James Talarico has decided that God isn’t nonbinary after all. Anyone who has relied on the Texas senatorial candidate for theological guidance might be experiencing whiplash.
Talarico is trying to clean up a series of idiotic statements, including about God’s supposed nonconforming gender, that are vulnerabilities ahead of a competitive race against the scandal-plagued Republican candidate, Ken Paxton. Once upon a time, Talarico, a former Presbyterian seminarian, wanted to make the Bible into a tool of radical gender ideology.
It was during a 2021 debate in the Texas Legislature on whether biological men should be allowed to compete in women’s sports that Talarico declared that “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between. God is nonbinary.” Talarico now says that he was just being provocative, although in the clip, he is as measured and earnest as a mainline Protestant pastor delivering a sermon at a 9 a.m. Sunday service.
In explaining what he was getting at, the Democrat says that God is above and beyond human categories. Well, sure. God doesn’t have a male or female body. This doesn’t change the fact, though, that God refers to himself in the masculine gender, and the Bible calls him such things as Father, King and Husband.
Talarico also cites the Apostle Paul and a famous verse in Galatians for the proposition that the Bible rejects traditional notions of gender: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This is a ringing statement of the unity of Christians in their faith in Jesus Christ, no matter ethnicity, class or gender; it isn’t an endorsement of modern gender theory.
It is especially preposterous to claim otherwise when Paul extensively discussed the two biological sexes and their different roles. (“Husbands should love their wives sacrificially, as Christ loved the church. Wives should respect and submit to their husbands.”) Talarico similarly wishes to revise his 2021 comment that there are six biological sexes, something that he insisted had been established by “modern science.” Now, he says that there are two biological sexes — men and women, as it turns out — although there are people with chromosomal abnormalities who should be treated with respect.
If this is all he meant at the time, though, he could have said so.
He’s also backed off a COVID-era post about white people spreading the virus of racism “wherever we go — through our words, our actions and our systems.” He added, “We don’t have to be showing symptoms — like a white hood or a Confederate flag — to be contagious.” This, he now claims, was merely a denunciation of racism. Most white people, of course, manage to oppose racial bias without making struggle-session-worthy condemnations of their own whiteness. Finally, after saying several years ago that one of his campaigns for the Texas Legislature had decided to go vegan in order to promote animal welfare and fight climate change, he now insists that his current senate campaign practically runs on Texas barbecue.
All of this raises the question: Which is better: A candidate who has sincerely held woke views, or a candidate who adopted an outlandish worldview a few years ago because he thought it was fashionable, and is now jettisoning that worldview because it is no longer convenient? Neither speaks well of Talarico.
Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.
