Kori Doty gave birth to a baby named Searyl Atli last November. The parent claims that a visual inspection at birth is unable to determine what gender a person will have or identify with later in life. As a result, the parent wants to keep Searyl’s sex off all official records.
This could be the first baby in the world not to have a gender designation. I predict that it will not be the last.
Meanwhile, ABC Newsreports that “earlymoons” are “the latest wedding trend.” More and more engaged couples are apparently taking vacations together before their wedding. One wife explained, “It was just us being able to enjoy each other’s company and just relax with no burden of kind of anything else weighing us down especially all the pre-wedding planning.”
Nowhere in the article does the writer mention the moral question of an unmarried couple vacationing together. This unfortunate omission is not surprising since cohabitation has increased by nearly 900 percent over the last fifty years.
I understand why a parent who rejects the concept of God-given biological gender would resist identifying a baby by gender. And why a couple who has no moral objection to sex before marriage would choose to live and vacation together before their wedding.
But what does the Lord think about these decisions?
Scripture clearly teaches that God creates us as male and female (Genesis 1:27). Men are warned not to act as women (Leviticus 18:22; 1 Corinthians 6:9–10) or dress as women (Deuteronomy 22:5). Scripture also forbids sex before marriage (1 Corinthians 7:2), considering it to be “sexual immorality” (cf. Acts 15:20; Ephesians 5:3; Colossians 3:5; 1 Thessalonians 4:3).
Imagine a culture where people lived according to their biological sex. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gay men make up 2 percent of the American population, but they comprise 67 percent of all new HIV diagnoses. LGBTQ persons are almost three times more likely than others to experience major depression or other mental health conditions. Some blame “homophobia” for this fact, but in Sweden, one of the world’s most “gay-tolerant” societies, married same-sex couples have nearly three times the suicide rate of their heterosexual counterparts.
Now imagine a culture where sex was restricted to marriage. In America, 85 percent of women who have abortions are unmarried. This means that more than 50 million babies aborted in America were conceived out of wedlock. Research shows that children of unmarried mothers are far more likely to live in poverty than children of married parents. They experience more family instability and have more problem behaviors and more trouble finishing school.
We are all broken people in need of God’s grace. He loves us where we are, as we are (Romans 5:8). But as my wife noted in her latest blog, “Tolerance is not grace if it offers a person permission to remain in their sin.”
It is loving and right to warn people when they are wrong (1 Timothy 5:20). And “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin” (James 4:17).
Jim Denison, Ph.D., speaks and writes on cultural and contemporary issues. He produces a daily column which is distributed to more than 113,000 subscribers in 203 countries. He also writes for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Post, Common Call, and other publications.
