Southern Baptist thought leader Al Mohler agrees with President Donald Trump that Democrats are “crazy.”
The president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary used his Feb. 25 column in World magazine to say the president’s rambling two-hour State of the Union speech demonstrated “moral clarity.”
Amid the “political theater” of the speech, “the president did exactly what he was expected to do — he defended his record, made broad claims of political success, pointed to policy priorities and went after his political opponents, often with disdain,” Mohler notes.
Al Mohler (Baptist Press)
Amid all that, Mohler found one moment he views as being of “great importance.” That’s when Trump made misleading claims about public schools attempting to make students transgender.
He wrote:
President Trump pointed to a young woman in the audience with her mother. The president then explained that “Sage was 14 when school officials in Virginia sought to socially transition her to a new gender, treating her as a boy and hiding it from her parents.” The president then said, “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Well, as President Trump also explained, 15 years ago people would have thought someone talking this way was out of his mind, asking, “What’s wrong with him?” Sadly, all this does make sense in our confused age.
Sage Blair was encouraged to “socially transition” at school, identifying as a boy, explicitly without the knowledge of her parents. In her confusion, she eventually ran away from home, came under the care of the state, and was sent to an all-boys state school in Maryland.
As the president explained, “After she was found in a horrific situation in Maryland, a left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son.”
The story ends with Sage identifying again as a young woman and receiving “a full ride scholarship to Liberty University.” She stood with her mother and was warmly affirmed by the Republicans in the room, receiving a standing ovation. It was a very touching moment.
The president then said this: “But surely, we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will.” He went on to state, “We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately.”
But, looking at the audience, President Trump said that not one Democrat in the room stood up — something he was in a position to see. “Look, nobody stands up,” he said. “These people are crazy. I’m telling you they’re crazy.”
Then Mohler summarizes: “Well, they are crazy, and they are also dangerous. President Trump knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew exactly how the Democrats would respond. The simple truth is that the Democratic Party is under the control of the LGBTQ movement, and their activists are all for exactly what happened to Sage Blair and her parents. Indeed, they demand it.”
“The simple truth is that the Democratic Party is under the control of the LGBTQ movement.”
This is “moral insanity,” Mohler insists and echoes Trump’s false claim that such stories have “happened all over the country, and it is happening still. The Democratic Party is sold out to the LGBTQ activists and the ideological left. One of the most threatening ideologies of the left is based in the claim that children and teenagers must be liberated from their parents and indoctrinated by the liberal establishment into the total redefinition of gender.”
Then, echoing a familiar refrain from his lexicon, Mohler says LGBTQ activists are rejecting “Creation Order” by perverting sexual identity and parental rights.
Trump — a convicted sexual predator — has consistently opposed this perversion, Mohler says. “No other president of the United States had said any such thing, and made it stick. … President Trump pushed back on this moral revolution hard last night, and he did so with verve. He put himself and his administration on the line, and he didn’t have to do so. It was a moment of remarkable moral clarity, and, in my view, it was the most important moment of the entire night.”
The story of Sage Blair is more complicated and nuanced than either Trump or Mohler portrayed.
According to the Independent: “Sage Blair’s mother, Michele, sued the Appomattox County School Board in 2023 over allegations that the district did not disclose information that Sage was identifying as male. Michele has claimed that the school’s alleged withholding of that information led to Sage running away from home and experiencing abuse.”
Michele Blair is named in court documents as Sage’s paternal grandmother and adoptive mother. Sage Blair was diagnosed with “severe gender dysphoria” and related symptoms in 2021, according to court filings.
No court has found that school officials violated parental rights in this case.
Trump has found favor with his conservative evangelical base, which claims there is widespread promotion of transgender identity in public schools even though there is little evidence of such.
“Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.”
In 2024, Trump claimed: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs 15 years later say, ‘What the hell happened? Who did this to me?’”
The Brookings Institution reports that under the second Trump administration, fighting transgender identity has become the primary focus of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. Meanwhile, “the department has resolved zero cases of racial harassment against Black or Latino students, and no cases of sexual harassment or assault, since the Trump administration took office.”
In the limited number of reported cases of minor children claiming a gender identity at school that they are not allowed to claim at home, the conflict arises over whether school officials should be obligated to report student preferences to parents whom the children believe are not supportive of their identities. Thus, conservatives like Mohler frame the issue as one of parental rights.
In the case of Sage Blair, this conflict that began at home and spilled over into school resulted in the youth running away from home and becoming a victim of sex trafficking. The family blames the school for creating the confusion.
Education Week reports about 3.3% of high school students identify as transgender, and 2.2% are questioning their gender identity — “and they face high rates of bullying and symptoms of depression amid a national landscape that has become especially charged surrounding their identity.”
According to Gallup, 1.1% of American adults now identify as transgender. However, younger adults today are more likely than older adults to identify as transgender, with 3% of 18- to 29-year-olds claiming such.