Explainer: Arkansas bans gender transition procedures for minors

What just happened?

On Tuesday, Arkansas became the first U.S. state to prohibit doctors from providing gender transition procedures for children.

The legislation, known as the Arkansas Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, prohibits any physician or other healthcare professional from providing gender transition procedures to any person under the age of 18. Additionally, it prohibits any public funds from being given directly or indirectly to any doctor, hospital, or other entity that provides gender transition services for minors.

Editor's Note

If I had to create a short list of the most important things I've done to prepare to engage pressing issues in the public square, being trained in Christian ethics by Dr. Russell Moore would be at the top of that list. This May you can join Dr. Moore, whether in person or via Zoom, for a two-day training session called ERLC Academy. The academy is for students, pastors, and Christians seeking to be equipped to engage the most important questions being debated in our society. I hope that you can join us.

This Week at the ERLC

• Russell Moore joined PBS News Hour's John Yang to encourage Christians to get the COVID-19 vaccine. 
   
• Josh Wester joined our partners at Prison Fellowship for a Twitter chat about justice reform and Second Chance Month.
   
• Jason Thacker was quoted in WORLD discussing a recent opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that has implications for the future of free speech and Big Tech. 
   
• Travis Wussow talked to Baptist Press about two recent federal court victories for sstudent faith groups that were kicked off state university campuses for requiring their leaders to be Christians.

What You Need to Read

Alex Ward with How can we understand trends of declining church membership?

America is no longer a Christian nation if one goes by the official membership rolls of churches. According to a recent study by Gallup, church membership dropped below 50% for the first time in their 80 years of studying religion. This follows a decades long trend of increasing disaffiliation, rejection, and apathy of faith by Americans.

Jared Kennedy with Are you “working on” your kids ministry?

Most children’s ministers spend more time each week thinking about getting ready for Sunday than they do thinking about the philosophy and methodology that has shaped the way they do ministry. Children’s ministers work in the ministry but on a week-to-week basis, most don’t give as much thought to what it would look like to work on the ministry. 

Jordan Wootten with How can Christians resist the ethic of outrage culture?

Outrage culture, sadly, is a phenomenon that has enticed us far and wide, even within the church. We apparently can’t help but participate in outrage culture because doing so feeds a Pharisaical self-righteousness that feels good. It coddles the pride that, unless God grants repentance, will result in disgrace and, ultimately, our destruction.

This Week in Washington, D.C.

With Congress still in recess this week, the ERLC team in Washington worked on religious freedom advocacy in the states and internationally.

• Federal courts in Michigan and Missouri recently delivered defenses for faith-based student groups on state university campuses that were discriminated against by administrators. Travis Wussow told Baptist Press in a story written by Tom Strode that the cases “highlight just how far outside the bounds of the Constitution these university administrators were acting.”
  
  The schools rebuked in court were Wayne State University in Detroit which revoked the on campus status of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the University of Iowa which violated the free speech rights of a campus group called Business Leaders in Christ. Wussow’s comments continued:

“I’m glad that these federal courts ruled what is plainly obvious — that government officials cannot target students and discriminate against their groups because they are religious. Such double-standard viewpoint discrimination is as incoherent of a policy as it is injurious to a university community. I know firsthand how valuable a Christian campus ministry is to one’s college career and character formation.”

• On the international front, the ERLC team continued coalition building work in our efforts to counter the Chinese Communist Party morally. Notable to this effort, we reflect back to an article by Drew Griffin at ERLC published in February 2020. Griffin opened the piece with the following ominous sentence, “The world is once again gripped in apprehension and fear as a new and previously unknown virus has emerged from China.”
  
  He then explained how this new “coronavirus” revealed the dangers of China's totalitarian government. As we work to end the pandemic suffering none of us could have imagined back in early 2020, we must also now look ahead to the systemic challenges facing the world by the global aspirations of the Chinese Communist Party. For more, check out this podcast episode with Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian of AXIOS on China’s rising influence and the threat to human rights​.

Featured Podcasts

From The Public Square