Ipso facto. It’s a Latin phrase meaning an inevitable result, by the fact itself, or that a specific outcome is a direct consequence or effect of some belief or action. It’s what we’ve come to in American culture.
If you hold to traditional or biblical moral standards, you now can expect ipso facto to be called intolerant, bigot, prejudiced, discriminatory, hater, or depending upon the issue, homophobic, transphobic, or sexist.
This is now par for the course, especially given Year 2020’s wholesale rush to throw off moral codes, law and order, and common sense.
Consider March Madness. According to the author of a recent piece on Oral Roberts University’s run in March Madness, the school’s views regarding homosexuality are “wildly out of line with modern society and the basic values of human decency…prejudiced teachings and moral regressiveness…toxic notions of fundamentalism that fetishize chastity, abstinence…their anti-LGBTQ+ stance, which is nothing short of discriminatory… decrees banning homosexual conduct, stating that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and specifically banning male students from wearing makeup.” For this the author argues ORU, which “is a hotbed of institutional transphobia, homophobia with regressive, sexist policies (with) no way to separate their men’s basketball team from the dangers of their religious dogma,” should be banned from the NCAA March Madness tournament.
The author provides no actual examples of the phobias, i.e. hateful acts toward someone, that she decries, and she does not acknowledge that ORU forbids not simply homosexual activity but all sexual activity between non-married individuals. Apparently, she is unfamiliar with the First Amendment, because her values are more righteous than thou and thus trumps religious liberty. In her view it is acceptable for her to be prejudiced against Christian teaching and to deny Christians their religious freedom to hold to matters of moral conscience.
As I’ve noted before, sexual progressivism is becoming the point of the spear for the Left, a way of advancing its agenda while overpowering religious or specifically Christian traditional views of morality.
This is now becoming a growing concern for Christian colleges and universities, so ORU is not alone, and will not likely be alone going forward. In fact, along with churches, Christian colleges and universities stand in the way of the Left’s march toward acceptance of its sexually progressive, brook-no-debate orthodoxy. And it’s happening to states and other entities without overt religious commitments but with concerns about fairness in athletics. Consider North Carolina.
Whatever one thinks about ORU, the university’s articulation of its views about LGBTQ are in line with traditional Christian views of morality, and for that matter, what most of the general public considered moral until only recently.
What is called the Gay Rights and later the LGBT Movement is not something routed in antiquity but one developed just in the past 70 years, for example, some highlights:
1969 – The Stonewall Riots, NYC. Stonewall Inn a clandestine, gay club in Greenwich Village.
1973 – Homosexuality no longer considered mental illness by American Psychiatric Association.
1978 – Rainbow Flag first used in a Gay Pride parade.
1979 – first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
1980 – American Psychiatric Association added gender identity disorder to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).
1980s-1990s – AIDS.
1993 – “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” via B Clinton, allowing Gays to serve in military. Law repealed under Obama 2011.
2013 – DSM changes gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria.
2015 – Boy Scouts lift ban on transgender.
2015 – Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 US 644 (2015), same sex marriage allowed by SCOTUS.
2016 – Military allows transgender soldiers to serve openly but curtailed by President Trump 2018.
2021 – President Biden via Executive Order lifts ban on most transgender individuals serving in the military.
From a Christian point of view, the Word of God does not change and has not changed. What God considered sin or immorality before the 1970s He still does today. And it should be noted the Scripture does not say homosexual immorality is somehow a worse form of sin than heterosexual immorality.
God as Creator gave us a perfect design that met humanity’s needs. But in 2021, American culture largely embraced the tenets of the Left’s sexual progressivism in the name of personal freedom. If “consenting adults” are involved one may do what one wants and no one should judge. Any one or any organization that disagrees with this view is ipso facto a bigot and a hater, to be denied, suppressed, removed, ruined, stamped out as unworthy.
Sad to say, but this ipso facto equation is going to get worse.
© Rex M. Rogers – All Rights Reserved, 2021
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