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Should I Provide My Preferred Pronouns When Asked by a Judge During Jury Duty?

#STRask — Stand to Reason
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Should I Provide My Preferred Pronouns When Asked by a Judge During Jury Duty?

January 8, 2024
#STRask
#STRaskStand to Reason

Questions about whether we should provide our preferred pronouns during jury duty when a judge asks for them and how to respond to a Christian who says it’s kind to use a person’s preferred pronouns and that not using them is unkind, unloving, and judgmental.

* When a judge asks me to provide my preferred pronouns in a courtroom during jury duty, is that the wrong place to resist providing them?

* How should I respond to a Christian who says it’s kind to use a person’s preferred pronouns, that by not doing so I’m being a hypocrite, unkind, unloving, and judgmental, and that not all translations of the Bible say God made male and female?

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Transcript

This is Stand to Reason's hashtag-STRask podcast with Amy Hall and Greg Cockel and we thank you for listening. We do. We also thank you for sending in your questions.
We always appreciate hearing from you. And today we are starting with a question from Jordan. I've been to jury duty before where the judge asked everyone, including jurors, to provide a message to the judge.
I don't think so. There's no authority that the courtroom has over you in that regard. It's just a convention.
And that's like being asked. Do you prefer to be called Mr. or or rather Mrs. or Ms. So there's two variations.
Of title that one might.
The court doesn't care. What it's doing is trying to conform to a social pattern that is highly controversial and offensive to a lot of people, but nevertheless, that's what the court is doing.
And so I think it's entirely appropriate to say what I've suggested to say on the air and also on street smarts in the chapter on the issue of gender.
It's just simply say, I don't have a preferred pronoun. I have a sex. I'm male.
So all you have to say.
If you say my preferred pronouns are he and him, if you're a male, then what you're doing is saying that those pronouns are what you prefer rather than the appropriate pronouns to match your physical sex. And what we want to do is we want to restore the or at least try to restore as much as possible the standard understanding and meaning of those words that are meant to describe somebody's sex, not their sexual ideation contrary to their physical sex.
That's why I suggest saying, well, I don't have any preferred pronouns. Basically, you're alerting them to you're not playing along with that narrative. I have a sex.
I'm male.
So now the judge might say, well, what are your preferred pronouns? He might press it again. I said, I don't have any preferred the pronouns that are appropriate to use for me are the ones that are consistent with my sex, which is male.
And I just leave it at that. I can't imagine you're going to get any more pushback than one more attempt to conformity and you and you might and the judge might say, I don't know. And now look, the judge says, I'm going to hold you in contempt of court.
If you don't give me your preferred pronouns. And then then you got to make a choice.
That would be a radical abuse of power, obviously.
But the response would be, Your Honor, you're asking me something, asking me for something I do not have.
I do not have preferred pronouns. My pronouns that are appropriate for me are not what I prefer.
They're what is appropriate.
And that's the way I understand pronouns. I don't know.
He said, if you don't answer my question, I'm going to hold you in contempt. That's when you could say, OK, well, I'm an ampersand.
I'm joking, of course.
Just go along with it. Just say, OK, he, him, if you're a male.
And, but I think it's appropriate to make the point and it's inappropriate for the judge to press the city further because it has no bearing on courtroom procedure of any kind at all.
It is just social engineering.
But it does no good to get in trouble with it with a judge that that has the power to punish you immediately. I don't know if you're willing to take it.
Well, it just depends on what the punishment is. If you are making your case and then you're threatened with punishment, I would rather say he him rather than get $1,000 fine. Because I've already made my point and it's pretty clear what I'm being doing.
What's happening is somebody is twisting my arm and forcing me to say something that I don't, that I'm not.
I don't know why with the judge, you could do that. But I think it's better just to say what I offered.
I think that's been in a mentoring letter and certainly since all the ground in the chapter on gender, sex and marriage.
So, but it's very simple. I don't have preferred pronouns.
I have a sex. I'm a male. And just leave it at that.
What would you normally refer? How would you normally refer to a male as a hero, him? That would be appropriate since I am a male. Maybe that's the way of giving a pronoun, but tying it to your sex and not to your preference. And that's what we're trying to avoid here.
But I don't think it's a hill to die on with the judge. I have a suspicion, though, if you make the point and it gets even just as scotch contentious, they're not going to approve you for the jury.
So that might be a hidden blessing.
But if the judge gets in a certain sense, wants to play rough, well, he is the judge and he is the authority in that circumstance.
And I just go along with it at that point and not making it more fuss because you've already communicated to everybody else that whatever it is that you're going to say to please the judge is arm twisting by the judge. I think, I mean, obviously people would have to decide when it got to that point what they're willing to undergo, but there's nothing wrong with continuing to say, look, I don't mean any disrespect, but this is my belief.
And I'm not going to say something I don't believe because you're making me do it. And I'm sorry that it has to be. I mean, you could do it very nicely if you wanted to go all the way with this.
Yeah, that's a great thing. I don't mean to be disrespectful. Respect.
Well, that's good. But what my suggestion is at this point, don't say this is my belief, but say, this is my religious conviction.
Just throw that one in because now it becomes a religious matter that he's persecuting you for if it gets pushed further, but you don't have to take it further.
You could just say that.
This is my religious conviction. Of course, the point is that it's not your religious conviction.
It's your conviction about the nature of reality.
Right. Yeah.
So if you if you if you don't, if you want to, you know, still be a bit obnoxious, just go to Google and find a kind of a creative pronoun preference out of the 60 pronouns or 60.
Gender identities or so that apparently Google has identified. You choose one.
Like I said, ampersand. You might say, Hey, that's not that you try to be smart with the court. No, it's checking Google, Google it.
There are a lot of people who think they're they're ampersand. So what do you want to use? What do you might end up in contempt of court that way too? So either way, either way. It is so it is so interesting.
I my wife and I were taught walk watching a movie last night. It was a series on on on Amazon Prime.
I think it's called Generation War.
It's kind of booked as a German band of brothers. So it's about Germans fighting the Russians and from the German perspective.
But I mean, that doesn't take anything away from the drama and the intensity of it and what's going on and in that there's a woman that gets shot because she's telling other people that we can't win this war.
So she's given her opinion contrary to the narrative. And so she is being on patriotic and they lined her up on a wall and they shot her after a couple of weeks of imprisoning or they just shot her. Of course, this is an extreme application in that movie because this is the kind of thing that happened there, but the same in principle, the same kind of things are going on now.
If you don't use the right affirm the right narrative, then you're going to get punished. Nobody's getting shot now, obviously. And I don't actually don't think it'll ever come to that.
But by the same token, I don't think anybody expected what ended up happening in Germany to come to that either.
And especially the Jews, they did not expect it. So this is in kind.
It is similar in kind to the thing that was happening in the film and portrayed there regarding the Third Reich.
So it's appropriate, I think, obviously to push back. But again, you have to decide what hill you're going to die on.
And if I got pressured on this, I would just go along. I give a pronoun that's consistent. Hear the pronouns that are consistent with my sex, he, him.
Is that work for you, Judge? Your honor, rather?
Well, yeah, you could just say that's the English language. I don't understand why you're asking. But whatever you do, you have to remember to be clear and to be calm and to be respectful with the way you explain what you're doing because this is a thing.
It's a small form of civil disobedience, but you do it in a way that's not. You don't add a finish. It's not rude.
Right. And do you accept whatever consequences come your way, depending on how far you're willing to go, but you just have to do it in a way that's very clear.
And calm.
All right, let's go on to a question from Kara.
It bugs me, though, to think that judges would ask that question. It really bugs me.
It has nothing to do with the right. It's a pure abuse of power.
That's all it is.
Anyway, okay, moving on.
I wonder if they in the past have had people complain because they assumed people's pronouns. I mean, I shouldn't laugh, but everything is so geared towards not getting sued or causing trouble or whatever.
So they think the easiest way forward is to get everyone's pronoun so that nobody's offended.
Yeah, but all kinds of people are offended. Exactly.
That only applies to the left. And you know why is because when the left doesn't get their way, they break things and they burn things and they hurt people. Well, and that's so that's the thing.
They're they're only thinking about not offending the left. Yeah. Yeah.
So you just, you know, just be clear and calm.
Okay, so here's the question from Kara. How do I address another Christian who says it is kind to use preferred pronouns? They say by you not using the preferred pronoun.
That means you're being a hypocrite, unkind, unloving and judgmental. They also say not all translations of the Bible state God made male and female. So there's two questions there.
Well, the question is what does the text actually say, not whether you can find some kind of super flexible translation that fits your theology. I mean, that's silly. I can't even imagine that there could be one that doesn't say male and female.
I can't imagine either.
But nevertheless, just because you can find one, that's a problem with the translator. It's not a problem with it.
It isn't like you're arguing maybe God didn't really say male and female. According to these people, he didn't. Well, look at the text.
This is this is not that silly. Okay, it's just silly. Somebody's going to peel that way.
All right. So let's just dispatch that right away. The second thing is that the basically, well, I would want to ask the question, how is it hypocritical? How is it unkind? How is it whatever all the charges are? One clarification.
I can see how they might construe it as unkind because what I'm doing is not what the other person wants.
But if it's unkind to the other person, why is it unkind to the one whose pronouns are being pronounced? I'm sorry, the one who's being being bullied into using pronouns that they are inconsistent with their convictions. Why are you being unkind to me by forcing me to live by their truth? In fact, this is a line that I'm not sure if it's in the book or not, but streets and arts, but it's one that can be used.
So that's is that her truth that she is a man and that we should use male pronouns with her? Yeah, that's her truth. Well, then why are you asking me to live by her truth instead of by my own truth? And what you're doing there is you're using their odd way of thinking about truth against them. You're just deploying it against them.
And what I'm going to do since all of these streets, so to speak, are one way. They only are meant to favor one side. We can't hurt their feelings.
What about hurting my feelings?
We can't go against their truth. What about going against my truth? We can't be intolerant about them. Why can't why is it okay then to be intolerant about me towards me? This works both ways.
One thing that I do make in the book, though, is that it is not an example of loving your neighbor to do this because what you're doing is promoting a lie that which lie ends up harming them. And you could tell that simply by the suicide rates of these people and or the attempted suicide and the suicide rates. It's very high.
It's unbelievably had 20 times the regular.
Now, people are going to say, see what your Christians are doing. See what you're doing.
You know, would you rather have? You would you have a living girl, if your child is a boy who's got gender dysphoria or a dead boy.
This is the way they talk. This is one of their rhetorical flourishes.
The reason that people are committing suicide is not because they're a very small amount that of the very small fraction of the population who you're not allowed to hear from anyway disagrees with this whole movement. Everybody else on the planet is aggressively promoting an affirmation of this view. How could it possibly be that this little sliver of people that never get to get heard because their side does get reported in a favorable favorable way are the ones responsible for all these people killing themselves or attempting to kill themselves? No, the statistics are the same in Sweden.
As they are here, and I footnote that in the book, and Sweden is much more saying what about this whole issue, obviously, than we are in this country. So these are the it is not kind to promote a lie that does damage to the person who's believing it. Let me say that again, it is not kind to promote a lie that does damage to the person who believes the lie.
And that's basically what we're being told. Oh, it's kind. It's nice.
Okay. And in fact, I remember in the section where we talk, I talked about this in the book, you had a lot of edits for me regarding this issue that I put it in the most charitable way, which is, I think the word kind is the word that you suggested.
And of course, the context, I explained why it wasn't kind to lie about this or to promote falsehood and then the whole narrative.
So it's just crazy out there. And this is why it's so, you know, the people who are on the left, excuse me, including Christians, can appeal to certain virtues or certain politically correct behaviors as being virtuous when they're not. And this is one of them.
Just very quickly about the translation part of this, it would be very easy just to say, which translation did you have in mind? Because it's hard to know where to even go with that because I can't, I honestly can't imagine if you look at what is it Matthew 19 and Genesis two or three or Genesis one and two by Jesus, the first one on male and female. That's the first thing he says. And the second one is the two become one flush.
Okay.
I can't imagine that in both of those that neither of them in one translation would translate it as male and female. So I think I would just ask, what did you have in mind? Because I don't think that's actually accurate.
Sure. Now, as far as the other part, what's interesting here is you have somebody who, Kara says, is another Christian. So you have something to appeal to here.
And that is obviously what is God said about love because what this comes down to as you noted, Greg, is what is the definition of love.
And so if you have a Christian, you can go to the Bible and very clearly, I mean, even if you just go to 1 Corinthians 13, where it talks about how love does not delight in your choice and on right. How does God define love in the Bible? And how is not affirming reality, loving, just making someone feel better.
That's never the way.
That's never the way things go in the Bible. It's never what God recommends.
But here's where the problem is. I doubt your friend knows the Bible very well.
And so it's going to be really hard to talk about big picture ideas in the Bible if you can't go to a specific verse.
And likely, even if you find a specific verse, if somebody's committed to this idea of the culture's idea of love, I doubt quoting a verse or two is going to change that person's mind.
So all you can do is just say, look, God has explained to us what it looks like to love. And he did that in his commandments.
And Paul says, you know, that it's in other places too. But but he says that the first John or one of the John's second John third John one of those first John wouldn't be Paul.
Right.
So it's in addition to him. Paul talks about, I think it's in in Romans somewhere, but he talks about how the law was given that for the sake of love, this is why we don't commit adultery, why we don't steal all these things.
And, and first John, and I think maybe one of the other two, John says that this is how we love people by following God's commandments.
So that's how we know what it means to love. We can't go by what the world says about love. You know, Jesus is very clear that the world is against him.
If you're going with the majority of the world, then the chances are that you are not actually actually acting in a loving manner. We need to look at how Jesus loved people. And at that point, they're probably thinking, well, Jesus would have done it.
So then maybe what you could do is say, look, why don't we just leave this aside for a minute?
Why don't we just read through the Gospels together? You and me, let's look at who Jesus is. Let's look at what he actually says. And, and then let's go from there.
I think that's the only place you can start because they need a bigger picture of who God is than what the culture says about who God is.
Well, we're out of time, Greg. Whoa.
That was fast. So thank you, Jordan and Cara, for those great questions. If you have a question, send it on Twitter or X as it's so cold.
I have such a hard time saying that. It's hard to change that after so long. But you can send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask.
Or you can go to our website at str.org. Just find our hashtag STRask podcast page and you'll find a link there where you can send us your question. We look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocoa for Stand to Reason.

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