In his new exhortation on marriage and family, Pope Francis is adamant about how children should be taught to “accept their own body as it was created” and to avoid the pretension of cancelling out sexual difference “because one no longer knows how to deal with it.”

Writing for Breitbart, Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D., says the Pope’s new exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), contains the same message to parents and educators that was given by the American College of Pediatricians who recently issued a statement condemning the encouragement of transgenderism among youth.

In the section dealing with the sexual education of children, Francis said that these programs should teach “respect and appreciation” for sexual differences as a way to overcome self-absorption.

“Beyond the understandable difficulties which individuals may experience, the young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created, for ‘thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation… An appreciation of our body as male or female is also necessary for our own self-awareness in an encounter with others different from ourselves. In this way we can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work of God the Creator, and find mutual enrichment’.”

This isn’t the first time Francis has spoken out against gender theory – which is a broad term referring to how people learn to identify themselves sexually.

“Let's think also of . . . gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation," Francis states in the book, Pope Francis: This Economy Kills. "With this attitude, man commits a new sin, that against God the Creator. The true custody of creation does not have anything to do with the ideologies that consider man like an accident, like a problem to eliminate. . . . God has placed man and woman at the summit of creation and has entrusted them with the earth. The design of the Creator is written in nature."

This teaching is in alignment with the recent statement from the American College of Pediatricians which issues a stern warning about the physical and psychological dangers of exposing children to transgenderism. Almost all children eventually outgrow their gender confusion, and the best way to deal with a child exhibiting this behavior is to treat this confusion for what it is – a psychological disorder.

“When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such,” the statement reads. “These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association . . . .”

The group warns against this new national trend being foisted upon the public by LGBT activists in the form of controversial new “bathroom bills” and transgender reality shows such as I Am Jazz.

“Endorsing gender discordance as normal via public education and legal policies will confuse children and parents, leading more children to present to ‘gender clinics’ where they will be given puberty-blocking drugs. This, in turn, virtually ensures that they will ‘choose’ a lifetime of carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones, and likely consider unnecessary surgical mutilation of their healthy body parts as young adults.”

This is why the group warns that “Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”

Chances are, these common sense warnings will go the same way as similar warnings to the public about the dangers of encouraging homosexual behavior, a lifestyle riddled with well-document physical and emotional ills – all of which are kept out of the public eye and carefully buried beneath the imposed silence of political correctness.

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