Gender Ideology and Parent’s Rights: A Tale of Two States

In 2021 something shocking happened. State authorities removed a child from his parents’ home due to the supposed emotional and verbal abuse their child suffered when they came out as transgender. Essentially, because the parents refused to affirm their child, the state took that child away for fear of harm that might come to the child if he continued to live with his parents. Sadly, that alone might not sound all that shocking. You could see a state like California, Minnesota, or New York doing something like that. What was shocking was not so much what happened, however, as it was where it happened. It happened in the deep red state of Indiana, a state with a Republican governor, Republican legislator, and a state that has voted for a Republican president in every election since 2008, and every election before that since 1964. That’s right, it was in my home state of Indiana that the Department of Child Services took away a child because parents refused to bend on their convictions.

What happened next? Well, a long legal battle ensued, eventually working its way all the way up to an appeal Supreme Court. Sadly, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, and the courts in Indiana sided with the state. Eventually the child grew up and was past the age of majority, but the precedent had been set. The state had gotten away with it, or so it would seem. But what began as a crushing defeat galvanized those who take Scripture and their families seriously. With much hard work, conservatives sought to solve this problem legislatively, and they succeeded. Now after four years of fighting this battle first in the courthouse and then in the statehouse, Indiana has passed critical legislation protecting families. 

HB 1412, which was signed into law by Governor Mike Braun on May 1, 2025, is a bill on mandatory reporting of abuse. This bill also includes, however, the following crucial provision: “‘Child abuse or neglect’ does not include raising or referring to a child in a manner consistent with the child’s biological sex.’ It is now etched in Indiana law that parents cannot have their children removed from their homes because they refuse to buy into the gender-bending insanity of the current culture. 

Attention is being paid to Colorado right now, and rightfully so. Colorado is currently working on a bill that would do the exact opposite. In Colorado, HB 25-1312, the so-called “Kelly Loving Act,” states clearly in its opening summary: “Section 2 provides that, when making child custody decisions and determining the best interests of a child for purposes of parenting time, a court shall consider deadnaming, misgendering, or threatening to publish material related to an individual’s gender-affirming health-care services as types of coercive control. A court shall consider reports of coercive control when determining the allocation of parental responsibilities in accordance with the best interests of the child.” In other words, if you use the wrong pronouns or insist on using a child’s birth-given name, we might take your child away from you or give you less parental rights. You are the bad guy. You are engaging in “coercive control.” 

I want to take just a few moments and compare these two very different approaches. I think we should ask how we got here, and then where we should go from here. How do we as Bible-believing Christians navigate living in a country of such starkly different approaches within the same nation?

 

How did we get here? 

Let’s start with how this is even possible to begin with. How is it that one state is passing laws protecting the rights of parents, while another state is passing laws that will do exactly the opposite? Well, that’s federalism for you. Our country strongly believes, at least in theory, that as much freedom as possible should be delegated to the states, and that any issue taken up by the federal government should have a broad, almost unanimous consensus. The tenth amendment to the constitution states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In other words, if the Constitution does not give the federal government the right, then the right defaults to the state. In an age of high political polarization, this means that states will start to look and feel more and more different. It means that until we can all agree, states will  head down very different paths regarding key moral issues like abortion, parent’s rights, and LGBTQ issues.

Will the federal government weigh in and solve this problem for us? And if it did, how would it even do so? Well, there are three branches of government, so there are three possible avenues for the federal government to address this problem. The first and perhaps most obvious would be the legislator creating a new law like Indiana did that would take one side or the other. That seems unlikely to happen, unless there is such a broad consensus one way or the other that there is agreement from both political parties as to what the right direction is. Right now, there would need to be a 60 vote majority in the Senate to advance legislation like that to the president’s desk. That seems a far way off, and if it happens at all it would more likely be the final step of a long cultural battle than a realistic path to victory in the current situation. 

The second possibility would be the courts, most notably the Supreme Court. Sadly, America has a long tradition of the courts essentially inventing rights and laws from the bench, from Roe v Wade, which legalized abortion throughout the whole country, to Obergefell v Hodges, which legalized gay marriage. Right now there is a conservative majority on the Supreme Court, so it’s possible they will take this issue up and decide for America that children are to be protected from this madness. As of right now, they have had opportunities to do so (such as the Indiana case), and have not yet done so. They might do it in the future, but we can’t know for sure. There is really nothing to be done here except wait. Wait and see what, if anything, happens on this front.  

What about the executive, the president? Well, the current administration has used its power to enact executive orders in an attempt to put the weight of the federal government behind the side of reality in the debate over gender. While this is good, such moves have limited value. First, when you hear “executive order,” you should think, “at least for now.” All it takes is an election that goes the other way for an executive order to be overturned. One administration decides that when enforcing the laws on the book, “gender” will include “gender identity.” The next decides it means “biological sex.” Absent a Supreme Court ruling or a new law, anything one president does can easily be undone by the next president. The other problem is that executive actions can run into problems with the court. Lawyers can and do challenge the legitimacy of executive orders, and such challenges can stall or overturn these orders.

What all this means is that for right now, we will probably continue to have states like Indiana and Colorado. States where the biblical standard is upheld, and states where in Orwellian fashion it is called “coercive control”. Our country will continue splitting, with red states getting redder and blue states getting bluer. 

 

What should we do? 

Our response to all of this can be summed up in three words: celebrate, pray, and fight. First, we should celebrate the victories. What happened in Indiana is a cause for rejoicing. Jesus tells us in the beatitudes that we should hunger and thirst after righteousness (Matthew 5:6), likely a reference both to personal righteousness as well as societal justice. When biblical truth prevails in the public market, we should praise God and be thankful for the good outcome. When God’s will is done on earth, even if partially, we are right to be excited.

But we should also be sober, and we must pray. Pray for the inevitable challenges laws like the one in Indiana will face in the courts.[1] Pray for states like Colorado, that the plans of wicked men would be thwarted. Pray for confused teenagers and for states and state departments that feed that confusion in ways that can lead to irreparable harm. Pray for God’s mercy on a nation wrestling with the logical yet ghoulish outcome of its own insane ideas, and pray that God would show mercy as we face the great price our children are paying for those bad ideas. Above all, pray that God would send revival and that people would not just turn from gender ideology to a worldview closer to Scripture’s, but from their sin to the Savior. 

And finally we should fight. Never with violence, but with every legal tool at our disposal. It was a legislative battle that got Bill 1412 passed in Indiana, a battle that took many long hours behind the scenes to add a few key sentences that will forever change the direction of the state. It took Christians citizens voting, Christian lawyers lobbying, and Christian politicians passing bills. We should seek to be good citizens, remembering that politics tends to be more local than we realize, and seeking to be a Daniel who influences the culture without compromising our standards.[2] America’s system means that we aren’t just fighting on one front, we are fighting on 50. Each of us should do what we can in our sphere of influence, pray for other believers like those in Colorado facing horrific legislation, and seek above all to live out our lives as a bright Christian example before a watching world. And then we trust a righteous God to work as we pray the way our Savior taught us to pray: “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

 

[1] In 2023, Indiana legislator passed bills forbidding the use of so-called “gender affirming care.” After challenges from the court, the laws didn’t officially go into effect until late February of the next year. 

[2] A helpful resource along these lines is https://www.goodcitizen.us/ This is a project of Josh Hershberger, the lawyer who represented the family whose child was removed by DCS and who did much work to lobby for HB 1412.

 

 

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Ben Hicks is the Associate Pastor at Colonial Hills Baptist Church in Indianapolis. You can check out Bible studies he has written as hearanddo.org. 

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Image is a screengrab of Indiana HB1412