There was a news item last week that caught the attention of the media and then went viral on the internet. If you pay any attention to the news, you saw the story about the gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo who was killed by zoo officials because he was a threat to a 4-year-old boy

There was a second news story that had something in common with the gorilla story, but got very little attention. It was a report about how school officials in the State of Washington recently adopted new standards that require K-12 instruction on “gender identity” and “gender expression.”

What did these two news stories have in common? I’ll answer that question in a moment.

Harambe The Gorilla – While at the Cincinnati Zoo, a 4-year-old boy climbed into a gorilla cage and fell into a moat where a 400-pound Western lowland silverback gorilla named Harambe was located. The boy immediately caught the attention of the gorilla. The gorilla ran over to the boy, grabbed him by the ankle, and quickly dragged him through the water. Rather than risk the boy being severely injured or killed, the officials at the zoo shot and killed the gorilla.

Zoo director Thane Maynard explained: “The child was being dragged around. His head was banging on concrete. This was not a gentle thing. The child was at risk. . . . So when it was determined that the child was being injured . . . we had to make a decision.”

The story of the gorilla’s death went viral on the internet and tens of thousands of people expressed outrage over the killing of the gorilla. Several celebrities spoke out against the zoo’s “brutality.” The most popular hashtag on the internet concerning the incident was #JusticeForHarambe.

Jack Hanna, the Director Emeritus of the Columbus Zoo explained the decision to kill the gorilla by saying, “I have seen a silverback gorilla take a green coconut and crush it — beyond the strength of anything you know. It’s a choice between a human life and an animal life.”

When asked why a tranquilizer was not used instead of a bullet, Hanna said that when an animal is in an agitated state, tranquilizers often take time to go into effect, which would have put the boy’s life in danger.

There were numerous people who argued that because Western lowland gorillas are an endangered species, the gorilla’s life was more important than the life of the boy.

K-12 Gender Identity Instruction – On Wednesday, June 1, an article was published in the Daily Caller that reported that in March of this year, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Washington adopted new K-12 gender identity education learning standards. The standards were put into place without issuing a press release or otherwise notifying the public of the new standards.

The Daily Caller reported that the new standards include teaching “self-identity” which requires teachers to educate students about the various ways to express gender. According to the state’s health education glossary, “gender” is defined as “a social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex.”

The primary goal of the new standards is to teach students, beginning in kindergarten, how to “distinguish between biological sex, gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.” What the children will ultimately be taught is that it is up to them to determine what their true gender is and how they will “express” their gender to other members of society.

What do the gorilla and gender identity stories have in common?

Let’s start with Genesis 1:27 which states, “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

Besides being created in the image and likeness of God, we were all created to believe in absolutes. An “absolute” is defined as “a value or principle that is regarded as universally valid or that may be viewed without relation to other things.” God created each of us to believe in absolutes. When we abandon the absolutes that were put into place by God, we always replace those absolutes with our own.

Since the beginning of time, the biological gender of a person has been viewed as an absolute — a universally valid principle that has never changed. When a person does not believe in God or abandons God after having believed in Him, that person finds something else to worship. After that, the person develops a distinct and separate set of absolutes that are based on what is being worshiped. The person then frequently attempts to make the newly created absolutes universally valid by imposing them on others.

Two replacements for the worship of God are the worship of nature and the earth and the worship of ourselves.

Despite the probability that the gorilla would severely harm or kill the child, the outrage over the gorilla’s death arose primarily from individuals who worship nature and the earth. When a person does not believe that man was created in the image and likeness of God, the value of a human life can easily be placed on the same level as an animal.

When that happens, an argument can be made that humans are inferior to animals because humans represent a threat to all life on earth. After all, it was humans who invented nuclear weapons and, because of the destructive nature of humans, they deserve to die while a gorilla like Harambe, who was doing nothing wrong, deserves to live.

I would expect that the thousands of people who were outraged by the death of Harambe haven’t paid any attention to the fact that thousands of Christians are being tortured and murdered every month in the Middle East. I would also expect that those same people rarely give any thought to the millions of unborn babies throughout the world who are murdered in their mothers’ wombs every year.

In addition to those who have abandoned God and chosen to worship nature and the earth, there are also those who have chosen to worship themselves. In their own minds, they become supreme beings who have the right to create their own absolutes. These individuals believe that they have a right to kill their unborn children because a pregnancy and subsequent child is an inconvenience and a burden on their body and their life.

They also believe that they have the right to determine their own gender and how they should be viewed and treated by society. They expect society to respect and honor their newly created absolutes as being morally acceptable and valid. Those of us who do not adopt their beliefs are expected to “tolerate” their newly created moral standards at the expense of our own moral standards — standards that we believe were given to us by our Creator.

If we fail to accept these individuals’ new absolutes concerning gender identity and gender expression as being morally valid, and if we refuse to allow them to teach our children and grandchildren about their newly created absolutes, then they insist that our government punish us with fines, jail, and ostracization from society.

Why are we continuing to allow these godless individuals to exercise control over our public school system?

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