Kaeley Harms, an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse, has a visceral response to emotional manipulation. This is her response to Bishop Budde’s sermon to President Trump.

One needs only spend a few minutes familiarizing oneself with the entire body of Bishop Budde’s work to realise that what she was really asking for is not mercy but capitulation.  She wasn’t asking Trump to use softer words.  She was asking him to pump the brakes on necessary policy changes that would protect the greater good.

Jesus loves people. He loves you. He loves me. He loves illegal immigrants. He loves kids who are confused about their gender. His heart is merciful toward us. But loving every person does not mean He loves every idea or every action. Mercy doesn’t look like capitulating to ideologies that lead to harm. Mercy looks like intervening to stop the harm from happening, and it’s precisely that intervention that Bishop Budde was standing staunchly against in her speech. She framed the whole thing as love, of course, but the brand of love she was peddling wasn’t love at all, and that’s why it vexes me.

You should be able to step foot in a Christian church and find that the leaders are pointing you toward Jesus and the truth that can save.

Jesus says, “Come as you are,” not “Stay as you are.”  Faithful Christian leaders lovingly encourage their congregants to surrender their sins to Jesus and allow Him to transform them from the inside out. To be a Christian is to be willing to change. It means your identity is in Him, not your sexual preferences or rebellion against the material reality of your sex. But false leaders like Bishop Budde encounter this necessary shepherding and shout, “Have mercy! Don’t tell people they need to change! That’s hateful.” And in so doing, they circumvent the very repentance that could bring the healing we all claim to desire.

Budde’s speech perpetuated both the myth of the “transgender child” and the histrionic belief that children will die if we don’t indulge their delusion about their bodies. There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Mercy and compassion for kids who are confused about their sex looks like lovingly helping them make peace with the immutable nature of it. It does NOT look like forcing the rest of society to play make-believe with the cult ideology that’s harming them. The price tag here is just too high. Kids are not dying because we refuse to tell them lies about their bodies. The suggestion is preposterous and harmful.

Conservative political commentator Mark Steyn blasted Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde as “a tool of Satan” for pushing the idea of “transgender children” from the pulpit of the National Cathedral during her recent rebuke of President Donald Trump. There’s no such thing as a transgender kid,” Steyn said. “Some may think there is, and a confused 8-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl may think there is. But what it boils down to is you, the bishop, supporting slicing off the breasts of middle school girls. That makes you, the bishop, a tool of Satan. So you should be on a roasting spit in Hell for promoting that.”

Sadly, until very recently, the transgender movement has had all the institutional power. All of it. They’ve had a death grip on the entirety of mainstream media, big tech, big pharma, the medical industrial complex, academia, Hollywood elite, and, increasingly, of the now largely apostate church.

They have not been “powerless.”  Women have been powerless to stop them. How do you think female inmates raped by men in their prison cells feel when people who claim to be abuse survivor advocates defend their rapists in the name of God?

What does “mercy” look like to a physically castrated young man like Ritchie Herron who will never be a father because people like Bishop Budde encouraged the cult belief that they could be born in the wrong body? What does “mercy” look like to grieving parents whose children have committed suicide after the medical intervention experts promised what would make them happy failed to deliver?

I’m focused heavily on the trans element of Budde’s speech for obvious reasons: it’s been my soapbox for the past 10 years.  I’m so inundated with the stories of harm perpetrated by the gender cult that it keeps me up at night.