WASHINGTON (RNS) — Speaker Mike Johnson celebrated the Home passage of a invoice banning transgender college students from ladies’ sports activities on Tuesday (Jan. 14) by linking opposition to transgender rights with a passage from the biblical ebook of Genesis.
Johnson made the feedback shortly after the Home handed the Safety of Ladies and Women in Sports activities Act in a 218-206 vote, with all Home Republicans and two Texas Democrats — Reps. Vicente Gonzalez and Henry Cuellar — voting in favor of the invoice. The laws bars transgender athletes from competing in ladies’ and girls’s sports activities from elementary college by way of school.
“We all know from Scripture, and from nature, that males are women and men are ladies, and males can’t change into ladies,” Johnson stated in a information convention instantly after the vote. He spoke whereas flanked by Rep. Greg Steube, who launched the invoice, in addition to Riley Gaines, a former school athlete who is thought for advocating towards transgender ladies in sports activities. Gaines, who identifies as Christian, has credited a “religious awakening” with informing her activism and likened her work to preventing a “religious battle.”
Johnson stated he was referring to a passage in Genesis, and when requested by RNS how he responded to totally different interpretations of that passage by Christians, together with traditions that ordain brazenly transgender individuals, he stated the Bible was “fairly clear.”
“Properly, it goes again to the primary ebook — Genesis: female and male, he made them,” Johnson stated. “I’m undecided there’s one other interpretation, however all people’s open to decoding Scripture nevertheless they’ll.”
Johnson then argued that the invoice “comports with widespread sense as properly.”
Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines, heart, speaks throughout a information convention after the Home handed a measure that might ban transgender ladies and ladies from college sports activities applications geared toward feminine college students on Capitol Hill, Jan. 14, 2025, in Washington. (RNS picture/Jack Jenkins)
“We all know it from our non secular custom, which I consider is the reality — I’m a Bible-believing Christian and make no apology about that,” he stated. “However whether or not you regard that as fact or not, it’s additionally nature. It’s biology, and biology shouldn’t be bigotry, as we are saying.”
Johnson, a Southern Baptist, voiced the identical scriptural declare in November throughout debate over whether or not to bar individuals from utilizing bogs that don’t correspond with their intercourse assigned at delivery — an effort directed at transgender individuals. The talk was tied to then-incoming Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, a Democrat and a Presbyterian, who grew to become the primary brazenly transgender member of Congress when she was sworn in earlier this month.
Johnson, who in the end did institute the ban, shortly garnered pushback from non secular leaders akin to Bishop Gene Robinson, the primary brazenly homosexual Episcopal bishop. Robinson preached a sermon in protection of McBride on the Washington Nationwide Cathedral in November and derided Johnson’s interpretation of Scripture as “absurd” in an interview with RNS.
On Tuesday shortly earlier than the vote, Democrats spoke out towards the invoice, together with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who’s Catholic, and Greg Landsman of Ohio, who’s Jewish. Ocasio-Cortez condemned Republicans for what she stated amounted to pretending to “care about ladies,” and Landsman, a Harvard Divinity College graduate, likened it to bullying.
“This invoice is about bullying youngsters,” Landsman stated.
The invoice, which advocates stated President-elect Donald Trump is keen to signal after he’s inaugurated subsequent week, now strikes to the Republican-controlled Senate.
