Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World

A Thankful Reflection

Today is a good day. There are moments in history, quiet but unmistakable, when truth stirs from its long slumber, shakes off the scorn of the fashionable lie, and rises to speak again. The news that the University of Pennsylvania has agreed to bar biological males from competing in women’s sports is one such moment. It is not just a legal decision, nor merely a policy change; it is the slow, dignified turning of a nation back toward the ancient wisdom it once knew instinctively, that reality matters, and fairness is not a relic of the past but a duty to the present. 

Paula Scanlan’s testimony is at once sorrowful and hopeful. As a former teammate of Lia Thomas, she endured what few would have the courage to oppose. She and her fellow athletes, for daring to question the erasure of female distinction in sports, were maligned as bigoted and pressured into silence under the guise of tolerance. The bitter irony, of course, is that tolerance was weaponized to enforce uniformity. The very institutions that claim to educate in truth had turned against it, preferring ideological sentiment over biological fact, emotional appeasement over competitive integrity. 

The U.S. Department of Education’s resolution marks a turning point. It affirms that the rights of female athletes are not to be sacrificed on the altar of political expedience. This is not a matter of malice toward any person, but a recognition that men and women, equal in dignity, are not interchangeable in form. Sporting competition, by its nature, rests on distinctions: weight classes in boxing, age brackets in youth leagues, and most fundamentally, sex divisions to preserve fairness and safety. To deny these is not to be inclusive, but to dissolve the very structure upon which sport is built. 

It is right to give thanks for this decision, not in triumphalism, but in gratitude that a standard, long trampled underfoot, is being restored. That this restoration required political pressure and federal intervention only underscores the severity of the drift. But now, a precedent has been set. Institutions once lauded for their prestige, such as Penn, must now reckon with the fact that prestige does not grant moral infallibility. Indeed, it may mask a deeper cowardice when it conforms to the winds of culture rather than anchoring itself in eternal principles. 

Scanlan’s perseverance deserves particular praise. She stood not only against an institution but against a mood, a collective pressure to conform, to be silent, to swallow what one knows is untrue. Her resolve, along with others who joined her, has helped shift public perception. What was once unspeakable, saying that men should not compete in women’s sports, is now widely affirmed by the majority of Americans. This is not regression, but recovery. It is not a culture war; it is a reawakening to moral sanity. 

Let us be clear: compassion does not require capitulation to confusion. One may love those struggling with gender dysphoria while still affirming that male bodies have no place in female competitions. The very idea of boundaries, physical, moral, and institutional, is not oppression, but the framework that makes freedom and justice possible. 

We are watching a curtain begin to lift. May this decision echo far beyond the halls of the Ivy League. May it resound in every school district, athletic association, and legislative chamber. And may it remind us all, especially the young women whose opportunities were stolen, that truth is not decided by decree, but discovered in creation. The body is not a costume, and biology is not bigotry. 

Let this be the beginning of the end of the cultural charade, where identity unmoored from reality was elevated above fairness. Let this be the rekindling of common sense in a time that had nearly forgotten it. 

We give thanks not merely for the policy, but for the principle behind it: that truth matters. That courage matters. That women matter. And that the human race, male and female, must not forget how beautifully different and equally necessary those two words are. 

In Christ’s service, ~ JFH