Daily Broadside | Man Can Donate Blood if He’s Not Pregnant

Daily Verse | Psalm 59:16
But I will sing of your strength,
    in the morning I will sing of your love;
for you are my fortress,
    my refuge in times of trouble.

Tuesday’s Reading: Psalms 60-66

Good morning my friends. It’s Tuesday and we’re only ten days away from the end of June — already! I’ll soon be taking a two-week break and my good friend, Bruce Gust, who has filled in for me before, will be taking the keyboard starting Monday. He’ll bring you into July and I’ll pick up again a few days after the fourth of July celebrations wind down.

A story I read in the New York Post yesterday caught my attention because the title seemed so absurd: “Man denied giving blood after refusing to answer if he was pregnant.” Is the progressive brain disease known as “being woke” so pervasive that blood banks are now asking men if they’re pregnant?

They are in Scotland.

It’s not as clear cut as a guy sitting in a chair with rubber tubing wrapped around his elbow as the technician is plumping an artery while asking, “Are you pregnant?” But it’s close.

Leslie Sinclair, a 66-year-old father of two, had donated some 125 pints of blood over five decades before he was barred from his altruistic efforts during a trip Wednesday amid a push for new donors, Daily Mail reported.

Sinclair, of Stirling in central Scotland, was told to complete a form asking whether he was with child or had been pregnant in the last six months, prompting him to reply that the question did not apply to a man in his late 60s.

So he’s filling out a form and comes to a question that asks if he’s pregnant. Like this:

Obviously, he’s not. He’s a man, of the male variety. Men don’t get pregnant.

Now I suppose that if I had been filling in that form and came to that question, I would just check “No” because I’m a guy and I can’t be pregnant, not even “in the last 6 months.” And I would assume that the question is there because both men and women donate blood and 99 percent of the questions are the same and this one is different, so they just include it rather than creating a separate form for women only.

But not our hero, Leslie Sinclair.

Sinclair told a staffer at the Albert Halls clinic in Stirling it was “impossible” for him to be pregnant, but soon learned that he needed to answer the query in order to give blood …

“I told them that was stupid and that if I had to leave, I wouldn’t be back,” Sinclair said. “And that was it, I got on my bike and cycled away.”

Sinclair said he was angered since “vulnerable people,” including children, are in desperate need of donations.

“But they’ve been denied my blood because of the obligation to answer a question that can’t possibly be answered,” Sinclair told Daily Mail.

Actually, he can answer it with “No.” But I get his point. By answering the question, he’s validating it. If we didn’t live in a Woke World, I think my assumption that it’s a woman’s question on an otherwise identical form would be reasonable.

But it turns out Mr. Sinclair’s irritation is justified.

Anyone who has given birth in Scotland must wait six months before donating blood. Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service officials said all donors are now asked whether they’re pregnant as part of a “duty to promote inclusiveness,” according to the report.

“We appreciate the support of each and every one of our donor community and thank Mr. Sinclair for his commitment over a long number of years,” SNBTS director Marc Turner told Daily Mail.

Ah, yes — ideological conformity over common sense while kicking a long-term blood donor in the teeth. Punish the non-conformist, even if it means losing a reliable source who has been giving blood for nearly 50 years in the midst of a donor shortage.

The stand-off took place as NHS England launched a campaign earlier this week to recruit a million more blood donors over the next five years after numbers fell during the pandemic. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) began a drive earlier this month to find 16,000 new donors in the coming year.

It emerged last night that all potential donors are asked if they are pregnant to ‘promote inclusiveness’ and because pregnancy is ‘not always visually clear’.

When you cater hard to wokeness it takes you out of the realm of reality and into the realm of fantasy. Mr. Sinclair is clearly not pregnant: not yesterday, not today, and not tomorrow. But a numbing bureaucratic regime insisting on conformity is willing to put the health and safety of children and adults who need blood at risk for the sake of satisfying mentally unwell women who believe they are male “birthing persons.”

We need a million blood donors, but not any of those icky people who believe that men can’t get pregnant, thank you. Step aside.

You may not be interested in the idiocracy, but the idiocracy is interested in you — and you will be made to care.

Daily Broadside | That Time Jesus “Transgendered Himself” in the Gospels

Daily Verse | Exodus 15:11
Who among the gods is like you, Lord?
Who is like you—majestic in holiness,
awesome in glory, working wonders?

Tuesday’s Reading: Exodus 19-21

Happy Tuesday and if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know that it’s mostly focused on the crazy of our political class and its intersection with American culture. I also try to pay attention to where faith is making a statement in our culture, but come at all of it as an unapologetic conservative evangelical Christian.

With that in mind, I recently came across an article that showcases how the culture has, at least in one instance, twisted the very person of Christ himself in service to an agenda. In the following video, Simon Woodman of London’s Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church holds forth on his unique interpretation of Jesus’ activities. (Yes, I know it’s Britain, but “woke” is international and we know this stuff is here in the U.S.)

In case you don’t have time to watch it all, here’s what this misguided pretender said (my transcription):

So, if we think of Jesus as, um, the one who reveals God, uh, I was really struck by Angela saying earlier that “God is queer.” And, uh, I, I think, as humans we have a tendency to construct God in our own image, rather than to recognize that we are made in the image of God. And, therefore, the dominant expression of humanity ends up writing itself onto God, and making that God. And, and I think, in, in the story of Jesus, the stories of Jesus’ life, we, we find that being very condemned, um, in, in some quite radical ways, which is then having the ‘knock-on effect’ of altering the way we understand who God is in relation to humanity. So, I think Jesus, um, transgenders himself on a number of occasions. Um, I, I think, you know, just, just the little phrase, uh, Jesus is lamenting over Jerusalem, longing to gather Jerusalem as a mother hen gathers her chicks. Um, I think if you look at, um, the foot-washing from John’s gospel, foot-washing elsewhere in both Old and New Testaments, that it, it’s consistently done by, by women. And, yet, Jesus takes this on. People often cast that as being the servant’s role — it was the women’s role. And, and Jesus does it and becomes the woman at that point. And, and, I think, you know, we’ve observed that either he’s a marriage [sic], he’s childless, he defies gender and sexual norms of his day, he’s known for associating with those whose own sexual history or gender identity may be ambiguous. So, I think in Jesus, we’ve got a revelation of God as encompassing far more, than what historically and recently, at least, um, Christians have tended to construct God as being. And I think there’s a bit of an antidote to, uh, heteronormative idolatry hidden in the story of Jesus.

This statement is so full of holes and absurdities and contradictions and half-truths it’s hard to know where to start. But let me try. The logical flow of his argument is:

1) Jesus reveals God;

2) Humans “construct” God in their own image;

3) Therefore, the “dominant expression of humanity” makes God “heteronormative” (i.e. men attracted to women and vice-versa);

4) But, Jesus condemns that understanding of God by “transgendering” himself multiple times;

5) Ergo, Jesus reveals God as embracing transgenderism, which is an antidote to “heteronormative idolatry.”

So much theological nonsense, so little time.

We agree that Jesus reveals God. Jesus says, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). We can also agree that people often imagine (“construct”) God according to their own ideas or “image.” After that, we disagree with everything else he says.

God Himself is not “heteronormative” nor “transgender” because he is Spirit and “not a man.” Woodman argues that the “dominant” practice of humanity is heterosexuality (true), which mankind has projected (or written) onto God. The scripture says otherwise from the very beginning: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). God “wrote” that onto humanity.

Woodman claims that Jesus “transgenders” himself. What the heck does that even mean? Nobody saw Jesus as a “transgendered” individual. For instance, the Jews were ready to stone Jesus in John 10:33 because “you, a mere man, claim to be God.” Is Woodman suggesting that Jesus “pretended” to be a man pretending to be a woman? And then went back to being a man?

It’s sheer nonsense.

Woodman also claims that foot-washing is done by women in both old and new testaments. This is not at all clear from the texts that mention washing feet. In fact, it seems like most of the time guests were expected to wash their own feet (see Genesis 18:4, 19:2, and 24:32 for three quick examples).

As far as Jesus hanging out with sexually “ambiguous” people — Woodman gives no examples of such people in scripture. However, the people that Jesus was most often associated with in the gospels were “sinners and tax collectors.” Some of the sinners were sexually immoral, like the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) or the Samaritan woman who had five husbands and was living with a sixth not her husband. All heteronormative relationships, I might add, even if sinful.

What’s so ironic is that Woodman starts off his argument by admitting that “as humans we have a tendency to construct God in our own image,” and then proceeds to do exactly that. None of his arguments hold up under scrutiny.

This is a case of someone with an agenda who “writes” onto God what he wants to see. You know how I know? Count the number of times he says, “I think.”

I’ll save you the trouble: eight times.

Eight times in roughly 13 sentences Woodman starts his thought with, “I think.” His entire statement is what he thinks—not what God thinks and not what the scripture teaches.

And when he concludes with the charge of “heteronormative idolatry,” that gives away the game.

Wokeness is envy run amuck.