“Gender ideology” took center stage at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, D.C. And side stage. And student mixer. In each instance, it was used as a handy catchall: Objecting to “gender ideology” allows Christian conservatives to consolidate all their objections to treating LGBTQ people with dignity into one scary talking point.
VVS is the annual conference of the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins’ conservative advocacy and \ lobbying organization with the White House’s ear. President Donald Trump has spoken at the summit in the past, as has Steve Bannon. This year, Vice President Mike Pence gave the keynote address following evangelical and conservative darlings like the Benham Brothers (house flippers and sons of Operation Save America’s Flip Benham), Michele Bachmann, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, David Daleiden (of Planned Parenthood hit-video fame), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Masterpiece baker Jack Phillips, and many others.
The turn to “gender ideology” marks a change for this conference and for conservative talking points in general, which in the past have focused more directly on bathroom bills and specious fears for the safety of children. If you’re not familiar with the term, that’s not surprising. More popular with European conservatives, “gender ideology” as a conservative rallying cry has only grown in domestic U.S. circles in the past year or two. Among conservatives, “gender ideology” encompasses a broad range of horrors: LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination laws, transgender-inclusive school and ID-document policies, and comprehensive sex education, to name a few.
To many evangelical Christians, who composed the majority of the audience at the evangelical-led Values Voter Summit, “gender ideology” contradicts Biblical complementarity, the idea that God made man and woman to serve their own roles and to fit together, literally and figuratively. Speakers also mentioned “teleology,” the philosophy that a phenomenon can be explained by the purpose it serves, in this case twisted into a pseudo-scientific justification to oppose same-sex marriage because it defies the “purpose” of marriage: to procreate. At the student mixer on Friday night, Chelsea Patterson Sobolik, author of Longing for Motherhood, spoke about her story of struggling with childlessness in a culture that prizes fertility. She told the young people in attendance that every one one of our cells is coded as XX or XY; there are no other options.
Rather than ginning up support around specific topics, the broader lens of “gender ideology” allowed speakers to talk about a range of theoretical harms to religious freedom if politics are permitted to be overrun by the “new secular orthodoxy” of sexual orientation and gender identity, as Emilie Kao of the Heritage Foundation called it during her presentation on religious liberty. Read more via Rewire