White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded to questions on Monday about the statement by Pope Francis condemning gender theory, reaffirming US President Joe Biden’s support for the transgender community, according to Fox News.
The Pope’s documents unveiled on Monday formally reaffirm and expand on the Catholic Church’s assertion that attempts to change an individual’s immutable gender are ultimately “misguided attempts to play God.”
We are pleased to see that the document… furthered the Vatican’s call to ensure that LGBTQ+ are protected from violence and imprisonment around the world. However, the president will continue to be an advocate for the rights, safety and dignity of the LGBTQ+ community, including transgender people here in the US.
Jean-Pierre also noted that Biden “has always been very clear on the importance of protecting or having protections for the transgender community and the broader LGBTQ+ community.”
Francis’ Monday declaration called Dignitas Infinita addressed over a dozen separate contemporary issues through the lens of scripture and church teaching, including abortion, human trafficking, poverty, euthanasia, the death penalty and more.
“Regarding gender theory, whose scientific coherence is the subject of considerable debate among experts, the Church recalls that human life in all its dimensions, both physical and spiritual, is a gift from God.”
The document, released in Latin after more than five years of development by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), focuses on threats to human dignity in the modern world.
This gift is to be accepted with gratitude and placed at the service of the good. Desiring a personal self-determination, as gender theory prescribes, apart from this fundamental truth that human life is a gift, amounts to a concession to the age-old temptation to make oneself God, entering into competition with the true God of love revealed to us in the Gospel.
Earlier, Pope Francis called gender ideology one of the “most dangerous ideological colonisations” in the world.
“Another prominent aspect of gender theory is that it intends to deny the greatest possible difference that exists between living beings: sexual difference. This foundational difference is not only the greatest imaginable difference but is also the most beautiful and most powerful of them. In the male-female couple, this difference achieves the most marvelous of reciprocities. It thus becomes the source of that miracle that never ceases to surprise us: the arrival of new human beings in the world.”
The document also reaffirmed the Church’s teaching on abortion and develops a long-standing ethical criticism of surrogate pregnancy, which the Pope recently called for a worldwide ban.
