The bathroom battles come to the U.S. Capitol

Al Mohler is proof that you can dress a fundamentalist in a $3,000 suit and he’s still going to come off like a sweaty William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes monkey trial.

Al Mohler

The ever-well-dressed and ever-opinionated Mohler slapped down the Washington Post for suggesting Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has political motivations in not rolling out the welcome mat for the first transgender person elected to the House.

Yes, the election of Rep.-elect Sarah McBride, D-Del., has brought the bathroom battles of 2016 to the U.S. Capitol. The U.S. House is an institution, by the way, that didn’t provide a restroom for women near the House floor until 2011. Talk about an Old Boys’ Club.

In a column for the Post, Philip Bump wrote: “McBride’s imminent arrival and her use of the women’s bathroom has become a jumping-off point for a new round of trans-hostile grandstanding.”

Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., has preemptively jumped into the fray, protesting which toilet McBride will use in the Capitol, all while stupidly associating transgender people with rapists.

“I’m a victim of abuse myself; I’m a rape survivor,” Mace said. “I have PTSD from the abuse I suffered at the hands of a man, and I know how vulnerable women and girls are in private spaces.”

Sarah McBride (Scott Applewhite, AP Images)

Speaker Johnson, a Southern Baptist, has taken Mace’s side with a caveat: “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman. And a man cannot become a woman. That’s what Scripture teaches, what I just said.”

That’s the point at which Mohler agrees with Johnson. Mohler tweeted Nov. 19: “The predictable folks are condemning @SpeakerJohnson for stating that a man cannot become a woman. @washingtonpost slaps him for trying to ‘score political points.’ OK, but before the political points are the biological points and before both are theological points … and the truth.”

Both Mohler and Johnson are dead wrong — again.

As I have previously written, being transgender is not a sin. It’s also not something the Bible condemns. And a biblical scholar like Al Mohler should know this.

And yes, Johnson is using this bathroom debate to score political points. As I also have written, scapegoating transgender people is successful because transgender folks are such a small and misunderstood minority of the American population. They do not have the collective power to fight back, which is why the rest of us need to speak up.

Just as Donald Trump has demonized immigrants, evangelicals have demonized transgender people. What they are doing is morally repugnant. And it’s cruel.

But the cruelty is the point.

Oh, and also, these evangelicals are hypocrites. They say they’re all about parental rights, about keeping government out of decisions that should be left to parents. Except when those decisions involve gender care and sexual orientation, of course.

“Just as Donald Trump has demonized immigrants, evangelicals have demonized transgender people.”

Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, is among those who have said “parents — not politicians — have the authority to guide and direct their children’s education.”

Yet Focus on the Family is the most hate-inspired group attacking families with transgender kids. They want conservative evangelical parents to have the right to teach and care for their children but they do not want other parents to have the same right.

Which is how we get back to the restrooms in the U.S. Capitol. If Mike Johnson and Nancy Mace actually had any transgender friends, they would know how stupid their position is. As Adam Kinzinger noted on Bluesky today: “The real story on Capitol Hill is the desire of GOP men to have transgender women in their bathrooms.”

An Anti-Evolution League holds a books sales at the opening of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial in which biology teacher John T. Scopes is being prosecuted for teaching evolution in his class. (Getty Images)

At root, Johnson and Mace and Mohler are still litigating the Scopes trials. They claim the Bible contradicts science. They have a losing argument, and the longer they persist, the more they look like Bryan, who was called to the stand as an expert witness in the Bible during the trial where he was prosecuting the state’s case.

Here’s how that went:

Clarence Darrow: “You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?”

Bryan: “Yes, sir; I have tried to … But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy.”

Darrow: “Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?”

Bryan: “I believe that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there; some of the Bible is given illustratively. For instance: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth.’ I would not insist that man was actually salt, or that he had flesh of salt, but it is used in the sense of salt as saving God’s people.”

Bryan lost the case because on the witness stand he could not defend his stated belief in biblical literalism.

Someone needs to call Mohler, Johnson and Mace to testify about the Bible under oath.