In 1973, the United States launched Pioneer 10. It was a probe of deep space, slated to go beyond the solar system. Pioneer 10 took extensive photographs of the distant planets. As it left the gravitational spheres of the Sun, Pioneer 10 carried a golden stele. Designed by NASA scientists and Carl Sagan, this plaque featured symbols indicating Earth’s position within our solar system. As an attempt to make contact with extra-terrestrial life, Dr. Sagan’s golden stele included two human figures, male and female. They are nude, indicating different sexes. And the male figure holds up his hand to indicate friendship, as well as showing his opposable thumb. Sagan’s message was a statement which gained praise in his time: It showed the human race—one—and sexes—two.
That NASA greeting card to space is controversial today. President Biden has said trans is the civil rights issue of our day. He put that statement into action when he chose Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of HHS for Health. Levine will lead the Public Health Service with its thousands of uniformed doctors, nurses, and physician assistants.
This controversy was predicted to me by the Tocqueville Fellowship. This Paris-based program sent Fellows to Washington three successive years. From 2012-2014, these French visitors tried to alert us to La Théorie du Genre. They agreed with our organization’s state-by-state campaign to save marriage as the union of one man and one woman. But they told us the expected overturn of marriage by the Supreme Court would launch a powerful drive by activists for trans ideology.
Trans activists would use a radical Supreme Court ruling to launch a worldwide campaign. They would use civil rights language to force acquiescence to all their demands. As proof, as soon as the Court acted in 2015, we saw Drag Queen Story Hours for children offered in Anne Arundel County Public Libraries.
Fulfilling the Tocqueville messengers’ prophetic words, as soon as the High Court overturned marriage in its 2015 ruling in Obergefell, candidate Donald Trump pronounced the marriage controversy over. The Supreme Court 5-4 ruling was “settled law,” he announced. The sigh of relief on Capitol Hill by congressional Republicans was heard throughout the land. No incumbent loudly protested the Obergefell decision that Justice Anthony Kennedy would make his “landmark” achievement.
To those of us who had been active for the protection of unborn children, this was deeply disheartening. We knew that eighty-five of every one hundred unborn children who are killed are those of unmarried mothers. We know marriage is their best protection.
Moreover, if Obergefell was settled law, as Trump asserted, why weren’t Roe and Casey also settled law? On the other side, those who claim Roe, Casey, and Obergefell as ‘landmarks,” continue strenuously to oppose “that eminent tribunal’s” dicta on guns, on corporate contributions to political campaigns, and environmental backtracking.
President Barack Obama used his 2010 State of the Union Address to tongue lash the Supreme Court Justices that sat robed and mute before him. President Obama was following Lincoln’s example. It was Lincoln who based his return to politics on his denunciation of the infamous Dred Scott opinion. Opposition to Supreme Court erroneous rulings has a long history in America.
Who voted for gender? When was sex abolished? Those who consult the burgeoning list of genders online will learn that in 2023, there are as many as 107. Sam Brinton was an official in the U.S. Department of Energy. Brinton identifies as “non-binary.” And Brinton insists upon being addressed by pronouns of choice—in this case they, them, theirs. Pronoun Pandemonium has been unleashed upon us.
This lurching drive will have dire consequences for the place of this “last best hope of man on earth.” If our USAID programs of foreign aid, if our U.S. military presence in 150 foreign countries, if the U.S. State Department, if our Peace Corps all become instigators for this unsettling law, the people of the Global South will vomit us out.
In a competition with Russia and China for the friendship of billions of people worldwide, we will have crippled ourselves. The message America sends to the people John F. Kennedy addressed in his Inaugural Address—those dwelling in the “huts and villages of half the world”—must not be a threat to their deepest values.
Gospodin (Mr.) Putin is already using the Biden administration’s adoption of trans ideology as his best argument for continuing his unjust war against Ukraine. He calls sex changes for children “demonic.” Stop it in Ukraine, he argues, or it will overwhelm us in Russia.
We can treat gender dysphoric persons with dignity and respect as American citizens without violating the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. We can still make a course correction. If we allow La Théorie du Genre to become America’s message to the world, we will have yielded the Global South to those who offer authoritarian regimes as the alternative to an increasingly undemocratic USA.
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