing these marital norms. And it causes people to see marriage and child raising differently. So you have some descriptions of what's happening in other countries in the book.

Did you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, there's so much in the book about that. The countries that have legalized same-sex marriage, first of all, it really destroys marriage itself because the sacredness of marriage is gone. And if it's just about a piece of paper, why do we need that? So illegitimacy tends to go through the roof.

People, they still have kids, maybe not to the same extent, but they just don't get married. And that's a disaster for kids long term. And it really, let me just say this.

The people that really brought same-sex marriage or genderless marriage to America really were the Christians. And you go, well, how can that be? You mentioned it a minute ago, Wintry Knight, and that is when we approved No Fault Divorce, that really bought into the idea that marriage was just about the romantic affinity of two adults. And it had nothing to do really with a covenant between two people to bring forth the next generation.

It was more about just whether you felt in love anymore. And if you didn't feel in love anymore, then you had the right to dispense with the person that you married and find somebody else. And Christians really got behind that.

Now, they might say it was for a good reason. There are too many people stuck in these abusive marriages. But it seems to me that the law went too far.

And the first governor to actually sign this law was Ronald Reagan in California. He later went on to regret doing that, but it spread around the country. And so now, if marriage through the law is really defined as just the romantic affinity of two adults, well, same-sex people could come along and say, well, why not us then? If it has nothing to do with children, why not us? And that's really what's happened.

And so we've switched the emphasis from children's needs to adult desires. And the Christians are the ones that actually did that. And there's many other problems with it.

And by the way, this book, Correct Not Politically Correct, is not a book that quotes Bible verses at people. It's the natural law, common sense, medical case, why same-sex marriage and transgenderism are not good for individuals and they're not good for a society as a whole either. Yeah.

And that's something we appreciate about the book, is that you have studies, you have statistics, you have natural law arguments. They're excellent. I think this is one of the things that you touched on earlier, Frank, was this idea that love today is approval and affirmation.

And people are really feeling pressure to be seen as loving. And that's why children are often being led down paths that don't work out for them in the long term. And that's in many different areas.

I wanted to ask you, how would you improve the ability of Christians to kind of feel comfortable telling the truth to people who are engaging in behaviors that we know in the long term are not going to work out for them? And before you answer, I just want to give an example. So like a grown-up who has done a trade or a couple of STEM degrees is going to be able to say to a young person, you know, these are the jobs that earn more and don't take out, you know, $40,000 a year of student loans for this degree because you don't seem to even like it that much. So those kinds of conversations, people can be confident because they can say, listen, I've been in the job market.

I know how this works. And so I'm going to give you advice based on my success in this area. We don't seem to have as much trouble telling the truth in that context.

So is there a way to make this debate over sexuality and same-sex marriage and transgenderism more like that kind of conversation rather than stop it? I don't like it kind of a conversation. The Bible says, yeah, I think you can start with a question if it's somebody that's close to you. I think you can say, hey, can I ask you a question? Yeah, sure.

If I were about to go down a road that you knew or thought would hurt me or hurt others, would you love me enough to tell me? What's the other person going to have to say? Well, of course. Then you can say, thank you. Can I do that for you right now? In other words, you're asking for permission to speak into their lives.

And then I think asking questions is so much more important than making statements. Like maybe for a second, let's just talk about transgenderism if we can. If your kid comes to you and says, mom, dad, I'm trans, first of all, don't freak out.

If you freak out, the kid's going to say, wow, I'm never coming to mom or dad again. They went nuts on this, right? Don't freak out. Just say, hey, thank you for telling me.

Can I ask you some questions? Yeah, sure. What do you mean by trans? What does that even mean? And then secondly, how did you come to this conclusion? Why do you think this is right? And then you can ask, what happened that made you feel this way? Because you know, Walt Heyer, who for eight years lived as a trans woman, in other words, a man trying to be a woman and then became a Christian and got out of that trans lifestyle. He has a website called sexchangeregret.com, which is a good place to go for information on this.

And he's interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of people that have come to him for advice. And he says, when I ask them the question, what happened that made you feel this way? One hundred percent of them can point back to an event. Well, normally a traumatic event, sexual abuse of some kind.

And he goes on to say that when a young boy or a boy wants to become a woman, sometimes it's because they want to rid themselves of the sexual organ that was part of the abuse. And so you can understand the psychology behind this. So you don't have to be condemning about this.

They experienced a trauma and you want to help them through it. And so you could say, what happened that made you feel this way? Then you can say, do feelings always tell you the truth? Right. And all of us can.

I don't care who you are going to say, no, a lot of times feelings don't tell me the truth. Then you can say, do your feelings ever change? I mean, honey, a month ago, you were you weren't trans and now you are. So your feelings have changed.

Do you think your feelings may change again? Do you know that 80 percent of young people that have these feelings of gender dysphoria grow out of them by the time they're 18? In other words, this is going to fix itself in most cases. I mean, your feelings change quite a bit when you're young. In fact, puberty is one big long transition.

It's normal to feel odd when you're going through puberty and we've got to let our kids know that. I mean, there are so many things that kids go through phases, even as Bill Maher has admitted. Bill Maher is one of the more articulate spokespersons who despite the fact being mostly liberal and an atheist, he's realizing leave the kids alone.

What are you doing? He said, you know, kids go through phases. He says, if everybody wanted to if everyone knew what they wanted to be when they were eight, the world would be filled with cowboys and princesses. But it's not.

He said, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a pirate. Thank God nobody took me seriously and took me for eye removal and peg leg surgery. So hilarious.

But he's pointing out, by the way, most of this now is social media driven. This is social media contagion that's going on. There's another question you can ask a young person, and that is this.

How much reading have you done into the effects or the side effects of trying to change your gender? Because I can guarantee you the answer is probably zero. If people really investigated what happens in a so-called sex change operation, they would be horrified. There's no protocol.

Why? Because it's an impossible and it's an impossible operation. You can't do it. Right.

Right. You can't change your sex. It's impossible biologically and physically.

You can try and make your body look more, more female or male, but you can't change your biology. And that's why there's no protocol. And that's why people like Chloe Cole, who we have in the book, correct, not politically correct, who had her breasts removed when she was 15.

By the time she hit 18, she knew it was a terrible mistake. Now at 19, she's suing her doctors for, quote, doing Nazi like experiments on her, unquote. Wow.

And so, look, this is just the truth. And I know people don't like the truth sometimes. They want to change reality to fit their desires.

But wisdom says you need to change your desires to fit reality. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Another area where I see this happening, where I think that grown ups need to like have conversations with young people about the expected long term consequences of their actions. Like, where do you think you're going to be in 20 years? Where do you think most people who are making the decisions that you want to make end up in 20 years? Just asking them questions like that helps them to say, oh, I didn't even think of that. I think young people don't think of the future the way that grown ups do.

And one other area where I see this happening is with young people and sex, like sex before marriage, and particularly in the age of Instagram and TikTok, where they don't see anything wrong with being extremely promiscuous. And I think everyone has heard of the college hookup culture. So if you say to them, well, what did the studies say are the long term consequences for the stability of your marriage? You know, they go, oh, I haven't even looked at that.

So I just would encourage all the grown ups who are listening. Two steps. Number one, Frank's book is full of studies.

Okay. So reading the studies, I think, really equips you to feel comfortable discussing issues that you may think are not cut and dried, that they're not like, you know, car repair or, you know, medicine. But if you look at the studies that you get a lot more information to allow you to be much more intelligent about these things.

And the second thing is just asking young people the question about where this is going to go is probably something they haven't even thought of. So, yeah, excellent points. I'd like to revisit homosexuality for a second because I've had a lot of conversations about this and people often bring up to me the challenge that or argument that homosexuality is no different than race.

So if if we're going to say that that there's a problem with homosexuality, then it's no different than saying there's a problem with, for example, being black, being African-American. Are they the same? Are they different? How do you respond to that kind of argument? First of all, I would ask them, what do they mean by that? Why how are they the same and how are they different and see if they can detect that? Right. In reality, behaviors are choices, but race is not a choice.

Right. I mean, you'll find many former homosexuals. You'll never find a former African-American.

Right. Because behaviors are choices and race. There's nothing that says that because you have a particular skin color, you have to act in a certain way.

Right. Sexual behavior is a behavior. That's what it is.

Now, the reasons you might want to engage in that behavior, that's another question. You know, were you born this way, that kind of thing? Well, actually, there's no way of knowing you're born with anything other than your genitalia because you don't know anything when you're born. So to say I was born this way is a speculation.

There's no way of knowing. But secondly, all you can do is look back and say, well, I first started having these feelings at a particular time. OK, was that nature or nurture? Now, when it comes to is it nature, were you were you born with some sort of genetic component to act in this way? The answer is the studies don't really show that.

In fact, they show the opposite. Identical twin studies don't show that if the people with the same DNA are going to wind up in the same place with regard to their sexual orientation, that's not what it shows. And of course, if people do have the gay gene, how could they be passed on? Because generally homosexuals don't reproduce.

And from an evolutionary perspective, which I don't agree with, I don't believe in evolution. But if it is true, evolution would have selected out same sex attraction by now because it has no survival, a goal to it. There's no there's no survival benefit to it.

When you look at what's going on in the world of same sex attraction, it appears to me more brought on in most cases by some sort of broken relationship with the same sex parent that influences someone's desire to have same sex attraction. I had a friend of mine who's a very well-known megachurch pastor. And with regard to lesbianism, he said to me, he said, I've never met a lesbian who wasn't sexually abused.

In other words, you can understand why a woman would not want to have relations with a man if they were, say, abused by their dirty uncle or their stepfather or whatever. You can understand how that might be a trigger for them to say, I don't want to have anything to do with men. But look, even if there is an orientation, an inborn orientation, that doesn't necessarily make the behavior correct.

As I mentioned before, we all have an inborn orientation, it seems toward negative behavior, toward selfishness rather than selflessness. It's easy to be bad. It's hard to be good.

And to say that I was born this way, you have to accept what I do would be like somebody saying, if they bash gays, it would be if they were to say, look, I was just born with the anti-gay gene, so don't blame me, right? Nobody would accept that kind of behavior or that kind of excuse. Or if someone were to say, look, I'm just born with the alcohol gene, so alcoholism is okay for me, right? I'm born with the anger gene, so if I punch you in the face, sorry, that's just my orientation. Nobody would accept that.

But somehow when it comes to sex, we always look the other way and we say, oh, no, if you have that orientation, you have to engage in it. The truth is, we're all born with an orientation toward bad behavior. Exactly.

Right. The question is, what are we going to do to fight our orientation toward bad behavior? Exactly. Yeah.

And it's always fascinating to watch young, young children, infants, you know, the word of the day, one of the words of the day is narcissistic, right? Anyone we don't like is narcissistic. You want to see narcissism. Watch a bunch of infants with their little toys.

Oh, yeah. Take toys from others and hit the person who has the toy they want. That sort of thing.

You don't have to teach a two-year-old to say mine. He already knows that. You have to teach a two-year-old to share because we're oriented in that direction.

And that's as Augustine famously said, depravity is the propensity to sin and the necessity to die. We are just born with it because of Adam's ultimate sin. And yet, thanks be to God, God came into the world to take that ultimately away from us by taking our punishment on himself through the sacrifice of Christ.

And we can be free from the punishment of sin by accepting what Christ has done. Amen. So tell me this.

Do gay activists tend to support therapy for unwanted same-sex attraction? Oh, come on, Desert Rose. You know the answer to that. Why are you bringing that silly question up? Come on.

Isn't it amazing that you can only be counseled into it but never out of it? Yes, exactly. And then this is the big hypocrisy with it because you hear people in the same-sex world saying, oh, look, we're born this way. We would never choose this, right? It's a hard life to be same-sex attracted.

Yet, as soon as someone somehow works their way out of it, they're looked at with derision by the people who just said, it's a hard life. I wish I could get out of it. When somebody does get out of it, they're all mad because that just destroys their argument that, oh, there's nothing I can do.

I have to behave this way because I'm born this way. And now, with transgenderism really becoming very popular, it shows you the problem with the entire so-called community where they try and say, we're born this way. But now, just 10 minutes later, they're saying, I can go to bed as a man and wake up as a woman.

Whatever happened to born that way? And that's why there's one of the reasons there's kind of a civil war within the so-called LGBTQ community because if the T's get their way that there are no genders, then the L's, the G's, and the B's don't exist. Because how can you be lesbian, gay, bisexual, even heterosexual, for that matter, if there are no genders? All of those so-called identities presuppose fixed genders. Without those genders, you couldn't be any of those things.

So there's a bit of a civil war going on in that community because the T's are making it impossible to be a lesbian, gay, bisexual, even heterosexual. And the feminists don't like it either. Because if there are no genders, there are no women.

If there are no women, there are no women's rights. This is why J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, who probably is liberal on most things, but when it comes to transgenderism, particularly this claim that a trans man is really a man or a trans woman is really a woman, and she's right, and she's standing firm against all this. Yeah, it's good to see her standing firm.

Someone else who has spoken out and then recanted, but now I think they're back to their original position is Martina Navratilova, who was a very, very well known. She was the number one female tennis player in the world and very well known when I was growing up and known not only for her tennis, but for being a lesbian when she said that a man can't just become a woman and a woman can't just become a man because then the same-sex attraction of women to women is no longer legitimate because what's a woman? She received a lot of hateful responses and then so she recanted and said, sorry, I was insensitive, I'll train myself, I'll educate myself, more like the same old statement that everybody seems to make. I don't know where they get that statement, but they all look the same.

But then I think she was probably inspired by J.K. Rowling and then started coming back and saying, well, wait a minute, no, I really do think that there's a problem with this transgender issue. And by the way, it's the people making all the noise who are a very small minority. Most people understand this is madness, that you can't change your gender, that you are racing women.

It logically makes no sense and biologically makes no sense, morally makes no sense, and pro creatively, obviously, makes no sense. This is a delusion and it's being perpetrated on people through social media. It's a social media contagion.

That's why there's been a 10,000, well, actually a four to 6,000 percent increase in young girls claiming to be boys over the past decade or so. Gender dysphoria used to just affect one out of every 10,000 men, men who thought they were women. But now, in some locales, according to Abigail Schreier, who wrote that seminal book, Irresistible Damage, about four years ago, about the transgender craze, she said she's been to some schools where 30 percent of the girls claim to be trans.

You go, how did we go from one in 10,000 men to 3,000 in 10,000 women, claiming it's all social media driven? So there's an article in this publication called Sexualology that identifies similarities between trans identification and anorexia as maladaptive attempts to resolve developmental conflicts in female adolescents. And I was reading that this morning, actually, and it's really remarkable, the similarities. And I had a lot of friends growing up in sports, especially, who were anorexic and bulimic.

You know, at that time, that was kind of the dominant way for females to deal with body image issues, puberty issues and that sort of thing. But now, saying you're changing your gender has become kind of a new way that's not only accepted, but it's actually celebrated now. So in this regard, it's actually more dangerous than anorexia.

It was it was also it was Dr. Paul McHugh from John Hopkins University, a psychiatrist who actually back in the 70s was one of the ones that started sex change operations at John Hopkins and later shut him down because of the damage they did. He points out that anorexia is almost a perfect analog to transgenderism. And if you think about this, it's true.

If you have a mismatch between your psychology and your biology or between your psychology and your physical stature, the way to fix that is not to change your physical stature, but to change your psychology. Right. For example, if an anorexic says, look, I'm overweight, I need liposuction, you would never affirm that you would never say, oh, honey, yeah, you are.

Let me let me get you liposuction. You would say, honey, I'm sorry, your mind's playing tricks on you. We need to get you nutrition.

Let's get you some mental health care here. You would never affirm them in their anorexia. You would try and change their mind, right, not affirm them in their delusion.

And yet when it comes to sex, we say, oh, no, let's affirm them in their delusion. I mean, if you're if your daughter came to you and said, mom, dad, I'm a mermaid, you wouldn't take her off the coast and drop her in the ocean. Would you? I mean, you would say, honey, your mind is playing tricks on you.

We need to get you some psychiatry. We need to get you some mental health care. Right.

And in most cases, you don't fix a mental problem with surgery. You fix it with psychiatry, with counseling, with prayer, sometimes with medication. But you would never give surgery to fix a mental health problem in most cases anyway.

And yet here we are trying to fix a mental health problem by removing perfectly healthy sex organs. Right. This is madness.

It is. It is. Absolutely.

Would you mind telling us about what happened to you when you were working for Cisco? I thought that was really significant for our day and age. Yeah. Well, in order to put myself through seminary, when we moved to Charlotte in 1993, I had to make money for the family.

So I started doing corporate training. This is after I was out of the Navy. And for many years, I did corporate training for Fortune 500 companies, mostly sales, training, team building, leadership, that kind of thing.

And in 2011, I was doing training for Cisco and I've done that training for them for many years. Not the food people, but the computer people, the people based out in San Jose, CISCO. And what happened was I was doing leadership training and somebody in one of the leadership courses I was teaching googled my name and figured out I'd written this book.

Correct. Not politically correct. How same sex marriage hurts everyone.

That was the first edition in 2008. Long story. I'll save you all the details.

It's all in the book. Correct. Not politically correct.

Because in the next edition, I wrote about it. Basically, they fired me in the name of inclusion, tolerance and diversity for holding a diverse view. I wasn't tolerated and I was excluded for holding this diverse view, even though the view was never expressed at work.

It was just that somebody in the course who claimed to be same sex attracted said Frank can't work here because he doesn't agree with same sex marriage. Despite the fact that that guy said it was one of the best courses he's ever been in. So anyway, after I was fired, I wrote a letter to John Chambers, who at the time was the president of Cisco and the CEO of Cisco.

And Chambers in 2008 was on the elect McCain Commission in California. That was the presidential election that pitted John McCain against Senator Barack Obama. They were both senators.

Right. And so he wanted McCain to win. Chambers did the CEO of Cisco.

So I wrote him a letter and I said, dear Mr. Chambers, I'm a veteran in the United States Navy. I've been working for your company for many years doing corporate training, and I appreciate your support for Senator McCain in the last election. I was fired for holding views similar to Senator McCain on same sex marriage.

Are you qualified to be working at Cisco? And so I get a phone call the next day because I FedEx the letter to his office and the attorney said, what do you want? And I said, I don't want anything other than the fact you call the dogs off other Christians because you claim to be inclusive, tolerance and diverse. And yet you're not including me. You're not tolerating me for holding a diverse view.

How does that make any sense? Now, I couldn't really sue them because I was a vendor. I was not an employee. I mean, they could fire me for any reason.

Right. But I found it quite hypocritical that they claim to be inclusive, tolerant and diverse. And yet they're firing me for this reason.

So the guy said, well, I'll set you up with the head of inclusion, tolerance and diversity, this lady by the name of Marilyn Nagel at the time. So I was on the phone call with my friend, the late Mike Adams, who was a columnist at the time, and we were talking to her. And I kept asking her questions like, how was I fired? How was I excluded, not tolerated for holding a diverse view? If you claim to be all about inclusion, tolerance and diversity, what does it even mean to be inclusive, tolerant and diverse? To find those for me.

Right. Well, she couldn't. It was just all platitudes.

And she couldn't answer any of the questions. So I looked at Mike. I said, Mike, this is not going well.

We just said, OK, thanks very much. Hung up the phone and said, we've got to go public with this. So he wrote the first column called The Cisco Kid, which you can still find online.

And then I wrote a column called Sex at Work. Do not Google that, ladies and gentlemen. Do not Google Sex at Work.

It will take you right to Harvey Weinstein's website. No, you want to go. You want to get the book correct, not politically correct, because I put the column I wrote in there.

You can also go to our website, crossexamine.org, and search for it on our website. Just type in Sex at Work in the search bar. And my basic question is this.

Why are we even talking about Sex at Work? Are we supposed to have sex at work? Why is corporate America obsessed with trying to get us to accept certain sexual practices which have nothing to do with workplace productivity? Why should we even be talking about this? Exactly. It's not like you brought it up at work. No, no, they fired you for committing a thought crime.

I mean, that's that's insane. Well, not only that, but here's what you can do when you you should be asking your H.R. director questions like this. Like questions like, hey, you know, I know we have certain policies and I'm just a little bit confused about some of them.

And I'm not blaming anybody here for anything. I think all these policies are very well intended, but I think they may have some unintended consequences. And I just want to make sure I'm in compliance.

Can I ask you, you say we're about inclusion. What does that mean? What does inclusion mean? What does tolerance mean? What does diversity mean? Do you think that we all need to have the same religious and moral beliefs about certain sexual practices in order to work here and see what they say? Now, if they say yes, you have to. They've just violated a civil rights law, right? Right.

If they say no, you can say, well, great. You can also ask them questions like, do you think it's right to try and force people to violate their conscience? Yeah, yeah. They're going to say no.

Then you can say, great, please don't ask me to violate mine. Look, as long as I treat everyone with respect, regardless of their sexual orientation, which I pledge to do because everyone's made in the image of God and they deserve respect, then you should have no problem with any of us working here. Right.

Because that's why we're here to perform a service. We're here to to create a product. We're not here to agree on every controversial political and moral issue, I hope.

If that's the case, you couldn't create a company unless you hired everybody that had the exact same views. Yeah, this is something that's personal to me coming through information technology in order to get my green card working in very liberal companies where I was pressured to wear rainbow lapel pins and all and all kinds of stuff. And I knew that it was affecting my promotions that I wasn't, you know, supportive enough of the company line on these issues.

I just want to encourage people that unless we start standing up against this, this is just going to continue and get worse. You might lose your job. I'm not saying anything I said is going to work.

You might. Right. But to borrow an insight from Rod Dreher's book, Live Not Buy Lies.

The folks that had the iron curtain come down on them after the Nazis lost World War II, Eastern Europe. There was a Catholic priest, I think he was in Czechoslovakia, who said, look, we know the Soviets are coming. They're going to put the iron curtain on curtain on us.

We need to get into small groups now because that's the only way we're ever going to solve this or survive this. And that means that if we get into trouble, if they fire us because we don't we don't tow the party line, this small group is going to come around you and support you, help you find another job or to support you until you do. We need to do that now as Christians because we can't in good conscience continue to look the other way when people are being silenced, when this kind of ideology is being pressed all over society and it's hurting particularly young people.

We can't continue to be silent about this. We have to stand up for Jesus and take the hits that come. But we can also protect ourselves as well by getting engaged in small groups who will support us when this kind of thing happens.

Yeah, I love those comments. I like any kind of strategic thinking about this. I guess my position is more I don't want to be an easy target, but I also accept that I have to be faithful if these things come up.

Right. And as you well know, the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF out there in Phoenix, they come to the aid pro bono of Christians that have their religious liberties curtailed either in the public square or in the private sphere like a corporation. So if you are actually singled out for this, they'll come alongside you just like they have like Jack Phillips, the guy out there in Colorado, right? He's been through the ringer, but he hasn't paid a cent in his defense because ADF comes behind them.

That's why we personally donate to ADF because they'll support you in the court of law on these issues. Excellent. I have one question about that.

So about these, the bakers, the florists, the wedding photographers, even the Mozilla CEO, Brandon Eich, who got hammered from making a pro marriage donation. I have a lot of Christian friends who say I am so loving that I would go to a gay wedding and for these businesses who get dragged into court, you know, they should just go ahead and participate in these same sex weddings. So what are your thoughts about people who say that these Christian business owners are denying service, they're discriminating, and they deserve to be dragged into court and have their homes and businesses threatened? They're not discriminating because somebody identifies as LGBTQ.

They're saying they can't participate in a ceremony or give their artistic insights or artistic talents to something that they know is against God's will. That's what they're saying. And people like Baronelle Stutzman, who was the florist in Washington State, she served the couple that sued her for years with flowers.

She wasn't against serving people, but she was against promoting their viewpoint with her own talents. I would ask, say you had an LGBTQ identified t-shirt maker, should an LGBTQ t-shirt maker be compelled to create t-shirts that say God hates, which is what that abominable Westboro Baptist Church, which isn't a real church, would have those kinds of t-shirts printed up. Should that person be forced to do that? My answer is no.

Exactly. Right? No, you should not be forced to support something that you find morally abhorrent. And so it cuts both ways.

And no, and no, you shouldn't go to a gay wedding. Why? Because that's not loving. You're approving of something, not only you approving of something that God disapproves of, you may be approving of their own damnation by staying in a lifestyle that God says you will not inherit.

You will not inherit the kingdom of God. Why would you do that? When you go to a wedding, what you're pledging to do, why you're there, it's not just to celebrate, but to be a support for the couple as they go through life because marriage is hard. You need people to come around you and support you to stay in a marriage when it becomes difficult.

That's why you go to a wedding. It's not just to celebrate. And how can you as a Christian pledge to try and keep people living in sin in sin? And in fact, if you look at 1 Corinthians 5, Paul talks about a man who's basically sleeping with his stepmother.

And what does he say to him? Oh, why don't we arrange a marriage? No, he doesn't say that. He says expel the immoral brother, a little bit of leaven or a little bit of yeast will leaven the whole loaf. Get this guy out of here.

Hopefully he'll come to his senses and you can welcome him back. There's only one type of person that is not welcome in a church. It's not people who are same sex attracted.

It's people who claim that they're a Christian and that known sin in the Bible is no longer sin. Whether it's sleeping with your stepmother, whether it's in a same sex relationship, whether it's adultery. I mean, would we say to somebody who said that adultery was a good thing, but I'm a Christian and I commit adultery, would we say, oh, yeah, you ought to stay in the church? Oh, yeah, you're fine.

No, we would say you need to be church disciplined. So it's crazy that people don't think this stuff through. Yeah.

So mental health comes up a lot with regard to transgenderism and whether or not someone should transition. Or, you know, what we often hear people say to parents, doctors are saying to parents, well, would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son, for example, if their daughter says they feel like a boy and want to transition. Does transitioning cause a decline in mental health or is transitioning the result of poor mental health? How would you evaluate mental health given your study on this issue? Yeah, the study seemed to show, and this is all in the book, correct, not politically correct, that about two thirds of the people that claim to be trans have a prior mental health condition.

In other words, there are comorbidities. For some, it's autism. For some, it's depression.

For some, it's trauma of some kind. For some, it's anxiety. In other words, it's not that transgenderism has resulted in their mental health condition.

It's that their mental health condition has resulted or at least contributed to them claiming to be trans. On the suicide issue, we I just did a podcast on this last week and you can go to our podcast. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist and look up the trans suicide issues.

I can't cover the whole thing here. It's a complicated issue. The bottom line is people who claim to be anorexic have a higher suicide rate between 18 and 31 times.

I think the number is I don't have it in front of me. The general public, a trans identified person is 13 times higher, but a trans person who has gone through the surgery 10 years after the surgery, their suicide rate is 19 times higher. That's higher than the general public.

So transitioning does not help the problem. The problem is more trauma and that person, regardless of whether they transitioned or not, they need mental health care. And the same thing is true with someone who has anorexia.

And we're not helping people by suggesting that the solution to their suicide tendency is a series of surgeries or a series of cross-sex hormones or whatever that isn't going to fix the problem in most cases or on average. Are there exceptions? Of course, there are exceptions. We're talking on average here.

And so this is not something that we ought to be suggesting for people. But tragically, since medicine has become politicized, as we document in the book, correct, not politically correct, what people are doing now is they're automatically jumping, if they're youth, to hormone blockers, cross-sex hormones, and then surgery without evaluating any other comorbidity. That's why Chloe Cole says, look, I was diagnosed with autism after they cut my breasts off.

They're not going through the proper channels because politically, you're encouraged just to say, well, if somebody claims they're the opposite sex, you just need to go right into transitioning. It's actually malpractice. By the way, this is why the top UK transgender clinic or gender clinic has closed because they were five or 10 years ahead of the U.S. And what's happened now is as these youth who were transitioned as youth and couldn't give informed consent, when they became adults, they did the same thing Chloe Cole did and realized this was a huge mistake.

Now they're suing their doctors and the clinic knows they're not going to be able to survive this. In fact, countries in Europe are stopping transitions for youth because they know how damaging it is now. And here in America, we have the Biden administration basically saying, if you don't want to give your child gender-affirming care, we may take that child from you.

Yeah, exactly. This is madness. And by the way, it matters who you vote for.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's a good place for us to stop for today.

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