The Missouri Senate left early for spring break, hung up on the latest proposal that is part of the constant process of trying to determine who we are.
Senators had been locked in a two-day filibuster on a bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors.
It’s never easy to classify people and people’s rights as we learn that human beings are more varied and more complicated than we think. The issue has been summed up by Catholics for Choice:
The Catholic hierarchy teaches that God created a binary system of male and female bodies that are supposed to complement each other. They believe that women and men are equal in worth and dignity, yet their physical and anatomical differences are evidence that God intends different roles and purposes for them in church, society and the family. This system not only reinforces women’s suffering but oversimplifies the complexity of gender identity, erasing whole communities of people made in God’s image.
Men are always awarded power, authority and dominance, women are relegated to the roles of service, nurturing and adoration, and non-binary or gender non-conforming people are not even recognized.
Catholics for Choice believes that God’s creation is far more complex. We do not accept that an individual’s purpose is bound by biology or anatomy, and the notion that sex is a binary of male and female is scientifically inaccurate. We work towards a world that treats all people equally regardless of sex, gender identity, or gender expression.
It’s not just the Catholic Church that is divided by this issue philosophically. Several Protestant fath organizations divided on the issue of slavery. Another split on the issue of instrumental music in worship. Today’s divisions, philosophically as well as structurally, seem to be on issues of gay marriage or other gay rights.
This is not new to our nation. What’s happening is that we again are at a point where we are re-defining human beings. We have never been able to see each other—as Catholics for Choice put it—as a whole community of people made in God’s image.
African Americans got the 14th Amendment in 1868 saying they were equal citizens under law. The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, gave women the right to vote. Native Americans were declared American citizens in 1924. In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled black and white children could go to school together. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination in hiring because of religion. Inter-racial marriage became legal in 1967. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 eliminated race-based real estate covenants. Gay marriage became legal in 2015.
Now we are wrestling with how to recognize a different kind of identity, the non-binary individual. Once again, some of the arguments are based on religion and doctrine versus science, society, and self-identity.
We are more complicated as a species than we sometimes want to admit. Always have been. As a society we’ve always had problems dealing with those who are different and reconciling ourselves that even different people have unalienable rights, too.
A generation from now, maybe two, some of our descendants will look at our times and ask, “What were they thinking?” in the same way we look at our previous generations and wonder about the race and gender issues that bedeviled them.
Will they still be fighting about what rights people have who are in some way different from the majority of them?
Utopia will always be far away as long as we find ways to define ourselves by our differences