Beyond better vibes

The world has moved on, but let’s look back to the very first episode of California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast when he sat down with conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. Among the topics discussed was the issue of transgender women competing in women’s sports. Pressed on the issue by Kirk, Newsom surprisingly agreed with his guest: “I think it’s an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. ... It is an issue of fairness. It’s deeply unfair.”

It appeared to be quite a reversal by a politician who has been a steadfast supporter of LGBTQ issues. Newsom was among the first elected officials to support gay marriage when, in 2004, as mayor of San Francisco, he ordered the city clerk to issue licenses to LGBTQ couples. This was eleven years before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. One commentator told Politico that Newsom’s podcast with Kirk was a shock wave sent through Democratic circles: “To have the governor of one of the bluest states come out and say this, saying our party has gone too far left, then it’s a permission structure for other Democrats to do this, too—to start saying publicly what people have been saying privately.”

Newsom’s about-face follows other similar comments from leading Democrats. Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago, White House chief of staff, and ambassador to Japan, recently ripped Democrats for their obsessive focus on LGBTQ issues, saying, they need to “talk less about the bathroom and more about the classroom.”

This vibe shift is undoubtedly a response to the results of the 2024 presidential election, where the arguably most successful television ad featured Vice President Kamela Harris’ support for taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for military personnel and the devastating line, “She’s for they/them. He’s for you.”

In a poll conducted in January, The New York Times found that 79% of the American people, including a majority of Democrats, believe biological men should not compete in women’s sports. Figures like Newsom and Emanuel know their party is on the wrong side of popular opinion and thus have shifted their views. Many are blaming the loud activist fringe who pulled the party so far to the left as to cost them elections.

How should Christian conservatives think about these shifts in both popular opinion and among leading figures on the left? It’s proper to have healthy skepticism about progressives’ sudden change of heart. After all, zero Democratic senators recently voted for a Senate bill that would have barred biological males from competing in women’s sports.

Yet we can also take heart that a significant majority of Americans are acknowledging reality. What they may call “common sense,” we understand to be God’s law written on the human heart and embedded in the creational design of the universe. When courageous athletes such as Riley Gaines began opposing this, even when it was unpopular, they helped move the needle forward by igniting a public debate. We should be thankful anytime elected officials are persuaded to give rhetorical support to good policy. Even if they arrive there much later than they should have.

Still, the vibe shift against transgender athletes in women’s sports is not the end of the argument. Unfairness is the most accessible argument to make against the insanity of the transgender movement, but it’s a mere symptom of a much larger social problem. It is the perverse moral architecture of the sexual revolution, which denies creational realities and exalts expressive individualism, that has led to today’s moral anarchy.

This is why Christians should not hesitate to hold fast to and declare God’s design for sexuality and marriage. Not merely to win an argument or be proven right, but out of love for our neighbors. In a sexually confused culture, people are questioning the received wisdom of progressive orthodoxy and looking for guidance on how to order their lives.

Christianity, with its high view of human dignity and the promise of bodily renewal at the end of the age, offers something more beautiful about sexuality and marriage than the cheap substitutes on offer in the world. What’s more, Christianity offers not only a cohesive worldview, but a compassionate and redeeming Savior who is making all things—especially the broken things—new.

So we should celebrate even small shifts from those who once called us bigoted for resisting unreality even as we pray and work for a day when the world rejects the false and harmful ideologies of our age and turns toward God.