The Government's Directorate for Children, Youth and Family (Bufdir) has recently presented proposals for new national “language guidelines” about so-called gender diversity for everyone working in the public sector. On paper, this is supposed to be an inclusive and professionally based document. In reality, it functions as a set of ideological injunctions that directly interfere with the freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and freedom of religion of hundreds of thousands of public employees. In other words, there is bad news afoot.
This measure is no longer just woke or identity political activism. It is an attempt to establish a new belief framework in the state sector, where biological reality and objective ,observable facts must give way to subjective gender experiences. Employees are effectively required by Bufdir to affirm and express themselves in accordance with a radical belief about gender that many neither share nor can accept in good conscience.
Bufdir proposes in something resembling a neo-religious consultation note, a set of ten new commandments for public employees to think, believe and speak correctly. You must use pronouns, concepts and titles that may contradict many employees' biological and theological understanding of what a human being is. Not as a voluntary consideration, but as an expectation and state requirement with the threat of punishment in the end for those who do not obey.
This practically means a requirement that conservative or Christian teachers, health workers, nurses, NAV employees and the police officers should utter words they do not believe in, and recognize a person's subjective identity rather than what their God or beliefs tell them: that there is only man and woman and that changing gender is impossible. This is happening in a Christian country according to the Constitution, a country that has been Christian for as long as it has been united in one kingdom for 1000 years.
It is important to state clearly what this is, because activists in Bufdir and the government apparatus do not seem to have understood it. That forcing you to state something you do not believe to be true is a violation of freedom of expression. Forcing you to confirm something that goes against your conscience is a violation of freedom of religion. Both are protected in the Constitution and in human rights law. But the activists disregard the law, justice and truth when it does not serve their cause.
Bufdir is proposing a state regulation of language that has consequences far beyond politeness. When employees are expected to use the "correct" pronouns and avoid traditional terms such as man and woman, three things happen at once: Biological facts are downplayed. Christian anthropology is defined as wrong. Anyone who speaks the truth risks, at best, being accused of discrimination.
This is the beginning of a linguistic regime where truthful speech is no longer desired, and where the whole of working life becomes an ideological correction chamber. In practice, this means that a Christian teacher who says “the girls in the girls’ changing room” is acting wrongly. A health worker who automatically refers to a biological female as a woman with the pronoun “she” violates the state’s new gender-neutral mandate. The worker should first ask how the person identifies. State discipline and demands for endless repentance from pronoun “sins” will be the next consequence of this secular Old Testament.
When the state begins to regulate the speech of its employees, it is never a sign of more freedom – but of more surveillance and control.
The most striking thing is not what Bufdir imposes, but what they leave out. Because there is not a single word – not one – about how Christians and other conscientious employees should be able to live with integrity when state language requirements collide with their own faith and convictions. NOU 2016:13 clearly states that freedom of conscience shall be protected in the workplace. But Bufdir chooses to overlook this, and creates a situation where Christian employees must choose between being obedient to God's eternal truth about gender or being obedient to the state's new truth about gender. Such a massive conflict of faith in a Christian country testifies to the fact that the state has entered the domain of the church. This should worry many.
The free, Christian Norway we know can only be preserved if people with conscience and truth in their hearts dare to speak bravely and clearly during this frightening development. Therefore, we must pray, work and stand together for the right to speak the truth about humanity, the right to follow the Bible's teachings about man and woman, the right to use language that is gendered and according to one's own convictions. And last but not least, the right to let one's conscience be governed by God, not the state.
Because the state requires blind faith, God does not.
Our consultation response can be read here
