Daily Verse | Exodus 20:20
Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.

It’s Thursday, meaning we’re in the last half of the last week of January. If I ever ask you to save my bacon, I mean whatever is left over from breakfast.

My friend Laurie Higgins was placed in Facebook jail for seven days for writing a slightly cynical but truthful post about Resident Biden’s new transgender military policy. Here is what she wrote:

This is how Facebook responded:

Her friend Dr. Robert A.J. Gagnon, a well-known Christian scholar on the topic of biblical sexuality, shared her post and was himself suspended for seven days. Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media picked up the story writing, (with my emphasis),

Facebook claimed that Gagnon’s criticism of this government-imposed ideology violated the platform’s “Community Standards on violence and incitement.”

Again, quoting O’Neil, here’s what Gagnon wrote:

My friend Laurie Higgins has been suspended for 7 days, for making an accurate and witty satirical post, by left-wing FB overlords who seek to squash all dissent on the issue of transgenderism, no doubt emboldened by the Biden/Harris administration. There’s nothing inaccurate about this post.

1. Biden’s lifting of Trump’s transgender military ban will indeed put women military personnel in the awful position of having to shower with biological males.

2. Trans-promoters aren’t content with having men invade the domain of women’s sports and shelters.

3. “Transgender” ideology is indeed a pseudo-science, compelling people to reject basic biological facts.

4. Promoters of “transgenderism” do indeed exhibit traits of a religious cult in their mind-numbing, science-denying conformity. The censoring and suspending of Laurie Higgins rather proves the point, doesn’t it?

Both Laurie and Dr. Gagnon were suspended for seven days, each according to different standards. Laurie was suspended for “hate speech and inferiority” while Dr. Gagnon was suspended for “violence and incitement.”

Go back and read their posts again. It is a stretch, by any reasonable meaning of the words, to think that either Laurie or Dr. Gagnon were “inciting,” being “hateful,” being “violent” or making statements of “inferiority.”

Have you read Facebook’s “Community Standards”? I never did until this incident. I can’t possibly go into detail on them, but go here if you’d like to peruse them yourself. Remember, these aren’t legal definitions. These are Facebook’s business definitions. They cover several categories but are somewhat nebulous and leave plenty of room for discretionary interpretation and application.

For more detail on the current topic, here’s Facebook’s discussion on what constitutes “hate speech.”

Rod Dreher, senior editor at The American Conservative, also wrote about Dr. Gagnon’s suspension.

Leaving aside the laws, there is nothing that can prevent Facebook from enforcing whatever standards it wishes to on its platform. Seventy percent of Americans use Facebook. If Facebook regards resistance to gender ideology — not abuse of transgendered people, but merely dissenting from gender ideology — as an incitement to violence, and therefore worthy of a ban from its public square, that is a very big deal.

Because seventy percent of Americans use Facebook, we are standing on shifting sand. It is not unreasonable to think that what Facebook decrees shapes the thinking of the majority of them. If critiquing transsexual ideology lands users in the stockade, others will take note and adapt accordingly.

You might also like “First They Came for the President.”

For believers, this presents a dilemma. Are we going to shy away from controversial subjects? Are we going to keep things superficial and stay away from speaking the truth? Do we really think that posting Bible verses like, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” won’t (eventually) get us suspended? If the emotional safety and comfort of transsexuals is the priority, those verses will be labeled as “hateful” and “violent.”

For the record, Dr. Gagnon was let out of Facebook jail early, although I doubt it was for good behavior. Nor does his early release diminish his being sentenced to digital incarceration in the first place. If you have a Facebook account (7 out of 10 of you must!) read his statement in which he says,

If critique is an incitement to violence, then FB’s own censoring as “hateful” those people who hold positions that the Lord Jesus Christ himself held (and holds) are inciting people to violence. Every critique by the Left of the orthodox Christian stance on transgenderism would be inciting to violence. This is absurd.

We have been in dangerous semasiological territory for some time, and it’s getting more risky by the day. When the plain language of disagreement expressed in truthful statements is categorized as “hateful” or “violent,” to which words shall we retreat?

There aren’t any.

You and I have been put on notice that while we may not be interested in Wrongthink, Wrongthink is interested in us—and the margins are closing in.