Daniel Darling: A shift in rhetoric

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, April 8th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom said this about men in women’s sports, speaking with a conservative influencer.

NEWSOM: The issue of fairness is completely legit. So I completely align with you. And I think Democrats have lost that…

The comment made news and took many by surprise.

EICHER: But WORLD Opinions contributor Daniel Darling says it’s not that surprising.

DANIEL DARLING, COMMENTATOR: It appeared to be quite a reversal by a politician who has been a steadfast supporter of LGBTQ issues. California Gov. Gavin Newsom was among the first elected officials to support gay marriage when as mayor of San Francisco he ordered the city clerk to issue licenses to LGBTQ couples in 2004. Eleven years before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision.

Newsom’s about-face follows other similar comments from leading Democrats. Rahm Emanuel, former mayor of Chicago and White House chief of staff, recently said Democrats 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. Arguably, one of the most successful television ads criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’ support for taxpayer funded transgender surgeries for military personnel. The ad featured 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.And in Newsome’s home state of California, the Democratic supermajority turned down the opportunity for a similar ban. So it looks as if the rhetoric, from the left, is still mostly rhetoric.

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. It is embedded in the creational design of the universe. When courageous athletes such as Riley Gaines began speaking out, it was unpopular. But 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 has a high view of human dignity. It promises bodily renewal at the end of the age. It 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. We must also pray and work for a day when the world rejects the false and harmful ideologies of our age and turns toward God.

I’m Daniel Darling.

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