The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Tuesday, November 11, 2025

Starting point is 00:00:04 It's Tuesday, November 11, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. Sometimes on a daily basis, the big news is something that happens. Sometimes the big news is something that didn't happen. And the category of big news about something that didn't happen is the fact that yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States did not decide to take up a case that was a direct challenge to the Obergefeld decision of 2000. 2015 legalizing same-sex marriage. So why is it news that something didn't happen? It's because the way the Supreme Court works is that the court has to decide whether or not it's going to take a case that is not an automatic case. If it's going to take a case and decide to take the case, at least four justices have to agree that the Supreme Court is going to move to accept the case and then to move towards arguments and then oral arguments and then an eventual Supreme Court decision.

Starting point is 00:01:04 So it is news when a case is appealed to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court either does or doesn't decide that it will accept the case. In this case, the big news is that the Supreme Court did not decide to take this case. There have been previous comments. I think the most interesting of those comments was made by Justice Clarence Thomas back when the court handed down the 2002 decision reversing Roe v. Wade, reversing the abortion decision. The infamous Roe v. Wade decision was overturned, and Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion in that case, went on to say that the same process of review and reversal should apply to Obergefell, largely because it was argued along the same lines. So Justice Thomas was saying, if Roe can't stand, then Obergefell shouldn't stand either.

Starting point is 00:01:54 I think that logic is absolutely right. But I think it's also important for us to step back and recognize there are some significant reasons why the Supreme Court probably didn't take this case. In this situation, the appeal came from a former county clerk here in Kentucky, Kim Davis, and lower courts had judged against her and had applied a $300,000 penalty. And that came from a case that was filed by a same-sex couple that had been denied a license by Kim Davis in her role as county clerk. She was hoping to have that financial judgment reverse. She was also hoping in her appeal in this case to see the Bergerfield decision reversed.

Starting point is 00:02:38 As I said, the big news is that the Supreme Court did not take the case. Now, there are some other big dimensions to this. But I just want to say this doesn't mean necessarily that the Supreme Court wouldn't be interested in a case like this. It doesn't mean that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court would not consider a direct case that would reverse the Obergefell decision. They have shown they would reverse a major decision as they did in Roe v. Wade. And as a matter of fact, the arguments that came from at least some of the supporters of Roe was that regardless of where one stands on abortion, this had become just a part of the American cultural landscape to use some legal language that has been invoked by the court.

Starting point is 00:03:16 People had depended upon the Roe decision in terms of planning their own lives. The same thing, of course, would apply in Obergefell, but by the same reason that Roe needed to be reversed, Obergefell needs to be reversed as well. Number one, it is the wrong judgment. Number two, it was decided wrongly. So on both those counts, Roe and Obergefell should fall. But it's important for conservative Christians to understand that it took nearly a half century to reverse Roe v. Wait. Now, for the most part, that had to do with changes in terms of who sits on the court. It took about a half century to achieve the conservative majority ready to reverse row in 2022. But it also took the right case. So looking at abortion decisions before the Supreme Court,

Starting point is 00:04:03 it was clear that the Dobbs case coming from Mississippi afforded the court's conservative majority, the right opportunity for basically knocking the ball out of the park. And that just points to the fact that the Supreme Court in declining to take a case like this doesn't mean that it will decline to do so forever. It doesn't even mean that the majority of conservative justices aren't interested in a case like this. But law often comes down to the particulars of a case. And even many who want to see Obergefell reversed understood that this is probably not the best case to present to the court in order to achieve that result. You need a clean case. That is, a case that would be a direct challenge to Obergefell that isn't clouded by other

Starting point is 00:04:50 issues. And that's exactly how the court overturned Roe in the Dobbs decision. It is what we hope to see in terms of the court in the future reversing and overturning the Obergefell decision. But I think the majority of conservative legal analysts believed that this was not the right case and that the Supreme Court probably wouldn't take it. So why was it such big headline news? It is because those in favor of same-sex marriage and their fellow travelers, the mainstream media love to act as if it's a likelihood that Obergafel would be under threat. It's very good for the people who are trying to raise money for the LGBTQ activist community. It is also something that I think a lot of people in the mainstream media want to present

Starting point is 00:05:37 as if to say, look, the conservatives are coming, the conservatives are coming. And I certainly hope, and I think all those listening to me should surely hope that the a Bergerfeld decision will be overturned, conclusively and as soon as possible. But the facts of the case turn out to be important. And the fact that you've got a clear conservative majority on the court, and yet there were not evidently four justices to vote to take this case that tells you that they did not see this case as the case. But next, as we're thinking about the Supreme Court and big constitutional issues in the intersection with big moral issues, let's consider. that are two other big issues right now making headline news.

Starting point is 00:06:20 Number one, the Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to move forward with eliminating a transgender or non-binary identification factor on passports. Notably, the Supreme Court did not block the Trump administration from reducing the gender options to male and female in saying that those had to correspond with the gender identity at birth. So, in other words, biological sex. This is absolutely consistent. with what the president said in his inaugural address for his second term when he said that in the Trump

Starting point is 00:06:52 administration, there would be two and only two genders, and they would be specifically defined biologically. Now, I think we understand that's really important. That's vitally important. That is nothing less than an affirmation of common sense, and more importantly for Christians, an affirmation of creation order. We actually don't believe there are other genders to be rejected. We actually believe, as the White House policy states there are two and only two genders male and female the female with the large reproductive cell the male with the smaller reproductive cell and that's the end of the matter but as you can't imagine when the trump administration moved to eliminate any other option than male or female at birth as designations for the u.s passport there were immediate challenges they

Starting point is 00:07:39 ricocheted to the lower courts the supreme court basically just announced that it's going to allow the Trump administration to move forward with the policy. Okay. So that's the big headline news. The headline in the New York Times was, quote, Supreme Court clears the way for Trump's transgender passport policy. Okay. So if you get the headline, that pretty much is the story. As the Times said, the order allows, quote, a halt to applicant selection of gender markers, end quote. In other words, individual Americans or those who are qualified for an American passport, can't say, you know, I'm going to identify as this or that. Okay, there's a history here. There's a history here. Of course, when you go back just to, let's just say, the categorization of human

Starting point is 00:08:21 beings is male or female, that was not something that was invented by the United States government at any stage in our government's history. That is creation order. That is Genesis 1. But it's also true that every sane society since Genesis 1 has recognized that basic structure of creation order. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans chapter 1 and elsewhere, scripture makes very clear that is not just something that is explicit in scripture, it is explicit in creation. And I'll just simply say that species, they don't get that figured out, become extinct species fast. Abby Van Sicle, the reporter for the Times, said, quote, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to stop issuing passports that

Starting point is 00:09:03 include gender identity markers selected by applicants. So every one of those words is important. Gender identity selected by applicants. Applicants for what? Applicants for the passport. As the story tells us, quote, the emergency order, which will remain in place as the case makes its way through the lower courts, marked the latest victory for President Trump before the Supreme Court. End quote. So the case designation here is Trump v. Or. And as the Times rightly reports, it, quote, stems from a Trump administration policy to change gender requirements for passport holders. A lower court back in June had put a hold on this. The Supreme Court basically removed the hold, told the Trump administration, you can move forward with your plan, but the Supreme Court didn't say that the case can't work its way through the lower courts. And so it's going to be very interesting. The Supreme Court did say,

Starting point is 00:09:52 most fundamentally, it's not taking this case. And it's going to allow the Trump administration to exercise its executive authority until lower courts decide one way or the other. And the Supreme Court has to decide the issue on appeal. So at this point, it's going to be very difficult, I think, for someone successfully to challenge this policy. In the short term, it might be possible to challenge it, of course, in the longer term. So we look at this and we understand the Trump administration took an action to undo something. So in other words, the Trump administration didn't say it was going to continue a policy. In his inaugural address, the president said he was going to institute a policy to and only to genders male and female. And that's as

Starting point is 00:10:37 determined at birth and determined by biology. So why did this have to be changed? Well, decades ago, the United States government began allowing persons to use a non-gender-specific, non-binary or transgender identity that is claiming a gender identity opposite to one at birth. And they began doing this, but they required evidence of, quote, gender reassignment surgery or the equivalent language at the time. And so an applicant for a passport, an American passport, who was born male, wanted to identify as female or vice versa, had to bring basically medical evidence that the individual would undergo gender transition surgery. The Biden administration changed all of that just a matter of a few years ago and removed that requirement, basically making it quite easy for persons

Starting point is 00:11:30 to claim either a male or female identity when that is not biologically true or to claim a non-gender specific identity. And that really showed up in a protest to the Trump administration's policy and to the Supreme Court's declining to continue to block the Trump administration on the policy. Em Gessen, who identifies as transgender. It's hard to say exactly consistently how to identify this person other than to say that, M period, Gessen, no longer using the male name that had been original or just the initial M. Now, Gessen complains, quote, at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv a few weeks ago, about to fly back to New York, I handed my passport to two young border officers, one of them examined it and handed it to the other with a puzzled expression.

Starting point is 00:12:23 Now the second officer looked concerned. What is your gender? he asked. It's X, I answered. What does that mean? It means X. Can you elaborate? No. Is there an issue? We're told that the officers there in Israel, quote, conferred for a moment and sent me on my way. Guessing then writes, quote, it was glorious. All my life, I've been asked to explain my gender when I was a little kid. Children and adults would interrogate my appearance because I wore pants, but my hair was a bit too long for a Soviet boy. Guessing continue, quote, as an adult, I would often face questioning when I tried to use a women's bathroom. Finally, at the age of 58, I was able to refuse to. to explain my gender to someone with authority because I carry a U.S. passport that indicates my gender as X. And Gesson went on to say, quote, an official document that attests my being exactly who I am, a person who doesn't identify as either male or female, end quote. So let's just stop here for a moment.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Guessing here, who let's remember is biologically male, says that he does not want to identify as male, nor does he want to identify as female. He wants to identify as X. And he says that the Biden administration's allowance of X allowed him to be who he was, quote, a person who doesn't identify as either male or female. End quote. Okay, from a Christian perspective, let's just stand back. We have full sympathy for persons who are confused at this level. But that sympathy does not extend to agreeing with them that they are not male or female biologically defined consistent with creation order. And so we look at this and we recognize that I think one big issue here for Christians to see is that there's no middle ground on this.

Starting point is 00:14:05 There are people who say, you know, I think there ought to be some kind of compromise, some kind of middle ground. What would the middle ground be? If you agree that you can have gender identity and that the government should recognize gender identity and the passport should indicate gender identity as something other than male or female biologically defined, then you can't stop short of agreeing to everything and everything literally in this case includes X. Gessen doesn't like this, quote, in another sense, the document that means the passport,

Starting point is 00:14:34 attests to the meaninglessness and uselessness of all gender designations. Why did the border officers need to know my gender at all? I matched the age indicated in my passport. The photo is mine. New technology makes it close to impossible to travel using a lookalikes documents. Many passports contain iris scans and fingerprints, end quote. Okay. But Gasson asked the question, why does this matter?

Starting point is 00:14:56 at all. And the answer is because the assertion here that gender designations are useless and meaningless, that's absolutely wrong. If we buy into that argument a little bit, guess what? You bought into that argument entirely. We don't believe that that biological identity is meaningless. We also cannot accept for a moment that it's useless. But you see the argument here is that that gender designation is male or female corresponding to biology, we're told that it is now both meaningless and useless. And what we need to see is that that is the inevitable logic of the LGBT revolution, the T part in particular. You can't buy into the argument a little bit. If you buy into the argument, then you've destroyed any usefulness or meaningfulness to gender identity,

Starting point is 00:15:48 to biological sex whatsoever. Now, let's just also note that there are immediate biological limitations to this. And by that, I mean that if you show up at the hospital, then someone at the hospital is going to have to know, is this a male or a female? And that's not going to be a hypothetical transgender identity. That's going to be a matter of biology. Let's just say the organs are different. Let's just say that includes internal organs as well as external organs. It also has to do with differences in physiology that could have everything to do, not only with surgery, but also to the use of certain medications and medical procedures. In the emergency room, guess what?

Starting point is 00:16:26 Male and female is neither useless or meaningless. It is absolutely useful, absolutely meaningful, and let's face it, absolutely necessary. All right. It's also very interesting. This is at a lower level of urgency, but it is interesting that in this article, M. Gessen claims that there's a political distinction here. Quote, perhaps ironically, some of the world's most repressive states, including contemporary Iran and communist Poland have at times made it easy for people to change

Starting point is 00:16:56 their official gender designation or indeed force people to do so, bringing identity documents in line with their gender presentation in a strictly binary heteronormative way. So there you see it, even a government that does what this person demands can do so for the wrong motivation, and that includes heteronormativity. And it just goes to say that let's just use Iran as an example. Iran does not have a designation for something other than male or female. But it's also interesting that Gessen here points to the Soviet Union. Quote, the Soviet Union, where I grew up, made it possible for some people to transition

Starting point is 00:17:34 legally as well as socially and medically back in the 1970s. Now, Gessen goes on to say, quote, this accomplished the state's goal with keeping everything in familiar order and everyone easily identifiable. Okay, but here's the thing. The Soviet Union was an officially atheistic government. It rejected creation order. Everything was political in the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union. Everything was within the power of the government to declare.

Starting point is 00:18:01 That hardly brings the Soviet Union up as an example for the United States to follow. And I just think it's very interesting that all of this shows up in just the first few paragraphs of this article processing the Supreme Court's allowance of the Trump administration to move forward with the policy. But I want to notice one final thing about this argument. We are told that the Trump administration's policy, quote, puts people at risk, end quote? Well, at risk of what? At risk, you notice that's the language here. It points to the redefinition of the moral category known as the morality of harm. And Christians have long understood that there is validity to a morality of harm.

Starting point is 00:18:45 Now, we don't limit moral principles to harm, but we do. recognize that where there is a harm, it is almost sure if there's some kind of injury and if there's some kind of wrong moral action, it can be traced to the fact that some act that should not have happened, happened, and somebody did it in order to bring about this harm. All right. But if you define the way the modern leftist ideology defines harm, it means harm against an individual's self-designation or gender identity or non-binary identity. And all of a sudden, the morality of harm that makes sense in a creation order world now makes no sense whatsoever because you're told to be harming someone simply by indicating that male and female are alternatives that are biologically defined. The statement here that the Trump administration policy puts trans people at risk, the word risk here,

Starting point is 00:19:44 is a stand-in for the word harm. And you can understand how this happens. But while we're talking about these issues, we also need to recognize that a federal judge in Oregon has blocked the Trump administration's policy. And according to USA Today, running a piece from Reuters, quote, a federal judge in Oregon said she would block President Donald Trump's administration from forcing a group of Democrat-led states led by Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota to remove all references to gender ideology from sexual health education curricula before they can receive federal grant funding. So that's a mouthful, but the bottom line is that a federal judge in Oregon acted on behalf of a case filed by 16 Democratic states against the Trump administration's policy.

Starting point is 00:20:30 And the order by this federal judge applies immediately only to those 16 states. And the complaint against the Trump administration is that through the Department of Health and Human services, the states were going to be required to drop transgender identity and ideology when it comes to school curricula. And that is what these states did not want to do. As a matter of fact, the case coming from these 16 states said that the federal policy would quote, edit transgender kids out of their curricula, end quote. So let's just understand what we're being told here. These states are claiming that if you don't affirm transgender identity, you are writing transgender kids out of the curriculum. Now, once again, there's just no middle ground here. Either you

Starting point is 00:21:15 believe that school children should be presented with a transgender option in school curricula, or you don't. You can't say, yes, I agree that it ought to be, say, halfway presented. That just doesn't work. It's not going to be acceptable to either side. It has no coherence. And this, once again, points back to the fact that when you reject creation order, you don't reject it a little bit. You have to reject it entirely. And it also applies to Christians if you are going to hold to creation order, guess what? You can't hold to it when it's convenient. And when it's applauded by the culture, you have to hold to it even when there are all kinds of people who are going to challenge you saying that you are putting people at risk. This is where we have to face as Christians the

Starting point is 00:21:58 situation very squarely. We believe it's actually putting children regardless of age. But we understand that children are more vulnerable, we believe you're actually putting them at risk if you tell them that they can change their identity or that they can have no gender identity whatsoever. We believe it's actually a harm to say to a child that they could be neither male nor female, but X. We also believe it's wrong to tell children that if they're biologically male, they can be a girl or a woman, or if they're biologically female, they can be a boy or a man. Now, you have to understand, once again, we're back at the morality of harm. And this is where conservative Christians, based in a biblical world, you have to understand,

Starting point is 00:22:39 we are not evading the argument of harm. We're turning it on its head. We believe the real harm is telling children, or for that matter anyone, but again, children are more vulnerable, so that's our first concern. We believe the real harm is lying to children about the, say, fluidity of gender or the very fact that you can change your gender. We believe that that that, that, is the harm. And we also believe with broken hearts that that harm is going to pile up and pile up in full evidence in years to come. If on the other hand, you believe that you're causing the harm by not presenting children with this kind of option, then, well, you're going to file the kind of case that we saw from these 16 states. By the way, the lead states in this once again are Washington,

Starting point is 00:23:27 Oregon, and Minnesota. And one of the things they protest is the designation of the transgender as a transgender ideology. And once again, you either see it as that or you don't. You either see it as the way things ought to be and should have been from the beginning or you see them as a direct contradiction to creation order. And let's just say in the beginning as the scripture clearly begins. By the way, going back to the previous story about the transgender issue in the passports and all the rest, let me just point out that there's been all kinds of confusion in the

Starting point is 00:24:04 past, but there has never been a time in which this kind of organized ideological corruption and confusion is being presented as the way all contemporary governments should simply reconceptualize the entire issue. And this is exactly the logic the Biden administration bought into. It is exactly the logic the Trump administration has rejected. And I'll just say that if you understand anything at all about this, you have to understand that it's going to be one of those policies or the other. It just reminds us again that elections have consequences. And if you are looking at the Biden administration continuing in a second term or a Harris administration, just imagine that the Biden administration policy would not only be upheld, it would almost assuredly be extended because the LGBTQ revolution,

Starting point is 00:24:51 let me remind you, by its own self-designation and advertisement, doesn't end with a letter. It ends with a plus sign. In other words, it ends with what one side sees as a promise. but Christians have to see as a threat. Thanks for listening to the briefing today is November the 11th. It is Veterans Day in the United States. And we cannot let this pass without recognizing that the very fact that we have the freedom to have this discussion, to voice our opinions, and the very fact that we have a nation, the United States of America, and that we exist in the security that we enjoy.

Starting point is 00:25:28 We know that that was hard won by millions of Americans who put on the U.S. uniform in terms of the American Armed Forces and have put their lives on the line. And we just have to understand that that debt of gratitude is not something that passes. It is something that just grows more significant with every passing year. To all of you who are veterans, I want to say once again, thank you. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on Twitter or X by going to X.com forward slash Albert Mueller. For information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.

The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Tuesday, November 11, 2025

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