Encountering Trans-Gender Tactics of Intimidation

July 4, 2024

David Montgomery

Thank you for reading this article. Serving on the Easton Town Council has created sufficient distraction to keep me from concentrating on one topic long enough to write.  I am now concentrating on the subject of transgender ideology because I, along with Council President Frank Gunsallus, spent the last three Town Council meetings being berated for opposing a Pride Festival and purchase of Pride Flags by the town.  

The mobs that took over the public comment segment of our meeting were out for blood. In an article also being published in this issue, the Jeff Cleghorn commented that “This tactic – of intimidation and aggression – I see all the time by angry transgender activists who don’t get their way. Time and again, trans activists have quashed or crushed dissent and refused to allow rational conversation to occur.”

The reasons I gave for opposing the Pride Festival and flags were simple: 1. The town government has a responsibility to protect public health and safety.  2. Pride Festivals and flag displays endanger our youth by promoting the false idea that medical and pharmacological treatments to change gender will solve their teen-age emotional and social problems. I saw this as a neutral statement of a position that could be discussed rationally. Not the case.

Speaker after speaker accused me (and Frank) of bigotry, of hate speech, and of encouraging attacks on and even murder of transgender individuals. With one exception, there was no attention to the possible truth of what he and I said, the entire mob went on at length at how hurtful our remarks were to them. They inverted the adage “truth can hurt” into “if it hurts, it can’t be true.” The one direct rejoinder to my statements about gender treatments was the ad hominem argument that some of my sources were listed as hate groups by the SPLC. (Another notable group on the SPLC Hate List is the Talbot County Moms for Liberty). Speakers intentionally exceeded the Council’s 3-minute time limit by 15 minutes or more. The Talbot County Sheriff’s Department even received a complaint of a hate crime, based the Festival organizer’s claim of feeling threatened.  The complaint was rejected, because of the protection of the First Amendment and specific Maryland law, but a bias report, naming no names, had to be entered into the governor’s Hate Crime and Bias website.

Our experience was not all bad. At the most recent Council meeting, June 15, the audience was almost equally divided between critics and supporters. Several supporters rose to state that free speech goes both ways, and that Frank and I had an equal right to state our opinions and have them discussed civilly. The most eloquent was a retired Army sergeant who talked about his 22 years of service and many deployments in defense of the right of all of us to speak our minds. If our actions in taking a stand against on the Pride Festival and flags encouraged others to take the risky step of stating their opinions in public, it was all worthwhile.

Which brings me to the subject of this issue.  My first Worth Reading suggestion is an article that first appeared in the Easton Gazette by Jeff Cleghorn, who describes himself as “a gay rights advocate.” It is titled “The Truth About Queer Theory and Transgenderism” He documents at length — for that I apologize — the scientific basis for my opposition to anything that would encourage children to consider gender alteration and my statement that there is abundant evidence that gender alteration, by any means, is generally harmful.

He begins his article with the sentence “Maryland, the birthplace of transgender medicine in the United States, is again front-and-center on the transgender issue, with the unfolding scandal about medical ethics and fraud committed on vulnerable children.”  I hope you will continue and read the entire article.

But I am not finished with my own reflections. A friend suggested that my opposition to the Pride Festival violated the separation of Church and State. That surprised me, since I purposely chose an entirely secular — and by itself sufficient — reason for my opposition. Since I have spent a great deal of time in the last decade reflecting on how Christians — and Catholics in particular — should participate in the politics, I decided to write some of those reflections down.

I will start a bit indirectly. As I understand it, Federal law bans giving material support to terrorism.  In terms of our town, I think that approving a pro-Hamas march would be giving material support to terrorism.  I would deny any such proposal a public assembly permit, on both legal and moral grounds.

That is one example of the principle that it is wrong, and sometimes illegal as well, to give material support to an immoral activity.  We all make moral choices when we decide whether or not to take part in a questionable activity.   Public officials make moral choices when they pass laws and regulations that permit questionable activities.  

Approving a pro-abortion march is a clear example in my mind.  I am convinced that the unborn are human beings from the moment of conception.  Abortion is killing innocent human beings. That killing an innocent human being is wrong has been recognized in times and places far removed from Christianity.  I conclude that no one in authority can approve abortion without giving material support to the killing of babies — a gravely immoral act.  

Likewise, approving Pride Marchs, which have been taken over by transgender activists and glamorize sex change, give material support to the immoral activity of chemically and surgically mutilating children too young to make reasoned decisions.  Maybe medical opinion is divided about whether or not procedures changing sexual characteristics of children cause long term physical or emotional harm.  But applying the Precautionary Principle — or just the rule “do no harm” — requires that treatments with an unknown likelihood of causing harm should be avoided.  That would ban all surgical or chemical treatments of minors. Approving a Pride Festival that could lead children into wanting to change gender thus also gives material support to immoral activity.

There is no church and state in this.  It is the application of the universal moral principle that intentionally killing or harming the innocent is wrong.  Terrorists intentionally kill the innocent, not as collateral damage but as the purpose of their actions.  That is the difference between Israel and Hamas. Abortionists kill innocent human beings, in utero or later, as the intended purpose of their treatment (as opposed, for example, to necessary cancer treatment with the same but undesired effect).  Sex-change doctors make irreversible changes in the bodies of children who are not mature enough to make decisions of that magnitude.  No one in authority can approve events or activities that support or encourage these actions without giving material support to their immoral activities.

This conclusion does depend on understanding that there are certain moral principles that apply without exception in all times and places.  One is that it is always immoral to kill or harm an innocent human being.  That acceptance of universal moral principles has been almost eliminated from our society, and replaced with the dogma that each person can decide for him- or herself what is moral or immoral, based on his or her own feelings.  The trans movement takes that deification of individual feelings even further, by pushing the further dogma that biological sex — XX or XY chromosomes — is irrelevant and that individuals can choose freely what sex they want to be.

I use the word “dogma” purposely to make the point that the statement that sex is something anyone can and should choose for themselves independent of biological characteristics is as much a religious belief as the belief that God created each human being with a unique combination of body and soul.  The view that religion should be kept out of discussions of public policy is in effect a claim that only one, secular set of beliefs about human nature can be the basis for public decisions.

The controversy in the Easton Town Council room is just another skirmish, peaceful so far, between two definitions of what constitutes a good life.  One is individualistic, defining virtue and the purpose of life as self-fulfillment. The other has an opposite view of the path to virtue and purpose of human life, that it entails co-operating with our Creator to become what He intends us to be.  Both are religious views.

Right now the transgender religion is close to becoming the State religion of the United States, as it has become in Canada and much of Europe.  Different views are tolerated as long as they are not expressed in public or given political form.  Activists like those in Easton push against the First Amendment, which still protects us against their accusations of hate crimes, as hard as they can to silence opposing views. (Ironically, at the last Council meeting a leader of the Pride organization cited First Amendment rights in demanding the Council approve next year’s Festival)

The new state religion seems intent on emulating the Islamic practices of enforced silence and taxation that allow infidels to live in conquered countries.  Just think what would be the reaction to asking the town to purchase Sacred Heart banners to celebrate June, the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Roman Catholic calendars. 

So no, I have no problem with having my beliefs guide my actions as a legislator.  Those with opposite views do not hesitate to impose them. 

Going back to 1776, exclusion of religion from politics was not the view of the Founding Fathers.  They were convinced that common religious belief is the basis for American democracy, and did not think it would last without that foundation. Our current turmoil proves just how right they were.