This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, April 30, 2024
Can we come to some agreement on a definition of the word “discrimination.” A lot of people are throwing that word around and I am not sure they know what it means. I am a Gen Xer, my generation and every generation younger than me have had it drilled into our heads from every source imaginable since as far back as we can remember that discrimination is bad. Whatever mistake you make in your life, for the love of God, please don’t discriminate! To all my sisters and brothers from Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, today I am sharing our dirty little secret with the whole world. We discriminate every minute of every day. Our generations are the most discriminating generations this world has ever known because we have more choices to make than anyone else has ever had.
I looked up the definition of the word discrimination in Websters Dictionary, and here it what it told me: “a prejudiced or prejudicial outlook, action or treatment i.e. racial discrimination.” So in the definition of the word discrimination, we use another evil buzz word: prejudice. Prejudging something is the greatest of all social faux pas that a person can commit. That is what my generation and younger have been told since we were old enough to understand words.
Are there evil forms of discrimination in the world? Are there ugly prejudices that we can hold? Of course there are. But the worst part of discrimination is we only allow certain varieties of it to exist and because of this imbalance of what discrimination is punished and what discrimination is required, we have become stupid as a culture.
There are plenty of examples that I could site here as to why our inability to discriminate against certain things makes us stupid, but I need only one example. In 1972, the Department of Education passed what is known today as Title IX. What Title IX said is that there will be no more sex discrimination in education. In theory, Title IX is a very good thing because it appeared to level the playing field so that people would be given advantages based solely on their qualification, talent and hard work.
In application, I believe that Title IX has been mostly good because it has opened up opportunities for women that were far more difficult before. And let me be clear, if someone out there is working to cure a disease that I may someday have, I could not possibly care less about their gender because I want the world’s most brilliant person fighting to save me.
The most controversial application of Title IX is in athletics. The rule was that there had to be equal opportunity for both boys and girls in sports. I assume that this means that sports is considered a part of education now, a debate I am not going to get into here. However, there had to be as many opportunities for girls to play sports as there were for boys and for the most part I agree that both boys and girls should have their own leagues to play sports. And this is where the problem comes in.
Let me show you how the inability to discriminate destroys anything it touches. Right now, having just passed the House of Representatives and is now being considered by the Senate, there is a revision to Title IX that is so mind numbingly insane that I can’t believe this is the world we live in today. The revision changes Title IX from protecting from sex discrimination to protecting gender identity discrimination, this are not the same thing. What this means that everyone gets to play in whichever league they identify with regardless of their actual sex. This will mean the end of girls’ sports.
Not only will all the accolades for girls be taken up by boys, so will every scholarship dollar. This revision to Title IX will destroy everything Title IX was created for in the first place and the real kicker here is that this is happening because no one will allow the most basic discrimination to happen.
Everybody and I mean absolutely everybody deserves the chance to play sports. We have leagues to provide appropriate opportunities to play based on skill levels, ages, and locations. This will provide both boys and girls locker rooms where they are safe, competition that is fair, and rules that allow the games to be orderly. With this Revision to Title IX that will undoubtedly soon be passed by the Senate and then signed into law by the President, we have decided that providing these opportunities for everyone is less important than not discriminating.
Please, for the love and safety of our daughters, decide that protecting locker rooms is worth the most basic of discrimination.