Colorado, ever the progressive petri dish of experimental governance, has once again declared its disdain for Christian convictions—this time by officially categorizing biblical parenting as a form of abuse. House Bill 25-1312, which I wrote about earlier this month, cynically dubbed the “Kelly Loving Act,” slithers under the guise of compassion while weaponizing the state against parents who won’t cosign their child’s gender confusion.

The bill, already passed through the Colorado House and marching toward Senate approval, gives the state license to rip children from their parents’ arms for the unthinkable offense of calling their son “son.”

Deadnaming. Misgendering. Coercive control. These are the spell-cast phrases by which the secular priesthood now enforces its liturgy. Under this law, referring to your daughter by her real name becomes an act of violence. Pronouns rooted in biology? Psychological abuse.

And worst of all, even speaking about the global medical consensus that puberty blockers and sex hormones are experimental at best and mutilating at worst? Well, that’s child endangerment.

But the real story isn’t just the legislation—it’s the irony bleeding out of the digital pages of… wait for it… The Gospel Coalition. The Gospel Coalition, which published an article by Joe Carter sounding the alarm on this very development.

All of a sudden, Carter and the TGC editorial crew want to raise concerns about state overreach and the erosion of parental rights. Suddenly, they’ve discovered that the party they spent years laundering to evangelicals might actually have fangs.

Let’s rewind, shall we?

For years, TGC was the ideological Trojan horse through which evangelicalism’s backbone was surgically removed. Readers were serenaded by the dulcet tones of men like Thabiti Anyabwile—whose birth name, Ron Burns, vanished more thoroughly than the accountability at a Democratic fundraiser—as he insisted that Christians could, and should, vote for Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders.

Why?

Because the Republican party was, allegedly, a den of racists and white nationalists who didn’t have the best interests of black Americans at heart. Never mind that the Democrats support the wholesale slaughter of the unborn, the dismantling of the nuclear family, and the forced sexualization of children—apparently, that wasn’t quite as serious.

David Platt—who Joe Carter serves as an associate pastor with at McLean Bible Church—went a step further, climbing into his moral ivory tower to inform his congregation that if they weren’t comfortable sharing a pew with Democrats, they might want to find another church. The message was clear. Biblical clarity, morality, and ethics is out, bipartisan sensitivity is in. The real sin, according to Platt and his yes men, wasn’t voting for abortion-enthusiasts but daring to question their presence at church.

JD Greear, Matt Hall, Ligon Duncan, Mark Dever, Russell Moore—the TGC-aligned all-star team of third-way theologians—have made careers out of dancing delicately on the tightrope of moral equivalence. They’ve spent more ink defending Democrats than opposing drag queen story hour. To them, voting blue was just a matter of “conscience.” Conscience, that is, unmoored from Scripture, tradition, reason, or reality.

And of course, we must not forget the late Tim Keller, co-founder of TGC and registered Democrat, whose elegant ambiguity and Manhattan charm helped coat the bitter pill of political compromise in a sugar glaze of urban sophistication. He gave evangelicalism its intellectual permission slip to capitulate.

So now, here comes Joe Carter—a man whose prose has often resembled lukewarm oatmeal—offering us a serious, somber warning about Colorado’s new legislative overreach. He walks us through the horrors of the Kelly Loving Act with all the sincerity of a fox shocked to find feathers in his mouth. His article reads like a burglar filing a noise complaint.

He laments that Colorado courts could now consider parents unfit simply for failing to affirm a child’s self-declared gender identity. He frets about the loss of custody, the medicalization of minors, the disregard for international medical consensus. He even appeals to Scripture. It would be touching if it weren’t so grotesquely late.

Where was all this hand-wringing when TGC was busy mainstreaming the very ideologies that birthed this madness? When Russell Moore transformed the ERLC into a progressive think tank with a steeple? When Greear uttered his infamous line that “Christians should be the fiercest advocates for the rights of LGBTQ people”?

It would be easier to stomach this sudden concern if it weren’t so drenched in plausible deniability. But that’s TGC’s specialty, isn’t it? Always threading the needle, always hedging their bets, always reserving just enough orthodoxy to avoid being dismissed outright. Their strategy is maddeningly effective… keep one foot in the pulpit and the other in the polling booth, and hope the congregation doesn’t notice the split.

But now the cracks are showing. The contradictions are catching up. The ideological chickens are coming home to roost—and they’re laying rainbow-colored eggs.

Joe Carter may not see the joke, hence the nickname “Joke Harder,” but the rest of us do. TGC helped build the road to Colorado’s legislative insanity. Now they want to act like reluctant tourists on the very path they paved. They asked us to be “nuanced,” to be “charitable,” to be “winsome.” But nuance has a cost, and charity without clarity is a weapon in the hand of tyrants.

No, The Gospel Coalition doesn’t get to cry foul. Not after years of enabling this nonsense. They handed the keys of the culture to the left and called it faithfulness. Now that the house is being looted, they want to draft op-eds about the broken windows?

Spare us.

The irony isn’t subtle. It’s blinding. It’s deafening. It’s embalmed in layers of sanctimonious gaslighting. And it’s exactly what happens when theological cowardice dresses itself up in intellectual respectability and parades through the church pretending to be discernment.

They wanted us to vote for the people tearing down our homes. Now they want to grieve the rubble.