(OSV News) — A proclamation by the country’s second Catholic president on a transgender-themed occasion causes consternation among some faithful, as the date this year coincides with Easter — and as the annual egg competition Easter ban from the White House, among other things. , religious symbolism.
On March 29, President Joe Biden released his annual message for the March 31 “International Transgender Day of Visibility,” in which he said to “honor the courage and extraordinary contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm( s) our nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union.
This celebration was created in 2009 by psychotherapist Rachel Crandall-Crocker, executive director of the advocacy group Transgender Michigan and its Transgender Michigan helpline.
Crandall-Crocker recently told NPR that her goal was to create a day of celebration separate from the Nov. 20 “Transgender Day of Remembrance.” The event was launched in 1999 to “highlight the need to raise awareness about anti-transgender violence,” founder Gwendolyn Ann Smith explained in a 2012 Huffington Post essay.
At the same time, the White House asked young people participating in its traditional Easter egg art contest to refrain from drawings with “religious symbols” and “overtly religious themes”, as well as “partisan political statements » ; hateful and discriminatory material, and “any questionable content”.
Easter, or Passover, is the principal religious holiday of all Christian churches, commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead three days after his crucifixion on Good Friday. The tradition of dyed “Easter eggs” is believed to have originated among the early Christians of Persia, as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ, and that the custom gradually spread to other Eastern and then Western churches.
Easter is a holiday whose date is believed to be close to the Jewish holiday of Passover – when the Gospels say the crucifixion, death and resurrection of Jesus took place – while also occurring on a Sunday. It changes each year based on a complex calculation of the spring lunar months and the solar calendar. In the Catholic Church and other Protestant churches, Easter is celebrated in 2024 on March 31; Most Orthodox churches celebrate Easter on May 5 due to calendar differences.
Biden’s proclamation, the simultaneous dates of Easter and transgender observance, and the rules of the White House contest combined to spark outrage on social media.
Among those who spoke out was Catholic pro-life activist Lila Rose, who wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on March 30 that the White House “will proudly celebrate the sect’s religion trans, but will ban Christian “symbols or themes” on the site. the greatest Christian holiday: Easter.
“Our ‘Catholic’ president cynically uses faith as a selling point when it suits him, then mocks and denigrates it,” she wrote.
However, when it comes to the rules of the White House egg competition, Politico reports that these rules have been in place for every administration since 1976, including under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump.
The Trump campaign tried to lambast Biden for the Easter egg restrictions, but then caused a stir by claiming an apology was owed “to the millions of Catholics and Christians.” The Biden campaign countered that “Catholics *are* Christians. You don’t say “Catholics and Christians”. Politico pointed out that this unnecessary distinction has a thorny history, as some American Protestant churches have argued that Catholics are not actually Christians.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Being a man” or “being a woman” is a good reality willed by God: man and woman possess an inalienable dignity which comes to them immediately from God their Creator. Man and woman have one and the same dignity “in the image of God”. In their “being-man” and their “being-woman”, they reflect the wisdom and goodness of the Creator.
In March 2023, the U.S. bishops’ doctrinal committee issued a 14-page statement declaring that surgical, chemical or other interventions aimed at “exchanging” a person’s “sexual characteristics” for those of the opposite sex “are not morally justified.”
“The human person, body and soul, man or woman, has a fundamental order and a purpose whose integrity must be respected,” declared the committee chaired by Most Reverend Daniel E. Flores, bishop of Brownsville, Texas. “Because of this order and purpose, neither patients, nor doctors, nor researchers, nor any other person have unlimited rights over the body; they must respect the order and purpose inscribed in the incarnated person.
The doctrinal committee recognized that “many people are sincerely seeking ways to respond to real problems and real suffering.”
Nevertheless, the doctrinal committee declared that “any technological intervention which does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body , ultimately does not help but, on the contrary, harms the person. human person. »
Gina Christian is a multimedia journalist for OSV News. Follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @GinaJesseReina.
