In case you haven’t already figured out what a despicable person Stephen Miller is, hear this: The adviser to President Donald Trump posted on X an attack on Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico that says, “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.”
Say what?
Mark Wingfield
There is zero evidence that Talarico is transgender. No one has claimed he is, and to suggest so is absurd. But remember Miller is the guy who designed Trump’s most cruel policies, including his harsh immigration actions.
This guy is a literal Nazi, and he’s calling Talarico “transgender”?
What’s really going on here? It’s easy to see. The Republican Party has made transgender people — a vast minority of the population — the boogeymen for everything they fear. They have caricatured transgender Americans as symbolic of everything they think is wrong with America.
These are false charges from the start, but now they’re being amplified as smears against people who clearly aren’t transgender. Miller is like a fourth-grade boy on the playground who derides a classmate by screaming, “You’re so gay!”
In another post on X, Miller attacks Talarico for a photo showing him eating Texas barbeque and declares, “He’s transitioning.”
Another clear misguided reference to transgender fear but mixing in the fear of vegans. Why? Because Republicans have falsely claimed Talarico is vegan — God forbid in a beef-producing state!
Trump and Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton have led the charge in saying Talarico is vegan — as if that should disqualify someone from office. Talarico and his campaign have steadfastly denied this accusation, and he has frequently been seen eating meat and animal products on the campaign trail, including giant turkey legs, breakfast tacos with bacon, and barbecue.
It seems these rumors originated with a 2022 speech where Talarico advocated for reducing meat consumption to fight climate change and noted his campaign would purchase vegan products from local businesses when possible.
Talarico recently shot back with his own post, accompanying a photo of him eating barbeque: “I’m an eighth-generation Texan. I’ve been eating barbecue since before Ken Paxton’s first indictment. And if all they have on me is lying about me being a vegan, I feel pretty good about our chances this November.”
Now that he’s the Republican nominee, Paxton has amplified the lies about Talarico — not that lying is new to Paxton.
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Paxton has taken to calling his opponent “Talafreako” — another Trump-style playground insult. Talarico’s response: “If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles. This is the guy who just released Adam Hoffman from jail, an admitted child rapist, after one of Ken Paxton’s wealthy lawyer friends got involved in the case.”
We would be better served having an honest debate over some of the other claims Republicans have made against Talarico that are substantive. Such as his claim that God is nonbinary.
Evangelicals and Republican leaders freaked out over this statement because a severe form of complementarianism has taken over the evangelical world. In this view, God must be male because males have been given authority over women and children.
The root of this is found in a 2021 comment Talarico made during floor debate in the Texas Legislature that “God is nonbinary.”
In a recent interview with ABC News Live, Talarico replied that “Ken Paxton is clipping my past cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption,” as part of a “playbook” of “distraction and division.”
Talarico, who is a Presbyterian minister, said, “You can’t use human categories to define God.” And that is true. Historic Christian theology does not assign gender to the divine because God is not human.
It is a fatal theological error to anthropomorphize God with human labels. Yes, Scripture refers to “God the Father,” but Scripture also compares God to a mother. Yes, Jesus came to earth in the physical form of a male, but that doesn’t make the entire Godhead masculine in human terms.
Talarico was right in what he said, but this is a theological distinction evangelicals don’t want to consider because they are so obsessed with male hierarchy. And that sets them up to believe Stephen Miller’s outrageous lies that Talarico is transgender.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global and is author or Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves.